The parade took six hours and he spent all of them inside the mask, sweating.
They came into Alexandria by the Canopic Gate at the first hour of the morning, in the summer, nine months after they'd gone south, and the city had been waiting since the night before. The Canopic Way ran straight as a ruler through the middle of Alexandria from the gate to the sea, a hundred feet wide, colonnaded on both sides for three miles, and every inch of it was people. On the pavements. On the steps of the colonnades. On the roofs of the colonnades, on the roofs behind them, hanging out of windows, sitting in trees. Flower petals coming down from the roofs so thick it was like walking through pink snow.
John rode a white horse beside Cleopatra's chariot, in the black armour, with the mask on. She'd insisted on the horse. A god on foot is a man, she'd said. He hadn't ridden since a riding-school donkey in Lucca at the age of seven and he sat on it like a sack of flour, and the horse knew it.
Behind them came the Kandake's tribute: forty camels with gold in their packs, and ebony, and ivory, and leopard skins, and ten young Kushite nobles in white linen, hostages, walking with their heads up. Behind them Achillas and the army. Behind them, on a cart drawn by eight oxen, one of the bronze tubes, garlanded with flowers, which the crowd cheered louder than anything else.
They're cheering a gun, he thought. They're cheering a gun with flowers on.
* * *
He'd learned to see the parade through the slits. That was the only way to bear it. Two narrow strips: the horse's ears, a slice of the street, faces. He chose which faces. A fat man on a balcony weeping with joy. A row of girls on a wall with their legs swinging. A scribe with ink on his fingers, holding up a print-shop broadsheet with John's mask on it, the cheap woodcut one, and pointing from the picture to John and back, laughing, to his friends.
People reached out to touch his feet in the stirrups as he went by. Hundreds. He felt their hands on his ankles like birds landing.
He didn't see the knife. The Branches saw it.
They came through the mask the way they did now, thin and single, like one voice down a long wire: left, the third column, the man in grey. He turned his head. A man in a grey cloak at the front of the crowd, by a column, with his hand inside it, and his face set and white, the face of a man who's been praying all night. A Serapis token on a thong round his neck.
The man came out of the crowd at the horse with the knife.
John pushed.
It came easily, with the mask. That was the thing. It came down like a door in a quiet room and the petals hung in the air in their thousands, pink and still, and the man hung in the middle of his lunge with the knife held low, not at John. At the horse's belly. Bring the god down. Let the people see him fall.
He had forty counts. He used eight. He leaned down out of the saddle, which he could never have done at normal speed without falling off, and took the knife out of the man's hand by the blade, carefully, and dropped it, and put the man's hand back down by his side, and sat up.
He let go.
The man stumbled forward against the horse's shoulder and stood there with his hand empty, looking at it. Then he looked up, at the mask, and his face crumpled, and he went down on his knees on the paving stones in front of the horse and pressed his forehead to the ground.
The crowd around him saw it. They didn't know what they'd seen. They saw a man come out of the crowd and fall on his face before the Bronze Face, and they roared.
John rode on.
His fingers weren't even cold. Eight counts, with the mask, cost him nothing at all.
He thought about the lamp at the third cataract. One count, without it. And the blood in his mouth.
* * *
The war room was the old audience hall of the queen's grandfather, with a floor of black and white marble in squares and a ceiling painted with the signs of the zodiac, and in the middle of it, on a great trestle, the map.
John had had it made in the winter before the war in the south, by Theon the mathematician from Cyrene and a dozen of his students from the Library, from every survey and itinerary and ship's log they could find. It was the best map of the world in the world. Egypt and the Mediterranean and the coasts round it on twelve sheets of papyrus glued edge to edge, with the distances measured and the coastlines drawn true. Now someone had added a thirteenth sheet at the bottom, freshly inked: the Nile above the first cataract, the second, the third, Meroe. A line of red along it, all the way down.
Cleopatra stood over it at sunset with a cup of wine in her hand, still in half her parade gold, her feet bare on the marble.
"From the sea to Meroe," she said. "Under one crown. No one's done that since Thutmose." She traced the red line with a finger. "Do you know, the last time an Egyptian army went that far south, my ancestors were still goat-herders in Macedon?"
"You sound pleased."
"I'm very pleased. I'm going to be pleased for at least an evening." She looked at him. He'd taken the mask off in the corridor and his face was red and creased where the bronze had sat on it all day. "You're not."
"I'm tired."
"Liar." She put the cup down. "You've been tired since Giza. You've been something else since the cataract. You sat on that horse all day like a man going to his own funeral."
He opened his mouth to tell her about the lamp.
The door opened first.
