Death of an Eye Read online

  There were cats wherever one looked, black, brown, white, striped tabbies and multicolored tortoiseshells. They begged the dairyman for milk and the fisherman for scraps. They twined around the ankles of the unwary, hissed at children who had the temerity to pull their tails, arched their backs and purred when their spines were scratched, pounced and played with a bit of string, and napped in the sun curled up on the wide ledge of a fountain or a half-wall of stone or a marble seat.

  Roses bloomed everywhere, vying with bushes of rosemary and verbena and lavender to perfume the air. It was a city to delight every sense, and Tetisheri did not wonder at the dazed expressions of the visitors who wandered the streets.

  Where a side street met the Soma a large wooden tray of artfully spilled unset gemstones perched on a sturdy metal tripod, towered over by two enormous guards armed with pilums, gladii, and long knives. Their job was to scowl menacingly in the background while the gem merchant, one Cordros, bargained deferentially with a young Alexandrian noble attired in silk tunic and kilt, who preened beneath a broad collar of gold and lapis beads and four broad beaten gold bracelets, one above and below each elbow. He was attended by ten or twelve of his closest friends, though none were as well dressed or as expensively adorned as he.

  Tetisheri knew him and took care not to catch his eye. Cordros, a friend of Neb’s, winked at her on the sly as she passed. “My lord, you wound me to the heart! My prices are the best you will find from here to Rome itself! Fifty denarii for such a stone would leave me no profit at all—”

  “Nenwef still spending his wife’s money as fast as her father hands it over to him, I see,” Apollodorus said. “Our esteemed King Ptolemy did the girl no favors in arranging that marriage.”

  “Not so loud, you’ll be heard.”

  “I don’t care if I am.”

  A man, an upriver Egyptian by the look of his headscarf, was sent sprawling from the door of a taverna. Apollodorus stepped in between him and Tetisheri as the taverna keeper spat at their feet. “No Egyptians allowed! Keep out!”

  Apollodorus helped the Egyptian to his feet. “All right there, sir?”

  The Egyptian, dark face made darker by rage, wrenched out of Apollodorus’ grip and shoved his way through the crowd. The Alexandrians and the tourists were largely indifferent, but across the street a group of Egyptians clustered and muttered together. Alexandria was a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and history, but beneath its glittering surface the city held its breath. For what? Until Caesar left? Until Ptolemy tried to kill Cleopatra and she killed him instead? Until the Egyptians rioted against their Greek lords? It had happened before, too many times to count.

  Apollodorus watched the group of Egyptians until they noticed him looking and broke off to go their separate ways. “Who’s the girl?” he said, continuing up the Way.

  “What girl?”

  “The young girl with the old eyes who answered the door.”

  “Oh. Keren.”

  “From Judea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. All those dark curls. Another one of your runaways?”

  “She wanted to be a doctor, not a wife. It wasn’t an option her father was willing to entertain.”

  “How did she come your way?”

  “Neb was homeward bound from Iskenderun almost two years ago. Someone told her to look for his sail and when he put into port at Jaffa to offload cargo, she stowed away on board. He didn’t find her until he saw Pharos.” She saw his smile from the corner of her eye and in spite of herself she smiled, too. “Well, all right. He didn’t allow her to be found until then.”

  “What happened to the one before? The one from Persia who was fleeing a geriatric husband and his first three wives and their, what was it, twenty-four children?”

  “Yasmin? Sosigenes took her on his staff.”

  Apollodorus’ eyebrows went up. “On the staff of the queen’s chief counselor? She did well for herself.”

  “She reads and writes Greek, Latin, and Persian, and he’s teaching her cursive Demotic. He says she shows real aptitude. She took lodgings with Iphigenia to be nearer the Library.”

  “A scholar. I wonder how she managed that, given how cloistered the Persians keep their women.”

  “She says her father thought education was a way to keep the women quiet.”

  Apollodorus laughed out loud, a sound that had more than one woman look around and follow him with their eyes. “More fool he.” He stepped out in front to lead the way through a knot of Roman tourists gathered around a display of allegedly antique pottery and statuary featuring the entire panoply of Egyptian gods and goddesses going all the way back, according to the lively, sharp-featured proprietor, to the First Dynasty. The Romans, displaying that touching reverence mixed with inferiority with which they approached all things pharaonic, looked only too willing to believe him.

  “Poor bastards,” Apollodorus said, still not bothering to lower his voice.

  Tetisheri, knowing the proprietor, another and less savory friend of Uncle Neb’s, agreed with him but she had other, more pressing things on her mind. “How is she?”

  “Big as a hippo.”

  She quelled a giggle and tried to speak reprovingly. “This is not a respectful way of which to speak of our sovereign.”

  “She said it first.” He glanced at her, a grin lurking at the corners of his mouth. The sun streaked his hair with gold. “Takes an extra large carpet to roll her up in these days.”

  She laughed outright at this and he paused in mid step, looking down at her. When Auletes had hired Apollodorus away from the Five Soldiers to be Auletes’ daughter’s personal bodyguard, Apollodorus had seemed so much older and more experienced. Now, he seemed oddly so much nearer in age and every bit as attractive as he had been when she was a moonstruck girl of twelve.

