Page 61 of Cleopatra

I lifted my chin. “I will not allow it.”

Caesar met my gaze. “Neither will I. You know what comes next.”

I looked to the ocean where the royal barge had become just a speck on the horizon. I smiled, though I felt no joy.

“War.”

Chapter Twelve

48 BCE

t took two cycles of the moon for the rest of Caesar’s troops to arrive in Alexandria, during which time war had broken out across the city.

The crusade wasn’t what I had expected. I’d had romantic ideas of warfare, in many ways believing it to be a larger version of a gladiator match, where two opposing forces would battle until someone surrendered.

But war was not romantic. It smelled of blood, piss and shit. The tactics were barbaric, underhanded and nothing like what I had studied with my tutors.

The nobility who supported Arsinoe and Theos’s cause had armed their servants with blades and sent them to ransack Alexandria. Caesar and I had in turn dug trenches and erected mantlets around the city’s walls, barricading ourselves from their onslaught.

In the early days of the siege, life on Antirhodos continued much as before. The fighting was too far away for it to affect me. On the rare occasions I went into the city to see the progression of our defences, I would return to the palace dazed as though waking from a nightmare. By the time I had got to the throne room, with our maps and charts, the war had become a senet game once more—a distant thing, though there was no winning this game, no matter the outcome.

Either I lost Egypt, or I lost my siblings.

As the crescent moon shone in the sky for the second time since the battle had begun, the impact of the siege had started to bleed across the bay to the island.

The food was the first to go.

“There’s not enough meat to feed them.” My lions prowled in their cages before me. I could see the ribs beneath the skin of the lioness closest to me. Another pawed at the ground where a streak of dried blood had stained the stone—the only remnant of their last meal, which had been some days earlier.

An errant cloud floated over the sun, casting the menagerie in shadow. It suited my mood.

“They will not survive,” I said to Caesar sadly.

The rest of the cages in the menagerie were empty; we had let the hippos and crocodiles free in the bay and released the cats and dogs into the city. But the lions’ hunger would drive them to the people’s throats, and there had been enough bloodshed in the city.

Caesar didn’t mock me for the care I gave to the animals. “Let me send a ship down the coast and release them there.”

“It’s not possible. The bay is surrounded. We’d only be sacrificing capable sailors and soldiers.”

He knew that, but I believed he would have done it if I’d asked. Caesar had been true to his word—as he always was—and stayed to help me regain my throne. The moment Arsinoe and Theos had sailed away, he had sent word to every soldier and ship from Crete, Petra, Rhodes, Syria and Cilicia. Nine Rhodian warships were the only ones to have arrived so far, but they weren’t enough to break through the blockade.

One of the lionesses growled low in her throat, her eyes glittering as she watched me. I wrung my hands in guilt.

“You see the smallest one, with the silver patch of fur on her paw? I captured her when I was twelve years old. She had been abandoned by her pack and was wounded right there, where the fur has grown back grey.” I had been hunting with Father and Arsinoe—who had both made many kills that day. I, on the other hand, had come up short. I was not as skilled with the bow as my sister.

“It would have been an easy kill,” I continued. “But when I took aim, she lifted her head and looked at me. She wasn’t scared; if anything she was defiant.” I laughed. “Father was not happy when I returned to the litter with her bound and alive. But he let me keep her here.”

Caesar looked around the menagerie. The only thing that thrived here now were the plants, growing wild and free without servants to tend to them. The air was thick with the smell of the orange pomegranate flowers pouting towards the sun.

Show me your home, Caesar had said. Every day, when the sun reached its highest point, we would walk together to a new part of the island. Most of the time the walk would invigorate me; time alone with Caesar was always exhilarating. But occasionally, like today, I would become morose.

“There are very many cages here—you must have had an impressive number of animals,” Caesar said.

“Yes. Some were sent from our neighbouring allies as gifts, others I caged from hunting trips.”

“But no aviary?”

“No,” I said. “I will not cage a bird. It would be like binding a lioness’s legs together. A bird must be allowed to fly.”