"Like Sextus, I won't leave you again. But surely the place to go is Africa. We should sail for Utica at once, Magnus."
"Should we?" The vivid blue eyes were emerging once more from his puffy face, shrinking, like his body, from the anguish, the pain, the blow to his pride he still found impossible to govern. "Cornelia, it has been terrible. I don't mean Caesar or the war, I mean my associates in this venture. Oh, not your father! He's been a tower of strength. But he wasn't there for most of it. The bickering, the carping, the constant faultfinding."
"They found fault with you?"
"Perpetually. It wore me down. Perhaps I could have coped better with Caesar if I'd had control of my own command tent. But I didn't. Labienus generaled, Cornelia, not me. That man! How did Caesar ever put up with him? He's a barbarian. I do believe that he can only achieve physical satisfaction from putting men's eyes out—oh, worse acts I can't speak of to you! And though Ahenobarbus died very gallantly on the field, he tormented me at every opportunity. He called me Agamemnon, King of Kings."
The shocks and dislocations of the past two months had done much for Cornelia Metella; the spoiled amateur scholar had gained a measure of compassion, some much-needed sensitivity to the feelings of others. So she didn't make the mistake of interpreting Pompey's words as evidence of self-pity. He was like a noble old rock, worn away by the constant dripping of corrosive water.
"Dear Magnus, I think the trouble was that they deemed war as another kind of Senate. They didn't begin to understand that politics has nothing to do with military matters. They passed the Senatus Consultum Ultimum to make sure Caesar wouldn't be able to order them about. How then could they let you order them about?"
He smiled wryly. "That is very true. It should also tell you why I shrink from going to Africa. Your tata will go, yes. But so will Labienus and Cato. What would be different in Africa? I wouldn't own my command tent there either."
"Then we should seek shelter with the King of the Parthians, Magnus," she said decisively. "You sent your cousin Hirrus to see Orodes. He hasn't come back, though he's safe. Ecbatana is one place won't see either Caesar or Labienus."
"But what would it be like to look up at seven captured Roman Eagles? I'd be living with the shade of Crassus."
"Where else is there?"
"Egypt."
"It's not far enough away."
"No, but it's a place to jump off from. Can you imagine how much the people of the Indus or Serica might pay to gain a Roman general? I could win that world for my employer. The Egyptians know how to get to Taprobane. In Taprobane there will be someone who knows how to get to Serica or the Indus."
She smiled broadly, a nice sight. "Magnus, that's brilliant! Yes, let's you and I and Sextus go to Serica!"
He didn't stay long in Mitylene, but when he heard that the great philosopher Cratippus was there, he went to seek an audience.
"I am honored, Pompeius," said the old man in the pure white robe with the pure white beard flowing down its front.
"No, the honor is mine." Pompey made no attempt to sit down, stood looking into the rheumy eyes and wondering why they showed no sign of wisdom. Didn't philosophers always look wise?
"Let us walk," said Cratippus, putting his arm through Pompey's. "The garden is so beautiful. Done in the Roman style, of course. We Greeks have not the gift of gardening. I have always thought that the Roman appreciation of Nature's beauty is an indication of the innate worth of the Roman people. We Greeks deflected our love of beauty into man-made things, whereas you Romans have the genius to insert your man-made things into Nature as if they belonged there. Bridges, aqueducts ... So perfect! We never understood the beauty of the arch. Nature," Cratippus rambled on, "is never linear, Gnaeus Pompeius. Nature is round, like the globe."
"I have never grasped the roundness of the globe."
"Didn't Eratosthenes prove it when he measured the shadow on the same plane in Upper and Lower Egypt? Flatness has an edge. And if there is an edge, why don't the waters of Oceanus flow off it like a cataract? No, Gnaeus Pompeius, the world is a globe, closed on itself like a fist. The tips of its fingers kiss the back of its palm. And that, you know, is a kind of infinity."
"I wondered," said Pompey, searching for words, "if you could tell me anything about the Gods."
"I can tell you much, but what did you want to know?"
"Well, something about their form. What godhead is."
