Cleopatra had been awake for the whole of the dawn, and so she was the first person in Alexandria to know that the god had really gone.
Not that he'd vanished. Everyone in the square had seen that: the bronze mask, the raised hand, and then the empty balcony and the morning light on the stone where he'd been standing, and a sound from the crowd like a great animal breathing out. She'd stood there beside the empty place for as long as she could bear it, with her chin up, so that they could see her. Then she'd gone in.
What she knew, and they didn't yet, was that it wasn't a trick. That he wouldn't walk out of the colonnade at noon with his hands in a bowl of warm water saying sorry, that went wrong. She knew because his side of the bed was cold, and because the bronze mirror on the stand in the corner, where his armour had hung for five years, had nothing in front of it now but a wooden frame.
She sat on the end of the bed and looked at the frame.
Iras came in with water and a towel, and looked at her, and went out again without saying anything, which was why Cleopatra had kept her for eleven years.
* * *
At the second hour there was a knock.
"Enter," she said. Her voice came out steady. She'd been practising.
Amenhotep came in and bowed. He'd gone grey at thirty, the year of the Roman fleet, and the grey made him look older than he was, which he said was useful at council. He'd been chief of the council for three years now. He was the only priest in Egypt she trusted, and that was because he'd told her on the second day she knew him, on the barge at Memphis, that he didn't believe in half the gods he served and served them anyway because the people did.
"Majesty," he said. "The people are still in the square. They haven't moved. Some of them have been there since midnight." He hesitated. "They want to know where he's gone. They want to know if he's coming back. Some of them are saying he was taken. That the gods were angry. That the Romans did it, or the priests of Amun." He looked at her. "Some of them are saying you sent him away."
"Do they believe that?"
"Not many. Yet."
She stood up.
"Then they'll hear it from me," she said. "Tell Charmion. The crown. The white dress, not the gold. Have the steward open the granary doors on the west side of the square and give out bread. I want them fed before I speak to them, not after."
* * *
She spoke to them from the steps of the temple of Isis, at the edge of the square, at noon, in the white dress and the double crown, with no one standing at her left shoulder.
She'd thought about that, putting the dress on. Whether to have Sobek there, or Amenhotep, or Achillas on his stick. Someone in the place where the god had stood for five years. She'd decided no. Let them see the space. Let them get used to it.
"People of Egypt," she said, in Egyptian, and then again in Greek. "The man you called Montu, the Bronze Face, has gone."
The sound went across the square. Not a cry. A murmur. Like wind going over water.
"He was not taken. He was not sent away. He chose to go, as he chose to come, and he told me why." She let that sit. "He said that while he stayed, you would wait for him to tell you what to do. And that if he went, you would work it out for yourselves." She looked out over the faces. Thousands. The fishwives from Rhakotis at the front, she saw. Tia, with her arms folded. "He said you could. He said I could. He said he'd only been standing next to me in a mask for five years."
Someone laughed, at the back. Then someone else. It went round the square, uncertain, then less so.
"He came to us when the river failed," she said, "and showed us how to lift the water. He came when Rome sent a fleet, and showed us how to load a gun. He never once loaded the gun himself. You did that. The bakers did that. The women of Rhakotis held my hill on the beach with spears." She raised her voice for the first time. "He has left us the tools. He has trusted us to use them. Will we prove that he was right?"
The answer came up out of the square like a wave against the Pharos.
She stood there and let it hit her, with her face perfectly composed, and thought: He taught me that. The voice. Let it sit, then raise it. She'd learned it from him on the steps of the Gymnasium. He'd learned it, he'd told her once, from a sergeant at a place called Étaples who had been, he said, the most frightening man in the world.
* * *
In the afternoon she went round the city.
She did it on foot, which she'd never done as queen, with Sobek and twenty guards and Charmion with her tablets, and she didn't tell anyone where she was going.
The shipyards first. They were working. She hadn't been sure they would be. A thousand men in the yards on the eastern harbour, and the hammering going on, and the smell of pitch and hot iron, and in the biggest slip a new hull on its stocks, longer than the Isis, with the ribs of iron already up. The master shipwright came down off the scaffolding and knelt in the sawdust and didn't know what to say to her, and she asked him what the new ship was going to be called, and he went red.
"The men have been calling her the Bronze Face, Majesty. Since this morning. We can change it."
"Don't," said Cleopatra.
The fields outside the Canopic Gate were working too. Water lifts turning, oxen walking in their circles, buckets coming up full and tipping into the channels, the way they'd done every day for five years. A farmer with a hoe on his shoulder straightened up as she went by on the dyke and stared at her, and then, uncertainly, raised the hoe, as if to show her he still had it.
