Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  The woman squatted beside him, reached matter-of-factly for the bandage around his chest and deftly began to untie it. “You’re lucky. Your friend is buying myrrh to put on this.”

  “He’s not my friend,” he told her irritably.

  “No?” She paused. “Then why is he paying us to look after you?”

  “He expects to be paid back handsomely.”

  She laughed. She had an unpleasant leering laugh which revealed blackened teeth. He looked away, wishing she’d sent the dark girl. “You’re rich, aren’t you?” she purred hoarsely. “He’s seen that as well. You’re one of the young men who were up in the mountains. A special detachment, they said, specially appointed by the queen herself. I thought to myself, Those must be fine rich young gentlemen; I wish they’d come here!” She stroked his shoulder with a crooked finger. “I could have found delicious entertainments for you.”

  He pushed her hand away and looked at her in cold offense. “What do you know about it?” he demanded.

  She leered. “Entertainment? Oh, young lord, what don’t I know about it?”

  “The camp in the mountains!”

  Another laugh. “Oh, come! Your commander sent men here to Hydreuma to buy vegetables: do you think we didn’t know you were there? What happened to your camp and your friends, young lord? Did your enemies find you? Or was it bandits?”

  He glared, not knowing what to say.

  “That dirty caravan-master who isn’t your friend said he found you on the road,” she confided. “He says that Alexandria has fallen. Please tell me what happened, young lord! If it was the barbarians, I’m afraid they might come here next, and carry off my girls.”

  She didn’t look afraid; she looked eager. This woman, he realized abruptly, would “entertain” barbarians as happily as Greeks, and if they tried to carry off her “girls,” her only concern would be to get money from them first. What was more, she’d sell him if she thought she had a market. She’d approach any Roman who appeared in Hydreuma looking for water or vegetables or information. She might even send up to the camp to inquire whether anyone wanted a girl or a fugitive.

  “Do your business!” he ordered her sharply, then sat still while she untied the bandage, wondering what he could say that would convince her to keep her mouth shut. Threaten her? With what? He was wounded and powerless, and the care she was providing had been paid for by another. Give her the pin in exchange for her silence, then? She’d take it and still sell him. She was a whore and a whore-mistress. Why had Ani put whores in charge of him? He drew a deep breath in indignation, then winced as the bandage came off.

  There were two wounds on his right side: a deep puncture between the lower ribs, and a short gash leading down to it from above. A linen pad which had been tucked under the bandage was stained liberally with blood, and the skin around the cuts was puffy and red. Caesarion stared at his own torn flesh in fascinated revulsion.

  The woman tut-tutted. “Bandits hereabouts use the bow from a distance, and knives and clubs for close quarters,” she pointed out. “Oh, young lord, it was the foreign barbarians, I know that! Why don’t you want to talk about them? Are they chasing you? Did you kill one of them?”

  “Be quiet!” he snapped desperately, and tried again to think of some way to make her stay that way.

  She raised her eyebrows, but stopped talking. Fetching a basin and a sponge, she began dabbing at the wounds. The water was salt, and it stung. He bit his lip, then pressed the remedy against his face and breathed deeply.

  More footsteps crunched up to the house-tent, and Ani came in, disheveled and bad-tempered. He saw what the woman was doing, grunted “So!” and came over to stand behind her and stare while she cleaned the wound. He looked, Caesarion thought indignantly, as though he were inspecting a purchase.

  “Better than it might have been,” he commented, as the woman finished and got up to empty the basin. “The way you screamed this morning I thought you were about to die. Heard you right over by the camels.”

  Caesarion said nothing. He had been told that he shrieked horribly at the start of a falling fit. He had never heard himself: he was always unconscious when the cry was uttered.

  “I’m setting out in about an hour,” the Egyptian went on. “But I think you should stay here for a couple days more. I can take a letter to your ship. You can write, can’t you?”

  “Of course I can write!” Caesarion said with contempt. “But I can’t give you a letter.”

  “Why not?”

