Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Are you growing old, that there is so much need of haste?” Olympus asked her.

  “What does that comet mean? What does the stirring within my heart mean?”

  “That means you are excited,” said Olympus. “It is a calm mind that receives the reflection of wisdom and again reflects it.”

  “But the comet?”

  “On its endless round has reached a quarter of the heavens where its influence, for good or evil, possibly can touch you.”

  “Are you ignorant to-night? Or are you obstinate? Why is it that THEY send no advice — now, when I need it?”

  “They are not your owners. You are not their agent. They will let you meet your destiny and conquer it or not,” Olympus answered. “They would blame me, should I encourage you to depend on any other judgment than your own. But they will help you when you give them opportunity, though not with violence, and not with any shouldering of your responsibilities.”

  “Am I responsible for Caesar?”

  “That you know well you are not. And yet beware of being so! For I tell you, Tros made no mistake when warning Caesar to beware, although neither of them understood the warning or each other.”

  Cleopatra laughed — angrily — scornfully. “It was I who sent Tros to warn Caesar!”

  “And yet you say THEY send you no advice? Does it occur to you that possibly your brain misread the wisdom of your heart, that had been stirred — who knows how?”

  “Well, I warned him!” she retorted.

  “Hoping by a law of contraries to — ?”

  Olympus paused, for there were limits of familiarity beyond which even he forebore to trespass. Suddenly he saw a way of making clear his meaning without risk of giving offense. He went on:

  “There is never a lack of warnings nor a dearth of guides. But they in the dark reverse both. They mistake a warning for a challenge. They mistake a guide for warning of a pitfall.”

  “You are too mysterious,” she answered. “Leave me alone to meditate. Yes, leave me, Charmian, but stay near.”

  There was almost desert stillness up there on the roof. The ceaseless breakers at the foot of Pharos beacon made a murmur in the distance. To the south, beyond the maze of palace dwellings and the Lochias wall, the city rumbled obbligato to the silent music of the stars. Now and then Caesar’s soldiers challenged, and their voices, with the accompanying clash of metal, were like shots of color rather than as many sounds. Bats’ wings were distinctly audible.

  And then a footstep. Like a god in gleaming white, his toga undulating in the zephyr, pausing from minute to minute to gaze into gloom to the westward — standing like Apollo on a breastwork — walking along the parapet — came Caesar.

  Presently he stood still, watching. She did not turn to recognize him; she went on gazing at the starlight mirrored on the purple surface of the sea — at the silvery lines of phosphorus where dolphins wove incomprehensible designs — at the yellow lights of Caesar’s ships reflected on wine-dark water.

  “What poetry!” said Caesar. “But it lacks movement.” He was suddenly beside her. She nodded a curt confidential welcome, and then went on gazing at the night. “That comet moves,” she answered presently out of the darkness.

  “Too imperceptibly,” said Caesar. He was very close to her. She said nothing more for several minutes, until the silence became unendurable.

  “I begin my campaign to-night to make you Queen of Egypt,” he said then.

  Quietly she turned and met his blue eyes which were brilliant with fire that she had never seen in any man’s — light without heat — desire unlimited by scruple — passion like a Roman legion’s, disciplined and loosed deliberately at a goal. If she could read his eyes she kept her secret to herself. Her own were pools of violet, alight, too, but with mystery.

  “You look so small,” he said, “it is hard to believe you can be so great; yet I think that your wisdom is greater than mine.”

  “It is neither less nor greater. It is different,” she answered. “Reason is a man’s quality. Intuition is a woman’s.”

  “Egypt — could you make Rome wise?” he asked her, and she trembled now. It was the first time he had ever called her Egypt.

  “Are you Rome — or Caesar?” She could speak in colors, for her voice touched chords of nature, and the sound was all in harmony with zephyr, night-sky, bat’s-wing breathing and the glow of Pharos light. One word was a jewel; those five words were a magic spell.

  The ensuing silence was like a pause between two eternities; it maddened him; he would have taken her in his arms, but she retreated.

