Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “What is it you want, Tros?” demanded Caesar.

  Tros met his gaze. There was an interchange of mutual recognition of the gulf unbridgeable between them.

  “Orders from the Queen,” Tros answered. “It is clear I have a destiny that anchors me to Egypt. I will not cut cables; destiny shall run its course. But I am Cleopatra’s admiral, not Caesar’s.”

  Caesar smiled, agreeably but with a tinge of tartness. Cleopatra tucked her feet up on the couch and lay back, studying Tros as if she saw in him an answer to a thousand riddles that Olympus had left unsolved.

  “Tros,” she said, “I would give you a wife if I thought you could be tamed to live with one. You might even conquer Arsinoe, only I fear that she would stab you first or poison you. Shall I give you a palace? It would make you more fretful than a caged lion. Money? Later, you may have as much of it as you can use; but I know you cannot be bought with money. What then shall I give you?”

  “A promise,” Tros answered. “Remember that promise you made me on the day I first came. Remember it, and keep it.”

  Cleopatra nodded three times. Neither of them looked at Caesar, who was already attending to some tablets that a secretary brought him.

  CHAPTER XXVIII. “We will never see the old Apollodorus back.”

  Great men set examples which the lesser imitate. And there are many lesser ones far wiser than the merely great whose greatness causes other men to err; for wisdom has no more to do with size, or noise, or violence, or fame, or riches, than dimension has to do with quality. They may exist together, and they need not. Second only to ability to lead men rightly is ability to choose which leader, out of many, it is wise to follow.

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  SWIFTLY Alexandria revived under the hand of Cleopatra, upheld by Caesar. Even more swiftly Caesar modified his views, and Cleopatra hers, she knowing it was useless to attempt to dam the mental energy, of which his physical endowments were a faint, however marvelous, reflection. But he could be guided, and diverted, like the Nile flood. So she yielded all she could yield, and was firm without his knowing it — most firm, in fact, when she appeared most yielding. And she flattered his confidence in Rome’s and Caesar’s destiny, encouraging his craving to surpass the exploits of Alexander of Macedon, raising, meanwhile, artfully constructed dikes, in the form of reasons why he should not turn aside to overflow her Land of Khem with those mechanically perfect Roman legions, so tolerant of gods, such deadly adversaries of ideas.

  Like Caesar, she could forefeel the beginning of a new, great era. She had only her intuition and ideals with which to resist Rome’s overflow. She set herself, guilefully and ceaselessly, to color Caesar’s thought with as much of her own philosophy as he could understand. And while that, like a chemical reacting on a chemical, wrought madness in him, she herself — attempting to absorb into herself in turn some elements of his materialistically masterful philosophy — became corrupted. Never wavering from her own high purpose, nevertheless, she lost at intervals her vision, that was in any event in danger from the lees and fumes of Ptolemaic tendencies, which she inherited, of which she was aware, and which she fought against, with varying success, her whole life long.

  Born and educated in the most licentious and corrupt court in the world, with murderers for forebears, the marvel was that she descended no more than she did, at times, into the darker Ptolemaic layers of her nature. Youth and dawning motherhood combined with consciousness of genius to keep her thought uplifted. Caesar’s love of splendor and his insatiate craving for power, along with his contemptuous appraisal of the value of the world’s opinions and of the danger of disregarding them, corrupted her. His love of power was as contagious as most vices. It amused him to make her, at twenty, an absolute autocrat, and to see her gathering into her hands, day after day more firmly, the control of the most splendid city and the richest country in the known world.

  To make her popular he reduced Rome’s demands for money to the minimum that he needed for the payment of his troops, and he let it be known that it was at her request he did it. The sum of ten million denarii, which he demanded on behalf of Roman creditors was not only moderate but an actually generous concession — a demand comparatively easy for the Alexandrians to meet, in spite of the fact that so much of their city had been wrecked in the fighting. They praised her. They began to talk of offering him the crown of Egypt as her consort — an amusing suggestion typical of Alexandria’s conceit that, nevertheless, set Caesar thinking about crowns and thrones — and Rome — and Alexander’s empire.

