by Jack Lindsay
Amos kissed the girl. Then he was seized with another anguishing thought. “But you won’t tell her, will you?”
The girl laughed and wriggled away. “I won’t promise. But you’re nothing to boast about. So make your mind as easy as you can with a face like that in front of it, and I’ll tell you where to find her. Go straight on round the corner there, and knock at the door you’ll see on the left. Then explain to her that Rhode gave you a stir and said you needed to be left standing a while yet — a good long while.”
Amos retreated, pleased, and wiping his mouth. He had met Karni in the Food Market where she had been sent to shop, and had helped her against a meat-salesman who was cheating her. She was a Jewess, a slave; and he had obtained permission to visit her by describing her at home as a freedwoman, and expressing the hopes of picking up custom through her influence.
Finding the door, he knocked timidly. The door was opened by an enormous negress with a necklace of tiger’s teeth and a red smock. She jabbered at Amos, and he was about to give up hope when he saw Karni passing along the corridor at the end of the short hall. He shoved past the negress and ran to Karni, calling her name in his fear that he would lose her after all. She stopped, laughing at his excited appearance, a slender dark-browed girl; and taking him aside in a dim room where another girl sat sewing at the window, she listened to the tale of his difficulties. Amos felt very flattered. Unobtrusively he brushed back his hair and smoothed his clothes, and kept his shoes hidden under the couch; and when the other girl went out, he took Karni in his arms. She might be a Jewess, but she was a slave of Alexandrian stock and not likely to be strict in her notions, living in such a household. He hoped correctly. Karni pushed him away once, laughed, closed her eyes, and embraced him so tightly that he knew he would never be able to uncrease his tunic before he reached home. Then she asked him laughingly if he would marry her.
It was the first time that Amos had had a love-affair, and he was flustered. All his other girls had been slaves clasped speedily in alleys of the dusk; and he did not know how serious Karni was in speaking of marriage. Being readily dazed, he forgot that she was a slave; but he remembered to explain that he was dependent on his father and couldn’t marry without money. Still, this seemed a good moment to introduce the subject of custom for the fuller’s establishment; but Karni pretended to weep.
“You’re a scoundrel,” she said, and patted his cheek. Then, as the other girl had returned, she asked importantly, “Would you like to have a look at the Queen?”
“Yes, indeed I would,” said Amos, thinking that the offer might lead to a satisfactory business interview. At the moment, in his confused exhilaration, he felt capable of tackling any queen out of Asia. Karni, who held a subsidiary post of command in the kitchen and pantry, led him out along several corridors, where they met other members of the household hastening to and fro at work, and then ushered him into a small waiting-room. He kept close behind, afraid of being lost, and admiring the way that the tight flowered cotton-dress moved with her swaying hips. When possible, to make sure of not being lost, he pressed up close against her, holding her from behind with his hands over her breasts; and she lay back, letting him kiss her over her shoulder.
Amos grew more dazed. He tried to collect himself and think of business, but Karni was too softly slender, too palpably close. “Not here,” she whispered. “We’ll both be whipped if we’re seen.”
That quenched his ardour, but he allowed her to take him towards some heavy gold-threaded curtains, which she drew aside sufficiently to give him a view of what lay beyond. Holding her gingerly in his arms, Amos peeped into the room where Queen Cleopatra sat at her toilet.
At first he could not see the Queen, for the room was large, and his attention was distracted by a girl who was trimming a lamp on top of a large silver candelabra with satyr support and trying to eat a honeycake at the same time. The huge tapestry behind the girl seemed bellying in the flickering light. Lamps were needed, for the room had only a skylight at one end, and the afternoon was becoming overcast. Then Amos moved his glance along the line of green-marble pillars and saw the Queen seated on her chair with a mirror in her hand. Two girls were kneeling at her feet, washing and anointing them, and polishing the toenails. Cleopatra lay back on some red cushions with her eyelids lowered. Amos had a side-view, and his first impression was that the Queen was not at all beautiful. Karni was far more attractive, Karni who was rubbing her head against his cheek like a well-behaved cat. The Queen was fair; her face seemed rather frail, a little pinched in the uncertain light; her eyelashes were heavy against her high cheek bones; but her nose was too long for the taste of Amos. Her mouth wasn’t full enough either, and she didn’t seem as broad-hipped as Karni, who, for all her slenderness, had the swaying weight at the loins that Amos preferred.
