He looked toward the head of the pier, where the queen was just joining the little crowd gathered there. He nodded thoughtfully. "I chose between the two of them, and I chose wrongly. But the gods gave me a chance to rectify my mistake before I compounded it further. Cleopatra deceived me, and I lost faith in her. Now I've deceived her in return; and so we're even and may start afresh."
"It seems to me, Consul, that neither of you deceived the other a whit. You each perceived exactly the game played by the other."
"But we shall pretend otherwise; and there you have the essence of statecraft, Gordianus-and of marriage, as well. Cleopatra is a woman, and I am a man; but we are also heads of state. When one of us sets a foot wrong, the other will pretend not to notice. When there is friction, we shall maintain a fiction of harmony; and thereby we shall respect one another's dignity."
"Would it not be wiser, and a great deal less troublesome, in marriage as well as statecraft, to simply be forthright and honest? To admit one's mistakes and ask forgiveness?"
Caesar looked at me and shook his head. "I don't know what sort of husband you made, Gordianus, but you could never have succeeded as a politician or a king."
"I never desired to be either, Consul."
"A good thing! Now, let's get off this damned pier. Where are my officers? Where are my messengers? There's a queen to be defended and a battle to be won!"
CHAPTER XXIX
As it turned out, there were many battles to be waged over the course of the coming months in Alexandria.
Achillas's assault on Caesar's position was only the beginning of what developed into a full-scale war, and a most unusual one, fought almost entirely within the arena of the city and its harbor. The fight on land took place in the close quarters of narrow streets and across adjoining rooftops, rather than on sweeping plains or across mountainous terrain, and therefore it required a strategy very different from the usual tactical deployment of cavalry and infantry. The naval engagements took place within the confines of the harbor, and at times took on the appearance of some vast aquatic spectacle mounted for the dubious amusement of the populace.
Caesar, taken by surprise by Ptolemy's duplicity and outnumbered, was at first hard-pressed to maintain his position. To flee by ship at that time was virtually impossible, due partly to unfavorable winds that made it difficult to leave the harbor, and partly to the extreme hazards attendant upon a withdrawal of all the troops toward the docks and thence by ship through the narrow harbor entrance, all the while under Egyptian attack on land and sea; Pompey, harassed by Caesar, had managed such a naval withdrawal from Brundisium, but just barely. Caesar was effectively trapped in Alexandria, and faced certain destruction should the Egyptians manage to penetrate his defenses. There was considerable grumbling among his officers that he had landed them in a very tight spot, thanks to an uncharacteristic miscalculation of the forces against him and to his love for a treacherous queen; but Caesar himself never betrayed any sign of doubt or gave vent to recrimination. Perhaps Cleopatra had convinced him that together they possessed a divine destiny, and that together they would overcome all obstacles on their path to immortality.
I shall leave it to others to recount all the many incidents of the Alexandrian War. No doubt Caesar himself, with the help of Meto and others, will write a more or less accurate, if entirely self-serving, account. How candid will he be about his relationships with the royal siblings? It will be interesting to read the delicate phrases he uses to justify his decision to allow Ptolemy to leave the palace and join Achillas. But when it comes to recounting events in the military arena, Caesar's memoirs can usually be trusted.
Certain incidents stand out in my memory. Early on, the Egyptians attempted to contaminate the water supply to the palace. In all Alexandria, not a single public fountain is supplied by a well or a spring, and the water of Lake Mareotis is too brackish to drink; all fresh water for the city arrives via the canal from the Nile, and where the canal approaches the city, the water is split into numerous channels to supply various precincts. The Egyptians, having control of the canal, began pumping seawater into the supply that flowed into the areas under Caesar's control. As their water inexplicably grew saltier, Caesar's men came near to panicking; but he assured them that along every coast, underground veins of fresh water could be found. The men devoted themselves to digging at numerous spots, working continuously night and day. And in fact, enough veins of fresh water were struck to produce an adequate supply, and a crisis that might have given the Egyptians an early victory was averted.
Also early on occurred the burning of the warehouses along the harbor, which has since grown into the legend that Caesar burned the whole of the great Library. In fact, when Caesar's men set fire to a number of Egyptian ships anchored in the great harbor, so that the vessels could not later be seized and used against them, the fire spread to some buildings on the waterfront. Among these was a warehouse used by the Library, in which great quantities of papyrus were stored along with an uncertain number of recently acquired or copied scrolls that had not yet been filed in the Library. As many as forty thousand volumes may have been destroyed, but the Library itself was unscathed. Still, Cleopatra gave Caesar much grief about the destruction, and Caesar himself bitterly regretted it, if only because it gave the Egyptians further cause to label him a destroyer and a barbarian.
But the low point of the war, for Caesar, was the day he lost his new purple cape.
Caesar had always worn a blood red cape, proud of the fact that friends and foes alike could easily spot him in the thick of battle. It was Cleopatra who gave Caesar a new cape of a different hue, an equally conspicuous, very regal shade of purple. A few Romans grumbled at this innovation-were they fighting for a consul or a king?-but many appeared to welcome it. Caesar wore the cape on the day he sailed across the harbor with several hundred troops and laid siege to the causeway leading out to the Pharos lighthouse. His object was to gain control of the arch in the causeway that allowed Egyptian ships to attack from the Eunostos Harbor.
The battle went well at first; the island of Pharos itself was seized, as was the causeway, and Caesar's men set about filling the mouth of the tunnel with stones. But the Alexandrians received reinforcements, and the tide of the battle turned. Caesar's men panicked and fled. Caesar himself was forced to retreat to his ship, which was drawn alongside the causeway. So many soldiers streamed onto the ship that it began to founder. Wearing his purple cape, Caesar jumped from the deck and swam toward another ship farther out in the harbor. The heavy folds of the sodden cape threatened to drag him under; struggling in the choppy waves, barely keeping his head above water, he managed to extricate himself from the garment, and for a while he swam with it held between his teeth, for he hated to lose the queen's gift. But in the end the cape slipped from his teeth, and he abandoned it.
The day was a disaster for Caesar. The Alexandrians reclaimed the archway and removed the stones that blocked it; more than eight hundred of Caesar's men were killed by the enemy or drowned, including all those aboard his lost ship; and the triumphant Alexandrians managed to fish his new purple cape out of the water. On the causeway, they danced and shouted and waved the cape like a flag of triumph as Caesar dragged himself sputtering and half-drowned aboard the ship and made an ignominious retreat. Later the Alexandrians attached the tattered, filthy cape to a pole, like a captured banner, and for the rest of the war, they flaunted it on every possible occasion as an insult to Caesar's dignity.
The war continued for months. As in all wars, there were lulls in the fighting as each side regrouped. Caesar used such occasions to consult the many scholars and philosophers who found themselves confined to the precincts of the city under his control, which included the famous Library and the adjacent Museum, the repository of so much of the world's mathematical and astronomical learning. It was during one such lull that Caesar set about devising a new, more reliable calendar, for the venerable Roman calendar had in recent years grown out of step with the actual seasons, so that harvest festivals were taking place long before the actual harvests, and spring holidays occurred while Romans shivered. The world's most esteemed scholars were consulted when Caesar devised the new calendar, and if they did their job well, it may be that the calendar, like the movements of the stars and planets, will outlast Rome itself.