Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You will find,” he told them, as if they did not know it, “that a beginning was made many years ago, but the mistake was made of dealing too much in miracles, with the result that only slaves and thoughtless men were interested. What I want you to do is to spread your doctrine of immortality and the deification of rulers among the electorate, who will be benefited by it and who will submit themselves more willingly in consequence to arbitrary government.”

  Then down the Nile and no time lost, with Caesar’s new plans boiling in his brain and Cleopatra realizing that her own work must be rebegun; and she with a child to bring forth presently — a circumstance likely to engage her whole attention for a while, although she was young, strong, healthy, and the doctors assured her there would be no difficulties. She had no physical fear whatever; but dismay took hold of her as she reviewed the outcome of her political efforts — dismay and embarrassing doubt as to whether she had rightly interpreted that inner voice for which she always, or almost always, listened.

  It was true that by making that journey to Philae with the great parade of Roman troops and Alexandrian officials she had reopened the principal trade routes and restored the revenues, which were certain now to come pouring into the treasury. If nobody else, Esias and his coreligionists, anxious to make good their newly acquired citizenship, would lend her, against the security of future taxes, any sums she might need. She knew how Caesar squandered money; her purse would give her a certain hold on him, but not much; he accepted money as he did a woman’s favors, or as the poor accept doles, and if it were not forthcoming from one source he would extract it from another — borrow or steal or merely appropriate, it would not make much difference to Caesar.

  True, too, for the time being Egypt was saved from being a Roman province, although not saved in the way she had intended, nor as securely. She had gained a temporary respite, that was all. There would be no invasion now of Roman armies, and no commission of Roman senators to impound the revenues and pocket most of them, as Rabirius and his fellow rascals had done in her father’s day. It would be she herself who would send Caesar chests of gold and fleets of corn; which, after all, would not make much difference to Caesar, who had received his percentage from Rabirius in former days without being in the least entitled to it, but without a shadow of compunction.

  Caesar was going away. She had lost the first main of her gamble to make Alexandria the capital of the world. And worse: she had lost her fight to make Caesar view life as she viewed it, mystically, through a lense of Philaean ideals. He had seized on the husk of her philosophy, but the spirit of it seemed to have escaped him utterly.

  Dismayed, she did not let Caesar glimpse in her the shadow of dismay. She assured him he might leave her in Alexandria without a moment’s anxiety about Egypt’s welfare; a handful of Roman troops and Rufinus, with Tros to continue building up the fleet and establishing good discipline among the crews, and she could manage Egypt firmly, with a view to peace and abundant revenues. She did not even ask him to remain in Egypt until her child should be born, preferring to let that suggestion reach him by way of Charmian and the other women. Caesar would never have thought of it for himself; there were couriers coming up the Nile to meet him with news of armies gathering in Asia Minor, and he was half killing the crews in his haste to reach Alexandria and take up the reins of war again with reawakened vigor.

  “We will see,” he said to Cleopatra, “whether or not there is anything in this theory of our being gods on earth. If it is true that admission to ourselves that we are gods produces the realization of it, that may have been the secret of Alexander’s victories, and you shall see some swift and very terrible events.”

  But her courage and her self-evident affection for him bridled even his impatience. The day before they reached Alexandria he assured her that he would stay until he knew whether it was a boy or a girl, even if Rome should perish meanwhile.

  She cordially hoped that Rome might perish, but she did not tell him so. She hoped that the armies in Asia Minor would advance on Rome and wreck all Caesar’s chances of establishing himself in Italy, thus forcing him after all to make Alexandria his capital and to reconquer Rome as the Pharaoh of Egypt. But she was not fool enough to expect’ that or to mention it. She offered him only encouragement and never let him see the nervous strain that she was under, tautened and plucked though it was incessantly by Caesar’s own vivid restlessness and by the daily widening gap between their differing points of view.

