“Why this farce?” Thyrsus asked Octavian as darkness fell and palace servants came with torches to light the area. “She must know you can’t promise her what she asks! And why won’t she speak directly to you? She knows you’re here!”
“Because she’s afraid that if she speaks directly to me, no one else will hear what we say. This is her way of putting her words on some kind of permanent record—she knows Proculeius is a scholar, a writer of events.”
“Surely we can enter from above during the darkness?”
“No, she’s not tired enough yet. I want her so worn down and weary that her guard drops. Only then can we enter.”
“At the moment, Caesar, your main trouble is I,” Proculeius said. “I’m flagging dreadfully, my mind is reeling. I am ready to do anything for you, but my body is giving up.”
At which moment Gaius Cornelius Gallus arrived, his handsome face fresh, his grey eyes alert. Octavian had an idea.
“Ask Her nuisance Majesty if she’ll talk to a different but equally prestigious writer,” he said. “Tell her you’re sick, or that I’ve called you away—something, anything!”
“Yes, I’ll talk to Gallus,” said the voice, not as strong now that twelve hours had elapsed.
The discussion went on until the sun came up and continued into the morning: twenty-four hours. Luckily the little precinct in front of the doors was well shaded from the summer sun.
Her voice had grown very weak; she sounded now as if she hadn’t much more energy to command, but with Octavia for a sister, Octavian knew how hard a woman would fight for her children.
Finally, well after noon, he nodded. “Proculeius, take over again. That will wake her up, focus her attention on the tube. Gallus, take my two freedmen and enter the tomb through the aperture. I want it done with absolute stealth—no jingling pulleys, no creaks, no stage whispers. If she succeeds in killing herself, you’re nose deep in the shit with my hand on your heads.”
Cornelius Gallus was a catlike man, very silent and supple; when all three men stood on the aperture wall he elected to shinny down a rope on his own. In the waning torchlight he saw Cleopatra and her two companions clustered around the speaking tube, the Queen gesturing passionately as she talked, all her attention focused on Proculeius. One servant woman held her right side in the armpit to prop her up, the other her left side. Gallus moved like lightning. Even so, she gave a great cry and lunged for the dagger on a table next to her; he wrenched it from her and held her easily, despite the two exhausted maids tearing and beating at him. Then Thyrsus and Epaphroditus joined him and the three women were restrained.
A thirty-eight-year-old man in the pink of health, Gallus left the women to the care of the freedmen and tilted the two mighty bronze bars up and away from the doors, then opened them. Light streamed in; he blinked, dazzled.
By the time the women were brought outside, literally held up, Octavian himself had disappeared. It was no part of his plans to confront the Queen of Beasts yet, or for many days to come.
Gallus carried the Queen in his arms to her private rooms, the two freedmen carrying Charmian and Iras. The homo novus senior legate had found himself shocked at Cleopatra’s appearance once the light of day fell on her; robes stiff and crusted with blood, breasts bared and covered with deep lacerations, hair a tangled mess between patches of oozing scalp.
“Has she a physician?” he asked Apollodorus, hovering.
“Yes, domine.”
“Then send for him at once. Caesar wants your queen whole and healthy, chamberlain.”
“Are we to be allowed to minister to her?”
“What did Caesar say?”
“I did not presume to ask.”
“Thyrsus, go and find out,” Gallus ordered.
The answer came at once: Queen Cleopatra was not to be let leave her private quarters, but anyone she needed could go to her there, and anything she asked for was to be supplied.
Cleopatra lay, golden eyes huge and hollowed, on a couch, no regal figure now.
Gallus went over to her. “Cleopatra, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she croaked.
“Give her wine, someone!” he snapped, and waited until she had swallowed some. “Cleopatra, I have a message for you from Caesar. You are free to move about your apartments, eat whatever you like, have knives on hand for paring fruit or meat, see whomever you wish. But if you take your life, your children will be put to death immediately. Is that clear? Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand. Tell Caesar that I won’t attempt to harm myself. I must live for my children.” She lifted herself on an elbow as a shaven-headed Egyptian priest entered, followed by two acolytes. “May I see my children?”