  Yet another concession he made to the Alexandrians. His tribune, Calvinus, was not particularly tactful and had been personally offensive to the nobility since that incident of his replacing Ptolemy at the banquet table; so he promoted Calvinus, to get rid of him, sending him to command the troops in Pontus, replacing him with another freedman, Rufinus by name, who was as wholly Caesar’s man as Calvinus had been, but who almost worshiped Cleopatra and was in sympathy with the Alexandrians’ own admiration for their city.

  Rufinus and Tros grew friendly. Tros, of his own initiative, but with Cleopatra’s generous encouragement and Caesar’s cold assent, began to rebuild the Egyptian fleet with the aid of Rhodian shipwrights. The foreign corn trade was a royal monopoly demanding an enormous fleet of ships which Rufinus foresaw would be at Rome’s disposal if required, but which Tros intended should be an eventual obstacle to Rome’s imperial progress; so that the two, from motives diametrically opposite, worked hand-in-hand. Caesar saw money — the all-necessary money for his own imperial projects, which a reviving corn trade would pour into Cleopatra’s treasury. And she was as generous with her money as he could be extravagant with other people’s. It would only need a year or two of peace and normal revenue to make her fabulously rich — another Croesus; Caesar much preferred to have those funds to draw from personally than to see them pouring into the Roman treasury, where the Senate might have too much to say. With private money he could buy the votes of the individual senators — a cynicism he had never balked at.

  The importation of Euxine and Lebanon timber in enormous quantities, the laying of keels and the planning of ships and docks kept Tros too busy to observe what else was going on, though Cleopatra might have listened to him had he neglected his own problems to consider hers. Tros’ mind was on ships, and on a ship canal that should reopen the ancient fairway to the East. Apollodorus was useless, gloaming over his own lost self-esteem and training teams of Arab horses in the stadium, under watchful Roman eyes, enjoying melancholy even while he risked his life a dozen times a day, attempting to break to the racing chariot ungovernable stallions that were a gift to Cleopatra from Semsicaramus of Hemesa, whose cavalry, lent to Caesar, were mounted on desert mares, but who sent that most priceless gift that was in his power to bestow when he learned by messenger how Cleopatra’s star was rising.

  Cleopatra was left entirely under Caesar’s influence and subject to the flattery of Alexandrian counselors appointed, at Caesar’s whim, to form her ministry.

  And there were Romans constantly arriving now, with messages for Caesar and requests that he should take up the dictatorship in Rome; for the Senate had elected him, in his absence, absolute dictator for the ensuing year. Mark Antony as his lieutenant was not winning wholesale approval; he and Caesar had been outright enemies on more than one occasion and he was even rumored in some quarters to be listening to overtures from Pompey’s still rebellious supporters. Those Roman emissaries, treated noncommittally by Caesar, did their utmost to ingratiate themselves with Cleopatra, flattering her in order to discover, if they could, the secret of her influence over the man whom all Rome feared, however much some hated him. They returned to Rome with their imaginations fevered by her magnificent entertainment and by the skill with which she parried, in their own tongue, their bluntly inquisitive questions. All of them accepted handsome gifts, which whetted appetites for more; and all of them carried home incredible tales o
f how Caesar was being treated as a god by the Egyptians.

  For Cleopatra made the most of that convenient convention. Always, and not only in the olden days, when a prince’s parentage was doubtful the religious legend was invoked of gods in human form begetting offspring from a princess to refresh the spiritual lineage. Such doctrine was accepted literally by the Egyptian populace, to whom their ruler was, if not divine in person, then at least the shadow of divinity on earth. All miracles were credible to them. And even by a number of the educated Alexandrians that theory of divine royalty was accepted almost literally, because of the general human tendency to keep religion in one layer of the mind and in the other layers incredulity, irreverence and common sense. Those Alexandrians who mocked religion as the rankest superstition (and they were many) nevertheless well understood the political advantage of credulity in other people and, consequently, were the last to dream of publicly exploding a myth that could be made to serve convenient dynastic purposes. Intelligence suggested silence, when an argument might lead to rivalry and civil war.

