The first day
The ruins of Carthage came up out of the sea at dawn like the bones of something that had died on the beach.
John stood in the bow of the Arsinoe, the first of the new hulls, with Achillas beside him and the mask in his hand, and looked at it. A long low headland. A hill at the back of it, the Byrsa, where the citadel had been. Everything between scorched and tumbled, a hundred years after the Romans had burned it and ploughed it and, the story said, sown it with salt. Weeds and broken columns and fallen walls. And on the hill, new and raw and yellow in the morning light, a fort. Timber and rubble and earth on the old foundations. Smoke from cooking fires. A flag.
And in the round harbour below the hill, the old Punic war harbour with its island in the middle, twenty warships with their oars out, already moving.
"They've seen us," said Achillas.
"They saw us yesterday." John had felt it, the evening before, with the mask off, his hand on the rail: a Branch of a lookout on a headland running. "They've had all night to get the oarsmen aboard."
"Then they'll come out and fight."
"Yes."
Achillas looked down the line of Egyptian ships behind them. Thirty-one. Fourteen of the new hulls with the hinged stern rudders, seventeen of the old with steering oars, all of them crewed by men who had never fought a sea battle in their lives, because Egypt hadn't fought one in eighty years.
"You know what Pompey's sailors are?" said Achillas. "They're the men who cleared the whole sea of pirates in three months, twenty years ago. They're the best there is."
"I know."
"And you still want to fight them at sea."
"I want to fight them anywhere but on that hill."
* * *
They came out of the harbour mouth in line abreast, twenty ships, the sun behind them, the bronze rams at their bows throwing spray, and the drums going so loud John could feel them in the deck.
It was nothing like the canal. Nothing like Kokura. He'd been in a battle once before in his life where everything was bigger than he was, and it had been the Somme, and he'd spent it in a hole in the ground with a wireless set that didn't work. This was the Somme on water. Ships the size of houses. Men in hundreds. The sound.
The new rudders saved them.
He'd known they would. He'd watched clippers in his book turn on a sixpence. He hadn't known what it would look like: the Pompeian line coming in fast and straight to ram, the way men had fought at sea for five hundred years, and the fourteen new Egyptian hulls simply turning, all at once, on their hinged rudders, inside the turning circle of ships that had to swing their steering oars like barn doors. The rams went past them into empty water. The Egyptian ships came round and in behind and hit the Pompeians in their sides, where the oars were.
The sound of a ship's oars breaking all down one side, all at once, was the worst sound he'd ever heard. Worse than shells. Men were on the other ends of those oars.
He didn't fight that morning. He stood on the Arsinoe's bow with the mask on and the Branches narrowed to two strips and called out, in Greek, where the next ram was coming from, a breath before it came. Achillas's helmsman turned the ship where John said. Twice the Pompeian rams missed them by a man's length. Once they didn't, and a Pompeian ship hit the Arsinoe's stern quarter and stove in four oar ports and killed nine men, and John had seen it coming and called it too late, because he'd been watching somewhere else.
By noon nine Pompeian ships were sunk or taken and the rest had gone back into the harbour, and pulled a chain across the mouth.
Egypt had lost five. Two of the new ones. Three hundred men.
Achillas came and stood beside him in the bow with his face grey.
"That's the first day," he said.
* * *
The second day
They landed on the beach north of the harbour in the dark, three thousand men, and at dawn they went up the hill.
Achillas wanted to. John didn't. He'd said so on the ship, in the night, with the mask off and his hand on the hill's own earth, a clod of it that one of Achillas's scouts had brought back, and the Branches had shown him the hill in a dozen ways and in most of them the hill was covered in Egyptian dead.
"Then what?" Achillas had said. "We sit on the beach and starve? They've got the cisterns. They've got the harbour. They can sit up there till winter. We can't. Our water's in the ships."
"Give me a night."
"For what?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then you can have it after," said Achillas, "if there's anyone left," and at dawn he went up the hill.
John went with him, because there was nothing else to do.
The fort on the Byrsa had a ditch and an earth rampart and a timber wall on top with towers every forty feet, and behind the wall were three thousand Pompeian legionaries who'd lost a war in Greece and had nowhere else in the world to go. They didn't run. They didn't break. They stood on the wall and threw pila and stones and boiling water down on the Egyptians in the ditch for four hours, in the sun, and the Egyptians, who'd been farmers and boatmen a year ago, came on and came on and fell in the ditch and stayed there.
John used the Hold until he couldn't.
He did what he'd done at Schedia. Found the Branches flaring with someone about to die, pushed, went there, pulled a man out from under a falling stone or knocked a pilum out of the air with the flat of his sword, came back, let go. With the mask he could hold forty counts. He did it over and over. Twenty times. Thirty. On the thirty-first the cold came through the mask like water through a cracked dam, and his legs went, and he found himself on his knees in the ditch with blood running out of his nose into the dust and a man screaming beside him with a pilum through his thigh, and he couldn't do anything about it at all.
Achillas called off the assault at noon.
