The first year
She told the council in the fourth month, when she could no longer hide it under the white dress, and she told them in the war room standing over the map, the way she told them about grain.
"I'm with child," said Cleopatra. "His. It will be born at the end of the flood." She looked round the table. Amenhotep, who had known for two months and said nothing. Achillas on his stick. The young priest from Ptah with his new gold collar. Theon. Six old Macedonians who had never got used to sitting at a table with Egyptians and never would. "If anyone at this table would like to say that the god's child is a bastard, now would be the time, while I can still have you thrown off the Pharos personally."
Nobody said anything.
"Good," said the queen. "Next. The Parthian treaty."
In the square outside, when the heralds read it from the steps of the temple of Isis that afternoon, the crowd was quiet for the length of a breath, and then made a sound that the oldest people in the city said afterwards they had heard only once before, on the beach, the night of the Roman fleet.
* * *
The second year
The boy was born in the last week of the flood, at night, after a labour of twenty hours. Iras delivered him. Asklepiades the doctor stood in the corner with his hands boiled red, the way John had told him, and touched nothing that hadn't been boiled first.
Cleopatra named him herself, the next morning, with the baby on her chest and her hair stuck to her face.
"Ptolemaios," she said. "Because he has to be, or the Macedonians will have a seizure." She looked down at him. "And Iohannes. And in Egyptian..." She thought. "Iohannes-hotep. John is content. Let the priests make what they want of it."
The priests made a great deal of it. By the end of the month the whole of Egypt called him Johnhotep, and there were three new temples to Montu between Memphis and Thebes.
When he was four months old he caught a cup.
Iras saw it, and told no one but the queen. A clay cup knocked off the edge of a table by the boy's own flailing hand, falling. And the boy's other hand coming up, not fast, just early, much too early, as if he'd seen the cup fall before it fell, and closing round it.
He didn't drop it. He looked at it, and put it in his mouth.
Cleopatra sat with him on her lap for a long time that night, watching his eyes.
* * *
The ninth year
"Again," said Johnhotep.
He was eight, and he was standing in the yard of the Gymnasium at dawn in a linen tunic with a wooden practice sword, and he'd been doing the nine movements of the kata since before light with a man called Sobek, who had once been a boatman and was now a general and had learned the movements from the god himself by watching him do them alone at night for five years, when he thought no one could see.
Sobek was sixty and had never been able to beat the boy at anything since he was six.
"Your Highness should rest."
"I don't need to rest. I'm not tired." The boy looked at him, the way he looked at everyone: as if he could see what they'd do half a breath before they did it. Which he could. Cleopatra had known that since the cup. "You're tired, Sobek. You're going to say one more time and then you're going to say that's enough."
"One more time," said Sobek, and stopped, and laughed.
* * *
The twentieth year
He was crowned co-ruler in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, in the thirtieth year of his mother's reign, the twentieth year since the god went away. Amenhotep put the double crown on his head. Achillas had been dead for seven years and was carried in the procession anyway, as a statue.
He was taller than his father, Iras said, who had seen both. He had his mother's nose and his father's white streak, which he'd had since he was twelve, at the left temple. He spoke nine languages. He'd read everything in the Library's mathematics room by sixteen and corrected Theon twice, and Theon, very old, had wept with delight both times.
He'd asked his mother, once, at fourteen, whether she'd ever wanted another man.
"No," said Cleopatra.
"Not ever?"
"There were offers. A king of Armenia. A Parthian prince. A rather beautiful Roman." She was reading a grain account and didn't look up. "I always had the impression, darling, that the comparison wouldn't have been fair to them."
* * *
The forty-sixth year
The queen died in the spring, in her seventy-fifth year, in her bed in the palace on the point of Lochias with the windows open to the harbour.
She had ruled for fifty-seven years. She'd outlived Amenhotep, and Iras, and Charmion, and every one of the six old Macedonians, and Rome had sent three more embassies in her lifetime and no more fleets. On the last day she asked for two things: her son, and a roll of papyrus that had been kept in a cedar box by her bed for forty-six years, tied together with another one by the same cord.
