"Don't give me advice," Klea said. "I know, I know all Julius' reasons. Does it mean that he's right? Because Julius wants it, is it always right?"
"Listen to me, kit."
"Don't take that tone with met" Klea snatched her hand back, and the wine sloshed perilously in the glass. Her eyes, suffused with tears, turned to
Sargon, turned to Niccolo. "You said you'd help. Who's on watch down there?"
"Regulus' guard. Not bribable, signora. But if you want me to reconnoiter I will. I will try to carry a message. Understand-" Niccolo cleared his throat.
"Caesar has me under surveillance. This will not be without personal hazard. But if you will write this out - if you can be clever about it - I believe I can persuade Caesar himself to permit it."
"Damn you, you have an opinion of yourself."
"Tssss," said Sargon. "Niccolo is not the boy's mother. He has far more chance of reasoning with Julius."
Kleopatra took up the wine glass and took a healthy slug of it. Moisture threatened her makeup.
"Paper," she said. "Pen." There was a cluttering in the air, a rushing here and there among the insubstantial servants. Hands materialized to dab at a little spilled wine, to fill the glass again, but Niccolo swatted at the latter "Vatene, let the bottle alone." He topped off the glass himself, spilling not a drop, while the requested paper and pen materialized and flurried across the room to arrange themselves in front of the little Ptolemy.
Kleopatra seized up the pen and set it to the paper, lifted it without a mark and bit anxiously at the cap as her brow furrowed in thought.
"A sentiment," Niccolo said, "that will be easiest to get through. An expression of concern.
Your mother is here. I can persuade Julius that that has value."
"Of course he knows I'm here! That's the problem, dammit!" Klea lifted the glass and drank.
Her hand shook and spilled a straw-colored drop on the paper.
"Damn!" A fierce brush then at the moisture.
"Maternal tears," Niccolo murmured. "Very effective."
Kleopatra glared at him, then set pen to paper, hesitated, wrote, and hesitated again, wiping her cheek with a pale hand. The hand when she set it back to paper, trembled violently, her frail shoulders hunched, and her head lifted with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare at Niccolo.
"Oh, damn you, damn you-"
"Don't just sit there," Hatshepsut said, thrusting back her chair, a scrape of metal on terrazzo.
She took Klea by the shoulders, and Sargon was hardly slower, taking die pen from Klea's unresisting fingers, supporting her drooping head.
"A fine help you are," Hatshepsut snapped at Niccolo.
"They always blame me," Niccolo said in genuine offense. "Why do they always look at me?"
It was a narrow hallway, down among the storerooms. In fact the room had seen such use before, was a prison with all the plumbing, inescapable, for Caesarion had tried the door, probed the windowless walls, had examined the cot for materials for weapons and paced and paced till he knew it was useless and until the anxious sycophants that came and went through the walls of the place began to crowd upon him with cluttering admonitions to be still, to give in, a hundred whispering voices, touching hands, contacts which brushed against him until he flung his arms about and yelled at them for silence.
It only diminished the volume of it. The voices maintained a continual susurrus, give up, give in, hush, you'll only harm yourself ... till Caesarion tucked himself up in a corner of his cot against the wall and held his hands over his ears, breathing in great gasps. Still the touches came at his body.
He flailed at them and screamed aloud, great inarticulate screams of outrage.
Then, quietly, huddled amid the blankets in a fetal knot: Mother. But that was only in his mind, because he had had his tutelage in the courts of Egypt, and the hall of mad Tiberius on the lake, where sycophants were ordinary and betrayal was matter of course; and where only great fools opened up their hearts in a matter of sentiment. There was no one, finally. His half-sister Selene and his half-brothers Alexander and Ptolemaios, Antonius' Eastern brood, had made their accommodations with their destiny-Selene and Alexander Helios at Assurbanipal's court, Ptolemaios at Tiberius' court, lost in his library and his pretensions-oh, and there were the Romans: half-sister Julia, who was lost, he had never met; Antonius' daughter Antonia and her mother Octavia were Augustus' kin, and lived in retirement, in decent shame, it might be. His nymphomaniac remote cousin Julia was in and out of Tiberius' court, off lately with her darling daughter Agrippina, in Tiberius' disfavor (in this case tasteful) of Caligula and all his hangers-on-Zeus and Basteti it was a household. But he would rather the devils he knew than face the ones here, in this house, his father, and his two damned brothers, the one who had murdered him and the one who had murdered his father.
He clenched his hands against his eyes and gritted his teeth and tried not to hear the voices counseling surrender. He hid his face in the blankets and turned over finally, scanning the ceiling for convenient places for a rope made of bedding-There were none. And there were the sycophants, who would bring alarm, who would-He relaxed, sprawled wide on the bed, staring and thinking of that, that there was one way out and past the guards.
What are you doing? the voices wondered as he rolled out of bed and applied his teeth to start a tear in the sheet. He grinned at them, tucked up barefoot as they had left him-barefoot and beltless and without his jacket, just a tee shirt and pair of jeans, well-searched. He ripped another strip and began to tear a third.
Sycophants were not an intelligent breed, but they smelled disaster. They began to tug at the sheet. Voices reached a whispering crescendo as they tore at the strips in his hands, pulled with less success at him, and sycophants by the hundreds began Swirling about and through the walls-Help, help! they cried; and Not our fault!
It took about a quarter of a minute to have a key turning in the lock and that steel door opening; and Ptolemy XV Caesarion launched himself with a drive of his heels, knocked a startled legionary into the door frame, and used karate on a second as he barreled toward the last guard who, he was betting, dared not shoot him.
"Halt!" the man yelled, and swung a rifle butt at him, but Caesarion Sucked his gut out of the way and slid past, pelting for the door at the end.
Which was locked.
"Oh, shit!" Caesarion moaned, and turned hack to face three irritated and oversized legionaries in a hall with one exit only.
One legionary crooked his finger at him.
Then: No, no, no, a lone sycophant wailed, materializing between. Caesar wants! Caesar wants!
The magic word. The legionaries glared and Caesarion, feeling his knees weak, slumped back against the door. "It was stupid," Julius -said. "I don't say it wasn't a good try."
"You want to take the cuffs off-father."
Sullen look from under too-long black hair. Cheekbones and coloring his; the mouth Klea's, full and giving Caesarion a girlish handsomeness. Gods knew what Tiberius' house had taught the boy. Not that swagger, not that dark glare from under the brows; that did not go well with courtiers. Julius watched his youngest son walk over and drop himself, hands chained behind him, into a slouch in a fragile chair, curl the toes of his bare feet under him like a small boy and stare at him with the surliness of a defeated general.