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

That night, lying sleepless in Cleopatra's enormous goose-down bed, her warmth tucked against him in the mild chill of Alexandria's so-called winter, Caesar thought about the day, the month, the year. From the moment he had set foot on Egyptian soil, everything had drastically altered. Magnus's head that evil palace cabal a kind of corruption and degeneracy that only the East could produce an unwanted campaign fought up and down the streets of a beautiful city the willingness of a people to destroy what had taken three centuries to build his own participation in that destruction . . . And a business proposition from a queen determined to save her people in the only way she believed they could be saved, by conceiving the son of a god. Believing that he, Caesar, was that god. Bizarre. Alien. Today Caesar had had a fright. Today Caesar, who is never ill, faced the inevitable consequences of his fifty-two years. Not merely his years, but how profligately he has used and abused them, pushed himself when other men would stop to rest. No, not Caesar! To rest has never been Caesar's way. Never will be either. But now Caesar, who is never ill, must admit to himself that he has been ill for months. That whatever ague or miasma racked his body with tremors and retches has left a malignancy behind. Some part of Caesar's machine has what did the priest-physician say? suffered a change. Caesar will have to remember to eat, otherwise he will fall in an epilepse, and they will say that Caesar is slipping at last, that Caesar is weakening, that Caesar is no longer unbeatable. So Caesar must keep his secret, must never let Senate and People know that anything is wrong with him. For who else is there to pull Rome out of her mire if Caesar fails? Cleopatra sighed, murmured, gave one faint hiccough so many tears, and all for Caesar! This pathetic little scrap loves me loves me! To her, I have become husband, father, uncle, brother. All the twisted ramifications of a Ptolemy. I didn't understand. I thought I did. But I didn't. Fortuna has thrown the cares and woes of millions of people on her frail shoulders, offered her no choice in her destiny any more than I offered Julia a choice. She is an anointed sovereign in rites older and more sacred than any others, she is the richest woman in the world, she rules human lives absolutely. Yet she's a scrap, a babe. Impossible for a Roman to gauge what the first twenty-one years of her life have done to her murder and incest as a matter of course. Cato and Cicero prate that Caesar hankers to be King of Rome, but neither of them has any concept of what true kingship is. True kingship is as far from me as this little scrap beside me, swollen with my child. Oh, he thought suddenly, I must get up! I must drink some of that syrup Apollodorus so kindly brought juice of melons and grapes grown in linen houses! How degenerate. My mind wanders, I am Caesar and I together, I cannot separate the two. But instead of going to drink his juice of melons and grapes grown in linen houses, his head fell back upon the pillow and turned to look at Cleopatra. It wasn't very dark, for all that it was the middle of the night; the great panels in the outside wall were flexed sideways and light poured in from a full moon, turned her skin not to silver but to pale bronze. Lovely skin. He reached out to touch it, stroke it, feather the palm of his hand down across her six-months belly, not distended enough yet to be luminous, as he remembered Cinnilla's belly when she was close to term with Julia, with Gaius who was stillborn in the midst of her eclampsia. We burned Cinnilla and baby Gaius together, my mother, Aunt Julia, and I. Not Caesar. I. She had budded delicious small breasts, round and firm as globes, and her nipples had darkened to the same plummy black as the skin of her Aethiopian fan bearers; perhaps she has some of that blood, for there's more in her than mere Mithridates and Ptolemy. Beautiful to feel, living tissue that has greater purpose than simply gratifying me. But I am part of it and her, she is carrying my child. Oh, we parent babes too young! Now is the time to relish them, adore their mothers. It takes many years and many heartaches to understand the miracle of life. Her hair was loose and strayed in tendrils across the pillow, not dense and black like Servilia's, nor a river of fire he could wrap himself in like Rhiannon's. This was Cleopatra's hair, just as this was Cleopatra's body. And Cleopatra loves me differently from all the others. She returns me to my youth. The leonine eyes were open, fixed on his face. Another time he would have closed his face immediately, excluded her from his mind with the automatic thoroughness of a reflex never hand women the sword of knowledge, for they will use it to emasculate. But she is used to eunuchs, doesn't prize that kind of man. What she wants from me is a husband, a father, an uncle, a brother. I am her equal in power yet hold the additional power of maleness. I have conquered her. Now I must show her that it is no part of my intentions or compulsions to crush her into submission. None of my women has been a boot scraper. "I love you," he said, gathering her into his arms, "as my wife, my daughter, my mother, my aunt." She couldn't know that he was likening her to real women, not speaking in Ptolemaic comparatives, but she blazed inside with love, relief, utter joy. Caesar had admitted her into his life. Caesar had said he loved her.

