The Shards of Heaven

by Michael Livingston

  “Begging my lord’s pardon, I think the men know all too well the influence of the queen of Egypt.”

  “The influence?” Antony rose, his temper ready to break again, but Cleopatra, passing before him, quelled him with a smile and brush of her fingertips across his wide chest.

  “Yes, my love. They fear I’ve seized power over you. That you’re not yourself. That I’m a … sorceress, was it? Yes. A sorceress. And you, dear Antony, are subject to my spell.” There was a dangerous undercurrent to the mirth in her voice, the seductive smile on her face.

  A snake, Vorenus suddenly realized. She reminded him of a beautiful but deadly snake.

  “It matters not, of course,” Cleopatra continued. She’d returned to her place behind Antony, who’d calmed enough to sit back down. “Lost men are lost. What matters now is tomorrow. Does it not, Delius?”

  “The lady speaks true,” Delius said. He looked back down to the maps on the table. “We can wait no longer. Between disease and defection, the time to act is now. We should begin our withdrawal south, fighting through Agrippa’s men on land as best we can. We’ll lose men, but without—”

  “No,” Antony interrupted.

  Delius blinked, his focus still on the map. Insteius and Caius Sosius appeared unsure where to look among the polished figure of their colleague, the seething general on his throne, and the slyly smiling queen behind it. In the end, Vorenus observed, they opted to look at each other. The lesser leadership in the tent tried to fade into the background of the cloth walls. Pullo just stared, looking tired.

  “My lord, we cannot stay,” Delius said. “Each day Octavian’s opportunities grow. We didn’t strike when we first had the chance here. We didn’t retreat when it was clear all advantage to this position was lost. We cannot stay now.”

  “I agree,” Antony said.

  Delius looked up, something like hope on his face. “Well, since we cannot push north through Octavian’s force—not now, not after these months of loss and entrenchment—we have no option but to move south and—”

  “There,” Antony said, cutting him off. “That’s where you’re wrong. We do have another option.” He stood and barreled down to the maps, thrusting a thick finger into the sea just west of their position.

  All three of his commanders were around the table now, staring. Cleopatra, too, had come down to the table and was resting her right hand between Antony’s shoulder blades, her fingertips reaching up to spiral in the ends of his curly hair. Delius shook his head slowly, disbelievingly, but it was Insteius who spoke. “With the disease and the … losses, my lord, we cannot outfit many of our ships. And even at full complement, we are outnumbered against Octavian on the water. Our men are tired and hungry, his rested and full.”

  Insteius didn’t say it, but Vorenus was certain that he was also thinking about the same additional fact they all had in mind: Octavian had Agrippa commanding his navy, the greatest admiral in Rome. Antony, on the other hand, was a man for the land, not the sea.

  Antony at last released his finger from the table. “You would have us retreat by land?”

  “Yes,” Delius said. “We would. All of us. South out of Actium. The army Agrippa landed is small and scattered. Enough to cut supplies, but not to stop the full might of this army, even hobbled as it is. We push south out of Actium, down the coastline—”

  “And leave my ships here to rot?” Cleopatra asked. “My treasury for the plunder of that cold fish Octavian?”

  “There’s no retreat by sea, my lord,” Delius said to Antony, ignoring Cleopatra. His finger traced the coastline extending west away from the base of the Actium Peninsula, on which their main camp was situated, resting finally on Leucas, an island separated from the mainland of Greece by a sliver of water shallow enough to be forded on foot during low tide. Vorenus had looked out to the island often these months, wishing Didymus had been around to see it: his old friend had a profound interest in Homer, and it was rumored that Leucas had been the Ithaca to which Odysseus so long sought to return. “The wind is running north to south this time of year. So any flight by sea means rowing west, right through Octavian and Agrippa’s navy, right through the teeth of it, all the way out west of the island. Only then could we raise sail and escape. Better to go south by land.”

  “Go south,” Antony said. “To where?”

  “To fight another day,” Insteius said.

