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Antony has seen how long plateaus of land could drive soldiers mad. Grass, sand, it didn’t much matter as long as the horizon remained changeless. Something about the endless plodding and the open terrain left some men feeling as vulnerable as if they had divested themselves of their armor.
For his part, this environment rarely bothered Antony much. However, he sometimes thought he could understand it whenever he had to climb some of those wretched mountains up to the north. Those landmasses seemed immune to his stamina. The air would always feel thinner, and his flesh would always feel ablaze with cold. Numbness would follow close behind. After a while, Antony would start to entertain notions that he had vacated his body and that it was now operating through sheer force of habit.
Antony never dwelled on the deprivations of war, of course. And yet, as soon as Antony catches sight of Caesar’s butchered corpse, the streets of Rome might as well be the furthest reaches of a far-flung mountain. As he runs from Brutus’s toadies at the Senate house, he hears from a distance how he’s gasping like some decrepit senator. All his limbs feel like they’re rotting from frostbite.
None of this is painful. Not his physical exertions, not this sudden and immutable personal loss. Antony has been punched and he’s been stabbed and he’s seen good soldiers cut down right in front of him. He’s had to order to crucifixions of men he thought he could trust. So many things could – and should – be felt in full later.
Perhaps after the mother of Caesar’s politically inconvenient son is safely out of the city. That would be a good time to let all of this drown him.
For now, his legs carry him on and on and on and he sends out wisps of prayers out to Mercury.
*
Cleopatra’s villa in the Horti Caesaris looks like a ghost town that’s been wiped out by some barbarian tribe. The way his footsteps echo, it’s clear that most of her Roman attendants have fled, while all her Greeks are in hiding. The distant outcry ‘Caesar’s dead, Caesar’s dead!’ has assumed an awful sort of rhythm to it. It’s reminiscent of the way music could carry to distant parts of the same household. Watery, and thin, yet somehow urgent in its reminder of the world outside.
Some Roman guards do try to pick a hopeless fight with him at the entrance to Cleopatra’s quarters. More the fool them. Antony’s hands ache to snap someone’s neck clean in half, and some pompous Alexandrians would be a great place to start.
“You may all desist.” Cleopatra’s voice wafts out. She doesn’t even deign to make an appearance. “Send the man in.”
Something about her tone makes it sound like admitting Antony into her presence is akin to ordering some bauble on impulse from the market. It’s very tempting to turn and leave, abandoning Cleopatra to whatever untender fate is in store for her.
But then he decides he’s not about to run from some foreigner. Not even one who cloaks herself in Alexander the Great’s luster (despite actually being descended from the man’s general.)
She’s sitting by a window, as motionless as Alexander’s mummy. Antony had wanted to mock it when he saw it on display in the city that bore its name, but then he’d been strangely moved by how even his eyelashes remained preserved.
Cleopatra must have heard the news, of course. The whole damn villa has heard. She’s a foreign woman in a city that bears no love for her. She’s a foreign queen in a city that has no love for monarchs. And Antony finds himself wishing she would sob or rage in front of him. It would be uncanny, almost like seeing his own soul finding expression through someone else’s body. Still, it would be less eerie than this; a young woman staring straight at him, her dark eyes almost never blinking.
Servilia has that quality to her, now that he thinks about it.
That thought makes him hiss more than speak. “So sorry to barge in on your incomparable grief.”
Though she’s been looking right at him, her eyes move a little, as though she’s seeing Antony for the first time.
“Grief?” She says this like it’s unfamiliar word, even though even Cleopatra’s staunchest opponents would admit she speaks Latin fluently.
“Surely you must be mourning your royal ambitions for Rome. If the city can’t accept the boy’s father as dictator-” here, Antony has to swallow briefly, briefly- “then they won’t accept his Egyptian son as a king.”
“You come bearing old information. I know Caesar named Octavian as his heir in his will. I plan to contest it.”
Antony scoffs, but it’s hard to maintain his incredulity when in the face of her certainty. Invoking Octavian might have been a diplomatic way of disappointing Cleopatra, when in truth Caesarion could never inherit any of his father’s properties or influence. It didn’t matter whether said father had a hundred grand-nephews, or none at all.
Nevertheless, the claim has a ring of truth to it. Caesar had his secrets, of course. That had been a great deal of the man’s appeal, in fact. He could keep his face so impassive, while all the while you knew he was spinning monstrously clever plans that he would never confide. It was kind of like witnessing someone yielding some fantastic foreign weapon Antony could never hope to master.