  All Alexandria turned out to bid them welcome as the fleet sailed out from Nile-mouth and headed in the dawn toward the royal harbor. Wealth was the blood in Alexandria’s veins; the trade route was now open — prosperity a foregone conclusion, with a world wasted by civil war — a greedy market for Egypt’s corn, and Rome’s credit sound enough although her treasury might be empty. Rome could always be depended on to replenish her stores of coin from somewhere!

  All the harbor-front was decorated and the palace was a delirium of waving banners. It was a new and good excuse for festival and the Alexandrians made the most of it, spending a day and a night in revelry, illuminating all the city as soon as darkness fell and praising Cleopatra as the Daughter of the Queen of Heaven and the greatest of the Lagidae.

  They sent committees to her, begging her to have Arsinoe beheaded, believing that as a Ptolemy she would crave her sister’s death and that her only reason for having delayed the execution was uncertainty as to the effect on public opinion. But whatever her private feelings were (and she let no one know them) she saw that the greater advantage would be gained by showing clemency, while at the same time flattering Caesar and perhaps getting him to shoulder a responsibility that she dreaded. So she let the representative committees of all ranks of citizens assembled in the throne-room have the obloquy of having urged the execution and, turning to Caesar, asked him:

  “Can you not discipline the girl? Would it not be wise to let her grace your triumph, walking through the streets of Rome in chains?”

  She knew that it was customary to behead important prisoners after they had followed the conquering general through the streets, and if Caesar chose to take that responsibility on himself —

  However, Caesar saw the issue. “Surely,” he answered. “She shall grace my triumph, and she shall be whipped if she does not walk with suitable demeanor. Afterward we will let her go, and see whether she has not learned to choose her counselors more wisely and to govern herself with more restraint. She was, I remember, appointed Queen of Cyprus. I have not rescinded that.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII. “But you keep your word, Tros?”

  Men believe that their own lot is harsh and that of their ruler easy. But they cannot rein their own ungovernable passions. It is curious that they should seldom stop to think how much more difficult it is to rein the passions of a multitude, and that the only reward that a ruler finds worth reckoning is consciousness of high aim and of work well done.

  — Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

  CAESAR spent the days before Caesarion was born in feverish preparations for departure and in instructing Rufinus how, and exactly within what limits, to uphold Cleopatra’s authority with the few troops that he felt he could afford to leave in Alexandria. What he wanted, and expected, from Cleopatra mainly now was money, and with his usual shrewdness he left supreme authority in her hands, counting on her gratitude. He depended on the Alexandrians to give her credit for the mildness of his previous exactions and for the reopening of trade, which should make them amenable and enable her to get along without any considerable army to enforce her will.

  News had come from Calvinus in Pontus to the effect that Pharanaces, the son of Mithridates the Great, was marshaling an overwhelming force against him. He knew that Calvinus lacked genius, although his loyalty was as unquestionable as his courage. It might be a matter of only days before all Asia would be up in arms, and there was no doubt there were Romans taking advantage of the dictator’s long absence to encourage disaffec
tion that should keep him out of Rome, perhaps forever.

  Nevertheless, scarce though shipping was after all the damage he had done to it, and with his own requirements for the movement of troops, and with the oversea trade in corn and onions increasing daily, he almost emptied the animal dealers’ cages, the zoological gardens of Alexandria, and the dungeons, in order to crowd on to a dozen ships material for his coming triumph in Rome and for the games in the arenas. He sent Arsinoe with one shipload of prisoners without telling her what fate she might expect, consigning her to the care of Mark Antony, with instructions that she was to be kindly treated as long as she took no undue advantage of the kindness; but he added in his letter that she was to be kept in irons if she should show the slightest inclination to intrigue.

  The child Caesarion was born at daybreak, in a tumult of doctors, midwives, casters of horoscopes, priests and society matrons. Even Cleopatra’s determination that the child should come into the world in an atmosphere of quiet dignity, to the strains of religious music, could not overcome court precedents. In the last hour she was overruled and even the musicians were hustled away to make room for the wives of ministers whose long-established privilege it was to witness the birth of an heir to the throne.

