Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  On the other hand, he could undoubtedly expect strict questioning, after being arrested on such a charge. He was probably secure from torture—gentlemen were not normally subjected to such degradations—but he could expect to be executed if found guilty. This would be a military affair, too, conducted by an army of occupation: he could not expect to receive a trial. At most there would be a hearing before the general, and even that would depend on what impression he made on his first interrogators. If the matter did go to the general, that had its own hazards. He had met a number of Octavian’s generals. Earlier in the year the Second Legion had been commanded by Gaius Cornelius Gallus, whom he knew by reputation as a talented commander and, unusually, as a poet, but whom he had never met. It was possible, however, that someone else was in charge of this expedition.

  The camp was about a mile to the north of Ptolemais. It was utterly standard: a ditch and rough palisade surrounding neat rows of tents. They were admitted at the south gate, and turned left past the standard of the Second Legion.

  Simplicius marched his party directly to a particularly large tent at the end of the central row. So: the interrogation was to be, in the first instance, by the centurion of the First Century. The first century of a legion was always a double-strength one, and its centurion outranked all his fellows, a senior and trusted man—though not as senior as the legionary commander or his tribunes. That gave some idea of how much importance the Romans attached to this case: it was serious, but not worth the attention of the high command. Simplicius halted outside the tent, and announced himself with a stamping of feet. A grizzled head poked out the tent flap, surveyed the party, and said, “Very well, bring him in!” in an irritated tone.

  Caesarion ducked his head and entered the leather shelter behind Simplicius. It was comparatively large, but otherwise very plain: one camp bed, a chair, a scribe sitting on a stool and holding a set of wax tablets, three oil lamps—and the centurion, a thin, scowling, wiry old man in a red tunic, out of armor, but with his vinewood staff-of-office thrust into his heavy leather belt. The centurion stared at Caesarion a moment, then cast Simplicius a reproving look. “You should have bound him,” he complained.

  Simplicius shrugged. “He didn’t give us any trouble—and he’s hurt his arm.”

  The centurion glared at Caesarion’s bandaged wrist and grunted. He sat down in the empty chair and surveyed his prisoner with dislike. “I’m told you speak Latin,” he said, in that language.

  “Certainly,” replied Caesarion, and made his opening move. “Sir, I believe that this false accusation against myself and my associate, Ani, son of Petesuchos, emanates from one of my associate’s business rivals, a man by the name of Aristodemos. May I ask, sir, if Aristodemos brought this charge—whatever it is—in person, and, if he did, whether you have him in custody as well?”

  The centurion flushed. “I am asking the questions!” he snapped.

  Caesarion inclined his head. “I will answer your questions, sir, very readily. But I believe Aristodemos should answer, as well. He is attempting to pervert the majesty of Roman law to satisfy a personal grudge.”

  “Hercules!” muttered the clerk, staring.

  “‘Majesty,’” repeated the centurion. “You know what that means?—Yes, you do, may the gods destroy you!” The dislike on his face was joined by resentment. Maiestas was the charge of treason, and by using the term in connection with his accuser, Caesarion had made his counteraccusation impossible to ignore.

  Caesarion inclined his head again. “I do not presume to dictate your course of action, sir. I merely assert that this accusation is false and malicious. The accuser probably brought it because he thought the Roman people were too savage and stupid to investigate it thoroughly. I trust that you will prove him mistaken.”

  “You speechify like some cheating lawyer!” snapped the centurion. “Where did you learn Latin?”

  “My father was Roman,” Caesarion replied evenly, “and he wished me to learn it. There were always Romans at court who were happy to speak it with me.” He glanced around. “May I sit down?” His legs were weak and his head was starting to hurt.

  “No,” the centurion said flatly. He glared at the prisoner. “You said you would answer my questions. Your name is Arion? Son of … ?”

  “Gaius,” Caesarion told him truthfully.

  “You are not the son of a Roman,” responded the centurion. “Romans have no sons by foreign women.”

