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

  “Ah.”

  Potheinus possessed his own palace among that profusion of buildings, situated on Cape Lochias itself and having a fine view not of the Great Harbor but of the sea. Had the Lord High Chamberlain wished it, he might have walked out his back door and down to a little cove wherein he could paddle his pampered feet.

  “Very nice,” Caesar said, sitting in a backless chair.

  “May I offer you the wine of Samos or Chios?”

  “Neither, thank you.”

  “Spring water, then? Herbal tea?”

  “No.”

  Potheinus seated himself opposite, his inscrutable grey eyes on Caesar. He may not be a king, but he bears himself like one. The face is weathered yet still beautiful, and the eyes are unsettling. Dauntingly intelligent eyes, cooler even than mine. He rules his feelings absolutely, and he is politic. If necessary, he will sit here all day waiting for me to make the opening move. Which suits me. I don’t mind moving first, it is my advantage.

  “What brings you to Alexandria, Caesar?”

  “Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. I’m looking for him.”

  Potheinus blinked, genuinely surprised. “Looking in person for a defeated enemy? Surely your legates could do that.”

  “Surely they could, but I like to do my opponents honor, and there is no honor in a legate, Potheinus. Pompeius Magnus and I have been friends and colleagues these twenty-three years, and at one time he was my son-in-law. That we ended in choosing opposite sides in a civil war can’t alter what we are to each other.”

  Potheinus’s face was losing color; he lifted his priceless goblet to his lips and drank as if his mouth had gone dry. “You may have been friends, but Pompeius Magnus is now your enemy.”

  “Enemies come from alien cultures, Lord High Chamberlain, not from among the ranks of one’s own people. Adversary is a better word—a word allowing all the latitude things in common predicate. No, I don’t pursue Pompeius Magnus as an avenger,” Caesar said, not moving an inch, though somewhere inside him a cold lump was forming. “My policy,” he went on levelly, “has been clemency, and my policy will continue to be clemency. I’ve come to find Pompeius Magnus myself so that I can extend my hand to him in true friendship. It would be a poor thing to enter a Senate containing none but sycophants.”

  “I do not understand,” Potheinus said, skin quite bleached. No, no, I cannot tell this man what we did in Pelusium! We mistook the matter, we have done the unforgivable. The fate of Pompeius Magnus will have to remain our secret. Theodotus! I must find an excuse to leave here and head him off!

  But it was not to be. Theodotus bustled in like a housewife, followed closely by two kilt-clad slaves bearing a big jar between them. They put it down and stood stiffly.

  All Theodotus’s attention was fixed on Caesar, whom he eyed in obvious appreciation. “The great Gaius Julius Caesar!” he fluted. “Oh, what an honor! I am Theodotus, tutor to his royal majesty, and I bring you a gift, great Caesar.” He tittered. “In fact, I bring you two gifts!”

  No answer from Caesar, who sat very straight, his right hand holding the ivory rod of his imperium just as it had all along, his left hand cuddling the folds of toga over his shoulder. The generous, slightly uptilted mouth, sensuous and humorous, had gone thin, and the eyes were two black-ringed pellets of ice.

  Blithely unaware, Theodotus stepped forward and held out his hand; Caesar laid the rod in his lap and extended his to take the seal ring. A lion’s head, and around the outside of the mane the letters CN POMP MAG. He didn’t look at it, just closed his fingers on it until they clenched it, white-knuckled.

  One of the servants lifted the jar’s lid while the other put a hand inside, fiddled for a moment, then lifted out Pompey’s head by its thatch of silver hair, gone dull from the natron, trickling steadily into the jar.

  The face looked very peaceful, lids lowered over those vivid blue eyes that used to gaze around the Senate so innocently, so much the eyes of the spoiled child he was. The snub nose, the thin small mouth, the dented chin, the round Gallic face. It was all there, all perfectly preserved, though the slightly freckled skin had gone grey and leathery.

  “Who did this?” Caesar asked of Potheinus.

  “Why, we did, of course!” Theodotus cried, and looked impish, delighted with himself. “As I said to Potheinus, dead men do not bite. We have removed your enemy, great Caesar. In fact, we have removed two of your enemies! The day after this one came, the great Lentulus Crus arrived, so we killed him too. Though we didn’t think you’d want to see his head.”