  All the anterooms were crammed to suffocation. There were relays of messengers posted across the city to announce the important news, and there were bets on the sex of the child that almost rivaled the wagering on the races. When it was known that a male heir was alive and yelling lustily all Alexandria kept holiday; free entertainment was provided even for the slaves, and the tables were set in the streets for the usual free cooked food and wine that so appealed to Caesar’s sense of the guile of government. Even at the last minute, with a thousand other things to think of, he made notes on how that public banqueting was managed.

  The horoscopes were unanimous, as might have been expected; no astrologer cared to incur the odium or the danger of forecasting misfortune at such a time. The child, said the readers of destiny, was born under a combination of planetary conjunctions that could not fail to render him successful in every walk of life, but more particularly, so they said, in the subjection of other people to his overruling wisdom. A great king was born — a herald of prosperity and peace. The wind was favorable and his men were uncomfortably crowded on the anchored fleet, so Caesar made the auspicious omen the excuse for taking his departure that same afternoon. He said a day on which a fortunate young man was born must be a good day on which to start an expedition, and he excused himself for refusing to remain more than a few minutes at her bedside, by saying that Cleopatra must avoid excitement.

  Their leave-taking was entirely typical of both of them: she brave, he courteous and humorously affectionate but full of his own dignity and the importance of his own affairs. She found strength enough to laugh at the Gaulish trousers and the broad-brimmed hat he wore against the rigors of the sea. In fact, her strength was next thing to miraculous and it was difficult to keep her quiet. She was careful to give Caesar no inkling of her own anxiety — above all careful not to let him think her in the least suspicious of his good faith.

  But when he was gone at last, and the booming of drums and horns had ceased, announcing that the fleet was out of sight, she sent for Olympus, who had refused to have anything whatever to do with the delivery of the child on the excuse that Sosistrates was more experienced in such matters and that his own talent might be better employed in consulting the signs and portents. He had avoided Caesar, although Caesar had lavished rewards on him and had invited him to Rome. And when at last he reached Cleopatra’s bedside he announced that he had cast no horoscope.

  “Are you like Apollodorus? Has Caesar made you too rich? Are you spoiled by fortune?” she demanded.

  “Surely it is not fortune that upsets Apollodorus,” he answered, smiling. “Caesar has dubbed him Driver of the Chariot of the Sun, so gay Apollodorus is himself again. As for me, I know that earthly good and evil are only prongs of the same fork with which Destiny goads us to master ourselves. Who can undo the past? Who can change the present? But the future—”

  “Why then no horoscope?” she insisted, plucking at filmy sheets with restless fingers, impatient because she could not leave bed and seize the reins of Egypt. She read in Olympus’ eyes a vague uneasiness, and as usual her courage demanded full information, no matter what its nature. “You did cast a horoscope! You have lied to me, Olympus! It was evil — an evil destiny! Speak!”

  “No,” he said, “I cast none, since what is the use? The child’s destiny depends on yours, and yours is in your own hands.”

  “Tell me mine then! You have read dark forebodings in mine! Is that not so?”

  “Nothing new,” said Olympus. “Always the strong swimmer at the meeting of the waters, but not always wise.”

  She glanced to see whether there were others in the room, but there was only Charmian. She gave both of them a glimpse then of her real feeling:

  “No, never wise, Olympus! Is there any other woman in the world who would have given what I gave to Caesar, and who would have failed, as I have failed, to hold him? Am I so cheap a thing? He has gone the way AEneas did. But I will not play Dido!”

  “You will lie still,” he commanded, with the familiar firmness of a privileged physician. “You have saved Egypt thus far, and you have saved yourself from being Caesar’s property. He cannot sell you to the highest bidder, as he might if you were a wife under the laws of Rome. You have a son, which was what you prayed for. All Egypt accepts your son as the heir to the double crown. Caesar may have his hands full henceforth with difficulties that his own ignorance and his own ambition make inevitable.”