  Her heart skipped a beat. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said after a long moment in which she felt he spent an inordinate amount of time cataloguing features he already knew only too well. He moved on and she followed.

  They passed still more docks facing the Great Harbor and still more shops and stalls and inns and tavernas that clustered opportunistically near the waterfront. They passed the obelisks, and the headquarters of the Queen’s Guard, where the bellows of sergeants and the stamp of feet and clash of arms drowned out everything else. A smaller company of Egyptians, none of them over fourteen and indisputably new recruits, was being drilled with sword and shield. They were assisted in this effort by a voluntary critique from some off-duty Roman soldiers. If she read their insignia correctly, they were part of the Veteran Sixth Legion, the legion Caesar had brought with him which had suffered so many casualties in the late war.

  “Put some shoulder into it, lad, it won’t bite you,” one of them said, and shook his head while the rest of his friends sighed and cast up their eyes when the recruit so advised hit himself in the head with the pommel of his own sword.

  The sound of a sharp smack was followed by a yelp. The instructor drew his hand back for another blow, the round, slender stick in his hand whistling through the air to come down with another smack on the unlucky backside of the recruit nearest him. “Straighten up that line, you clumsy bastards! If your mothers could not teach you how to walk without tripping over your own feet, by Sobek’s mighty balls the Royal Guard will!”

  “I’ve never seen so many upriver folk under arms,” Tetisheri said.

  “One of her new battalions,” Apollodorus said. “She’s been recruiting all the way up to Syrene and Philae.”

  “And they’re actually coming?”

  “They’ll come for her.”

  “They wouldn’t for Auletes.”

  He looked at her, brow raised. “No. But they will for her. She is their very own Isis made flesh, after all.”

  She knew what he meant. Four years before, they had both been present three hundred leagues up the river in Thebes when the queen had personally escorted the new Baucis bull
to his home in the temple of Hermonthis (or Armant, as any Egyptian worshipper could and would tell you was its proper name). Every priest in Upper and Lower Egypt was present in full regalia and Cleopatra appeared larger than life beneath the Double Crown. All of them were attendant on the massive beast with the white body and the black face whose raiment nearly outshone the queen’s. But only nearly.

  Thousands of Egyptians had lined both shores of the Nile and crammed into boats large and small that so crowded the river you could have walked across it without getting your feet wet. They were there to cry out as one their adulation to the Lady of the Two Lands. Their collective religious fervor drove many to faint dead away into the arms of their companions, to be revived later by a feast at Cleopatra’s expense which went on for days afterwards. It was a celebration to which the nomarchs in their annual reports to the crown attributed a dramatic uptick in births nine months later. All to the good, the queen would have said, as that meant more farmers, craftsmen and soldiers under arms nineteen years later.

  Regardless, no one who was there ever forgot the sight—or neglected to say so over and over again—and no living Egyptian who had not attended more bitterly regretted any decision in their lives. Many of them were so struck by the queen’s appearance at that event that they followed her downriver to Alexandria, where she welcomed them with a tithe of grain and a one-time relief from their annual tax to help them settle in.

  In fact, Tetisheri thought, before Cleopatra took her place on the throne of the Ptolemies, Egyptians had formed less than a third of the population of Alexandria, a city dominated by the Macedonian Greek ruling class and supported by the Jewish population. Now they were moving in to the city themselves, settling down, selling their own goods directly instead of through Alexandrian middlemen, drinking in Alexandrian tavernas—or trying to—and training in Cleopatra’s army.

  Not everyone was comfortable with that change.

  The extensive jumble of buildings that formed the Royal Palace gleamed richly in the noon sun, chiseled from limestone faced with marble and embellished with coral and lapis and turquoise and carnelian inlay. Elaborately carved columns supported bas-relief friezes depicting scenes from Atum creating Shu and Tefnut to Alexander scattering the grain that would become the de facto boundaries of the city, themselves painted every color of the rainbow. The mixture of dazzling white stone and garish rainbow paint was overwhelming, and when they entered through a small side door the relief was so abrupt Tetisheri closed her eyes for a moment to let them adjust. Apollodorus exchanged a nod with the guard, a grizzled Alexandrian Greek whose face she recognized but whose name she couldn’t remember. She followed Apollodorus down a long hall with guards stationed an arm’s length apart. They were, Tetisheri noted with interest, equally divided between Alexandrian Greeks and upriver Egyptians. To a man they looked narrow-eyed and suspicious, of Tetisheri and Apollodorus, and probably of each other as well.

  Apollodorus went through another door and a series of connecting corridors less well attended, one of which went behind a false wall and another so dusty she was surprised at the absence of corpses, human and otherwise. Once she saw two slaves engaged in a furtive embrace in a dark corner, who broke apart and scurried off when they caught sight of Apollodorus and Tetisheri. Around another corner she saw a tall, thin man with dark hair cut in the Greek style in a nondescript tunic and sandals approaching from the direction they were going. She caught the impression of close-set eyes and a long, sharp nose before he vanished into a passage that might have led outside and just as easily might not have, she was so turned around. A self-important steward clutching a ring with many keys on it stood back deferentially when he saw Apollodorus, his head bent as they passed.

