“Tell the brat and his pet eunuch that I’ll expect to meet them ashore tomorrow at noon—not an hour earlier and not an hour later. I’ll be able to judge how subservient these Egyptians intend to be by what they feed me for lunch. If they spring for crocodile steak and swallows’ tongues with a decent Italian wine, I’ll tell the boy-king to wipe my bottom for me as well. If they think they can get away with serving Nile mullets and Egyptian beer, I’ll know I have my work cut out for me.” This was followed by a harsh laugh that made my blood run cold.
Another voice replied, in lower tones, “As you command, Great One,” and a moment later an officer emerged from the cabin, wearing full regalia and carrying a plumed helmet under his arm. He spied me and raised an eyebrow. “Is this the one called Gordianus, Centurion Macro?”
“It is, Commander.”
“Well, Citizen Gordianus, I don’t envy you. But then, you probably don’t envy me, either. I’m off to the mainland to parlay with that haughty boy-king and his insufferable advisers. The Great One expects to receive a fitting welcome when he goes ashore tomorrow, but one gets the distinct impression that the boy-king had rather be staging another battle against his sister and her rebels in the desert.” The officer shook his head. “This sort of thing was so much easier before Pharsalus! I had merely to snap my fingers, and the locals cringed. Now they look at me as if . . .” He seemed to realize he had said too much, and scowled. “Ah, well, perhaps I’ll see you again when I get back. Or perhaps not.” He gave me a nudge in the ribs that was much too hard to be friendly, and then he pushed past me. I watched the officer descend the ramp and disappear from sight.
While I was distracted, one of the guards had apparently announced my arrival, for without further preamble Centurion Macro pushed me toward the cabin. I stepped inside, and he shut the door behind me.
The little room seemed dark after the bright sunshine. As my eyes adjusted, the first face I saw was that of a young woman, a strikingly beautiful Roman matron who sat in one corner with her hands folded on her lap, fixing me with a condescending stare. Even at sea, she had managed to take considerable pains with her appearance. Her hair was tinted with henna and piled atop her head in a complicated coif. Her wine-dark stola was belted about her shapely torso with chains of gold, and more gold shimmered amid the jewel-encrusted pectoral that adorned her throat and the lapis baubles that dangled from her earlobes. Pompey’s young wife had no doubt taken a great deal of jewelry with her when she fled from Rome with her husband; she must have lugged that jewelry from camp to camp as the arena of battle moved. If any woman had learned to look her best while on the move, and if any woman felt she had earned the right to wear her best jewels for any occasion, it was the long-suffering Cornelia.
Pompey was not her first husband. Her previous marriage had been to Publius Crassus, the son of Marcus Crassus, the lifelong rival of Caesar and Pompey. When the elder Crassus set out to conquer Parthia some five years ago, he took his son with him; both perished when the Parthians massacred the invading Romans. Still young and beautiful, and famously well versed in literature, music, geometry, and philosophy, Cornelia had not remained a widow long. Some said her marriage to Pompey was a political union; others said it was a love-match. Whatever the nature of their relationship, through good times and bad she had remained steadfastly at his side.
“So it is you, Finder!” The voice, so harsh it gave me a start, came from another corner. Pompey stepped forward, emerging from the deepest shadows in the room.
On the last occasion I saw him, he had been possessed by an almost supernatural fury. There was a glint of that same fury even now in his eyes. He was dressed as if for battle, in gleaming armor, and carried himself stiffly, his chin high, his shoulders erect—a model of Roman dignity and self-control. But along with the glint of fury in his eyes, there was a glimmer of something else—fear, uncertainty, defeat. Those emotions, held carefully in check, nevertheless undermined the stiffly formal facade he presented, and it seemed to me that behind his gleaming armor and scowling countenance, Pompey the Great was a hollow man.
Hollow, I thought—but hardly harmless. He fixed me with a gaze so intense that I had to struggle not to lower my eyes. When he saw that I refused to quail, he barked out a laugh.
“Gordianus! As defiant as ever—or merely stupid? No, not stupid. That can’t be, since everyone credits you with being so very, very clever. But cleverness counts for nothing without the favor of the gods, and I think the gods must have deserted you, eh? For here you are, delivered into my hands—the last person on earth I should have thought to see today. And I must be the last person you expected to encounter!”