“I like you better,” he whispered, emboldened, and Karni accepted his kiss. Still clasping her, Amos looked over her shoulder into the room. Cleopatra stirred, and kicked at one of the girls. Then, standing up, she slipped the loose shift from her shoulders and let it drop to her feet. She stood staring at herself in a tall silver mirror leant against a pillar. She was naked, but a warmth of proud graciousness seemed to garment her forbiddingly; and Amos, while still prudently insisting that he preferred Karni, could not deny a royalty in the naked woman. No, it would not be easy to accost her and suggest that she should send her washing and dyeing to the establishment of Fabullus and Ezra on the Aventine. Such schemes were easy to think out, but different when the time of action appeared. It was a fine scheme, for if he had obtained the patronage of Cleopatra, the firm would have been on a fair way to getting a contract from Caesar for dyeing uniforms and making a fortune out of the army. Amos had seen himself kissing the hand of his royal benefactress, uttering eloquent speeches ... He decided to drop all such dreams and concentrate on Karni.
Karni stared at her mistress from behind the curtain. She felt somehow that she herself was the Queen of the moment, throned upon her lover’s embrace in a recess of kisses. It gave one power to look at another who didn’t know one was looking, particularly if one was being kissed and the other was a naked Queen.
*
Cleopatra, now in her twenty-fifth year, stood looking into the silver mirror, moving her hand up and down her long warm thighs, and thinking of the statue of herself that Caesar had placed in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, two years ago. A lover’s act. Arcesilaos had sculptured the work, and she recalled the uncannily impersonal glances that the man with his thin beard had given her as he worked at the clay model — glances that nevertheless penetrated her senses more than a lewd stare. The fool! and yet she respected his absorption. Caesar had been so anxious to hasten the inauguration of the temple that he had ordered the statue to be set there unfinished. Arcesilaos refused, but the statue was taken away. Caesar was so busy, so coolly headstrong, so evasive. Why had he gone so far as to erect that statue, only to forget her the next moment? She knew how the populace and the patricians had murmured — for once of a like mind. The mongrel populace wanted Caesar to stand alone, entirely theirs, entirely Rome’s, not shared by a foreign queen; and the nobles talked glibly of keeping pure the racial stock.
Her thighs were softly strong, but so were the thighs of a myriad women. Why had Caesar seemed on the point of succumbing, why had he dared so much the opinion of others, only to fade out of her hands? Was that evasiveness his weakness or his strength? He was hard, bitterly hard, and yet so kind, so intuitively subtle, so childlike at times. What did he want? But perhaps the clue was the Parthian War. If he succeeded — and how could Caesar fail? — he would be absolute ruler indeed. No one could gainsay him then if he were to marry an Egyptian queen. As things stood, despite all his power he was nominally an officer of a constitution greater than himself. How could a State officer undertake a dynastic marriage? But why didn’t he explain? The truth must be that he was tired of her. He could care for no woman long. He had never cared. Yet to say that he c
ared or didn’t care seemed equally wrong of his gentleness, his ruthless will.
Meanwhile there was one thing she expected him to do. She knew that he had made a testament and deposited it in the Temple of Vesta. It was his duty to adopt the son that she had borne him. Then, if he died, the son would be a Roman, capable of claiming his father’s inheritance. Cleopatra’s lip curled as she thought of Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife: a Roman matron if ever there was one, a heavy, obedient woman with coarse thumbs. Calpurnia looked the kind who would spawn puppy-litters, and yet her womb had not opened to Caesar. The lesser nature contracted before the impact of incomprehensible power. Cleopatra had known and felt. She had conceived a son. She had taken Caesar into the depths of her being. What was the use of calling that emotion love or hate, ambition or lust? She had known Caesar, and she needed him; and somewhere in his being it must be the same with him.
