Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Not often until midnight,” said Olympus. “Secretaries read to him; or else he dictates accounts of all he has done, and of what he would like it believed he has done — of his motives, and of what he would like to be believed were his motives — not seldom what he thinks his motives were; for Caesar differs not at all from other men in mistaking afterthought for foresight, vividly foresighted though he is.”

  “I will go to him then shortly before midnight,” Cleopatra interrupted. “Go you, Olympus, and talk to the Romans who will be on duty when I come. Say nothing about me, but sing Apollodorus’ praises. Then be ready to identify him at the gate and at the stairway. Wait! I have not yet finished: clothes I have, and jewelry I have, but I need a tiring-woman and a bath, for I will never go to Caesar like a woman of the streets. So put me a good slave-girl, and a tub of water, and some brushes and oils and scents, into a boat at nightfall. Let spies think that the girl is going to some lovers’ trysting-place. And now go!”

  Olympus pulled a box containing several big fish from underneath the heaped-up net and set it in Cleopatra’s boat. Apollodorus drew a gold coin from the pocket in his belt and threw it.

  “Catch!” he shouted. “Find a good dependable high priest and have him bribe a god with that to help us! Stay — here is another — catch — buy two gods — outright!”

  CHAPTER XVI. “I am Egypt.”

  Great events, like great gods, come forth silently and they are here before we know it.

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  APOLLODORUS laid a loose plank lengthwise on the thwarts and padded it with his own discarded clothing. In the lee of an anchored barge, in darkness, Cleopatra wriggled until the pads were properly adjusted. Then Apollodorus wrapped her, plank and all, in the Persian rug in which she had brought her jewelry and clothing away from Tros’ ship.

  There was smothered whispering and laughter; he had difficulty in arranging the end of the rug to hide her and yet leave air enough. He had to tie the bundle with a rope and yet not show the outline of her figure, and not disarrange her hair. But it was done at last, and she promised not to move or speak again until he should unroll the rug and leave her to her own resources.

  “Though only the gods, if there are any, know what your resources are!” he remarked as he tested the weight of what he had to carry. She was lighter than he guessed; and she was so small he was confident that none would suspect a woman hidden in the rug.

  Then, though the wind was hardly breathing, he employed the sail to avoid thumping of oars against thole-pins, and with infinite patience, in silence, he steered until they drifted into the somber shadow of one of Caesar’s ships.

  There a sudden voice, gruff and ominous — a clank of armor up above them on a bireme’s deck — a head under a helmet leaning overside, half seen in dim light from a lantern:

  “Halt there! Who are you?”

  “Fish!” cried Apollodorus. He tossed up a dozen big ones. “In the morning I will bring green corn and melons.”

  “Don’t forget it! Hey! Halt there! Who are you!”

  But the boat had drifted on and in another moment it had nosed the wharf, where armed men sprang out of the night. There was torchlight at a guard-house fifty feet away.

  “Is Olympus here?”

  Olympus, taller than the Romans, like a goblin in his long black cloak, — loomed up among them.

  “You, Apollodorus? There, did I not say I could find him!”

  “Magic! I am afraid of you astrologers,” said a Roman’s voice. “You make me dread a night’s sleep! Let me look at that man — is he armed? Come up there, you. Are you Apollodorus? Let me see that bundle. What is in it?”

  Apollodorus hesitated.

  “What is in it?” echoed Olympus’ voice, and the very stars of heaven seemed to hold their breath.

  Apollodorus came up from the boat and laid the bundle on the top step at the Roman’s feet.

  “Heavy!” he said. “Is Caesar fond of books?”

  “Books? He has been sending for books from the library all day long,” a Roman answered. “But if you are the charioteer Apollodorus, what have you to do with such things?”

  “Nothing. But this war and rioting mean ruin when you depend on racing for a livelihood. I won a library of ancient Greek books from a man who could not pay the thousand minae he had betted. Books are no earthly use to me, and some of these are so old and brittle that they crack to the touch; but I have heard that Caesar values that kind of trash, so if I may wait here until morning—”

  “Why did you come by water?” asked the Roman. “And at this hour?”

