The head arrived before the man.
Theodotus brought it. He was the boy king's tutor, a rhetorician from Chios with soft hands and a beautiful voice, and he came up the harbour in a gilded barge flying the brother's colours under a flag of truce, two days before Caesar's fleet, with a jar of brine on a cushion. He stood on the royal quay, smiling, and asked to be allowed to wait there for the Roman.
"Let him wait," said Cleopatra, watching from the palace roof. "In the sun. Don't give him water." She was very pale under the kohl. "He's going to hand Caesar the head of the greatest man in Rome in a pickle jar and expect to be thanked."
"He won't be," said John.
"No?"
"Caesar and Pompey were family. Pompey married his daughter." John had read it at St Olave's, in a fat green Plutarch, the year before the war. He turned away from him with loathing, as from an assassin, and when he received Pompey's seal ring, he wept. "He'll weep. And then he'll never trust your brother again."
Cleopatra looked at him sideways. "Is that your trick?"
"No. That's a book."
"You've read a book about this?" She turned back to the quay, and the small figure of Theodotus in his blue robe beside his jar. "Of course you have. Of course there's a book." For a moment she looked very young. "Is there one about me?"
"Several."
"Do I come out of them well?"
He thought about the asp, and the mausoleum, and the boy Caesarion strangled at seventeen, and Octavian's triumph with an effigy of her carried through Rome. None of it had happened. None of it had to.
"You come out of them very clever," he said. "Not very lucky."
"Then we'll change that," said Cleopatra.
* * *
Caesar came on the second of the month, at noon, with ten warships and thirty-two hundred men, and walked up the royal quay in plain armour with his lictors in front of him, and Theodotus knelt and took the lid off the jar.
John watched from the colonnade with the mask in his shirt.
He'd expected someone bigger. Gaius Julius Caesar was fifty-two, tall, thin, balding and combing what was left forward over the top, with a long clever face, very dark quick eyes and a mouth that didn't give anything away. He looked into the jar for perhaps two breaths. Then he turned away from it, and walked three steps, and stood with his back to the quay and his face in his hand.
The quay was dead silent. Theodotus was still kneeling, with the lid in his hands, and his smile had gone stiff.
Caesar turned back. His face was wet and absolutely calm.
"Bury him," he said, in Greek, to his officers. "Properly. With rites. At my expense." He looked down at Theodotus. "And take this one somewhere he can't see me. If I have to look at him again today I'll forget I'm a guest."
* * *
Cleopatra received him in the great hall, on the throne, in full Egyptian regalia: the double crown, the cobra on her brow, the crook and flail, kohl and gold. She'd sat for two hours being dressed for it. She looked like a painting on a temple wall and spoke like a lawyer.
"Imperator," she said, in Latin. "Egypt grieves for Gnaeus Pompeius. And welcomes you. And would like to know how long you mean to stay, and how many of my people's grain you intend to eat while you do."
Caesar laughed. It was a surprisingly young laugh.
"Your brother's regents tell me you're a usurper," he said, "who's lost the city's love and will be gone by summer."
"My brother's regents just handed you a head in a jar."
"They did." Caesar studied her. "So I came to see for myself. And I find the city fed, which I did not expect, and the canal held, which I did not expect, and your brother's best men dead in the reeds at Schedia." His eyes moved, without hurry, along the row of courtiers by the throne, and stopped on John. "And a foreigner in your court in strange armour, about whom I've heard four different stories in two days. I'd like to see what you've been doing, Majesty. All of it. Will you show me?"
* * *
She showed him all of it. It took three days.
She showed him the granaries, dry now, the heaps raised on stone, lime white on the floors, cats asleep in rows. Caesar pushed his arm into a heap the way John had, to the shoulder, and pulled it out cool and smelled his hand and said nothing, but John saw him look at Paneb the granary master for a long moment afterwards, the way a man looks at a tool he hadn't known was blunt.
She showed him the yard behind the shipwrights' sheds, where the first eleven water lifts stood in a row. They were Leonardo's, more or less: a chain of wooden buckets on a great wheel, turned by an ox walking in a circle, lifting water from a ditch to a channel twice a man's height above it. John had drawn them on papyrus from memory over three nights, and the shipwrights had built them in a month with a lot of swearing, and the first two had broken, and the next nine hadn't.
Caesar watched the ox go round. Watched the buckets come up full and tip, one after another, and the water run away along the channel towards the dry fields beyond the city wall. He watched for a long time.
"How many?" he said at last, to John directly. In Latin. It was the first time he'd spoken to him.
"Eleven now. A thousand by next year, if the timber comes."
"And with a thousand?"
"Twice as much land under the plough as the flood reaches. Every year. Whether the river rises or not."
Caesar looked at him with those quick dark eyes. "Where did you learn this?"
"From a painter," said John.
"A painter." Caesar's mouth twitched. "Of course."
