It was true. Vorenus had spared him, too, hadn’t he?
“Besides,” Caesarion said, “we need Didymus alive. If this Juba is really seeking the Scrolls of Thoth, Didymus is our best shot at finding them first. We can’t let them fall into their hands.”
Vorenus was getting tired, but he didn’t want to stop talking. He needed to understand what was going on. “I heard Didymus say he didn’t think they existed.”
Caesarion nodded. “So he told the assassin. But he is, nevertheless, unsure. He’s already combing through the oldest records of the Library, looking for information.”
“All this for some scrolls?” Vorenus had been to the Great Library once. It was filled with scrolls. There were thousands of them. Perhaps thousands of thousands. Vorenus wondered if a man in one lifetime could count them all.
“You don’t know what they are,” Caesarion said. “Thoth is the Egyptian god of wisdom, the mind of the gods themselves, you might say. Thoth gave us writing. He gave us civilization. Laws. Numbers. Thought. The calendar. He’s said to have set the very stars in their places. When Osiris was dismembered, it was Thoth who taught Isis the incantations to raise him from the dead. Without his words, it’s said, the gods themselves might not exist.”
“So he wrote a book?” Pullo, apparently, had not yet heard of this, either.
“More than just a book,” Caesarion said. “The legend is that he poured the fullness of his wisdom into the Scrolls. Secrets known only to the gods. Secrets known not even to them. Magic and power we cannot imagine. It’s said that if you read the first page of the book you’ll be able to enchant the sky, the earth, the abyss, the mountain, and the sea. That you’ll understand the language of the birds in the air, the beasts of the earth, the fishes of the sea. If you read the second page, you become immortal, and you’ll behold the great shapes of the gods that are hidden. That power must be what Juba is after. If it does indeed exist, if it’s here in Alexandria, we must find it before him.”
Silence fell over the room. Vorenus rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. Pullo leaned back in his chair.
“So,” Caesarion said at last, “while you’re off to Greece, Didymus and I will be in the Library.”
“All the answers to all the questions,” Vorenus whispered. “What if you actually find it?”
“We’ll know if Pullo is wrong about the gods.”
“You’d use it?”
Vorenus turned his head, saw that Caesarion’s face was hard in the lamplight. “I’d like to think I could use it to preserve Egypt,” Caesarion said. “But then I think I’d be just like them.”
Vorenus nodded. A smarter man than any of them, he thought. “So what will you do?” he asked.
“The only thing I think I could do,” the boy-king said. “Destroy it. We’re not meant to know the mind of the gods.”
PART II
THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM
11
THE WAITING CITY
ALEXANDRIA, 31 BCE
Caesarion stood on the paving stones near the edge of the little harbor on Antirhodos, looking north and trying to ignore the two massive statues behind him—statues of him and his mother, the co-regents of Egypt, styled as gods. Though the gray granite structures were meant to welcome newly arrived visitors to the royal island, they did nothing but make the young man uneasy.
The rising sun was still out of sight behind the tall edifices of walls and palaces and temples on the peninsula of Lochias, but Caesarion knew its approach from the warming glow on the east side of the great Pharos lighthouse at the head of the harbor. That broad, sky-reaching expanse of stone was alight in red and white, broken only by the crisp shadows of architectural arches and windows. Atop the towering structure six crystal windows lensed the night’s simmering watch fire to an eerie glow against the dawn light. Looking out over the harbor this morning, toward that mountainous pillar at its mouth, Caesarion tried not to think about the fate of his family and friends—his armies and perhaps his kingdom—far to the north across the inland sea in Greece.
