The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
“What we forgot to tell them,” said their junior centurion to Rufrius, “was that we’re really here to meet a new fleet and a whole lot of warships. They don’t know about that.”
“We’ve got Ganymedes!” Caesar cried when Rufrius reported. “Our eunuch friend will have his navy in the roads off the Eunostus Harbor to waylay thirty-five humble transports returning loaded with fresh water. Sitting ducks for the Alexandrians ibises, eh? Where’s Euphranor?”
Had the day been less advanced, the Alexandrian war might have ended there and then. Ganymedes had forty quinqueremes and quadriremes lying in ambush off the Eunostus Harbor when Caesar’s transports hove in view, all rowing against the wind. Not too difficult a task with empty ships. Then, as the Alexandrians moved in for the kill, ten Rhodians, ten Pontics and twenty converted transports emerged from behind Caesar’s fleet, rowing at ramming speed. With only two and a half hours of daylight left, the victory couldn’t be complete, but the damage Ganymedes sustained was severe: one quadrireme and its marines captured, one sunk, two more disabled and their marines killed to a man. Caesar’s warships were unhurt.
At dawn on the following day the troop transports and food ships belonging to the Thirty-seventh Legion sailed into the Great Harbor. Caesar wasn’t out of boiling water yet, but he had successfully fought a defensive war against huge odds until these urgently needed reinforcements arrived. Now he also had 5,000 ex-Republican veteran soldiers, 1,000 noncombatants, and a war fleet commanded by Euphranor. As well as stacks of proper legionary food. How the men loathed Alexandrian rations! Especially oil made from sesame, pumpkin or croton seeds.
“I’ll take Pharos Isle,” Caesar announced.
Relatively easy; Ganymedes wasn’t willing to expend any of his trained personnel to defend the island, though its inhabitants resisted the Romans bitterly. In the end, to no avail.
Rather than waste his resources on Pharos, Ganymedes concentrated on marshaling every ship he could put in the water; he was convinced that the answer to Alexandria’s dilemma was a big victory at sea. Potheinus was sending information from the palace daily, though neither Caesar nor Ganymedes himself had told the Lord High Chamberlain that Achillas was dead; Ganymedes knew that did Potheinus know who was in command, his reports might dry up.
At the beginning of December, Ganymedes lost his informant in the palace.
“I can’t permit any hint of my next move to reach Ganymedes, so Potheinus must die,” said Caesar to Cleopatra. “Do you object to that?”
She blinked. “Not in the least.”
“Well, I thought it polite to ask, my dear. He’s your Lord High Chamberlain, after all. You might be running out of eunuchs.”
“I have plenty of eunuchs, and will appoint Apollodorus.”
Their time together was limited to an hour here and an hour there; Caesar never slept in the palace, or dined with her. All his energies were devoted to the war, an interminable business thanks to Caesar’s lack of numbers. She hadn’t told him yet about the baby growing in her womb. Time for that when he was less preoccupied. She wanted him to glow, not glower.
“Let me deal with Potheinus,” she said now.
“As long as you don’t torture him. A quick, clean death.”
Her face darkened. “He deserves to suffer,” she growled.
“According to your lights, definitely. But while I command, he gets a knife up under the ribs on the left side. I could flog and behead, but that’s a ceremony I don’t have time to conduct.”
So Potheinus died with a knife up under his ribs on the left side, as ordered. What Cleopatra didn’t bother to tell Caesar was that she showed Potheinus the knife a full two days before it was used. Potheinus did a lot of weeping, wailing and begging for his life in those two days.
The naval battle came on shortly into December. Caesar put his ships just seaward of the shoals outside the Eunostus Harbor without a center; the ten Rhodians on his right, the ten Pontics on his left, and a gap of two thousand feet between them in which to maneuver. His twenty converted transports lay well behind the gap. The strategy was his, the execution Euphranor’s, and the preparations before the first galley left its moorings meticulously detailed. Each of his reserve vessels knew exactly which ship of the line it was to replace, each legate and tribune knew precisely what his duties were, every century of legionaries knew which corvus it would use to board an enemy ship, and Caesar himself visited every unit with cheery words and a crisp summary of what he intended to achieve. Long experience had shown him that trained and experienced ranker soldiers could often take matters into their own hands and wrest victory from defeat if they too had been told exactly what the General planned, so he always kept his rankers informed.
The corvus, a wooden gangway equipped with an iron hook under its far end, was a Roman invention dating back to the wars against Carthage, a naval power far more skilled than any Roman admiral of that time. But the new device turned a sea battle into a land one, and Rome had no peer on land. The moment the corvus plunked down on the deck of an enemy ship, the hook married it to the enemy ship and let Roman troops pour aboard.
Ganymedes arranged the twenty-two biggest and best of his warships in a straight line facing Caesar’s gap, with twenty-two more behind them, and beyond this second line a great many undecked pinnaces and biremes. These last two kinds were not to fight; each held a small catapult to fire incendiary missiles.
