The granaries of Alexandria smelled like a wet dog.
John stood in the largest of them on the morning of the first day, by the western harbour, in a hall of mud brick as long as a cathedral with slit windows high up and a floor of beaten earth, and breathed it in, and knew he'd won the first two of his ten days before he'd done a thing.
Wet grain. Weevils. Rats. He'd lived three years in trenches and he knew all three by smell.
"How much do you lose in a year?" he asked the granary master, a fat Egyptian scribe called Paneb who'd been told by the queen to answer every question and was doing it the way a man answers questions at the dentist.
"Lose?" Paneb spread his hands. "We lose nothing, lord. The god's grain is counted in and counted out. It's all in the rolls."
"Then why does it smell like that?"
Paneb looked at the floor.
John walked to the nearest heap and pushed his arm into it up to the shoulder, the way his grandfather in Lucca had pushed his arm into the chestnut stores in autumn, and pulled out a fist of wheat from the middle. It was warm. Grain shouldn't be warm. He opened his hand and the grains were dark and soft and moving, and a smell came off them like a cellar.
"A third," he said. "At least. In the bottom of every heap. Gone to rot and fed to rats, and counted in the rolls as wheat."
* * *
It took Cleopatra's whole palace to do it.
The rot was the easy part. He'd seen it done in the war, at the supply depots on the Somme, where the quartermasters were men from Lincolnshire who knew grain the way priests knew prayers. Turn the heaps. Dry them in the sun on the roofs, on linen. Lime on the floors. Raise the floors on stone so the damp didn't come up. Cats, a great many cats, which in Egypt was the one thing no one argued with.
What took the palace was the counting.
Because the rot didn't account for it all. The rolls said the royal granaries held enough for fifty days. The rot said thirty-five. And the empty bins at the back of the hall, which the rolls said were full of barley from the temple estates at Canopus, said something else.
"I can't prove it," he told Cleopatra on the fourth night, in the study. "I can see it." He'd touched the doors of the empty bins with the mask off and let the Branches come, and they'd shown him boats on the lake at night, and barley in sacks going east, and a priest's seal on the sacks. "The temple at Canopus is selling your barley to your brother."
"I know which priest," said Cleopatra. "I've known for a month." She was eating figs from the bowl and writing at the same time, very fast. "Knowing isn't the difficulty. The difficulty is that he's the brother-in-law of a man who sits on the council, and the council is all I've got." She looked up. "What does your trick show you if I arrest him?"
He'd asked himself that already, in the granary, with his hand on the bin door. It had made his head ache.
"Riots," he said. "In the temple quarter. Not big. Three days."
"And if I don't?"
"He keeps selling. You run out at the end of the summer."
"Then I'll arrest him." She signed the roll with a quick flourish and pushed it to Charmion. "And three days of riots is three days. I'll go down to the temple myself on the second day and speak to them in Egyptian, and give out bread. Their bread, that he stole. I'll tell them that." She looked at him. "What are you making that face for?"
"I didn't expect you to decide so fast."
"You come from a long way off," said Cleopatra, "where I suppose they have time." She went back to her figs.
* * *
Achillas came on the sixth day.
He'd been told to come on the first, and had sent word he was ill. He'd been told again on the third, and had sent word he was inspecting the walls. On the sixth Cleopatra sent Charmion to his house with a message that John never heard, and Achillas came within the hour.
He was a big man of sixty with a scarred chin and the stiff walk of an old cavalryman, Egyptian by birth, Greek by training, and he'd commanded the queen's father's soldiers for twenty years. When the regents and the boy king went to Pelusium he'd stayed with the queen, nobody quite knew why. He stood in the study with his helmet under his arm and looked at John the way a sergeant major looks at a new officer who's been to university.
"Majesty," he said. "You've given a foreigner the run of your granaries."
"And he's found a third of my grain rotting and a fifth of it stolen," said Cleopatra pleasantly. "Which you didn't. Sit down, Achillas. He has something to tell you about the canal."
John told him.
The third lock on the Canopic canal from Lake Mareotis. A village there, Schedia. Men coming down from Pelusium by the eastern branches of the river, a hundred, perhaps more. A night soon, a night without a moon. Mattocks and fire. They'd break the lock gates and the embankment, and the lake water would run out into the marsh, and the city's fresh water and the lake boats with it.
Achillas listened with his helmet on his knee. When John stopped he was silent for a while.
"How do you know this?" he said.
John had decided, after Florence, that he wouldn't lie to people who didn't deserve it. He'd also decided, after Kokura, that he wouldn't tell the truth to people who'd use it.
"I've been to Schedia," he said, which was true, in a way, through the Branches of a lock-keeper's rope. "And I know how men think who want a city to starve. I've seen it done." That was true too. The Germans had flooded the Yser.
"You've been to Schedia." Achillas's face didn't change. "And you know the night."
"Within three."
"And the number."
"A hundred. Perhaps a hundred and twenty."
Achillas looked at the queen. "Majesty, a man who knows all that is either a prophet or the man who arranged it."
"Yes," said Cleopatra. "I thought of that. So you'll take three hundred men to Schedia tomorrow, Achillas, and you'll take him with you, and if nobody comes, you can cut his throat on the embankment and I won't ask you about it."
* * *
Nobody came on the first night, or the second.