The Library was full. It was always full. The scholars were in the reading rooms and the colonnades arguing, as they always argued, and Theon was in the mathematics room with his students and his curves and a slate, and he looked up at her in the doorway with his eyes red-rimmed and said, "Majesty, we've had an idea," and then stopped, because there was no one to take it to. And then, after a moment, he started again, and told her.
She understood about a third of it. She told him to do it.
There were flowers on the plinth of the statue in the reading hall. Hundreds. A mountain of them, lotus and rose and poppy, so high they'd buried the granite and reached the basalt feet, and people were still bringing them, quietly, one at a time, and laying them down.
She stood and looked at the statue for a long time. At the invented chin.
It's got someone else's chin, he'd said. She nearly laughed. She didn't, because people were watching.
* * *
The priests were in the temple quarter, by the Serapeum, and they were arguing too.
She heard them before she saw them: thirty or forty in a courtyard behind the temple, white linen and shaved heads, shouting at each other. She stopped Sobek at the gate with a hand on his arm and stood in the shadow of the gateway and listened.
"...a foreign god," one of them was saying. An old man, Serapis's priest, with a gold collar. She knew him. He'd preached against John in the first year, and against the printing presses, and against the Library being opened to anyone who could read. "Brought by a foreign queen. And now he has abandoned us. It is a sign. It is the gods of Egypt telling us to go back. To the old ways. To the way things were."
"Fool," said another. Younger. One of Amenhotep's, from Ptah. "Did you see the river last year? The river failed again. Third time in ten years. And no one starved. No one. Do you want to go back to the old way where half of Upper Egypt buries its children every time the flood is low? Is that what the gods want?"
"The gods want to be obeyed."
"Then they should have stopped the boy dying at Luxor themselves," said the young priest. "They didn't. Salt and honey did."
There was a silence in the courtyard.
Cleopatra turned and walked away before any of them could see her.
"Majesty?" said Charmion, behind her.
"Write down the name of the young one," said Cleopatra. "The one from Ptah. I want him on the council by the end of the month." She walked a few more steps. "And the old one from Serapis. I want to know who he talks to. Every week."
* * *
That night she stood on the balcony again, alone.
The city was lit. That was the thing she'd never got used to. Before he came, Alexandria at night had been dark except for the Pharos, the temples, a few rich houses. Then he'd shown Ezra's people a lamp with a woven wick in a glass chimney and a polished tin reflector behind it, a cheap simple thing he said every house in his London had once had before the gas came, and in five years they'd made two hundred thousand of them. Now from the balcony the whole city glittered, every street, every window, every boat on the harbour, as if someone had spilled the stars into it.
She had his scroll in her hands.
She'd found it on the table that morning, beside her own. She'd read it four times already. She read it again now, by the light of the city.
It wasn't long. It wasn't prophecies, or warnings, or plans. She'd been afraid it would be. She'd been afraid it would be a list of what she should build, and when, so that she'd spend the rest of her life doing what a man who'd gone away had told her to.
It was a list of what she'd done.
The riots at Canopus, on the second day, when she'd gone down to the temple and given out the stolen bread in Egyptian. The night at Luxor in the doorway of the side chapel. The beach. The sand hill. The fishwives. The way she'd spoken to Achillas's wounded at Schedia by name. Things she'd forgotten. Things she hadn't known he'd seen. All of it written down in his St Olave's Greek, very plainly, in his square foreigner's hand, like a ledger.
And at the bottom, one line:
None of this was me. Read it on the bad days.
She rolled it up.
Beside her on the balustrade was the other scroll. Her own. The one she'd written at the table by the window before dawn while he watched her from the bed, and told him nothing you need. She untied it and looked at it.
It was a list too. Of what she'd do, the first year without him. The council. The schools. A law about the priests' lands she'd been thinking of for a year. A treaty with Parthia. Theon's idea, before Theon had it. She'd written it so that when she woke up this morning and he was gone, she'd have something to do with her hands.
She'd known for a month. Since the roof of the Library, if she was honest. Since before that.
She looked at the two scrolls side by side on the balustrade for a while.
Then she rolled them both together, his inside hers, and tied them with the same cord, and took them inside.
* * *
She woke before dawn, feeling sick.
She lay still in the dark for a while, waiting for it to pass. It didn't. She got up and went to the basin and was sick into it, quietly, so as not to wake anyone, and stood there afterwards with her hands on the cold marble edge, breathing.
When she turned round, Iras was in the doorway with a lamp, looking at her.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
"Get me a cup of water," said Cleopatra at last. "And don't count on your fingers. I can see you doing it."