  Because I don’t trust you, he thought. Ani would undoubtedly read a letter before handing it on—or find someone else to read it for him, since the fellow was probably illiterate. If he knew who Caesarion really was, he’d sell him as readily as would the whore.

  “You think that if your friends on the ship know what happened, they’ll sail off without waiting for you?” Ani asked sweetly.

  “Yes,” Caesarion said tightly. It was as good an excuse as any, and it was probably exactly what the ship would do if he sent them a letter written under a false name.

  “True and faithful friends!” Ani remarked, hooking his thumbs in his belt. “Boy, I still think you should rest for a couple days more. Last night you were raving, and the way you screamed this morning—Scylla told me the pain gave you some kind of fit.”

  “He thrashed about and foamed at the mouth,” agreed the whore-mistress, coming back with a clean pad of linen to put inside the bandage. “It was horrible to see him.”

  “I’m better now,” said Caesarion grimly.

  Ani let out his breath through his nose. “Those Romans aren’t going to come after you,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’ve just taken fifty talents of gold: they’re not going to waste time chasing after one hot-headed boy, even if he did kill one of their comrades. They’re probably on their way home already.”

  “Fifty talents of gold?” shrieked Scylla. “Fifty talents of gold?” Her mouth was wet with awed avarice.

  “That’s what he said,” Ani told her, with a nod toward Caesarion. “It seems his lot were waiting to put it on a ship. But the Romans have it now. You think they’re sitting around waiting for every thief in the neighborhood to hear they’ve got that sort of money? I don’t.”

  Caesarion glared at him. Tell one stinking peasant a secret, and you’ve told the whole world. “I will start for Berenike tonight,” he said stiffly. “I can walk there on my own.”

  Ani shrugged. “If you insist!” He set down a bundle that appeared to be Caesarion’s sandals wrapped in his belt, then dug a small jar out of a fold of his shawl. “Myrrh,” he said, holding it out to Scylla.

  She took with a leer, opened it, and sniffed appreciatively.

  “I want the jar back when you’ve finished,” Ani told her flatly. “—With anything leftover still inside it, understand? And I’m going to stand here and watch.”

  Scylla snarled, took the jar, and rubbed the precious ointment onto Caesarion’s side with quite unnecessary force.

  They set off not long afterward. The dark girl reappeared to feed Caesarion another meal—flatbread with cheese and olives—before they left. She talked to him in a worried tone as he ate, apparently telling him that he was too ill to leave. She helped him to dress, however, fastening his sandals for him and wrapping Ani’s shawl about his head with earnest and incomprehensible instructions. When he at last stood up and walked unsteadily out of the house-tent, she hovered beside him anxiously.

  Hydreuma was less pleasant than he’d imagined—dust; a few house-tents clustered around a well; some date-palms and summer-withered vegetable patches; and a long colonnade thatched with palm leaves where a flock of goats and a few camels were sleeping. Behind him the sun was setting, and before him the caravan trail swept down the mountainside in pale loops like a dropped string. The Red Sea shone deep-indigo beyond it, and there, on a curve of that shining coastline, lay a lagoon like an emerald, with a tiny grid of red-and-white sparkling beside it: Berenike. Ani’s caravan was
waiting for him in the road, with Ani in front holding the donkey.

  “I’ll walk,” Caesarion told the Egyptian, eyeing the little animal with loathing.

  “Boy, you shouldn’t be up at all,” Ani replied. “You can’t walk to Berenike!”

  “I’ll walk as far as I can!” he insisted, and, without waiting for the others, started out.

  “Mush choi!” called the dark girl after him. It took him a moment to understand it as Greek: “Much joy.” He stopped, searched in his memory and found one of the few phrases of Trogodytic which his mother had impressed on him: the words that meant “Farewell.”

  The dark girl laughed with delight. She ran down the track and kissed him. Smiling stupidly, he repeated his phrase, and she returned it. When he reached the first bend in the road, he looked back and found her still standing there. She waved. He waved back.

  “Nice girl,” said Ani, joining him. Imouthes had the donkey, and the caravan-master was on foot. The setting sun cast their shadows long and blue into the pale dust. “How is it you speak Trogodytic?”