Johnhotep sat with her and read the first one to her, aloud, because her eyes had gone. It was a list, in a foreigner's square Greek, of things she'd done.
When he got to the end she was smiling.
"Read me the last line again," she said.
"None of this was me. Read it on the bad days."
"Liar," said Cleopatra, very fondly, to someone who wasn't in the room, and died at about the second hour of the afternoon.
* * *
The fiftieth year
The doctors in the Alexandria hospital, the big one by the Library with nine hundred beds, had a word for the little round things and rod-shaped things in the Sphinx scrolls by now. They called them seeds of fever, and they'd been able to see them for eleven years, through lenses Ezra's grandsons ground, stacked in brass tubes. They boiled everything. They had shown, in a long and very rude argument with the medical school at Pergamon, that the fever in the poor quarters came from the cisterns, and they'd made the city cover them.
Children in Alexandria lived to grow up. Not all. Most. The city had three times the people it had had when the god came, and it fed them all.
The ships of Egypt carried half the trade of the Mediterranean, in hulls with iron ribs and hinged rudders and, some of them, chimneys. The Bronze Face, the great ship that had been on the stocks the day after he left, had been to the far side of the Pillars of Hercules and come back with tin from Britain and a story about a people in blue paint that nobody believed.
Johnhotep had ruled alone for four years. He governed, people said, as if he could see what was coming. Which, in a very small way, very close to, he could.
* * *
The ninety-seventh year
The machine was in a cabinet of cedar in the mathematics room of the Library, and it was the size of a small chest, and it was full of wheels.
Bronze wheels, hundreds of them, with teeth cut so fine you needed one of Ezra's great-grandsons' lenses to see them. On the front, a set of dials. On the side, a crank. You set the dials and turned the crank, and the wheels went round inside the cabinet with a sound like a thousand crickets, and at the end, on a second set of dials, the answer came out.
The scholars who'd built it, over twenty years, said it could add and subtract and multiply any numbers up to a hundred thousand. They were working on dividing.
In a temple of white marble across the square from the Library, a bigger one than the temple of Isis, a statue of a masked man in armour stood with one hand raised, pointing up. Pilgrims came to it from all over the empire, and from beyond: from Arabia and India and the cities on the Black Sea. They left flowers. They asked him for children like his. The priests who served there called him the Father of the House, and on his feast day the reigning Pharaoh came to the temple on foot and laid a sprig of rosemary on the plinth, because that was what the first queen had done, and nobody remembered why.
* * *
The hundredth year
The Pharaoh stood at the window of her study on the point of Lochias in the evening, looking at the city.
She was thirty-one and had been on the throne for six years. Her great-grandfather was Johnhotep. His father was the god. She had the white streak, at the left temple, like all of them, and the nose, and a habit of catching things before they fell that made her servants very careful.
The city below her was lit. Two hundred thousand lamps, and gaslight now in the great avenues, a smoky yellow flame from pipes laid under the streets that the scholars had brought up from the swamps at Lake Mareotis. Steam trams on the Canopic Way. The Pharos, and next to it on the island the new tower, iron, taller, with a light on top that turned by itself.
On her desk lay a dispatch from Rome.
It had come that afternoon by fast steamer from Puteoli. Her ambassador there was an old, careful man, and he'd written it carefully. The new emperor, he said, was young, ambitious, and a soldier. He'd been heard to say at a dinner that Egypt had not been taught a lesson in a hundred years. That the Senate's histories called the battle off Pharos the Egyptian disgrace. That a family of half-gods on a throne of Greek kings was an insult to the Roman people. And that the legions on the Danube were doing nothing.
She read it twice. Then she rolled it up and put it in the cedar box on her desk, the one that had been her great-great-grandmother's, beside two old rolls of papyrus tied together with a cord so old it had been mended three times.
She looked out at the city for a long time.
Will he come back? she thought. Every Pharaoh of the house thought it. It was in the prayers they said as children. Will the Father come back, when we need him?
Somewhere far below, in the harbour, a steam whistle blew. The lamps of Alexandria went on burning.