The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra Read online

  The lad snorted with laughter. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me!” he said, grinning. “Arsinoë’s an arrogant bitch.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Hermocrates. He turned not to Cleopatra, but to Caesar. “Caesar, may we have our King?”

  Caesar wiped the sweat from his face. “Yes, Chief Judge.”

  Whereupon Ptolemy burst into noisy tears. “No, I don’t want to go! I want to stay with you, Caesar! Please, please!”

  “You’re a king, Ptolemy, and you can be of service to your people. You must go with Hermocrates,” said Caesar, voice faint.

  “No, no! I want to stay with you, Caesar!”

  “Apollodorus, remove them both,” said Cleopatra, fed up.

  Still howling and protesting, the King was hustled out.

  “What was all that about?” Caesar asked, frowning.

  When King Ptolemy reached his new quarters in an untouched, beautiful house in the grounds of the Serapeum, he still wept desolately; a grief exacerbated when Theodotus appeared, for Cleopatra had sent the boy’s tutor back to him. To Theodotus’s dismay, his overtures were rebuffed violently and viciously, but it was not Theodotus whom Ptolemy wanted to assault. He hungered to wreak vengeance on Caesar, his betrayer.

  After sobbing himself to sleep, the boy woke in the morning hurt and hardened of heart. “Send Arsinoë and Ganymedes to me,” he snapped at the Interpreter.

  When Arsinoë saw him, she squealed in joy. “Oh, Ptolemy, you’ve come to marry me!” she cried.

  The King turned his shoulder. “Send this deceitful bitch back to Caesar and my sister,” he said curtly, then glared at Ganymedes, who looked careworn, exhausted. “Kill this thing at once! I shall take command of my army personally.”

  “No peace talks?” asked the Interpreter, stomach sinking.

  “No peace talks. I want Caesar’s head on a golden plate.”

  So the war went on more bitterly than ever, an increasing burden for Caesar, who suffered such terrible rigors and vomiting that he was incapable of command.

  Early in February another fleet arrived; more warships, more food, and the Twenty-seventh Legion, a force composed of ex-Republican troops discharged in Greece, but bored with civilian life.

  “Send out our fleet,” Caesar said to Rufrius and Tiberius Claudius Nero; he was wrapped in blankets, his whole body shaken with rigors. “Nero, as the senior Roman, you’ll have the titular command, but I want it understood that the real commander is our Rhodian friend, Euphranor. Whatever he orders, you’ll do.”

  “It is not fitting that a foreigner makes the decisions,” Nero said stiffly, chin up.

  “I don’t care what’s fitting!” Caesar managed to articulate, teeth chattering, face drawn and white. “All I care about are results, and you, Nero, couldn’t general the fight for the October Horse’s head! So hear me well. Let Euphranor do as he wants, and support him absolutely. Otherwise I’ll banish you in disgrace.”

  “Let me go,” Rufrius begged, foreseeing trouble.

  “I can’t spare you from Royal Avenue. Euphranor will win.”

  Euphranor did win, but the price of his victory was higher than Caesar was willing to pay. Leading the action as always, the Rhodian admiral destroyed his first Alexandrian ship and went after another. When several Alexandrian ships clustered around him, he flagged Nero for help. Nero ignored him; Euphranor and his ship went down with the loss of all hands. Both Roman fleets made it into the Royal Harbor safely, Nero sure that Caesar would never find out about his treachery. But some little bird on Nero’s ship whistled a tune in Caesar’s ear.

  “Pack your things and go!” Caesar said. “I never want to see you again, you arrogant, conceited, irresponsible fool!”

  Nero stood aghast. “But I won!” he cried.

  “You lost. Euphranor won. Now get out of my sight.”

  Caesar had written one letter to Vatia Isauricus in Rome at the end of November, explaining that for the time being he was stuck in Alexandria, and outlining his plans for the coming year. For the moment he would have to continue as Dictator; the curule elections would just have to wait until he reached Rome, whenever that might be. In the meantime, Mark Antony would have to perform as Master of the Horse and Rome would have to limp along without higher magistrates in office than the tribunes of the plebs.