She showed him the print shop, in a storeroom off the palace kitchens, where two Jewish carpenters and an Egyptian scribe were cutting the queen's edicts on bread rations backwards into blocks of sycamore wood and printing them on papyrus, a hundred an hour, to be pasted up on the walls of every quarter in Greek and Egyptian. Caesar picked one up, still wet, and read it, and read it again, and put it down very carefully.
"In Rome," he said, "a man who could put the same words on every wall in the city in one night could make himself king by morning."
"In Egypt," said Cleopatra, "we already have one."
And last she showed him the Library.
* * *
It was the thing John had wanted most, and been most afraid of.
The old Library lay along the edge of the Royal Quarter, a long colonnaded building round a garden, with reading halls and lecture rooms and the shelves, the endless shelves, of rolls in their leather buckets. Two hundred years of everything the Greek world had written, and much of what the rest of the world had, bought or copied or stolen from every ship that docked. Scholars in the colonnades arguing about Homer. A smell of papyrus dust and lamp oil.
And it was made of wood.
Not all of it. The walls were stone, the colonnades marble. But the floors were cedar and the roofs were cedar and the shelves were cedar, and the storehouses down by the harbour, where new rolls were kept until they could be catalogued, were cedar and reed. He'd walked through them the first week and felt his hands go cold with a fear he couldn't explain to anyone.
He knew how the story went. Caesar would come, and fight, and burn the ships in the harbour, and the fire would jump to the storehouses on the quay. Forty thousand rolls, the books said, maybe more.
There'd been no fighting this time. But he hadn't waited to see if fire was fire.
So the new building beside the old one, rising on its foundations behind a screen of scaffolding, was stone. Every part of it. Stone floors on stone vaults, stone shelves cut into the walls, the roofs of baked tile on stone ribs, the only wood in it the doors, and those sheathed in bronze. It was half built. Two hundred men worked on it, and John had stolen half of them from the temple of Serapis, which had not forgiven him.
Caesar stood in the first finished hall, with its long stone shelves and the light coming down through the tile-roofed clerestory, and looked round it in silence.
"Why?" he said.
"Fire," said John.
"Fire." Caesar looked at him. "There hasn't been a fire in the Library in two hundred years."
"There will be one day," said John. "There always is. Something sets the harbour alight, a war, an accident, and the wind's from the north. And the next morning a hundred thousand books are gone that no one ever copied. Plays by Aeschylus no one will ever read. Mathematics no one will work out again for a thousand years." He touched one of the stone shelves. "So I'm building a library that won't burn."
Caesar was quiet for a long time.
"You say that," he said at last, "as if you'd seen it."
* * *
He left on the ninth day.
He'd done his business. The brother kept Pelusium and the eastern Delta for now, under a truce that Caesar wrote himself and both of them sealed, and Cleopatra kept Alexandria and the crown, and Egypt would sell Rome grain at a price that made Caesar's quartermasters wince and Cleopatra's steward smile. Theodotus was put on a ship back to Pelusium with his jar and told never to come into Caesar's sight again, and went, with his soft hands folded and his beautiful voice silent.
On the last evening Caesar asked to see John alone.
They walked along the harbour wall under the Pharos, with Caesar's lictors following at a distance and the light from the tower lying out across the water. Caesar walked with his hands behind his back.
"Come to Rome," he said.
"No."
"I haven't told you what I'd give you."
"You'd give me anything I asked for, until you'd learned how I did it. And then you'd give it to someone else." John stopped walking. "And Rome would put my machines on every hill in Italy and make an army out of them before the queen's carpenters had built their thousandth water lift. No."
Caesar looked at him for a while with his long clever face.
"That's what I'd have done," he agreed, without any embarrassment at all. "So you'll stay here and do it for her instead." He looked across the harbour at the palace, where the lamps were being lit along the colonnade. "Be careful, John of nowhere. Rome is a very large animal. It doesn't hate what it doesn't understand. It simply eats it, to find out what it was." He turned to go. "Tell the queen I'll want more grain next year. And tell her I liked her. She'll pretend she doesn't care."
* * *
She pretended she didn't care.
She was on the palace roof when John came up, alone, in a plain linen dress with no gold on it at all, watching Caesar's ten ships go out past the Pharos into the dark with their stern lanterns lit.
"He asked you to go with him," she said, without turning round.
"Yes."
"And you said no."
"Yes."
"Good," said Cleopatra. She watched the lanterns for a while. "I'd have had to have you killed." She said it so lightly that he didn't know, then or for a long time after, whether she'd meant it.
She turned round. The lights from the harbour were on one side of her face, and the other side was dark.
"Why, though?" she said. "He's Caesar. He'll own the world. You could have had anything."
He didn't have an answer that he could say out loud. He stood there looking at her with the mask heavy in his shirt.
She looked back at him for a long moment, and the corners of her mouth went up, slowly, the way they did when she'd been handed something interesting, and then, for the first time since he'd walked through her door, she didn't seem to know what to say either.
"Go to bed, John," she said finally, and went past him to the stair, and didn't look back.