She turned to the girls who were still kneeling at her side. “My dressing-gown.” She enveloped herself in a light gown of blue silk with long sleeves, embroidered with silver flowers, and tied the girdle fast round her waist. “Send Ammonios in.”
Ammonios, a stooping hook-nosed Greek, entered and bowed deeply. “Your Majesty sent for me.”
“Have you been able to find out anything about that will?”
He looked at the nails of his left hand, stretching the fingers out, and then turning them in towards the palm; then he did the same to the nails of his right hand. “I have raised the loan you suggested.”
“But the will?”
“So far I have learned nothing.”
She stamped her foot, and her lips twitched angrily. “What use are you, you fool, you bastard of a corpse-robbing undertaker !”
Ammonios spread out his hands. “Rome is not Alexandria. Money does much, but not everything. If my services are valueless, I beseech you to find a worthier servant. My life is yours, but I cannot yet see through the stone walls of Vesta.”
Cleopatra studied him with knit brows. Then she smiled. “So you at least have the money.”
“It will be in the coffers by nightfall.”
“You’re a good servant.” She stretched out her hand for him to kiss. “You may go.”
Ammonios took the hand languidly, and kissed it with courtier-ease, looking up at her along her slender arm. She did not withdraw the hand, but he saw that she was thinking of other things. “Snake-spawn of incest!” he murmured, in his mind. “You gobbet that a brother threw up for the platter of Caesar! Too fine for such as me, you sweet sister of the cat. But I can at least cheat you.”
Cleopatra disengaged her hand and touched him lightly on the wrist. “No need for play, Ammonios. It’s the plunder you love, not your princess. Get back to your dragon-lair and brood over your gold-pieces. I know you cheat the others more than you cheat me.”
Ammonios was frightened. Had she read his thoughts, the yellow-haired witch? She should be smeared with the fat of a she-wolf and burned alive. How the jaws of flame would crunch her young bones. But he showed nothing; he was too old a hand. “What talents I possess in the way of business,” he said, “are certainly all enlisted against your Majesty’s creditors.” Then, bowing once more, he went out.
Cleopatra paced up and down the mosaic floor, kicking at the train of her gown each time she turned. She was proud of her long legs; they were very long for a woman of her height. But what was she to do about this will? She must know what Caesar had written. In a few days he would leave for the war, and she would be going back to Egypt.
“Send in Sara,” she said, and then seated herself, gripping the arms of the high-backed chair. She lay back, with legs loosely out-thrust, conscious of her posture. For a moment she felt drunken, tingling, sinking back into herself, warmly a woman. O if it were Caesar and not Sara.
Sara, a squat Egyptian with shorn head and large ears, sidled in. She watched him approach without moving. When he had neared the chair, he gave a clumsy bow and stood with bent knee, staring at her with narrowed eyes.
“I’ve some work for you, Sara,” she said, assuming a coarse tone of voice. She loved to change her manner with each man, practising even with menials.
“Yes, your Majesty,” he replied, in a raucous, matter-of-fact voice, twisting his head over towards his left shoulder and raising the shoulder uneasily as if he wished to scratch it and didn’t dare do so in such company.
“I want you to bribe some of the slaves of the Vestals, and find out what Caesar wrote in his will.”
“Yes, your Majesty. And what if the slaves fail? Shall there be a robbery?”
Cleopatra considered. “I’ll think that over. There mustn’t be a scandal. Try bribery first.”
Sara scratched himself behind the ear. “I haven’t noticed money buys less at Rome than elsewhere.”
“You’re a wise fool, Sara,” said Cleopatra, amusing herself, and lolling as she spoke with an air of boredom. “Come closer and I’ll tell you a tale about one of these Romans, a man named Cipius. He keeps a fine piece of flesh for wife, and when he wants something done for him, he sends a dinner-invitation to the man who can do it. Then he goes tipsily to sleep after dinner, and the wife rolls over on to the visitor’s couch. So one of the slaves thought there was a chance for profit in such a sleepy establishment. He pocketed a silver cup. But Cipius opened his eyes at that, and said: ‘Behave yourself, I’m not asleep to everyone.’”
