Page 13 of Cleopatra

13

CLEOPATRA

A chillas has gone. The creature has fled into the city, summoning all mercenaries and thieves. There is a lull. We don’t know where he’s gone. The city is oddly quiet – everyone hides, waiting, like animals seeking shelter before a thunderstorm. Days pass. Then weeks. The air is a breath held. And then the storm sweeps in with twenty thousand men gathering outside the city like flies around a boil, Achillas the pustule at its head. Several thousand mercenaries march inside the city, intent on murder. Caesar watches in amazement as siege towers taller than a dozen men are shoved against the palace walls. He didn’t realise that the Alexandrians had such ingenuity in them. We are resourceful and clever, although at this moment, I wish they were using their skills in my defence rather than in order to try and kill me.

Roman legions aided by my personal guard labour through the night to raise the walls, while archers rain arrows down upon the marauders. The towers are abandoned. We inside the palace are now under siege, cut off without food. But we are not fools: the deep streams flowing into the palace from underground wells bring us fresh water and are stocked with fish. We can outlast any blockade until Caesar’s legions arrive. We are fat with complacency. Caesar writes his memoirs in the lull – calling for paper and ink. I know he’s been writing an account of his life, his boyhood, the time he was kidnapped by pirates, his rivalry with Pompey, but while he’s alluded to his past, he’s never let me read it. Nor have I asked. Now I sit opposite him writing my own memoir; two versions of the same siege. Neither of us requests to read or hear the other’s account despite our affection towards one another. We write like two jealous schoolboys, each shielding his work from the other. I wonder what he says about me. I have no desire for him to discover what I say about him.

And then we wake after a week to find the rills stinking and silted up with dead fish, the rest floating on the surface, bellies up. The eunuch’s men have poisoned the waters, boring down and down into the ground water and flooding it with sea-water until all the streams and springs that run into the palace are fouled with salt. Inside the royal quarters, the atmosphere crackles with panic like the air before a lightning strike. Slaves and freedmen weep, their lips parched with thirst.

Ptolemy sits in his apartments complaining that he’s hungry and thirsty, fretting that we’ll allow him to starve. I wonder what he thinks of his eunuch now, when he’s condemned Ptolemy to suffer alongside the rest of us. I suppose Achillas believes we will send out Ptolemy to haggle for our lives. He cannot think to leave him here to die, for Achillas’s claim to power is only through my brother. This misspent war is in my brother’s name. But we don’t send Ptolemy out to bargain for peace, but keep him in his apartments under careful guard, where he shoves morsels of crispy polenta into his mouth and sends us messengers to whine that he’s hungry and thirsty.

Caesar dismisses his own portentous advisors in preference of my counsel, and the two of us sit in the glittering halls together, quietly discussing what we should do. We are neither frightened nor dulled by panic – the only pair in the palace who are not. Some battles are won with might, others with careful thinking. We sit in Caesar’s chamber, the shutters keep out the sun so it only spies upon us through the narrow slats. The dead fish have been pulled from the rills and are burning in pyres outside, and the air is thick with smoke and fish. We sip beer from the cellars since there is no fresh water.

I lead Caesar into the great library and call the librarian to bring me all the maps and scrolls pertaining to the water-courses. Inside the cool shade of its halls, the air is perfumed with the dry scent of its scrolls and manuscripts. The scholars work on, writing, reading, heads bowed as though just beyond the palace walls the city isn’t writhing, eating itself like an ouroboros. Caesar turns a circle on the spot, marvelling at the elegance of the library, the vast scale of the knowledge it holds.

‘One day we will hold a copy of the volume you scribble away upon,’ I say with a small smile as we wait.

‘No doubt. But where will it go?’ he asks, as if wanting to be shown the resting place for his unfinished tome, as a dying man seeks to inspect his waiting tomb.

‘Oh, there’s no room for it here. The shelves are overstuffed as it is. I’ll put you down by the docks with the other scrolls we don’t have space for,’ I tease.

‘You’ll shove me in the old warehouses with the grubs and second-rank historians?’ he asks, pretending offence.

I laugh. ‘Oh, many of our most precious works are there. It simply takes so long to inspect them and sort them properly. Years slide into decades.’

The librarian returns and Caesar and I sit at one of the tables in the Egyptian section. The scholars continue studying as though they aren’t in the midst of a war, and that they can ward it off through reading. And yet, their intuition may be correct, for the books and charts I have studied here may save us. I unfurl the pages and Caesar surveys me in silence as I trace my finger over the blue veins showing the watercourse as it threads through the island of Pharos and spurts along the Cape of Lochias. There’s a complex series of reservoirs that filter and purify the waters of Lake Mereotis and freshwater canals carry water between the lake and the city. The ingenuity of the system interests me, and I explain its secrets to Caesar.

He kisses my neck as I talk, and I shrug him off.

‘I’m busy. Listen.’

‘You have the memory and temperament of a soldier. No, of a general.’

His voice is honeyed with admiration and desire.

‘I am greater than a general, for I command Egypt. And sometimes Rome,’ I add, allowing him to plant a single kiss on my ear lobe.

When I’m finished, I adjust the weights on the maps, so that they cover the entire surface of the table.

