The Shards of Heaven (19 page)

“What brings you out here this fine morning?” Caesarion asked. “Aren't you supposed to be studying?”

Kemse came huffing up behind them, bowing so quickly and low she couldn't catch her wind. “Apologies … Lord Pharaoh … I … they…”

“We want to come with you,” Selene said. The jut of her chin up and out was more than was necessary to look up at her taller half-brother. “You're going to the city, aren't you?”

“I am,” Caesarion replied, waving away Kemse's still-stuttering concerns. “I have some business there.”

“We'll help,” Selene said. She looked over to Helios and knotted her brow.

“That's right,” her twin brother said at the prompting. “We'll help.”

Caesarion smiled. “I don't think you'd enjoy it. I'm going to check on the defensive works.” They'd accompanied him on one of his trips to do just that, a month earlier. The experience had bored them nearly to tears. “You know how much fun
that
is.” He sighed.

“No, you're not,” little Philadelphus blurted out. Kemse gasped sharply, and Selene turned to shoot her little brother a glance that bore daggers. The boy wilted for a moment before hardening his face in defiance at her. “Well, he's not. You said.”

Caesarion chuckled, tousled Selene's lustrous dark hair to cool her emotions. A quick look at Kemse told the slave woman not to think about scolding the little boy. “Ah, you've found me out, have you, little ones?”

“You're going to the Library,” Helios said. “To see Didymus. We want to see him, too.”

“I am,” Caesarion admitted. He looked to Philadelphus as he gently corrected him: “Though I will be seeing to the defensive works beforehand.”
Because the news from the north is not good
, he didn't say.

“We miss Didymus,” Selene said. “We haven't seen him since … well, it just isn't fair.”

Not for the first time Caesarion wondered how much the children—especially Selene, who'd been so close to the events of that fateful night—knew about the assassination attempt a year earlier. Did they know Didymus had once betrayed their mother? Did they know how close he'd come to betraying them all? Not that he himself even had time to think much on such questions. If Antony and his mother failed—and the latest information he had made that possibility seem more than likely—he had a kingdom to save. These children's lives to save. Not to mention his own. “No, it isn't fair,” he confessed. “And I'm sorry for it.”

“You mean we can't go?” Selene's voice, playing at a regal bearing moments earlier, had fallen into a whine.

Caesarion shook his head, but before he could say anything Khenti cleared his throat. “The boat arrives, Lord Pharaoh,” the guardchief said, nodding toward the harbor. “We should go.”

*   *   *

Alexander the Great, the supposed god-man child of Zeus himself, the conqueror of the known world whose preserved corpse—still wearing his bronze breastplate—lay on display in a crystal coffin in the great mausoleum in the center of the city he had founded and named for himself, had done well in choosing Alexandria's location three centuries earlier. Every Alexandrian knew the story of how the Macedonian king, after defeating the Persians controlling Egypt and being welcomed by the native people as a liberator and savior, was said to have aspired to found a city to carry on his name, a city built out of nothing, a city planned to the last detail with the finest infrastructure of sewers, streets, and deep underground aqueducts that engineers could devise. One night, the stories told, he had a dream of an old man of hoary locks who called out to him, reciting from the fourth book of Homer's
Odyssey
: “Now there is an island in the surging sea in front of Egypt, and men call it Pharos, distant as far as a hollow ship runs in a whole day when the shrill wind blows fair behind her. Therein is a harbor with good anchorage.” Alexander traveled to the island—where the Great Lighthouse of Pharos now stood—and saw at once that Homer was not only a fine poet, but an admirable architect. The island did indeed protect a fine harbor on the Mediterranean. And the mainland beside the harbor, where the city itself would be built, was a level and narrow sandstone spur separating the sea and the large inland lake Mareotis, which provided abundant fresh water, fish, and, perhaps most important, canal access to the Nile and the rich interior of Egypt. Even more favorable to Alexander's disposition was the suitability of the location for long-term defense. Since direct attacks by sea posed tremendous difficulties, Alexandria was, in essence, a city with only two natural approaches for any attacking army: northeast and southwest along the constricted strip of land between waters.

In the three centuries since the city had been founded, the generations of Macedonian rulers—self-styled as proper Egyptian pharaohs, Caesarion was sure, only in order to better control their native subjects—had not forgotten the natural defensive advantages of their position, though to Caesarion's mind they'd nevertheless grown complacent in strengthening the place. The city had achieved world-spanning fame and glory, fed by an unparalleled prosperity in trade between the Nile and the Mediterranean. But Alexandria's enormous wealth had more often gone into the construction of great palaces and temples, the Great Lighthouse, the famed Library that was aided in its growth by the wide swaths of papyrus marshes around Lake Mareotis, the bigger and longer canals connecting lake and sea, city and river, the new harbors on the many waters, or the great seven-stadium-long causeway connecting the mainland to Pharos Island. The walls of the great city, so carefully planned out by Alexander, had served more often as barriers to its outspreading growth than as bulwarks essential to its survival. So it was to the city's walls that Caesarion had focused most of his energies in the past months.

As he'd told the children, his first order of business, despite the Greek scholar's note calling for urgency, was to sail southwest through the Great Harbor, past the shipyards and the temples beyond them, up to the Heptastadion itself. The massive causeway connecting the mainland and Pharos had been cleverly designed: splitting Homer's natural anchorage into two distinct harbors—the Great Harbor itself and the less-famed Eunostos Harbor to the west—the Heptastadion was broken in two places by wooden bridges that not only served to allow water traffic to pass between the harbors but also could be burned in the case of an attempted land assault from Pharos. Caesarion and Khenti passed under the mainland-side bridge this morning, one of the oldest structures in the city, and they both examined the workings as best they could from beneath.

