Читать книгу Queen Cleopatra - Talbot Mundy - Страница 8

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Men speak to one another of protection, but what do they mean by it? For the strongest armor sometimes is an added disadvantage. I myself have treated many a wound that might have been a mere scratch had its victim not worn armor. And the medicines of many a physician are a deadlier preventive of recovery than a disease itself. If a man's own soul protect him not, where shall he look for safety from the multitudes of dangers that beset him on every side? But if he hide within the glory of his own soul, how shall any dark destroyer find him?

—Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.

THE Canopic Gate was closed at sunset, but its guards grew rich admitting belated travelers, runaway slaves and criminals in search of sanctuary in the army's ranks.

It was the fashion, too, for those who had drunk gaily at Eleusis to come racing homeward for prodigious wagers, and it was the profitable business of the guards to throw the gate wide open to them, to identify contestants, if they could, as they negotiated the exciting sharp turn at the masonry curtain just inside, and to collect at their homes next day a fee that varied with the individual's social standing or extravagance.

So, when nine chariots, enveloped in a cloud of dust, came clattering and swaying down the moonlit road, past desert and oasis, where the night alternately was sleepy, silent and awake with a din of frogs—where there was now no smell, then suddenly the reek of onions, cows, camels, rotting vegetables and manure—there was no time lost before a yellow lantern was set swinging to announce that the gate was open.

Outside the wall, the gate was clustered around with wine-shops, brothels, swarming Egyptian tenements and mud-walled rows of shops. There was a yelping of scavenger dogs and a chorus of shrill yells from women to their gutter children to come indoors out of danger. Then a clatter of hoofs and sparks: Apollodorus, far in advance of the other chariots, wrought a marvel, turning his team on the cobblestones between the gate and curtain. There was hardly time for the captain of the guard to recognize Apollodorus shouting over-shoulder to pass the eight following chariots through at his expense. Charmian and Cleopatra, wrapped in shawls and huddled on the rear seats, might have been ladies of easy virtue or the wives of drunken citizens; no guard was fool enough to risk his lucrative position by inquiring into that.

And then the street throng. There was a night life such as Rome had never witnessed in her mean streets by the Tiber, and the marble of the Street of Canopus was glorious with torch-light, lights from upper windows pouring golden radiance on motley crowds and casting a myriad enchanting shadows. It was a dream of opulence—a roar of countless tongues—a din upswelling into tumult and a dream that scattered as the chariot drove headlong into it.

Not drawing rein, but watching opportunity, Apollodorus recognized a public speaker on a flight of marble steps. He had just drunk from a gourd, and was wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He laughed and threw his right hand up in greeting.

"News!" Apollodorus shouted. "True news! She—Cleopatra—has fled—overland toward Pelusium! Spread it!"

He was gone, with a clatter of hooves before the fellow on the steps could fling a question back. That news would be all up and down the street within five minutes.

Then Apollodorus turned south, toward wharves and slums that fringed Lake Mareotis, where the riffraff of the city dwelt in tenements and all the thoughtless sinews of the constantly recurring riots lay in squalor, eager for excuse to wreak rough vengeance on whoever had less hardship to endure or more resource with which to meet it.

"Romans! The Romans are coming!" Apollodorus shouted. "Potheinos and Achillas have sold Egypt to the Romans! Cleopatra has fled to Pelusium to resist the Romans! Who hates Romans?—Who loves Alexandria? Go hotfoot to Pelusium! Join Cleopatra!"

No chance to question him. They only saw a milk-white team, wild-eyed and heaving, burst out of the night. They heard Apollodorus' voice. They saw him gesture, with his golden cloak outflowing in the wind that blew across the Mareotis Lake—caught fragments of his stirring news—and he was gone again into a trough of smelly darkness between sheds and wharves where other sleepers lay.

Tumult awoke behind him, as the long sheds, where the poor-free labor slept in fretful peonage not much removed from slavery, disgorged their yelling occupants, each shedful clamoring its guess at what the news might be.

"Egypt, we make history to-night!" Apollodorus laughed.

He threaded his way slowly now, because the team was weary and the dark streets of that section of the city were ill-paved—dangerous.

"Achillas and his soldiers have enough on hand to keep them busy for a while! Can you hear the looting?"

There was a battering-ram at work—a big beam being swung against a warehouse door. Half a dozen blocks away a roof burst into flame. Apollodorus laughed delightedly as he tooled the frightened team along an alley where the wheel-hubs scraped the walls.

"Don't you love your fellow-men?" he chuckled. "Oh, who wouldn't be a queen! Yet—take the queen away and look! What happens? Riot, arson, pillage! And they'll blame you for it—don't forget that! They will blame you, Cleopatra!"

Charmian was frightened by the meanness of those back streets, where an underworld of misery was lurking and an unguessed knife might slither out of shadow without anyone the wiser as to who had thrown it.

"Are you mad, Apollodorus?" she demanded.

"Aye, as mad as a god!" he answered gaily.

"Aren't you ashamed, driving your queen through filthy slums? And the other eight chariots—where are they?"

"If Achillas hunts them, he will lose us, won't he? That is the principal thing."

"Oh, what timid stuff chastity is!" said Cleopatra. She put an arm around Charmian and began soothing her in a low voice, using the tone that Apollodorus called the lion-tamer because its vibrance had a magic that seemed able to impose calm. He began to whistle, to himself and to the team, his eyes alert for accident, his merry mind awander for a phrase or two with which to decorate the danger they were in.

"A pearl," he cried to Charmian, "a pearl, though taken from its setting, is a pearl. So is a queen a queen! If she must have a throne, then she is no queen."

There was no reply. Cleopatra went on murmuring, recalling Charmian from somewhere near that borderland where courage leaves off and hysteria begins. Apollodorus toyed on with his fancy:

"Plunge a light into the darkness—lo, it burns the brighter! I am a philosopher—a greater one than the Shadow Olympus! With a poet's vision I discern our Sister of the Moon and Stars about to prove her moonliness—her starriness! O horses—milk-white horses—ignorantly ill-trained geldings that you are, belonging to some fat contractor's wife, who thinks an invitation to the palace is Olympian bliss, you draw the wheels of destiny toward a royal goal! So wake up!"

He applied the whip.

"And speaking of Olympus, it is time we found out how he manages a mob of women!"

He could hear the troops emerging from the Lochias main gate, and presently their trumpet-blare began to send a warning on ahead of them.

"And now—if Achillas had brains—but he hasn't—he would invade your wing of the palace swiftly, so as to be able to blame it on the mob! Zeus! How can even you shine, Cleopatra, in a world of fools? I praise your genius—I praise it—but even I have to be satisfied with my own assurance. You need real enemies to prove your mettle!"

Now he began to work his way toward the Lochias, approaching from the western end, where Cleopatra's guards kept one gate safe for her. The streets were empty—windows shuttered—doors locked—lights out; to be caught between the soldiers and the mob was a risk that the inhabitants of that part of the city were too middle-class respectable to care for. But a dozen blocks away, to the south and eastward, there was fighting—clatter of charging cavalry—the thump of slung stones against wooden shutters—shrieks—yells of execration and a crimson glare against the sky.