  “No.” Antony shook his head firmly. “To die another day, someplace else. Without Cleopatra’s ships our only hope would be to run our way out of Greece. And even if we manage it, where do we run? Through Thrace? Across the Bosporus and Bithynia, Cappadocia and Syria? And what will remain of Alexandria when we return, panting and sweating after our rather long run?”

  Cleopatra’s face was tight, but Vorenus didn’t think anyone but him was looking at her.

  “You still have friends in the east,” Delius said. “Forget Alexandria. Forget Egypt.”

  “Forget Egypt?” Antony shook with fresh rage and raised a fist as if to strike the man. He brought it down, instead, on the map table. Vorenus felt the blow reverberate through the wooden planks beneath his feet. “My children are in Alexandria, you worthless sack of shit,” he spat.

  Delius’ jaw clenched, but he lowered his eyes. “I beg your pardon, my lord. I spoke unthinkingly.”

  Antony’s arm trembled as he pulled his fist back off the table. Vorenus half-expected to see a dent where it had landed. “There is no option,” the general said firmly. “There is no choice. That coward Octavian, these coward defectors, this godsforsaken land … there’s no choice.”

  Antony turned on his heel, chest heaving for control of his emotions as he walked back to his chair and sat down. Cleopatra remained beside the table. “The plan is simple,” she said, ignoring Delius’ refusal to watch as her elegant hands traced lines on the maps, the fates of thousands. “We attack tomorrow.”

  13

  THE TOMB OF ALEXANDER

  ALEXANDRIA, 31 BCE

  Getting out of the palace hadn’t been difficult. She was, after all, a queen and the daughter of a god. If she wanted to go for a walk outside along the water, if she wanted to look out over the harbor at the busy world around them, who would stop her? Kemse had tried to keep her inside anyway, but Selene knew the old woman couldn’t force her to stay. So despite the anxious looks from Helios and Philadelphus—which were mostly looks of envy, Selene was sure—she’d left the palace for the second time that morning. It hadn’t been difficult at all.

  No, the hard part had been finding a way to the city. It wasn’t far to go, of course, especially off the southern tip of Antirhodos, but she wasn’t about to swim. The currents there were said to be far too strong to be easily crossed. And, even if she could somehow do so, it wouldn’t be … proper, she was sure.

  Unlike Caesarion, she couldn’t order up a boat, despite the handful of gold coins she’d nabbed before leaving the palace. She might be a queen, but Caesarion was a king, and he’d told them to stay on the island. The guards, Selene knew, would faithfully obey his command and prevent her from leaving if they knew she was trying to do so.

  She’d been thinking about the difficulty of the problem, chewing her lip in both concentration and frustration, when she’d seen the little shipping barge pull into the island’s harbor. It came a few times each week, bringing in full crates of fresh supplies for the royal family and taking out empty ones. The attention of the workmen had been on their labors. The attention of the guards had been on ensuring that no one set foot on the royal island. Between them, no one took notice of the nine-year-old girl—wearing a slave’s shawl for a cloak—who’d ducked from pillar to pillar, then crate to crate before she slipped aboard the barge, tucked behind some already-placed empty boxes. And no one noticed when she slipped back off again, half an hour later, when the boat tied off along the buzzing docks near the temple to Poseidon.

  Standing now at the edge of the docks, the noisy city stretching out before
her, Selene took a moment to glance back across the water toward Antirhodos. She couldn’t see it at first, there were too many men in the way: slaves and dockmen laboring under loads, tradesmen and merchants shouting, sailors laughing. She started moving a little to the side, to find a sightline back to the island, but she didn’t look where she was going. A barebacked laborer, sweating despite the early hour of the morning, strode hard through the crowd and clipped her shoulder, sending her sprawling down onto the wood. She gasped, feeling pain in her hand and shocked that someone would treat her thus. “Out of the way, girl,” the man grumbled, never looking back.