  “To have come from Eleusis by chariot might have shaken all these books to pieces. And the clumsy fools who guard the Canopic Gate would probably have thrust their fingers in. What do they know of ancient books, any more than you or I do? Even as it is, I fear—”

  “If you have any records there of Alexander the Great?” Olympus suggested. “They found none in the library that Caesar did not know already.”

  “What I have here is all over my head,” said Apollodorus. “But I was told that the great Alexander had something or other to do with it — though I forget what — something about his General Lagus.”

  Olympus offered a suggestion. “Caesar might prefer to see such books before another touches them?”

  A Roman answered:

  “But that is a strange-shaped package to contain books.”

  “They are brittle,” explained Apollodorus. “I laid the roll all touching one another on a plank and covered the lot with matting. However, open and look if you see fit.”

  “No. Lift that rug and drop it. Let me hear if there are weapons. By Bacchus, did I hear you throwing fish to the bireme’s crew? Have you more? You have? I’ll send a man down to the boat for them. Here, let a soldier carry that.”

  “No, I can lift it easily, and I know how best to balance it.”

  “Bacchus! The fellow is strong or that isn’t as heavy as it looks! Pass him along, Olympus. Tell Ahenobarbus that I sent him.”

  Shadowy Olympus seemed already to be well known to the guards on duty at the series of gates between the water-front and palace. One by one they challenged, peered at him, grounded a spear-butt and left him to open a gate for himself, until at last he and Apollodorus stood in lamplight in the courtyard at the palace entrance.

  Statuary, looming in the dark, resembled half-seen spirits. Murmuring of voices and the soft sound of a zephyr in the trees — the flap of a neglected awning and the swaying of a bough in purple gloom suggested spirit movement. Even when Ahenobarbus strode out from the porch and, nodding to Olympus, stood hands on hips to peer into Apollodorus’ face, the spell of mystery was still there. Grizzled, armored, with a bandage on his naked thigh, Ahenobarbus might well have been a guardian of Hades.

  “So — this is Apollodorus, eh? — A handsome fellow! What is in that bundle?”

  “All that I have in the world, unless Caesar can restore to me my stable from the rogues who—”

  “Ask for no favors to-night. He is vexed. I heard tell he has found the Alexandrians’ treasury as bone-dry as a last year’s bottle. Talk to him of horses, he will like that; if he likes you, trust him to be generous without the asking. Leave that bundle in the corner. I will take care of it.”

  “You appear like a man to be trusted with anything except a pretty woman’s virtue,” said Apollodorus. “But it happens I have a present here for Caesar — something that will put him in a splendid humor — an actual relic of Alexander the Great and his General Lagus.”

  “Dioscuri! What is the nature of it?”

  “Caesar may like to see that for himself.”

  “But he will blame me if it turns out to be a hoax of some sort.”

  “Take my ‘word on that count,” said Olympus. “Caesar will value highly what Apollodorus brings.”

  “Oh, you know what it is? Well, Caesar seems to trust you. Did he tell you he would see Apollodorus? Take
him up then — but wait! I had better take a look at that bundle after all.”

  Olympus intervened. “How would it be to send up word to Caesar that Apollodorus is here with a present for him. You might ask permission to admit him without opening the package.”

  “No. By Bacchus! I will take a chance on you. Tell Caesar it was I who found Apollodorus. Stay! You, Apollodorus, I have heard you are Cleopatra’s lover. Find her. Let me lay hands on her. I will take her to Caesar, and guarantee your fortune!”

  “Would he take her head off?” asked Apollodorus.

  “Only Caesar knows that. But I know this: he would pay a price for her that would make Croesus look like me without a sesterce! Can you find her?”

  “I will show her to you.”

  “When?”

  “To-morrow.”

  “Bacchus! If I thought you meant that I would see the tailor now about my tribune’s uniform!”

  “I do mean it.”

