They didn't come in the night.
By the second hour after midnight the lanterns had stopped moving. They lay along the western horizon in a long ragged line, sixty, eighty, more coming up behind, and stayed there, rocking. The Pharos beam couldn't reach them. They were too far.
"They're waiting for the chain," said Achillas, in the war room, with his helmet on the map. "For Nikias's men to lower it at the Eunostos. For a signal from the shore that won't come."
"And when it doesn't come?"
"Then they'll know something's wrong. And they'll come anyway, at dawn, the honest way." Achillas looked round the table at the captains, the gun-masters, Sobek, Theon the mathematician who'd worked out the ranges for the guns, Amenhotep in his white linen, Charmion with her tablets. "A hundred and twenty ships. Twenty thousand legionaries, if they're full. The men who beat the Pompeians at Thapsus." He said it without drama. "If even a third of them get ashore, we lose the city."
Nobody spoke.
"Then they mustn't get ashore," said Cleopatra.
* * *
The plan was John's, and Achillas's, and it had taken them a month of arguing, and it was simple, because the people carrying it out had been bakers a month ago.
The guns first. Twelve of the big bronze tubes along the shore west of the city and on the ends of the moles, each with its crew, each with its range marked out to the yard by Theon on the water, with buoys. When the Roman ships came in range, the Pharos would tell them where, and they'd fire.
Then the ships. Thirty-eight Egyptian warships in the Great Harbour, the new hulls with the hinged rudders, crewed by the men who'd been at Carthage. They'd wait behind the moles until the guns had done what they could. Then they'd go out, through the Eunostos, and hit whatever was left in the flank, the way they'd done it at Carthage, turning inside.
And then the beaches. Because some of them would get through. John had been at the Somme. He knew what some of them will get through meant. Achillas's soldiers, nine thousand of them, in the dunes west of the city behind ditches the fishwives had dug, and behind them the six thousand from the Gymnasium with their spears, and behind them the walls.
"And the god," said Achillas. "Where's the god?"
"On the Pharos," said John. "Until they land. Then on the beach."
"And the queen," said Cleopatra, "will be with him."
Every head round the table turned.
* * *
They argued about it for an hour, after the others had gone, alone in the war room with the lamps guttering and the map between them.
"No," said John.
"You don't say no to me. Nobody says no to me. It's one of the few compensations of the job." She had her arms folded. "I'm going to be on that beach."
"You'll be killed."
"So might you."
"I've got a mask."
"And I've got a crown, and an army, and a city, and every one of them is going to be standing in the sand tomorrow looking for me." She came round the map. "John. Listen to me. You think this is about courage. It isn't. I'm not brave. I was sick twice on the boat at the third cataract and only Iras knows. This is about what they see." She pointed out of the window, towards the dark city. "Six thousand bakers and fishwives who've been told for a month that a god is going to save them. What happens to them when the god's busy at the other end of the beach and the Romans come over the dunes? They look round. They look for something. If they see me there, in the sand, with them, they stay. If they see an empty space, they run." She looked at him. "My father ran. When the Alexandrians rose against him he got on a ship to Rome and left my sister to rule, and my sister was killed for it. I was eleven. I watched him go from the palace roof." Her voice didn't change. "I'm not going to be on a roof."
He didn't say anything for a long time.
"If you're there," he said at last, "and something happens to you. And at the same moment something happens on the beach. Somewhere else. Something big. And I can only be in one place."
"Then you'll go to the beach."
"Cleopatra."
"You'll go to the beach," she said, very quietly, "because if you come to me, they'll see the god run to save the queen and leave them to die, and the city falls, and I'll be just as dead, and so will you, and so will Egypt." She put her hand on his chest. "Promise me."
He looked at her face in the lamplight. The kohl. The big nose. The mouth.
"I promise," he said.
He didn't know if he meant it. He thought she knew that too.
* * *
There was nothing more to plan. There were three hours to dawn.
She didn't want to sleep. Neither did he. They went up to her room, where the windows looked north over the harbour and the lamps of the ships were bobbing at their moorings behind the moles, and she sent Iras and Charmion away, and stood in the middle of the floor in her night robe with her hair down, and said, "Tell me something. Anything. Not about tomorrow."