The fleet had sailed with pomp and optimism enough. Caesarion remembered how Antony, standing tall at the prow of one of the finest Roman quinqueremes in his fleet, looked strange to be once more in the garb of a Roman general. He remembered, too, how Cleopatra sat in golden light amid the luxurious pillows of her chair beneath the shadowed canopies of silk that covered the rear deck of her massive catamaran. He remembered how the people all along the docks cheered, how they’d lined the breakwaters, flags waving in color, voices raised in song, to see the ships depart. Watching it all happen from atop the palace walls on Lochias, bedecked in the finest god-mimicking headdress his mother’s vast wealth could procure, Caesarion had sat impassive as a rock—glad, for once, that he was not meant to show emotion. He’d held the gilded wood scepter upright, unmoving, until the last of the vessels, riding waves and goodwill, had entered the open sea. Then he’d left his throne, handed the scepter and the headdress to the safekeeping of priests and guards, wiped his face of the stifling paint upon it, and marched directly to the great hall of the palace, to the gathered commanders of the tiny remnant of an army his mother and Antony had left him. Within an hour of the fleet’s departure, he’d begun preparations for the defense of the city. And half a day later, when those plans were at last done, when he was certain that they all knew their tasks, he’d led his half-siblings to the plain, unadorned boat that was waiting to take them to Antirhodos, where the workmen were still completing repairs to the palace—including the damnable statue of himself.
Caesarion yawned, rubbed at eyes that were thankfully free of dark paint. Though he knew his mother wouldn’t have approved of his actions on the day of her departure, he knew that disapproval would be nothing compared with what she would think of his actions in the intervening months. He’d secured the royal isle as quickly as he could, leaving some of the workmen’s labors unfinished, keeping the family’s presence there as quiet as he could manage. Any emissaries seeking an audience with the ruling house of Egypt were made to await his presence at the Lochian palace on the mainland, the stewards there making whatever excuses they could manage until a boat—quietly dispatched and quietly returned—had brought the young pharaoh from the secure island. Worse in his mother’s mind, he imagined, would be the fact that he rarely allowed himself to be fitted with the symbols of his station for any meeting, preferring instead to appear as the man that he believed himself to be. Only once since her departure had he accepted the full regalia and adulation of his supposed divinity: earlier in the year during the festivities held to celebrate the tricentennial of the city’s founding by Alexander the Great. He’d abandoned, too, the almost weekly, exorbitant parades through the city that his mother had been fond of making, her heavy throne-chair carried on the bent backs of slaves, her hands equally ready to order a whipping or to throw coins at the adoring masses. Instead, his occasional trips to the city—his destination almost invariably the Great Library and Didymus—had been quiet affairs, in disguise as a simple scholar, accompanied by one or two of the loyal Egyptian guardsmen, similarly attired.
Caesarion glanced over to the man who would accompany him this morning: Khenti, the head of the palace’s Egyptian guards. Of average height but stoutly muscular, Khenti often reminded him of a shortened, more deeply tanned Pullo—though only in physical appearance. Where Pullo was a man to take little in life seriously, Khenti didn’t seem to possess any sense of humor at all. Stern duty defined him. Even now, on this beautiful morning, he appeared to take no notice of the beauty of the warming light on the stones, the soft flashing of reflections on the harbor. Instead, his eyes stared straight ahead, seemingly aimed at nothing. Not for the first time this early hour Caesarion regretted that the guardchief had volunteered to accompany him on this outing: Khenti looked nothing like an academic despite his scholarly clothes. No one working at the Library, Caesarion was sure, could possibly stand so stiffly perpendicular. If it wasn’t for the s
oft breeze brushing the man’s clothes and dark hair, he would have appeared to be another statue. “You really do need to relax,” Caesarion said to him. “No one will think you a scholar.”
“I am not,” Khenti said, his Greek formal and well pronounced, though tinged by his native Egyptian accent.
“I know, but that’s not the point. We want to appear to work there. To not raise suspicion.”
“Yes. I understand, sir,” Khenti said, though he remained unchanged in his stance.
Caesarion thought about pushing the matter but decided against it. He’d got what he deserved, after all: he hadn’t had to agree to Khenti’s request for the duty. The guardchief had many other jobs, after all, and he’d just finished overseeing the night watch when the message from Didymus arrived. Surely the man was tired, even if he showed no ill effects of it at the moment. Caesarion had been so surprised by his request that he’d agreed to it immediately, without thinking. He had no one to blame for the company but himself.
“You don’t really have to go this morning,” he tried.
“I know, sir.”
“You were on watch yourself last night, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re not too tired?”
“No, sir.”
Caesarion knew his mother would approve of this kind of empty exchange—it wasn’t the place of mortals like Khenti, after all, to make meaningful conversation with their superiors.