  “Hold your tongue about her then, and take Caesar your gift. Afterward, come back here and talk to me. If you can show me Cleopatra in the morning, you and I will die rich. Go on — take him up, Olympus.”

  There was a sentry at every landing on the stairs. The tramp of men patrolling the long corridors was deadened by such carpets as few Roman eyes had seen, but there was a clank of armor that divided up the silence into measures and the very portraits on the passage walls, half seen in flickering lamplight seemed to listen for the stroke of destiny.

  At a door on which turquoise bosses held in place the polished tortoise-shell a sentry halted them. He seemed to know Olympus, for he put his head in through the door and whispered to a man inside, who admitted them.

  The room was so familiar to Apollodorus that he knew each panel of the ivory-embellished walls, and he could concentrate his whole attention on the man who sat framed, as it were, by the curtained marble of an open window against a background of starlit purple sky. Two secretaries faced him at a table; one was checking figures on a tablet. Caesar, his toga thrown over the ivory chair-back and the white of his tunic relieved by a broad stripe of purple, one leg thrown over the other and his back half turned toward the door, was dictating to the secretary nearest to the window.

  “Who is it?” he asked, pausing without turning his head, which was as bald as the ivory chair-back, except for wisps of gray above the temples and a fringe of gray above his neck.

  The voice of a freedman seated on a stool beside the door announced:

  “Olympus, the physician — and—”

  “Apollodorus, the Sicilian,” Olympus added.

  “I will see them presently,” said Caesar. “Write:— ‘unsatisfactory state of the treasury which obliges me to take action that I might not otherwise have contemplated.’ Wait now. Read it to me.”

  The secretary’s voice began to drone. Apollodorus laid his bundle down and carefully undid the rope. The bundle moved; he pressed it heavily to intimate the time had not yet come. Then Caesar’s voice again — low, matter-of-fact and laden with a rather weary dignity:

  “If the Minister Potheinos can produce proof that, as he says, the Princess Cleopatra is either dead or in the hands of enemies, so that there is no doubt she will not return to Egypt, then, on confirmation of the proof, and in the interests of Egypt, I will — change that — as the representative of Rome — no as the authorized representative of the Senate and the Roman people — have you got that? — acting as executor of the will of the late King Ptolemy and in accordance with the prerogatives of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus recently assumed by me, I will take such steps as are necessary to confirm Prince Ptolemy as king co-regent with his younger sister the Princess Arsinoe, but subject to the unconditional recognition in full of all debts incurred in the name of Egypt by the late King Ptolemy and subject further to a garrison of Roman troops at the expense of the Egyptian Government as guarantee — What is that noise? Will you tell those people to keep silence!”

  But the noise was the unrolling of the rug. The secretary stared, lips parted, an expression on his face of curious astonishment.

  Again Caesar’s voice: “It would be preferable, nevertheless, that the Princess Cleopatra should be found and, if guilty of treason as charged, should be dealt with according to law, which in all civilized countries provides—”

  He turned at last, a trifle irritable. Cleopatra faced him.

  “You are Caesar?” she asked. The royal voice, that never failed her to her dying day, was tremorless; her dignity — the last and greatest of the long line of the Ptolemies — revealed to him that he had met an equal.

  “I am Caesar.”

  “I am Egypt.”

  Caesar gave an exhibition of his instant self-command. He stood up, bowing, and saluted with the gracious Roman uplift of the right arm.

  “Though you seem to have preceded welcome, nevertheless, I welcome you,” she said, acknowledging his bow. “I trust they have made you comfortable. If your officers have left me my apartment—”

  “It is untouched,” Caesar answered. Then his weary lean face lighted in the smile that melted anger even in his enemies. “The tale they told me of your death appears as false as that other, that we Romans leave manners behind us when we travel.”

  “If you came seeking truth, you will do better to speak with me than with my enemies,” she answered. “Caesar, are you not ashamed to listen to a eunuch’s lies about a queen who never injured you or Rome?”