  And Cleopatra, being one of those rare women who had been admitted to the inner mysteries, well knew the underlying truth. It was none of her doing that more than nine-tenths of the world was as incapable of understanding esoteric allegories as the animals are blind to mathematics. The essential divinity of every man and every woman — of all the universe and every atom it contained was axiomatic to her. From her viewpoint, there was no advantage in denying her divinity or Caesar’s and descending to the level of the herd, merely because the herd misunderstood a truth, her understanding of which placed her as high above them as they were higher than the beasts of burden. Anarchy might follow a repudiation of divine right, just as it would follow any effort to explain their own divinity to people not yet capable of comprehending it. They would mistake their lusts for spiritual privilege and Alexandria — all Egypt — would be turned into a shambles.

  But she did think Caesar might be made to understand, and she attempted it. One difficulty was that Caesar had made himself ineligible for the mysteries by sexual indulgence in his youth, and even in his middle age, when most men are credited with having bridled their grosser passions. There were minor mysteries, and outer fringes of the great ones that might have admitted him into their lowest ranks if his indulgence had not been so notorious; but, as far as the inner sanctuaries were concerned, where the inner secrets were revealed and, after terrible initiation, men were convinced, by proof, of their immortality, Caesar was as utterly excluded as a dog was from a mausoleum. He might harry, as he did in Gaul, and had meant to do in Britain, the reputed hierophants. He might burn them alive — flog, rack, crucify. But the lips of those who had attained initiation were as sealed as if death had silenced them. No death that Caesar could impose could be as terrible as that awaiting anyone who profaned the least of the mystery secrets by revealing it to uninitiated individuals; for whether that death was merely figurative, in the form of ostracism, or physical, as sometimes happened when public opinion was too thoroughly aroused, it included the self-recognition as a traitor to his oven soul, that the hardest must flinch from, and that those possessed of character enough to be accepted in the inner shrine would infinitely rather die than face. The world was full of tales of what went on within the mysteries, but those were told by men who had had to imagine; and men whose unbridled lusts exclude them from occult ceremonies are unlikely to imagine decency, or anything approximating truth.

  However, it was possible to hint and to arouse a speculative interest in Caesar that might lead to a dawning consciousness of truths, so near to the mystery teachings as to serve the same high purpose. Socrates had reached a comprehension of the truths unaided. It was impossible for Cleopatra, an initiate, to speak or act without in some way, indefinably perhaps, but noticeably indicating her familiarity with cosmic secrets; an initiate could usually recognize another without interchange of challenge and answer or secret handclasp. She could hardly help guiding Caesar’s mental processes.

  And there was one strong virtue that Caesar possessed, which made it possible to reach and stir his higher intuition: he had never meddled with the black arts. Sorcery and high ideals are as mutually exclusive as light and darkness. Sorcery was so abhorrent to him that he had, in Gaul particularly, wrecked and scattered purely ethical associations because he had been falsely informed that their secret practices were witchcraft or something worse.

  But Cleopatra had another difficulty to overcome, and it was almost as insuperable as the silence she must keep. She was now with child. Difficult and rare although it was for any woman to obtain initiation, there was one rule even more inviolable: during pregnancy, and until she had weaned her child, she was forbidden access to the mysteries for reasons which every initiated woman understood so clearly that she would never have dreamed of attempting to avoid the rule. She was excluded for her own protection.

  Foreseen when the veil was lifted to admit her as a virgin princess, the difficulty had been partly solved for Cleopatra by providing her with contact in the person of Olympus, so that even when the normal processes of nature shut her from the sanctuaries where her inspiration, growing dim, might be relit, Olympus could supply enough reflected spiritual light to rearouse her courage which is an essential requirement on the upward planes of thought. High thinking taxes courage to its limit.