  “Sir, my mother was a woman of rank, and the connection was formal and recognized. I do not claim my father’s Roman status or property, but he acknowledged me as his, and I do not reject him as mine. To do so, in my mind, would require me to reject and despise Rome itself. I have never done so: do you wish me to?”

  The centurion glared and yielded the point. “Gaius what?”

  Caesarion took a deep breath: he’d prepared for this. “Valerius.” It was probably the most common Roman family name, as Gaius was the most common personal name. It would be impossible for the centurion to pin down any particular Gaius Valerius who might have lived in Alexandria eighteen years before. “He came to Alexandria with the deified Julius, and met my mother, who was an attendant upon the queen.”

  That seemed to satisfy the centurion. “And you became a friend of the king, Ptolemy so-called Caesar? You were given a position on the staff of the commander of the king’s bodyguard, and accompanied him on his attempt to escape from Egypt?”

  “In that much your reports are correct.”

  “And after the king’s death, you fled back into Egypt, intending to raise opposition to the Senate and People of Rome. You received assistance from a troublemaking Egyptian by the name of Ani …”

  Caesarion took another deep breath and proclaimed loudly, “Lies! Outrageous lies! I surrendered, in Berenike, to a centurion by the name of Gaius Paterculus. He discharged me in accordance with the emperor’s policy of clemency, as I am sure his own report will show. Ani, son of Petesuchos, a pious and decent merchant who helped me when he found me wounded on the road, offered to let me travel with him from Berenike back to Alexandria if I assisted him with his letters. He has a cargo from Berenike—on which the tariffs have been paid!—and power of attorney to act for the ship captain who owns it. The clerk there has the documents.”

  The clerk who’d come to the ship hefted them and nodded. The centurion leaned back, scowling. “You say you were wounded? When was this?”

  “When your people took the king’s camp. Twenty days ago, I suppose.”

  “Then why are you wearing a fresh bandage?”

  There was a glint of triumph in the old man’s eyes. He’d heard of the incident at the temple, Caesarion realized. Someone had already reported it—human blood poured out on the queen’s altar, a ferocious condemnation of the new order and an attempt to invoke malign ghosts to curse it. The centurion had realized the significance of the bandage the moment he saw it. It didn’t matter, though: Caesarion had already worked out what he was going to say.

  “I was wounded in the side,” he said mildly. “This,” he lifted his wrist, “was an accident this afternoon.”

  “An accident?”

  “A stupid accident,” he agreed. “We went to the temple to make an offering to the Savior Gods, who are the patrons of my friend Ani’s boat. The priest there told me that the queen was dead, news I had not heard before. I was very distressed, and I tried to cut my hair in mourning as an offering to her spirit, but the knife slipped and cut my hand.”

  The old man glared at him indignantly. “You tried to cut your hair?”

  Caesarion took off his hat and showed him. “I made a mess of it.” He smiled appeasingly. “It was a small, sharp knife. I should have waited and used scissors.” Behind him, he heard Simplicius swallow a laugh.

  “It was reported to me,” declared the centurion furiously, “that a young man matching your description slit his wrists before the altar and prayed for vengeance on Rome!”

  Caesarion ra
ised his eyebrows incredulously. “Zeus! Whoever reported to you, must have been drinking. I cut my hair and the knife slipped—or do you think I normally wear my hair like this? You can ask the priest whether I prayed for vengeance—or, indeed, prayed for anything except a bandage, fast. He led me over to his house and gave me one. I suppose your informant saw us coming out of the temple and invented a more exciting story.”

  The centurion kept glaring. “You were very devoted to the queen, were you?”

  “Yes,” Caesarion replied, without hesitation. “I fought for her and for the house of Lagos with all my strength. If that is a crime, you may kill me for it—though you will have to kill many thousands of others as well, including the half of the Roman Senate who supported Antonius. I was told, however, that Caesar has proclaimed a policy of clemency to those who surrender and lay down their arms. I surrendered, I am unarmed, and since I left Berenike I have neither spoken nor acted against the Senate and People in any way. What is the emperor’s clemency worth, if it weighs less than a malicious lie from a second-rate merchant who’s lost trade to a rival? You have evidence there in your clerk’s hands that my friend Ani is engaged in lawful and honest trade. What evidence has Aristodemos offered to the contrary?”