  Suddenly she caught her breath. A shower of meteors sprayed the whole of heaven, dimming the eternal stars — a moment’s cataract of jewels.

  “Caesar!” Awe — reverence — gratitude — her voice was vibrant. Then a note of triumph: “That was a message! Whom the gods approve—”

  “The war-god justifies!” said Caesar. “Look!”

  He pointed westward, toward the Heptastadium, against which the Egyptians had moored their empty fleet. There came a sudden blaze of white-hot light, the din of an explosion, smoke and then a crimson holocaust that lit a whole horizon — red fire leaping along rigging and a mystery of black hulls floating in a crimson sea beneath a panoply of colored smoke.

  “They were planning to man that fleet,” said Caesar. “I filled a ship with a sort of Greek fire that I took from Tros and sent it down among them, only two ships following.”

  In silence they watched the flames lighting the whole length of the Heptastadium. Achillas’ troops, like demons writhing on a red-hot causeway — silhouetted — ruddy in the red flare — panic-stricken — fought to free the ships that had not caught yet. But the firelight glittered on oars where, almost hidden by the smoke, two of Caesar’s biremes were maneuvering for the range. Then javelins — arrows — slung stones, flickering through the firelight — and a movement along the Heptastadium as when a wind strikes standing corn.

  Then real wind, from the north, not gusty but enough to carry sparks inland. Mast after mast became a spout of golden flame to fall on burning decks and send a rainbow-fountain skyward, a-splash, as if the flame were liquid.

  Presently the sound of shod feet running. Then a legionary, breathless:

  “Where is Caesar? Caesar, the Centurion Ahenobarbus sends word that the library on the Bruchium is burning!”

  Cleopatra caught her breath and clutched at Caesar’s arm. He had the arm around her in a moment, hugging her close to him. He was about to speak, but paused to watch a shadowy black figure leap out of the gloom and vanish with a black cloak streaming in the wind behind him — Olympus in full flight. Cleopatra tried to free herself but his arm was like iron.

  “Caesar! If you let them burn that library, you—”

  She beat at his breast in her effort to break away from him.

  “ — Thousands of years of work! — The Hermetic books. — The lore of Babylon and Nineveh. — The pyramid calculations — all the knowledge of the stars — history — mathematics—”

  Caesar’s voice at last: “Tell Calvinus to take as many cohorts as he needs and save the library.”

  Retreating footsteps, and then Charmian, like a white-robed spirit fluttering against the sky, afraid to come near, staring at the holocaust and turning every second or two expecting Cleopatra’s summons.

  “The library!” she cried out. “Is the only glory of the Ptolemies to perish?”

  Cleopatra broke free. Even Caesar’s strength was not enough to hold her. But, unlike Charmian’s, her voice was quiet, vibrant with intense emotion in restraint:

  “Caesar, you might burn the whole world and it would not matter, if only you left that library!”

  His high-pitched laugh betrayed annoyance. He was in another mood than to grieve over Hermetic treatises on magic, or the legends of Atlantis, or the measures of the universe.

  “Calvinus will take care of it,” he said. “A very good soldier, Calvinus. And won’t the A
lexandrians themselves protect their own books?”

  “Go you, Caesar, and direct them!”

  “No,” he answered. “Let the shadow burn, if it will burn. I desire the image! Books can be written again, and the world is full of them.”

  “But, Caesar, there are books in there from India and from

  “I will conquer India.” He laughed again — the high-pitched, staccato, nervous neigh of excitement that his friends dreaded as much as his enemies, because it signified that his impetuous will was stirred and nothing had importance in his eyes but his immediate objective. “A lifetime in a library, poring in books for wisdom? And the woman here, who has the wisdom in her heart and in her eyes! No, Egypt, I prefer you to the library!”

  He took her in his arms again, she ceasing to struggle, for his strength was overwhelming now, and comforting besides. She might have called to Charmian, but it was Caesar who did that, over his shoulder, abruptly:

  “You may leave us!”