  “Inevitable? He will overcome them all,” she asserted confidently. “His destiny is as certain as the rising of to-morrow’s sun. There is only one Caesar.”

  “He is one too many,” Olympus answered. “You will see that Rome will find him one too many.”

  “He will twist Rome between his fingers,” she insisted. “He will snap Rome like a scorpion before it stings him. He will ride Rome like a man on horseback—”

  “Aye, until they find him out. There is a strain of madness in all conquerors. Caesar knows he has brains and energy; he sees the weakness, the hypocrisy and dull stupidity of other men; he sees therein his opportunity, and he believes that he can mingle god and devil in one vain bag of human skin. But such men grow intolerable and their end comes swiftly.”

  “Olympus, you have lied!” she said again. “You have been casting horoscopes. Is Caesar to die suddenly?”

  He nodded. “Unless he turns his back on Rome.”

  “Why Rome? Are his friends not strong there? If you should say he was in danger from the Parthians—”

  “He is in no danger from them,” said Olympus. “He is a conqueror by destiny. If he keeps on conquering he can continue until the sand in his glass has run. But in Rome he will try to play god and devil. What he understands he will neglect, and what he does not understand he will nevertheless try to practice; so that he will fall between two stools. His friends, who will admire his new-found godliness, will urge him to make use of evil for his own sake and for theirs; and his enemies, who cursed him for the evil he has wrought, will slay him because they hate his righteousness the more. Caesar is doomed unless he turns his back on Rome.”

  “I did my utmost to persuade him,” Cleopatra murmured. “Olympus, am I to blame for this danger you say he is in?”

  “Who else than Caesar is to blame for Caesar’s fault?” he answered. “Look you to your own task.”

  He told her to sleep, but she refused until Tros, Apollodorus and several of her ministers were summoned. Tros came and grinned at her baby as if it were some strange fish his men had caught:

  “A male, you say? If you had added one more woman to the world, O Egypt, even Caesar might have felt discouraged! The blue-eyed rascal! Hey! Already he looks like Caesar! Was he born with teeth?”

  He tried to put a finge
r in the infant’s mouth until Charmian scolded.

  “There,” he exclaimed, “a woman starts to interfere already! Little Caesar is his name, eh? He will have a reputation with women to live down, won’t he? Let me see if he will bite my finger, for that is a good omen.”

  But Charmian suspected Tros’ fingers of being poisonous with tar and whale-oil, or at any rate she said so. The experiment was called off.

  “Tros,” said Cleopatra, as he bowed over the bed, deliberately making his great amber eyes beam kindly on her, for he had no proper speech for such occasions and was far more ill-at-ease than he chose to let anyone see, “Tros, are you true to me? May I depend on you to help me to teach my son to be a true king, and to help me to preserve a throne for him?”

  He stood upright again and looked at her a long time, stroking his beard, before he answered:

  “Egypt, there is nothing less dependable than a man who has made rectitude his one main purpose. Day by day we throw old dunnage of ideas overboard. What appears worthy to-day, to-morrow may seem worthless in the light of new-won wisdom. How shall you trust me, who trust myself so little that I examine myself each night to know what folly I have done and what new course in consequence I ought to lay? And at dawn I lay it, though it cost me men’s opinion and my own ease. Caesar is more to be trusted. Caesar cares for neither right nor wrong; he chooses his goal and makes for it. He keeps his word, too, for his pride’s sake, unless pride betrays to him a proud excuse and points a glittering opportunity.”

  “But you keep your word, Tros?”

  “Aye, I do my best as a rule. But I pledge word not so readily. And having pledged, I am not so easily dissuaded, though a throne or two should tumble as the price of steadfastness. Pledges are bad anchors to ride to, Egypt, for they come not up, though a whole crew go to hauling. He who has no fondness for slipping cable may drown in the shelterless lee of an oath that holds his nose, it may be without scope enough.”