The tension that hung in the air became so oppressive that I began to think it emanated from me alone. Perhaps the sky, seen though other eyes, was a normal blue, and the moment no stranger than any other—except to me, facing my death. “Quickest done is best done,” the Etruscan proverb says. I fingered the vial inside my tunic. A not-unpleasant taste, a little discomfort, and then oblivion . . .
The royal skiff reached the shore, where an honor guard awaited. The oarsmen jumped out and dragged the boat forward until the hull grounded in the sandy surf. Salvius and Achillas stepped out of the boat, followed by Philip, who turned about and offered his hand to Pompey.
Cornelia screamed.
Perhaps she had an instant of precognition. Perhaps she was simply watching more closely than the rest of us. I stared at the boat and at first saw only a confusion of sudden movements. Only afterwards, reviewing those fleeting images in memory, would it become clear to me exactly what happened.
The oarsmen in the surf, joined by soldiers awaiting them on shore, reached for Centurion Macro and Pompey’s other bodyguard and pulled them out of the boat. Septimius, standing in the boat behind Pompey, drew his sword from its scabbard. As he raised it to strike, the delayed sound of Macro’s cry reached us in the galley, followed, in a weird moment of disconnection, by the scraping noise of Septimius drawing his sword. The blade descended at a sharp angle, plunging between Pompey’s shoulder blades. Pompey stiffened and convulsed. In what seemed a bizarre mimicry of his parting gesture to Cornelia, he flung his arms wide.
Philip was seized by soldiers on the beach and pulled back, his mouth open in a cry of anguish. Salvius and Achillas drew swords and clambered back into the boat. On either side, Pompey’s two bodyguards were held under the water until their flailing subsided. Inside the boat, while Pompey’s scribe cowered and ducked, the Great One collapsed as Achillas, Salvius, and Septimius swarmed over him, their swords flashing in the sun.
Abruptly, the stabbing stopped. While the other two pulled back, their chests heaving and their breastplates spattered with blood, Achillas squatted down in the boat and performed some operation. A few moments later he stood upright, his bloody sword in one hand and the severed head of Pompey held aloft in the other.
Those of us on the deck of Pompey’s galley stood frozen and speechless. From the various ships around us, scattered shrieks and cries echoed across the still water, punctuating the unnatural silence. Achillas deliberately made a point of displaying the head of Pompey to the fleet offshore. The Great One’s eyes were wide open. His mouth gaped. Gore dripped from his severed neck. Then Achillas turned about to show the head to the troops on shore. In their midst, in front of the royal pavilion, King Ptolemy had at last appeared. At some point during the attack, he had taken his place upon the throne, surrounded by a coterie of attendants. He was small in the distance, his features hard to make out, but he was instantly recognizable by the glittering uraeus crown of the Egyptian pharaohs upon his head, a jewel-encrusted band of gold with a rearing cobra at the center. In his crossed arms the king clutched a flail and a staff with a crook at the end, both made of bands of gold interspersed with bands of lapis lazuli. An adviser spoke in his ear, and the king responded by raising his staff in a salute to Achillas. The assembled Egyptian troops broke into a stunning cheer that swept across the water like a thunderclap.
I turned and looked up at Cornelia. She was as white as ivory, her face contorted like a tragedy mask. The galley’s captain ran to her, whispered in her ear, and pointed toward the west. Looking dazed, she turned her head. From the direction of the Nile, a fleet of ships had appeared on the horizon. “Egyptian warships!” I heard the captain say, raising his voice and gripping Cornelia’s arm to rouse her from her trance.
She stared at the ships, then at the shore, then again at the approaching fleet. The muscles of her face twitched as if she was trying to speak but could not. She shivered, blinked, and finally cried out, “Weigh anchor! Set sail! Set sail!”
Her cry broke the spell that held us frozen. The deck erupted in frenzied movement. Soldiers and sailors rushed this way and that. I was shoved and spun about and almost knocked down.
