The October Horse Read Online Free PDF

helmets bearing purple horsehair plumes. They also looked, thought an intrigued Caesar, as if they knew how to conduct themselves in a scrap rather than a battle. Considering the history of the royal House of Ptolemy, probably true. There was always an Alexandrian mob out to change one Ptolemy for another Ptolemy, sex not an issue.
    “Halt!” said the captain, a hand on his sword hilt.
    Caesar approached through an aisle of lictors and came to an obedient halt. “I would like to see the King and Queen,” he said.
    “Well, you can't see the King and Queen, Roman, and that is that. Now get back on board your ship and sail away.”
    “Tell their royal majesties that I am Gaius Julius Caesar.”
    The captain made a rude noise. “Ha ha ha! If you're Caesar, then I'm Taweret, the hippopotamus goddess!” he sneered.
    “You ought not to take the names of your gods in vain.”
    A blink. “I'm not a filthy Egyptian, I'm an Alexandrian! My god is Serapis. Now go on, be off with you!”
    “I am Caesar.”
    “Caesar's in Asia Minor or Anatolia or whatever.”
    “Caesar is in Alexandria, and asking very politely to see the King and Queen.”
    “Um—I don't believe you.”
    “Um—you had better, Captain, or else the full wrath of Rome will fall upon Alexandria and you won't have a job. Nor will the King and Queen. Look at my lictors, you fool! If you can count, then count them, you fool! Twenty-four, isn't that right? And which Roman curule magistrate is preceded by twenty-four lictors? One only—the dictator. Now let me through and escort me to the royal audience chamber,” Caesar said pleasantly.
    Beneath his bluster the captain was afraid. What a situation to be in! No one knew better than he that there was no one in the palace who ought to be in the palace—no King, no Queen, no Lord High Chamberlain. Not a soul with the authority to see and deal with this up-him-self Roman who did indeed have twenty-four lictors. Could he be Caesar? Surely not! Why would Caesar be in Alexandria, of all places? Yet here definitely stood a Roman with twenty-four lictors, clad in a ludicrous purple-bordered white blanket, with some leaves on his head and a plain cylinder of ivory resting on his bare right forearm between his cupped hand and the crook of his elbow. No sword, no armor, not a soldier in sight.
    Macedonian ancestry and a wealthy father had bought the captain his position, but mental acuity was not a part of the package. Yet, yet— he licked his lips. “All right, Roman, to the audience room it is,” he said with a sigh. “Only I don't know what you're going to do when you get there, because there's nobody home.”
    “Indeed?” asked Caesar, beginning to walk behind his lictors again, which forced the captain to send a man running on ahead to guide the party. “Where is everybody?”
    “At Pelusium.”
    “I see.”
    Though it was summer, the day was perfect; low humidity, a cool breeze to fan the brow, a caressing balminess that carried a hint of perfume from gloriously flowering trees, nodding bell blooms of some strange plant below them. The paving was brown-streaked fawn marble and polished to a mirror finish—slippery as ice when it rains. Or does it rain in Alexandria? Perhaps it doesn't.
    “A delightful climate,” he remarked.
    “The best in the world,” said the captain, sure of it.
    “Am I the first Roman you've seen here lately?”
    “The first announcing he's higher than a governor, at any rate. The last Romans we had here were when Gnaeus Pompeius came last year to pinch warships and wheat off the Queen.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Rude sort of young chap, wouldn't take no for an answer, though her majesty told him the country's in famine. Oh, she diddled him! Filled up sixty cargo ships with dates.”
    “Dates?”
    “Dates. He sailed off thinking the holds were full of wheat.”
    “Dear me, poor young Gnaeus Pompeius. I imagine his father was not at all pleased, though Lentulus Crus might