Steampunk Cleopatra

by Thaddeus Thomas

  I nodded. “And send a warning before Sosanna comes.”

  “But why?” she asked.

  “They'll be guiltless before Rome, and we'll have time to destroy the library before it's found.”

  She pulled away, saying, “I'm cold.”

  In a room off the dock, a fire burned beneath a chimney that carried away the smoke, just as the other did with the engine. It was a large chimney, large enough to accommodate a fire built to warm those working on the boats. I sat her outside the room, in the heat of the fire. She hugged her knees to her chest and shivered.

  “There are other caverns?” she asked.

  “Several,” I said. “A couple collapsed in the earthquake or have flooded, but the rest are sound.”

  “I want to see.”

  “You've seen some of it already,” I said. “Not the books, but the wonders they've produced.”

  “The lights,” she said, “and the wheel.”

  “The wheels provide the power that drives so much here, just like at the Library,” I said. “That wheel once powered all the smaller machines in the big room.”

  “Like the metal men,” she said.

  “Is that what we should call them?” I asked. “Yes. Each of the metal men has a smaller version of the wheel pumping away inside.”

  She peered up at the boats. “And the snakes.”

  Andros rode the hoist and climbed onto the first of the boats.

  “Snakes?” I asked.

  Amani refused to look away. “You said the boats were seaworthy?”

  Although battered with age and neglect, they showed the work of our restoration.

  “They will be,” I said. “Two of them.”

  “Tell me about the books.”

  “In libraries of earthen jars, the manuscripts are organized less by subject than by point of origin. There are at least thirty such points, the largest of which is Theodosiopolis.” but

  “Where do we take the books when the time comes?”

  She waited, knowing I understood the deeper question.

  “There is no choice,” I said. “It has to go to Alexandria.”

  “To Berenice?”

  I knew how she disliked that idea. “Or Ptolemy, if he returns.”

  His name did nothing to lighten her mood, but at just that moment, the metallic serpents moved into the light.

  “There.” She pointed, and her hand shook.

  I sucked in a deep breath of understanding. “That's Moira. You'll meet her, soon enough. I'd invite her to join us, but she's not very good with people.”

  Papyrus 5.08

  The next morning, while Andros helped Amani explore the annex, I set out to find Theodotus and his makeshift camp. Theodotus stood as I approached, and the metal men tightened their circle. The creatures of the wood were silent, no chattering squirrels, no bird calls. The soldiers glanced from me to the metal men and waited.

  I barked out an order, and the metal men walked off into the woods, the thunder of their footsteps trailing off for minutes.

  Theodotus threw his arms around me. I gave his men permission to relieve themselves in the woods, and Theodotus and I stepped away for a little privacy.

  “Don’t send us away,” he said. “I won’t take anything from you. If you have found the books, we can help you get them back to Alexandria. I have a ship.”

  “It won’t do us any good. We would never make it out of port. What we’ve discovered here has the potential to upset the world’s balance of power.”

  Theodotus let out a slow sigh of despair. “If not the ship, then what?”

  I led him and his men to the lake and across it to the temple. With every step, I reminded myself that, for all my fear of leading soldiers into camp who outnumbered us five to one, they feared the metal men more. Once we had crossed the lake, I had them set up camp in the hillside section of the ruins. From there, Theodotus would oversee perimeter security.

  As far as I knew, none of the tunnels connected, and as the men set up camp, Andros and Amani emerged from one on their way to another. I waved to Amani as they passed, but my eyes must have lingered too long on Andros.

  Theodotus smiled. “Still getting your ink well dipped, I see.”

  “This isn’t the place.”

  “Not the place?” Theodotus asked. “Have you looked? A ruined temple rises from a mist-covered lake as black smoke billows out of the hills beyond. Not a single tree grows that it doesn’t scrape the sky, and the grasses at the water’s edge grow thick and lush, dotted with purple flowers. If there was ever a place for love, this is it.”

  “That is only the physical space,” I said.

  “What else is there?”

  “The death of twelve thousand as Pompey takes Jerusalem.”

  “Bu...” Theodotus froze in mid-syllable as if the construction of language had failed him.

  “Andros seeks to help me, but the further we progress, the more our present circumstances send his thought back to past trauma. His turmoil grew worse as we heard that soldiers were tracing my search for the annex.”

  “You mean me, of course,” he said. “You could have just told him you know me. We’re friends.”

  “Even if settled the question of your intent for me,” I said, “and even if he agreed with my logic, that would be too little to solve the issue. There were similarities in the patterns of events, and those similarities played more heavily on his emotions than the differences.”

  “So there was no reasoning with him?”

  “We needed something greater than reason, and I found it in Dio’s ritual. Andros has committed himself to leaving Cyprus and going with me to Egypt.”

  “So there was some romance there,” Theodotus said.

  “We turned his house into a memorial for the dead who would not be left in the corruption of Sheol and whose memory could not be subsumed by the hell of war.”

  “And that worked?” he asked.

