The first thing Alexandria did was try to sell him a fish.
He came out of the dark onto a stone causeway at dusk with the armour on his back and the fever already climbing his legs, and fell over, and when he looked up there was a boy of about ten holding a dead mullet by the gills an inch from his face, saying something in Greek very fast. Behind the boy, a sea the colour of a green bottle. And beyond it, on its island, the tower.
He'd seen drawings. The drawings were wrong. It went up in three stages, square and then eight-sided and then round, white limestone gone gold in the last light, as tall as St Paul's, and on top of it, tiny with distance, a fire burning in a bronze cage, and the fire was reflected in something, a great curved mirror, so that a beam of orange light lay out across the water towards the open sea.
The Pharos, he thought. I'm in Egypt. I'm in armour. I'm going to be sick.
He was sick, on the boy's feet. The boy said a word John recognised from four years of Attic Greek at St Olave's Grammar School, which had not been taught to him by Mr Hargreaves.
* * *
The fever lasted three days and cost him Kiku's rosary.
He spent them in a fisherman's net shed at the root of the causeway, paid for with the beads, which the boy's mother looked at for a long time before deciding were foreign enough to be worth something. He lay on the nets in the armour, because he didn't trust anyone with it, and listened.
He'd been good at Greek at school. It was the one thing he'd been top of. Mr Hargreaves had made them read Xenophon aloud, and John had a memory for the sound of things. The Greek of the net shed was nothing like Xenophon. It was quick and slurred and full of Egyptian, and for the first day he caught one word in ten. By the third he had one in three, and enough to understand what everyone in Alexandria was talking about.
The river was low. It had been low last year, and lower this. The grain hadn't come down from the south in any amount since the winter, and bread in the market was four times the price it had been at the new year.
The queen's brother was at Pelusium, on the eastern edge of the Delta, with his regents and his army. The queen was in her palace on the point of Lochias with a few hundred men and the city's goodwill, which was going down with the price of bread.
And the Romans were fighting each other, over the sea, and whoever won would come here next, because Egypt had the grain and Rome had the mouths.
"She's finished," said the boy's mother, mending a net on the third evening. She said it without malice. "Pretty girl. Clever. Speaks to us in our own tongue, the first of them that ever did. Doesn't matter. When the Nile won't rise, nothing matters. By summer she'll be in Syria."
John lay on the nets and looked at the cracked roof.
In thirty of forty-one branches, Moira had said, you go to Egypt, and you make it into something it never was.
He'd thought about that every day of the arm healing. He'd thought about not coming. He'd heard the loud place through the mask on the beach at Kokura and very nearly taken the mask off and gone somewhere else, anywhere, the way you'd cross the road to avoid a man you owed money to.
And then he'd thought of the woman laughing. And of a glass city on the sea he'd seen for one second in a basement in 1920, with a face on a billboard three storeys high and Egyptian letters under it. A city that might exist because of something he did here. Or that might be the thing Moira had come all that way to stop.
She said I'll do great harm, he thought. She didn't say I'd do only harm.
He got up on the fourth morning, and buckled the sword on, and walked across the city to the palace.
* * *
The Royal Quarter was a city inside the city, walled off along the eastern harbour, and the gate in its wall had a single guard on it at noon, a Macedonian with a grey beard and the bored, intelligent face of a man who'd stood at gates for thirty years.
He looked at John. The black armour, the blue cords, the strange curved sword, the coat of a fabric he couldn't name rolled on the back. He looked for quite a long time.
"No," he said, in Greek.
"I'd like to see the queen."
"Everyone would like to see the queen. Most of them want to kill her, and the rest want bread. Which are you?"
"Neither."
"Then you're a liar or a lunatic." The guard didn't move his spear. "Go away, foreigner. Whatever you are."
John put his hand in his belt and took out Moira's coin.
He'd kept it all the way from Kokura. He'd thought about what to do with it on the walk across the city, and decided it was the only thing he had left that a gatekeeper would understand. Heavy, new, gold, with a pattern on one side so fine it looked like magic, and a number on the rim in no script anyone in the world could read.
The guard looked at it in John's palm. He didn't touch it. His eyes went to it and stayed there, and then came up to John's face.
"Where's that from?"
"Further than here," said John.
The guard looked at him for another long moment. Then he took the coin, and bit it, and turned it in the light, and put it in his own belt with great care, and stepped aside.
"The queen's audience is ended for today," he said. "If you get past Brennus and the Gaul at her door, it's not my fault, and I never saw you. Up the steps, the colonnade, left at the bronze lion." He looked at the sword. "Don't kill them. They're the only two she's got who don't drink."
* * *
Brennus and the Gaul were enormous.
They stood at the top of a short flight of marble steps at the end of a colonnade, in front of a pair of cedar doors carved with ibises, and they wore the bronze helmets and the long oval shields of the old garrison, the Roman soldiers who'd been left in Egypt years ago to keep the queen's father on his throne and had married local girls and forgotten Rome. They saw him coming from forty feet away. Brennus said something to the Gaul in a language John didn't know, and they both lowered their spears.
John put the mask on.
He did it walking, without stopping, the cord already tied, the bronze settling on his cheekbones, and the colonnade narrowed to two strips, white marble and blue sky and two big men with spears, and he pushed.
The Hold came down like a door in a quiet room.
