The judgement of Caesar

CHAPTER V

My body exhausted, my mind numb, I fell asleep that night with the flames of Pompey's funeral pyre dancing on my eyelids and the smell of his charred flesh in my nostrils. I slept like a dead man.

Hunger woke me. I had eaten nothing the previous day, and very little the day before. My stomach growled as I stirred from a dream of fish roasting on an open spit. I smelled cooked fish; the fantasy was so real that it stayed with me even after I opened my eyes.

I was lying on my back on the sand. The sun was high. I blinked at the brightness and raised a hand to shade my eyes, then the figure of a man blocked the sunlight. I saw him only as a looming silhouette, but I knew at once that it was not Philip, for this man was much bigger. I gave a start and skittered back on my elbows, then gave another start as something sharp was poked toward me. My stomach fairly roared with hunger. The thing in the man's hand was a sharpened stick; on the stick was a roasted fish, hot from the flames.

The man above me made a familiar grunt as he poked the fish toward me again in a gesture of offering.

"Rupa?" I whispered. "Is that you?" I shaded my eyes and squinted, and glimpsed his face clearly for only an instant before tears obscured my vision.

I blinked them away and reached for the spit. The next thing I knew, the spit in my hand held only the skeleton of a fish, and my stomach had stopped growling. Above me, Rupa grinned.

I wiped my mouth and looked up the beach, to the spot where Rupa had dug a pit in the sand and filled it with coals from the funeral pyres. Two pieces of driftwood on either side served to hold the spits, upon which more fish were roasting. I looked toward the water and saw Androcles and Mopsus, along with Philip, wading naked in the surf, armed with sharpened sticks and their own tunics to serve as nets. While I watched, Androcles deftly speared a fish and held it proudly aloft, laughing with delight.

I scanned the beach and felt a stab of panic. "But where is-?"

"Here, Husband."

I turned my head and saw that Bethesda sat on a hillock of sand behind me, leaning back against our traveling trunk. She gave me a weary smile. I drew myself beside her and rested my head on her lap. She gently stroked my forehead. I sighed and closed my eyes. The sun was warm on my face. The sound of the gentle surf was like a lullaby; gone were the flies of the day before. My body was rested, my hunger satisfied, and Bethesda restored to me, all in the span of a single minute. I blinked and looked up at her. I reached up to touch her face to reassure myself that I was not still asleep and dreaming.

"How?" I said.

She took a deep breath and leaned back against the trunk, settling in to tell the tale. "After we saw Pompey killed, and those Egyptian warships appeared, the captain weighed anchor and fled with all the others. But the Egyptian ships held back. They weren't looking for a battle; they just wanted to scare Pompey's fleet away. Still, we were surrounded on all sides by Pompey's ships, and the captain was afraid to sail off on his own. So he bided his time. When darkness fell, he saw his chance and cut away from the fleet and headed south. No one gave chase.

"As far as I knew, you were still on Pompey's galley with his widow, if indeed he hadn't slain you before he set off to meet King Ptolemy. I wanted the captain to turn back and rejoin the fleet, but he wouldn't. Then we caught sight of the flames on the shore, still very far away. Was it a signal from you? I prayed that it might be, and I was heartbroken, because I thought the captain intended to take us directly to Alexandria, and how would we ever manage to find you again? But the captain wanted to be rid of us as quickly as possible; we're lucky he didn't simply throw us all overboard. He said we must be cursed by the gods and would bring him nothing but trouble as long as any of us were aboard. He sailed straight back to this spot, maybe because it was the nearest patch of land, maybe because the fire served as a beacon.

"By the time we arrived, the fire had died down to embers. The sky was starting to grow light when he rowed us ashore. Then he rowed back to his ship and vanished. When I saw you lying here on the beach, I thought you must be dead. But as I stepped closer, you started to snore, so loudly that I laughed and wept at the same time. I wanted to wake you, but Pompey's freedman begged me not to. He said you were like a dead man when you fell asleep last night, that you desperately needed to rest." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, even though Philip was splashing in the surf and could not possibly have overheard. "He seems to be under the impression that you're some sort of important personage, a grizzled old veteran with some special tie to Pompey; he imagines that you were so grief-stricken to see the Great One beheaded that you swam ashore on a mad impulse to mourn for him."