“We’ve followed different paths to the same place, Great One. Perhaps it’s because the gods have withdrawn their favor from both of us.”
He blanched. “You are a fool, and I shall see that you end like a fool. I’d thought you dead already when I left Brundisium, drowned like a rat after you jumped from my ship. Then Domitius Ahenobarbus joined me in Greece and told me he’d seen you alive in Massilia. ‘Impossible!’ I told him. ‘You saw the Finder’s lemur.’ ‘No, the man himself,’ he assured me. And now you stand before me in the flesh, and it’s Domitius who’s become a lemur. Marc Antony chased him to ground like a fox at Pharsalus. Damn Antony! Damn Caesar! But who knows? Mark my words, Caesar will yet get his just deserts, and when he least expects it. The gods will abandon Caesar—like that!” He snapped his fingers. “One moment he’ll be alive, plotting his next triumph, and the next moment—dead as King Numa! I see you scoff, Finder, but believe me, Caesar will yet receive his due.”
What was he talking about? Did he have spies and assassins close to Caesar, plotting to do away with him? I stared back at Pompey and said nothing.
“Lower your eyes, damn you! A man in your position—think of those traveling with you, if not of yourself. You’re all at my mercy!”
Would he really harm Bethesda to take vengeance on me? I tried to steady the quaver in my voice. “I’m traveling with a young mute of simple intelligence, two slave boys, and my wife, who is not well. I find it hard to believe that the Great One would stoop to exact vengeance on such—”
“Oh, shut up!” Pompey made a noise of disgust and looked sidelong at his wife. Some unspoken communication passed between them, and the exchange seemed to calm him. I sensed that Cornelia was his anchor, the one thing he could count on now that everything else, including his own judgment, had failed him so miserably.
Pompey now refused to look at me. “Go on, get out!” he said between clenched teeth.
I blinked, not ready to believe that he was dismissing me with my head still on my shoulders.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
I turned to leave. “But don’t think I’m done with you, Finder!” Pompey snapped. “At present I have too much on my mind to fully enjoy seeing the life torn out of you. After I’ve met with young King Ptolemy and my fortunes have returned to a firmer footing—then I’ll summon you again, when I can deal with you at my leisure.”
Centurion Macro accompanied me back to the skiff. “You look as pale as a fish belly,” he said.
“Do I?”
“Mind your step, getting into the boat. I’ve been given orders that nothing untoward must happen to you.”
“The dagger that was taken from me?”
He laughed. “You won’t be seeing that again. Pompey says you mustn’t hurt yourself.”
CHAPTER III
Night fell. The sea was calm, the sky clear. Far away to the west, beyond the low marshland of the Nile Delta, I imagined I could descry the Pharos, a pinpoint of light upon an uncertain horizon.
“There!” I said to Bethesda, who stood beside me at the ship’s rail. “Do you see it? The Pharos.”
She squinted and frowned. “No.” “Are you sure?” “My vision is dim tonight.”
I held her close. “Do you feel unwell?”
She grimaced. “It seems such a small thin
g, now. To have come so far for such a petty purpose—”
“Not petty, Wife. You must be well again.”
“Toward what end? Our children are all grown.”
“Eco and Diana both have given us grandchildren, and now Diana is expecting another.”
“And no doubt they’ll do a splendid job of raising them, with or without their grandmother. My time on this earth has been good, Master. . . .”
Master? What was she thinking, to call me that? Many years had passed since I made her free and married her. From that day forward she had called me Husband, and not once had I known her to slip and address me as her master. It was the return to Egypt, I told myself, calling her back to her past, confusing her about the present.
“Your time on this earth is far from over, Wife.”
“And your time, Husband?” She gave no sign of noticing her earlier error. “When you came back today, I gave thanks to Isis, for it seemed a miracle. But the centurion forbade the captain to sail on. That means the Great One isn’t done with you.”