“No, that isn’t possible.”
She flopped back, covered her eyes with a graceful hand. “But they are still alive?”
“You have my word on that, and Proculeius’s.”
“If women want to rule as sovereigns,” said Octavian to his four companions over a late dinner, “they should never marry and produce offspring. It is a very rare female indeed who can overcome mother love. Even Cleopatra, who must have murdered hundreds of people—including a sister and a brother—can be controlled by a simple threat to her children. A king of kings is capable of murdering his children, but not the Queen of Kings.”
“What’s your purpose, Caesar? Why not let her put paid to her existence?” Gallus asked, part of his mind composing an ode. “Unless it’s all to have her walk in your triumph?”
“The last captive I want in my triumph is Cleopatra! Can’t you see our sentimental grannies and mamas all along the route of the parade beholding this poor, scrawny, pathetic little woman? She, a threat to Rome? She, a witch, a seductress, a whore? My dear Gallus, they’d weep for her, not hate her. Buckets of tears, rivers of tears, oceans of tears. No, she dies here in Alexandria.”
“Then why not now?” Proculeius asked.
“Because first, Gaius, I have to break her. She has to be subject to a new form of war—the war of nerves. I must play on her sensibilities, harrow her with worry for her children, keep her on a knife blade.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Proculeius, brow knitted.
“It’s all to do with the manner of her death. However she accomplishes it, it must be seen by the entire world as her own choice, and not a murder done at my instigation. I must emerge from this pristine, the noble Roman who treated her well, gave her all kinds of latitude once she was back in her palace, never once threatened her with death. If she takes poison, I will be blamed. If she stabs herself, I will be blamed. If she hangs herself, I will be blamed. Her death must be so Egyptian that no one suspects my hand in it.”
“You haven’t seen her,” said Gallus, reaching for a squab crusted with strange, tasty spices.
“No, nor do I intend to. Yet. First, I must break her.”
“I like this country,” Gallus said, tongue titillated by the perverse mixture of flavors in the squab’s crunchy skin.
“That’s excellent news, Gallus, because I’m leaving you here to govern it in my name.”
“Caesar! Can you do that?” the gratified poet asked. “Won’t it be a province at the command of the Senate and People?”
“No, that cannot be allowed to happen. I want no peculating proconsul or propraetor sent here with the Senate’s blessing,” Octavian said, chewing what he thought was the Egyptian equivalent of celery. “Egypt will belong to me personally, just as Agrippa virtually owns Sicilia nowadays. A trifling reward for my victory over the East.”
“Will the Senate oblige you?”
“It had better.”
The four men were gazing at him, it seemed in a new light; this was not the man who had struggled futilely against Sextus Pompey for years, nor gambled all on his homeland’s willingness to take an oath to serve him. This was Caesar Divi Filius, sure to be a god one day, and undeniable master of the world. Hard, cool, detached, farsighted, not in love with power for
power’s sake, Rome’s indefatigable champion.
“So what do we do for the present?” Epaphroditus asked.
“You take up station in the big corridor outside the Queen’s apartments, and keep a register of all who enter to see her. No one is to bring her children. Let her stew for a few nundinae.”
“Shouldn’t you be leaving for Rome in a hurry?” Gallus asked, anxious to be left to his own devices in this wonderful land.
“I don’t move until I have achieved my purpose.” Octavian rose. “It’s still light outside. I want to see the tomb.”
“Very nice,” Proculeius commented as they passed through the chambers that led to Cleopatra’s sarcophagus room, “but there are more valuable things in the palace. Do you think she did that deliberately, so that we’d let her keep her trappings for the afterlife they believe in?”
“Probably.” Octavian surveyed the sarcophagus room and the sarcophagus itself, a single piece of alabaster with a likeness of the Queen on its upper half, painted exquisitely.