  Caesar rose without a word and strode to the door, opened it and snapped, “Fabius! Cornelius!”

  The two lictors entered immediately; only the rigorous training of years disciplined their reaction as they beheld the face of Pompey the Great, running natron.

  “A towel!” Caesar demanded of Theodotus, and took the head from the servant who held it. “Get me a towel! A purple one!”

  But it was Potheinus who moved, clicked his fingers at a bewildered slave. “You heard. A purple towel. At once.”

  Finally realizing that the great Caesar was not pleased, Theodotus gaped at him in astonishment. “But, Caesar, we have eliminated your enemy!” he cried. “Dead men do not bite.”

  Caesar spoke softly. “Keep your tongue between your teeth, you mincing pansy! What do you know of Rome or Romans? What kind of men are you, to do this?” He looked down at the dripping head, his eyes tearless. “Oh, Magnus, would that our destinies were reversed!” He turned to Potheinus. “Where is his body?”

  The damage was done; Potheinus decided to brazen it out. “I have no idea. It was left on the beach at Pelusium.”

  “Then find it, you castrated freak, or I’ll tear Alexandria down around your empty scrotum! No wonder this place festers, when creatures like you run things! You don’t deserve to live, either of you—nor does your puppet king! Tread softly, or count your days.”

  “I would remind you, Caesar, that you are our guest—and that you do not have sufficient troops with you to attack us.”

  “I am not your guest, I am your sovereign. Rome’s Vestal Virgins still hold the will of the last legitimate king of Egypt, Ptolemy XI, and I hold the will of the late King Ptolemy XII,” Caesar said. “Therefore I will assume the reins of government until I have adjudicated in this present situation, and whatever I decide will be adhered to. Move my belongings to the guest palace, and bring my infantry ashore today. I want them in a good camp inside the city walls. Do you think I can’t level Alexandria to the ground with what men I have? Think again!”

  The towel arrived, Tyrian purple. Fabius took it and spread it between his hands in a cradle. Caesar kissed Pompey’s brow, then put the head in the towel and reverently wrapped it up. When Fabius went to take it, Caesar handed him the ivory rod of imperium instead.

  “No, I will carry him.” At the door he turned. “I want a small pyre constructed in the grounds outside the guest palace. I want frankincense and myrrh to fuel it. And find the body!”

  He wept for hours, hugging the Tyrian purple bundle, and no one dared to disturb him. Finally Rufrius came bearing a lamp—it was very dark—to tell him that everything had been moved to the guest palace, so please would he come too? He had to help Caesar up as if he were an old man and guide his footsteps through the grounds, lit with oil lamps inside Alexandrian glass globes.

  “Oh, Rufrius! That it should have come to this!”

  “I know, Caesar. But there is a little good news. A man has arrived from Pelusium, Pompeius Magnus’s freedman Philip. He has the ashes of the body, which he burned on the beach after the assassins rowed away. Because he carried Pompeius Magnus’s purse, he was able to travel across the Delta very quickly.”

  So from Philip Caesar heard the full story of what had happened in Pelusium, and of the flight of Cornelia Metella and Sextus, Pompey’s wife and younger son.

  In the morning, with Caesar officiating, they burned Pompey the Great’s head and added its ashe
s to the rest, enclosed them in a solid gold urn encrusted with red carbunculi and ocean pearls. Then Caesar put Philip and his poor dull slave aboard a merchantman heading west, bearing the ashes of Pompey the Great home to his widow. The ring, also entrusted to Philip, was to be sent on to the elder son, Gnaeus Pompey, wherever he might be.

  All that done with, Caesar sent a servant to rent twenty-six horses and set out to inspect his dispositions. Which were, he soon discovered, disgraceful. Potheinus had located his 3,200 legionaries in Rhakotis on some disused land haunted by cats (also sacred animals) hunting myriad rats and mice, and, of course, already occupied by ibises. The local people, all poor hybrid Egyptian Greeks, were bitterly resentful both of the Roman camp in their midst and of the fact that famine-dogged Alexandria now had many extra mouths to feed. The Romans could afford to buy food, no matter what its price, but its price for the poor would spiral yet again because it had to stretch further.