John lay in the reeds below the embankment in his armour with his face to the sky and listened to the frogs, and to Achillas's soldiers breathing in the dark around him, and to the soft occasional scrape of Achillas's knife on its whetstone, which John assumed was for his benefit.
It was. On the second morning Achillas squatted beside him in the grey light and tested the edge on his thumb.
"One more night," he said.
"They'll come."
"You'd better hope."
The third night was black. No moon, a thin high cloud over the stars. In the second hour after midnight the frogs went quiet, all at once, downstream, and John put on the mask.
Through the slits, nothing. Reeds. Water. The dark shape of the lock gate, timber and bronze. He pushed, a little, not the full Hold, just enough to slow the night and let his ears catch up, and in the slow dark he heard it. Oars. Many. Muffled with rags. And voices, very low, in Egyptian and Greek.
He touched Achillas's arm.
Achillas listened for a long moment. Then he looked at John, in his mask, and John saw the old man's face change. Not to belief. To something more useful: a soldier deciding to act as if.
He raised his hand.
* * *
It wasn't a battle. That was what John remembered most, afterwards: how quick and ugly and small it was, and how it had none of the shape of a battle at all.
The boats came up to the lock, low in the water, packed with men, and Achillas let the first three touch the bank and the men climb out with their mattocks before his archers on the embankment stood up and loosed, all at once, into the boats behind. Men screamed. The boats rocked. Someone put a torch to a bundle of pitch-soaked reeds and threw it, and suddenly there was light, and in the light John saw men in the water, men on the bank, men coming up the embankment with mattocks and short swords straight at Achillas's line.
He'd told himself he wouldn't fight. Not here. Not with steel, among men who'd die of it. He'd come to be right, not to kill anyone.
A man came over the top of the embankment ten feet from him with a mattock raised over the head of one of Achillas's archers, a boy, who was fumbling an arrow and hadn't seen him.
John pushed.
Thirty counts, with the mask, and very little cost. He walked across the embankment and took the mattock out of the man's hands and put him on his back in the mud with the fourth movement of the kata. He walked back. He let go.
The man lay in the mud staring up at the stars. The boy archer stared at the empty place where the mattock had been.
It went on like that for a quarter of an hour. Not the whole fight, he couldn't do the whole fight. Just the places where the Branches flared up at him with someone about to die: he'd push, and go there, and take a blade out of a hand or a man off his feet, and come back, and let go. Seven times. Eight. He lost count. By the end the cold had got into his fingers even through the mask, and his lip was wet, and his legs had started to shake, and he stood on the lock gate with his hand on the bronze and watched the last boats rowing away down the canal into the dark.
The lock held. The embankment held. Forty men from Pelusium lay on the bank or in the water. Six of Achillas's.
The old general came and stood beside him, with blood on his sword and a cut on his cheek.
"You stood still," he said. "On the gate. I saw you. The whole time. And then men fell down all round the field." He looked at John. "I've been a soldier forty years. I've never seen that."
"I wasn't standing still."
"No," said Achillas. "I know." He wiped his sword on his cloak. "I still don't like you."
"That's all right."
"But I'll tell the queen you were right." Achillas sheathed the sword. "Get that thing off your face. My men are frightened enough."
* * *
Cleopatra came out to Schedia herself in the morning, in a plain chariot with Charmion and an escort of twenty, and walked along the embankment among the dead with her skirts held up out of the mud, and spoke to each of Achillas's wounded by name, in Egyptian.
At the end she stood by the lock gate, where John sat with a blanket round him eating bread like a starving dog, and looked at the boats run aground in the reeds.
"Ten days," she said. "You've done it in seven." She didn't smile. "The granaries, the thieves, the canal. Four things no one in Egypt had done. That's three."
"The fourth's harder."
"Tell me."
"Grain doesn't grow in a year when the river doesn't rise. You can save what you have. You can't make more." He swallowed bread. "Unless you lift the water yourself. Up out of the river and the canals onto the fields the flood can't reach. Not with men and buckets. With machines. A thousand of them. I can draw you one tonight." He thought of Leonardo, and the notebooks, the screw pumps and the chain wheels drawn right to left in red chalk. "I know where to steal the best ones."
Cleopatra looked at the fields beyond the canal, cracked and brown, where the flood hadn't reached for two years.
"How long?"
"For the first hundred? A season. If the carpenters work, and the smiths, and if the priests don't say it's sacrilege to make water run uphill."
"They'll say that."
"I know."
"Then I'll go to Memphis and talk to the priests of Ptah," said Cleopatra, "who hate the priests here, and will say the opposite to spite them." She turned to Charmion. "Have someone find me the name of the high priest at Memphis this year. The young one. Amenhotep, I think. And tell my steward to stop buying incense."
A rider was coming up the embankment road from the city at the gallop. They both turned to watch him. He reined in below the lock in a spray of mud, a palace messenger in blue, and threw himself down from the horse, and knelt in front of the queen.
"Majesty," he said. "From your brother's camp at Pelusium. Ten days ago." He was out of breath. "Pompey the Great came to Egypt by sea, asking your brother's protection. The regents had him killed on the beach, in the boat, as he came ashore. They cut off his head." He swallowed. "And Gaius Julius Caesar is two days behind him, with a fleet, and he's coming here."