Amid the chaos I climbed to a higher spot and scanned the nearby ships. All the boats were weighing anchor at once, with oarsmen struggling to turn them about and sailors frantically setting sail. Finally I spotted the Andromeda. Bethesda stood at the rail, staring toward Pompey’s galley but clearly not seeing me amid the confusion on the deck; she was standing on tiptoes and waving her hands. Even as I watched, Rupa grabbed her from behind and pulled her away from the rail and back toward the cabin, trying to get her out of the way of the sailors running back and forth. I waved my arm and shouted her name, but to no effect; in the next instant she disappeared into the cabin with Rupa and the slave boys.
I jumped onto the deck and ran to the ramp from which Pompey had departed. Sailors were heaving on ropes to raise the ramp clear of the water. I ran to its edge and dove into the waves.
Salt stung my nostrils. My heart pounded in my chest. I broke the surface and drew a desperate breath. All the ships were in motion, confusing me and making me lose my sense of direction. It seemed that every captain was acting on his own, with no coordination among them; hardly more than a stone’s throw from Pompey’s galley, two smaller boats collided, knocking some of the sailors overboard. I treaded water, turning around and trying to orient myself, searching for the Andromeda. I thought I knew the direction where I had last seen her, but my view was blocked by a passing ship. Nonetheless, I set off swimming in that direction, away from the shore.
The motion of so many oars from so many ships created waves that rippled and merged and smacked against one another. Water surged into my nostrils. I swallowed air and breathed in water. Swimming became impossible; just to keep my head above water was a struggle. From nowhere, a galley appeared and went racing by me, the long bank of oars, one after another, crashing into the water beside my head, setting up a turbulence that tossed me this way and that and dragged me under, spinning me upside-down beneath the waves.
By the time I recovered, I was more disoriented than ever, not even sure in which direction the shore lay. It took all my energy just to stay afloat. At some point, I thought I caught a glimpse of the Andromeda and tried desperately to swim after it, expending the last measure of my strength to call out Bethesda’s name. But it might very well have been some other boat, and in any case my pursuit was hopeless; the ship quickly receded, and with it my hopes of ever seeing Bethesda again.
At last I gave up; or more precisely, gave in. Neptune had his own plans for me, and I relinquished all control to the god. My limbs turned to lead, and I thought that I must surely sink, but the god’s hand kept me afloat and upright, with the hot sun on my face. The oar-churned sea grew calmer. The multitude of sails receded into the distance. From somewhere I heard a great commotion of movement, as of an army de-camping, but even that noise gradually faded until I heard only the shallow sound of my own breath and the gentle lapping of waves upon a shore. A sandy bank materialized beneath my back; the waves no longer carried me aloft but merely nudged me this way and that. The shallow surf sighed and whispered around me. I let out a groan and closed my eyes.
I may have slept, but probably not for long. Above the sighing of the surf, I heard another sound: the buzzing of flies, a great many of them, somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes and saw a bearded face above me. His eyes were wet with tears. His lips trembled. “Help me,” he said. “For the love of Jupiter, please help me!”
I recognized him: Philip, the trusted freedman who had accompanied Pompey ashore.
“Please,” he said. “I can’t do it myself. He’s too heavy. I’m too weary. I saw you on the galley before we left. You were standing with Cornelia. Did you know him well? Did you fight beside him? I thought I knew all his friends, but . . .”
I tried to rise, but my limbs were still made of lead. Philip helped me roll to my side, onto all
fours. I rose to my knees, feeling them sink into the wet sand. Philip’s hand on my shoulder steadied me.
The beach was deserted. The pavilions were gone; the soldiers had all vanished. The quietness of the place was eerie; I heard only the gentle murmur of waves and the low droning of flies.
I turned my head and gazed at the sea. The same thin haze that blanched the sky obscured the distant horizon. In that uncertain expanse of flat water, there was not a sail to be seen. Earth and sea were both empty, but not so the sky; I looked up and saw carrion birds circling.
Philip slipped his hands under my armpits and lifted, eager to bring me to my feet. He was a small fellow, but obviously quite strong, certainly stronger than I was. He claimed to need my help, but from the look in his eyes, I knew it was my company he wanted, the presence of another living mortal in that place of desolation. Philip didn’t want to be alone, and when he led me down the beach to the place where the royal skiff had landed, I saw why.
