The statue was eleven feet tall and he hated it.
It stood in the middle of the great reading hall of the new Library, the stone one, under the clerestory where the light came down, on a plinth of red granite from Aswan. Black basalt, polished. A man in armour of overlapping plates, with a curved sword at his hip, one hand raised, pointing up, and on his face, carved so finely you could see every hammer mark, the mask.
The sculptor had never seen him without it. Nobody outside the palace had, in five years. So the statue had the mask, and below the mask a jaw and a mouth that the sculptor had invented, stern and handsome and nothing like John's.
"It's a very good statue," said Cleopatra, beside him.
"It's got someone else's chin."
"It's got the chin of a god. Yours would have been a disappointment." She put her arm through his. "The scholars like it. They leave flowers on the plinth when they've solved something. Theon left a whole basket when he did the thing with the curves."
He looked at the flowers round the granite. Lotus, and roses, and a single sprig of rosemary that someone had left that morning.
* * *
Five years.
He'd thought, on the beach that night with the fires burning and the Roman ships going out over the sunset, that it would be one more year, perhaps two. Long enough to make sure. Then five had gone by, the way years went by in Egypt, in floods.
The water lifts had reached the first cataract and then Meroe. There were eleven thousand of them, now, from the Delta to the south, and the fields they watered fed a third more people than Egypt had ever fed. The roads ran from Alexandria to Pelusium and Canopus and Memphis, on their beds of broken stone. The print shops had become forty print shops, and a street of them behind the Gymnasium, and the Library's new reading rooms were open from dawn to dark to anyone who could read and some who couldn't yet, and the schools for scribes' children taught Greek and Egyptian and numbers with a mark for nothing, the way the people under the Sphinx had written them.
And the city had grown upwards.
That had been Ezra's doing, more than John's. Ezra's sons had learned to make sheets of glass as big as a door, flat and clear, from a trick with a tin bath John had half remembered and drawn for them. And the architects of Alexandria, who had been building in marble for three hundred years and were bored, had taken one look at the glass and gone mad. There were buildings along the Canopic Way now seven storeys high, of white marble on iron frames, with glass in every window, that caught the sun in the mornings so the whole street blazed like a row of lamps. There was a tower by the Gymnasium with twelve storeys, and a mechanical lift inside it, worked by a water wheel, that Alexandrians queued all day to ride.
And in the harbour, tied up at the quay below the Library, was the Isis.
She was ugly. A hull of oak sheathed in iron plates riveted on with copper, black with pitch, a tall iron chimney in the middle of her, and on either side, half under the water, a great wheel of paddles. Theon and his students had built her engine, the two of them and fifty smiths and a young man from Pergamon who could make iron do anything. It was a bad engine. It leaked steam from every joint and burned a forest of wood a week and broke down every second voyage. But she went to Canopus and back against the wind at a fast walking pace, with no oars and no sail, and every child in Alexandria had been out to the end of the mole to watch her come in, belching black smoke over the Pharos.
He'd seen it all happen. And he'd seen less and less of it.
* * *
That was the thing he hadn't told Cleopatra. He'd told her about the Hold, at the map, the night of the parade. He hadn't told her the rest.
The fog had got worse.
Every year of it. Every water lift, every road, every steam engine and pane of glass was a stone in the water, and the rings had gone out until now he couldn't see anything at all in Egypt. Not with the mask. Not with his hand flat on a door. He'd touch a man in the street, and there'd be nothing there. Grey. Like putting your hand into a cloud. The whole country had gone blind to him.
And the Hold.
He had twenty counts, with the mask, on a good day. Fifteen on a bad one. He had three without it, after five years of training alone in the Gymnasium at night, and the three cost him blood every time.
He stood in front of the statue in the reading hall with Cleopatra on his arm and thought about it. About the next war, whenever it came. The next Roman fleet. The god of war standing on the beach in his mask, reaching for the Hold the way he'd reached for it in front of Varenus, and finding ten counts. Then five. Then nothing, in front of everyone, and a sword coming.
What happens to them if you're wrong? she'd said, at the top of the Pharos.
He'd known the answer for a year. He'd been waiting to have the courage to say it.
* * *
He told her on the roof of the Library, at noon, with the city spread out round them blazing in the sun.
"You're really leaving," she said. She said it before he'd finished. "Aren't you?"
"Yes."
She didn't look at him. She looked out at the towers. "Why?"
He told her. The fog. The Hold. The statue with someone else's chin. The beach that would come, one day, and the god who'd fall over on it.
"And there's the other thing," he said. "The thing Moira said. Brakes. I didn't understand it in Japan. I thought she meant she'd stop me." He looked at the Isis down in the harbour, belching smoke. "I think now she meant that I can't stop myself. Every year I stay, I do more. Because I can. Because there's always one more thing. And every thing I do, I can see less of what it does." He turned to her. "If I stay, Egypt will be a country that waits for a god to tell it what to do next. If I go, it'll be a country that has to work it out." He swallowed. "And it can. You can. You've been doing it for five years. I've just been standing next to you in a mask."