  “You are a very insolent little bastard!” snapped the centurion. He glanced at Simplicius and commanded, “Strip him.”

  Caesarion straightened, his face heating. “I am an Alexandrian of good family! You may not treat me like a slave! I demand to see your superior!”

  “Oh, you demand, do you, Greekling?” snarled the centurion. He nodded to Simplicius, who, rather hesitantly, took hold of Caesarion’s cloak and hauled it off.

  Caesarion wrapped his arms protectively around his tunic, quivering with outrage. Nakedness was not the issue: like all Greek boys, he had exercised naked in the gymnasium. But to be stripped, by soldiers, so that he could suffer beating or thegods-knew-what at their hands—it was inconceivable! “Yes, I demand!” he exclaimed furiously. “What else can I do, when my interrogator violates imperial policy? Aristodemos stood in Coptos marketplace and swore, in the hearing of half the city, that he would not endure the loss of his partnership to an Egyptian. Send to Coptos, if you don’t believe me! If you accept his bare accusation over our evidence, you dishonor the Roman name and you mock the policy of the emperor!” He glanced imperiously at the scribe. “Have you written this down, man? And will you show it to this oaf’s superiors?”

  “May the gods destroy me!” The centurion pulled out his vinewood truncheon and slapped it against his palm. “Oaf, is it? You’re a proud boy, and I ought to beat some of that arrogance out of you.—Hold him.”

  Simplicius seized Caesarion’s arms and wrestled them behind his back. Caesarion struggled, hurt the wrist, was forced, panting, to his knees. He glared up at the centurion. He was far too angry to be afraid. “You dare!” he gasped, in outraged incredulity.

  The centurion prodded him in the chest with the end of the truncheon. “Very proud, aren’t you, for a mongrel and an epileptic bastard?”

  Caesarion caught his breath, aware of sudden shock of hurt even through the anger. Ani had told this unspeakable man about the disease—recounted all of Caesarion’s humiliation and suffering during his own interrogation, in an effort to shift blame from himself.

  Maybe it hadn’t been Ani. Maybe it had been Ezana and Apollonios. They would have been interrogated as well, and he would expect such behavior from them.

  “Should we spin a wheel in front of you?” jeered the centurion.

  It was a test for the sacred disease, often performed on slaves before a sale. Caesarion had never been bothered by spinning wheels, but, in his weakened state, thinking about having a seizure was enough to bring one on. He caught the first scent of carrion, and the dread suddenly swallowed him whole. “O Apollo!” he begged frantically. “No!”

  “What …” the centurion began—but the rest of his words were lost.

  The criminal stopped breathing. His face was pale, covered with sweat, but calm. The asp sat coiled on his chest, its black scales gleaming in the light. Mother inspected it with a twisted smile on her face, her eyes fearfully bright. “That doesn’t look painful,” she observed. She trailed the edge of her purple cloak across the coiled snake, and it mantled, lifting its body so that it echoed the serpent on her crown.

  The doctor frowned at him and relaxed the ligature. Caesarion watched the red rivulet flow down the inside of his arm from the puncture just above the elbow. It twisted like a snake. “So we release the poison,” said the doctor, with satisfaction. He wiped the bloody lancet on a rag.

  Rhodopis smiled at him, stretched out on top of the silk coverlet. Her body seemed to glow in the summer heat. “I don’t think you’re full of poison,” she told him.

  An anemone folded its red petals around a snail. Waves lapped against the quay.

  Mother’s flagship, the Antonias, was sailing into the Great Harbor, her purple sails shining against the blue sea. Distant on the air came the wailing of the mourners, and the air smelled of smoke, incense, and cremated flesh.

  He was kneeling, half naked, on the muddy floor of a tent. His left wrist hurt. A thin old man in a red tunic was examining the livid, scabbed-over wound in his side. Others were standing around him, staring with horror and disgust. He bowed his head, trembling with humiliation and weakness, and reached for the remedy.

