Colleen McCullough - 6. The October Horse - A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

Just after the middle of November the long-awaited Roman fleet arrived, though no one in Alexandria knew it; the winds were blowing so hard that the ships were driven miles to the west of the city. A skiff stole into the Great Harbor and made for the Royal Harbor when its crew spotted the General's scarlet flag flying from the main palace pediment. It bore messages from the legate in charge of the fleet, and a letter from Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. Though the messages said that the fleet was desperate for water, Caesar sat down first to read Calvinus's note.

I am very sorry that it isn't possible to send you the Thirty-eighth Legion as well as the Thirty-seventh, but recent events in Pontus render that impossible. Pharnaces has landed at Amisus, and I am off with Sestius and the Thirty-eighth to see what I can do. The situation is very grim, Caesar. Though as yet I've only heard of the awful destruction, reports say that Pharnaces has upward of a hundred thousand men, all Skythians formidable foes, if one can believe the memoranda of Pompeius Magnus. What I am able to do for you is to send you my entire fleet of warships, as it seems unlikely that they will be needed in the campaign against the King of Cimmeria, who has brought no navy with him. The best of my bunch are the ten Rhodian triremes fast, maneuverable and bronze-beaked. They come under the command of a man you know well Euphranor, the best admiral this side of Gnaeus Pompeius. The other ten warships are Pontic quinqueremes, very big and strong, though not speedy. I have also tricked out twenty transports as war vessels rigged their bows with oaken beaks and added extra oar banks. I have no idea why I have a feeling that you're in need of a war fleet, but I do all the same. Of course, since you're now going to Africa Province, I daresay you'll run into Gnaeus Pompeius and his fleets soon enough. The latest news on that front is that the Republicans are definitely gathering there for another try. It is terrible to hear what the Egyptians did to Pompeius Magnus. The Thirty-seventh comes with plenty of good artillery, and I thought you might be in need of provisions, as we hear that Egypt is in famine. I've loaded up forty merchantmen with wheat, chickpea, oil, bacon, and some very nice dried beans, perfect for bean-and-dumpling soup. There are some barrels of salt pork for the soup. I've also commissioned Mithridates of Pergamum to round up at least another legion of troops for you thank you for the imperium maius, it enabled me to waive the stipulations of our treaty. Just when he'll turn up in Alexandria is in the lap of the gods, but he's a good fellow, so I'm sure he'll be hurrying. He'll be marching, not sailing, by the way. We are too short of transports. If he misses you, he can commandeer transports in Alexandria to follow you to Africa Province. My next letter will be from Pontus. By the by, I left Marcus Brutus governing Cilicia under strict orders to concentrate on troop recruitment and training rather than on debt collection.

"I think," said Caesar to Rufrius as he burned this missive, "that we'll pull a little wool over Ganymedes's eyes. Let's load every empty water barrel we can find aboard our transports, and take a little sea voyage to the west. We'll create as much fuss as we can who knows? Ganymedes might gain the impression that his saltwater trick has worked, and Caesar is quitting the city with all his men except the cavalry, whom he has callously abandoned to their fate." At first this was exactly what Ganymedes thought, but a detachment of his cavalry, scouting west of the city, stumbled upon a party of Caesar's legionaries wandering on the shore. They seemed nice, if naive, Romans; captured, they told the squadron leader that Caesar hadn't sailed away, he was just getting fresh water at the spring. Too eager to get back to Ganymedes and tell him this news, the horsemen galloped off, leaving their erstwhile prisoners to return to Caesar. "What we forgot to tell them," said their junior centurion to Rufrius, "was that we're really here to meet a new fleet and a whole lot of warships. They don't know about that." "We've got Ganymedes!" Caesar cried when Rufrius reported. "Our eunuch friend will have his navy in the roads off the Eunostus Harbor to waylay thirty-five humble transports returning loaded with fresh water. Sitting ducks for the Alexandrians ibises, eh? Where's Euphranor?" Had the day been less advanced, the Alexandrian war might have ended there and then. Ganymedes had forty quinqueremes and quadriremes lying in ambush off the Eunostus Harbor when Caesar's transports hove in view, all rowing against the wind. Not too difficult a task with empty ships. Then, as the Alexandrians moved in for the kill, ten Rhodians, ten Pontics and twenty converted transports emerged from behind Caesar's fleet, rowing at ramming speed. With only two and a half hours of daylight left, the victory couldn't be complete, but the damage Ganymedes sustained was severe: one quadrireme and its marines captured, one sunk, two more disabled and their marines killed to a man. Caesar's warships were unhurt. At dawn on the following day the troop transports and food ships belonging to the Thirty-seventh Legion sailed into the Great Harbor. Caesar wasn't out of boiling water yet, but he had successfully fought a defensive war against huge odds until these urgently needed reinforcements arrived. Now he also had 5,000 ex-Republican veteran soldiers, 1,000 noncombatants, and a war fleet commanded by Euphranor. As well as stacks of proper legionary food. How the men loathed Alexandrian rations! Especially oil made from sesame, pumpkin or croton seeds. "I'll take Pharos Isle," Caesar announced. Relatively easy; Ganymedes wasn't willing to expend any of his trained personnel to defend the island, though its inhabitants resisted the Romans bitterly. In the end, to no avail. Rather than waste his resources on Pharos, Ganymedes concentrated on marshaling every ship he could put in the water; he was convinced that the answer to Alexandria's dilemma was a big victory at sea. Potheinus was sending information from the palace daily, though neither Caesar nor Ganymedes himself had told the Lord High Chamberlain that Achillas was dead; Ganymedes knew that did Potheinus know who was in command, his reports might dry up.

