THE EIGHTH WONDER
For many days, the fiery deaths at the Pharos were the talk of Alexandria. Various stories were put forth to account for the terrible events, but the one that came to hold sway was this: one of the workers, in a fit of insanity, attacked the master of the lighthouse and cast him into the flames, and this same worker then attacked a visitor whom Anubion had been escorting on a tour, an unfortunate scholar from the Library who had expressed an interest in the history of the Pharos. The killings were put down to the act of a madman; politics and intrigue played no part. A certain Zoticus of Zeugma was occasionally mentioned, but only as a witness. No one seemed to know anything about him—which was hardly surprising, I thought, since no such person existed.
* * *
At the age of seventeen, the world had declared me to be a man, old enough to wear a toga. But it was in Alexandria that I truly left my boyhood behind. The transformation happened not in an instant, but over a period of time. It began the moment I realized that Antipater had deceived me.
Before, despite all my travels and riddle solving and amorous adventures, I was still a boy, trusting the world around me—or more precisely, trusting that the world, enormous though it might be, was nonetheless a comprehensible place, susceptible to reason, as were the people in it. People, especially strangers, could be mysterious, but that was not a bad thing; it was a cause for excitement, for mysteries existed to be solved, and solving them gave pleasure. Every mystery had a solution; and by their very proximity, the people closest to us were the least mysterious. Or so I had believed.
“The world is not as simple as you think,” Antipater had said to me. It would never be simple again.
My first days and months alone in Alexandria were often languorous, but never boring. I had just enough money to get by, which is all a young man needs. Also, as Antipater had predicted, I began to find work, following in my father’s footsteps. The Finder, he called himself—though as often as not, I found myself playing ferret or weasel, digging through other people’s garbage. To a young Roman in a vibrant, foreign city, the mysteries I was hired to solve all seemed exotic and alluring—the more sordid and bizarre, the better.
I continued to struggle to come to terms with Antipater’s deceit. Thanks to our travels together, I had seen with my own eyes the glories of Greek civilization. Antipater loved that world and desperately wanted to preserve it, at any price. He was a poet who decided to become a man of action, dedicating his final years to the cause of saving the Greek-speaking world from the domination of Rome, which could only be accomplished by Mithridates. Toward that end, Antipater had been willing to sacrifice everything else—including my trust in him. My feelings about this changed from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour.
One evening, as the stars began to come out, I was sitting on the steps of the Temple of Serapis, gazing over the city toward the distant Pharos, when a doubt suddenly occurred to me. It must have been worming its way through my consciousness for months, planted there by Nikanor. He had been certain that Antipater was a traitor to their cause—and had said as much to Anubion before he killed him, railing against “the old Sidonian.” Of course, Nikanor had been mad. But madmen are not always mistaken.
What if Nikanor had been right about Antipater?
Was it possible that Antipater was a double agent? Could it be that he only pretended to side with Mithridates, while in fact he was loyal to Rome? If such was the case, might it be that my father knew of the deception and actively took part in it? Indeed, could it be that my father was the author of the scheme? What did I really know about my father’s activities and affiliations?
If my father was in fact working for the Roman Senate, and Antipater was a double agent, then the two of them had doubly deceived me—all for my own good, of course. I found this convoluted notion at once disquieting and strangely comforting.
How was I ever to know the truth? I prayed that the gods would keep my father safe from all harm, and that I would see him again in Rome. I prayed for them to protect Antipater as well, so that I might speak to him at least once more. But the world is a dangerous place, and prayers are not always answered. What if I was never to know the truth?
Sitting on the temple steps, I stared at the unwavering light of the Pharos—a point of certainty in an uncertain world. I wished for an end to all my doubts, knowing it was not to be. This was manhood, from which there could be no turning back: to know that some mysteries might never be solved, some questions never answered. But a man must persevere nonetheless.
* * *
“Why seven?” I had asked Antipater. At the time, it had not occurred to me to ask, “Why make a list at all?”
Now I knew. A list delineates that which is from that which is not. A list can be memorized and mastered. A list gives order to a chaotic universe.
With such thoughts in my head, I took to spending much of my free time on the steps of the Library, listening to teachers and philosophers who freely shared their wisdom with anyone who cared to listen or dared to argue. All schools of thought were represented. I listened to Stoics, Skeptics, Cynics, Epicureans, and Neo-Platonists, along with stargazing Babylonian astrologers and tale-spinning Jewish sages.
At night, I sought pleasures of the flesh. In Alexandria, these were not hard to come by.
It occurred to me that the true wonders a man encounters in the journey of his life are not the mute monuments of stone, but his fellow mortals. Some lead us to wisdom. Some delight us with pleasure. Some make us laugh. Some fill us with terror, or pity, or loathing. You need not travel the world to find these wonders. They are everywhere around you, every day.
But a man who has traveled to the Seven Wonders of the World need never lack for attention. Men and women alike loved to hear the stories I could tell. In the taverns of Rhakotis, my cup was always full. On warm, starlit nights, my bed was seldom empty.
Such was the life into which I settled in Alexandria: hardworking, intellectually stimulating, and dissolute all at once. By the Roman calendar the month of Martius arrived, and with it the birthday of Antipater. Was he blind drunk, suffering his annual “birthday fever,” wherever he might be? This was followed by the second anniversary of his false death. Then came my birthday. I was twenty.