  “And perhaps the best won’t burn,” Cleopatra murmured, “and the soul of wisdom lives on though the body perish.”

  Charmian turned away but stood and watched them from the shadow of a stairhead. They were framed against the night sky, half surrounded by a garden grown in granite pots in imitation of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Caesar took her in his arms, and lifted her like a Roman carrying his bride across the threshold — a ceremony dating from the day they raped the Sabine women. Then he carried her away into the darkness — none knew whither.

  Clank of armor, where an unseen sentry moved; then silence, so still that the distant roar of fire and shouting blended and became one with the murmur of the waves on Pharos. Charmian walked westward along the roof until she came to the parapet, and leaned there, gazing at the buildings burning on the Bruchium, with figures flitting in and out of lurid smoke and, here and there the gleam of flame on armor where Caesar’s men battled the fire.

  It was there that Olympus came to her. He found her weeping — talked to give her time to control herself.

  “Luckily,” he said, “repairs were being made, and most of the secret books had been stored for the time being in the houses of the chief librarians. Some of those books — the very ancient ones — are not inflammable. They are done on stuff called Pergamos.”

  “I don’t care,” she answered. “I think more than books are being burned to-night.”

  She told Olympus what she had heard and seen.

  “Be you faithful to her, nevertheless,” he answered. “Stormy-weather friends are links between us and the Universal Soul. Fair-weather friends are parasites.”

  “She forgot me,” said Charmian. “She has always mocked my chastity — but, Olympus, she let Caesar order me away.”

  “And she forgot me,” he answered. “But what then? What if you and I remember?”

  CHAPTER XXI. “Kneel. Look upward.”

  Imagination is like a virgin until she bear her living fruit. But let imagination and a strong will choose each other, as the great gods chose, immaculately, in the dawn of time, then lo! the very comets in their courses are as darkness to the splendor that shall come forth!

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  AND now a change took place in Caesar. There was something added to him. His imagination, hitherto as masculine as Mars, discovered realms of views so wholly new to him that for the moment war, and even Rome, were inconsiderable trifles. He beheld a cosmos on a new titanic scale. He realized that he had only concentrated his attention hitherto on one small aspect of immensity; that there were planes of thought on which his intellect might revel without limit — fields of outlet for his energy that he had never dreamed of — glorious realms of thought and action on which lesser mortals than himself could never even challenge him. He was alone, with only Cleopatra for his guide, and she as sweetly, gaily yielding to him as the earth in springtime giving up her secrets to the sun.

  He threw off twenty years of age and drove Calvinus to distraction by his indifference to military needs and to the hourly increasing danger. He forbade his secretaries to annoy him even with dispatches from the Roman Senate urging his immediate return to Rome — messages sent twice or thrice a week in fast small ships, that several times were intercepted by Achillas’ men, who held the Pharos. He abandoned his daily dictation of the diary on which he had formerly set such importance — ordering his secretaries not to bother about records.

  “I will build a new world. Time and history begin when I begin,” he told them in one of his grandiose moods.

  He appointed Apollodorus master of the ceremonies but employed him chiefly to keep business at bay — dammed to stagnation to manage itself, while he and Cleopatra entertained each other.

  They were neither of them gluttons. Meals, that they invariably ate together, were a feast of merry talk and music, flowers, and as little food, as exquisitely served, as might have satisfied two Stoics. They explored the vast Lochias together, praising Alexander’s foresight. Together they walked on the acres of roof amid groves of shrubbery in marble pots. By night, alone, they strode the water-front and wove ideal pictures of the world as they would leave it after they had finished playing and their spirits winged into the Infinite For in that mood Caesar could imagine after-life among the gods.

  Neither was lonely in those days. Caesar, for the first time in his life, had met a woman capable of understanding him and ministering to his mental needs. She brought to him a dawning, as it were, of knowledge of his own self. Not like other women, she saw deeper than the purple cloak, or than the imperator, or than the conqueror whom all a Roman world acclaimed as Caesar, as if Caesar were a new divinity. She saw a hungry soul and fed it from the wealth of her own spiritual storehouse.