“The Great One has far greater concerns than me. He’s come to seek King Ptolemy’s assistance. All Pompey’s other allies—the Eastern potentates and moneylenders and mercenaries who gave him their allegiance before Pharsalus—have deserted him. But his ties to Egypt are strong. If he can persuade King Ptolemy to take his side, then he yet has a hope to defeat Caesar. Egypt has grain and gold. Egypt even has a Roman army, garrisoned here for the last seven years to keep the peace.”
“Something they’ve singularly failed to do, if Ptolemy is engaged in a civil war with his sister Cleopatra,” said Bethesda.
“So it’s ever been in Egypt, at least in our lifetimes. To gain power, the Ptolemaic siblings intermarry, conspire among themselves, even murder one another. Sister marrying brother, brother murdering sister—what a family! As savage and peculiar as those animal-headed gods the locals worship.”
“Don’t scoff! You’re in the realm of those gods now, Master.” She had done it again. I made no remark, but sighed and held her closer.
“So you see, Pompey has far too much to think about to be bothered with me.” I said the words with all the conviction I could muster.
When sleep is distant, the night is long. Bethesda and I lay together on our little cot in the cramped passenger cabin, separated from Rupa and the boys by a flimsy screen woven from rushes. Rupa snored softly; the boys breathed steadily, submerged in the deep sleep of children. The ship rocked very slightly on the calm sea. I was weary, my mind numb, but sleep would not come.
Had it not been for the storm, we would have been in Alexandria that night, safe and snug in some inn in the Rhakotis district, with a steady floor beneath our feet and a proper roof above our heads, our bellies full of delicacies from the market, our heads awhirl with the sights and sounds of a teeming city I had not seen since I was young. Come the dawn, I would have hired a boat to take us up the long canal to the banks of the Nile. Bethesda would do what she had come to do, and I would do what I had come to do—for I, too, had a reason for visiting the Nile, a purpose about which Bethesda knew nothing. . . .
At the foot of our sleeping cot, where it served each morning as a dressing table for Bethesda and each evening as a dining table for all five of us, was a traveling trunk. Inside the trunk, nestled amid clothing, shoes, coins, and cosmetics, was a sealed bronze urn. Its contents were the ashes of a woman called Cassandra. She had been Rupa’s sister, and more than that, his protector, for Rupa was simple as well as mute, and could not make his own way in the world. Cassandra had been very special to me, as well, though our relationship had very nearly proven fatal to us both. I had managed to keep the affair secret from Bethesda only because of her illness, which had dulled her intuition along with her other senses. Cassandra and Rupa had come to Rome from Alexandria; Rupa wanted to return his sister to the land of their youth and to scatter her ashes in the Nile, restoring her remains to the great cycle of earth, air, fire, and water. The urn that contained her ashes loomed in my mind like a fifth passenger among us, unseen and unheard but often in my thoughts.
If all had gone well, tomorrow Bethesda would have bathed in the Nile, and Cassandra’s ashes would have been mingled with the river’s sacred waters: duties discharged, health restored, the closing of a dark chapter, and, I had hoped, the opening of a brighter one. But that was not how things had turned out.
Was I to blame for my own fate? I had killed a man; disowned my beloved Meto; fallen in love with Cassandra, whose ashes were only a few feet away. Was it any wonder the gods had abandoned me? For sixty-two years they had watched over me and rescued me from one scrape after another, either because they were fond of me, or merely because they were amused by the peculiar twists and turns of my life’s story. Had they now grown disinterested, distracted by the grander drama of the war that had swept over the world? Or had they watched my actions, judged me harshly, and found me no longer worthy of life? Surely some god, somewhere, had been laughing that afternoon when Pompey and I met, two broken men brought to the edge of ruin.
Thus ran my thoughts that night, and they kept sleep far away.
Bethesda slept and must have dreamed, to judge by her low murmurs and the occasional twitching of her fingers. Her dreams appeared to be uneasy, but I did not rouse her; wake a sleeper in middream, and the dark phantoms linger; but let a dream run its course, and the sleeper wakes with no memory of it. Soon enough Bethesda might have to face a nightmare from which there would be no waking. How would I die? Would Bethesda be forced to witness the act? Afterwards, how would she remember me? Above all else, a Roman must strive to face his end with dignity. I would have to remember that and think of Bethesda and the last memory of me she would carry, the next time the Great One summoned me.
