Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Haircut finished, he put on the orange cloak and went out into the courtyard. Ani was seated at the far end, under a fig tree, holding his youngest son and listening to a skinny old woman who appeared to be reporting to him on the state of the linenworkings. The toddler was eating a fig, and there were sticky red handprints on his father’s tunic.

  “Good health!” said Ani cheerfully. “Feeling better this morning?”

  “Yes, thank you,” he replied awkwardly.

  “Good, good! Thought of anything we need to buy before we set out?”

  “I was wondering about weapons,” he said hesitantly. “There may be fugitives or bandits.”

  “No,” Ani replied at once, very firmly. “Anybody who comes at us with weapons is likely to have more of them than we do. If we were armed, they’d kill us. Anyway, there aren’t any fugitives or bandits, none that I’ve heard of … apart, I suppose, from the odd soldier on his way home.” He grinned sympathetically at Caesarion. “I wouldn’t be planning to take the children if I’d heard there was likely to be any danger. Everything I’ve heard says that the policy of clemency is real. Still think the emperor is a crocodile?”

  “A crocodile with a full stomach,” Caesarion replied sourly, and sighed. Octavian needed money to pay his army and the debts he had incurred in the war: reprisals would only destroy sources of revenue and would gain him nothing, since he already had everything he’d fought for. He knew, however, that the imperial clemency would not extend to himself. He could see the sense of Ani’s refusal to carry weapons. He would, nonetheless, have felt happier if he knew he could lay hands on a spear if he needed one—not because he thought it would keep him safe, but because it would give him another chance at a noble death. On the other hand, Ani, very reasonably, did not want a noble death, and, in fact, had probably never been taught even how to hold a spear.

  “Then, no,” Caesarion said regretfully. “I can’t think of anything we need to buy.”

  The boat was drawn up at a private landing, next to a field belonging to Ani. It was not a convenient arrangement in this season: the field still lay under several inches of water, so that anyone going on board had to wade through the fresh mud. Caesarion suspected that dread of Aristodemos lay behind the decision not to load the cargo at the public quays in Coptos, and was exasperated: the man hadn’t looked such a dire threat to him.

  The boat itself was a sailing barge, battered and dirty, but solidly built, with a capacious cargo hold and a thatched cabin amidships; there were a dozen oars, but it was planned to manage the craft with only eight, manned by four of Ani’s slaves, two of his dependents, and Kleon’s two sailors. When Caesarion arrived, Ani’s wife was already on board, arranging the accommodations.

  Caesarion stopped in the flooded field, up to his ankles in mud, and regarded the vessel in dismay. It was clear at a glance that there was not enough space for him to have a room to himself. He thought of his own sailing barge, the Ptolemais, on which he had sailed to Coptos, only two months before at the rising of the flood. Forty oars, and space for sixty men; the sails were purple, and the prow was worked with gold. He’d had a spacious chamber in the stern, with a separate dining room lit by golden lamps …

  He’d sent Ptolemais on up the river after disembarking; it had orders to sail up to Thebes, and then return to Alexandria, to mislead any spying eyes. His own boat was long gone, it was the ebb of the flood, and he was coming home in this … craft.

  “Arion, good health!” called Tiathres, smiling at him with shy goodwill. She turned to her stepdaughter, and went on in Demotic: “Melanthe, can you tell him the sleeping arrangements?” He had already noticed that her Greek was rudimentary.

  “I speak Demotic,” he said abruptly, and waded unhappily forward, sandals in one hand, cloak edge fastidiously high in the other.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Tiathres, taken aback by his declaration. He had not admitted his knowledge before, and he realized that he should not have done so now. It removed another of the barriers between himself and these people. It was too late, though, to take back what he’d said. Tiathres cheerfully began to rattle away at him in Demotic, telling him that he could sleep in the stern cabin, with Ani and Kleon’s men, that she and the children and the nurse had the forecabin, that the others would sleep on deck—quite comfortable, really, in this weather.

  It was dismal, squalid. It would have to do. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, climbed onto the gangplank, and washed off his feet in the Nile before he came on board.

