Complete Works of Talbot Mundy, page 539
“And then you set forth to sail around the world? Why did you turn back?”
“My heart said that my task was only half done. Caesar was still living, and Rome rampant. Who am Ito burst out of my egg until my work within the egg is finished?”
“Why did you not kill Caesar? I understood you to say you took him prisoner.”
“It is not my habit to slay prisoners. A prisoner is one whom Destiny lets live a while. And who am I, that I should gainsay Destiny? It is Rome I dread, not Caesar.”
“It is Egypt, not myself, that I will save from Rome,” said Cleopatra, and Tros eyed her for a moment with a new approval.
“Caesar,” he said, “is the genius of Rome in human shape. He is the very essence of the wolfish Roman energy, that uses even its own virtue to a cruel end. But to slay Caesar in order to check Rome’s conquests would be sillier than to nail a shadow to the wall to check the growth of the tree that cast it. Rome might loose three Caesars on the world, in place of one.”
Cleopatra mused a while. “And Pompey?” she asked suddenly.
“Pompey is a man whom dignities and partly understood philosophies have swallowed until he mistakes the surface for the heart of things. The name Magnus that they gave him blinded Pompey. He could no longer see his greatness since its shadow covered him; his littlenesses had to serve, and they were many, leading him this way and that into indecision and deceiving others.”
Cleopatra followed her own train of thought, her eyes half closed, and for a long time there was silence, broken only by the “talking” of the great ship’s timbers and the regular thrash of the sea against the oaken hull.
“I agree,” she said at last, “that killing Caesar would not stay Rome’s course. And yet stay it I shall! None knows, except I, who burn with it, what will there is in me to save my Land of Khem from the fate of Gaul — aye, and from the fate of Samothrace, whose spirit died.”
“Nay!” Tros exclaimed. “That spirit flew forth. Samothrace is like the Moon, whose course was run and whose spirit found release into a larger sphere.”
“They call me Sister of the Moon,” she answered. “Is that ominous?”
“Woman, if you have heart enough to understand, all omens are only evidence that life and death succeed each other as the day and night. The faint of heart may shudder to see the sun sink westward. But a wise one greets the night and gives thanks, turning to the eastward presently to greet the sun again.”
“And Caesar, you say, — Tros! I — no, not this Cleopatra — not this shadow that you see here, but I — I am Egypt! What does it mean, that I must go forth like a hunted criminal? Is that, too, ominous? Is Egypt doomed to die like Samothrace?”
“I tell you, Samothrace is not dead!” Tros retorted, “Do you look for the soul of Samothrace in the shell of a rock-bound island? Look then for the soul of Egypt in a bucketful of Nile mud! Did wisdom die the day Pythagoras went free from his tired old body? Did they poison all intelligence with Socrates? I never was admitted to the higher mysteries, not being whole enough in understanding of that little knowledge that I have. I am a novice. Nevertheless, where I go, there goes Samothrace! And when I die, that Spirit I have let shine — dimly though it shone through me — shall once again receive me and renew me, until I go forth to a new birth. In the interval shall seed I sowed not germinate? When I return to earth shall I find fault if Samothrace is known by other names, and if its spirit dwells in other lands than that bare island? Are the olden gods of Khem but worms, that eat their Egypt, and destroy it, and have no home left nor anywhere to go?”
She nodded. “You are generous to fight my gloomy spirit for me, Tros. Olympus puzzles me with long words and symbols, whose inner meaning seems to be a key to yet more mysteries. And Olympus is no man’s enemy, which makes it difficult to have patience with him—”
“He is a greater than I,” said Tros.
“Olympus ever bids me choose between the spirits of light and darkness. But do you know how difficult that is when darkness steals up, and there is gloaming, and no stars, but only a nameless fear and a loneliness beyond all reach of companionship?”
“It is alone that we learn at last how countless and how close the gods are,” Tros replied. “And I tell you the gods would cease if they should cease to cherish — aye, and to obey us! But they obey the spirit in us, not the fumes from off our crucible of moods. Alone — not otherwise — we commune with the Spirit that is a bright light in the bosom of the Soul.”
