slaves had been unloading their baggage during all this. By the time it was all ashore, the ship rode a foot higher in the water. The ladies were attended by their personal maids, of course, and a few other slaves. They would be lost among the multitude at the embassy.
'Is Alexandria as fabulous as I've always heard?' Julia asked, excited despite her rather drawn and haggard appearance.
'Beyond your wildest imaginings,' I vowed. 'It shall be my greatest pleasure to show it all to you.'
Fausta smiled obliquely. 'Even those low dives where you've no doubt been disporting yourself?'
'No need,' I said. 'The very basest of amusements are to be had at the Palace.' At that even the notorious Fausta looked a bit nonplussed.
'Well, I want to see the more elevated sights,' Julia said, crawling wearily into her litter and inadvertently treating me to a flash of the whitest thigh I had ever seen. 'I want to see the Museum and converse with the scholars and attend lectures by all the famous, learned men.' Julia had that tiresome love of culture and education that infected Roman ladies.
'I shall be only too happy to introduce you,' I said. 'I am intimate with the faculty.' Actually, I had been there only once, to visit an old friend. Who wants to consort with a pack of tiresome old pedants when some of the finest racehorses in the world are exercising in the Hippodrome?
'Really?' she said, eyebrows going up. 'Then you must introduce me to Eumenes of Caria, the logician, and Sosigenes, the astronomer, and Iphicrates of Chios, the mathematician. And I must tour the Library!'
'Libraries,' I corrected. 'There are two of them, you know.' I sought to change the subject and turned to Fausta. 'And how is my good friend Milo?'
'Busy as ever,' she said. 'Fighting all the time with Clodius. He's secured a quaestorship, you know.'
'I heard,' I said, laughing. 'Somehow I can't picture Milo working away in the Grain Office or the treasury.' Milo was the most successful gangster Rome had ever seen.
'Don't bother. He works out of his headquarters as always. I think he's hired somebody to carry out his duties as quaestor. He sends you his warmest regards, by the way. He says you'll never amount to anything if you spend all your time lazing away in foreign lands instead of working in Rome.'
'Well, dear Titus has always extolled the benefits of hard work and diligence. I, on the other hand, have always felt these to be virtues proper to slaves and freedmen. Look at how hard these litter-bearers work. Does it do them any good?'
'I knew you would say something like that,' Julia said, sitting up and craning her neck to take in the magnificence through which we were carried.
'The men destined for greatness are all fighting it out in Rome right now,' Fausta said.
'And every one of them will die on a battlefield, or from poison or the dagger of the assassin,' I maintained stoutly. 'I, on the other hand, intend to expire of old age with the rank of Senior Senator.'
'I suppose every man must have his own ambition,' she sniffed.
'Oh, look!' Julia said. 'Is that the Paneum?' The weird, artificial hill with its spiral path and its circular temple was just visible in the distance.
'That it is,' I said. 'It has the most outrageous statue in it. But here's the embassy.'
'Is this all part of the Palace?' Julia asked as I helped her from the litter. I was forced to kick a slave aside in order to perform even this simple, agreeable task.
'It is. In fact, for all matters involving practical power, the Roman embassy is the court. Come along, I'll see you to your quarters.'
But I was not to be permitted even this. No sooner had we reached the atrium than a mass of courtiers entered, complete with riotous musicians, oiled Nubians leading leashed cheetahs, a tame lion, a pack of baboons dressed in livery, chiton-clad adolescent girls bearing baskets of rose petals which they scattered promiscuously, and, in the midst of them all, a young woman to whom all deferred.
'I hear that we have visitors,' the young woman said. 'If I had heard sooner, I would have come to the royal harbor to welcome you!'
I bowed as deeply as Roman dignity permitted. 'You honor us with your presence, Princess Berenice. May I present the lady Fausta Cornelia, daughter of the late, illustrious Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and the lady Julia Minor, daughter of the reverend Senator Lucius Julius Caesar.' She embraced both ladies while the courtiers cooed and twittered.
The Roman ladies displayed creditable aplomb, accepting these royal embraces with coolness and dignity. Aplomb was called for, as Berenice was one of the Ptolemies who favored Egyptian fashions. On her upper body she wore only a cape of gauze, which was quite transparent. What she wore below that would have got a dancing-girl drubbed out of Rome for indecency. Her jewelry, on the other hand, would have rivaled a legionary's armor for weight and bulk.
'We are at a disadvantage, Highness,' Fausta protested. 'We are not prepared to receive royalty.'
'Oh, think nothing of that,' Berenice said. 'I never get interesting women to entertain, just tiresome men with their politics and their foolish intrigues.' She waved a hand that took in the whole Roman embassy, me included.
'And the foreign queens and princesses who come here are all ignorant and illiterate, no more than well- dressed peasants. But two genuine patrician ladies all to myself! Come along, you aren't staying here. You're going to stay in my palace.' Yes, there was yet another palace within the Palace, this one belonging to Berenice. And so she shepherded them out like two new additions to her menagerie. I wondered if she would try to leash them as well.
Creticus came in just as the mob disappeared. 'What was that all about?' he asked.
'Berenice has spirited away our ladies,' I said. 'They may never see Rome again.'
'Well,' he said practically, 'that takes care of that problem. New toys for the princess instead of a headache for us. They'll need to be squired about the city by a Roman male of high lineage, though. Wouldn't be proper otherwise. That's your job.'
'I shall be diligent,' I promised.
Berenice was thoughtful enough to give her two new acquisitions an evening to recover from their ordeal at the hands of Neptune; then she threw a lavish reception for them, inviting all the luminaries of the Museum as well as the most fashionable people of Alexandria. As you might expect, this made for a fairly grotesque mixture. Since the Museum was owned and financed wholly by the Palace, Berenice's invitation had the authority of a summons. Thus every last star-gazing, number-torturing, book-annotating scholar in Alexandria was there, along with actors, charioteers, foreign ambassadors, cult leaders and half the nobility of Egypt, who were as decadent a pack of lunatics as one could wish for.
As they assembled, I spotted the one face I knew well. This belonged to Asklepiodes, physician to the gladiators of the school of Statilius Taurus in Rome. We had a long history together. He was a small man with cleanshaven cheeks and a jawline beard of the Greek sort, wearing the robes and hair-fillet of his profession. He was delivering a course of anatomical lectures that year. I took him aside.
'Quick, Asklepiodes, who are some of these people? Julia expects me to know them all!'
He grinned. 'Ah! So at last I get to meet the beauteous Julia? Is she so deficient in perception that she thinks you a scholar?'
'She thinks I'm improving. Who are they?'
He looked around. 'To begin with the most distinguished, there'-he nodded toward a tall, sharp-featured man-'is the illustrious Amphytrion, the Librarian. He is in charge of all things concerning the Library and Museum.'
'That's a start,' I said. 'Who else?'
He nodded toward a burly, wild-haired man who stared around him like a wrestler challenging all comers. 'That's Iphicrates of Chios, the mathematician, foremost champion of the school of Archimedes.'
'Oh, good. She wants to meet him.'
'Then perhaps her feminine charms will succeed where so many others have failed. He is a most irascible man. Let me see: ' He picked out another dusty old Greek. 'There is Doson the Skeptic, and Sosigenes, the astronomer, and: ' and so on. I committed as many names as I could to memory, enough to fake knowledgeability. As soon as I had a chance, I went over to Julia and introduced Asklepiodes. She was polite but cool. Like many well-taught persons, she was only marginally interested in medicine, which is concerned with the real world.