* * *
The messenger was a young Jew from the Delta quarter called Philo, one of the agents Cleopatra had sent to Rome after Caesar's visit, to sit in the taverns by the Forum and in the slave markets and the bathhouses and listen. He'd come by fast ship from Puteoli, nine days, and he looked it. He went down on one knee on the marble without waiting to be told.
"Majesty. Lord." He had a sealed packet. He held it out. "I was told to bring this to your hand and speak the rest."
Cleopatra broke the seal and read it standing. John watched her face. It didn't change, which meant it was bad.
"Speak the rest," she said.
"The Senate's heard about the south, Majesty. About Carthage last year, and now the Nile, and the guns. Everyone in Rome's talking about the guns. They're calling them Egyptian thunder." Philo swallowed. "There was a debate. Four days. I had it from a senator's secretary in a bathhouse. They're saying Egypt's become a danger to the Republic. That a kingdom which can take a Roman fort in three days and conquer Kush in a season will not be content with Kush. That it must be... contained, was the word. Some of them said broken."
"Some of them always say broken," said Cleopatra. "What did Caesar say?"
"Caesar wasn't there, Majesty. He's in Africa still, finishing the Pompeians." Philo hesitated. "But his people were. And there's talk, in the Forum, among the soldiers. That when he's done in Africa he means to come back to Egypt. Not as a guest, this time. With an army. With the legions from Thapsus." He looked at the floor. "The soldiers say it as if it's settled."
John watched Cleopatra.
She'd liked Caesar. He knew that. She'd pretended not to care, on the roof, watching his ships go out past the Pharos, and she'd cared. She'd said I'd have had to have you killed so lightly he still didn't know if she'd meant it. She stood now over the map with the packet in her hand, and for a moment, just one, before she put it away, he saw her face do what it had done at the telescope. Get smaller.
"Thank you, Philo," she said. "Go and eat. Go and sleep. Come back in the morning and tell me the senators' names."
Philo went.
* * *
They stood at the map for a long time without talking.
"Is it true?" she said at last. "Your trick. Can you see if it's true?"
He'd already tried. He'd tried as Philo was talking, with his hand flat on the edge of the map, on Italy, with the mask off. He'd got almost nothing. A fog over the sea between them and Rome so thick it was like looking into milk. Two years of granaries and lifts and roads and guns, the Library and Carthage and Kush, all of it stones in the water, and the rings had spread out so far now that he couldn't see across the Mediterranean.
"No," he said. "Not from here. Not any more."
She took that in. "And with the mask?"
He hesitated.
"With the mask," he said. "Maybe."
"Then put it on."
He didn't move. She looked at him.
"John."
"I'll put it on," he said. "I'll look. But I want you to know something first, and I want you to know it from me, not from Achillas when he works it out."
So he told her. The lamp at the third cataract. One count. The Hold that had been fifteen counts under the cherry tree in Kokura, and four counts in Florence, and nothing at all now, almost, without the bronze on his face. Musashi in the snow in the yard. A crutch. The best I'll ever make. The hundredth time.
She listened without moving. When he'd finished she was quiet for a while.
"So if someone takes the mask," she said slowly, "or breaks it. Or you drop it in the harbour."
"I'm a man with a farmer's body and a hawk's eyes. That's all."
"And if Caesar comes with the legions from Thapsus."
"Then I'd better not drop it."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she came round the map, and took the mask out of his belt where it hung by its silk cord, and turned it over in her hands, the way she had on the first day, and looked at the hammer marks.
"Then nobody touches this but you and me," she said. "Ever. Not Charmion. Not Iras. Not the slaves who clean your armour." She put it into his hands. "Now look."
* * *
He put it on.
Two strips of the world. The black and white floor. The edge of the map. He laid his hand on Italy and pushed, very gently, not the Hold, just the opening, and let the Branches come one at a time down the thin bronze wire.
Rome was still fog. Even like this. A grey nothing over the whole of Italy, the sea, the west. He went east, then, slowly, along the coast of the map with his fingers, Cyrene, the Delta, closer to home, where the fog thinned.
Alexandria.
It came up clear, suddenly, small and sharp, like a picture in the bottom of a well.
A room. Low, plastered, a lamp. A table with maps on it, not his map, smaller, cruder, Roman maps of the harbour with the moles and the Pharos and the two entrances marked. Men round the table. Five, six. Greek faces, good clothes, nervous.
And at the head of the table, with his soft hands folded on the maps, talking in his beautiful voice, a man in a plain cloak who should have been dead in a ditch at Pelusium with the boy king he'd tutored. The boy king had drowned in the Nile a year ago, in the spring floods, his barge overturned. The regents' faction had scattered. Nobody had seen his tutor since.
Theodotus.
He took his hand off the map. He took the mask off.
"The Romans aren't going to fight their way into the harbour," he said. "Someone's going to open it for them."