“I am afraid of mine,” said Cleopatra. “When I feel that greatness in me, and that brightness, I become a coward. For I fear this little body and this brain will burn up.”
“Aye, a shell breaks ere a phoenix hatches,” Tros assured her. “And a phoenix hatches only in the hot flame.”
“But you were telling me of Caesar. Speak on. Killing Caesar would be to unleash Rome without a master. Rome needs money and would drain the very dregs of Egypt for it.”
“Aye,” Tros answered, “and in the name of law would rape religion, tolerating — aye, and whoring for its body, but slaying its soul as it slays the souls of the women its dealers buy and sell.”
“But Caesar?”
“He can whip his Romans to obedience. He has that merit.”
“Then if I win Caesar?”
Tros pondered that a moment. “Caesar,” he said then, “is a man whom many women have beguiled, to their own undoing. There is none — not man or woman — who has come within Caesar’s orbit and not suffered for it.”
“Suffering? We may expect that. Do we women bring forth children without suffering?”
“They cut Caesar forth from his mother,” said Tros. “It may be justice that a woman suffers, since she peoples a world with men to wreak worse cruelties.”
“Time was,” Cleopatra said, “when Egypt was a land of wisdom and its kings were patriarchs whom men revered. When I was young my mother took me a long journey up the Nile, to Philae, and I saw on my way the Pyramid, Memphis, Karnak, Thebes. I saw what dignity and affluence are born into a world where wisdom reigns; and I saw how, when the spirit is no longer understood, a people lapses into dullness and the very temple columns fall. My mother told me stories of the Land of Khem that I will remember as long as I live; so that Egypt to me is not Alexandria, but thousands of years of splendid history that flow down from the past as the Nile flows from none knows what mysterious source. And I know that as the Nile flows, so that spirit lives on, rising and waning, yet ceaseless. And I know that spirit moves me whenever I forget life’s meanness and remember what the Fathers told me at Dendera. Tros — I was anointed Pharoah of the Upper and the Lower Nile and High Priestess of Osiris and of Isis!”
CHAPTER IX. “Did I summon you from straw-roofed villages to tell me how to govern?”
In the drama that we call life it is the part of wisdom to expect the unexpected, and to mistrust the expected when it comes — remembering: there is a false dawn but there is no doubt possible when once the sun has risen.
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
THE farthest eastern outlet of the Nile, fast silting up and navigable only in flat-bottomed scows, met the sea at Pelusium. Waves moaned into the estuary and pounded on an endless beach of unclean sand, and to the southward lay a wilderness of mud-flats fringed with reeds, inhabited by myriads of birds.
A strong fort, scowling, as it might be, at the dreariness, defended the highway between Egypt and Syria, which crossed that last arm of the Nile by the only practicable ford, with fish-traps on either side, winding amid miles of mud-flats where the ibis broke the eggs of crocodiles and myriads of flamingoes hunted shell-fish.
On the eastern bank there was a strip of cultivation — mainly onions and corn: on the western, as far as the eye could see, field after field of black mud that bore prodigious crops in season — water-wheels, thatched huts barely separable from the landscape, no trees.
The great brick fort was square and around it lay Pelusium — a maze of barns, shops, slaughter-houses, brothels, wine-shops, with a few mean inns and a marketplace, where Greek, Persian, Syrian and Armenian traders vied with Jews, or joined with them in chousing the Egyptian.
There was heat insufferable and a stench of dead fish, seaweed, onions and camel-dung. By day there were flies in swarms so dense that to the leeward of a wall or on the beach at noon a man could hardly breathe without inhaling them. A few small boats lay drawn out on the sand; a few small ships stuck noses into mud berths in the estuary. Over the whole landscape lay a pall of dreariness, suggesting that neither hope nor health had any being near Pelusium. The place seemed dying, like that outer tentacle of Father Nile that formerly had made it a considerable port.