The skiff was gone. “Where . . .?” I began to say. “They loaded it onto a wagon. Can you believe it? They brought it here just to bring Pompey ashore, and when it was over, they cleaned out the blood with buckets of seawater, then turned the boat upside-down and loaded it onto a wagon and carried it off, over those low hills. The whole army did an about-face and vanished in a matter of minutes. It was uncanny, as if they were phantoms. You’d almost think they’d never even been here.”
But the army of King Ptolemy had indeed been here, and the proof lay at our feet, surrounded by a swarm of buzzing flies. Someone—Philip, I presumed—had dragged the corpses of Macro and his fellow centurion onto the beach and laid them on their backs, side by side. Next to them was the slave who had accompanied the party to act as scribe. He lay beside his box of writing materials, his tunic stained with blood from several wounds.
“He must have gotten in the way when Achillas and Salvius clambered back aboard the boat with their swords,” said Philip. “They had no reason to kill him. They didn’t kill me. The poor scribe simply got in the way.”
I nodded to show that I understood, then turned my eyes at last upon the sight I had been avoiding. Beside the bodyguards and the scribe lay the naked remains of Pompey the Great, a mangled body without a head. It was around his corpse, and especially around the clotted blood where the neck had been severed, that flies swarmed in greatest profusion.
“They took his head,” said Philip, his voice breaking. “They cut it off and carried it away like a trophy! And his finger . . .”
I saw that a finger had been cut from the corpse’s right hand; a smaller swarm of flies buzzed about the bloody stump.
“To take his ring, you see. They couldn’t just remove it. They cut off his finger and threw it in the sand, or in the surf—who knows where. . . .” Philip sobbed and in a sudden frenzy stripped off his tunic, using it as a scourge to snap at the flies. They dispersed, only to come back in greater numbers.
Philip gave up the effort and spoke through sobs. “I managed to strip off his clothes. I washed his wounds with seawater. Even so, the flies won’t go away. We must build a funeral pyre. There must be enough driftwood, scattered up and down the beach. I’ve gathered some, but we need more. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
I gazed at Pompey’s corpse and nodded. As a young man, he had been famous for his beauty as well as his bravery. His physique had been that of a young Hercules, his chest and shoulders thick with muscle, his waist narrow, his limbs beautifully molded. Like most men, he had grown softer and thicker with passing time; the sagging lump of flesh at my feet was nothing any sculptor would have seen fit to reproduce in marble. Looking at what remained of Pompey, I felt neither pity nor revulsion. This thing was not Pompey, any more than the head with which the Egyptians had absconded was Pompey. Pompey had been an essence, a force of nature, a will that commanded fantastic wealth, fleets of warships, legions of warriors. The thing at my feet was not Pompey. Nonetheless, it would have to be disposed of. As far as I knew, Neptune himself had saved me from watery oblivion for the singular purpose of paying homage to Pompey’s remains.
“He should have died at Pharsalus,” said Philip. “Not like this, but at a time and in the manner of his own choosing. When he knew that all was lost, he made up his mind to do so. ‘Help me, Philip,’ he said. ‘Help me keep up my courage. I’ve lost the game, and I have no stomach for the aftermath. Let this place be the end of me, let the history books say, “The Great One died at Pharsalus.” ‘ But at the last instant, he lost his nerve. Pompey the Great quailed and fled, with me running after him to keep up. Only to come to this, with his head carried off as a trophy for the king!”
Philip dropped to his knees on the sand and wept. I turned away and scanned the beach for bits of driftwood.
The sun reached its zenith and sank toward the west, and still we gathered wood, venturing farther and farther up and down the beach. Philip insisted that we build three pyres, one for the murdered scribe, another for the two centurions, and another, conspicuously larger than the others, for Pompey. By the time the pyres were built and the bodies laid atop them, the sun was sinking into the west, and shadows were gathering. Philip started a fire with kindling and flint, and set the pyres alight.
As darkness fell and the flames leaped up, I wondered if Cornelia, aboard her galley, would be able to see her husband’s funeral pyre as a speck of light in the far distance. I wondered if Bethesda, wherever she was, would be able to see the same flame, and if it would remind her of the Pharos, and make her weep, as I wept that night, at the twist of fate that had turned a journey of hope into a journey of despair.