  The cargo of spices was carried down to the river on donkeys—Menches and Imouthes had taken the camels back to their stables—then transported on heads and shoulders across the flooded field and stowed safely. It was dusk by the time the work was finished. Ani and the people who were going exchanged noisy and effusive good-byes with the people who were staying, and then the slaves and farmworkers were splashing away with the donkeys across the field, and the boat was bobbing quietly on the river under the brightening stars, moored fore and aft to stakes driven into the bank. Tiathres lit a fire on a small, carefully insulated stone hearth on the foredeck, and soon the air was full of the scent of flatbread and stewed lentils.

  Ani came over to Caesarion where he sat morosely at the stern. He drew a deep breath and stretched happily. “This is the way to travel!” he declared.

  Caesarion looked at him sideways.

  “I always hoped I could use this boat properly,” Ani went on, and slapped the wooden side affectionately. “Up till now it’s done nothing but move flax.”

  Caesarion’s lip curled. “Does it have a name?”

  Ani shook his head. “I call it ‘my boat.’ Everyone else calls it ‘Ani’s boat.’ I bought it two years ago. The last owner drowned, which made it unlucky—and cheap. I had a priest bless it, to change the luck, and I had the old name taken off, but I didn’t want to rename it until I had a real use for it.”

  “You were already thinking about becoming a merchant two years ago?” Caesarion asked, curious.

  “I’ve been thinking about it most of my life!” replied Ani. “I just haven’t had the money and the opportunity until recently.” He leaned on the low rail. “When I was a boy I used to watch the caravans leaving the marketplace and think that I would run away with one someday—go off and see the world!” He laughed. “In the last few years, I’ve been more worried about the way that bugger-arsed Aristodemos has cheated me over the linens.”

  “Has he?”

  “Sweet Lady Isis, yes! Ever since I started selling to him, and every time I’ve improved the product he cheated me more.” He glanced down at Caesarion indulgently and went on. “See, I keep improving the product, making it more what the people down south want. Kleon got more for it, Aristodemos got more profit on his share—and I got the crumbs. I was sure Aristodemos was lying to me about how much he was making, and Kleon has confirmed it. That thieving bugger made himself the richest man in the district on the back of my hard work!”

  “I thought the real business was the goods from Alexandria.”

  “Huh. Up to a point. Kleon has a man in Opone who wants the tin for bronzeworking. That’s the backbone of his trade: tin for incense. The fat—the increase in the profits over the last few years—has been from my linens. See, I started off selling undressed linen cloth, and not much of it, just like my father did. Then I looked at what I had to pay in licenses to the royal linen monopoly, and I decided that nobody was ever going to make money making linen—except the queen, of course. So I branched out into clothing—no license needed, see? I made money on that, so I persuaded some of the neighbors to sell their flax to me, and spare themselves the license fee. I started selling to Aristodemos then, and I thought I was doing well. I bought some new looms, and improved the quality of the cloth, which meant I could charge more, and I gave the neighbors wives cheap loans so they could buy new looms as well. Then I started getting the cloth dyed, with good dyes and strong mordants, in bright colors, the way they li
ke it in the south. It’s top-quality stuff now, what I make, and Kleon says that in Adulis and Mundus and Opone they’re mad for it. It sells for twenty times the price of undressed cloth—and Aristodemos never passed on more than a fraction of that increase to me. He’s the grand Greek merchant, I’m the humble farmer, so the profit is his—but I’m the one who increased that profit. Now I’m a merchant as well, and I’m going to take what’s mine.”

  Caesarion felt a slight uneasiness. If this was true, then it explained why Aristodemos was so angry, and why Ani was worried about him. A new partnership would not replace the profits which Aristodemos was losing with the old one. Aristodemos must bitterly resent Ani’s trip to Berenike.

  “You’re right, though,” Ani went on, regaining his good humor. “The boat ought to have a name, now it’s a proper trading vessel. Come on, then, what’s a good, well-omened Greek name for a merchant boat?”

  Caesarion glanced along the battered and dirty hull. “Soteria ?” he suggested.