The following day he put her atop a donkey and took her to see what six months of war had done to Alexandria. Whole tracts of it lay in ruins, no houses left standing, makeshift hills and walls sporting abandoned artillery, women and children scratching and grubbing for anything edible or useful, homeless and hopeless, clothing reduced to rags. Of the waterfront, almost nothing was left; the fires Caesar had set among the Alexandrian ships had spread to burn every warehouse, what his soldiers had left of the great emporium, the ship sheds, the docks, the quays. "Oh, the book repository has gone!" she cried, wringing her hands, very distressed. "There is no catalogue, we'll never know what burned!" If Caesar eyed her ironically, he said nothing to indicate his wonder at her priorities; she hadn't been moved by the heart-wrenching spectacle of all those starving women and children, now she was on the verge of tears over books. "But the library is in the museum," he said, "and the museum is perfectly safe." "Yes, but the librarians are so slow that the books come in far faster than they can be catalogued, so for the last hundred years they've been piling up in a special warehouse. It's gone!" "How many books are there in the museum?" he asked. "Almost a million." "Then there's very little to worry about," Caesar said. "Do cheer up, my dear! The sum total of all the books ever written is far less than a million, which means whatever was stored in the warehouse were duplicates or recent works. Many of the books in the museum itself must be duplicates too. Recent works are easy to get hold of, and if you need a catalogue, Mithridates of Pergamum has a library of a quarter-million books, most of fairly recent date. All you have to do is commission copies of works the museum doesn't have from Sosius or Atticus in Rome. They don't have the books in ownership, but they borrow from Varro, Lucius Piso, me, others who have extensive private libraries. Which reminds me that Rome has no public library, and I must remedy that." Onward. The agora had suffered the least damage among the public buildings, some of its pillars dismantled to stop up the archways in the Heptastadion, but its walls were intact, as well as most of the arcade roofing. The gymnasium, however, was little more than a few foundations, and the courts of justice had entirely vanished. The beautiful Hill of Pan was denuded of vegetation, its streams and waterfalls dried up, their beds encrusted with salt, Roman artillery perched anywhere the ground was level. No temple had survived intact, but Caesar was pleased to see that none had lost its sculptures and paintings, even if they were stained and smirched. The Serapeum in Rhakotis had suffered least, thanks to its distance from Royal Avenue. However, three massive beams were gone from the main temple, and the roof had caved in. "Yet Serapis is perfect," Caesar said, scrambling over the mounds of masonry. For there he sat upon his jeweled golden throne, a Zeus-like figure, full-bearded and long-haired, with the three-headed dog Cerberus crouched at his feet, and his head weighed down by a gigantic crown in the form of a basket. "It's very good," he said, studying Serapis. "Not up to Phidias or Praxiteles or Myron, but very good. Who did it?" "Bryaxis," said Cleopatra, lips tight. She looked around at the wreckage, remembering the vast, beautifully proportioned building on its high podium of many steps, the Ionic columns all bravely painted and gilded, the metopes and pediment veritable masterpieces. Only Serapis himself had survived. Is it that Caesar has seen so many sacked cities, so many charred ruins, so much havoc? This destruction seems to leave him quite composed, though he and his men have done most of it. My people confined themselves to ordinary houses, hovels and slums, things that are not important. "Well," she said as he and his lictors escorted her back to the un-marred Royal Enclosure, "I shall scrape up every talent of gold and silver I can find to rebuild the temples, the gymnasium, the agora, the courts of justice, all the public buildings." His hand holding the donkey's halter jerked; the animal stopped, its long-lashed eyes blinking. "That's very laudable," he said, voice hard, "but you don't start with the ornaments. The first thing you spend your money on is food for those left alive in this desolation. The second thing you spend your money on is clearance of the ruins. The third thing you spend your money on are new houses for the ordinary people, including the poor. Only when Alexandria's people are served can you spend money on the public buildings and temples." Her mouth opened to rail at him, but before she could speak her outrage, she encountered his eyes. Oh, Creator Ptah! He is a God, mighty and terrible! "I can tell you," he went on, "that most of the people killed in this war were Macedonians and Macedonian-Greeks. Perhaps a hundred thousand. So you still have almost three million people to care for people whose dwellings and jobs have perished. I wish you could see that you have a golden opportunity to endear yourself to the bulk of your Alexandrian people. Rome hasn't suffered reduction to ruins since she became a power, nor are her common people neglected. You Ptolemies and your Macedonian masters have run a place far bigger than Rome to suit yourselves, there has been no spirit of philanthropy. That has to change, or the mob will return more angry than ever." "You're saying," she said, pricked and confused, "that we at the top of the tower have not acquitted ourselves like a true government. You harp on our indifference to the lowly, the fact that it has never been our habit to fill their bellies at our expense, or extend the citizenship to all who live here. But Rome isn't perfect either. It's just that Rome has an empire, she can squeeze prosperity for her own lowly by exploiting her provinces. Egypt has no provinces. Those it did have, Rome took from it for her own needs. As for yourself, Caesar your career has been a bloody one that ill equips you to sit in judgement on Egypt." The hand tugged the halter; the donkey started walking. "In my day," he said in ordinary tones, "I have rendered half a million people homeless. Four hundred thousand women and children have died because of me. I have killed more than a million men on my fields of battle. I have amputated hands. I have sold a million more men, women and children into slavery. But all that I have done has been done in the knowledge that first I made treaties, tried conciliation, kept my end of the bargains. And when I have destroyed, what I have left behind will benefit future generations in far greater measure than the damage I did, the lives I ended or ruined." His voice didn't increase in volume, but it became stronger. "Do you think, Cleopatra, that I don't see in my mind's eye the sum total of the devastation and upheaval I've caused? Do you think I don't grieve? Do you think that I look back on all of it and look forward to more of it without sorrow? Without pain? Without regret? Then you mistake me. The remembrance of cruelty is poor comfort in old age, but I have it on excellent authority that I will not live to be old. I say again, Pharaoh, rule your subjects with love, and never forget that it is only an accident of birth that makes you different from one of those women picking through the debris of this shattered city. You deem it Amun-Ra who put you in your skin. I know it was an accident of fate." Her mouth was open; she put up her hand to shield it and looked straight between the donkey's ears, determined not to weep. So he believes that he will not live to be old, and is glad of it. But now I understand that I will never truly know him. What he is telling me is that everything he has ever done was a conscious decision, made in full knowledge of the consequences, including to himself. I will never have that kind of strength or perception or ruthlessness. I doubt anyone ever has.