From the top of the Pharos the Roman fleet looked like a city on the move.
A hundred and twenty ships. More. Quinqueremes in the middle, the big ones, five men to every oar bank, with towers on their decks and bronze rams the length of a man. Triremes on the wings. Transports behind, wallowing, low in the water with legionaries. Red sails. Painted eyes on the bows. They came in out of the west in a crescent two miles wide with the dawn behind them, and the sound of their drums came across the water a long time after the sight, like thunder after lightning.
John stood on the western gallery in the mask with the wind pulling at his cords and the keepers behind him at the great mirror. There was no need for the beam. It was daylight. The Romans had come the honest way.
"Theon," he said.
The mathematician was beside him with a wax tablet and a brass sighting rod, very pale. He'd never seen a battle. He sighted along the rod at the first of the buoys on the water, then at the leading Roman ships.
"Two thousand yards," he said. His voice shook and his numbers didn't. "Eighteen hundred. They're rowing hard."
"Tell me at fourteen."
"Yes."
John looked down. Along the shore west of the city, in the dunes, he could see the gun crews. Little figures in the sand around their bronze tubes. Dockers and bakers and fishwives. On the end of the mole below the Pharos, the nearest crew had a woman in charge, a fish-gutter from Rhakotis called Tia who'd made up most of the song about lentils, and she was standing on the carriage of her gun with her hand shading her eyes, looking up at him.
"Fourteen hundred," said Theon.
"Mirror."
The keepers swung the small mirror across the fire. Long. Long. Aim.
Down in the dunes, twelve crews bent over their guns.
"Twelve hundred."
John took a breath.
"Long. Short. Short."
* * *
The guns went off together.
Twelve white clouds along the shore, and the sound arriving a heartbeat later, flat and huge, rolling up the tower. Out on the water, in the middle of the Roman crescent, white spouts going up. One. Three. Seven. And one that didn't go up as water but as wood, a great burst of splinters and oars and men from the side of a quinquereme, which slewed round across the line of the ships behind it, and stopped.
Theon made a sound.
"Again," said John.
They'd drilled for a month. The crews were fast. Faster than anyone had any right to be. The second volley went off before the first smoke had cleared. Then the third. The iron balls went out over the sea in their long arcs and came down among the ships, and most of them missed, and some didn't. A trireme broke in half. A tower on a quinquereme went over the side with the archers in it. One of the transports, hit low, went down so fast John saw the soldiers on her deck still standing in their ranks as the water came over them.
The Roman line came on.
That was the thing he'd known and hadn't known. They didn't stop. They didn't turn. Rome had never stopped for anything in five hundred years and it didn't stop for twelve bronze guns. The crescent tightened. The drums went faster. Ships that were hit fell out of the line and the ships behind them went round and came on.
"Eight hundred," said Theon. "Six."
The guns fired again. And again. The Roman fleet came out of the smoke into the shallows west of the city, the bow ramps of the transports already coming down.
"They're landing," said Theon.
"Signal the fleet."
The mirror. A long sweep east, towards the Great Harbour, three times. Behind the moles, thirty-eight Egyptian warships went out through the Eunostos at full oars and turned west along the coast, inside the Roman line, between the warships and the transports, the way they'd done it at Carthage.
John was already on the stairs.
* * *
The beach west of the city was two miles of sand and dunes and scrub, and by the time he got there half of it was Roman.
He came along the shore at a run with Sobek and a hundred of Achillas's best behind him, through the gun positions, past Tia's crew on the mole end still firing at the ships, and into the dunes, and saw it.
The transports had grounded all along the shallows. Legionaries were coming off them into the surf in their thousands, in good order, shields up, the way they'd come off ships in Gaul and Britain and Africa. The arrows from the dunes went into their shields and stuck there. The first ranks reached the beach and formed up and came on at a walk, and the ditch the fishwives had dug was a hundred yards in front of them, and behind it were Achillas's soldiers, and behind them the Gymnasium six thousand with their spears.
And in the middle of it, in the second line of the Egyptians, behind the ditch, standing on a sand hill where everyone on that beach could see her, in a bronze breastplate and a helmet with a cobra, was the queen.
If they see me there, they stay.
They stayed.
John looked at the Branches. Two strips. A thin wire. He'd given up trying to see the whole of it. He looked for one thing, the thing he'd known he'd have to look for since Kokura: where it would break.
It was on the left. A gap in the dunes where a dry stream bed came down to the sea, and the ditch was shallow because the sand kept slipping in. Three cohorts of legionaries were already moving towards it, along the beach, behind the main line where Achillas couldn't see them. Fifteen hundred men. If they got through the gap they'd be behind the whole Egyptian line in a quarter of an hour, and the six thousand would see the Romans behind them, and break.
He looked at Cleopatra on her sand hill.
And on the right, in the corner of the Branch, where he hadn't wanted to look: Roman marines off one of the warships, forty men, coming up through the scrub behind the queen's position from the seaward side. Towards the sand hill. Unseen.
Then you'll go to the beach, she'd said.
He went to the gap.
* * *
He held the gap for a quarter of an hour with a hundred men and Sobek.
He never knew afterwards how much of it he'd done himself. He used the Hold the way he'd used it at Carthage, over and over, but it was thinner now even with the mask, and it went faster, and it wore through every time at thirty counts and then twenty-five and then twenty. Inside it he went through the front rank of the first cohort like a man walking through a field of standing corn, and turned their shields aside and took their swords out of their hands, and came out the other side and let go and there were twenty legionaries on their backs in the stream bed and a hole in their line. And Achillas's men went into the hole.