She was quiet for a long time.
"There are other places," she said at last. "Aren't there? Other times. That's part of it too. You can hear them."
He didn't lie to her. "Yes."
"Loud ones."
"Yes."
She nodded slowly. She looked at the city for a while longer.
"Will I see you again?" she said.
He'd known she'd ask that, too, and he'd thought for a month about what to say. All of it had been either a lie or cruel.
"Time's a river with a great many branches," he said. "I don't know where they go. I've never been able to see my own." He took her hands. "But the places I leave never seem to be finished with me. Or I with them."
It was the most honest thing he had. She looked at him, and he saw that she knew exactly how much it was and wasn't, and that she'd take it.
"Then go and do it properly," said Cleopatra. "Not slinking off in the night like my father. Properly. In front of them."
* * *
The farewell feast was in the great hall of the palace, the one with the zodiac on the ceiling, and everyone came.
Achillas, very old now, with a stick, who'd told John at least once a month for five years that he still didn't like him and had come to the feast in his best armour. Amenhotep, high priest of Ptah and chief of the queen's council, who'd bowed to him at the door and then held his hand for a long time without speaking. Theon, and Asklepiades the doctor, and Ezra and all five of his sons. Sobek, who was a captain of the queen's guard now and wore a gold collar he was embarrassed by. Tia the fish-gutter, who ran the gun crews of the whole western shore and had been given a house by the queen and a seat at the high table, where she sat next to an ambassador from Parthia and taught him the rude verses of the lentil song.
At the end, he stood up.
He'd taken off the mask for it. Cleopatra had said he should, and he'd agreed, and when he stood up at the high table with his own face and his own chin and the white streak in his hair, the hall went so quiet he could hear the lamps.
He didn't say much. He'd never been good at speeches. He said that when he'd come to Egypt he'd talked about wonders, and that they'd made them. He said that the wonders didn't matter, in the end. That the guns would rust and the towers would fall down one day and the Isis would break down again tomorrow, probably. That what mattered was the people in this room, and the people in the street outside, who'd learned to look at a broken thing and ask how it worked.
"To Egypt," he said, and raised his cup. "And to a future none of us can see."
They drank. Achillas wept, openly, into his beard, and then told everyone it was the smoke.
* * *
The last night he didn't remember in order. It came back to him afterwards in pieces, the way the good things did.
Her hand on the side of his face. The lamps going out one by one. The sound of the harbour. Her saying, very late, into the dark, "I love you. In this life and in all the others, if there are others," and him saying it back, and meaning it more than he'd meant anything.
Some time before dawn she got up and lit a lamp and sat at the table by the window, in her night robe, and wrote. He watched her from the bed. When she'd finished she rolled it and tied it and put it on the table.
"What's that?"
"Nothing you need," she said, and came back to bed.
He'd written one too. He'd done it the week before, in the Library, in a corner of the reading hall under his own statue, on the best papyrus in the city. He'd written it four times and burned three. It wasn't prophecies. He'd decided that early. No warnings about Rome, no list of things she should build. He'd written down, as plainly as he could, everything he'd seen her do in five years that no one else in the world could have done. The canal and the riots and the temple at Thebes. The sand hill. All of it. So that on a bad day, when she was old and alone and tired and the priests of Amun were at her again, she could read it and remember.
He put it on the table beside hers before he got dressed.
* * *
At dawn he put on the armour, and Musashi's sword, and she tied on the mask.
They went out together onto the great balcony on the harbour side of the palace, the one the queens of Egypt had shown themselves from for three hundred years, and below it the square was full. All of it. And the colonnades round it, and the roofs, and the moles, and the streets running away into the city. He'd never seen so many people so silent.
He looked out at them through the two narrow strips. The towers blazing in the first sun. The Isis at the quay, with steam up for once. The Pharos.
"Remember," he said. Not loud. The square had gone so quiet it carried. "The power to shape what comes next was never mine. It's yours. Every one of you. It always was."
He felt for the loud place.
It was there. It had been there for a month, at the back of his head like a sound in another room. Not a battle, this time. Not a duel. Something huge and far off and humming, like a city of machines, and at the bottom of the hum, very faint, a thread he'd last felt in a basement in London in 1920 with the light coming out of Hartley's coil. A glass city on the sea, with Egyptian letters on its walls and a year on a poster. 2002.
The far end of the accident. Still there. Still waiting.
He turned his head and looked at her one last time.
Cleopatra stood beside him in the morning light with her chin up and the kohl drawn out to her temples, the way she'd looked the first day, when she laughed. She wasn't laughing. She wasn't crying either, quite. As he watched, a single tear ran down from the corner of one eye, through the kohl, and she didn't wipe it away, because the whole of Alexandria was watching.
He reached for the thread, and pulled.