Oooothalia
Capaneus’s world was dark. His sandaled feet moved quickly but carefully. His heart beat rapidly; beat a new, strange rhythm.
Alexandria’s midnight streets were deserted. Between his lodgings and the Library was a mile of narrow, twisting streets, overhung precariously by houses and balconies, impeding the moons light. The slummy vulgarity of the architecture upset and offended him. It had none of the glory of the Library, none of the grace, none of the craftsman’s touch.
Vermin moved with him, in his slipstream. They hissed archaic spells and blasphemies as he shooed them away.
During the day, the streets would be full of people from all over the world; Phoenician peddlers, Sicilian swindlers, cloth makers from Samarkand, Babylonian priests, Frankish whores, Hibernian stonemasons, Nubian cutthroats, Iberian shipwrights, djinn from the deepest sands, heavily robed, trying to fit in. Capaneus hated mixing with this international rabble and instead preferred the quietude of the Library.
Capaneus would spend most of his time indoors, inside the Library’s reading halls, transcribing books seized from sailors, and those tomes brought in by Arab merchants and their camel trains, archiving and recording every word, multiple times over. Checking and rechecking the works of his colleagues, just as they did to his. He felt safe in the Library, at peace there, its natural tranquillity accentuated by the echoes of history that dwelt within its mighty walls. In there he could avoid the threats the bustling day held for a meek academic, eyes weakened by concentration.
But at night there were still threats, and those threats were not always human.
A throaty growl came from the shadows behind and arrested his heart. He pressed himself as tightly as possible against the nearest wall and took a deep breath. He instinctively shut his eyes just as the great beast’s paws appeared around the corner, remembered himself and his teaching, and instantly reopened them. The paws were as massive furry plates. Equally graceful and terrifying, with lethal nails retracted, hidden. The head appeared next, sniffing the air, doubtless catching Capaneus’s scented oils and the evening meal of lamb, peppers and honied eggs digesting in his stomach. Its sharp eyes locked onto his and he could feel his soul begin to tug, to come apart.
He couldn’t bear it. He wanted to scream out in agony and run, but the animal would run him down with ease. He knew he could not break eye contact. No matter what. Those golden irises, ablaze in the darkness, drawing him inwards…. He could blink, but that was it — to break contact now would mean his end.
A sphinx understood its surroundings by eye contact, it was how it judged friend from foe from prey. If it could not make that judgment, it would take the safest route available to it – kill.
He had seen bigger ones, from afar, out in the deep deserts where the bigger ones dwelled, but this thing was big enough to tear him to pieces in moments.
It was close now. So close he could smell its foul breath and see the fleshy bits of its last meal stuck between its mighty teeth. He considered reaching for the small knife he kept hidden beneath his greying white robe, but thought better of it. The sphinx’s flat nose pushed right up to his face, sniffing intensely. Its eyes grew level with his. He could not take much more of it. He could feel its great claws inside him, probing and shredding, unveiling his deepest secrets. Learning about her.
No!
Just as his mind began to fracture and fail, the great cat released its mental grip on him and slunk away, back into the shadows of the dark city.
He had urinated and his legs were wet with the warm liquid. He breathed as if he had raced at full stride across a mountain range, finally closed his eyes, regathered his thoughts — ordered them exactly as they needed to be — and found himself once more.
Interruption over, he moved on. His heart was pounding in its cage, ready to break the bars and free itself.
Capaneus crossed the park with swift feet. He felt watched. He had no reason to draw suspicion, but he could feel inquisitive, disapproving minds following his every move, his every thought. He could feel eyes on his back, millions of them.
He shivered slightly, and most of the eyes fell away.
Euthalia was her name. ‘Oooothalia’. He liked the music of her name. It suited her perfectly. Her beauty was an eternal one, universal. Wherever in the world she went, or in whatever time she was to travel, men would kill and be killed just for the chance to share a moment with her.
She was from an ancient Macedonian family. Rumoured to be related to the city’s namesake himself. Her skin had maintained a porcelain delicateness even with the ravages of sun and sand, and her eyes, still big and girlish despite her blooming into womanhood, were a twinning of brown and jade green.
Naturally, she had many suiters throughout the city, all of Egypt, and far beyond. Emissaries had arrived with messages and gifts from places as distant as Chach in the east, Lixus to the west, the ancient jungles of the south, and the northernmost ice wastes.
And, of course, from Capaneus’s own desk.
He had written to her poetry from the depths of his soul, places he didn’t even know previously existed, and which he did not yet fully understand. He had saved three months of his transcribing job salary — and taken a loan from a brown-toothed lender who did business out of a shop selling every kind of olive — to buy her a ruby gem. Small, but the biggest he could afford. He had pressed it himself into a wired amulet and through it had ran a silver chain left to him by his grandmother. He knew his grandmother would be pleased to see a family inheritance going to a woman of such great beauty, who had captured her only grandson’s heart so totally.