Then again. Then again. Every time the cold came further into his fingers. Every time the blood on his lip was more.
The third cohort's centurion, a man with a face like a boot, saw what was happening and did the one thing John hadn't expected. He stopped his men. Closed them up into a square, shields locked on every side, a wall of red and bronze, and stood them in the mouth of the gap and didn't move. You couldn't Hold your way through a wall of shields. There was nowhere to step.
For a long moment the two sides stood and looked at each other across the dry stream bed.
Then Sobek, who'd been a boatman, said, "Lord. The tide," and pointed.
The tide was coming in. It came up the stream bed, behind the square, a foot of water, then two, and the sand under the legionaries' feet began to go soft, and their square began to lean.
John put his hands flat on the bank of the stream bed, where the soft sandstone was crumbling into the water. He pushed forward. A century of weather in a breath, a thousand years, all the heat in his body.
The bank came down. Not on the Romans. Into the water behind them, a slide of wet sand and rock, a dam, and the incoming tide piled up against it and went sideways, round, under the square's feet.
The square went over like a table with one leg kicked out.
* * *
He didn't see the queen's sand hill. He didn't look. He knew if he looked he'd go.
When the third cohort had broken, and the main Roman line had heard what was happening behind it and begun to come apart, and the Gymnasium six thousand had seen it come apart and come over the ditch with their spears screaming, he finally let himself turn round.
The sand hill was covered in bodies. Roman marines. Thirty, forty of them.
She was standing in the middle of them. Iras was beside her with her little bronze knife red to the hilt. Brennus and the Gaul were on either side, their oval shields dented and their spears gone. Two hundred of the Gymnasium women stood round the hill in a ring with their spears, the ones who'd carried powder, the fish-gutters and the bakers' wives, breathing hard. And the queen of Egypt had blood on her face and on her breastplate and on the short Greek sword in her hand, and she was looking across the beach at him.
She raised the sword. Not a salute. Just to show him she still had it.
He found he couldn't breathe.
* * *
The Roman admiral found him at the water's edge at noon.
His name was Aulus Varenus. He was sixty, a sailor, not a legionary, with a grey crop and a face burned brown by forty years at sea. He'd come ashore from his flagship with the last of his marines when he saw his transports burning in the shallows, and his own ship sinking behind him, and his legions coming apart in the dunes, because he was the kind of officer who went to where it was worst. He came down the beach with a sword in his hand and thirty men behind him and saw the bronze mask by the water and came straight at it.
"What are you?" he said, in Latin. "What kind of demon are you?"
John didn't answer. He didn't have the breath.
Varenus came on.
John reached for the Hold, and it came, thin, frayed, ten counts, maybe less, like the last of the water in a canteen. It was enough to see the cut. Not enough to get out of its way cleanly. He turned it on Musashi's blade and felt it jar all the way to his teeth. Varenus was good. Old and good and desperate. He cut again. John Held again, and saw it, and turned it, and his knee nearly went.
The third time he didn't Hold at all. He didn't have it. He just moved, the groove, the fourth movement of the kata, the one he'd done ten thousand times in a yard in Kokura under a cherry tree, with a farmer's body Musashi had made into something else. His blade went under Varenus's and up, and turned, and the admiral's sword went spinning out over the water and fell in the surf.
Varenus sat down in the wet sand. He looked up at the mask, breathing hard, waiting.
The beach had gone quiet around them. Egyptians and Romans both. Thousands of people watching.
John held out his hand.
Varenus stared at it.
"Get up," said John, in Latin. His voice came out cracked and strange through the bronze. "Take your ships, what's left. Take your men. Go home." He swallowed blood. "Tell the Senate Egypt doesn't want a war with Rome. Tell them Egypt will sell Rome grain at a fair price for as long as there's a Rome. And tell them that the next fleet that comes to Alexandria won't go home."
Varenus looked at the hand for a long time. Then he took it, and got up.
* * *
They lit fires along the beach that night, all the way from the city to the dunes. The Romans had gone at sunset: forty ships out of a hundred and twenty, and eight thousand men, and the rest were in the sea or the sand.
He'd learned, in the afternoon, what else had burned. One of the quinqueremes, on fire from the guns, had drifted in on the tide through the eastern harbour mouth and gone aground against the quay below the Royal Quarter, by the old Library's harbour storehouses, where the new rolls were kept in buildings of cedar and reed. The wind had been from the north. The storehouses had caught.
Ezra and his sons had been the ones to get there first, with buckets, and then the scholars, and then half the Delta quarter in a chain from the harbour. They'd lost two storehouses and four thousand rolls. The fire had reached the wall of the new building, the stone one, and stopped.
He sat on the sand by one of the fires, with the mask in his lap and his hands in Cleopatra's, and thought about four thousand rolls, and about forty thousand, which was what the books had said Caesar's fire took, in the other world. The one where he hadn't come.
The crowd had found them. Thousands, on the beach, around the fire, standing. Cleopatra stood up.
"People of Egypt," she said. Her voice was hoarse from shouting all day. It still carried. "Look at the man who led you today. Is he not worthy to be called a god?"
The sound they made went up the beach and the coast and into the city and was heard, they told him later, in Canopus, twelve miles away.
Montu. Montu. Montu.
He stood up. He raised his hand. It took a long time for them to go quiet.
"I am no god," he said, in Egyptian. "I'm a man. Today the bakers of Alexandria loaded the guns. The fish-gutters of Rhakotis held the queen's hill. The boatmen held the gap. The scholars put out the fire in the Library with buckets." He looked at their faces in the firelight. "Today's victory belongs to you."
They cheered that louder than anything.
He didn't think a single one of them believed him.