Читать книгу Queen Cleopatra - Talbot Mundy - Страница 11

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In the drama that we call life it is the part of wisdom to expect the unexpected, and to mistrust the expected when it comes—remembering: there is a false dawn but there is no doubt possible when once the sun has risen.

—Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

THE farthest eastern outlet of the Nile, fast silting up and navigable only in flat-bottomed scows, met the sea at Pelusium. Waves moaned into the estuary and pounded on an endless beach of unclean sand, and to the southward lay a wilderness of mud-flats fringed with reeds, inhabited by myriads of birds.

A strong fort, scowling, as it might be, at the dreariness, defended the highway between Egypt and Syria, which crossed that last arm of the Nile by the only practicable ford, with fish-traps on either side, winding amid miles of mud-flats where the ibis broke the eggs of crocodiles and myriads of flamingoes hunted shell-fish.

On the eastern bank there was a strip of cultivation—mainly onions and corn: on the western, as far as the eye could see, field after field of black mud that bore prodigious crops in season—water-wheels, thatched huts barely separable from the landscape, no trees.

The great brick fort was square and around it lay Pelusium—a maze of barns, shops, slaughter-houses, brothels, wine-shops, with a few mean inns and a marketplace, where Greek, Persian, Syrian and Armenian traders vied with Jews, or joined with them in chousing the Egyptian.

There was heat insufferable and a stench of dead fish, seaweed, onions and camel-dung. By day there were flies in swarms so dense that to the leeward of a wall or on the beach at noon a man could hardly breathe without inhaling them. A few small boats lay drawn out on the sand; a few small ships stuck noses into mud berths in the estuary. Over the whole landscape lay a pall of dreariness, suggesting that neither hope nor health had any being near Pelusium. The place seemed dying, like that outer tentacle of Father Nile that formerly had made it a considerable port.

On the eastern bank of the Nile, set so as to command the ford, lay Cleopatra's camp—a maze of black unsightly tents around a dune on which her white pavilion, of jetsam timber and a sail, open on three sides to the fetid wind, had been erected. She had hardly privacy; but her women were in thatch-roofed huts around her, which helped a little, and she had a small screened-off apartment at the rear.

Her ragged army's right flank rested on the beach, where a riffraff from Joppa and Gaza bivouacked by driftwood fires.

The left flank touched a muddy irrigation ditch a mile inland. At the rear of the camp a thousand camels meditated and as many horses kicked and fretted at the flies. There was a swarm of sutlers, traders, hangers-on, but not much of the pomp and panoply of war. Diomedes, followed suspiciously by a group of petty Arab chiefs, looked worried.

But he observed the decencies. He caused a bugle to be blown to announce that he desired an audience. When Cleopatra came forth from the enclosure at the rear into the open-sided sail-cloth pavilion, he made his bodyguard of ten black Nubians salute her—and he waited while her own ten answered the salute. Her throne was a chariot-body draped with leopard-skins, but she could have made an upturned empty chest look royal. Charmian and Lollianè came to stand beside her, and there were women with tall palm-leaf fans to drive the flies away.

Diomedes bowed again. The Arab chieftains, moving slowly, jockeying surreptitiously for precedence, contrived to conceal whatever interest they felt. Observant, they were careful not to exceed the bow of Diomedes.

"What do these princes want?" she asked.

Her voice awoke them to alertness, though they did not understand her Greek. They glanced at Diomedes, who was evidently primed to answer for them.

"Royal Egypt," he began, "these princes are complaining that you did not seize the fort, so that your cause, they say, is lost before the war begins. They say your brother's army in Pelusium is strong, and growing stronger, whereas we have few supplies and there is no help coming. Who, they ask, is to reward them and their followers for leaving home to linger in a camp beside a marsh, where flies infest them and Egyptians steal by night what little stores they have? To them I have answered, Royal Egypt, what you ordered me to say, but they demand an answer from your own lips."

Cleopatra's forehead clouded.

"You speak as if you favor their complaint," she said when she had thought a while. "You are a poor judge, Diomedes, if you hope to manage me by watering allegiance till it tastes like the tavern wine your lazy foragers provide!"