  It wasn’t there. His fingers fumbled blindly for it against his bare skin. The centurion straightened and prodded him in the shoulder. “Finished?” he asked.

  Caesarion realized that they’d unpinned his tunic, pulled it down around his waist, taken the remedy away. Had they done anything else?

  He thought not. Not much time seemed to have passed. It had been only a small seizure. “Please give me the herbs back,” he asked, his voice shaking with shame and exhaustion. “They’re for the disease. They help.”

  “Didn’t even need a wheel,” remarked the centurion. “Very proud, you are, for someone so sick. The thing I don’t understand,” a poke of the vinestaff, “is what a proud boy like you is doing working for an upstart peasant. The rest of what you say might be true and you have, you insist, evidence—but I just don’t see a young man with such a high opinion of himself agreeing to write letters for an illiterate farmer. The thing I would have expected you to do in a strange city would be to attach yourself to a gentleman of your own class. There must be some, even in Berenike.—Well?”

  Caesarion looked away. His left wrist hurt savagely, and he could feel a warm dampness on the bandage. His head was swimming; it was even harder than usual to distinguish the world present from the fragments of the seizure. “Ani saved my life,” he said faintly. “I owed him a debt.”

  “Go on.”

  “When I escaped … When I left the king’s camp, I was wounded. I had no water. I walked as far as the caravan trail, but it was very hot. I … had a seizure. Several. I couldn’t go on. Ani found me lying unconscious in the road and saved my life. He gave me water and he paid for people to look after me. I tried to give him my tunic pin, which was the only valuable I had, but he wouldn’t take it. He said I would need the money. When he asked me to write letters for him, I had to agree. I had no other way to repay him—and it would bring me home. I was ill on the journey, and he looked after me: I am more deeply in his debt now than I was before. And … he is a good man. He helped me when he didn’t expect anything in return. I’ve never met anyone like that before. I trusted him because I had no choice, but he didn’t fail me, not once.”

  There was a long silence. Then the centurion nodded at Simplicius.

  The tessararius gave Caesarion the little bag of herbs. He clutched it hard, breathed the warm, familiar scent. He did not try to get up. Instead he inspected his bandaged wrist. A splash of red had blossomed on the white linen. When had that happened? He sank back on his heels, shuddering, and cradled his arm against his bare chest.

  “Let me see the do
cuments,” the centurion ordered the clerk.

  Caesarion remained on the floor, breathing in the remedy and hugging his wrist while the centurion thumbed through the cargo manifests, contracts, and tax receipts. His head hurt. The resolution and resources which had brought him this far had all run out. He wanted only to lie down.

  “So,” said the centurion at last, “tell me about this Aristodemos. I take it he used to be the partner of this fellow Kleon?”

  Caesarion listlessly detailed the arrangements, explained the Greek financial terms in the documents. The old man listened, asked questions. At last he turned to his scribe. “Run over to the general’s tent,” he said. “If he’s still up, ask him if he’ll see me. Tell him it’s about a malicious charge brought by a Greek merchant against a rival, and I need to know how he wants to proceed.”

  Caesarion looked up, not daring to believe it. The centurion gave a snort of laughter. “Simplicius,” he ordered, “give the young man a cup of wine. He looks like he could use it.” He tossed the tunic pin over to the tessararius. “Do up his tunic for him, too. I don’t think he’ll be able to manage it himself.”

  Caesarion was just finishing the wine when the scribe came back, saying that the general was up and would see the centurion.

  “Bring him along,” the old man ordered Simplicius, and Caesarion was pulled to his feet, draped in his cloak, handed his hat, and marched out the door. The shock of the night air cleared his head a little. He hung the remedy around his neck and pulled the hat on straight as he walked. It was, he realized, looking at the stars, still before midnight.

  They went up along the rows of tents to a main aisle, then right to a large pavilion—the general’s quarters—in the center of the camp. They stood a moment waiting while the centurion was announced.

  “Is your general still Cornelius Gallus?” he asked Simplicius. The extreme lassitude which had followed the seizure was beginning to wear off, and his mind was clear enough to let him worry.