At some point in the middle of that very long, very dark night, Bethesda stirred and sought my hand with hers. She twined her fingers with mine and squeezed them so tightly that I feared she must be in pain.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
She rolled toward me and pressed a finger to my lips to silence me. In the darkness I could see the glimmer of her eyes, but I could not make out her expression. I murmured against the finger pressed to my lips. “Bethesda, beloved—”
“Hush!” she whispered.
“But—”
She removed her finger and replaced it with her lips, pressing her mouth to mine in a deep, breathless kiss.
We had not kissed that way in a very long time, not since the onset of her illness. Her kiss reminded me of Cassandra, and for a brief moment I experienced the illusion that it was Cassandra beside me in the bed, her ashes made flesh again. But as the kiss continued, my memory of Cassandra faded, and I was reminded of Bethesda herself, when she and I both had been very young and our passion was so fresh it seemed that such a thing had never before been known in the world—a portal to an undiscovered country.
She pressed herself against me and slid her arms around me. The smell of her hair was intoxicating; neither illness nor travel had stopped her from the ritual of washing, combing, and scenting the great mane of black shot with silver that cascaded almost to her waist. She rolled atop me, and her tresses enclosed me, sweeping across my bare shoulders and over my cheeks, mingling with the tears that abruptly flowed from my eyes.
As the boat swayed gently on the waves, with Rupa and the boys and the urn that contained Cassandra very close, we made love, quietly, slowly, with a depth of feeling we had not shared in a very long time. I feared at first that she might be expending herself beyond her limits, but it was she who set the pace, bringing me quickly to the point of ecstasy and then holding me there at her leisure, stretching each moment to exquisite infinity.
The paroxysm wracked her body, and then again, and on the third occasion I joined her, peaking and melting into oblivion. We separated but remained side by side, breathing as one, and I sensed that her body had relaxed completely—so completely that I gripped her hand, fearing there mig
ht be no response. But she squeezed my fingers in return, even as the rest of her remained utterly limp, as if her joints had loosened and her limbs turned as soft as wax. It was only in that moment that I realized just how stiffly, for month after month, she had been holding her body, even when she slept. She released a long sigh of contentment.
“Bethesda,” I said quietly.
“Sleep,” she whispered.
The word seemed to act as a magical spell. Almost at once I felt consciousness desert me as I sank into the warm, boundless ocean of Somnus. The last things I heard were a high-pitched whisper followed by a stifled giggle. At some point Androcles and Mopsus must have awakened and been richly amused by the noises in the room. In other circumstances I might have been angry, but I must have fallen asleep with a smile on my face, for that was how I awoke.
The smile faded quickly as I remembered exactly where I was. I blinked my eyes at the dim light that leaked around the cabin door. I sensed movement. From outside the cabin I heard the sailors calling to one another. The sail snapped. The oars creaked. The captain had set sail—but to where?
I felt a thrill of hope. Had we somehow, under cover of darkness, escaped from Pompey’s fleet? Was Alexandria in sight? I scrambled from the cot, slipping into my tunic as I opened the door and stepped out.
My hopes evaporated in an instant. We were in the midst of Pompey’s fleet, surrounded by ships on all sides. They were all in motion, taking advantage of an onshore breeze to draw closer to the coast.
The captain saw me and approached. “Get a good night’s sleep?” he asked. “I figured you needed it. Didn’t have the heart to wake you.”
“What’s happening?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with them.” He pointed toward the shore. Where on the previous day the beach had been a featureless smear of brown lacking any sign of life, this morning it was thronged with a great multitude of soldiers arrayed in formal ranks, their spears casting long shadows and their armor gleaming in the slanting, early-morning sunlight, the plumes atop their helmets appearing to shiver as the leaves of certain trees shiver in the slightest wind. Brightly colored pavilions with streaming pennants had been erected atop the low hills. The largest and most impressive of these pavilions was at the center of the host atop the highest of the hills. Beneath its canopy a throne sat atop a dais—a shimmering chair made of gold ornamented with jewels and worthy to seat a king. At the moment the throne was vacant, and though I squinted, I could not see beyond it into the royal tent.
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