Crossing the ramp amid Aithiopian businessmen in their formal skins and feathers and Aigyptian hawkers, raucous and insistent in their black robes, the pair managed to cross the quay unmolested. Rhita kept her eye out for somebody to meet them, not knowing quite what to expect if indeed her grandmother’s influence still reached to Kleopatra. Off to one side of the pier, in a narrow corridor reserved for motor taxis and horse-drawn cargo trucks, a long, shabby black passenger wagon puffed steam while its driver smoked a foot-long black cigar redolent of cloves. A slate chalked with the message “VASKAYZA-MOUSEION” leaned against one open door.

“That’s ours, I think,” Rhita said. It wasn’t the most elegant of receptions. There were no security guards present—none she could see, anyway.

As they approached the passenger wagon, she felt bucolic in her innocence. The city, a palpable, odoriferous presence now—thick acrid fuel oil, sweet spattering clouds of steam, gassy horse dung, unwashed masses of travelers and merchants—could swallow her whole, chew her up, and not be held to any kind of account. For the first time, Rhita acutely felt her lack of power. Her grandmother had always seemed so self-assured; how could she possibly be emulated, in the face of such a huge, overpowering place?

Rhita and Lugotorix presented themselves to the driver, who stubbed out his smoke against an often-smudged door guard, stuffed the butt into a grimy pants pocket, and climbed into the elevated front seat. They boarded the wagon. With a hiss and a jerk, the wagon labored them down a broad boulevard lined with ancient marble colonnades. Turning left into a high marble archway, it took them onto the grounds of the Mouseion, the great Library and University of Alexandreia.

“She’s a very handsome young woman,” said the bibliophylax of the Mouseion, adjusting his floor-hugging stool before the queen. “She has more of her mother’s looks than her grandmother’s, but her former pedagogue assures me she is the equal of the sophē Patrikia. She’s arrived in the harbor with some great Northern brute, a servant, my scouts say, and will be in her temporary quarters within the hour.”

Kleopatra the Twenty-first shifted her short, stout body on the informal throne. The scar that sucked a line across her face from left temple to right cheek, marring the bridge of her nose and half-closing one eye, was a pale shell pink against her fair, otherwise smooth skin. She had little of the beauty of her youth; the Libyan hasisins had seen to that twenty years before, during her state visit to Ophiristan. Having no further interest in lovers—she had lost her three favorite consorts on that one hateful day—she did not mind her appearance any more. Kleopatra was simply thankful she still had her health and a sound, agile mind.