  After that he wrote no more to Rome, trusting that his proverbial luck would keep the city from harm until he could get there in person and see to things. Antony had turned out well after a dubious period, he would hold the place together. Though why was it that only Caesar seemed able to gift places with political stability, functioning economies? Couldn’t people stand off far enough away to see beyond their own careers, their own agendas? Egypt was a case in point. It cried out for firm tenure of the throne, a more caring and enlightened form of government, a mob stripped of power. So Caesar would have to remain there long enough to educate its sovereign to her responsibilities, ensure that it never became a refuge for renegade Romans, and teach the Alexandrians that spilling Ptolemies was no solution for problems rooted in the mighty cycles of good times and bad times.

  The illness sapped him, for it refused to go away; a very serious malady that saw him lose weight by the pounds and pounds, he who carried not an ounce of superfluous flesh. Midway through February, and over his protests, Cleopatra imported the priest-physician Hapd’efan’e from Memphis to treat him.

  “The lining of your stomach has become grossly inflamed,” said this individual in awkward Greek, “and the only remedy is a gruel of barley starch mixed with a special concoction of herbs. You must live on it for a month at least, then we shall see.”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve liver and eggs-in-milk, I’ll eat anything,” said Caesar fervently, remembering Lucius Tuccius’s diet as he had recovered from the ague that had nearly put paid to his life while he had been hiding from Sulla.

  Once he began this monotonous regimen, he improved dramatically, put on weight, regained his energy.

  When he received a letter from Mithridates of Pergamum on the first day of March, he went limp with relief. His health now something that didn’t cast a grey shadow at the back of his mind, he could bend it to what the letter said with his old vigor.

  Well, Caesar, I have come as far as Hierosolyma called Jerusalem, having picked up a thousand horse from Deiotarus in Galatia, and one legion of reasonable troops from Marcus Brutus in Tarsus. There was nothing to be had in northern Syria, but it seems that the Jewish king-without-a-kingdom, Hyrcanus, has a keen affection for Queen Cleopatra: he has donated three thousand crack Jewish soldiers and is sending me south in the company of his crony, Antipater, and Antipater’s son Herod. In two nundinae we expect to reach Pelusium, where Antipater assures me that he will have the authority to collect Queen Cleopatra’s army from Mount Casius—it consists of Jews and Idumaeans.

  You will know better than I whereabouts my army is likely to meet opposition. I gather from Herod, a very busy and subtle young man, that Achillas removed his army from Pelusium months ago to war against you in Alexandria. But Antipater, Herod and I are all wary of entering the swamps and canals of the Delta without specific directives from you. So we will wait at Pelusium for instructions.

  On the Pontic front, things are not good. Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus and the troops he managed to scrape up met Pharnaces near Nicopolis in Armenia Parva, and were defeated badly. Calvinus had no choice other than to retreat west toward Bithynia; had Pharnaces followed, Calvinus would have been annihilated. However, Pharnaces preferred to stay in Pontus and Armenia Parva, wreaking havoc. His atrocities are appalling. The last I heard before I marched myself, he was planning to invade Bithynia—but if so, then his preparations were slipshod and unorganized. He was ever the same, Pharnaces; I remember him when I was a youth.

  By the time I reached Antioch, a new rumor caught me up: that the son Pharnaces left to govern in Cimmeria, Asander, waited until his daddy was thoroughly involved in Pontus, then declared himse
lf king and his father an exile. So it may fall out that you and Calvinus will have an unexpected breathing space, if Pharnaces returns to Cimmeria first to put down this ungrateful child.

  I await your reply with eagerness, and am your servant.

  Rescue at last!

  Caesar burned the letter, then had Trebatius write a new one purporting to be from Mithridates of Pergamum. Its contents were designed to tempt the Alexandrians into quitting the city for a quick campaign in the Delta. But first it had to reach Arsinoë in the palace in a way that led her to believe her agents had stolen it before Caesar opened it, that he didn’t know reinforcements were at hand. The false letter was sealed with an impression of a coin issued by Mithridates of Pergamum and by devious ploys it duly reached Arsinoë, apparently unopened. Both letter and Arsinoë were gone from the palace within an hour. Two days later King Ptolemy, his army and the Macedonian element of Alexandria sailed away eastward toward the Delta. The city lay incapable of any fighting, its leading caste gone.

