The Judgment of Caesar by Steven Saylor Page A

flies, a great many of them, somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes and saw a bearded face above me. His eyes were wet with tears. His lips trembled. “Help me,” he said. “For the love of Jupiter, please help me!”
    I recognized him: Philip, the trusted freedman who had accompanied Pompey ashore.
    “Please,” he said. “I can’t do it myself. He’s too heavy. I’m too weary. I saw you on the galley before we left. You were standing with Cornelia. Did you know him well? Did you fight beside him? I thought I knew all his friends, but . . .”
    I tried to rise, but my limbs were still made of lead. Philip helped me roll to my side, onto all fours. I rose to my knees, feeling them sink into the wet sand. Philip’s hand on my shoulder steadied me.
    The beach was deserted. The pavilions were gone; the soldiers had all vanished. The quietness of the place was eerie; I heard only the gentle murmur of waves and the low droning of flies.
    I turned my head and gazed at the sea. The same thin haze that blanched the sky obscured the distant horizon. In that uncertain expanse of flat water, there was not a sail to be seen. Earth and sea were both empty, but not so the sky; I looked up and saw carrion birds circling.
    Philip slipped his hands under my armpits and lifted, eager to bring me to my feet. He was a small fellow, but obviously quite strong, certainly stronger than I was. He claimed to need my help, but from the look in his eyes, I knew it was my company he wanted, the presence of another living mortal in that place of desolation. Philip didn’t want to be alone, and when he led me down the beach to the place where the royal skiff had landed, I saw why.
    The skiff was gone. “Where . . .?” I began to say. “They loaded it onto a wagon. Can you believe it? They brought it here just to bring Pompey ashore, and when it was over, they cleaned out the blood with buckets of seawater, then turned the boat upside-down and loaded it onto a wagon and carried it off, over those low hills. The whole army did an about-face and vanished in a matter of minutes. It was uncanny, as if they were phantoms. You’d almost think they’d never even been here.”
    But the army of King Ptolemy had indeed been here, and the proof lay at our feet, surrounded by a swarm of buzzing flies. Someone—Philip, I presumed—had dragged the corpses of Macro and his fellow centurion onto the beach and laid them on their backs, side by side. Next to them was the slave who had accompanied the party to act as scribe. He lay beside his box of writing materials, his tunic stained with blood from several wounds.
    “He must have gotten in the way when Achillas and Salvius clambered back aboard the boat with their swords,” said Philip. “They had no reason to kill him. They didn’t kill me. The poor scribe simply got in the way.”
    I nodded to show that I understood, then turned my eyes at last upon the sight I had been avoiding. Beside the bodyguards and the scribe lay the naked remains of Pompey the Great, a mangled body without a head. It was around his corpse, and especially around the clotted blood where the neck had been severed, that flies swarmed in greatest profusion.
    “They took his head,” said Philip, his voice breaking. “They cut it off and carried it away like a trophy! And his finger . . .”
    I saw that a finger had been cut from the corpse’s right hand; a smaller swarm of flies buzzed about the bloody stump.
    “To take his ring, you see. They couldn’t just remove it. They cut off his finger and threw it in the sand, or in the surf—who knows where. . . .” Philip sobbed and in a sudden frenzy stripped off his tunic, using it as a scourge to snap at the flies. They dispersed, only to come back in greater numbers.
    Philip gave up the effort and spoke through sobs. “I managed to strip off his clothes. I washed his wounds with seawater. Even so, the flies won’t go away. We must build a funeral pyre. There must be enough