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of flooding, or the use of dams or prepared canals. These directions have already been given to you, you will follow them, or you will be replaced."
    The scratching sound of the stylus in the wax continued for a moment, then ended. The scribe, knowing his master's desire, held up the tablet for Aurelian to read. The red-beard was not a scholar, but he owned a handy grasp of Latin, Greek and some Persian. Aurelian nodded, then motioned the scribe away. "Lad, go with Phranes here—he is my aide—and get something to eat and drink. I will send you back to Cestius, with my reply, and I hope you will take great haste in reaching him."
    The soldier nodded, then saluted. Phranes led the boy away, calling for food, for watered wine, for a place in the shade. Aurelian did not return to his working table, moving instead to the eastern side of the tent and staring out, glowering at distant Pelusium, across leagues of field and farm and canals and the distant bright ribbon of the Nile itself. The air was thick and gray here in the humid lowlands. Vast flocks of birds rose and fell like living smoke above the slaughter yards and granaries surrounding Alexandria. The prince's camp sat atop an ancient tell rising from the depressingly flat plain of the delta. Old columns, bricks and shattered slabs of paving stone crunched under his feet.
    At the base of the ancient mound, thousands of men labored in the sun, digging with spades and mattocks in the dark earth. They made a line arcing around to the north and west, running along a low ridge marking the eastern border of the sprawling, profligate metropolis of Alexandria. In the time of the Ptolemies—the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt before the coming of Rome—the city itself had boasted a wall of sandstone and marble. The intervening centuries, under an enduring Roman peace, saw the ancient wall engulfed by the city, then demolished block by block for building material. Now there was no rampart, no bastion, no powerful towers to hedge the city in. Only miles of villas and shops and warehouses and little gardens. There was only one gate of any size, completely surrounded by a dyer's district, and entirely useless for defense.
    Aurelian had levied sixty thousand laborers to build a line of fortifications from Pelusium at the eastern edge of the Nile delta south to the edge of the Reed Sea. Though the Roman had every confidence in his men, he was also cautious. The enemy might break through the defenses sixty miles to the east. Alexandria might be threatened.
    So nearly a hundred thousand men sweated in the blistering sun before the provincial capital, with two full Legions of Western troops to guide them. A wide ditch was being gouged from the earth, from Lake Mareotis a mile south to the shore of the Mare Internum a mile north. The earth from the excavation was being hauled in cloth bags—one to a man—up to a wide, heavy berm behind the ditch, along the crest of the ridge. A rampart thirty feet high would loom over the ditch, and it would be faced by a thicket of stakes and fitted stone. A fighting wall twelve feet high would run along the length of the rampart, with square towers jutting up every half mile.
    All the land for a half-mile before and behind the wall was being cleared; the villas knocked down, the houses broken into brick and timber, the shops emptied and demolished. Brick, mortar, stone, cut timber—Aurelian's enterprise swallowed building materials at a prodigious rate.
    The eastern horizon was a flat green line, shrouded with haze curving up into a simmering blue-gray sky. Somewhere out there, four Roman Legions were squared off against the Greek rebels and their Arab auxiliaries. Aurelian did not expect there to be a battle—the enemy army was far too small to force its way past the fortifications spidering out from Pelusium. He did not want his hand to be tipped, though, and this fool Cestius may have done just that.
    "Lord Caesar?" Aurelian turned, and sighed,