  Caesar still wasn’t entirely well, though he refused to admit it; watching him buckle himself into leather for the coming Delta campaign, Cleopatra fretted.

  “Can’t you let Rufrius deal with this?” she asked.

  “Probably, but if I am to crush resistance totally and bring Alexandria permanently to its senses, I must be there in person,” Caesar explained; the effort of dressing had him sweating.

  “Then take Hapd’efan’e with you,” she pleaded.

  But the gear was on, he had managed unassisted, and his skin was regaining some color; the eyes he turned on Cleopatra were Caesar’s eyes, in control of everything. “You concern yourself too much.” He kissed her, his breath stale and sour.

  Two cohorts of wounded troops were left to guard the Royal Enclosure; Caesar took the 3,200 men of the Sixth, the Thirty-seventh and the Twenty-seventh Legions, together with all the cavalry, and marched out of Alexandria on a route Cleopatra for one thought unduly circuitous. Instead of going to the Delta by way of the ship canal, he took the road south of Lake Mareotis, keeping it on his left; by the time he did turn toward the Canopic arm of Nilus, he was long out of sight.

  A fast courier had galloped for Pelusium well ahead of King Ptolemy’s army, his mission to inform Mithridates of Pergamum that he was to form one half of Caesar’s pincers by moving down the east bank of the Pelusiac arm of Nilus, and that he was not to enter the Delta itself. They would nip Ptolemy between them near the apex, on solid ground.

  So called because it had the shape of the Greek letter delta, the Delta of Nilus was larger than any other river mouth known: on Our Sea, a hundred and fifty miles from the Pelusiac to the Canopic arm; and from the coast of Our Sea to the bifurcation of Nilus proper just north of Memphis, over a hundred miles. The great river forked and forked and forked again into many branches, some larger than others, and fanned out to empty itself into Our Sea through seven interlinked mouths. Originally all the Delta waterways had been natural, but after the Greekly scientific Ptolemies came to rule Egypt, they connected Nilus’s network of arms with thousands of canals, so that a piece of Delta land was nowhere farther than a mile from water. Why was it necessary to tend the Delta so carefully, when the thousand-mile course of Nilus from Elephantine to Memphis grew more than enough to feed Egypt and Alexandria? Because byblos grew in the Delta, the papyrus reed from which paper was made. The Ptolemies had a worldwide monopoly on paper, and all the profits of its sale went into Pharaoh’s privy purse. Paper was the temple of human thought, and men had come to be unable to live without it.

  This being the beginning of winter by the seasons, though the end of March by the Roman calendar, the summer flooding had receded, but Caesar had no desire to bog his army down in a labyrinth of waterways he didn’t know nearly as well as Ptolemy’s advisers and guides did.

  Constant dialogues with Simeon, Abraham and Joshua during the months of war in Alexandria had dowered Caesar with a knowledge of the Egyptian Jews far superior to Cleopatra’s; until his advent, she seemed never to have considered the Jews worth her notice. Whereas Caesar had huge respect for Jewish intelligence, learning and independence, and was already planning how best to turn the Jews into valuable allies for Cleopatra after he departed. Constricted by her upbringing and exclusivity she might be, but she had potential as a ruler once he had drummed the essentials into her; it had encouraged him when she had freely consented to give the Jews and Metics the Alexandrian citizenship. A start.

  In the southeast of the Delta lay the Land of Onias, an autonomous enclave of Jews descended from the high priest Onias and his followers, who had been exiled from Judaea for refusing to prostrate themselves flat on the ground before the King of Syria; that, Onias had said, they did only to their god. King Ptolemy VI Philometor gave the Onians a large tract of land as their own in return for an annual tribute and soldiers for the Egyptian army. The news of Cleopatra’s generosity had spread to the Land of Onias, which declared for her in this civil war and made it possible for Mithridates of Pergamum to occupy Pelusium without a struggle; Pelusium was full of Jews and had strong ties to the Land of Onias, which was vital to all Egyptian Jews because it held the Great Temple. This was a smaller replica of King Solomon’s temple, even to a tower eighty feet tall and artificial gulches to simulate the Vales of Kedron and Gehenna.

