“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
CLEOPATRA’S PLAN
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.