  “Caesar, how long did your mother live? Mine lived for nine years after I was born, so I am rich, but I will share it all with you.”

  Olympus had vanished, arousing no regret in Caesar, who had begun vaguely to dislike his influence. But there were nights when Olympus’ erstwhile vigilance was missed — dark dangerous nights of wakefulness and secret wandering from room to room to frustrate murderers like rats, who hid in secret passages and cut their way through panels. There were days when poisoned food was brought to them, when slaves, obliged to taste it, died in agony. And there were days of almost mutiny when Caesar had to show himself to homesick troops and stir them back to confidence with words of praise and boastfulness, of shame and mockery, of stirring memories and golden promises all mingled. He returned to Cleopatra and forgot them, promises and all.

  And then a wonder-night when hand-in-hand, alone, identities well hidden in the robes of devotees of Isis, they escaped together from the Lochias and sought a shrine of mystery within a temple, whose vast roof murmured to the sound of hundreds sleeping in the aisles, to dream — the men of fortune and the women of unborn children. Cleopatra rather puzzled Caesar by the reverence with which she passed between the rows of silent women, stooping once to whisper to a young wife words that started her weeping happily.

  Through heavy doors, that opened at a whisper; up marble steps between immensely solid walls; down passages whose geometrical design was purposeless, unless to symbolize some speechless truth that should reveal itself to inner understanding, if an inner eye could read; through curtains, of four colors, glittering with stars that shone in pale light from an unseen source; amid a silence that was awe itself made audible; then downward, toward foundations, until bared feet felt the naked rock and someone in a white robe sprinkled water on their closed eyes with something — Caesar never knew what.

  A solemn voice said: “Kneel. Look upward.”

  So together they saw Isis, Mother of the Universe, as symbolized in marble, glowing in reflected light.

  The shrine was shrouded with the utter blackness of the womb of Chaos. There was no source visible from which the light came; yet it shone in glory on the marble form of Isis represented as a woman, passionless, mother of sex and yet as sexless a
s the mystery of time.

  They knelt together on a rug worn threadbare by the knees of thousands, which was a strange thing for Cleopatra to do, she being high priestess of Isis by divine right of her royal heritage — and Caesar titular high priest of Rome, who reckoned himself worthy to invade whatever sanctuary stirred his curiosity. But curiosity was latent that night. Cleopatra’s mood was overpoweringly gentle, leading Caesar as it were by unseen chains into a mystery that calmed his all-too-easily excited intellect and made him dimly conscious of emotions he had never previously felt.

  The grand, impersonal, enormous loveliness of Isis, that had not been limited by any artist’s effort to define a type of beauty, opened up the thought toward infinity — eternity — and let expand those forces of the inner consciousness that crack the very molds of mind and change a man into a nascent demigod. By caring nothing for a surface, save that it reveal the hidden mysteries of form and infinite proportion, he who wrought that image had suggested all the wonder of evolving mother nature. There was not a finished detail to retard imagination by suggesting anything might end; nor any hint of a beginning, to reduce that majesty to meanness. Curve — contour — calm — in an effulgent light that seemed to be the emanation of the glory of an absolute idea, bathed them in such spiritual peace as Caesar had never guessed even existed.

  Presently, in silence, forth again into the street, by passages as short and easy to discover as the entrance had been narrow and involved — thus symbolizing that descent into materiality is easier and swifter, by a broader way, than the ascent to spiritual understanding.

  Danger in the street (for they had come in secret; there were no guards). Flight, with Cleopatra running beside Caesar, clinging to him, sobbing with excited laughter. Legionaries’ challenge — unbelief — then recognition by a guard-room lantern — consternation, and the clang of shields on armor when the cohort formed in ranks with that delirious, maddening music of sound and motion that was Rome’s salute to whom she chose to honor.