  Selene stood quickly, spinning to glare at the man and instinctively wanting to order his arrest, but he was already receding into the seething crowds. Suddenly remembering her intention to hide, though, Selene lowered her head and looked from side to side this time as she moved out to the edge of the dock, away from the thick of the pressing flow of men. There was a sliver of wood in her palm, and she gritted her teeth as she worked it out with the fingernails of her other hand. A little bubble of blood welled up and trembled, bright red against her smooth and clean skin, before she wiped it away on Kemse’s shawl. Then she looked back to the island at last.

  Antirhodos was quiet. The red-roofed and white-walled royal palace gleamed peacefully amid the greens and browns of trees and gardens, and the few guards she could make out among the pink granite columns of the long east-west colonnade were standing at ease. Selene felt a pang of sadness—at first for the anxiety that Kemse would feel, but after that for the fact that they’d not yet noticed her absence—but she smiled nonetheless. If they hadn’t noticed her missing yet, then she had all the more time to cut through the tumbling Emporium, which stretched along the water’s edge from the Poseidium to the Navalia docks. She’d find a street south and make her way to the intersection of the Sema and Canopic avenues, the city’s two great streets, where Alexander’s mausoleum and the Museum and Library stood.

  Selene turned back to the city, to the sprawling maze of stores and carts and banners and people that was the long Emporium of Alexandria. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that the hard part was getting off the island. Then she started walking.

  * * *

  The assault on her senses was immediate and filled her with wonder. To her eyes came the bolts of bright fabrics held forth by a dyer, the headless little animals held up for sale by a butcher, the strangely clad foreigners from every land. To her ears came a thousand voices from as many cities—talking, cursing, chanting, singing, or roaring with laughter—a rumbling of carts, an elephant’s trumpet, and a ringing of hammers that echoed up from smoky shadows. To her nose came the scents of meat and men, of sweets and filth, and, everywhere, spices upon spices.

  Selene tried to keep her head down and her shoulders up as she walked against the tide of sights and sounds and smells. She tried to walk straight away from the docks and the water, into the heart of the city itself. But unlike the easy grid laid about by Alexander for the boulevards of his namesake city, the little alleys and pathways in the Emporium were a confusing maze with no sensible organization, as if it had all been jumbled out against the shore. Twice Selene had noticed the crowds thinning and thought she’d made it out—only to realize that she’d somehow circled back to another spot on the shoreline and had to start over again.

  On her third attempt, turning right where she’d gone left, left where she’d gone right, she was pleased to see the crowds thinning out again—but this time, the street below her feet was rising upward and simultaneously widening before it abruptly opened up into one of the wide, perfectly straight and paved streets of Alexander’s design: a hundred paces wide, built atop an intricate network of aqueducts and sewers that she’d once heard her mother describing as the city beneath the city. Selene had never been down there, but it nevertheless had a hold on her imagination. Even walking now, she wondered if a person standing in the waters somewhere below her—and she was certain that people lived down there, probably hiding from someone or something—could hear her steps as they echoed down through the stones. They probably could, she decided. They could probably even tell by the lack of weight in her steps that she was just a girl.

  Not just a girl, she corrected herself. A queen.

  Her steps faltered then, and she nearly tripped. Would they care that she was a queen? Or would they only take her for a helpless girl, and do things to her that men did with girls? Or, worse yet, would they care that she was a queen but hate her for it? Would they take her away and parade her through a Triumph like Helios and Didymus had talked about? Would they strangle her then?

  Pulling her stolen shawl close, Selene hurried her steps onward, deeper into Alexandria.

  * * *

  No sewer-people attacked her, and by the time she’d turned west along the Canopic Way, mingling with the streams of people and chariots and wagons, Selene was feeling more confident and relaxed. No one was giving the little girl in the slave’s shawl the slightest second glance. No one knew who she was. And, unlike at the docks, she felt a kind of relief in the fact.