  Caesarion grunted resentfully and started walking again. “I don’t. Just ‘Greetings’ and ‘Farewell.’” But he could not dismiss the question of the girl so quickly, and he found himself asking, “She’s a slave, isn’t she? That foul whore-mistress rents her out to passing camel-drivers.”

  “And profits handsomely from it,” the caravan-master agreed equably. “Ah well, somebody will probably buy her before long, and take her away to better things. A nice girl like that won’t stay a whore for long.”

  “I don’t understand how anyone could have sold her to a brothel to begin with!”

  Ani gave him an odd look. “Most poor people will sell a surplus daughter, and the people round here can’t be rich. Mother Isis, I’ve never seen such barren country!”

  Caesarion was surprised. “Haven’t you been this way before?”

  For once the Egyptian looked abashed. “No,” he admitted. After a moment he added, “It was an opportunity, see. I know a man who invests in shipping, only this year he decided that, with the war and all, he wants to keep his money, not spend it. I had some money, and I’m willing to risk it. You Greeks have kept the Red Sea trade all to yourselves since it started. I reckoned I should take my opportunity while it offered.” He glanced back at the train of camels with nervous pride. “I was born in Coptos. All my life I’ve seen the caravans setting out for Myos Hormos and Berenike and coming back laden down with the riches of the East. Now I’ve got a caravan of my own.”

  Not much of one, thought Caesarion. Resentment boiled up again. “Why did you leave me in a brothel?” he demanded.

  Ani stared, then gave a loud bray of laughter. “Isis and Serapis, that offended you? I can’t imagine it was the first time you’ve ever been in one.”

  Caesarion’s cheeks burned: it was the first time he’d ever been in such a place. “That vile old whore was trying to find out if the Romans would buy me!”

  “Yes, but the Romans are on their way home,” Ani pointed out. “I made sure she knew that. Boy, where else could I leave you, in that dung-heap? Apart from Scylla and her girls, there’s nobody in the place but a few goatherds and gardeners. They looked after you well, didn’t they?”

  He glowered uncomfortably and did not respond.

  “Why are you so worried about the Romans chasing you, anyway? They’re not baby-eating savages. All the ones I’ve ever met speak Greek and admire Greek culture: they wouldn’t kill a well-born Greek boy like you unless you gave them good reason. Did you kill one of them?”

  It was, he supposed, a reasonable explanation for his urgent desire to get away. He ought to use it. “I may have,” he said carefully. “I don’t know. It was dark.” Then he added sarcastically, “So you don’t still believe I’m a runaway slave?”

  Ani shrugged. “You’ll admit that when I first saw you, you weren’t at your best. When you started talking, I realized pretty fast you had to be a gentleman. ‘Myi dehbt is too thee mahstair of your cahrahvahn …’” He mimicked Caesarion’s long-voweled Attic Greek with mincing exaggeration. “I never would have believed anybody really talked like that, but you were too ill to pretend. And the troop you were with pretty plainly weren’t regular army: the queen would never put the regular army in charge of fifty talents of gold.” He fished in his purse and brought out the tunic pin. “Here.”

  Caesarion took it. It was, he saw, the gold annular one with the emerald, a more lavish affair than the plain gold fibula he’d usually worn in the camp. He stopped, tugged his tunic straight and pinned it.

  “A runaway slave wouldn’t wear that,” Ani remarked with satisfaction. “He’d hide it. Where are you from?”

  He began to walk again without answering. His side was starting to hurt more fiercely.

  “You said you were Alexandrian?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Never been there,” Ani informed him, “but if this venture succeeds I’ll see the city next month when I go there to sell my cargo. Your family’s there?”

  Mother a prisoner, if she was still alive, Antonius dead. “You said the city’s fallen,” he said, suddenly urgent. “Do you know anything about … about how, about what happened?”

  “Ah,” said the Egyptian. After a moment, he said, “It wasn’t sacked, that’s what I heard. Your family should be safe.”

  “What happened? Surely people said?”