"Royal Egypt," he stammered uncomfortably, "I warned you, but you would not listen. There was nothing left for me but to bring them and let you find out for yourself. I have no—"

She interrupted him: "I require your courage. If you have none, rid me of your cowardice this minute!"

"Royal Egypt! What more can I do than I have done already? I abandoned all that I possess to join you here and to uphold your cause. Is this justice—to accuse me of—?"

"Justice?" she retorted. "Justice! That is what gods provide, after events!" She motioned him aside and he obeyed her, leaving the chiefs to plead their own cause uninterpreted. But Cleopatra gave them no chance, overwhelming them with fluent Arabic before they could begin to frame their speech:

"Did I summon you from straw-roofed villages to tell me how to govern? I have haled you here to save your wives and daughters, and your cattle and those little hoards of money you have buried under stamped earth floors!"

Their brown eyes shifted nervously at the suggestion that they had money hidden. One man made shift to answer, but she frowned him into silence.

"Am I answerable for the wind? You saw my great ship sail. It carried word to Caesar. You saw my messenger Apollodorus gallop to find Herod. And some of you, I think, know Herod, who is young, but he already has a name at which the very horses prick their ears. Do you prefer him as an enemy to recompense his followers at your cost?"

Their truculence was not so noticeable now. Her unexpected fluency in Arabic deprived them of the chief advantage they supposed they had: they could not prompt one another without her knowing; neither could they bewilder her with vague and random-worded sentences in her own tongue designed to half hide insolence.

"Ptolemy grows stronger in Pelusium?" she went on. "Answer then: why does he not march forth against us? Because his General Achillas counts the cost of giving battle, fearing Alexandria, behind him, that neither loves him nor is willingly against me. If Achillas had the worth within him of a tavern-thief he would have hurled himself against us, lo, these days ago. But he is too late. Herod comes, and a thousand cavalry."

"How do you know that?" a lean hook-nosed chieftain answered. "We have no such knowledge. If a thousand cavalry should follow Herod, he would have to raise them from the country to the east of Jordan and the south of Jericho. And if he did that, we should know it. We have no such news."

"Then go to the top of yonder dune and observe the dust toward the northeast," she retorted.

"We have seen it," the Arab answered. "That is the dust of twenty-five or thirty chariots—no army—surely not a thousand men. Moreover, there is movement in your brother's camp across the river."

There was no denying that. From hastily constructed sand-pits and redoubts, and from the breastwork that guarded the Nile ford, Cleopatra's pickets were sending word of it, the runners racing to be first. All along the crenelated fort wall of Pelusium appeared men's heads and shoulders, like vultures, gazing seaward. In the roadstead, out beyond the shallows where the Nile mud piled up ever-widening shoals and sea-birds circled above waves of yellow green, Ptolemy's small fleet apparently was weighing anchor.

Diomedes saluted with scant ceremony, turned away and, shouting for his horse, went striding toward the river to inspect the ford defenses.

"They will take us in flank. They will sail their fleet into the estuary," said an Arab.

Cleopatra stood up on tiptoe. But she was small and there was still a part of the horizon that she could not see. She gestured and her women moved her chariot-throne to higher ground outside the tent, the guards assisting and the Arab chiefs observant, curious, preserving a vague deference that might be turned into respectful friendliness or the reverse, as circumstances should dictate.

She stood on the chariot, gazing seaward, shielding her eyes with her hand. An Arab chief called for his camel. He mounted. The beast rose and he, too, stared in the direction of the sea.

"A ship. But whose ship?" said the Arab.

For a long time Cleopatra gazed in silence. Three times she seemed about to speak, but checked herself, as if doubting what she saw. Then:

"Pompey!" she said at last. "Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, seeking refuge!" She stepped down from the chariot. "To the beach with you! Go to the beach and signal him! Send out a boat to him! Warn him! Persuade him to land on our side of the estuary! Welcome him in my name!"

The Arabs left her and she turned to Charmian:

"What pity that Tros did not meet him! If he falls into the hands of my brother's men, they will sell him alive to Caesar! Whereas if he should join me here his men might rally to him and—and I would seize Pelusium—then Alexandria—we would give Caesar and Rome a problem that would make Rome hesitate!"