  It helped that she also knew exactly where she was now. Two hundred paces wide, the Canopic Way was the longest, broadest, and most famed of Alexandria’s streets, running from the Sun Gate on the east side of the city to the Moon Gate on the west, from the road to the city of Schedia on the Nile to the pathways and gardens of the City of the Dead. The parades her mother had enjoyed holding—like the parade after Antony had made everyone in the family kings and queens by donating so many lands to her and Helios and Philadelphus and Caesarion—were always held on the Canopic Way or its north-south counterpart, the Sema Avenue. She’d been carried down these wide streets in litters, on elephant-mounted platforms, in boats on wheels, pulled by slaves. She knew them well. Still, she’d never walked one before, and she thought it was interesting how different it was from the ground.

  Her meandering path through the Emporium had taken her a little farther east than she’d intended, a fact made clear when she walked past the beautiful porticoes lining the gymnasium, more than a stadium in length. The home of athletes stood beside the Canopic Way, however, so she needed only to turn right and continue walking to reach her destination.

  Everything seemed much bigger from the ground, without the pressing throngs of cheering people. The Canopic Way was busy with all manner of traffic on foot, horse, litter, or chariot, but it was wide enough still to seem relatively open. Buildings, too, seemed larger.

  Selene didn’t feel hurried as she walked down the street between the high walls of buildings fronted by columns, arches, hanging banners, and statues of gods and goddesses, kings and queens. A few of the statues were of her brother Caesarion, she noted with a smile. He would hate that.

  There weren’t any statues of her yet.

  The heart of Alexandria, without question, was the great plaza of the intersecting main avenues that Selene soon saw opening up before her. Here, on the four corners of the plaza, surrounded by magnificent minor palaces, temples, theaters, and gardens, stood four massive structures. The first, which she began to pass on her right, was the grandest of the city’s resplendent temples to the goddess Isis—to her mother, Selene supposed. The second, to her left across the Canopic Way, was the pyramid-topped mausoleum of Alexander the Great, where the body of the mighty conqueror was displayed in a crystal coffin. Opposite these structures, on the other side of the plaza, stood the imposing temple to Zeus-Ammon on her left—fitting, Selene always thought, given that this two-horned god was supposed to have been Alexander’s father—and the enormous complex of the Museum on her right. It was in the latter, amid the many structures dedicated to the Muses, that she would find the Great Library, Didymus, and her stepbrother.

  But because she had time, and because she was enjoying seeing the city from the perspective of her people, she didn’t walk directly to the grounds of the Museum. Instead, she carefully dodged across the busy Canopic Way, feeling bolder a
nd more grown-up with each step, and then bounced up the swept granite steps, between high pillars and the trinket men plying their wares there, and into the gaping shadowed mouth of the mausoleum.

  Alexander’s resting place was quiet this early in the morning. Other than the echoes of a few distant footsteps inside, and the quickly receding noise of the city outside, she heard nothing as she passed through the scores of pillars of the great gallery. She’d walked the length of this hall many times before, but always there were crowds to wade through, duties to perform. She’d never actually slowed down to look at anything. Doing so now, she saw that the pillars were wrapped with scenes carved in intricate, meticulous relief. Here she saw Alexander solving the riddle of the Gordian knot by cutting it apart with his sword. There she saw him on horseback during the battle of Issus.

  Farther on, close to the end of the gallery, she stopped beside one of the last columns, one showing Alexander in distant India. Walking around the pillar, the tales of his adventures in that strange, far-off land wound out before her sight: the defeat of Porus, the refusal of his army to continue east toward the unknown edge of the world, the terrible battle in which Alexander was struck with a spear arrow in the chest. The wound was so grave, so deep, that his men thought it might kill the man they thought was the son of the father-god: it was said that it gushed red and frothed like water when the iron point was pulled free. Selene remembered how in the stories Alexander had looked down on his surgeon’s finger pushing cotton into the hole to staunch the bleeding and smiled at the faces around him. “Behold: it is blood, my men, not the ichor of a god,” he’d said.

  Somehow, Alexander had recovered. He always did. Despite his many wounds, despite his insistence on being at the front of the line in so many battles, he was invincible. Like a living Achilles, Didymus had once told her and Helios, certainly not unable to be wounded, but just as surely incapable of dying from his wounds. It took poison to kill him in the end.