  Ever since the school established by Pythagoras had come to grief through trespassing in the realm of politics the hierophants of the inner mysteries had set their faces rigidly against a repetition of that error. Cleopatra, as the Queen of Egypt, had her own task to accomplish, on a plane on which no hierophant would interfere. Their aim was to preserve the spiritual knowledge and to re-enlighten all the world, not only Egypt; nations and boundaries meant less than nothing to them. Her duty was to make their task less difficult by resisting the wave of mercenary frenzy that was threatening to engulf the world. The only help that she might look for was the strengthening of her vision by inpouring of sublime rays of intelligence; that, and the encouraging admission of her right to wear the crown and scepter of the Upper and the Lower Nile.

  However, even on the surface and in the realm of politics, such help was of enormous value. The Egyptian priests were not notorious for purity; their contact with the ignorance of masses, who accepted literally allegories meant to indicate unspoken secrets of the cosmos, had imbued great numbers of them with contempt — an attitude exclusive of that inner light in which a spiritual purpose thrives. But one and all, from the high priests of the temples downward to the lowest ranks of newly frocked confessors, they were in awe of the sacred mysteries — particularly of the Mystery of Philae; and they knew that Cleopatra was approved by Philae — crowned and blessed by Philae’s emissaries. So they used their influence in Cleopatra’s cause.

  And Caesar very soon became aware of the enormous power of the priests — a power that was inevitably sterilized by civil war, but that grew stronger with every day of stabilized government. The practice of confession made the priests recipients of all the secrets of the city. Alexandrian love of festivals and glorious processions gave the priesthood opportunity to hypnotize the populace with solemn gaiety and ritualistic glamour. Rome’s priesthood was the aristocracy itself, which had advantages for the aristocracy but split society in twain; whereas Egypt’s priests were a third estate depending for its revenues and power on the throne, which it supported and from which, in turn, it derived authority.

  That priesthood, which he could not, in his own mind, separate from the entirely independent, overbrooding spiritual hierarchy, interested Caesar. He began to study it. When Cleopatra, wearing the royal robes of Isis and borne on an open golden litter so that all Alexandria might see her exercising the divine right, went to the Serapium in splendid procession to identify herself with unseen powers that had brought peace, Caesar, watching from a window, saw the crowds lay foreheads in the dust and saw the high priest on the temple steps receive her, amid blaring
music, as if Time were welcoming a young year, to reward it with his blessing and to send it forth enriched by an ensuing season.

  Rome had no such ceremony — nor such a temple, where the divers deities all blended into one, and all were represented without lessening the dignity of any. Rome had no such glamour to confer on her dictator as those priests provided for their Queen. Caesar perceived the value, on the merely mundane surface, which was all he cared about, of recognition as the representative on earth of unseen gods. Plainly, the ignorant herd not only liked, but needed, deities that it could hear and see.

  Historical events were periodically carved and painted on the temple walls, symbolically, to suggest the ever-close association between gods and men. In temple after temple they began to picture Cleopatra holding intimate communion with Amon — recognizable as Caesar, who raised no objection. He preferred the ithyphallic significance of that to his better-known title of calvus moechus, that he had had to endure for many years with none too easily assumed indifference. His dignity was very precious to him. Deification seemed perhaps the best way to remove old stigmas.

  Natural austerity increased. He grew paternally benevolent to Cleopatra, chilly and aloof toward the Alexandrians, more and more distantly proud in his dealings with Rome, whose constantly returning messengers reported him as fast in Cleopatra’s toils. He gave ridiculous excuses to them for his absence: as that the wind was adverse, or that the military situation needed his direct attention on the spot. Nor did he trouble himself to write dispatches.

  The truth was that his ideas were undergoing transmutation and he wanted time to think; and a theory of the Egyptian priests, that epilepsy was a state of consciousness in which the mortal held communication with the unseen powers, encouraged him to study what the nature of these unseen powers possibly might be. His attacks of epilepsy had begun to recur more frequently, and he dreaded them; whatever argument might serve to minimize that dread was welcome.