I grunted. "I tried to swim to you, but I very nearly drowned instead. I was lucky to make it to shore. That Greek captain's a fool. We're not cursed by the gods, Bethesda, we're blessed by them!" I took one of her hands and pressed it to my lips.

She smiled wanly. "So here I sat and waited all morning, listening to you snore while Rupa and the boys made a meal for us. Would you care for more?"

I saw that Rupa was approaching with another roasted fish. My mouth watered, and my stomach growled again.

"Why don't you have it?" I said.

Bethesda shook her head. "I'm not hungry."

I tried to think of the last time I had seen her eat, and felt a prickle of anxiety. Was she not paler than before, and looking more frail than I had ever seen her? Or was she merely worn out by the events of the last few days, as any woman would be?

I sat up and took the fish from Rupa. I had devoured the first one without thinking, but this one I was able to savor. Bethesda smiled, taking pleasure in my appetite.

I licked my fingers and wiped my hand on my tunic, and felt something in the pouch: the poison Cornelia had given me. Vile stuff! What if I had swallowed it in a moment of weakness and despair? Was Cornelia regretting her gift to me now, wishing she had kept it for herself? I should pour the contents over Pompey's ashes and throw the alabaster vial into the sea, I thought; but simple laziness prevented me. It was far more pleasurable to sit beside Bethesda, feel the warmth of the sun on my face, and watch the boys fish in the glinting surf.

That afternoon, Philip and I scouted the vicinity and discovered a small fishing village just around a spit of land to the east. Occupying a territory disputed between Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra, the war-weary villagers were wary of strangers, but they had no aversion to the Roman sesterces I was able to offer. Times were hard in Egypt, and Roman silver went a long way. For a very reasonable price I was able to hire a wagon and two mules to pull it.

My Egyptian was very rusty, and the villagers spoke nothing else; Philip, fluent in many languages, negotiated the deal, and conveyed the wagon-owner's assurance that the coastal road was well maintained all the way to Alexandria. I asked him how we were to cross the Nile, and he said that at every fording of the many branches of the Delta, there would be ferrymen competing to carry us across. The man had a cousin in the capital; when we arrived, I was to leave the wagon and the mules with him.

Philip stayed in the village, saying he intended to head east, not west, and so we parted company. I gave him some sesterces to see him on his way. He gave me a heartfelt embrace, still harboring the mistaken assumption that I was one of Pompey's devoted veterans.

"Anytime one travels, one must be prepared for changes to the itinerary," I said to the assembled company on the beach that night, over our dinner of warmed-over fish supplemented by flat-bread purchased from the villagers. "Granted, we've taken a bit of a detour, but now we shall press on to Alexandria just as planned, except that Bethesda will be able to bathe in the Nile sooner rather than later, since the river lies between us and the city." And Rupa will be able to scatter the ashes of his sister, I thought, and silently gave thanks to Cassandra, for it was her legacy to me that was paying for this excursion-the journey by ship, the mules and the wagon, even the morsels of flat-bread that Androcles and Mopsus were stuffing into their mouths. The villagers had told me that Alexandria lay about 150 miles distant-a journey of several days over flat terrain. Wherever the road crossed a branch of the Nile, there would be a village, or at the very least a tavern or an inn. The landscape would consist of flat marshland interspersed with cultivated fields where farmers and slaves would be busy tending to irrigation ditches and waterwheels; for the annual inundation of the river, upon which the life of the country depended, had begun. The trip might be monotonous, but should not be particularly dangerous, and we would be safe sleeping in the wagon alongside the road if we wished; banditry, the villagers maintained, was not a part of the Egyptian character. While this was surely no more than wishful thinking-bandits exist everywhere, as do victims and heroes-it was true that we had arrived in a part of the world that was much older and arguably more civilized than Italy. Brutally beheading a potential conqueror before he could set foot in Egypt was one thing; common banditry was another, and about that I was not to worry.

The next morning, very early, we set out for Alexandria. The weather was hot, the atmosphere muggy, and the sky dotted with puffy clouds. With occasional potholes and crumbling edges, the stone-paved road was definitely not up to Roman standards. Bethesda was jostled about more than I would have liked, but the mules made steady progress.