Naming Octavian heir is precisely the kind of thing Caesar would do. The fact that such crucial secrets could be divulged in pillow talk makes Antony want to kick something until his foot is black and blue.
He tries to formulate a sentence that might jar this woman into reacting. Caesar would have sacrificed your Caesarion to bring back his Julia sounds about right.
However, then Cleopatra gestures a slave to step forward, and Antony poises to fight instead. He’s still ready to strangle someone.
“Peace,” Cleopatra says. “Charmion will attend to you. You have been injured.”
Has he?
Oh, he’s noticed the droplets of blood and how they’re steadily forming a puddle. Like wine dripping down onto the floor. It reminds him of wine spilling from a cup that’s been knocked aside.
“Your slave woman?” He says, not even wincing as Charmion digs a needle into the arm with the deep gash. “Don’t you have some fancy physician at your beck and call?”
“You require stitches, not surgery. Or perhaps I am mistaken, and you hit your head during your escape today? You certainly are acting like it.”
Antony slams his free hand down onto the table, but neither of the women jump.
“Perhaps things are different in Egypt, but in Rome we tend to react when our friends are murdered. And aren’t you legally Caesar’s special friend?”
At last, Cleopatra displays some anger. Just like Caesar (and Antony loathes to make this comparison) she’s withholding her words and allowing the target of her ire to fill in the silence for her.
But then, at last, she gives in. “I am not a professional mourner. If something requires such a service, it may look elsewhere.”
In the past, he had been aggravated by her rhetorical trick of reducing someone to an object. Then he had realized it was the most revealing thing she ever did.
Whenever they attended the same event together, he would try to get her to call him ‘it.’ At first it had been easy, but she must have caught on to his ways. Perhaps during the banquet where had lost a bet and had submitted to one of the Alexandrian slaves painting his eyes with kohl. During that whole process, Cleopatra had stared at him and stared at him. Then she had abruptly nodded the way men sometimes did before single combat.
From then on, she never took his bait. Not even at their most recent meal together. As soon as Caesar was out of hearing, he’d asked Cleopatra how it felt to be her own cousin. The joke was even cruder than most he’d assailed her with, and she had simply slipped away to go be at the side of her man.
The last time he’d seen Caesar with Cleopatra, the two of them had been side-by-side, staring up at the stars. They’d looked less like lovers and more like two sailors plotting out the course of a difficult journey.
After a long, long drought he’s finally made Cleopatra fall back into that verbal tic. It’s come at such an unbearable cost that he wants to moan like one of the dying heroes of the Trojan war.
*
Instead, he and Cleopatra both drink some wine. Maybe because that’s what they’re always doing whenever they happen to meet. It fortifies him, and also allows things to go back to being as numb and blurry as they had been in the Senate house today.
“Is he truly dead? Did you witness the body? How did you manage to escape?”
The first question insults Antony’s intelligence. The second insults his vision. The third insults his bravery.
“Yes, yes, and like I was escaping a bear. Respectively.”
“A bear? How does one escape one of those?”
This was another lesson Antony had learned in the north. “You meet their eyes and back away slowly. You don’t look afraid, but you also don’t run away.”
“I see.” Cleopatra looks like she’s storing this information in the back of her mind, as though she might need it someday.
“I had more respect for the bear, of course.”
People still laugh. Even in the midst of grief. Especially in the midst of grief. This is precisely the kind of joke people make after they return home, still stinking of smoke from the funeral pyre. He’s heard Cleopatra laugh, but always at the appropriate moment, like bells jangling at the correct moment in a song. She’s not laughing now even though he can tell she wants to do so.
This must be what happens when you’re raised in a viper’s nest, Antony supposes. Every ten or so years, news of the latest bloodbath in Alexandria trickles into Rome in a garbled format. It always involves Ptolemies, and Berenices, and Cleopatras murdering their sibling-spouses. Romans were often voracious for these tales, especially in times of civil unrest. It was easy to chuckle and compare and order another round of drinks ‘in honor of things not being quite as bad as they are in Egypt.’
Of course, Antony still finds that Ptolemaic dynasty hilariously bizarre, but for a moment he spares the smallest sliver of sympathy for the girl who had once had to flee Alexandria with her useless father.
“Aren’t you glad you left your son back home?” Antony asks now.
In response, Cleopatra lets out one of her carefully rehearsed laughs. She’s admitted to her humanity once today. It won’t happen again.
“My turn for a question,” Antony says because they’re wasting time and he’s suddenly tired of needling her.
“Yes?”
“Are there any carpets suitable for an escape here?”
