I covered my face with my forearm and wept. As faint as a whisper, Bethesda's perfume lingered on the air.
CHAPTER XVII
The boys stayed very quiet the next morning, allowing me to sleep late. I was still groggy, my head full of uneasy dreams, when Merianis arrived bearing a scrap of papyrus that had been folded several times and sealed with wax. The impression in the wax was that of Caesar's ring, which bore an image of Venus circled by the letters of his name.
"What's this?" I said.
"I've no idea," said Merianis. "A missive from Little Rome. I'm merely the bearer. Shall I stay, in case you wish to send a reply?"
"Stay, so that I can look upon your beaming face. At least someone in this palace is happy. I don't suppose the return of your mistress has anything to do with your mood this morning?"
She grinned. "While Queen Cleopatra was gone, the temple of Isis was a place without magic."
"And now the magic has returned." I broke the seal and unfolded the papyrus. The letter was in Caesar's own hand.
Gordianus
Apologies for our interrupted dinner. Much was left unsaid. But unexpected encounters bring happy results. There will be a royal reception today that I should very much like you to attend. Call it a lesson in the fine art of reconciliation. Wear your toga and come to the grand reception hall at the eighth hour of the day.
I put down the letter. Merianis looked at me expectantly. "A reception of some sort, later this afternoon," I said.
She nodded to indicate she already knew about it.
"Will you be there?" I said.
"No power in heaven or earth could keep me from attending."
"Then I shall go, as well. Mopsus! Androcles! Stop playing with that cat and lay out my toga for me." The reception hall was truly grand, the result of hundreds of years of refinements, additions, and adornments by generations of Ptolemies. Here the kings and queens of Egypt received tributes from subjects, announced treaties and trade agreements, celebrated royal weddings, and put on their most magnificent displays of wealth and power. Every surface shone with reflected light, whether from the polished marble of floors and pedestals inlaid with semiprecious stone, or from the burnished silver of brackets and lamps, or from the gold of gilded alcoves filled with gilded statues. The lofty ceiling was supported by a forest of slender columns decorated with lotus motifs and painted in vivid hues.
The room was already buzzing with excitement when Merianis and I arrived. The crowd was made up mostly of Egyptians in ceremonial dress, but there was a large contingent of Romans as well. "A lesson in the fine art of reconciliation," Caesar had remarked in his note to me, and the Roman officers seemed to be following that theme, taking pains to mingle with the locals and engage them in conversation. Among the Egyptians, however, there seemed to be two unequal factions in the room, standing apart from one another. The greater faction I took to be adherents of the king; the lesser group, adherents of his sister. While the Romans moved among both, the two groups of courtiers did not mix, but instead exchanged suspicious, furtive glances.
Merianis took my hand and drew me toward the far end of the room, where four thrones were set upon a low dais. The gilded thrones were upholstered with crocodile flesh, and the arms of the thrones were carved to resemble crocodiles whose open jaws revealed rows of ivory teeth. On the wall behind the thrones, a vast painting depicted the city of Alexandria as it might appear to a bird soaring at a great height, with the Pharos lighthouse looming above all else. Beyond the cityscape and its teeming harbor, an expansive blue sea was scattered with tiny, but meticulously rendered, ships, and the great islands of Rhodes and Crete (identified by their names in Greek letters beneath them) loomed in the far distance.
A wave of excitement as palpable as a warm breeze passed through the room, with a loud hubbub following in its wake. I saw that an entourage was making its way through the crowd toward the dais. Pothinus was in the forefront, followed by the king, who wore the uraeus crown with a rearing cobra. Caesar came next, dressed as consul of the Roman people in his toga with a purple border. After him, resplendent in a gown of purple, adorned with jewelry, and wearing a uraeus crown with a vulture's head, came Cleopatra.
Following the older siblings came the two members of the royal family I had not seen before, Arsinoe, who was slightly older than the young king, and the youngest of all, a boy who also bore the name Ptolemy, who could not have been more than ten or eleven. These two did not wear diadems, but were dressed in dazzling raiment.
As the royal procession passed by, I tried to read their expressions. Pothinus looked pinched and uneasy, like a man who had swallowed something that disagreed with him. King Ptolemy kept his lips tightly compressed and his gaze straight ahead, as if deliberately putting on an inscrutable face. Caesar looked eminently pleased with himself. And Cleopatra…
The previous night I had seen her with her hair in a bun, wearing a practical garment suitable for traveling in rough circumstances, and little other adornment. Even so, she had seemed unmistakably a queen. Now, wearing royal raiment, with a necklace made of golden scarabs adorning her bosom and rings of gold and silver upon her fingers, she seemed to fill the chamber with her presence. I looked about and saw that some of the Egyptians in the room gazed at her with loathing, others with adoration, and that the Roman officers regarded her with expressions that ranged from wonderment to simple curiosity; but every pair of eyes, without exception, looked on Cleopatra as she passed by.
Her expression was as inscrutable as her brother's, but radiated a quality quite different. Ptolemy exuded the tension of a ratcheted catapult; Cleopatra seemed to flow effortlessly across the room, as a cloud proceeds across the sky.
The king and queen mounted the dais and sat upon the two thrones in the center. To either side of them sat Arsinoe and the younger Ptolemy in thrones only slightly lower and less magnificent. Seeing all the siblings side-by-side, I was struck by how closely the four of them resembled each other. I seemed to be looking at four manifestations of the same being incarnated in bodies of different age and gender, which were nonetheless more alike than different. Had their striking similarity served merely to make the siblings all the more hostile to one another?
Pothinus, facing the king and queen, struck his staff against the floor. The Egyptians in the room bowed their heads and knelt. The Romans hesitated, looking to Caesar for guidance. By a wave of his hand, he indicated that they should do as the Egyptians did, and with considerable grace he dropped to one knee. I followed his example but kept my head up. Caesar, I saw, bowed his head first to Ptolemy, who stared back at him blankly, and then to Cleopatra, who gazed at him with a look that left little doubt, in my mind at least, about what had occurred between the two of them after I left their presence.
" 'History is made at night,' " I muttered.
"What's that you say?" whispered Merianis.
"I was merely quoting an old Etruscan proverb."
Pothinus stood and again struck his staff against the floor. All rose. Caesar stepped forward. From many years of experience as an orator in the Forum and a commander in the field, he was able easily to fill the vast chamber with his voice.
"Your Majesties, I stand before you today in two capacities: as consul of the Roman people, and as a friend of your late father. Eleven years ago, in the year of my first consulship, your father, driven out of Alexandria by civil strife, came to Rome to seek our help. He received it. The Senate declared him Friend and Ally of the Roman People, a very great honor; in return, he appointed the Roman people to be guardians of his children. Thus Rome and Egypt became bound together by ties of law as well as of friendship.