CHAPTER V
My body exhausted, my mind numb, I fell asleep that night with the flames of Pompey’s funeral pyre dancing on my eyelids and the smell of his charred flesh in my nostrils. I slept like a dead man.
Hunger woke me. I had eaten nothing the previous day, and very little the day before. My stomach growled as I stirred from a dream of fish roasting on an open spit. I smelled cooked fish; the fantasy was so real that it stayed with me even after I opened my eyes.
I was lying on my back on the sand. The sun was high. I blinked at the brightness and raised a hand to shade my eyes, then the figure of a man blocked the sunlight. I saw him only as a looming silhouette, but I knew at once that it was not Philip, for this man was much bigger. I gave a start and skittered back on my elbows, then gave another start as something sharp was poked toward me. My stomach fairly roared with hunger. The thing in the man’s hand was a sharpened stick; on the stick was a roasted fish, hot from the flames.
The man above me made a familiar grunt as he poked the fish toward me again in a gesture of offering.
“Rupa?” I whispered. “Is that you?” I shaded my eyes and squinted, and glimpsed his face clearly for only an instant before tears obscured my vision.
I blinked them away and reached for the spit. The next thing I knew, the spit in my hand held only the skeleton of a fish, and my stomach had stopped growling. Above me, Rupa grinned.
I wiped my mouth and looked up the beach, to the spot where Rupa had dug a pit in the sand and filled it with coals from the funeral pyres. Two pieces of driftwood on either side served to hold the spits, upon which more fish were roasting. I looked toward the water and saw Androcles and Mopsus, along with Philip, wading naked in the surf, armed with sharpened sticks and their own tunics to serve as nets. While I watched, Androcles deftly speared a fish and held it proudly aloft, laughing with delight.
I scanned the beach and felt a stab of panic. “But where is—?”
“Here, Husband.”
I turned my head and saw that Bethesda sat on a hillock of sand behind me, leaning back against our traveling trunk. She gave me a weary smile. I drew myself beside her and rested my head on her lap. She gently stroked my forehead. I sighed and closed my eyes. The sun was warm on my face. The sound of the gentle surf was like a lullaby; gone were the flies of the day before. My body was rested, my hunge
r satisfied, and Bethesda restored to me, all in the span of a single minute. I blinked and looked up at her. I reached up to touch her face to reassure myself that I was not still asleep and dreaming.
“How?” I said.
She took a deep breath and leaned back against the trunk, settling in to tell the tale. “After we saw Pompey killed, and those Egyptian warships appeared, the captain weighed anchor and fled with all the others. But the Egyptian ships held back. They weren’t looking for a battle; they just wanted to scare Pompey’s fleet away. Still, we were surrounded on all sides by Pompey’s ships, and the captain was afraid to sail off on his own. So he bided his time. When darkness fell, he saw his chance and cut away from the fleet and headed south. No one gave chase.
“As far as I knew, you were still on Pompey’s galley with his widow, if indeed he hadn’t slain you before he set off to meet King Ptolemy. I wanted the captain to turn back and rejoin the fleet, but he wouldn’t. Then we caught sight of the flames on the shore, still very far away. Was it a signal from you? I prayed that it might be, and I was heartbroken, because I thought the captain intended to take us directly to Alexandria, and how would we ever manage to find you again? But the captain wanted to be rid of us as quickly as possible; we’re lucky he didn’t simply throw us all overboard. He said we must be cursed by the gods and would bring him nothing but trouble as long as any of us were aboard. He sailed straight back to this spot, maybe because it was the nearest patch of land, maybe because the fire served as a beacon.
“By the time we arrived, the fire had died down to embers. The sky was starting to grow light when he rowed us ashore. Then he rowed back to his ship and vanished. When I saw you lying here on the beach, I thought you must be dead. But as I stepped closer, you started to snore, so loudly that I laughed and wept at the same time. I wanted to wake you, but Pompey’s freedman begged me not to. He said you were like a dead man when you fell asleep last night, that you desperately needed to rest.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, even though Philip was splashing in the surf and could not possibly have overheard. “He seems to be under the impression that you’re some sort of important personage, a grizzled old veteran with some special tie to Pompey; he imagines that you were so grief-stricken to see the Great One beheaded that you swam ashore on a mad impulse to mourn for him.”
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