At the beginning of December, Ganymedes lost his informant in the palace. "I can't permit any hint of my next move to reach Ganymedes, so Potheinus must die," said Caesar to Cleopatra. "Do you object to that?" She blinked. "Not in the least." "Well, I thought it polite to ask, my dear. He's your Lord High Chamberlain, after all. You might be running out of eunuchs." "I have plenty of eunuchs, and will appoint Apollodorus." Their time together was limited to an hour here and an hour there; Caesar never slept in the palace, or dined with her. All his energies were devoted to the war, an interminable business thanks to Caesar's lack of numbers. She hadn't told him yet about the baby growing in her womb. Time for that when he was less preoccupied. She wanted him to glow, not glower. "Let me deal with Potheinus," she said now. "As long as you don't torture him. A quick, clean death." Her face darkened. "He deserves to suffer," she growled. "According to your lights, definitely. But while I command, he gets a knife up under the ribs on the left side. I could flog and behead, but that's a ceremony I don't have time to conduct." So Potheinus died with a knife up under his ribs on the left side, as ordered. What Cleopatra didn't bother to tell Caesar was that she showed Potheinus the knife a full two days before it was used. Potheinus did a lot of weeping, wailing and begging for his life in those two days.

The naval battle came on shortly into December. Caesar put his ships just seaward of the shoals outside the Eunostus Harbor without a center; the ten Rhodians on his right, the ten Pontics on his left, and a gap of two thousand feet between them in which to maneuver. His twenty converted transports lay well behind the gap. The strategy was his, the execution Euphranor's, and the preparations before the first galley left its moorings meticulously detailed. Each of his reserve vessels knew exactly which ship of the line it was to replace, each legate and tribune knew precisely what his duties were, every century of legionaries knew which corvus it would use to board an enemy ship, and Caesar himself visited every unit with cheery words and a crisp summary of what he intended to achieve. Long experience had shown him that trained and experienced ranker soldiers could often take matters into their own hands and wrest victory from defeat if they too had been told exactly what the General planned, so he always kept his rankers informed. The corvus, a wooden gangway equipped with an iron hook under its far end, was a Roman invention dating back to the wars against Carthage, a naval power far more skilled than any Roman admiral of that time. But the new device turned a sea battle into a land one, and Rome had no peer on land. The moment the corvus plunked down on the deck of an enemy ship, the hook married it to the enemy ship and let Roman troops pour aboard. Ganymedes arranged the twenty-two biggest and best of his warships in a straight line facing Caesar's gap, with twenty-two more behind them, and beyond this second line a great many undecked pinnaces and biremes. These last two kinds were not to fight; each held a small catapult to fire incendiary missiles. The tricky part of the operation concerned the shoals and reefs; whichever side advanced first was the most at risk of being cut off and forced on to the rocks. While Ganymedes hung back, hesitating, Euphranor fearlessly rowed his vessels into the passage and skimmed past the hazards to engage. His leading ships were immediately surrounded, but the Rhodians were brilliant on the sea; no matter how he tried to manipulate his own clumsier galleys, Ganymedes couldn't manage to sink, or board, or even disable any of the Rhodians. When the Pontics followed the Rhodians in, disaster struck for Ganymedes, his fleet now in complete disorder and at Caesar's mercy a quality Caesar wasn't famous for in battle. By the time dusk broke the hostilities off, the Romans had captured a bireme and a quinquereme with all their marines and oarsmen, sunk three quinqueremes, and badly damaged a score of other Alexandrian ships, which limped back to the Cibotus and left Caesar in command of the Eunostus Harbor. The Romans incurred no losses whatsoever. Now remained the Heptastadion mole and the Cibotus, heavily fortified and manned. At the Pharos end of the mole the Romans dug themselves in, but the Cibotus end was a different matter. Caesar's greatest handicap was the narrowness of the Heptastadion, which didn't permit more than twelve hundred men a foothold, and so few men were not enough to storm the Alexandrian defenses. As usual when the going was hard, Caesar grabbed his shield and sword and mounted the ramparts to hearten his men, his scarlet paludamentum cloak marking him out for all to see. A huge racket in the rear gave his soldiers the impression that the Alexandrians had worked around behind them; they began to retreat, leaving Caesar stranded. His own pinnace sat in the water just below, so he leaped into it and directed it along the mole, shouting up to his men that there were no Alexandrians in their rear keep going, boys! But more and more soldiers were jumping into the craft, threatening to capsize it. Suddenly deciding that today was not the day he was going to take the Cibotus end of the mole, Caesar dived off the pinnace into the water, his scarlet general's cloak clamped between his teeth. The paludamentum acted as a beacon while he swam; everyone followed it to safety. So Ganymedes still held the Cibotus and the city end of the Heptastadion, but Caesar held the rest of the mole, Pharos Isle, all of the Great Harbor, and the Eunostus apart from the Cibotus.