Colleen McCullough - Antony and Cleopatra

‘Read this,’ she said curtly when the council assembled, thrusting the scroll at Cha’em. ‘All of you, read it.’

‘If Antonius brings his legions, he can sack Alexandria and Memphis,’ Sosigenes said, handing the scroll to Apollodorus. ‘Since the plague, no one has had the spirit to resist. Nor do we have the numbers to resist. There are many gold statues to melt down.’

Cha’em was the high priest of Ptah, the creator god, and had been a beloved part of Cleopatra’s life since her tenth year. His brown, firm body was wrapped from just below the nipples to mid-calf in a flaring white linen dress, and around his neck he wore the complex mixture of chains, crosses, roundels and breastplate proclaiming his position. ‘Antonius will melt nothing down,’ he said firmly. ‘You will go to Tarsus, Cleopatra, meet him there.’

‘Like a chattel ? Like a mouse ? Like a whipped cur ?’

‘No, like a mighty sovereign. Like Pharaoh Hatshepsut, so great that her successor obliterated her cartouches. Armed with all the wiles and cunning of your ancestors. As Ptolemy Soter was the natural brother of Alexander the Great, you have the blood of many gods in your veins. Not only Isis, Hathor and Mut, but Amun-Ra on two sides – from the line of the pharaohs and from Alexander the Great, who was Amun-Ra’s son and also a god.’

‘I see where Cha’em is going,’ said Sosigenes thoughtfully. ‘This Marcus Antonius is no Caesar, therefore he can be duped. You must awe him into pardoning you. After all, you didn’t aid Cassius, and he can’t prove you did. When this Quintus Dellius arrives, he will try to cow you. But you are Pharaoh; no minion has the power to cow you.’

‘A pity that the fleet you sent Antonius and Octavianus was obliged to turn back,’ said Apollodorus.

‘Oh, what’s done is done!’ Cleopatra said impatiently. She sat back in her chair, suddenly pensive. ‘No one can cow Pharaoh, but … Cha’em, ask Tach’a to look at the lotus petals in her bowl. Antonius might have a use.’

Sosigenes looked startled. ‘Majesty!’

‘Oh, come, Sosigenes, Egypt matters more than any living being! I have been a poor ruler, deprived of Osiris time and time again! Do I care what kind of man this Marcus Antonius is? No, I do not! Antonius has Julian blood. If the bowl of Isis says there is enough Julian blood in him, then perhaps I can take more from him than he can from me.’

‘I will do it,’ said Cha’em, getting to his feet.

‘Apollodorus, will Philopator’s river barge sustain a sea voyage to Tarsus at this time of year?’

The Lord High Chamberlain frowned. ‘I’m not sure, Majesty.’

‘Then bring it out of its shed and send it to sea.’

‘Daughter of Amun-Ra, you have many ships!’

‘But Philopator built only two ships, and the ocean-going one rotted a hundred years ago. If I am to awe Antonius, I must arrive in Tarsus in a kind of state that no Roman has ever witnessed, not even Caesar.’

To Quintus Dellius, Alexandria was the most wondrous city in the world. The days when Caesar had almost destroyed it were seven years in the past, and Cleopatra had raised it in greater glory than ever. All the mansions down Royal Avenue had been restored, the Hill of Pan towered lushly green over the flat city, the hallowed precinct of Serapis had been rebuilt in the Corinthian mode, and where once siege towers had groaned and lumbered up and down Canopic Avenue, stunning temples and public institutions gave the lie to plague and famine. Indeed, thought Dellius, gazing at Alexandria from the top of Pan’s hill, for once in his life great Caesar had exaggerated the degree of destruction he had wrought.

As yet he hadn’t seen the Queen, who was, a lordly man named Apollodorus had informed him loftily, on a visit to the Delta to see her paper manufactories. So he had been shown his quarters – very sumptuous they were, too – and left largely to his own devices. To Dellius, that didn’t mean simple sightseeing; with him he took a scribe, who jotted down notes using a broad stylus on wax tablets.

At the Sema, Dellius chuckled with glee. ‘Write, Lasthenes! “The tomb of Alexander the Great, plus thirty-odd Ptolemies in a precinct dry-paved with collector’s-quality marble in blue with dark green swirls … Twenty-eight gold statues, man-sized … An Apollo by Praxiteles, painted marble … Four painted marble works by some unidentified master, man-sized … A painting by Zeuxis of Alexander the Great at Issus … A painting of Ptolemy Soter by Nicias …” Cease writing. The rest are not so fine.’

At the Serapeum, Dellius whinnied with delight. ‘Write, Lasthenes! “A statue of Serapis approximately thirty feet tall, by Bryaxis and painted by Nicias … An ivory group of the nine Muses by Phidias … Forty-two gold statues, man-sized …”’ He paused to scrape a gold Aphrodite, grimaced. ‘“Some, if not all, skinned rather than – ah – solid … A charioteer and horses in bronze by Myron …” Cease writing! No, simply add, “et cetera, et cetera …” There are too many more mediocre works to catalogue.’

In the agora, Dellius paused before an enormous sculpture of four rearing horses drawing a racing chariot whose driver was a woman – and what a woman! ‘Write, Lasthenes! “ Quadriga in bronze purported to be of a female charioteer named Bilistiche …” Cease! There’s nothing else here but modern stuff, excellent of its kind but having no appeal for collectors. Oh, Lasthenes, on!’

And so it went as he cruised through the city, his scribe leaving rolls of wax behind like a moth its droppings. Splendid, splendid! Egypt is rich beyond telling, if what I see in Alexandria is anything to go by. But how do I persuade Marcus Antonius that we’ll get more from selling them as works of art than from melting them down? Think of the tomb of Alexander the Great! he mused, a single block of rock crystal almost as clear as water; how fine it would look inside the Temple of Diana in Rome! What a funny little fellow Alexander was! Hands and feet no bigger than a child’s, and what looked like yellow wool atop his head. A wax figure, surely, not the real thing – but you would think that, as he’s a god, they would have made the effigy at least as big as Antonius! There must be enough paving in the Sema to cover the floor of a magnate’s domus in Rome – a hundred talents’ worth, maybe more. The ivory by Phidias – a thousand talents, easily.

The Royal Enclosure was such a maze of palaces that he gave up trying to distinguish one from another, and the gardens seemed to go on forever. Exquisite little coves pocked the shore beyond the harbor, and in the far distance the white marble causeway of the Heptastadion linked Pharos Isle to the mainland. And oh, the lighthouse! The tallest building in the world, taller by far than the Colossus at Rhodes had been. I thought Rome was lovely, burbled Dellius to himself; then I saw Pergamum and deemed it lovelier; but now that I have seen Alexandria, I am stunned, just stunned. Antonius was here about twenty years ago, but I’ve never heard him speak of the place. Too busy womanising to remember it, I suppose.

The summons to see Queen Cleopatra came the next day, which was just as well; he had concluded his assessment of the city’s value, and Lasthenes had written it out on good paper, two copies.

The first thing he was conscious of was the perfumed air, thick with heady incenses of a kind he had never smelled before; then his visual apparatus took over from his olfactory, and he gaped at walls of gold, a floor of gold, statues of gold, chairs and tables of gold. A second glance informed him that the gold was a tissue-thin overlay, but the room blazed like the sun. Two walls were covered in paintings of peculiar two-dimensional people and plants, rich in colors of every description. Except Tyrian purple. Of that, not a trace.