The tricky part of the operation concerned the shoals and reefs; whichever side advanced first was the most at risk of being cut off and forced on to the rocks. While Ganymedes hung back, hesitating, Euphranor fearlessly rowed his vessels into the passage and skimmed past the hazards to engage. His leading ships were immediately surrounded, but the Rhodians were brilliant on the sea; no matter how he tried to manipulate his own clumsier galleys, Ganymedes couldn’t manage to sink, or board, or even disable any of the Rhodians. When the Pontics followed the Rhodians in, disaster struck for Ganymedes, his fleet now in complete disorder and at Caesar’s mercy—a quality Caesar wasn’t famous for in battle.
By the time dusk broke the hostilities off, the Romans had captured a bireme and a quinquereme with all their marines and oarsmen, sunk three quinqueremes, and badly damaged a score of other Alexandrian ships, which limped back to the Cibotus and left Caesar in command of the Eunostus Harbor. The Romans incurred no losses whatsoever.
Now remained the Heptastadion mole and the Cibotus, heavily fortified and manned. At the Pharos end of the mole the Romans dug themselves in, but the Cibotus end was a different matter. Caesar’s greatest handicap was the narrowness of the Heptastadion, which didn’t permit more than twelve hundred men a foothold, and so few men were not enough to storm the Alexandrian defenses.
As usual when the going was hard, Caesar grabbed his shield and sword and mounted the ramparts to hearten his men, his scarlet paludamentum cloak marking him out for all to see. A huge racket in the rear gave his soldiers the impression that the Alexandrians had worked around behind them; they began to retreat, leaving Caesar stranded. His own pinnace sat in the water just below, so he leaped into it and directed it along the mole, shouting up to his men that there were no Alexandrians in their rear—keep going, boys! But more and more soldiers were jumping into the craft, threatening to capsize it. Suddenly deciding that today was not the day he was going to take the Cibotus end of the mole, Caesar dived off the pinnace into the water, his scarlet general’s cloak clamped between his teeth. The paludamentum acted as a beacon while he swam; everyone followed it to safety.
So Ganymedes still held the Cibotus and the city end of the Heptastadion, but Caesar held the rest of the mole, Pharos Isle, all of the Great Harbor, and the Eunostus apart from the Cibotus.
The war entered a new phase and was waged on land. Ganymedes seemed to have concluded that Caesar had wreaked sufficient havoc on the city to make rebuilding a major task, so why not wreck more of it? The Alexandrians began to demolish another swath of houses beyond the no
When this bombardment didn’t succeed, a wooden siege tower ten stories high and mounted on wheels began to roll up and down Canopic Avenue contributing to the chaos, firing boulders and volleys of spears. Caesar put a counterattack on top of the Hill of Pan and shot enough flaming arrows and bundles of blazing straw into the tower to set it afire. A roaring inferno, hordes of screaming men toppling from it, it rolled away toward the haven of Rhakotis, and was seen no more.
The war had reached a stalemate.
After three months of constant urban battle that saw neither side in any position to impose terms of truce or surrender, Caesar moved back into the palace and left conduct of the siege to the competent Publius Rufrius.
“I detest fighting in cities!” he said savagely to Cleopatra, stripped to the padded scarlet tunic he wore under his cuirass. “This is exactly like Massilia, except that there I could leave the action to my legates and march off myself to wallop Afranius and Petreius in Nearer Spain. Here, I’m stuck, and every day that I’m stuck is one more day the so-called Republicans have to shore up resistance in Africa Province.”
“Was that where you were going?” she asked.
“Yes. Though what I had really hoped was to find Pompeius Magnus alive and negotiate a peace that would have saved a great many precious Roman lives. But, thanks to your wretched, corrupt system of eunuchs and deviants in charge of children and cities—not to mention public moneys!—Magnus is dead and I am stuck!”
“Have a bath,” she said soothingly. “You’ll feel better.”
“In Rome they say that Ptolemaic queens bathe in ass’s milk. How did that myth originate?” he asked, sinking into the water.
“I have no idea,” she said from behind him, working the knots out of his shoulders with surprisingly strong fingers. “Perhaps it goes back to Lucullus, who was here for a while before he went on to Cyrenaica. Ptolemy Chickpea gave him an emerald quizzing glass, I think. No, not a quizzing glass. An emerald etched with Lucullus’s own profile—or was it Chickpea’s profile?”
“I neither know nor care. Lucullus was a wronged man, though personally I loathed him,” Caesar said, swinging her around.
Somehow she didn’t look as wraithlike in the water; her little brown breasts broke its surface more plumply, nipples big and very dark, areolae more pronounced.
“You’re with child,” he said abruptly.
“Yes, three months. You quickened me that first night.”