He thought. "We have a dance."
"Who?"
"In my time. In London. Everybody does it. It came over from America just after the war. The foxtrot." He felt foolish. "You walk, mostly. Slow, slow, quick, quick. There's music for it on the gramophone. The band at the Hammersmith Palais played it every Saturday."
"Show me."
"There's no music."
"Then hum it," said Cleopatra.
So he hummed. Badly. A song he'd heard in a dance hall in Hammersmith the summer before the accident, that everyone had been whistling that June, that he'd never thought about again until now. He took her right hand in his left and put his other hand flat on her back, the way the girls in Hammersmith had shown him, and she put her hand on his shoulder, and he walked her backwards across the floor of the queen of Egypt's bedroom, slow, slow, quick, quick, humming.
She was bad at it for about a minute. Then she wasn't. She caught the pattern the way she caught languages, all at once, and after that she was ahead of him, anticipating, and he realised she was leading.
"You're leading," he said.
"Of course I'm leading. I'm the queen." She laughed. "Hum louder. You've gone wrong. It went up there."
He hummed louder. They went round the room twice. Three times. Past the windows and the harbour lamps, past the great bed and the painted lotuses, past the stand in the corner where, polished and ready, her armour stood waiting. A bronze breastplate made for her in Memphis, small, shaped. A helmet with a cobra on the brow.
Somewhere on the third time round he stopped humming, and they went on anyway, without music, slow, slow, quick, quick, until they weren't dancing at all.
* * *
Afterwards, in the dark, with her head on his chest, she said, "Will we win?"
He'd tried to look. Twice, in the war room, with the mask, with his hand on the map. The fog over Alexandria was so thick now that he could barely see the next hour. Two years of everything he'd done had fogged this city like a breath on glass.
"I don't know," he said.
"Good," said Cleopatra. "I'd hate to be bored." She was quiet. "John."
"Yes."
"Whatever happens. I want you to know that I knew what I was doing. All of it. From the first night, when you knocked out Brennus and I laughed." She moved her head on his chest. "You didn't make me into this. I was always going to be this. You just gave me better tools."
He lay in the dark and thought about Lisa, and the lodger in him that was her hurt, the hurt he'd taken without asking. I'd never have told, Lisa had said. Not on the rack.
"I know," he said.
* * *
At the first grey light Charmion knocked, and came in without waiting, and said, "They're moving."
He went to the window. On the western horizon, in the half dark, the line of lanterns had begun to change shape. Bunching. Lengthening. Coming in.
Iras came and dressed the queen.
He watched. He'd never seen it done. The breastplate on over a linen tunic, laced at the sides, Iras's small strong fingers pulling the cords tight. The greaves. The sword, a short Greek one, on a baldric. The kohl, freshly drawn, out to her temples, so that she'd look like herself from a hundred yards. And last, the helmet with the cobra, which Cleopatra settled on her own head and looked at in the bronze mirror for a long moment without any expression at all.
Then she turned to him.
"Now you," she said.
He put on the black armour. The blue cords. Musashi's sword. And last of all, the mask, which she took out of his hands and tied on herself, the silk cord behind his head, her fingers quick and certain, the only hands but his that ever touched it.
The world narrowed to two strips. Her face in one of them.
"Go to your lighthouse, Montu," said Cleopatra. "I'll see you on the beach."
They went down together through the palace, through the colonnade and down the marble steps where Brennus and the Gaul stood, in their helmets, and saluted. Out into the Royal Quarter, where the soldiers were running. Out through Demetrios's gate, where the old Macedonian with the grey beard stood with his spear and the gold coin from 2041 hanging on a cord round his neck, and watched them go.
The city was awake. All of it. People on every roof. And when they saw the two of them come out of the gate side by side, the queen in her bronze and the god in his, a sound came up out of Alexandria that John would hear for the rest of his life, on bad nights, in other places. Not a cheer. A roar. A whole city with one throat.
On the western sea, a hundred and twenty Roman warships were coming in out of the dawn.