We reached the easternmost branch of the Nile Delta at the bustling fortress town of Pelusium. The idlers at the shop where we purchased provisions were abuzz with speculation about the war between King Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra; this I gathered from Bethesda, who was able to understand the locals far better than I. She had grown up in Alexandria, speaking Egyptian, and though she claimed that the dialect spoken by the locals in Pelusium was rough and uncouth, she seemed to have little trouble understanding them. Once we reached Alexandria, everyone would speak at least a little Greek. Greek was the language of the Ptolemies and the official language of the state bureaucracy, and the upper classes spoke nothing else. But outside the capital, the native Egyptians, even after two and a half centuries of Ptolemaic rule, clung stubbornly to their native tongue.

According to Bethesda, word of Pompey's fatal landing had already reached Pelusium, but only as a rumor. Some of the locals believed the story; some did not. Just as we were about to show our purchases to the shopkeeper, a self-important little woman with her nose in the air cut in front of us to purchase a basket of dates, and proceeded to address anyone within earshot.

"Who's this hen?" I whispered to Bethesda.

"The wife of a local magistrate, I imagine."

"What's she saying?"

Bethesda listened for a while, then snorted. "Some nonsense about how Pompey met his end. She claims there was a battle between the Romans and Egyptians, and the boy-king himself wrestled Pompey to the ground and then chopped off his head. Silly hen!"

Catching Bethesda's tone if not understanding her Latin, the woman turned around and flared her nostrils at us. I braced for a scrap, but Bethesda bit her tongue and lowered her eyes, and the woman went on with her story. The moment left me feeling uneasy; it seemed to me yet another symptom of her malady that Bethesda should submit so readily to the babblings of a pompous busybody.

Indeed, it seemed to me that Bethesda became more subdued with each passing mile, so that I regretted putting any extra strain upon her by making her deal with the locals. As our journey continued, an unnatural stillness settled upon her. She stared vacantly at the marshes and the muddy fields. I tried to draw her out with reminiscences, as I had on the sea journey, but she seemed disinterested and distant.

Even about her intentions, she had little to say. We had reached the Nile, the object of our journey, and I asked her where she intended to bathe and what was needed for the ritual of purification she had in mind.

"Not here," she told me. "Not yet. I'll know the place when we come to it. Osiris will show me where to step into the river. The river will show me what to do."

The farther we traveled, the more uneasy I found the villagers. Word of Pompey's death invariably preceded us and formed the chief topic of conversation. It seemed that the Nile had failed to rise as high as in previous years. A year of low inundation meant fewer crops, with hunger and hardship to follow. To cause such a poor inundation, something must have displeased the god (for in Egypt, the Nile itself is a god). The civil strife between Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra had previously been blamed, for they, too, were divine, and strife between a god and goddess caused repercussions throughout both the natural and the supernatural worlds. But now it was perceived that the Nile had been withholding its floods in anticipation of an even more cataclysmic event, the murder of the Great One, the only man to claim such a title since Alexander himself. The discord of civil war was everywhere upon the earth, bringing one disaster after another, and the people feared that some even more terrible event was yet to come.

So we passed from Pelusium to Tanis, and thence to Thmuis, and thence to Busiris, at the very center of the Delta. Each day the summer sun grew hotter and the air more stifling and humid. The rank smell of the muddy Nile seeped into my pores. Along the way, following Bethesda's dictates, we made numerous excursions upriver and down-river, which came to nothing; she would arrive at a spot and declare it suitable, saying she would bathe there the next day, only to change her mind when the next day came. Beyond Busiris, we came to the particularly squalid little village of Sais; saying the sun had grown too bright, Bethesda remained in our private room at the town's shabby little inn, refusing to come out. Rupa, Androcles, Mopsus, and I found little to do in Sais, and I passed several idle days drinking Egyptian beer, stifled by heat, boredom, and a growing sense of foreboding.

At last we pressed on from Sais and came to Naucratis, a village on the westernmost branch of the Nile. We had traversed the entire Delta, and still Bethesda had found no location suitable for the ritual of purification.

Each day, as our journey continued, Bethesda had given me greater cause for concern. She ate almost nothing. When I questioned her about this, she said that fasting was a part of the purification ritual. She sat motionless in the wagon for long hours, and when pressed to move, did so only very slowly and deliberately. She seemed less and less to fully occupy a place in this world, and more and more to reside in some other realm invisible to the rest of us. There were times when I glanced at her and for a startling instant thought I was looking right through her, as if she had become transparent. Then I would blink, and the illusion would pass, and I would tell myself it was merely a trick of the heat and the moisture-heavy air.