  It was a sarcastic suggestion—“Salvation” was a grand and divine name, given to warships as often as to merchant vessels. Ani, however, was delighted. “That’s good! They call Lord Serapis and Lady Isis the Saviors. And your Greek Dioskouroi are called the Saviors, too, aren’t they? and they’re gods of seamen and merchants. You Alexandrians celebrate a festival called the Soteria in their honor isn’t that right?”

  “In honor of the first Ptolemy and his wife,” Caesarion corrected, suddenly unhappy. The name he had suggested to mock Ani’s pretensions had twisted and mocked his own. “They’re the ones who are called the Savior Gods in Alexandria.” Ptolemy, son of Lagos—Ptolemy Soter the Savior—had founded the glorious dynasty which was now reduced to riding this battered hulk.

  “That’s even better!” exclaimed Ani. “The first king’s wife was Berenike, wasn’t she? The one the port’s named for! It suggests where we go. And better still, it sounds safe. Soteria! Huh. Well done!” He slapped the side of the boat, then walked forward to where the evening fire cast its marigold light over the quiet water of the river. “Arion’s suggested a name for the boat,” he told his family happily. “What do you think of Soteria?”

  SOTERIA SET OUT at dawn the following morning. Ani pulled out the forward mooring stake; Ezana removed the one aft, and Apollonios steered the vessel out onto the wide brown current. Serapion cheered and waved at the empty shore, then ran to hug his father as Ani climbed dripping back on board.

  All that day they ran downriver, the oarsmen rowing only hard enough to give them steerage. It was even more dismal and squalid than Caesarion had feared. There was no space. If you tried to walk along the deck, you were always ducking around the men who were on the oars and stepping over the ones who weren’t. If you sat down, people pushed over and around you—particularly the children, who were constantly pelting from one end of the vessel to the other. And there was no privacy. The Egyptians pissed over the side, the men contesting who could piss farthest and making disparaging comments about each other’s equipment; they defecated over the stern. The women were more modest, and put up a screen first, but it was impossible to copy them without being mocked.

  Most of the Egyptians didn’t like him. Ani’s authority ensured that nobody insulted him openly, but they only stopped ignoring him to scowl at him. And they behaved as though he were unclean—not surreptitiously, as people had for much of his life, but openly and aggressively, spitting if he happened to brush against them, washing anything he had touched. Ani didn’t, and seemed to have prevailed on his wife to behave naturally as well, but the rest were noxious—except for the children, who didn’t care, and Melanthe, who simply gave him looks of deep pity.

  Apollonios, who as the only other Greek in the party might have been expected to be sympathetic, was the worst offender. Caesarion understood why, and had nothing but contempt for it. The man had made a tentative sexual advance toward him when they first left Berenike, and he had rejected it with disgust. Apollonios had then decided that he didn’t want Caesarion anyway, that the disease rendered him detestable, and spread the attitude as far as he was able.

  Occasionally Caesarion tried to imagine what Cleopatra would have done to Apollonios, but it was not much comfort. The queen was a prisoner, her allies deserted or dead, and neither she nor he would ever hold power again.

  At night the boat was moored by a sheltered bank. There were mosquitoes. His sleeping mat was next to that of Apollonios, who made an ostentatious point of edging away from him. The river gurgled noisily under the keel. One of the Egyptians on the deck snored.

  In the morning, when the others were still getting up, he left the boat and walked away from the river a little, just to get away from the smell and the noise. He went as far as a grove of date-palms and sat on the edge of a well for a while. There were birds chattering among the leaves, and somewhere not far away cows lowed. He considered staying there, and allowing Soteria to leave without him.

  He owed Ani too much. He sighed, and started back to the boat.

  He met Melanthe while he was still ten minutes’ walk away, hurrying along with her skirts hitched up. She had nice legs.

  She saw him and stopped, dropping the skirts. “Oh!” she exclaimed in relief. “There you are. We’re ready to leave. Why did you go off on your own like that?”

  He set his teeth. “To escape the company.”

