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Summer. Easy, hazy, languorous summer.
Antony lays in a hammock skinning an orange; Cleopatra's voice, snapping at the nanny about the mess Alexander had made with his crayons, washes over him. A fly skims his ear. Even with three fans gyrating around him, it is stifling hot. (Rome, his mind helpfully supplies, does not get so hot this time of year.)
"Caesar was smart enough to leave," he imagines Octavian saying, slight sneer attached, to a crowd of respectfully-nodding sycophants at some lavish party. Or maybe not. He is certain he is falling right into a web spun especially for him; he has imagined every permutation of every plan Octavian could have dreamt up to the point of exhaustion. He does not care.
Cleopatra has the children sent to their tutors for their afternoon studies. When she returns to the patio she's holding a glass bowl. "I had gelato shipped in," she says. "Hazelnut."
Antony pushes himself up on his elbows and inspects the gelato. It is melting already; a rivulet slides off the top and collects in a little creamy moat around the scoop. "Not hungry," he mumbles, but Cleopatra huffs, so he takes the bowl and tries a spoonful. He manages a muffled compliment. It's good, certainly-- Cleopatra smiles, presses a kiss to the top of his head, disappears into the comforting cool shadows of the palace. He swirls his spoon around. His favorite place on the Caelian left the hazelnuts partially unground, leaving a glorious gritty layer that lingered on the tongue after you swallowed. He tosses the half-peeled orange to the floor and stares up at the unclouded sky. He'll pick that up later, he thinks.
Vorenus marches in later, when the gelato's fully dissolved into a syrupy soup and the sun's near setting. He steps pointedly over the orange. "Letters in from Rome, sir," he says, holding a sheaf out.
Antony skims over the names on the envelopes-- boring senator, boring senator, poor wife Octavia (he'll have to read that one at some point), exceedingly boring senator, Octavian by way of one of his many pawns. His stomach sours. "Guess I have some homework to do," he says, swinging his legs out of the hammock. He blinks at the sun. Surely the day could not be so long; the gods are mocking him. Twenty-four hours roll by like Sisyphean boulders here.
Vorenus eyes the gelato. "Yes, sir."
"Tell me something, Vorenus," he says, "do you think I'm foolish for not returning to Rome?"
Antony has asked the wrong person; Vorenus is temperamentally unfit for royal life. Given Antony's choices the man would have picked lifelong exile in some frozen Gallic hell over a single opiate-fueled, musk-scented orgy in Egypt. Vorenus shuffles. "The people love you," he says after a pause, "and would forgive you almost anything."
"If I wanted to know the people's opinions, I'd start reading the tabloids," Antony says.
Vorenus steels himself, ever the loyal soldier. "I think, sir, that you could do a lot of good elsewhere. It would give your detractors less ammunition."
"That's where you're wrong," Antony tells him brightly, standing up and making for the patio doors. "I'm a font of ammunition for my detractors. I seem to create it wherever I go."
Winter brings memories of Gaul, and, by logical consequence, memories of Caesar. Cleopatra must be some species of psychic, for she can always tell when Antony's thinking about him. Somehow it always manages to put her in a bad mood.
"Really," he says one day, when Cleopatra catches him telling the boys about Alesia (a mistake, but he's been drinking), "it should be me who gets upset by the mention of Caesar's name. You act as if he were my lover and not yours."
Cleopatra stares witheringly down at him. "Don't be crass."
If it were a real winter-- that is to say, hail and snow, impeding frostbite, long nights, knuckles cracking and bleeding under the wind-- he would be less sentimental. It's been months since he's been home from war; he'll take any battle he can get, even an impossible to win one against an alpine blizzard. As it is he sees Caesar everywhere. It's the palace's fault, on account of being eons old, and rather inclined towards collecting ghosts. This was where Caesar would have spread out his maps, where his hand rested warm on the mahogany table as he pondered his next move; here, the bed he shared with Cleopatra (the thought arouses in Antony only the faintest tickle of jealousy). Caesar had possessed this city, and now it is possessing Antony.
Vorenus is antsy. The soldiers are all antsy. At least the rest of them have the sense to turn to drink and whores.
Cleopatra, meanwhile, has taken to redecorating. Antony wakes one day to find the wallpaper being ripped out. "What's wrong with it?" he grumbles into his pillow.
It's eleven in the morning. Cleopatra stands fully dressed watching the men work, little Ptolemy tottering by her side. "The blue was starting to bore me," she says. "It's been that color since I was a girl."