  There was no shame visible, but his changed expression made it obvious he had been bored until she came. He offered her the ivory chair in which he had been seated. His secretary brought another and he sat down, facing her.

  “You may leave us,” he commanded.

  Bowing — unnoticed — secretaries, freedman, Apollodorus and Olympus backed away. The freedman, coming last, only partly closed the door. They stood outside to listen. They heard Caesar’s footfall. Then the heavy hardwood, overlaid with turquoise-studded tortoise-shell, was suddenly and firmly shut tight in their faces.

  CHAPTER XVII. “Who that is born in a womb is not a member of a mystery?”

  The majority of men and women, the less they know, the more they talk. But genius asserts itself in crises, saying only that which is essential and relevant.

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  CLEOPATRA began by taking Caesar’s magnanimity for granted and by proving to him that her own was on a plane with his:

  “I grieve with you over the great Pompey’s death. I did my best to save him, knowing well you would have found some way to preserve his dignity in his hour of defeat. But he stepped ashore beyond reach of my protection. However, I saved some of his men; I sent them to Ptolemais, which they now hold in your name, awaiting your clemency.”

  Caesar was on guard against an appeal to his notorious sex-appetite. Few women neglected that angle of assault, and very many had succeeded in exchanging favors with him; but Cleopatra ignored it, which was a novelty that appealed to the higher, more rarified layers of vanity on which imagination gave his intellect free reign.

  He stared at her.

  “Presently, you must tell me how; but say first why you have come to me,” he answered in a fatherly tone of voice; her youth had touched a sentimental chord in him that had not vibrated for many years. He was lonely and that unexpected emotion rather thrilled him. She recognized it — stirred it again subtly:

  “Are you not an honorable Roman? I have no right to imagine you will deal unfairly with me.”

  “What do you wish me to do for you?” he asked.

  “To inform yourself, Caesar, and to use your judgment.”

  “You are confident that information will induce me to protect you from your enemies?”

  The tone of his voice implied that he already had beard stories none too creditable to her.

  “Protection?” she answered. “I could have gone to Philae, hundreds of leagues distant up the Nile, where no enemy could reach me by any means. But that would
have meant continuing a war that I see can be prevented. Do you approve of civil war? You who have been forced to fight one? Would not you have welcomed personal danger if you could have saved Rome from all that bloodshed?”

  That was exactly the sort of flattery he liked. He, who had plunged a continent into fratricidal bloodshed, relished more than anyone the credit for desiring peace.

  “You are no longer in personal danger,” he assured her. “I will protect your life in any event.”

  She held to her point: “Neither you nor I consider that important,” she retorted. “Did you ever see the Nile where it reaches the sea? — how it freshens the sea? — how it blends? — and how at last a new land rises at the meeting of the waters? So are Rome and Egypt meeting now. It is their destiny. It is for you and me to decide whether we will oppose destiny or ride on its torrent, using the helm of wisdom in the bark of courage.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Like you, Caesar, I am older than the world. But I was born into this body twenty years ago.”

  “As queen, do you believe that you could govern Egypt?”

  “Egypt?” she answered. “I am Egypt. The spirit of Egypt guides and governs me. But men must be fit to be governed before government can touch them. Man is the hardest of all animals to govern, because nothing else in the universe is so treacherous — so deceitful.”

  “I am a man,” said Caesar. “Do you propose to trust me?”

  “As an animal-man, no. As a godlike man, yes. I speak to you as Egypt, meeting Rome.”

  “I have been told,” said Caesar kindly, “that you are not yet even recognized as Queen of Egypt.”

  “Do you let a eunuch do your recognizing for you?” she retorted. “Is the opinion of such vermin as slew Pompey on the beach a weighty matter in your judgment?”

  “I have spoken with your brother, and with your sister Arsinoe,” said Caesar.

  “Doubtless you have formed your own opinion of them also,” said Cleopatra. “There is no need for me to tell you mine. If you had not spoken with them, I would have preferred that you should, before talking with me. I would think less highly of you if I thought you incapable of forming a clear opinion unaided.”