  He tried to stalk past her, but she fell in beside him as though she expected him to need support. “You shouldn’t go off on your own,” she told him solicitously. “You might fall down.”

  “So might you,” he snarled.

  “I’m not ill!”

  “You might slip in the mud, or trip. Far more common causes for a fall than a seizure, even for me. If you don’t worry about that, why should you worry about the other?”

  “You haven’t seemed well. I was worried.”

  “Without cause, I assure you,” he told her coldly.

  They walked on for a minute in silence, and then she said hesitantly, “I’m sorry the men are unpleasant to you. It would help, you know, if you joined in the work. If you helped fetch firewood or wash up, they’d see that at least you were trying, and they wouldn’t feel you were just a burden.”

  He stopped short with a glare of amazement. “You’re suggesting that I fetch firewood and wash cooking pots?” The phrase Don’t you know who I am? came to his mind, but remained unspoken. She did not know, and he dared not tell her.

  “Everybody else helps with whatever has to be done,” she said, taken aback by his outrage. “Papa takes a turn at the oars, too, same as the other men. You may be too ill to do that, but …”

  “I am not ‘too ill’ to row. I do not do it because gentlemen do not do menial work. Dionysos! Do you really need that explained to you?”

  Her look of surprise gave way to one of offense. “Papa joins in the work.”

  “Your father, girl, is not a gentleman. It’s why he made an arrangement with me. And he will have to stop degrading himself to the level of his slaves if he wants any gentleman to do business with him.”

  She gaped, then flared up. “My father is the most respected Egyptian in Coptos!”

  He gave a snort of deep contempt. “Oh, indeed, the most respected Egyptian in the great and wonderful town of Coptos! In Alexandria they hire people like that to sweep floors. If he wants to be accepted as a merchant, he’ll have to behave like one. Pissing over the side with his slaves, and letting his wife squat over a fire and do the cooking! Zeus!”

  “What’s wrong with Tiathres cooking?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Ladies have slaves to cook for them. If a woman does the chore herself, it means she has none.”

  “But we have slaves, you know we do! Tiathres is just being helpful—unlike some people! She’s always helpful and kind. And she likes cooking; she does it better than anyone else in the household.”

  “Then she should do it at home. It disgraces your father, to have her doing it in
the sight of anyone who goes by. And why doesn’t he have her speak Greek?”

  “Because he cares for her feelings. She’s shy, she gets embarrassed when she makes mistakes, she doesn’t like trying to speak Greek. If he made a fuss about it, she’d worry that she wasn’t good enough for him. He thinks about things like that!”

  “If he wants to be a merchant, he’ll have to think less of that and more of his own dignity.”

  “I hope he never does!”

  Caesarion was momentarily taken aback——not by Melanthe’s words, but by the fact that he agreed with them. He was far too angry, however, to admit it. “Then he’ll never amount to more than he is now.”

  “He saved your life!”

  “Which is the only reason I’m still here! Otherwise I wouldn’t spit on that filthy hulk he calls a boat.”

  “I felt sorry for you,” Melanthe informed him hotly. “I won’t anymore. How can you talk about my family like that?”

  “I’m saying nothing but the truth,” he replied, “but if it spares me your pity, girl, I’m delighted.”

  They walked the rest of the way back to Soteria in hot silence. The boat was, indeed, ready to depart, and all the crew were annoyed with him because he’d made them wait. He went on board and walked straight into the stern cabin without speaking to any of them.

  THERE FOLLOWED ANOTHER miserable day. Late in the afternoon they reached the town of Ptolemais Hermiou, where Ani apparently considered the threat of Aristodemos sufficiently abated to put in at the town docks. There he and the sailors promptly engaged in a discussion of trade and the hazards of the next stretch of river with the crews of some of the other boats at the mooring. Tiathres was impatient to get to the market, to buy fresh vegetables for the party before the stalls closed. Melanthe was eager to see the town. Caesarion just wanted to get off Soteria, and he found himself escorting the two women into the city. Melanthe had cooled down a little since the morning, but she still wasn’t speaking to him.