Antony and Cleopatra. Colleen McCullough

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СКАЧАТЬ than they had Cassius, to whom they had belonged. The weather was chilly, but bitter only when the wind got up, and down in the bottom of the gorge country there was little wind. Despite its color, the water was potable for men as well as horses; central Anatolia was not a populous place.

      The settlement of Eusebeia Mazaca sat at the foot of the vast volcano Argaeus, white with snow, for no one in history remembered its erupting. A blue city, small and impoverished; everyone had looted it time out of mind, for its kings were weak and too parsimonious to keep an army.

      It was here that Antony began to realize how difficult it was going to be to squeeze yet more gold and treasure out of the East; Brutus and Cassius had plundered whatever King Mithridates the Great had overlooked. A realization that put him severely out of sorts and sent him with Poplicola, the brothers Decidius Saxa and Dellius to inspect the priest-kingdom of Ma at Comana, not far distant from Eusebeia Mazaca. Let the senile King of Cappadocia and his ludicrously incompetent son stew in their denuded palace! Perhaps at Comana he would find a hoard of gold beneath an innocent-looking flagstone – priests left kings for dead when it came to protecting their money.

      Ma was an incarnation of Kubaba Cybele, the Great Earth Mother who had ruled all the gods, male and female, when humanity first learned to tell its history around the campfires. Over the aeons she had lost her power, save in places like the two Comanas, one here in Cappadocia, the other north in Pontus, and in Pessinus, not far from where Alexander the Great had cut the Gordian knot with his sword. Each of these three precincts was governed as an independent realm, its king also serving as high priest, and each lay within natural boundaries like Pontic cherries in a bowl.

      Scorning an escort of troops, Antony, his four friends and plenty of servants rode into the beguiling little village of Cappadocian Comana, noting with approval its costly dwellings, the gardens promising a profusion of flowers in the coming spring, the imposing temple of Ma rising atop a slight hill surrounded by a grove of birches, with poplars down either side of a paved avenue that led straight to Ma’s earthly house. Off to one side was the palace: like the temple, its Doric columns were blue with scarlet bases and capitals; the walls behind were a much darker blue, and the shingled roof edged in gilt.

      A young man who looked in his late teens was waiting for them in front of the palace, clad in layers of green gauze, a round gold hat upon his head, which was shaven.

      ‘Marcus Antonius,’ said Antony, sliding from his dappled grey Public Horse and tossing its reins to one of the three servants he had brought with him.

      ‘Welcome, Lord Antonius,’ said the young man, bowing low.

      ‘Just Antonius will do. We don’t have any lords in Rome. What’s your name, shaveling?’

      ‘Archelaus Sisenes. I am Priest-king of Ma.’

      ‘Bit young to be a king, aren’t you?’

      ‘Better to be too young than too old, Marcus Antonius. Come into my house.’

      The visit started off with wary verbal fencing, at which King Archelaus Sisenes, even younger than Octavian, proved a match for Antony, whose good nature inclined him to admire a master of the art. As indeed he might have happily tolerated Octavian, had not Octavian been Caesar’s heir.

      But though the buildings were lovely and the landscaping good enough to please a Roman heart, an hour on the water clock was quite enough time to discover that whatever wealth Ma of Comana might once have possessed had vanished. With a ride of only fifty miles between them and the Cappadocian capital, Antony’s friends were fully prepared to set out at dawn of the following day to rejoin the legions and continue the march.

      ‘Will it offend you if my mother attends our dinner?’ the Priest-king asked, tone deferential. ‘And my young brothers?’

      ‘The more the merrier,’ said Antony, good manners to the fore. He had already found the answers to several vexed questions, but it would be prudent to see for himself what kind of family had produced this intelligent, precocious, fearless fellow.

      Archelaus Sisenes and his brothers were a handsome trio, with quick wits, a thorough knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy, and even a smattering of mathematics.

      None of which mattered the moment Glaphyra entered the room. Like all the Great Mother’s female acolytes, she had gone into service for the Goddess at thirteen, but not, like the rest of that year’s intake of pubescent virgins, to spread her mat inside the temple and offer her maidenhead to the first comer who fancied her. Glaphyra was royal, and chose her own mate where she wished. Her eye had lighted upon a visiting Roman senator, who sired Archelaus Sisenes without ever knowing that he had; she was all of fourteen when she bore the boy. The next son belonged to the King of Olba, descended from the archer Teucer, who fought with his brother Ajax at Troy; and the father of the third was a handsome nobody guiding a team of oxen in a caravan from Media. After that, Glaphyra hung up her girdle and devoted her energies to bringing up her boys. At this moment she was thirty-four and looked twenty-four.

      Though Poplicola wondered what drove her to appear for dinner when the guest of honor was a notorious philanderer, Glaphyra knew very well why. Lust did not enter the picture; she who belonged to the Great Mother had long ago abrogated lust as demeaning. No, she wanted more for her sons than a tiny priest-kingdom! She was after as much of Anatolia as she could get, and if Marcus Antonius was the kind of man gossip said he was, then he was her chance.

      Antony sucked in his breath audibly – what a beauty! Tall and lissome, long legs and magnificent breasts, and a face to rival Helen’s: lush red lips, skin as flawless as a rose petal, lustrous blue eyes between thick dark lashes, and absolutely straight flaxen hair that hung down her back like a sheet of hammered silver-gilt. Of jewels she wore none, probably because she had none to wear. Her blue, Greek-styled gown was plain wool.

      Poplicola and Dellius were shoved off the couch so quickly that they were hard put to land on their feet; one huge hand was already patting the space where they had reclined.

      ‘Here, with me, you gorgeous creature! What’s your name?’

      ‘Glaphyra,’ she said, kicking off her felt slippers and waiting until a servant pulled warm socks over her feet. Then she swung her body onto the couch, but far enough away from Antony to prevent his hugging her, which he showed every sign of wanting to do. Gossip was certainly right in saying that he wasn’t a subtle lover, if his greeting was anything to go by. Gorgeous creature, indeed! He thinks of women as conveniences; but I, resolved Glaphyra, must exert myself to become a more convenient convenience than his horse, his secretary or his chamber pot. And if he quickens me, I will offer to the Goddess for a girl. A girl of Antonius’s could marry the King of the Parthians – what an alliance! As well that we are taught to suck with our vaginas better than a fellatrix can with her mouth! I will enslave him.

      Thus it was that Antony lingered in Comana for the rest of winter, and when, early in March, he finally set out for Cilicia and Tarsus, he took Glaphyra with him. His ten thousand infantrymen hadn’t minded this unexpected furlough; Cappadocia was a land of women whose men had been slaughtered on some battlefield or carted off to slavery. As these legionaries could farm as well as they soldiered, they enjoyed the break. Originally Caesar had recruited them across the Padus River in Italian Gaul, and, apart from the higher altitude, Cappadocia wasn’t so very different to farm or graze. Behind them they left several thousand hybrid Romans in utero, properly prepared and planted land, and many thousands of grateful women.

      They descended a good Roman road between two towering ranges, plunging into vast aromatic forests of pine, larch, spruce, fir, the sound of roaring water perpetually in their ears; until at the pass of the Cilician Gates the road was so steep СКАЧАТЬ