Realizing he was frowning, Caesarion shifted his face to a smile and called up the Egyptian language he’d been learning in his spare time, the better to understand his subjects. “So why are you here, Khenti?” he asked, doing his best to mimic the general accent of the men as he’d heard it, listening unseen to their banter in the guard barracks.
Khenti blinked at the sudden shift of language, and his gaze actually flicked up and down over the pharaoh for a moment, as if sizing him up. “It seemed best,” he said in Greek.
“You’re worried about something,” Caesarion said, keeping up his Egyptian, hoping his inflection was the proper conversational tone in the somewhat unfamiliar language. “Why? Do you know something I do not?”
Khenti thought for a moment, then turned to square up his shoulders with the co-regent of Egypt. His eyes were downcast. “My lord Horus,” he said, at last speaking in his native tongue, “you know there is nothing hidden from you.”
Caesarion felt like rolling his eyes, but he didn’t out of deference to the older man’s beliefs. “My dear Khenti, you know I’m not Horus. I’m just a man. Just like you. As much is hidden from me as it is from any other man. Perhaps more, if those who serve me will not speak freely their thoughts, their suspicions.”
Khenti’s gaze at last met the young man’s, though Caesarion could not read the emotions that might be roiling behind his dark eyes. “I am sorry if I have offended my pharaoh,” he said. “What would you know?”
“Why are you here this morning?”
“Would you have me speak in Egyptian? Or in Greek, as a scholar?”
There was, Caesarion thought, the slightest hint of a smile in the corners of Khenti’s eyes—though he couldn’t be sure. “Egyptian for now. I can use the practice.”
“Very well, my pharaoh.” Khenti took a deep breath, a sight that struck Caesarion as notable, as if he hadn’t seen the thick-formed man breathe before this morning. “It’s rumored in the palace that the Greek teacher has not always been kind to my lord. It is said that he’s odji.”
“Odji?” The Egyptian word was one Caesarion did not know.
“Wrong,” Khenti said in Greek. “Wicked.”
“I see. And who says this?”
Khenti shrugged, returning smoothly to Egyptian. “It’s rumored among the guard. I don’t know where it started, Lord Pharaoh, though I’ve ensured that it has not passed beyond my men.”
“And so?”
“Begging your forgiveness, my pharaoh, I think it is true what is said of the Greek Didymus. I do not trust him.”
“He hasn’t harmed me when I’ve journeyed to see him before. What makes you think it will be different this time?”
Khenti’s face betrayed a hint of a frown, and Caesarion wondered if it was disappointment that his pharaoh did not see things as clearly as he did. “He has not called on our lord Hor—… on my pharaoh in two turns of the moon,” he said. “I’m told he’s been away, in Sais. And his message now is unexpected, and begging haste.”
“You think he’s been up to no good while he’s been in Sais.”
“I think it best to accompany you,” Khenti replied, looking back in the direction of the island’s small palace.
Caesarion’s gaze followed the guardchief’s, and he saw his half-sister and -brothers running down the stone steps toward them. Their tending nurse, Kemse, a black-skinned slave from Kush, the land south of Egypt along the distant reaches of the upper Nile, was running behind them, panting. They’d clearly given her the slip. “Caesarion!” Selene called.
“I think I’m not the only one,” Khenti said in formal Greek, and then he was rigid as a statue once more as the children approached.
It didn’t surprise Caesarion to see that Selene was in the lead. Though a twin to her brother Helios, the nine-year-old girl had increasingly taken charge among the younger siblings over the past year, exerting herself in the same kind of headstrong manner as her absent mother—never against her older half-brother, thankfully, but there was no doubt who was in charge among her and the younger siblings.
The three children skittered to a stop in front of Caesarion. Though not adorned with such gold and finery as they had worn in the Lochian palaces in previous years, they nevertheless exuded a sense of wealth and the privilege that came from it: finely woven and clean, unmarred linens, delicate bracelets, fresh-washed hair, and a softness of flesh that had never known labor. Caesarion had actually considered some remedy to the last of these separations between the royal family and their subjects. He himself was proud of the calluses on his hands and feet that he’d developed from the weapon training that he’d continued even in the absence of Pullo. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to force labor upon them. They were too young. And they’d already suffered so much, being confined to this little island, bereft of the god-worshiping treatments they’d known before their mother had left. At least the health of young Helios seemed to have improved after the move. Perhaps the air over the harbor was cleaner.