  “Well, we build a purely temporary wall and palisade around this camp, but we make it look as if we think it’s permanent. The natives are nasty, very nasty. Why? Because they’re hungry! On an income of twelve thousand gold talents a year, their wretched rulers don’t subsidize their food. This whole place is a perfect example of why Rome threw out her kings!” Caesar snorted, huffed. “Post sentries every few feet, Rufrius, and tell the men to add roast ibis to their diet. I piss on Alexandria’s sacred birds!”

  Oh, he is in a temper! thought Rufrius wryly. How could those fools in the palace murder Pompeius Magnus and think to please Caesar? He’s wild with grief inside, and it won’t take much to push him into making a worse mess of Alexandria than he did of Uxellodunum or Cenabum. What’s more, the men haven’t been ashore a day yet, and they’re already lusting to kill the locals. There’s a mood building here, and a disaster brewing.

  Since it wasn’t his place to voice any of this, he simply rode around with the Great Man and listened to him fulminate. It is more than grief putting him out so dreadfully. Those fools in the palace stripped him of the chance to act mercifully, draw Magnus back into our Roman fold. Magnus would have accepted. Cato, no, never. But Magnus, yes, always.

  An inspection of the cavalry camp only made Caesar crankier. The Ubii Germans weren’t surrounded by the poor and there was plenty of good grazing, a clean lake to drink from, but there was no way that Caesar could use them in conjunction with his infantry, thanks to an impenetrably creepered swamp lying between them and the western end of the city, where the infantry lay. Potheinus, Ganymedes and the Interpreter had been cunning. But why, Rufrius asked himself in despair, do people irritate him? Every obstacle they throw in his path only makes him more determined—can they really delude themselves that they’re cleverer than Caesar? All those years in Gaul have endowed him with a strategic legacy so formidable that he’s equal to anything. But hold your tongue, Rufrius, ride around with him and watch him plan a campaign he may never need to conduct. But if he has to conduct it, he’ll be ready.

  Caesar dismissed his lictors and sent Rufrius back to the Rhakotis camp armed with certain orders, then guided his horse up one street and down another, slowly enough to let the ibises stalk out from under the animal’s hooves, his eyes everywhere. At the intersection of Canopic and Royal Avenues he invaded the agora, a vast open space surrounded on all four sides by a wide arcade with a dark red back wall, and fronted by blue-painted Doric pillars. Next he went to the gymnasium, almost as large, similarly arcaded, but having hot baths, cold baths, an athletic track and exercise rings. In each he sat the horse oblivious to the glares of Alexandrians and ibises, then dismounted to examine the ceilings of the covered arcades and walkways. At the courts of justice he strolled inside, it seemed fascinated by the ceilings of its lofty rooms. From there he rode to the temple of Poseidon, thence to the Serapeum in Rhakotis, the latter a sanctuary to Serapis gifted with a huge temple amid gardens and other, smaller temples. Then it was off to the waterfront and its docks, its warehouses; the emporium, a gigantic trading center, received quite a lot of his attention, as did piers, jetties, quays curbed with big square wooden beams. Other temples and large public buildings along Canopic Avenue also interested him, particularly their ceilings, all held up by massive wooden beams. Finally he rode back down Royal Avenue to the German camp, there to issue instructions about fortifications.

  “I’m sending you two thousand soldiers as additional labor to start dismantling the old city walls,” he told his legate. “You’ll use the stones to build two new walls, each commencing at the back of the first house on either side of Royal Avenue and fanning outward until you reach the lake. Four hundred feet wide at the Royal Avenue end, but five thousand feet wide at the lakefront. That will bring you hard against the swamp on the west, while your eastern wall will bisect the road to the ship canal between the lake and the Canopic Nilus. The western wall you’ll make thirty feet high—the swamp will provide additional defense. The eastern wall you’ll make twenty feet high, with a fifteen-foot-deep ditch outside mined with stimuli, and a water-filled moat beyond that. Leave a gap in the eastern wall to let traffic to the ship canal keep flowing, but have stones ready to close the gap the moment I so order you. Both walls are to have a watchtower every hundred feet, and I’ll send you ballistas to put on top of the eastern wall.”

  Poker-faced, the legate listened, then went to find Arminius, the Ubian chieftain. Germans weren’t much use building walls, job would be to forage and stockpile fodder for the horses. They could also find wood for the fire-hardened, pointed stakes called stimuli, but their and start weaving withies for the breastworks—wonderful wicker weavers, Germans!