  “What I heard was that the army deserted to Caesar Octavian without a fight. They’ve been doing that all year, of course, ever since it became clear that the queen and Antonius were going to lose, but once Octavian was camped in the hippodrome it went like cloth unraveling. Men peeled off in all directions. Then the fleet went over as well. They weren’t mercenaries or Romans like the others that went; they were Egyptian, and everybody’d expected them to stay loyal to the queen. Antonius apparently concluded that the queen was abandoning him as well, and he ran about threatening to kill her. She was so frightened she had her servants tell him she’d killed herself already. I suppose she meant to come explain herself when he’d calmed down, but he killed himself. Couldn’t bear life without her and fell on his sword. That was the end. The general was dead, the war was over, and the city fell without a struggle. The queen locked herself up in her own mausoleum, along with all her treasure, and threatened to set fire to it unless the Romans allowed her to leave the city, but the Romans tricked their way in and took her prisoner.”

  It had the bleak sound of truth. He recognized it all. Desertion, treachery, deceit were bitterly familiar: he’d been hearing that story for years. His mother had said she would burn in her mausoleum before she surrendered to the Romans, but if they tricked their way in … it was probably true. Everyone had betrayed her, in the end. He wondered if she knew that Rhodon had betrayed her as well.

  “A calamitous business,” said Ani piously. “The fall of such a great and ancient house, and a queen who claimed the favor of the holy goddess. But at least the war is over now, thank the good goddess, and there’ll be no more fighting, and no more war-tax. And I’ve heard that the Roman king is promising clemency.”

  Caesarion gave a snort of contempt. “Caesar Octavian has always been a cold-blooded liar and a murderer.”

  “You think there’ll be reprisals?” Ani asked, with a shade of anxiety.

  “He has never kept any promise which became inconvenient,” Caesarion said bitterly. “He has broken treaties, and pretended it was the other side’s fault. He has had thousands of his own countrymen put to death—and Romans are far more reluctant to shed Roman than foreign blood. He pretends that the deed was forced on him—but he keeps all the estates he confiscated from his victims. A crocodile is more clement than Octavian.”

  “Be that as it may,” Ani said, after a moment’s hesitation, “I haven’t heard of any executions. I expect you could go home. In fact, if you like you could …”

  “Do you know what happened to the queen’s ch
ildren?” He had said good-bye to his half-brothers and half-sister when he left Alexandria in June. Little Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was six, had refused to let his big brother go, and had followed him all the way to the stables. He remembered the tiny figure in its miniature purple cloak, standing forlornly in the stableyard biting its fist as he rode away.

  Ani blinked. “No. I heard that the young king wasn’t in the city when it was taken. How many other children did she have?”

  Caesarion stared at him in shock. “Don’t you know?”

  Ani made a rude noise. “Boy, I’ve lived all my life in Coptos! I know more about what’s happening in the world than most people there, because I’m interested and I make a point of talking to travelers and getting all the news I can, but people don’t say much about anyone except the queen and the king, and a lot of what they say about them is rubbish. I know that the queen and Antonius had children—but it’s not as though they’ve ever come up the river, or are ever likely to, now.”

  “She had them proclaimed kings and queens!”

  Ani looked surprised and doubtful. “I haven’t seen their names on any decrees or documents.”

  “Not kings and queens of Egypt! Of Armenia and Media and Macedonia and Cyrenaica! And she proclaimed herself ‘Queen of kings,’ and her son ‘King of kings’!”

  Ani again looked surprised, then thoughtful. “Oh. Yes. I suppose I did hear something about that. There was a big ceremony in the gymnasium of Alexandria, wasn’t there? People talked about it. I heard the ceremony was the most magnificent thing ever seen, but that most of those places have kings of their own already, so if anything ever came of it, it would mean more wars. Thank the good gods, I suppose nothing will come of it now. Well, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it, or about the queen’s children. All I heard was that the queen was taken prisoner, and that the young king wasn’t in the city …” He stopped, as though suddenly struck by something. “Maybe you know more about that than I do, too.”