On the eastern bank of the Nile, set so as to command the ford, lay Cleopatra’s camp — a maze of black unsightly tents around a dune on which her white pavilion, of jetsam timber and a sail, open on three sides to the fetid wind, had been erected. She had hardly privacy; but her women were in thatch-roofed huts around her, which helped a little, and she had a small screened-off apartment at the rear.
Her ragged army’s right flank rested on the beach, where a riffraff from Joppa and Gaza bivouacked by driftwood fires.
The left flank touched a muddy irrigation ditch a mile inland. At the rear of the camp a thousand camels meditated and as many horses kicked and fretted at the flies. There was a swarm of sutlers, traders, hangers-on, but not much of the pomp and panoply of war. Diomedes, followed suspiciously by a group of petty Arab chiefs, looked worried.
But he observed the decencies. He caused a bugle to be blown to announce that he desired an audience. When Cleopatra came forth from the enclosure at the rear into the open-sided sail-cloth pavilion, he made his bodyguard of ten black Nubians salute her — and he waited while her own ten answered the salute. Her throne was a chariot-body draped with leopard-skins, but she could have made an upturned empty chest look royal. Charmian and Lollianè came to stand beside her, and there were women with tall palm-leaf fans to drive the flies away.
Diomedes bowed again. The Arab chieftains, moving slowly, jockeying surreptitiously for precedence, contrived to conceal whatever interest they felt. Observant, they were careful not to exceed the bow of Diomedes.
“What do these princes want?” she asked.
Her voice awoke them to alertness, though they did not understand her Greek. They glanced at Diomedes, who was evidently primed to answer for them.
“Royal Egypt,” he began, “these princes are complaining that you did not seize the fort, so that your cause, they say, is lost before the war begins. They say your brother’s army in Pelusium is strong, and growing stronger, whereas we have few supplies and there is no help coming. Who, they ask, is to reward them and their followers for leaving home to linger in a camp beside a marsh, where flies infest them and Egyptians steal by night what little stores they have? To them I have answered, Royal Egypt, what you ordered me to say, but they demand an answer from your own lips.”
Cleopatra’s forehead clouded.
“You speak as if you favor their complaint,” she said when she had thought a while. “You are a poor judge, Diomedes, if you hope to manage me by watering allegiance till it tastes like the tavern wine your lazy foragers provide!”
“Royal Egypt,” he stammered uncomfortably, “I warned you, but you would not listen. There was nothing left for me but to bring them and let you find out for yourself. I have no—”
She interrupted him: “I require your courage. If you have none, rid me of your cowardice this minute!”
“Royal Egypt! What more can I do than I have done already? I abandoned all that I possess to join you here and to uphold your cause. Is this justice — to accuse me of — ?”
“Justice?” she retorted. “Justice! That is what gods provide, after events!” She motioned him aside and he obeyed her, leaving the chiefs to plead their own cause uninterpreted. But Cleopatra gave them no chance, overwhelming them with fluent Arabic before they could begin to frame their speech:
“Did I summon you from straw-roofed villages to tell me how to govern? I have haled you here to save your wives and daughters, and your cattle and those little hoards of money you have buried under stamped earth floors!”
Their brown eyes shifted nervously at the suggestion that they had money hidden. One man made shift to answer, but she frowned him into silence.
“Am I answerable for the wind? You saw my great ship sail. It carried word to Caesar. You saw my messenger Apollodorus gallop to find Herod. And some of you, I think, know Herod, who is young, but he already has a name at which the very horses prick their ears. Do you prefer him as an enemy to recompense his followers at your cost?”
Their truculence was not so noticeable now. Her unexpected fluency in Arabic deprived them of the chief advantage they supposed they had: they could not prompt one another without her knowing; neither could they bewilder her with vague and random-worded sentences in her own tongue designed to half hide insolence.
“Ptolemy grows stronger in Pelusium?” she went on. “Answer then: why does he not march forth against us? Because his General Achillas counts the cost of giving battle, fearing Alexandria, behind him, that neither loves him nor is willingly against me. If Achillas had the worth within him of a tavern-thief he would have hurled himself against us, lo, these days ago. But he is too late. Herod comes, and a thousand cavalry.”
