The house was in the Beta quarter, behind the theatre of Dionysus, a rich man's house gone shabby, with a blind wall to the street and a garden at the back with one fig tree. It took John four nights to find it.
He did it the slow way. Cleopatra wanted to send Achillas with two hundred men to turn the city upside down. John asked for four nights, and a cloak, and Sobek.
"Why?" said Cleopatra.
"Because if Achillas turns the city upside down, Theodotus hears about it in an hour and leaves by the Moon Gate in a fish cart. And then we've got a city upside down and no Theodotus." He put the hood up. "He's a scholar. He hides like a scholar. Near books, and near people who read them."
So he walked the Beta quarter with Sobek for four nights, in a plain brown cloak with the mask on under the hood, and touched doors. Gateposts. A ring on a wall where a man had tied his mule. Each time the Branches came one at a time down the bronze wire, and most of them were nothing, and on the fourth night, at the back gate of the house with the fig tree, one of them was a man with soft hands going in at midnight.
"Here," he said.
Sobek looked at the wall. It was twelve feet high. Sobek had been a Delta boatman until two years ago and could climb a mast in a gale.
"Up," said Sobek, and made a stirrup of his hands.
* * *
He lay on the roof tiles over the room for an hour, with his ear to a vent.
They'd come in ones and twos. Seven men. He knew some of the voices: a member of the council, the brother-in-law of the Canopus priest he'd caught stealing grain in the first week. A Greek shipowner who'd lost money when the new hulls came in. A man from the old Macedonian families, the ones who'd come with Alexander three hundred years ago and had run Egypt ever since, and who did not like Egyptians, or queens who spoke Egyptian, or foreigners in bronze masks. A Roman, by his Latin, nervous, younger than the others.
And Theodotus.
He hadn't changed. He'd lost weight and his robe was plain, but the voice was the same. Beautiful, reasonable, sad.
"Within the month," he was saying. "The fleet's at Rhodes now. Our friend here has it from Rome direct. A hundred and twenty ships, the legions from Africa. They'll come from the west, out of the sunset, along the coast from Cyrene. They know about the guns, so they won't try the Great Harbour by daylight." A paper rustled. "Which is why they won't have to. On the night, the chain across the Eunostos harbour will be lowered. Nikias's men have the windlass. The Romans come in through the west harbour in the dark, land at the Heptastadion, and are in the Royal Quarter before the gunners wake."
"And the queen?" said the shipowner.
"The queen will be offered a choice," said Theodotus. "Rome is reasonable. Rome likes queens who know their place. She can keep a crown, a small one, if she gives up the guns and the foreigner." He paused. "She won't, of course. She's her father's daughter only in her nose. So she'll be put on a ship to Rome, and walked in Caesar's triumph, and strangled in a cellar afterwards, as they do." The voice didn't change at all. "And the foreigner will be taken to Rome in a cage, so they can find out what he is."
"And Egypt?"
"Egypt," said Theodotus softly, "will go back to what it was. Greek. Ours. Not this... thing she's making. Printing presses. Egyptian on the walls. Water lifts for peasants. Priests of Ptah at the council table. Did you hear she's going to open the Library to anyone who can read? Anyone." A cup was put down hard. "I taught her brother. A sweet boy. Not clever, but sweet. He drowned in the Nile with his barge on its side because that man's floods ran higher than any flood for six years, and his water lifts sucked the canals dry at Pelusium so the river ran wild in the main channel. Did you know that? No one knows that. I went and looked." His voice cracked, just a hair. "The foreigner killed my king without ever lifting a hand. And she gave him a horse to ride in a parade."
There was a silence in the room.
On the roof, John lay with his cheek on the tiles, inside the mask, and thought about it. The water lifts. The flood. The boy king's barge. He'd never thought about where the water went.
Stones in the water, he thought. And the rings go out and drown someone you've never met.
"The money," said the Roman.
"Is here." A chest lid opened. A sound of coins. "Our other friend has been generous."
John pushed the mask up and put his eye to the edge of the vent.
The chest stood open on the table in the lamplight. It was full of gold. New gold, bright, thick coins, heavy, with a pattern on one face so fine it looked like the rings of a tree.
He put the mask back down.
* * *
He went in through the garden door. Sobek came in through the window.
There's no clean way to do a thing like that. He'd learned it in Kokura, in the village under the three pines: there's the Hold, and inside it there's time, but outside it seven frightened men with knives are seven frightened men with knives. He went through the door with the Hold already down and the room thick and still. The lamp flame standing up straight. Theodotus with his mouth half open. The Roman's hand going to his belt.
He didn't count. He'd stopped counting. He took the knives first. The Roman's, the shipowner's, the Macedonian's, a little one from the council member's sleeve. He dropped them in the chest with the gold. He put the Macedonian on the floor, and the shipowner, carefully, the way you'd lay down a man who'd fainted. He reached the Roman just as the Hold started to thin, the way it did now even with the mask, after thirty or so, like a cloth wearing through, and the Roman came back into time with John's hand on his wrist and John's foot behind his knee and went over backwards into the wall.