  “It has delayed the crisis,” I said, “but there are seven days until waters rise and we can make our escape, assuming the boats are ready. Even those seven days may be more than he can take.”

  Theodotus waved his hand in the air as if dismissing a fly. “There has to be something wrong with him, something weakened in form to be broken in experience. We had heard of Amani’s coming from Rome. Nearly all of her companions were slaughtered, and she only barely managed her own escape. Should she be suffering any less? And if you say it is the magnitude of twelve thousand over a hundred, I’ll remind you Malachi was in Jerusalem.”

  I waited before giving my answer and stared out over the shallow lake and the submerged, undulating grasses. “While we all may be affected differently, don’t think any of us untouched. We were not here to see Malachi’s struggles when he first arrived, back when Andros, still wandering in his private diaspora, would have seemed untouched.”

  “And Amani?” he asked.

  I hated to even think the words. “I doubt the horrors of her experience have fully struck her. She is propelled by purpose, and, for a time, that may be enough.”

  “And when it’s not?”

  I heard the echo of her voice rising out of the earth as she and Andros navigated a tunnel to the surface.

  “None of us escape this life unchanged,” I said.

  Papyrus 5.09

  Amani secured herself with the rope and dropped into her fourth cavern. Andros followed, but she avoided looking at him directly, thinking about the sound of his voice, or feeling the space between them.

  He secured the ropes and led the way, but what she wanted was to be alone. Did Andros not know how difficult it was to have him around? He needed to go away or touch her hand. He had to go, but a touch would be nice.

  This was the secret library, damn it, the focal point of all her dreams. He had said this tunnel was different, but she could not see how. Other than the stream which was only in the ships’ dock, they all began the same way. There was the drop into a large area with a back w
all carved to look like the temples back home. Each wall was different, but the motif remained the same, including a pair of gods whose statues emerged from the wall on either side of the doorway. In the first tunnel, it had been Amun and Amunet, very human-looking gods with human heads and ram horns. The horns were an unusual depiction that Amani knew came out of the land of Kush.

  In the earliest age of Egyptian history, Amun and Amunet were part of the Ogdoad, and they, like the others, had animal heads. The first three caverns Andros and Amani explored that morning depicted them accordingly.

  Now, the pattern broke with a lion-headed warrior god on one side and on the other, a goddess who wore a crown shaped like a crescent moon. Upon that moon perched a falcon.

  Amani stopped. “That's Apedemak and Amesemi.”

  Andros looked down at her, unmoved.

  “They're Nubian,” she said.

  She could see that meant nothing to Andros, and she followed him through the doorway. He lit torches (no gas lamps here), revealing a room that, but for the pathway, was a miniature world carved into the interior of a hollow sphere. The torches hung from the ceiling, their light cast upon a stone river that ran from the mountains at Amani's right, up across the ceiling, to a delta on her left. She saw the pyramids and the sphinx, and all the cities of the Nile, like Memphis, Thebes, and even Swenett.

  Swenett: “the southernmost city of Egypt--beyond that begins the land of my ancestors.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. The touch.

  “My people are in Judaea. When I came here, it was the farthest place I could imagine.”

  “Why did you come?” she asked

  He ignored the question. “We better hurry on.”

  “We can talk,” she said. “We have time.”

  “We have eight days.”

  “Days?”

  “It is eight days or twenty-two,” Andros said. “Should we risk twenty-two? The Romans will be upon us.”

  “I understand the parties at play,” Amani said, “but not your time frame.”

  Andros touched his fingers to the path, rippled, as if with waves seen at a distance. “The Great Green isn't like the waters beyond the Temple of Heracles. The dock only fills every two weeks.”

  She realized he was talking about the tides. Pisodinius had written about the phenomenon.

  “Beyond the Green,” Andros said, “the waters rise and fall twice a day, becoming more severe during the full and new moons. Here the moons are all we have, and in eight days, the waters rise.”

  The idea startled her into silence. He led her out of the inverse globe, and, as he lit the wall torches, Amani understood why he thought this branch so different. It was not the Nubian gods at the door. Nor was it the room whose carved walls traced the Nile. In all the branches but the ships’ dock, what followed was the actual library, sometimes three stories high, filled with clay jars and the scrolls they protected. This time, wall torches lit a great and long room displaying strange, metallic machines. In the middle of it all, an immense workspace housed many half-completed marvels, their innermost parts laid bare.

  “For a hundred and fifty years, the people who lived here carved this place out of the earth. They organized and studied the books, and here they practiced what they had learned.”

  “They built the metal men here,” she said. “Are there no survivors? No descendants remaining of the scholars Epiphanes sent?”

  “One,” Andros said. “You’ll meet her when she’s ready.”

  “Moira,” she whispered, and the silence of the surrounding space measured its depth.

  Andros stood waiting, and she wondered if he expected something of her. Soon, she saw that most of the designs had one thing in common.

  “They’re weapons,” she said.

  “Less than it seems,” he said. “The oldest designs are, though. Alone with the knowledge, building death was the first thing they did. Eventually, they moved on to other things. They’re artifacts now.”

  “They don’t work?”