  Back down Royal Avenue rode Caesar to the Royal Enclosure and an inspection of its twenty-foot-high wall, which ran from the crags of the Akron theater in a line that returned to the sea on the far side of Cape Lochias. Not a watchtower anywhere, and no real grasp of the defensive nature of a wall; far more effort and care had gone into its decoration. No wonder the mob stormed the Royal Enclosure so often! This wouldn’t keep an enterprising dwarf outside.

  Time, time! It was going to take time, and he would have to fence and spar to fool people until his preparations were complete. First and foremost, there must be no indication apart from the activity at the cavalry camp that anything untoward was going on. Potheinus and his city minions like the Interpreter would assume that Caesar intended to huddle inside the cavalry fortress, abandon the city if attacked. Good. Let them think that.

  When Rufrius returned from Rhakotis, he received more orders, after which Caesar summoned all his junior legates (including the hopeless Tiberius Claudius Nero) and led them through his plans. Of their discretion he had no doubts; this wasn’t Rome against Rome, this was war with a foreign power not one of them liked.

  On the following day he summoned King Ptolemy, Potheinus, Theodotus and Ganymedes to the guest palace, where he seated them in chairs on the floor while he occupied his ivory curule chair on a dais. Which didn’t please the little king, though he allowed Theodotus to pacify him. That one has started sexual initiation, thought Caesar. What chance does the boy have, with such advisers? If he lives, he’ll be no better a ruler than his father was.

  “I’ve called you here to speak about a subject I mentioned the day before yesterday,” Caesar said, a scroll in his lap. “Namely, the succession to the throne of Alexandria in Egypt, which I now understand is a somewhat different question from the throne of Egypt of the Nilus. Apparently the latter, King, is a position your absent sister enjoys, but you do not. To rule in Egypt of the Nilus, the sovereign must be Pharaoh. As is Queen Cleopatra. Why, King, is your co-ruler, sister and wife an exile commanding an army of mercenaries against her own subjects?”

  Potheinus answered; Caesar had expected nothing else. The littleking did as he was told, and had insufficient intelligence to think without being led through the facts first. “Because her subjects rose up against her and ejected her, Caesar.”

  “Why did they rise up again
st her?”

  “Because of the famine,” Potheinus said. “Nilus has failed to inundate for two years in a row. Last year saw the lowest reading of the Nilometer since the priests started taking records three thousand years ago. Nilus rose only eight Roman feet.”

  “Explain.”

  “There are three kinds of inundation, Caesar. The Cubits of Death, the Cubits of Plenty, and the Cubits of Surfeit. To overflow its banks and inundate the valley, Nilus must rise eighteen Roman feet. Anything below that is in the Cubits of Death—water and silt will not be deposited on the land, so no crops can be planted. In Egypt, it never rains. Succor comes from Nilus. Readings between eighteen and thirty-two Roman feet constitute the Cubits of Plenty. Nilus floods enough to spread water and silt on all the growing land, and the crops come in. Inundations above thirty-two feet drown the valley so deeply that the villages are washed away and the waters do not recede in time to plant the crops,” Potheinus said as if by rote; evidently this was not the first time he had had to explain the inundation cycle to some ignorant foreigner.

  “Nilometer?” Caesar asked.

  “The device off which the inundation level is read. It is a well dug to one side of Nilus with the cubits marked on its wall. There are several, but the one of greatest importance is hundreds of miles to the south, at Elephantine on the First Cataract. There Nilus starts to rise one month before it does in Memphis, at the apex of the Delta. So we have warning what the year’s inundation is going to be like. A messenger brings the news down the river.”

  “I see. However, Potheinus, the royal income is enormous. Don’t you use it to buy in grain when the crops don’t germinate?”

  “Caesar must surely know,” said Potheinus smoothly, “that there has been drought all around Your Sea, from Spain to Syria. We have bought, but the cost is staggering, and naturally the cost must be passed on to the consumers.”

  “Really? How sensible” was Caesar’s equally smooth reply. He lifted the scroll on his lap. “I found this in Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus’s tent after Pharsalus. It is the will of the twelfth Ptolemy, your father”—spoken to the lad, bored enough to doze—“and it is very clear. It directs that Alexandria and Egypt shall be jointly ruled by his eldest living daughter, Cleopatra, and his eldest son, Ptolemy Euergetes, as husband and wife.”