“What brings you out here this fine morning?” Caesarion asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be studying?”
Kemse came huffing up behind them, bowing so quickly and low she couldn’t catch her wind. “Apologies … Lord Pharaoh … I … they…”
“We want to come with you,” Selene said. The jut of her chin up and out was more than was necessary to look up at her taller half-brother. “You’re going to the city, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Caesarion replied, waving away Kemse’s still-stuttering concerns. “I have some business there.”
“We’ll help,” Selene said. She looked over to Helios and knotted her brow.
“That’s right,” her twin brother said at the prompting. “We’ll help.”
Caesarion smiled. “I don’t think you’d enjoy it. I’m going to check on the defensive works.” They’d accompanied him on one of his trips to do just that, a month earlier. The experience had bored them nearly to tears. “You know how much fun that is.” He sighed.
“No, you’re not,” little Philadelphus blurted out. Kemse gasped sharply, and Selene turned to shoot her little brother a glance that bore daggers. The boy wilted for a moment before hardening his face in defiance at her. “Well, he’s not. You said.”
Caesarion chuckled, tousled Selene’s lustrous dark hair to cool her emotions. A quick look at Kemse told the slave woman not to think about scolding the little boy. “Ah, you’ve found me out, have you, little ones?”
“You’re going to the Library,” Helios said. “To see Didymus. We w
ant to see him, too.”
“I am,” Caesarion admitted. He looked to Philadelphus as he gently corrected him: “Though I will be seeing to the defensive works beforehand.” Because the news from the north is not good, he didn’t say.
“We miss Didymus,” Selene said. “We haven’t seen him since … well, it just isn’t fair.”
Not for the first time Caesarion wondered how much the children—especially Selene, who’d been so close to the events of that fateful night—knew about the assassination attempt a year earlier. Did they know Didymus had once betrayed their mother? Did they know how close he’d come to betraying them all? Not that he himself even had time to think much on such questions. If Antony and his mother failed—and the latest information he had made that possibility seem more than likely—he had a kingdom to save. These children’s lives to save. Not to mention his own. “No, it isn’t fair,” he confessed. “And I’m sorry for it.”
“You mean we can’t go?” Selene’s voice, playing at a regal bearing moments earlier, had fallen into a whine.
Caesarion shook his head, but before he could say anything Khenti cleared his throat. “The boat arrives, Lord Pharaoh,” the guardchief said, nodding toward the harbor. “We should go.”
* * *
Alexander the Great, the supposed god-man child of Zeus himself, the conqueror of the known world whose preserved corpse—still wearing his bronze breastplate—lay on display in a crystal coffin in the great mausoleum in the center of the city he had founded and named for himself, had done well in choosing Alexandria’s location three centuries earlier. Every Alexandrian knew the story of how the Macedonian king, after defeating the Persians controlling Egypt and being welcomed by the native people as a liberator and savior, was said to have aspired to found a city to carry on his name, a city built out of nothing, a city planned to the last detail with the finest infrastructure of sewers, streets, and deep underground aqueducts that engineers could devise. One night, the stories told, he had a dream of an old man of hoary locks who called out to him, reciting from the fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey: “Now there is an island in the surging sea in front of Egypt, and men call it Pharos, distant as far as a hollow ship runs in a whole day when the shrill wind blows fair behind her. Therein is a harbor with good anchorage.” Alexander traveled to the island—where the Great Lighthouse of Pharos now stood—and saw at once that Homer was not only a fine poet, but an admirable architect. The island did indeed protect a fine harbor on the Mediterranean. And the mainland beside the harbor, where the city itself would be built, was a level and narrow sandstone spur separating the sea and the large inland lake Mareotis, which provided abundant fresh water, fish, and, perhaps most important, canal access to the Nile and the rich interior of Egypt. Even more favorable to Alexander’s disposition was the suitability of the location for long-term defense. Since direct attacks by sea posed tremendous difficulties, Alexandria was, in essence, a city with only two natural approaches for any attacking army: northeast and southwest along the constricted strip of land between waters.
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