Sara sniggered and scratched at his ear. “That’s the kind these Romans are,” Cleopatra went on, slapping herself on the thigh and sitting up, “liars, betrayed by the shine of gold in their eyes. Slavish creatures that can’t bear the truth of a clean subjection even when the master’s a man like Caesar that’s swept their rottenness off the earth—”
She paused. She was growing too urgent, and that wasn’t the part she had meant to play with Sara. She wanted to be coarse and jesting, a tavern-trull — to dare him with her voice and see if he’d try to take advantage; and if he tried, she’d have him stripped and beaten under the navel with rods to teach him his place.
Sara looked at her insolently, as insolently as he knew to be safe. “So your Majesty means to set up as both Cipius and wife in one.”
Cleopatra laughed loudly. “That’s the trick, my man; and if Sara pockets something that isn’t his, I’ll do more than open my eyes.”
Sara bowed very humbly. “Shall I set to work this evening?”
“At once.” She spoke sternly, royally, again. Her blue eyes stared out past Sara, ignoring him; and he backed away, bowing deeply, as if he wished to sink his head right in between his humped shoulders.
*
In the offices along the Forum Romanum the bankers were discussing the effect of the foreign policy on the loan-rate. Like all the moneyed class, they were opposed to a dictatorship which, being based on soldiers and proletariat, was liable to pass land-bills and repudiation measures destructive of vested interests. Yet they could not but be excited about the war. It would mean endless new markets. Contact with India and China would be put on a solid basis. Unless there was something behind the rumours that Caesar meant to marry Cleopatra and make Troy or Alexandria his capital, there was a great time in store for Rome. If money poured in, what need of revolutionary confiscations? The defenders of Caesar among the middle-classes said that there lay his intention. The only way he could hold his radical supporters in check was by this grand imperialist measure. For it was clear that, whatever else he wanted, he did not want to interfere with the system of production that was developing, in quality and quantity of manufactures, more actively and complicatedly every year.
“But he can’t be trusted.”
“Look here: the Bithynian Company is still paying 30 per cent.”
“Postumus is going bankrupt.”
“Take care if you put central-heating in. The builder was leaving the stove exhaust-pipe right under the bedrooms.”
“Yes, her hair’s so long that I can let it down front and back, and tie it betwee
n her legs. Then seal the knot with my signet.”
“What’s Caesar going to do about it?”
There was discontent in the civil service. Caesar was already amplifying the service, and his plans clearly meant to give it much wider scope. But instead of providing sinecures for politicians, he was introducing his trained slaves and freedmen, mostly Greeks. A pack of Egyptians were causing trouble at the Mint. But for the minor officials there was work in abundance. More appointments were made daily. All the municipalities of the Empire, including Rome, needed re-organisation; and commissioners were busy modifying the general law in terms of each locality and producing town-charters. In the townships there was a new burst of energy. More, Caesar had talked of a general codification of law, and was making efforts to rehabilitate the state-religion. Peace with heaven and earth.
Manufacturers of war-supplies were overjoyed at the boom. Weapons and accoutrements, as fast as they could be turned out, were being shipped to Demetrias, the depot for the Parthian War. More public buildings were to arise at Rome. Carthage and Corinth were being re-settled; and surveyors were to report on the project of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. Settlements around the Black Sea must safeguard another great corn area.
But everyone was not satisfied. The financiers, who had not forgotten the scares of the past, were full of murmurs: “Things seem to be going smoothly, but that’s an illusion, a mere marking-time. Held-over bonds and delayed mortgages are heaping up. The loan-rate is ready to soar at any moment. The propertied classes are ready to tolerate Caesar as things stand, but wait and see what they say when the squeeze comes. There’s been no basic solution, only a series of temporary measures. And Caesar knows it.”
The nobles, detesting the dictatorship, had to admit a tolerance of many of the measures, particularly those aimed at curbing luxury and expensive funerals, at fostering the old piety of civic devotion, at encouraging the birth-rate. But they deprecated Caesar’s hustle, and hated his extensions of the franchise to provincials. He wanted to cover every problem at once. He had settled the old confusion of the calendar, introducing a year of 365 days. Nobody knew what he’d tackle next.