Читать книгу Queen Cleopatra - Talbot Mundy - Страница 5

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We recognize a kindred spirit, or a greater spirit, neither by eye nor by ear, but by the heart, which sees by flashes of the Light within ourselves.

—Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

OUTSIDE, the chariot's restless team was being petted by a noisy throng of sightseers, to the intense annoyance of the charioteer, who began to grin, however, when Tros followed Apollodorus into the chariot and the horses reared at the touch of the reins.

The team leaped forward, scattering the crowd. The Thracian jumped in, squatted on the floor, leaving his master's guest his choice of the two rear seats and studying with interest the enormous size of Tros' legs—ready to avoid being stepped on when their owner should lose his balance.

But Tros surprised him. He stood, legs well apart, hands clenched behind him, holding on to nothing, looking ahead calmly over Apollodorus' shoulder—an imperturbable figure, king-like in his crimson-bordered cloak. Apollodorus sent the horses at the limit of their speed, but Tros stood calmly surveying the splendor of Alexandria and its feverishly moving crowd.

"You astonish me," Apollodorus remarked over-shoulder at last. "I never before saw a seaman who could ride a chariot."

"On a paved street? You should go to Britain," Tros answered. "My friend the King, Caswallon, drives wild horses over goat-tracks, at a speed that would show you nothing but his dust!"

"Good drivers, are they, the Britons?"

"Hah! You should have seen them swoop into the Roman ranks, eight chariots abreast, with scythes on the wheel-hubs and the scythe-points almost touching, then wheeling like pigeons to right and left to mow the Romans down—and that on a beach, mind you, with a big surf running. I have ridden across the breadth of Britain with Caswallon. Nearly half my crew are Britons."

"Good sailors?" Apollodorus asked.

"No. Rank bad. There will never come a sailor from that island—not though the world should last for ever. I make use of them to serve the catapults, to scrub decks, cook, and man the oars in fair weather. They are also good at music. They can harp and chant. For the foul-weather work I have Northmen, who came from the top of the world, where the winters are dark and six months long. I have, too, Eskualdunak* from Spain—red-headed rogues, each with a fine opinion of himself. They need an iron discipline. Five hundred men in all—a quandary to keep well fed. A great ship such as mine is more care than a kingdom."

[* Basques.]

Apollodorus laughed. "An obol for your ship then! Nay, that is too much—that is more than all the kingdoms of the world are worth!" But suddenly his manner changed. The horses checked a little, feeling subtle warning pass along the reins. Ahead—away ahead, where a bright-hued stream of slaves and merchants flowed across-street, south and north, the crowd had parted suddenly to let two chariots through that came at full pelt.

"Racing?" Tros asked. He had seen a street race on his way that morning.

"Ptolemy's men!" Apollodorus answered, leaning forward, holding the reins short, as if about to make the sharp turn at the barrier's end in an arena. All his debonair indifference was gone.

The crowd under the colonnades began to shout excitedly, well used to mid-street racing in defiance of the law, but this was novelty. This looked like such a game as Romans loved to stage, with death included, and a slim chance even for Apollodorus to escape alive.

Toward him, furiously, one on either hand, the two-horsed military chariots came headlong, clattering and swaying, two men helmeted like heroes leaning out of each to shout and gesture. They appeared to be commanding him to stop, but Apollodorus held his course exactly down the middle of the street, only making sure that he had his team in hand.

Suddenly, within a hundred paces, both oncoming chariots swung inward, wheeling, trying to bar the way. Their horses slid and struggled—met breast to breast—a pole broke and a horse went down—

"Halt! Halt in the name of Ptolemy!"

A man in leopard-skin leaped out of the confusion and came running to seize Apollodorus' reins. He received a whip-lash on the face that sent him reeling. The Sicilian swung his frenzied team to the right and escaped collision by an inch, then shook the reins and took the middle of the street again, full pelt.

"Not bad," said Tros. "The Britons would have done it better."

Apollodorus did not answer, for again the crowd had scattered. Cavalry were coming—a troop of Ptolemaic guardsmen, at the trot, their red plumes dancing and the sun a-gleam on brass. General Achillas, splendid in his armor, led them, with a mercenary Roman body-guard of four on either hand.

Between them and Apollodorus was a cross-street, running right and left. He raced for it, leaning forward, shaking the reins, fanning his team with the long whip, silent. And a roar went up like that of the arena when the favorite begins to make his bid to leave the field behind and the watching crowd grows frantic.

"Ah-h-h! Apollodorus! Ah-h-h!"

There was a mob surge at the cross-street, where the crowd ran helter-skelter. Some of them, divining that he meant to take the right-hand turn, went scattering into mid-street to avoid him, getting in the way of the oncoming calvary that had broken into a gallop. A trumpet sounded.

"Fools!" said Apollodorus grimly between set teeth. "Good! They have started a riot!"

There began to be a clamor and the thwack of the flat of swords on heads and shoulders—then a mob snarl. Stones, onions, broken bricks and flower-pots suddenly began to rain from windows, roofs and colonnades. The air became charged with flying debris. Alexandria, not often in a mood to be imposed upon, had snatched excuse for one of its sudden tantrums and the sunlit Street of Canopus changed into a rainbow tumult quicker than the eye could follow or the unused stranger understand.

Apollodorus took the turn on one wheel, not ten paces clear of the indignant cavalry.

Achillas and his cavalry shook off the crowd and poured into the street behind the chariot. The din and thunder of pursuit gave warning to whole blocks of market-stalls and tenements. A thousand wild-eyed Alexandrians on the instant recognized Apollodorus in headlong flight, saw the helmets of oncoming cavalry, and charged into the street to block pursuit with any weapons they could lay their hands on, yelling for their favorite.

Apollodorus, with the crowd between him and the cavalry, had no fear now of being overtaken in the side streets, through which he began to weave his way as swiftly as the throng would let him.

They came to a side-gate of the Royal Area, threading their way through a crowd that hemmed in the chariot like water against a ship's sides. Half Alexandria seemed to have something to sell, or else a peition to make, to the supposedly more fortunate palace occupants. There were merchants with strings of slaves, lawyers, beggars, laden camels, temple priests, magicians, burdened asses, dogs, parrots and apes for sale, itinerant water-carriers inhabitants of all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, including renegade Romans and the destitute wives and children of some of the Gabinian troops whom Pompey had recalled to serve him against Caesar. Sweating agitators, hardly heard above the tumult, stood on portable platforms to harangue them all—each agitator raucous with a cure-all of his own for solving all the public difficulties.

"See how our rhetoricians keep themselves in practice!" Apollodorus exclaimed merrily, waving his arm. "One by one the silly fellows shout themselves into a fit of apoplexy or a public office, and I don't know which is the worse for them or us!"

A group of soldiers at the gate made a way for him by locking spears in line and, wheeling outward, forcing back the crowd to either hand. He drove into a marble courtyard, and a huge gate made of Euxine timber, painted red in contrast to the white stone walls, swung shut behind him.