‘We are close to the sea and the rocks below are veined with streams flowing into the bay. If we dig down, we’ll find fresh water.’

Caesar examines the maps again and considers for a few minutes, then taps a spot with his finger.

‘This. Here. This is where we must dig.’

On his command, the soldiers and slaves begin to tunnel through the muck and rock. They dig down and down. The sun rises and sets and rises again. We measure time in the emptying of the beer flasks instead of through the water clocks and through the telling of tales. If he’s worried, he conceals it. We return to his apartments in the palace and each of us writes our thoughts and recollections for a few hours, and then, tiring of this task, we talk instead. He is good company and the hours slide past, he recounts stories to distract me of his campaigns, his kidnapping by pirates. I’ve heard rumours and echoes of these tales before but it’s something new to hear them fall from Caesar’s own lips, and he gives them their own shape. I listen, thirsty and eager. I shall gather these stories deep inside myself and recall them later, again and again. These are the moments where he sheds his outward self, puts to one side the general and dictator, and I see glimpses of the man; his half-smile like the sun dipping behind a cloud. He lies beside me, naked and unembarrassed, propped on his elbow. He runs his index finger along the ridges of my spine, his finger moving in the same way it does when he tracks the line of a manuscript as he reads. I wonder if I’m a text he’s attempting to decode.

‘When I was kidnapped, I was little more than a boy,’ he says.

‘Like my brother?’ I ask with a wry smile.

‘Nothing like your brother,’ he replies. ‘Older and wiser. I’d tarried a while with King Nicomedes in Bithynia and was starting for home.’

I have heard the rumours about Caesar and King Nicomedes. That the young Caesar stayed for months as he was besotted with the king. There are whispers that the two were lovers. Even now his enemies chant ‘Caesar, Queen of Nicomedes’.

‘Tarried a while?’ I ask, arch. ‘Doing what?’

‘The king has excellent vineyards.’

‘You don’t drink.’

Caesar ignores my teasing. ‘On my voyage back, I was captured near the island of Pharmacus by pirates.’

‘Were you frightened?’

‘Annoyed. It was an inconvenience. Then they insulted me. They demanded a mere twenty talents for my ransom.’

‘Did they not know who you were?’ I ask, amused.

‘They did not. So I laughed at them, and told their leader that they needed to ask for at least fifty talents.’

‘Only fifty?’

‘Cleopatra, do you wish to tell this story?’

I mouth my apologies and settle back.

‘Next, I sent my followers to procure the money so I was left alone with my captors. The pirates were profoundly irritating. Murderous, yes, but also loud. Although I did not entirely dislike them. For eight and thirty days, I shared in their sports and games. I also wrote poems and penned speeches I intended to give in the senate, which I read aloud to them, to observe the response. Senators and pirates are not so dissimilar.’

I smile even though I’m not entirely sure if he’s joking.

‘And then I’d threaten to hang them all and crucify them.’

‘Which they also took as boyish mirth and good humour?’

‘Exactly.’

He pauses and takes a long drink and then continues. ‘After my ransom had been paid they set me free. They seemed almost sad to see me go.’

‘Poor fools.’

‘Nothing poor about them. They were stuffed to the gills with gold, much of it mine. The moment I reached shore, I raised ships and put them to sea to catch the robbers. We caught them still lying at anchor off the island.’

He still sounds outraged at the wound to his dignity, and there is a note of triumph as he recounts his retribution. It hasn’t faded in the twenty-five years since.

‘I had the men locked up at in the prison at Pergamum. I went myself to the governor and demanded that it was my right to punish the captives. All their money and treasure belonged to me as spoils. But the governor was greedy and cast longing eyes on the money.’

‘But you did not let the matter pass.’

‘I did not. I took the robbers out of prison, where they greeted me as an old friend, come to help them escape. Then, I crucified them all along the shore.’

I imagine the line of pirates crucified on the beach, like a gruesome variety of palm trees. I recall Pothinus, how he aimed his slick insults at Caesar, and I almost pity the dead man. He forgot what Caesar is. I know that the Nile will yet run with more blood.

‘You are my captive now, what should I set your ransom at?’ I ask, kissing him.

‘All the gold and beauty in Egypt,’ he says, smiling.

I pull away. He’s naming the price of his friendship, his fee to win me this war, and it’s a good Roman price: more than I can ever pay.

Neither of us speaks for a little while. He pulls me closer and trails his finger along my arm. I find myself wondering about the other women he has lain beside. Did he tell them the same stories, and did they wonder about the cost of his friendship? I have no other lover to compare him with.

‘Do you miss your wife?’ I ask.

He looks at me in surprise, then covers it.

‘My wife? No.’

I noticed the pause before he answered.

‘You miss someone else,’ I say, now understanding.

Again, he does not speak at once and when he does it is carefully.

‘Miss is too strong. I feel her absence. We have known each other a very long time. We were friends before you were born.’

I experience a pang of something, not jealousy, but awareness of how little he belongs to me. This time between us is but a verse in an epic poem, thousands of lines long.

‘Can I know her name?’ I ask.

He hesitates, and then says, ‘Servilia.’