"I think you Romans are closer to that answer than we Greeks. We set up our Gods as facsimiles of men and women, with all the failings, desires, appetites and evils thereof. Whereas the Roman Gods—the true Roman Gods—have no faces, no sex, no form. You say numina. Inside the air, a part of the air. A kind of infinity."
"But how do they exist, Cratippus?"
The watery eyes, Pompey saw, were very dark but had a pale ring around the outside of each iris. Arcus senilis, the sign of coming death. He was not long for this world. This globe.
"They exist as themselves."
"No, what are they like?"
"Themselves. We can have no comprehension of what that might be because we do not know them. We Greeks gave them human personae because we could grasp at nothing else. But in order to make them Gods, we gave them superhuman powers. I believe," said Cratippus gently, "that all the Gods are actually a part of one great God. Again, you Romans come closer to that truth. You know that all your Gods are a part of your great God, Jupiter Optimus Maximus."
"And does this great God live in the air?"
"I think it lives everywhere. Above, below, inside, outside, around, about. I think we are a part of it."
Pompey wet his lips, came at last to what preyed on his mind. "Do we live on after we die?"
"Ah! The eternal question. A kind of infinity."
"By definition, the Gods or a great God are immortal. We die. But do we continue to live?"
"Immortality is not the same as infinity. There are many different kinds of immortality. The long life of God—but is it infinitely long? I do not think so. I think God is born and reborn in immeasurably long cycles. Whereas infinity is unchanging. It had no beginning, it will have no end. As for us—I do not know. Beyond any doubt, Gnaeus Pompius, you will be immortal. Your name and your deeds will live on for millennia after you are vanished. That is a sweet thought. And is it not to own godhead?"
Pompey went away no more enlightened. Well, wasn't that what they always said? Try to pin a Greek down and you ended with nothing. A kind of infinity.
He set sail from Mitylene with Cornelia Metella, Sextus and the two Lentuli and island-hopped down the eastern Aegaean Sea, staying nowhere longer than an overnight sleep, encountering no one he knew until he rounded the corner of Lycia and docked in the big Pamphylian city of Attaleia. There he found no less than sixty members of the Senate in exile. None terribly distinguished, all terribly bewildered. Attaleia announced its undying loyalty and gave Pompey twelve neat and seaworthy triremes together with a letter from his son Gnaeus, still on the island of Corcyra. How did word get around so quickly?
Father, I have sent this same letter to many places. Please, I beg of you, don't give up! I have heard of your frightful ordeals in the command tent from Cicero, who was here but has now gone. That Labienus! Cicero told me.
He arrived with Cato and a thousand recovered wounded troops. Then Cato announced that he would take the soldiers on to Africa, but that it was inappropriate for a mere praetor to command when a consular—he meant Cicero—was available for command. His aim was to put himself and the men under Cicero's authority, but you know that old bag of wind better than I do, so you can imagine what his answer was. He wanted nothing to do with further resistance, troops or Cato. When Cato realized that Cicero was secretly bent on going back to Italia, he lost his temper and went for Cicero with feet and fists. I had to drag him off. The moment he could, Cicero fled to Patrae, taking his brother Quintus and nephew Quintus with him. They had been staying with me. I imagine the three of them are now sq
uabbling in Patrae.
Cato took my transports—I have no need of them—and set sail for Africa. Unfortunately I had no one I could give him as a pilot, so I told him to point the bows of his ships south and let the winds and currents take him. One consolation is that Africa shuts Our Sea in on the south, so he can't help but fetch up somewhere in Africa.
What this tells me is that the war against Caesar is far from over. Resistance will crystallize in Africa Province as the refugees all head there. We are still alive and kicking, and we still own the seas. Please, I beg you, my beloved father, gather what ships you can and come either to me or to Africa.
Pompey's answer was brief.
My dearest son, forget me. I can do nothing to help the Republican cause. My day is over. Nor, candidly, can I face the thought of the command tent with Cato and Labienus breathing down my neck. My race is run. What you do is your choice. But beware Cato and Labienus. The one is a rigid ideologue, the other a savage.