  “You could stab someone with something sharp, but these weapons were once the equal of a legion of archers with flaming arrows. They’re nothing now.”

  She picked up one of the smallest machines, glass and shaped like a child’s ball, not understanding what it might have once done. “That’s unfortunate.”

  “Would you use them if you could? Could you shoot fire down upon Ptolemy’s soldiers?”

  She saw men lying in the street, not yet dead, screaming for the pain of their wounds. She closed her eyes and willed herself cold and distant. The men were gone. Their pain no longer mattered.

  “I once imagined using these against Pompey,” he said.

  The voices of the dead rattled in her chest, and she breathed to keep them down.

  “This is no place to be,” he said.

  “There’s as much to learn from these machines as from the books,” she said. “They are a different kind of language.”

  “You tell yourself that, but the language this room speaks is death. The more time you spend here, the more you’ll come back. It begins with thoughts of vengeance and ends with memories of loss, memories that won’t stay behind when you leave this place, memories you had pushed down and buried, but now you can’t control. This room isn’t what it claims to be. Your job is to catalog the books. There’s no reason to be here. It has nothing for you but pain.”

  When he left, she followed, still carrying the small device.

  Papyrus 5.1

  We sat in the camp among the fallen pillars and watched the stars. Amani leaned against my arm, but was quiet as she studied a glass globe. We shared silence in the palace of our dreams and felt only heartbreak.

  Nearby, two soldiers whispered to themselves, and their voices carried. They wondered aloud why we needed soldiers when the metal men patrolled the wood.

  “I've shown you how the image of Serapis moves,” I said, as if it were Amani who had asked the question.

  She nodded. “Ropes and pulleys.”

  “It's more than that.”

  The silence dragged long, but she answered. “The pegs release the ropes at predetermined intervals, and the people who placed the pegs and wound the ropes planned what the statue could do.”

  “This time, the designers didn't use ropes and pegs, but the idea is the same,” I said. “The builders gave the metal men the capacity to accept commands, just like a priest can manipulate where Serapis points. The machines are complex, and I'm sure I don't know half of what they can do. What they don't do is think for themselves.”

  I felt her nod.

  “Does that disappoint you?” I asked.

  “They're going to be destroyed.”

  “There's not enough room for everything on those boats,” I said, “and we can't let Rome have them.”

  “So many creations,” she said. “So many books.”

  I wanted to believe that the destruction of the books and machines was not what bothered her, but that was not fair. She carried the deaths in Rome with her, but now we had added to that the seven days that remained to finish the boats and escape Cyprus.

  “In the beginning, we tried to catalog what information should go with us, but before long, all our efforts had to be focused on repairing those boats. There were three worth saving, and we started work on all of them, but there isn't time. We settled on two boats, but even with that limited capacity, we're not half done selecting the books that will go.”

  She sat up and took a bite of fish. “Andros said I’d be taking over the job.”

  “It's up to you now what goes back.”

  For every book she would save, we would lose a hundred more, and I saw the weight of that responsibility in the droop of her shoulders.

  “It’s wrong to destroy those books.” Her voice grew louder as she spoke. Soldiers turned. “Maybe some of it goes to Berenice, some ends up with Ptolemy, and some with Rome. Let them do with what they can, but if we destroy it, the work of my ancestors
dies. The memory of their accomplishments vanishes. I feel as if I’m murdering my people.”

  I felt the others watching us, and instead of answering, I just sat with her and put my arm over her shoulders. They turned away. Stars rippled upon the face of the lake, and the three-quarter moon peeked out over the trees.

  Because of those around us, I said nothing but mulled over what my answer would have been. You suggest, I would have said, that it is better for the legacy and memory of your people for their work to fall in the hands of Rome. However, the works that we save are returning to Alexandria. Scholars will herald your ancestors and study their work. The advancements enjoyed by society because of this work will benefit Egyptians and improve their lives.

  How can it honor your ancestors if Rome uses this knowledge to destroy Egypt?

  The night air and its wind felt different in Cyprus than in Alexandria. I could feel it on my skin, which was cold but felt healthier than before, not as dry.

  The soldier’s fire made sounds like feet crushing dried leaves.

  If Rome found us, they would take the work and claim it as their own. Amani’s people would be no wiser than before, no better off, and their country would be a country no more.

  Dio was no more.

  Amani had witnessed him die and a hundred more beside him. Andros had witnessed twelve thousand. How do you process death on that scale?

  “Is there no other way?” she asked.

  Is there a point where one death means more than the death of thousands? I knew of the thousands who died in Jerusalem. Dio’s death was strange to me. I felt as though he died twice and was not dead at all. I wondered if I would only truly feel it when I was back in Alexandria and sleeping in his house.

  “Philostratos?”

  “We are out of time,” I said. “Focus on what we save, not what we lose.”

  Papyrus 5.11

  Amani inspected the books we had cataloged and gathered in a room off the ships’ dock. Needing additional light, she sat in the doorway, studying our notes and occasionally sneaking glances upward, hoping to spot Moira.