A noisome smell issued from a door at the back of the room; Octavian passed into Antony’s sarcophagus room and stopped dead, eyes dilated on horror. Something resembling Antony lay on a long table, its body buried in natron salts, the face still visible because, had they known it, Antony’s brain had to be removed in small gobbets through his nostrils and the cranial cavity filled with myrrh, cassia, and crumbled sticks of incense.
Octavian gagged; the embalmer priests looked up briefly, then returned to their work. “Antonius, mummified!” he said. I believe it takes three months to finish the job. Only then will they remove the natron and wrap him in bandages. Disgustingly un-Roman! It offended the Senate far more than Alexandria did.”
“Will Cleopatra want the same?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And will you let this revolting process continue?”
“Why not?” Octavian asked indifferently, turning to leave.
“So that’s why the aperture in the wall. To let the embalmers come and go. Once it’s finished—for both of them—they’ll bar the doors and wall up the opening,” said Gallus, leading the way.
“Yes. I want both of them reduced to this. That way, they belong to old Egypt and will not become lemures to haunt Rome.”
As the days dragged on and Cleopatra refused to cooperate, Cornelius Gallus had an inspiration as to why Octavian would not see the Queen: he was afraid of her. His relentless propaganda campaign against the Queen of Beasts had conquered even him; if he came face-to-face with her, he wasn’t sure the power of her sorcery wouldn’t overcome him.
At one stage she began to starve herself, but Octavian put a stop to that by threatening to kill her children. The same old ploy, but it always worked. Cleopatra began to eat again. The war of nerves and will went on between them remorselessly, neither participant showing any sign of giving in.
However, Octavian’s intransigence worked more powerfully on Cleopatra than she knew; had she only been able to step back far enough from her predicament, she would have seen that Octavian didn’t dare kill her children, all very much underage. Perhaps it was her conviction that Caesarion had succeeded in escaping that blinded her; but whatever the reason, she continued to be convinced that her children stood in peril.
Then, as Sextilis wore down toward its end and September loomed with the threat of equinoctial gales, Octavian sought out Cleopatra in her quarters.
She was lying listlessly on a couch, the scratches, bruises, and other relics of her grief at Antony’s death healed. When he entered she opened her eyes, stared, turned her head away.
“Go,” Octavian said curtly to Charmian and Iras.
“Yes, go,” said Cleopatra.
He drew up a chair beside the couch and sat, his eyes busy; several busts of Divus Julius dotted the room, and one splendid bust of Caesarion, a likeness taken not long before he died, for it was more man than youth.
“Like Caesar, isn’t he?” she asked, following his gaze.
“Yes, very.”
“Better to keep him in this part of the world, safely away from Rome,” she said, voice at its most melodious. “His father always intended that his destiny be in Egypt—it was I who took it upon myself to expand his horizons, not knowing that he had no wish for empire. He’ll never be a danger to you, Octavianus—he is happy to rule Egypt as your client-king. The best way you can safeguard your own interests in Egypt is to put him on both thrones and ban all Romans from entering the country. He will see to it that you have whatever you want—gold, grain, tribute, paper, linen.” She sighed and stretched a little, conscious of her pain. “No one in Rome need even know that Caesarion exists.”
His eyes turned from the bust to her face.
Oh, I had forgotten how beautiful his eyes! she thought—as much silver as grey, so filled with light, and rimmed with such thick, long, crystal lashes. Why then do they never give away his thoughts? Any more than his face does. A lovely face, reminiscent of Caesar’s, but not angular, the shape of the bones beneath more secretive. And, unlike Caesar, he is going to keep that mop of golden hair.
“Caesarion is dead.” He repeated it: “Caesarion is dead.”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes went to his and locked there, still as a stagnant pond and gone a greenish brown; the color emptied out of her face from hairline to neckline in a flash, leaving the beautiful skin grey-white.