  The little king had barged his army down the Phatnitic arm of Nilus; it merged with the Pelusiac arm just above Leontopolis and the Land of Onias, which stretched between Leontopolis and Heliopolis. Here, near Heliopolis, King Ptolemy found Mithridates of Pergamum encased in a stout, Roman-style camp, and attacked it with reckless abandon. Hardly crediting his good luck, Mithridates promptly led his men out of the camp and waded into the fray so successfully that many Ptolemaians died and the rest scattered in panic. However, someone in Ptolemy’s army owned common sense, for as soon as the post-battle frenzy evaporated, the Ptolemaians fell back to a naturally fortified position hedged in by a ridge, the Pelusiac Nilus, and a wide canal with very high, precipitous banks.

  Caesar came up shortly after Ptolemy’s defeat, more out of breath from the march than he cared to admit, even to Rufrius; he halted his men and studied Ptolemy’s position intently. The chief obstacle for him was the canal, whereas for Mithridates, it was the ridge.

  “We’ve found places where we can ford the canal,” Arminius of the German Ubii told him, “and in other places we can swim it, the horses too.”

  The foot soldiers were directed to fell every tall tree in the neighborhood to build a causeway across the canal, which they did with enthusiasm, a hard day’s march notwithstanding; after six months of war, Roman hatred of Alexandria and Alexandrians burned at white heat. To the last man they hoped that here would be the decisive battle, after which they could quit Egypt forever.

  Ptolemy sent infantry and light-armed cavalry to block Caesar’s advance, but the Roman infantry and the German cavalry poured across in such a rage that they fell on the Ptolemaians like worked-up Belgic Gauls. The Ptolemaians broke and fled, but were cut down; few escaped to seek shelter in the little king’s fortress some seven miles away.

  At first Caesar had thought to attack at once, but when he set eyes on Ptolemy’s stronghold he changed his mind. Many old temple ruins in the vicinity had contributed a wealth of stone to buttress the site’s natural advantages. Best put the men into camp for the night. They had marched over twenty miles before engaging at the canal crossing, they deserved a good meal and a sleep before the next clash. What he told nobody was that he himself felt faint, that Ptolemy’s dispositions had pitched and heaved in his gaze like flotsam on a stormy sea.

  In the morning he ate a small loaf of bread laced with honey as well as his barley gruel, and felt a great deal better.

  The Ptolemaians—easier to call them that because they were by no means all Alexandrians—had fortified a nearby hamlet and joined it to their hill structure by stone bastions; Caesar threw the main brunt of his initial charge at the h
amlet, intending to take it and carry on by natural impetus to take the fortress. But there was a space between the Pelusiac Nilus and the Ptolemaic lines that whoever commanded had made impossible to negotiate by directing a cross fire of arrows and spears into it; Mithridates of Pergamum, driving from the far side of the ridge, had problems of his own and could not help. Though the hamlet fell, Caesar couldn’t extricate his troops from that lethal cross fire to storm the heights and finish the business.

  Sitting his hired horse atop a mound, he noticed that the Ptolemaians had made too much of this minor victory, and had come down from the highest part of their citadel to help fire arrows at the beleaguered Romans. He summoned the hoary primipilus centurion of the Sixth Legion, Decimus Carfulenus.

  “Grab five cohorts, Carfulenus, skirt the lower defenses and take the heights those idiots have vacated,” he said crisply, secretly relieved that rest and food had restored his usual grasp of a military situation. Easy to see how to do it when he was feeling himself—oh, age! Is this the beginning of Caesar’s end? Let it be quick, let it not be a slow dwindle into senescence!

  Taking the heights provoked a generalized Ptolemaic panic. Within an hour of Carfulenus’s occupation of the citadel, King Ptolemy’s army was routed. Thousands were slain on the field, but some, harboring the little king in their midst, managed to reach the Pelusiac Nilus and their barges.

  Of course it was necessary to receive Malachai, high priest of the Land of Onias, with due ceremony, introduce him to the beaming Mithridates of Pergamum, sit down with both of them and partake of sweet Jewish wine. When a shadow fell in the tent opening, Caesar excused himself and rose, suddenly very tired.

  “News of little Ptolemy, Rufrius?”

  “Yes, Caesar. He boarded one of the barges, but the chaos on the riverbank was so frenzied that his puntsmen couldn’t push away before the barge became choked with men. Not far down the river, it capsized. The King was among those who drowned.”