He had handed the package — necklace, poetry and letters of love — to a miserable, leather-faced guard outside her house, with a small bribe to make sure it got to her. A grunt was all he received by way of receipt, but his heart lifted and soared knowing that soon she would read his undying words. That soon she would be his — and he, hers.
He slept little that night, or the following, or for weeks after. In his mind he turned over every word he had written, every syllable used, every turn of phrase. Had he correctly addressed her? Had he made sure to give details so he could be contacted?
As time went on, his soaring joy turned into plummeting anguish. He checked his letter box dozens of times each day, and would sometimes sit and wait by the front door, sitting on a little stool from sunrise to sunset, as the busy, uncaring world went by. He pictured the guards passing his letters and the poems back and forth, laughing, mocking, pawning the necklace for wine money. He cried and wailed all night, keeping his roommates awake and causing grumbles and fights. ‘Oooothalia. I love you, Oooothalia. My Greek queen.’
His work had faltered and failed, and eventually he stopped going. He was fired by way of a short note, scrawled on a torn shred of papyrus and put on his pillow by a colleague who lived in the same lodging. That had been thirty days earlier, one whole moon.
He still had a key.
Moonlight was his torch. He looked up just as something massive crossed the face of the waxing crescent. There were birds up there, bigger than a man, and meaner too.
He turned the key in the lock, slowly pushed the door, allowing the hinges to release their squeals gradually and quietly, and was inside. His presence was no longer welcome here, and it would have always been a suspicious thing so late at night. But Capaneus knew his way around as if this was his own home; he knew where the night watchmen slept and where the sheltering alley cats nested their young.
He moved through the great building as if made of smoke. His sandals glided over tiles, barely touching them. Soundlessly he approached one of the great archives and slipped within, only opening the gold embossed door enough to squeeze his thin frame through.
The smell was the first thing that his senses noticed. The musty sweetness of wax seals and long-dried ink. After ten years, his nose still twitched at the scent.
He picked one of the oil lamps from its bracket to the side of the door and as quietly as he could broke the thin glass with the point of his elbow, exposing the flame within. The shards cut him and blood flowed down his arm, dripping onto the floor from his fingertips.
The ceiling was far above his head. Intricate mosaics were there, visible only in daytime and only to the best eyes, depicting Alexander’s greatest victories at Gaugamela and Issus; chariots crashing into chariots, hoplite clashing with Darius’ bodyguard.
He walked to the centre of the vast room, where the spiralling scrollshelves began. They were tall — their top shelves only available to those with no fear of heights, standing on long ladders — and they moved outwards from there, in a miles-long spiral, back to the doors, where the shelves were still empty, waiting to be filled by the work of Capaneus and his colleagues — former colleagues. Capaneus’s job was a different one now. He was not there to create.
He reached out a slightly shaking hand and chose a manuscript at random. A thick one, full of knowledge. His hand shook not from fear, but nervous excitement.
On Energy and its Sources, by the Natural Philosopher, Zaphyrfax.
He vaguely remembered the author’s name. From Damascus, if he recalled correctly. Hundreds of years older than the Library itself.
Oh, well, Capaneus thought. At least he’ll have the honour of being the start of the end. He roughly pulled the scroll apart, unwinding it in a way that would have had him flogged and possibly executed if a senior librarian were to catch him. No need for caution now, no point.
The smooth edge of the papyrus welcomed the lamp’s flame as if it was a long-lost lover, finally returning to its bed. They wrapped around each other and became one. He threw the scroll back on the shelf where he had taken it from and the flames quickly spread. In a few moments, the entire wooden shelf had become engulfed and the flames were moving down the spiral like a fiery snake, jaws open, eating its prey. Wood cracked all around and above. Pieces of the building were crashing to the floor. The air in the room was thickening with black smoke. The smoke seemed to speak, to scream. Capaneus could hear voices in that smoke — long dead voices, cursing him, spitting his name like venom.
In the great flames he saw her lovely face, unblemished by the heat, untroubled, caring. The cruel voices were silenced by her spirit.
He felt as though he was hauling himself into the future, on a rope made of her dreams. Their dreams. He would be known for all time now: Capaneus, who loved Euthalia so much he destroyed the great Library just to capture her heart. Epics would be written. Ballads. Plays.
And most importantly, Euthalia would know him. She would know him until her last day. Where the Roman King, the defiler of the Egyptian Queen, had failed, he would succeed; Euthalia would be his Cleopatra.
A licking flame caught his robe and took to his skin. It instantly roasted away his nerves and he was numb, wrapped in a sheet of cleansing fire.
‘Yes, Euthalia! Now you know me! Now you love me! Oooothalia.’