“He came to see me while I was marching up the Alexandria road from Memphis, mounted on a camel, with two elderly companions. Head full of ideas that he could persuade me to spare you and the dual kingdom. So young! So deluded about the honorableness of men! So sure he could convince me. He told me that you’d sent him away, that he was supposed to sail from Berenice to India. And as I had already located the Treasure of the Ptolemies—yes, lady, Caesar betrayed you and told me how to find it before he died—I didn’t need to torture its whereabouts out of him. Not that he would have told me, no matter how extreme the torture. A very brave young man, I had no trouble seeing that. However, he could not be permitted to live. One Caesar at a time is enough, and I am that Caesar. I killed him myself and buried him alongside the Memphis road in an unmarked grave.” He twisted the knife. “His body was wrapped in a carpet.” Then he fumbled in the purse at his belt and handed her something. “His ring, but not to keep. It belongs to me now.”
“You murdered Caesar’s son?”
“With regret, but yes. He was my cousin, I have blood guilt. But I am prepared to live with the nightmares.”
Her body writhed, shuddered. “Is it enjoyment in witnessing my pain makes you say these things to me? Or is it policy?”
“Policy, of course. In the flesh you’re a damnable nuisance to me, Queen of Beasts. You’d be dead, except that I cannot be seen to have had anything to do with your death—very difficult!”
“You don’t want me for your triumph?”
“Edepol, no! If you looked like an Amazon I’d happily make you walk in it, but not looking like an abused, half-starved kitten.”
“What about the other young men? Antyllus? Curio?”
“Put to death, along with Canidius, Cassius Parmensis, and Decimus Turullius. I spared Cinna—he’s a nothing.”
The tears were rolling down her face. “And what of Antonius’s children?” she whispered.
“They’re well. Unharmed. Missing their mother, their father, their big brother. I have told them you’re all dead—let them do their crying now, while seemly.” His gaze moved to a statue of Caesar Divus Julius in the guise of an Egyptian pharaoh—very peculiar. “I am not enjoying this, you know. It gives me no joy to cause you so much suffering. But I am doing it nonetheless. I am Caesar’s heir! And I intend to rule the world of Our Sea from end to end and side to side. Not as a king or even as a dictator, but as a simple senator endowed with all the powers of the tribunes of the plebs. So right! It will take a Roman to rule the world as it should be ruled. Someone who enjoys not the power, but the job.”
“Power is a ruler’s prerogative,” she said, not comprehending.
“Nonsense! Power is like money—a tool. You’re fools, you oriental autocrats. None of you loves the job, the work.”
“You’re taking Egypt.”
“Naturally. Not as a province, swarming with Romans. I need to monitor the Treasure of the Ptolemies properly. In time the people of Egypt—in Alexandria, the Delta, and along Nilus—will come to think of me as they think of you. And I’ll administer Egypt better than you. You frittered this beautiful land of plenty away on war and personal ambition, you spent money on ships and soldiers in the mistaken belief that numbers always win. What wins is work. Plus, Divus Julius would say, organization.”
“How smug you Romans are! You’ll kill my children?”
“Not at all! Instead, I’m going to make Romans out of them. When I sail for Rome they’ll come with me. My sister Octavia will rear them. The loveliest and sweetest of women! I never could forgive that clod Antonius for hurting her.”
“Go away,” she said, turning her back on him.
He was preparing to leave when she spoke again.
“Tell me, Octavianus, would it be possible to send to the country for some fruit?”
“Not if you doctor it with poison,” he said sharply. “I will have every piece of it sampled by your own maids, right at the spot I indicate with my finger. The slightest suggestion that you died of poison, and I’ll be blamed. And don’t get any grandiose ideas! If you try to make it look as if I murdered you, I’ll strangle all three of your remaining children. I mean it! If I’m to be blamed for your death, what matters it if I murder your children?” He thought of something else, and said, “They’re not even very nice children.”
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