His eyes traveled to her flushed face, his mind racing to fit this astonishing news into his scheme of things. A child! And he had none, had expected to have none. How amazing. Caesar’s child would sit on the Egyptian throne. Would be Pharaoh. Caesar had fathered a king or a queen. It mattered not an atom to him which sex the babe emerged with; a Roman valued daughters just as highly as sons, for daughters meant political alliances of huge importance to their sires.
“Are you pleased?” she asked anxiously.
“Are you well?” he countered, stroking her cheek with a wet hand, finding those beautiful lion’s eyes easy to drown in.
“I thrive.” She turned her head to kiss the hand.
“Then I am pleased.” He gathered her close.
“Ptah has spoken, he will be a son.”
“Why Ptah? Isn’t Ammon-Ra your great god?”
“Amun-Ra,” she corrected. “Ammon is Greek.”
“What I like about you,” he said suddenly, “is that you don’t mind talking in the midst of touching, and you don’t moan or carry on like a professional whore.”
“You mean I’m an amateur one?” she asked, kissing his face.
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse.” He smiled, enjoying her kisses. “You’re better pregnant, you look more like a woman than a little girl.”
As January ended, the Alexandrians sent a deputation to Caesar at the palace. Ganymedes was not among its members; its spokesman was the Chief Judge, a worthy Ganymedes considered expendable if Caesar was in a mood to take prisoners. What none of them knew was that Caesar ailed, had succumbed to a gastric illness that grew worse with each passing day.
The audience was conducted in the throne room, which Caesar had not seen before. It paled every other chamber he had seen to insignificance. Priceless furniture stood around it, all Egyptian in style; the walls were gem-encrusted gold; the floor was gold tiles; the ceiling beams were covered in gold. What the local craftsmen hadn’t mastered was plastering, so there were no complicated cornices or ceilings honeycombed with detail—but with all that gold, who noticed? Most eye-catching of all was a series of solid gold statues larger than life and elevated on plinths: the pantheon of Egyptian gods, very bizarre entities. Most had human bodies, almost all had the heads of animals—crocodile, jackal, lioness, cat, hippopotamus, hawk, ibis, dog-faced baboon.
Apollodorus, Caesar noted, was dressed as an Egyptian rather than a Macedonian; he wore a long, pleated robe of linen dyed in red and yellow stripes, a gold collar bearing the vulture, and a cloth of gold nemes headdress, which was a stiffened, triangular cloth drawn tight across the forehead and tied behind the neck, with two wings that protruded from behind the ears. The court had ceased to be Macedonian.
Nor did Caesar conduct the interview. Cleopatra did, clad as Pharaoh: a great offense to the Chief Judge and his minions.
“We did not come to bargain with Egypt, but with Caesar!” he snapped, his head turned to look at a rather grey Caesar.
“I rule here, not Caesar, and Alexandria is a part of Egypt!” Cleopatra said in a loud, harsh, unmusical voice. “Lord High Chamberlain, remind this creature who I am and who he is!”
“You’ve abrogated your Macedonian inheritance!” the Chief Judge shouted, as Apollodorus forced him to kneel to the Queen.
“Where is Serapis in this hideous menagerie of beasts? You’re not the Queen of Alexandria, you’re the Queen of Beasts!”
A description of Cleopatra which amused Caesar, seated below her on his ivory curule chair, placed where King Ptolemy’s throne used to be. Oh, many shocks for a Macedonian bureaucrat! Pharaoh, not the Queen—and a Roman where the King should be.
“Tell me your business, Hermocrates, then you may leave the presence of so many beasts,” Pharaoh said.
“I have come to ask for King Ptolemy.”
“Why?”
“Clearly he isn’t wanted here!” Hermocrates said tartly. “We are tired of Arsinoë and Ganymedes,” he added, apparently unaware that he was feeding Caesar valuable information about morale among the Alexandrian high command. “This war drags on and on,” the Chief Judge said with genuine weariness. “If we have custody of the King, it may be possible to negotiate a peace before the city ceases to exist. So many ships destroyed, trade in ruins—”
“You may negotiate a peace with me, Hermocrates.”
“I refuse to, Queen of Beasts, traitor to Macedonia!”
“Macedonia,” said Cleopatra, sounding equally tired, “is a place none of us has seen in generations. It’s time you stopped calling yourselves Macedonians. You’re Egyptians.”
“Never!” said Hermocrates between his teeth. “Give us King Ptolemy, who remembers his ancestry.”
“Bring his majesty at once, Apollodorus.”
The little king entered in proper Macedonian dress, complete with hat and diadem; Hermocrates took one look at him and fell to his knees to kiss the boy’s outstretched hand.
“Oh, your majesty, your majesty, we need you!” he cried.
So now he stared at the Chief Judge suspiciously. “Need me?” he asked. “What for, Hermocrates?”
“You are our king, majesty. We need you with us.”
“With you? Where?”
“In our part of Alexandria.”
“You mean I should leave my palace?”
“We have another palace ready for you, your majesty. After all, I see Caesar sitting in your place here. It’s you we need, not the Princess Arsinoë.”