The Horse Changer (16 page)

By this time our men had fetched weapons from the armoury. One of the other prefects, as I recall, handed me a long sword. Trebonius, seeing it, suddenly begged for his life, but I paid no attention. ‘This is from Livia,’ I told him. I expect I hurried my stroke. I was a bit drunk as well. At any rate, my aim was faulty, and I cracked open his skull. He gasped and groaned, still alive. I pried the sword from bone and heard a cry of mortal pain. He lay on the marble, blood pouring from his scalp. At least the begging had stopped.

I used both hands this time as I brought the sword down and through his neck. The sword itself shattered. The head rolled across the floor like some kind of ball. I sloshed through the pooling blood after it. I gave it a vicious kick. I followed the thing as it tumbled along a macabre serpentine path, blood and brains spilling in its wake. I slipped and nearly fell before I kicked it again. Even then I was not finished but started after it once more.

‘Easy, Dellius,’ Dolabella called. He was laughing at the great mess of it all. ‘Allienus needs to recognise the face. Mash it up too much and you won’t get your legions.’

I stared uncertainly at the head, then back at its bleeding corpse. Finally I focused on my patron. I was like a man who awakens from a nightmare, no longer capable of distinguishing reality from dream. I grabbed the head by its ear and carried it over to one of the palace slaves who had been serving us when the carnage began. He was twelve or thirteen, quite small for his age. I dropped the bloodied pulp in his lap. ‘Put it in a jar of wine and seal the lid shut with wax,’ I told him. The boy looked at the face of his last master in perfect terror, his breathing fast and shallow. The poor lad seemed incapable of speaking, but at least he did as he was told.

After all these years I am still not sure if Livia sent me to kill Trebonius for the sake of revenge or to see if she could accomplish a murder simply by asking for it. I expect she hardly knew herself; she was only a child acting the part of an adult. For me, however, the real curiosity has always been the inexplicable rage I felt after taking the man’s life. Was it for the sake of the murdered Caesar or for Livia’s hurt pride that I kicked that head? I cannot answer with certainty. I am even inclined to wonder if something else excited my emotions, a feeling of having betrayed my own principles, perhaps.

I realise that, as a rational creature, I ought to be able to explain myself, but there it is. I am lost for a reason or had too many to understand my true motive. This much I can say, for I remember that evening in every detail. After handing the severed head to the boy I walked out of the governor’s banquet hall and ordered a weeping slave girl to draw a bath for me. I settled into a smooth stone tub of hot water and called for more hot water at once. When that cooled I demanded more. After I had soaked away whatever emotions stirred my rage, I pulled the girl into the water and tore away her tunic.

Later, I sent her to fetch fresh clothes for me from the governor’s wardrobe, his and no one else’s. I dressed myself in a handsome long-sleeved scarlet tunic cut in the Greek style. I had never before worn such a gorgeous costume; such airs in Tuscany and Rome would win a man scorn. In the orient such finery was customary, assuming one could afford it. After dressing, I fitted the governor’s ceremonial long sword and scabbard at my belt. Finally, I appropriated the finely woven wool mantle Trebonius had worn when he greeted us. Only then did I study my figure in a brass panel. By a trick of light the man staring back seemed a perfect stranger.

Dolabella’s Spartans had taken possession of the city. The only opposition remaining had withdrawn to the citadel. This meant it would be safe for my party to go at once to the harbour. Dolabella wrote out my passport in his own hand and impressed his signet ring into hot wax at the bottom of the letter. The parchment declared my name, my rank as a legate, and the authority under which I travelled, Cornelius Dolabella, proconsul of Syria. When he had passed the document to me he said, ‘Caesar once told me a legate does well to act exactly as his most experienced centurion advises, but if he is absolutely convinced he has a better idea, then he must “grit his teeth, pull his sword, and kill every son of a bitch who stands in his way!” I’ve found it the best advice I ever received. I suggest you follow it as well.’

I left the governor’s palace in the company of those officers who had helped me murder Trebonius and his staff. Also in our party was the slave boy to whom I had entrusted the head of Trebonius. I claimed the slave as my property by right of conquest. To my delight, once young Nicolas began speaking again, he demonstrated a rare talent for language, being fluent in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic, the popular language of the East. Like most Roman officers newly arrived in the East, I had studied the Greek of Homer and Plato, which is to say the ancient and classical dialects. I was still some years from being comfortable with modern Greek, called koine. Having an interpreter at my side would make my life easier.

At an island just west of Chios next evening our ship joined up with five transport ships in the service of Dolabella’s fleet. These carried a cohort of veteran legionaries, the horses of our officers, payroll for the men under my command and an armoury of weapons. I did not take inventory at once. I was eager to get on to Egypt. I simply assumed Hannibal was on one of the ships. I learned he was missing in Kos, when we were forced to take shelter from a storm and unloaded our livestock in the dead of night.

