Pullo frowned. “Luck, I suppose.”
Caesarion wouldn’t let it go. “Do you fear death?”
“I suppose so. But death is death.”
“For what, then, is the city of the dead here in Alexandria?”
“For the families left behind,” Pullo replied. “There’s nothing else there but offerings to rotting corpses.”
“No crossings of the Nile? No Elysian Fields?”
“I’ve never seen them,” Pullo said, voice defiant. “Nor do I know any who has.”
“Must you see to believe?”
“Yes.”
Vorenus coughed a little, wincing, but the pain subsided quickly. “You believe nothing you can’t see, touch, feel?”
“That’s right,” Pullo said.
Vorenus smiled. “What of Britain, then?”
Pullo’s brow furrowed. “What of it?”
“I think he’s asking whether you believe in Britain,” Caesarion said. There was a mischievous light in his eyes.
“Of course I believe in Britain.”
“But you’ve never seen it, have you?” Caesarion smiled. “Never touched it?”
“No, but it’s a place. It’s there on the maps.”
“Didymus has shown me many maps that have the realms of the dead upon them.”
“And Alexander looked for them, I know,” Pullo said. “But look at him now, in that crystal coffin in the Mausoleum. Dead. I’ve known men who served in Britain. We were near enough to it ourselves, Vorenus and me. But I don’t know anyone who’s really lived after death, if you know what I mean.”
Vorenus closed his eyes to think, and the others fell silent until he opened them again. “Caesarion,” he finally said, looking over at the young ruler. “About Didymus … you need to know something.”
Caesarion held up his hand—a royal gesture, Vorenus noted. “I know. I read the assassin’s letter.”
“You know?”
The tiredness, which had disappeared from the young man’s shoulders as they’d bantered, was back. “Much has happened while you were asleep.”
Pullo agreed but said nothing.
“You said something about me getting better ‘in time,’” Vorenus said.
“So I did,” Caesarion said with a smile, but the look in his eyes was grim.
“In time for what?”
“To take a ship,” Caesarion replied.
“A ship?”
“A ship north,” Pullo said. Any trace of a smile on his face was gone.
North. That could mean only one thing. “War,” Vorenus said quietly. “And Egypt?”
“My mother is going herself,” Caesarion said. “I’m to stay here in Alexandria in her absence.”
“Cleopatra herself?”
“Antony didn’t want her to go, you know,” Pullo said. “But Publius Canidius convinced him to let her. I think he must have owed her a favor or something, and she called it in. She’s taking the whole fleet, Vorenus.”
The whole fleet? That would mean hundreds of vessels. Thousands of men. Tens of thousands.
“It’s true, Vorenus,” Caesarion said. “And you’ll need to go with her. You and Pullo both. Your first priority is the protection of my mother—and Antony, of course.”
Something in the young man’s tone caught in Vorenus’ ear. “You don’t approve?”
Caesarion stood, paced in the small space behind his chair for a few moments. “I’m not the general Antony is,” he said.
“Experience isn’t wisdom,” Vorenus said, trying hard to lock the young man’s eyes with his own.
“That’s truth enough,” Pullo muttered.
Caesarion took a deep breath, let it out as he sat back down. “He is Antony.”
“And you’re pharaoh.”
“As is my mother. And Antony has her ear. I’m just a boy.” He rubbed tiredly at his eyes with his fingers, tried to stretch out his neck. “But to your question: no, I do not approve. I’ve told them so. Antony ignored me. Mother, well, she believes Antony is Osiris on earth, that he’s invincible.”
“Our young king here thinks we’re better off defending Alexandria,” Pullo said.
“It’s far more secure than foreign Greece,” Caesarion said, rising once more to pace. “Let Octavian have Greece. Let him keep Rome. Let him have all the world. Without the grains of Egypt he will in the end have nothing. With Antony’s legions and Egypt’s armies here, Octavian cannot force us to trade. He would, in the end, have to negotiate. Victory lies in waiting for peace, not in rushing off for war.”
Vorenus smiled at the young man’s logic, futile though it was. “Too long-term,” he said. “Antony thinks only in tomorrows.”
Caesarion stopped pacing. “I know. And that’s why you both need to go with them to Greece. They won’t listen to reason now, but perhaps they will when the need comes.” He seemed to gather himself. “And even if he won’t, perhaps she will.”
Vorenus blinked. He looked to Pullo, saw that his face was blank as he stared at the young man. They were sworn legionnaires of Rome. Antony was their superior. “I don’t—”
Caesarion met Vorenus’ eyes. “I’m not asking you to betray him, not asking you to betray your oaths to the legion. I’m just asking you to think about all that’s at stake. To think, like you said, long-term. And then to follow your good heart. That’s all.”
Vorenus saw that Pullo was looking to him now, confusion on the big man’s face. He felt a new pain in his hip and shifted again in the sheets, his mind racing. “We’ll do what we can,” he finally said.
“It’s all I can ask,” Caesarion said. He came back around to sit in his chair. “I’ll take my sister and brothers to Antirhodos once the fleet has sailed, if we haven’t moved there already. We’ll be safer there in your absence. When Didymus needs—”
“He’s not dead?”
“No.”
“I thought Antony…”
“If he knew, yes,” Pullo said, leaning forward in his chair. “He doesn’t. Neither does Cleopatra or the kids. Only the two of us and little Horus here.”
Caesarion ignored the jab this time. “Once you were in the hands of the physicians, Didymus himself took me and Pullo back to his room. He produced the assassin’s papers. He denied nothing and revealed everything.”
So that was where the new worldliness in Caesarion’s eyes had come from, Vorenus thought. “You didn’t tell,” he said to Pullo. It was bordering on treachery not to report it to their superior officer.
The big man’s cheeks, already toned orange by the light of the lamps and stone, appeared to darken. “Antony would’ve killed him. You know that. And we both know Didymus. No matter what he did back then, he’s a different man now.”
It was true. Vorenus had spared him, too, hadn’t he?
“Besides,” Caesarion said, “we need Didymus alive. If this Juba is really seeking the Scrolls of Thoth, Didymus is our best shot at finding them first. We can’t let them fall into their hands.”
Vorenus was getting tired, but he didn’t want to stop talking. He needed to understand what was going on. “I heard Didymus say he didn’t think they existed.”
Caesarion nodded. “So he told the assassin. But he is, nevertheless, unsure. He’s already combing through the oldest records of the Library, looking for information.”
“All this for some scrolls?” Vorenus had been to the Great Library once. It was filled with scrolls. There were thousands of them. Perhaps thousands of thousands. Vorenus wondered if a man in one lifetime could count them all.
“You don’t know what they are,” Caesarion said. “Thoth is the Egyptian god of wisdom, the mind of the gods themselves, you might say. Thoth gave us writing. He gave us civilization. Laws. Numbers. Thought. The calendar. He’s said to have set the very stars in their places. When Osiris was dismembered, it was Thoth who taught Isis the incantations to raise him from the dead. Without his words, it’s said, the gods themselves might not exist.”