It snapped back. Sobek came through the window with a knife in his teeth.
Theodotus was going for the inner door. He had a good start. John was out of Hold, and cold, and the Roman had kicked him in the shin on the way down. He took two steps after the old man and his leg wouldn't hold him.
Sobek caught Theodotus by the collar of his plain cloak in the doorway, and lifted him off his feet, and held him there, kicking, a foot off the floor.
"Not so fast, old friend," said Sobek, in Egyptian, very pleased with himself, which he'd heard John say once, and had liked.
* * *
They brought Theodotus to the palace before dawn, with the chest and the seven men and every paper on the table.
Cleopatra came down to the war room in a night robe with her hair in a plait and looked at him for a long time. He stood between two of Achillas's men with his soft hands tied in front of him and looked back.
"You'll have me killed," he said. "You'd be a fool not to."
"Yes," she said.
"May I ask one thing?"
"You may ask."
"Is it true?" He looked at John. "What I said. About the floods. About my boy."
John had looked, coming back through the streets with his hand on the chest. Not at the future. There was nothing of the future in a box of gold. He'd looked at Theodotus's face when the old man said I went and looked.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe. Probably."
Theodotus nodded slowly. "Then at least I'm not mad," he said, and seemed relieved.
Cleopatra didn't have him killed that day. She had him put in a room in the old palace with a guard on the door and his books brought to him, and John never found out, then, what she meant to do with him in the end.
The gold went on the war-room table. John took one of the coins and turned it to the lamp and looked at the rim. 2041. And on the face, among the fine lines of the coil, the same tiny letters. HARTLEY.
There was a slip of paper in the bottom of the chest, under the gold. Ordinary papyrus. He'd almost missed it.
On it, in English, in a neat, precise, slanting hand with the sevens crossed the continental way, were four words.
Brakes, Mr Ashford. Remember?
* * *
"And how," said Achillas, the next morning, at the map, "do you propose we stop a hundred and twenty Roman warships coming along the coast in the dark from the west? We've thirty-eight ships that can fight. The guns on the boats are made for rivers, not for open sea in a swell. And Rome isn't Kush."
He said it the way he said everything, like an old cavalryman who'd seen every clever idea in the world die in a ditch. Two years ago it had annoyed John. Now he found he relied on it.
"Come and see," he said.
* * *
It was in the biggest of the shipyard sheds, behind a screen of canvas, and it had taken Ezra's cousins at Memphis four months to cast.
A tube of bronze nine feet long and as thick as a man's waist at the breech, lying on a carriage of oak beams on four solid wheels, and beside it, on a wooden cradle, a ball of iron as big as a child's head. The founders had made three. Two had cracked on cooling. This was the third.
Achillas walked round it twice. "Another of your thunder pipes."
"A bigger one."
"How far?"
"Let's find out."
They wheeled it out onto the end of the mole by the Pharos at noon, with half the shipyard following and a crowd gathering on the harbour walls, and John loaded it himself, the way the gunners of the Royal Garrison Artillery had shown him once behind the lines at Albert when he'd been sent to mend their telephone. Powder in a linen bag. A wad. The ball, rolled down the barrel with a rammer. The touch-hole primed. He moved everyone back behind the stone wall of the mole. He put the slow match on the end of a ten-foot pole.
"Majesty," said Achillas, "you should stand back further."
"No," said Cleopatra, beside him.
John touched the match to the hole.
The sound went through the stone under their feet. The carriage jumped back six feet and slammed into the timber chocks behind it. A cloud of white smoke rolled out across the water, and high above it, black against the sky, small, rising, a dot.
It went up and up. The crowd on the harbour walls stopped breathing. It went out over the sea in a long arc, past the end of the mole, past the reef, past the place where the Pharos fishing boats turned back, and came down, at last, far out on the blue, in a white spout of water you could see from the palace roof.
Nearly a mile.
There was no sound on the walls at all.
Achillas walked to the edge of the mole and stood there, looking out at the place where the spout had been, for a long time.
"How many can you make?" he said, without turning round.
"In a month? Twelve. If nothing cracks."
"And if they come at night?"
"Then we'll have to light the sea," said John.
Achillas turned and looked at him. Then, for the first time in two years, the old man laughed. Short, through his scarred chin, like a dog barking.
"I still don't like you," he said.
* * *
That night, on the palace roof, Cleopatra stood with her arms folded and looked out at the harbour, where torches were moving on the moles. The founders were already digging the casting pits.
"Sometimes," she said, "I wonder if there's anything you can't do."
He was sitting on the parapet with the mask in his lap and his hands in a bowl of warm water. They'd been cold since the house with the fig tree and hadn't warmed.
"I can't stop her," he said. "Moira. She's in Rome, or she's been there. She paid them. She knew the fleet was coming before Caesar's people knew it was going." He looked at the gold coin on the parapet beside him, where he'd put it. "She told me she wasn't my enemy. She said she was my brakes."
"And is she?"
He thought about the boy king's barge on its side in the Nile. About the rag doll on the ridge at the third cataract. About the gun on the mole, and the crowd not breathing.
"I don't know," he said.