With so few horses making the journey it did not make sense that Hannibal had been forgotten. I knew a legate’s horse is never misplaced or overlooked; a general’s horses are accorded nearly the respect of the general himself. I could only conclude that Hannibal remained in Asia on Dolabella’s orders. Dolabella of course had no intention of keeping Hannibal as his own; of that I am quite sure, but he knew how I loved that horse and could not resist playing the prankster. And of course, since the horse was in Asia while I was in Africa, he took care to give the animal some exercise. Funny though it may have seemed from his perspective, I can tell you this: I found no humour in it.

Our fleet carried water and supplies capable of sustaining us a fortnight at sea. It was enough, with good weather, for us to sail directly to Egypt. Between Smyrna and Alexandria, Cassius Longinus and his allies in Judaea owned the islands and the entire coastline. Any stop was dangerous, but a storm we encountered close to Kos obliged us to find harbour and cost us a fight with the Roman garrison there. In fact, we used up almost a week of our supplies. With our scant forces we could not take the fortifications on the island, but before we left we damaged their ships so they could not give chase or warn Cassius’s allies on the mainland.

Three days more got us to Cyprus. There we stopped for fresh water and supplies with only a minor skirmish as we left the harbour. Afterwards, it was five days and nights against the wind to Egypt.

We saw what looked to be a second Venus in the night sky. It hung low on the horizon, shimmering like a star that none of us had seen before, but our pilot knew it for what it was. By first light we could see the faint outlines of Alexandria’s famous lighthouse under the great flame. It had been a long haul without coming to port, and the men began cheering. Egypt and land at last.

The lighthouse of Alexandria is situated on the island of Pharos, which is about a mile distant from the city. Pharos is a long, thin rectangular strip of ground that serves as the harbour’s primary breakwater. It also functions as the city’s outer fortress. A mile-long causeway had been constructed between the island and mainland, this perhaps a century after the city’s creation. Militarily, the effect was perfect. The island could be fortified with men and supplies; should it fall to the enemy the causeway was easily closed off from the city. As a result of the causeway, Alexandria enjoyed two large harbours, one for ships on imperial business, the other for commercial traffic. To either side of these harbours the land had been extended into the sea and fortified with artillery. The effective encirclement of each harbour, much as one finds at Brindisi, makes the city quite safe from attack by sea.

The royal palace sits on a spur of land along the eastern perimeter of the harbour. A temping jewel on view, seemingly for anyone to take, it is surrounded by water on three sides. Because the outer walls plunge down into the sea, access to the palace comes only from within the harbour. The first of these access points is a long and easily defended stairway that snakes its way up a steep incline from the harbour to the palace gates. This makes an attack on the palace quite costly, if not thoroughly impractical. A second point of access is the boulevard that connects the palace complex to the city of Alexandria. Like the stairway leading up from the harbour, this boulevard only appears open and inviting. For all its luxury and spaciousness, it is, in reality, a narrow defile designed for trapping and killing an invading force.

Thorough as these defences of the royal palace are, the city itself is also protected by a high wall and numerous towers. Alexandria’s chief fortification, however, is nature itself. There are no harbours close to the city. To the south and east one encounters the Nile Delta, swampy ground filled with fast running streams over which only a few roads and bridges afford access. To the west the pastel green fields soon fade into an inhospitable desert landscape. All of which has given Alexandria a relatively uneventful history during its three centuries of existence. In fact the only significant disturbances have arisen from internal unrest, the most recent being the civil war between Queen Cleopatra and her younger brother. This was the conflict that Julius Caesar famously settled, though he lost a fleet of ships in the process.

As we were Roman soldiers, our ships entered the imperial harbour without first being boarded by agents of the harbourmaster, but we were not permitted to disembark until I had presented my passport to a Roman freedman. This fellow was nominally in the service of our legions, but, as I quickly discovered, there were no legions in Alexandria. They had withdrawn to Memphis at Queen Cleopatra’s request.

Once this freedman had examined my passport, he asked my business. I informed him that I had a letter from Claudius Nero, who had asked me to deliver it in person to Aulus Allienus. This excited some curiosity, but I would not explain my business to anyone but Allienus. The freedman promised my request would be passed on to Allienus. He then suggested we stay on our ships until he could arrange accommodations for us within the palace compound. I answered him bluntly that we were coming off our ships with or without invitation. This was not well received but, having no rank, he would not quarrel with me.

Caesar had put Roman soldiers in the country. Any attempt to control or impede the Roman army was the same as open revolt, punishable by crucifixion. Accordingly, I ordered our men and supplies off the ships. We met no resistance from either the citizens or the Queen’s Guard.

I took up a defensive position in one of the basilicas close to the harbour. For the sake of our equipment and the great number of rowers and sailors in our company, we ended up commandeering three additional buildings, all of them adjacent to one another. This is the sort of activity that turns locals against standing armies, but I had no choice in the matter. I did not care to build a camp outside the city, lest we be locked out. While we were yet unloading our gear I sent men to collect food and supplies from the local merchants, writing promissory notes rather than parting with the meagre cash Dolabella had given me for payroll.