“How do you know that?” a lean hook-nosed chieftain answered. “We have no such knowledge. If a thousand cavalry should follow Herod, he would have to raise them from the country to the east of Jordan and the south of Jericho. And if he did that, we should know it. We have no such news.”
“Then go to the top of yonder dune and observe the dust toward the northeast,” she retorted.
“We have seen it,” the Arab answered. “That is the dust of twenty-five or thirty chariots — no army — surely not a thousand men. Moreover, there is movement in your brother’s camp across the river.”
There was no denying that. From hastily constructed sand-pits and redoubts, and from the breastwork that guarded the Nile ford, Cleopatra’s pickets were sending word of it, the runners racing to be first. All along the crenelated fort wall of Pelusium appeared men’s heads and shoulders, like vultures, gazing seaward. In the roadstead, out beyond the shallows where the Nile mud piled up ever-widening shoals and sea-birds circled above waves of yellow green, Ptolemy’s small fleet apparently was weighing anchor.
Diomedes saluted with scant ceremony, turned away and, shouting for his horse, went striding toward the river to inspect the ford defenses.
“They will take us in flank. They will sail their fleet into the estuary,” said an Arab.
Cleopatra stood up on tiptoe. But she was small and there was still a part of the horizon that she could not see. She gestured and her women moved her chariot-throne to higher ground outside the tent, the guards assisting and the Arab chiefs observant, curious, preserving a vague deference that might be turned into respectful friendliness or the reverse, as circumstances should dictate.
She stood on the chariot, gazing seaward, shielding her eyes with her hand. An Arab chief called for his camel. He mounted. The beast rose and he, too, stared in the direction of the sea.
“A ship. But whose ship?” said the Arab.
For a long time Cleopatra gazed in silence. Three times she seemed about to speak, but checked herself, as if doubting what she saw. Then:
“Pompey!” she said at last. “Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, seeking refuge!” She stepped down from the chariot. “To the beach with you! Go to the beach and signal him! Send out a boat to him! Warn him! Persuade him to land on our side of the estuary! Welcome him in my name!”
The Arabs left her and she turned to Charmian:
“What pity that Tros did not meet him! If he falls into the hands of my brother’s men, they will sell him alive to Caesar! Whereas if he should join me here his men might rally to him and — and I would seize Pelusium — then Alexandria — we would give Caesar and Rome a problem that would make Rome hesitate!”
CHAPTER X. “A Galilee for Egypt?”
Some men build — upraising one thing from the products of a thing thrown down. But other men, as scavengers, see only fuel in a living tree or quarries in the monuments of bygone days. Nobility, it may be, is a tendency to imitate the Lords of Life by building — whether it be character, or cities: Ignobility a tendency to imitate the Hounds of Death, that, seeing what is built up, hunger to annihilate.
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
THE dust-cloud to the eastward thinned and soon a dozen chariots whirled out of it, Apollodorus leading. Arab horsemen galloping to meet them wheeled into a cavalcade that crowded either flank and thundered in the rear until the leading chariot drew rein at last in front of Cleopatra’s tent.
Apollodorus, travel-stained and hollow-eyed, so weary that he reeled when his feet touched ground, was almost knocked down by a following chariot’s horses that were too far spent to feel their driver wrenching at the reins.
A very young man sat in that second chariot at ease. He took his time about descending and he made no comment, although he seemed to be amused by Apollodorus’ narrow escape. He looked distinguished, and, in a sly way, dignified.
He had a beard already long enough to curl. His almond finger-nails were beautifully polished, and his feet, in doe-skin slippers, were as small and well shaped as a woman’s. Gilded chain-mail showed through the opening of his tunic, over which he wore a thin striped cloak of green and gold. His head-dress was in the Arab style, but green and gold instead of white, and fastened with a jeweled brooch. He had rings on nearly all his fingers and a jeweled dagger at his waist.
If his clothing was designed to draw attention from his face, it failed. He was darkly handsome. Apollodorus’ good looks faded in comparison. But it was said that even his own mother swooned at the baleful influence of Herod’s eyes. Herod’s own attendants all wore charms against them.