Cleopatra looks at him like she might call in the brain surgeon, after all. “You know that tale is untrue. It was just a sack.”
“Ahhh, but the people believe it. You’re the clever Egyptian queen, and no one would expect you to be stupid enough to resort to the same trick twice.”
For several long moments she’s silent after that. Then she drains the last of her wine and rises to her feet. She rummages through a cabinet and produces a small bag. Instantly, Antony realizes it must be a store of money and other items necessary for a hasty escape.
“I see,” Antony snaps, even though wine and compassion continue to dull his rancor. He doesn’t like those emotions, so he decides to be harsher than warranted. “While you two were devising a new calendar, did you ever think to tell Caesar about your fears? Clearly he could have used the warning.”
Cleopatra sits in the middle of her carpet, as graceful as a dancer. Her clothes are plain, too. Antony notices this for the first time. She must have changed the instant she heard the news.
“The city was full of graffiti begging Brutus to kill Caesar. Caesar was well aware.”
Ah yes. Brutus, Brutus, Brutus. If Antony spends a second longer thinking about Brutus’s mournful face in the Senate, he really might smash this table to pieces.
“What would you have done today if you had brought your son here?” Antony asks.
“Drug him, put him in the kind of basket slaves put produce in, cover him with vegetable while making sure he can still breathe, dress up like a slave myself, and leave.” Cleopatra says this all very quickly, and Antony realizes this must be the plan she has in case of any insurrection in Alexandria.
He whistles low, impressed in spite of himself. And then, under the watchful eye of Charmion, he wraps a carpet around the queen of Egypt.
*
Antony also has to swap clothes. Even so, he’s far too recognizable if anyone dares to look at him head on.
No one is looking at him, though. They’re all caught up in their private fears and grief in light of this latest disaster. Most people are in hiding, but many craftsman look just like Antony; running through the city with their wares, simply trying to reach a safe location. A few people curse him out for branding such an unwieldy object on his shoulder, but after that no one spares him a second glance. Nor do they notice a Greek slave woman following several paces behind him.
This little stunt could easily kill Cleopatra. He thinks he’s bundled her up in such a way that she can breathe, but there’s no way of safely checking. It reminds Antony of the punishment for perpetrators of parricide. Those unhappy souls would be sewn into a sack with various wild animals, and then they would be unceremoniously chucked into the Tiber.
Perhaps they should have both dressed up as slaves, and wandered around arm-in-arm, like a couple trying to flee back to their master’s house. Maybe he could tell Cleopatra about how he’s now fantasizing about sewing Brutus into a sack with a rabid bear. He’s pretty sure she’d enjoy it, even if she didn’t laugh.
His shoulder is practically on fire once they’re near the docks of the Tiber. They duck into an alley and he gently deposits the carpet onto the ground. He unrolls it just as carefully, until he reveals a prone Cleopatra. In better times he might have made a joke about how this was not how he wanted to see her on her back.
Once again, though, he thinks about the mummy of Alexander.
“I hope I didn’t smother you,” he says, all the while keeping an eye on Charmion. He almost checks Cleopatra’s pulse, but he’s not keen on being slapped by her in this particularly moment.
Cleopatra sits up slowly. She’s clearly trying to hide her panicky gasps. Clearly she’d been afraid of a slow, painful death in that carpet as well.
“I am well enough.”
“Don’t worry. The stink of the Tiber has that effect on everyone. Do you have a ferryman here who’s loyal to you and can take you to your ship in Ostia.”
Cleopatra rises to her feet. “Yes.”
She really should be leaving now, but she’s giving Antony an appraising sort of look.
“What?” He snaps. “My debt to you is done.”
“This never happened,” Cleopatra decrees.
“What do you mean?”
“You did not rush to my aid instead of Caesar’s Roman widow. I was not weak enough to require the aid of a Roman soldier. I will reward you in due time, but it will be for your friendship with the father of my son.”
The whole thing is so cold. As cold as the chill that’s refused to leave his body ever since he saw Caesar’s corpse.
However, Antony cannot begrudge it. This is the kind of thing Caesar would do.
“This never happened,” he agrees. And then, before he can think better of it, he gives Cleopatra a kiss on the forehead. He’s done this before for soldiers that have fallen in battle, and something in Cleopatra seems to recognize this because she doesn’t shove or hit him.
“That never happened either.” It’s the last thing Cleopatra says to him.
Antony watches her go. He should keep moving, but he has to see her leave. Perhaps it’s because he wants to be sure she’s safe from Rome. Perhaps it’s because he wants to be sure Rome is safe from her.