Cornelia, Sextus and I are going far, far away. I will not say where in case this letter is intercepted. The two Lentuli, who have accompanied me until now, will leave me before I reveal my destination. I hope to elude them here in Attaleia.
Look after yourself, my son. I love you.
Early in September came the time for departure; Pompey's ship slipped out of harbor without the knowledge of the two Lentuli or the sixty refugee senators. He had taken three of the triremes but left the other nine to be sent to Gnaeus in Corcyra.
They called in to Cilician Syedra briefly, then crossed the water to Paphos in Cyprus. The prefect of Cyprus, now under Roman rule from Cilicia, was one of the sons of Appius Claudius Pulcher Censor and very keen to do what he could to help Pompey.
"I am so sorry your father died so suddenly," said Pompey.
"And I," said Gaius Claudius Pulcher, who didn't look sorry. "Though he'd quite gone off his head, you know."
"I had heard something of it. At least he was spared things like Pharsalus." How hard it was to say that word "Pharsalus"!
"Yes. He and I have always been yours, but I can't say the same for the whole patrician Claudian clan."
"All the Famous Families are split, Gaius Claudius."
"You can't stay here, unfortunately. Antioch and Syria have declared for Caesar, and Sestius in the governor's palace at Tarsus has always inclined toward Caesar. He'll declare openly any day."
"How is the wind for Egypt?"
Gaius Claudius stiffened. "I wouldn't go there, Magnus."
"Why not?"
"There's civil war."
8
The third Inundation of Cleopatra's reign was the lowest on record in a land where records of the Inundation had been kept for two thousand years. Not merely down in the Cubits of Death: eight feet, a new bottom for the Cubits of Death.
The moment Cleopatra heard, she understood that there would be no harvest this coming year, even in the lands of Ta-she and Lake Moeris. She did what she could to stave off disaster. In February she issued a joint edict with the little King directing that every scrap of grain produced or stored in Middle Egypt was to be sent to Alexandria. Middle and Upper Egypt were to feed themselves by irrigating the narrow valley of the Nilus from the First Cataract to Thebes. As every grain of wheat and barley grown in Egypt was the property of the Double Crown, she was fully entitled to issue this edict—and to exact the punishment for any transgression by grain merchant or bureaucrat: death and confiscation of all property. Informants were offered cash rewards; slave informants were offered their freedom as well.
The response was immediate and frantic. In March the Queen thought it politic to issue a second edict. This one assured those possessed of Letters Regnant exempting them from taxation or military service that their exemptions would be honored—on the sole condition that they were engaged in agriculture. The whole kingdom outside Alexandria had to be driven to grow in the most painful way, by irrigation minus Inundation.
[Caesar 597.jpg]
The letters of protest flooded in. So too did requests for seed grain and remissions in taxes, neither of which the Double Crown was in a position to grant.
Worse than this, Alexandria was in ferment. Food prices were spiraling, the poorer people scraping money together to buy food by selling their precious few possessions while those better off began to hoard both their money and their non-perishable foods. The little King and his sister Arsinoe smirked; Potheinus and Theodotus, assisted by General Achillas, went far and wide through Alexandria commiserating with the simmering citizens and suggesting that the shortage was a ploy of Cleopatra's to reduce the more seditious-minded elements among the people by starving them out of the city.
In June the trio struck. Alexandria boiled over; a mob set out from the Agora to the Royal Enclosure. Potheinus and Theodotus unbarred the gates, and the mob, led by Achillas, stormed inside. To discover that Cleopatra had gone. Nothing daunted, Arsinoe was presented to the mob as the new Queen and the little King spoke fair promises of improved conditions. The mob went home; Potheinus, Theodotus and Achillas were content. But they faced severe difficulties. There was no extra food to be had. However, power seized had to be defended and retained; Potheinus sent a fleet to raid the granaries of Judaea and Phoenicia, secure in the knowledge that the war between Pompey the Great and Gaius Caesar was occupying so much attention elsewhere that a few Egyptian raids would go, if not unnoticed, certainly unpunished.