The spear points stopped. A sparrow on the colonnade roof stopped with its head cocked. He walked up the steps between the two spears, not hurrying. It was further than it had looked, and the mask hummed, and he could feel the cost beginning, faintly, in his fingertips, the cold. Not much. He'd held for thirty and more in the snow at Kokura and felt nothing. He reached the top of the steps.
He didn't want to hurt them. He took Brennus's spear out of his hands and laid it on the marble. Then he did the thing Musashi had shown him for drunks in inns, two fingers pressed hard under the angle of the jaw, on the nerve, while the man's own body was frozen and couldn't flinch away, and then the same to the Gaul.
He let go.
The two of them sat down on the top step, very suddenly, side by side, like children told to sit, and then slowly lay back against the cedar doors, out cold.
John opened the doors.
* * *
The room behind them was small. That surprised him. He'd expected a throne room. It was a study, with a window on the harbour and the Pharos in it like a painting, and a table covered in papyrus rolls, wax tablets, a brass lamp, a bowl of figs, and three women.
Two of them were standing, a tall one and a small one, maids or companions in white linen. The small one had a knife already out, a little bronze one, held low, and her face said she knew how to use it.
The third was sitting at the table with a reed pen in her hand and an account roll spread in front of her, held flat with a fig, and she had looked up when the doors opened.
She was young. Twenty, twenty-one. Small, with a strong face, a big nose, a wide mouth, dark hair pulled back in plain rows the way Greek women wore it, and black kohl drawn out to her temples. She was not, John thought later, beautiful the way the paintings in his century would say she was. She had something better for a queen. She had a face you couldn't stop watching to see what it would do next.
She looked at him, in his black armour and his bronze mask, with his drawn-up fingers going white and a sword at his hip.
She looked past him at Brennus and the Gaul, asleep on the step.
Then she put her chin up and laughed.
It was the laugh from the vision in Florence. He knew it at once. Short and real and delighted, with her head back, the laugh of a woman who'd had a long bad year and had just been handed something interesting.
"Iras," she said to the small one with the knife. "Put it away. If he'd wanted to kill me he wouldn't have stopped to knock first." She looked back at John. "You came in through Demetrios's gate. You must have paid him a great deal. He's never taken a bribe in his life. And you've put my two best men to sleep without a mark on them." She put down the reed pen. "Take that thing off your face. I like to see who I'm talking to."
He took off the mask. The room came in from the sides: the window, the harbour, the Pharos, the papyrus, the women. And the Branches, a little, though the mask had kept most of them back.
"I'm sorry about your guards," he said, in his St Olave's Greek. "They'll wake up in a minute with headaches."
She tilted her head at his accent, the way Lisa had. "That's the Greek of a man who learned it from books," she said. "Old books. Athenian. You sound like my tutor's grandfather." Then, without warning, in another language entirely: "Do you speak Egyptian?"
"No."
"Aramaic?" A third. "Hebrew? The tongue of the Medes?" Each one different. She was watching his face as she tried them, as if trying keys in a lock. "Latin?"
"Latin, yes."
"Ah." In Latin, then, crisp and correct. "Then you're Roman, or you've lived with Romans, and you're too badly fed to be Roman. What are you?"
He'd thought about this on the walk across the city, too. What he'd say. All of it had sounded mad.
"A man who knows what happens next," he said.
She didn't laugh this time. She looked at him, and then down at the account roll under the fig. It was the grain account, he saw. Lines of figures. The granaries of the city, what they held, what was owed.
"Then tell me," she said, "what happens next."
* * *
He told her about the river.
He didn't need the Branches for most of it. He'd heard it all in the net shed, and the rest was arithmetic, which he was good at. The flood had failed two years running. The southern grain wasn't coming. The city had perhaps fifty days of bread in the royal granaries at current rations, and half of what was owed by the temple estates was never going to arrive, because the temple estates were selling it to her brother's agents at Pelusium for twice the price.
"I know all that," said Cleopatra. "Every fishwife in Rhakotis knows that."
"Yes. Here's what they don't." He leaned over the table, and touched the edge of the roll, and let the Branches come, a little, carefully, the way he'd learned with the mask in the forge. "In about a month your brother's general will cut the canal from the lake. The one that brings fresh water and the lake boats into the city. He'll do it at night, at the village by the third lock. After that, you have fifteen days before the city turns on you, and you go out by sea to Ascalon."
The small woman, Iras, drew a breath.
Cleopatra didn't. She was looking at his hand on the roll.
"Unless," she said.
"Unless you do four things in the next month that no one in Egypt has done before," said John. "And you let me tell you what they are."
She sat back in her chair. She looked at him for a long time, in the light from the harbour, her chin on her hand, with Brennus starting to snore on the steps outside.
"I don't know your name," she said.
"John."
"Ioannes." She tried it in Greek, then smiled. "No. That's a Jew's name, and you're not a Jew either." She stood up. She came round the table and stopped in front of him, much shorter than him, and reached up, and took the bronze mask out of his hand, and turned it over, and looked at the hammer marks on the outside and the polish on the inside.
"Somebody made this for you with great love," she said. "And no sense of proportion." She gave it back. "Charmion. Tell the steward this man has a room in the palace. Tell Achillas I want him at the first hour tomorrow, and that he'll hate it. And send someone to wake up Brennus."
"Majesty," said the tall one.
Cleopatra looked back at John. The corners of her mouth were still up.
"Fifty days of bread," she said. "That's what you said. I'll give you ten of them. In ten days you show me something in my granaries that wasn't there before. If you can't, I'll give you to my brother as a present." She thought about it. "With a bow on."