Alexander had built enormous water systems under Alexandria, deep canals that could be as wide as the streets that ran through the city above them. Caesarion saw the grate-covered spillway of one of the largest of them emptying out in the shadows just below the bridge. The little-used drain was flanked by twin weathered ledges of stone, each served both as a base for the massive wooden supports of the bridge above and as a platform to use the locked iron gates that allowed access to the undercity. At Caesarion's order, large clay jars had been placed alongside the seabird nests amid the wooden bridge supports rooted at each platform, and more were set just inside each of the gates. The jars would all be filled with a highly explosive concoction of oils and minerals, Caesarion knew, and he was glad to see that they were in place: if an attacker took Pharos he could order the bridge removed in what would surely be a frightening and deadly conflagration.

Caesarion and Khenti had paid the boatman to carry them along the southern coast of the city as far as Kibotos, the box-shaped harbor that men had cut into the sandstone at the mouth of the river that ran between Mareotis and the sea. The boatman, knowing only that his two clients were paying in good coin and were well enough connected to be allowed to set foot on the royal island, did as he was instructed, keeping as close to the breakwaters as he could. There were hundreds of boats on the sea here: trading boats moving out toward the open sea, early morning fishing boats coming in from the same, and barges of grain moving down the river to Kibotos, where their goods were being transferred to bigger, oceangoing vessels. Everywhere there was motion, including, Caesarion noted with pleasure, along the walls framing Kibotos and passing south toward the western Necropolis, the great City of the Dead beyond the walls of Alexandria. As he had ordered, workmen were strengthening the fortifications there.

Assured that his instructions were being carried out as intended, Caesarion whispered to Khenti, who passed word in Egyptian to the boatman to take them ashore at Kibotos. The Navalia docks on the Great Harbor side of the Heptastadion were far closer to the Library, but Caesarion was confident that anyone trying to follow their little boat this morning would quickly lose it in the bustle of activity at Kibotos. One couldn't be too careful.

Besides, with the increasingly dire news from the north, it would do him good to walk the wide, busy streets of his city again, thinking of simpler times, simpler fates.

And thinking, too, about what to do with Didymus in the end.

 

12

C
LEOPATRA
'
S
P
LAN

ACTIUM, 31 BCE

Even here, on the relatively higher ground where Mark Antony had established his advanced base, Vorenus breathed in air that was rotten with death, seemingly held down beneath a clouded, starless sky. It was the stench of malaria, of thousands of men dead or dying, mixed with the thick heaviness of smoke that may or may not have been from the burning of wood. Trudging up the muddy road to the top of the hillock where Antony's sprawling headquarters had been erected, knowing that tonight their fates might well be decided, Vorenus tried not to smell it as he took stock of the situation in his own mind.

They'd had some 22,000 men—mostly legionary marines—when they'd first taken up their position on the Actium Promontory to face Octavian's armies on the northern side of the Gulf of Ambracia. Twenty-two thousand men, over five hundred warships, and a substantial portion of Egypt's treasury as a war chest, held in the largest of Cleopatra's own vessels on the water. There was hope, given Antony's excellence as a land commander, that the war would be hastily concluded. And since they outmanned Octavian by several thousand men, the hope was high on their side.

Vorenus stepped aside as two hollow-cheeked men came down the path, pulling a handcart. Three emaciated, slack gray faces stared out from the back, shaking in lifeless motion to the bounce of the wheels. Three more Roman dead from the malaria or the starvation or the despair—it was getting harder to tell the man-killer these days.

Vorenus watched them without emotion, without surprise. He'd seen too much of war to have much hope for anyone's future in the field. There were too many unknowns in the mud, in the blood. Too many factors that no one could foresee.

Octavian's refusal to engage them, for instance. Who could have imagined it? The armies had faced each other across the narrow opening to the Gulf of Ambracia for most of a few months now, yet despite the occasional minor skirmish they'd never met in battle. Antony had sent challenges. Octavian had refused them. Antony ordered his forces to build a bridge across the mouth of the gulf to bring his men up to this advanced position, on the same ground as his adversary. Octavian had just fallen back to the strong defensive positions he'd been building to the north. Fallen back and waited in quiet confidence.

And for good reason, they now knew. In a surprise attack, Octavian's admiral, Agrippa, had struck to their south, attacking the western Peloponnese with several hundred war galleys and close to ten thousand marines. He'd cut off their line of retreat and their line of supplies, effectively trapping them here at Actium amid the swamps and the bugs and the slaughtering disease.

Vorenus had not been alone in asking Antony to attack Octavian en masse as soon as they'd built the bridge. There was a chance, they thought then, of overrunning the enemy position before Octavian's camp and defenses were in order. They would push them back to their ships or die trying.

But Antony—confident, boisterous, arrogant Antony—had refused the advice. He'd sent personal challenges to Octavian. He called on Octavian's honor, on Octavian's manhood. The adopted son of Caesar met all with silence or simple refusal, content to hold tight the knot of the noose he'd settled around them: armies to north and south, and his more numerous fleet of ships—now that Agrippa's vessels had rejoined them—settled just out to sea, blockading the gulf. They were trapped, like a fox run to a blind alley.

Vorenus felt his jaw clenching as he watched the cart rumble away in the dark, and he forced himself to take a deep breath, to relax as much as he could. Not thinking, he nearly choked on the thick stench that rolled into his lungs.