Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [57]
He had dallied in the city, wondering if indeed it was necessary to leave, until he heard nervous whispers in the streets that Octavian had searched the queen’s mausoleum for her body, and that she’d disappeared without a trace. Quickly thereafter, he heard that the Romans were looking for a scholar, one Nicolaus of Damascus, tutor to the royal children.
The walls outside the Museion were papered with his name and a reward, and he knew the other scholars would as easily turn him in as hide him. Everyone’s purse was empty now that Alexandria was occupied. He had to leave Egypt, and leave it now.
The port was closed and under guard. Nicolaus smuggled himself out of town in the company of a bribed musician, hidden inside a drum. When he finally got free of the city walls, it took him more than two months of dangerous travel to make his way to an open port. He backtracked through villages, fearful he was being watched. Roman patrols were everywhere, and Marcus Agrippa’s men were particularly tenacious. He heard about the missing Damascene scholar in every village he passed through. It was good fortune that his pursuits had taught him languages far beyond his own. Nicolaus very quickly learned to say that he’d never been to Damascus. No. And scholarship? He was apprenticed to a baker.
In his unhappy journey, he was witness to thousands of statues and engravings of Cleopatra being smashed and then covered over with stone. They were all being destroyed, all but the few the emperor had sanctioned.
The workers who were laboring over those images reported strange requests from the conquerors. The emperor had ordered completion on a temple the queen had begun, the outside of which was decorated with a depiction of Cleopatra and her son Caesarion making an offering to Isis.
The temple and its decoration were traditional, the boy depicted with a miniaturized version of himself traveling behind him. The souls of royalty were always portrayed this way.
The depiction of Caesarion was traditional, but that of the queen was not.
At the temple of Dendera, Octavian had ordered that the queen be depicted unaccompanied by her ka, her soul.
Most imagined it to be an act of libel, a mockery of the woman Rome had conquered. Cleopatra, robbed symbolically of her soul, no longer royal. It was an elegant metaphoric insult.
Nicolaus the Damascene suspected otherwise.
What did Octavian know?
When, at long last, he arrived at an open port, he was so desperate to get out of Egypt that he leapt aboard the first vessel he saw, Persephone, a Greek transport full of slaves and animals, destined, he assumed, for Athens. He bought his passage with coins marked in the queen’s image, paying more than he’d expected.
“Those are being melted down now,” the captain told him. It had been nearly two months since the queen’s death. The coins were the easiest portraits to obliterate, stirred into a slurry of metal and then recast. The new ones had Octavian and his general, Marcus Agrippa, on the front. The reverse was marked with a chained crocodile.
“Then have them all,” the scholar said. “They are of no use to me.”
They’d been at sea for a week before it occurred to Nicolaus to ask what exactly their destination was.
“We travel to Rome. The animals are to celebrate the emperor’s triumph over Egypt.”
Nicolaus would have laughed had it not been so idiotic. Of course. He’d placed himself aboard a ship sailing into the arms of those who hunted him.
Now he stood aboard this ship of animals, watching the vessel breach the waves and wondering if, despite all his fleeing, despite all his planning, his end was coming. He’d seen things as the ship tilted, visions in the green depths, and none of them were bright. Sharks, with their dull, gray eyes, and more. Tentacled things, nothing beautiful. None of the sirens of the great epics. He thought for a moment of his idol, Homer, who had simply lived a poet and died a poet. He had not been a fool, as Nicolaus had. He hadn’t trafficked in magic he didn’t understand.
Nicolaus sighed and rubbed