One difficulty loomed very large. Cleopatra had vanished. While ever she was free, she would be working indefatigably to ensure the downfall of little King Ptolemy's palace cabal. Only where had she gone? All the dethroned Ptolemies took ship and sailed away! Yet nowhere on that huge waterfront could any of the cabal's spies discover the slightest evidence that Cleopatra had sailed away.
She had not sailed away. Accompanied by Charmian, Iras and a gigantic, black-skinned eunuch named Apollodorus, Cleopatra left the Royal Enclosure clad in the clothes of a well-to-do Alexandrian lady and riding on a donkey. Passing through the Canopic Gate scant hours before the mob stormed the palace, they boarded a small barge at the town of Schedia, where the canal from Lake Mareotis behind Alexandria flowed into the Canopic arm of the Nilus Delta. The distance to Memphis, which lay on the Nilus itself just before it fanned into the Delta, was not more than eight hundred Greek stadia—a hundred Roman miles.
Memphis had again become the most powerful nucleus of worship in Egypt. Centered around the cult of the creator-god Ptah, under the first and middle pharaohs it had contained the treasure vaults and the most august priests. From the time of Pharaoh Senusret it sank from favor, superseded by Amon in Thebes. Religious power shifted from Memphis to Thebes. So did custody of the treasures. But with the fluctuating fortunes of Egypt after the last of the truly Egyptian pharaohs had died out, Amon too declined. Then came the Ptolemies and Alexandria. Memphis began to rise again, perhaps because it was much closer to Alexandria than was Thebes, the first Ptolemy, a brilliant man, had conceived the idea of bonding Alexandria to Egypt by having the high priest of Ptah, one Manetho, carve out a hybrid religion, part Greek, part Egyptian, under the godhead of Zeus-Osirapis-Osiris-Apis and an Artemis-Isis.
The fall of Thebes occurred when it rebelled against Ptolemaic rule during the time of the ninth Ptolemy, called Soter II in the inscriptions and Lathyrus (which meant Chickpea) by his subjects. Chickpea massed his Jewish army and his shallow-drafted war galleys and rowed down Nilus to teach Thebes a lesson. He sacked it and razed it to the ground. Amon suffered terribly.
However, the three-thousand-year-old priestly hierarchy of Egypt knew all there was to know about looting. Every pharaoh who had been laid to rest surrounded by incredible wealth was a target for tomb robbers, who went to any lengths to plunder the dead. While Egypt was strong these bandits were kept at bay; after Egypt became the prey of foreign incursions, most of the royal tombs were denuded. Only those secretly located remained unpillaged. As did the treasure vaults.
By the t
ime Ptolemy Chickpea tore Thebes apart (looking for the treasure vaults), those vaults were back in Memphis. He was desperate for money; Chickpea's mother, the third Cleopatra, was Pharaoh, but made sure he was not. She loathed him, preferring his younger brother, Alexander, whom she finally succeeded in putting on the throne in his place. A fatal act for Egypt. After Alexander murdered her, the two brothers warred for the throne. When both were dead, Sulla the Dictator sent Alexander's son to rule Egypt. He was the last legitimate male of the line, but not capable of siring children. His will bequeathed Egypt to Rome, and Egypt had lived in fear ever since.
Cleopatra came ashore on the west bank and rode on her ass to the west pylon of an enclosure half a square mile in extent. It embraced the temple of Ptah, the house in which the Apis Bulls were embalmed, a conglomeration of buildings devoted to the priests and their varied duties, and numerous smaller temples established in honor of long-dead pharaohs. Beneath it were honeycombs of chambers, rooms, runnels which proliferated as far as the pyramid fields several miles away. That part of the labyrinth entered from the embalming house of the Apis Bulls held the mummy of every Apis Bull which had ever lived, as well as mummified cats and ibises. That part of the labyrinth entered from a secret room within the temple of Ptah itself contained the treasure vaults.
The Ue'b came to meet her, accompanied by his reciter priest the cherheb, his treasurer, his officials and the mete-en-sa, who were the ordinary priests. Not five Roman feet tall and weighing no more than a talent and a half, Cleopatra stood there while two hundred shaven-headed men prostrated themselves, their brows pressed against the polished red granite flags.
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