Eight hundred Egyptians dead in the ditch. Perhaps fifty Pompeians on the wall.
That night, on the beach, John sat in the sand with a blanket round him and his hands in a pot of warm water and shook, and Achillas sat down beside him.
"Your night," he said. "Take it."
* * *
The third day
The cisterns were Punic.
He'd found them in the Branches the night before, through the clod of earth, and understood them the second time he went down into the Byrsa's past with his hand on the hill. The Carthaginians had built their citadel on a honeycomb. Cisterns under the hill, great vaulted tanks of stone and cement to hold the winter rain, and channels to feed them, and the channels came out on the slope below the north side, choked with a hundred years of rubble and weeds where the Romans had smashed the aqueduct. The Pompeians had cleared the cisterns. They drank from them. They hadn't cleared the channels. They didn't know they were there.
He went in at midnight with twenty men, the best Achillas had, and a lamp in a pot.
It was eight hundred yards. On their bellies for most of it, in a stone channel the height of a man's hip, through a hundred years of silt and bones and snakes and the stink of rotten water. Twice the roof had come down and they had to dig. The second time, John put his hands on the fallen stone, which wasn't alive, and Turned it, forward, a thousand years of weather in a breath, until it crumbled to gravel and sand and they could scrape through. It took the heat out of him so fast he thought his heart would stop. One of the men had to carry him for the next hundred yards, a boatman from the Delta called Sobek, on his back, like a child.
They came up through a cistern grate inside the fort in the hour before dawn.
There was a guard at the north gate, eight men, around a brazier. John was out of Hold. He'd used it all. He stood up out of the grate with his hands like ice and his face in the mask and nothing in him at all, and Sobek and the others came up behind him with their knives, and the guards saw them.
He didn't remember most of it. He remembered that it was quiet and very quick and done with knives in the dark, and that he didn't do any of it. He remembered Sobek lifting the bar off the gate, and the gate swinging open, and Achillas's three thousand coming up the hill behind it in a wave of shouting, with the first grey light behind them.
He remembered trying to push one last time, for a Pompeian officer coming across the yard with a sword at Sobek's back.
And then nothing.
* * *
He came back on the beach, in the afternoon, under a sail rigged for shade, with Achillas sitting beside him.
"You fell down," said Achillas. "In the yard. Like a dead man. For as long as it takes to boil a pot." He looked out at the sea. "We thought you were dead. My men said a god had gone out of you."
John's mouth was dry. "Sobek?"
"Alive. He killed the man who was going to kill him. And then he sat over you with his knife and wouldn't let anyone near." Achillas paused. "It's ours. The fort, the harbour, the ships in it. Their admiral's dead. He fell on his sword when he saw the gate open. The legionaries surrendered at noon. Eleven hundred of them. I don't know what to do with eleven hundred Roman legionaries."
"Send them home," said John. "To Caesar. With a letter. Say Egypt doesn't keep Roman prisoners. Say Egypt has no quarrel with Romans who don't burn its ships."
Achillas looked at him for a long time.
"You've lost more of your hair," he said.
John put his hand up. He couldn't see it. Later, in Alexandria, in Cleopatra's bronze mirror, he saw a streak of white running back from his left temple, a finger wide, like a stripe of paint.
* * *
They came back to Alexandria nine days later with the captured ships and the eleven hundred Romans and the bodies of eleven hundred of their own in jars of salt for burial, and the city came out on the harbour walls and cheered so loud it frightened the gulls off the Pharos.
There were envoys waiting. That was the first thing Cleopatra told him, that night, in her room, with his head in her lap and her fingers on the white streak.
"From Numidia," she said. "King Juba. Who was Pompey's friend until four days ago, when he heard about Carthage. From the Nabataeans at Petra. From two of the cities in Cyrene. And one from much further, from the Parthian king, who has a long beard and a very long name and wants to know, very politely, what Egypt is planning." She paused. "They all want to know the same thing. How. How a country that hasn't fought at sea in eighty years took the Pompeian fleet and a Roman fort in three days."
"What will you tell them?"
"What do you want me to tell them?"
He thought about the canal, and the ditch, and the cistern channel, and Sobek carrying him on his back. The rudders and the Branches and the Turn, and a man falling down dead in a yard for as long as it takes to boil a pot.
"Tell them whatever they already believe," he said.
"They believe," said Cleopatra, "that Egypt has been sent a god."
He was quiet.
"You've seen the walls," she said softly. "The print shop's posters. Someone's been pasting up others. Not ours. With your mask drawn on them. The temple of Serapis says you're a demon who's bewitched me. The priests at Memphis say you're the war god Montu, come back. The people in Rhakotis just say the Bronze Face. They touch the walls where the posters are, for luck." She looked down at him. "I can stop them, if you like. Or I can let them believe it, and the envoys will go home and tell their kings that Egypt can't be beaten, and nobody will try."
He lay with his head in her lap and looked up at the painted lotuses on the ceiling, and thought about Musashi. A man who walks on a crutch long enough forgets how to walk.
"Let them," he said.