  They emerged finally into a rectangular hall so large and bare of furnishings that their footsteps echoed off the walls. Apollodorus opened another door to reveal a short flight of stairs leading down. It was dark and airless and would have been intolerable if they had not emerged almost immediately onto another floor lit by torches. It must have been ventilated by hidden ducts because the flames flickered and the air was much fresher. Eventually they came to a door set deeply into the wall. Apollodorus knocked.

  “Enter.”

  He opened the door and stepped back to let Tetisheri precede him.

  In spite of being mostly underground the room had a quality of muted light, in part provided by long, narrow windows that lined the top of the exterior wall and admitted the salt tang of sea air and the sounds of waves lapping against rocks. Tetisheri thought the room must face the Royal Harbor and Pharos, and wondered if its light shone into this room at night.

  It was a small, rectangular room. Shelves lined all four walls and were filled with a fascinating array of scrolls and wooden boxes and bowls of every size, shape and depth and large burlap sacks and tiny linen bags and a quantity of plain glass vials with cork stoppers, some of which were full of mysterious liquids and had been sealed with wax. Two long tables stood in the center of the room, their tops crowded with bowls and beakers and braziers. Everywhere there were strips of papyrus and scraps of vellum densely notated mostly—Tetisheri craned her neck—in Greek, but some in cursive Demotic as well.

  A woman stood at the middle of one of the tables, tapping something from a square of papyrus into a bubbling pot set over a small brazier bearing a few glowing coals. “Thank you, Apollodorus,” she said without looking up.

  Tetisheri heard the door close behind her.

  Cleopatra Philopater Thea Noetera, seventh of her name, seventeenth of her line (or possibly eighteenth, depending on whether or not you counted Ptolemy VII), the Lady of Two Lands, the incarnation on earth of the goddess Isis, and absolute ruler of Alexandria and Upper and Lower Egypt (unless you counted her brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy XIV, and no one did, unless you were Julius Caesar, in which case everyone else did, too), fed the now empty envelope to the hot coals and took up a small metal spoon on a long handle to stir the contents of the pot. Her shift was simple but woven of the finest linen. Her hair was dark except when the light caught a stray auburn gleam, and was held back from her face by a thin gold fillet in the Greek style.

  “What are you working on?” Tetisheri said.

  The queen watched the pot as it came back to a boil. “Dried powdered willow bark ground fine, pomegranate juice, and honey.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “A potion to ease menstrual cramps.”

  Tetisheri smiled. “Not something I would have thought you stood in need of at present.”

  “No,” the queen said, chuckling as she ran a hand over her swollen belly. “Not just at present.”

  “You’re big for five months.”

  “It’s closer to six.” Cleopatra sighed and rubbed her belly again. “But yes, very big. All the women in my family show early on, or so my aunt tells me.”

  The potion boiled high inside the pot and she stirred it down again. “I’m trying to come up with something that a woman can swallow without it making an immediate reappearance. The ancient texts agree that pomegranate reduces inflammations, and it certainly tastes better than any of the ingredients in the remedies Zotikos makes.”

  “They’re that bad?”

  The queen shuddered. “Which is what happens when you have a man brewing tinctures meant to be administered to women for women’s problems.”

  Tetisheri grinned at the acid note in Cleopatra’s voice. “And the honey? A binding agent?”

  “So you weren’t asleep during the entirety of Natan’s classes after all. I often wondered. That, and the willow bark is so bitter and the pomegranate is so tart. I thought the honey might make it a little more palatable. Don’t touch that.”

  Tetisheri’s fingers had been hovering over a vial filled with some dark liquid. She snatched her hand back and looked up in inquiry.

  “Enough and it heals,” Cleopatra said. “Too much and it kills. Taken orally, almost instantly. Over time, used as a topical unguent, it c
an also prove fatal.”

  Tetisheri clasped her hands behind her back and maintained a respectful distance from everything in the room. “I knew you were skilled in potions and tinctures, Pati. I didn’t know you’d branched out into poisons.”

  “I’m thinking of writing a pharmacopoeia. Merit-Ptah could do with some updating.” The queen covered the coals in the brazier and looked up. Her wide-spaced eyes were large and dark and thickly lashed, her nose long, her mouth wide and full-lipped, her chin strong. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but there was an animated quality about every breath she took that drew attention and kept it. When Cleopatra Philopator caught your eye, you didn’t look away. “It’s been a long time, Sheri.”

  “Well, you’ve been busy, Pati.”

  “That I have. And you?”

  “The business flourishes. Uncle Neb is just back from upriver. I left him gloating over his newest boatload of treasures.”

  Cleopatra raised an eyebrow. “Did he bring back any books?”

  Tetisheri laughed. “It would be as much as my life was worth if I told you that he had.”

  With mock severity the queen said, “Are you implying I’m in the habit of commandeering trade goods legally acquired by my citizens?”

  “I’m implying nothing, I’m stating a fact.” Tetisheri let their mutual laughter warm her for a moment. But only for a moment. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, Pati, but why am I here?”