Antony rolls out of bed before he is buried in scraps of discarded wallpaper. He would go for a run, as he used to do in Rome by the banks of the Tiber, but he is not in the mood to be gawked at. Besides, it rankles that he now needs guards to accompany him on something so simple as a spot of light exercise. He settles for pacing the hallways. The TV's on in one of the rooms, and the anchor is discussing recent political developments in Rome. Octavian's latest denouncement of him in the Senate ("eloquent"), the triumvirate's expiration ("inevitable"-- Antony has to laugh at this particularly tautological pronouncement), murmurs of his own upcoming divorce (categorically false, at least for the time being, or as the commentator puts it, "unconfirmed"). They bring on a guest whose sole purpose seems to be critiquing Antony's handling of Parthia. Finally, mercifully-- an ad break.
Cleopatra, he notices, has been watching him from the doorway. Probably for some time now. "You need to stop listening to that drivel."
"Wallpaper done?" he asks.
To her credit, she ignores this inanity. "Caesar," Cleopatra says, carefully, "never put much stock in talking heads."
"Caesar," Antony says, rising to the challenge, "would have had Parthia in the palm of his hand by now."
Cleopatra's face turns to marble. "I do not know why you insist on being like this."
Time for a drink. He walks away; she does not follow. But Caesar does: Antony hears the sound of his boots on tile, always military boots, even during peacetime, and the song he always used to whistle. "Yes, yes, I know," he mumbles out loud, uncaring of who hears, "I was needlessly cruel. I'll make it up to her."
The thing is, the press had always loved Caesar. Even before Antony had served under him, when he was but a young man stumbling drunkenly down the streets of Rome, he would fall asleep to the crackling voice on the radio talking about the talented new consul, whip-smart, charming, just what the Republic needs. It was true that Antony was normally the envious type. But he had spent years rolling his eyes, mocking the fawning coverage, only to meet him in the flesh and realize that Caesar the man far exceeded Caesar the pontifex, Caesar the consul, even Caesar the general.
Antony pours himself a glass of bourbon, waits for Caesar's whistling to fade into the ambient sounds of the kitchen. The press had always loved Caesar. But Caesar had, in his own way, loved Antony: this, too, was a kind of triumph.
Winter again and Antony's remarried. He's still hungover from the wedding; the festivities had lasted weeks, he'd worn a ridiculous amount of kohl, it had been the antithesis of the staid affair Octavian had put together. For his part he delights in calling Cleopatra wife, in hearing her call him husband. It is the only title that Caesar never bestowed upon him; therefore, it is the only one he has ever truly earned.
Oh, Rome complained like a scorned lover. Octavian had dragged his sister through a series of painful TV appearances until she'd cried on every major talk show; that footage would be Cleopatra's Vercingetorix, humiliated in chains for the world to see. The Senate declared war, and Antony was relieved.
In Patrae there is enough to do that he does not dwell on Caesar or Parthia. Cleopatra comes to see him. Enemy of Rome looks good on her; they discuss strategy and fuck and discuss strategy again. In the morning Cleopatra watches him pretend to sleep and, after a moment, starts crying.
If he thought it would do her any good he would feign waking up, stroke her hair until her sobs slowed. "You promised you wouldn't leave me," she gasps, and falls silent.
It takes Antony a moment to realize that he is, in this moment, a cold corpse decaying in her arms. He squirms. See, no rigor mortis. But she is right: Rome always comes to collect on her debts. He will die, and she will live. Cleopatra is no virtuous Roman matron (he is so tired of virtuous Roman matrons). She will wear her mourning black for as long as is decorous and not longer, find herself a new husband, and Antony will, if he's lucky, be a half-memory in the mind of an old woman.
He opens his eyes and blinks blearily at her. Cleopatra's tears have been wiped off, so that all that remains of her brief outburst is a slight puffiness to the eyes. "Morning, spes mea," he whispers.
She runs her fingers over his face, down his chest, comes back to rest over his heart. Under her palm his pulse dutifully quickens.
Winter. He is not used to defeat. Actium is a burst of bright pain that lasts for a day before it is sublimated into the long, dragging funeral dirge that plays constantly in his mind. Alright. Long ago, in Greece, he had found himself to be a passable actor. He will play his part to the very end.
Vorenus looks more disturbed than usual. What was it the wretched man had said to him once? They shared the same symptoms, the same black sickness. By next winter Ptolemy will have forgotten him; Cleopatra Selene, who looks so much like her mother, will resent him; Alexander Helios will find a better soldier to emulate; and Cleopatra, he hopes, will be happy. So if he and Vorenus are to take part together in these last rites, Antony selfishly does not resent the company.
Summer. Easy, hazy, bloody summer.
Antony does not want to die here: better the battlefield; better, even, the Senate floor. He had always pictured for himself an autumn death, a sarcophagus of flaming leaves. He presses his helmet unsteadily to his head. When he laces up his boots his hands have stopped shaking. It is so terribly hot, even with the AC going. He had always harbored the secret delusion of one day returning to Rome; he sees now that Rome was not his to return to.
Gods, but he is tired of this. One more day, and he'll end it, he promises himself. One more summer day, twenty-four golden summer hours: it will have to be enough.