This book is a work of historical fiction. In order to give a sense of the times, some names of real people or places have been included in the book. However, the events depicted in this book are imaginary, and the names of nonhistorical persons or events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical persons or events to actual ones is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Karen Essex
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
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First eBook Edition: April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-55961-4
Contents
Copyright Page
Kleopatra’s Genealogy
Part I: ALEXANDRIA
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
Part II: ROME
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
Part III: THE TWO LANDS OF EGYPT
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
Part IV: EXILE
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
Volume Two
GLOSSARY
ACCOLADES FOR KLEOPATRA
Volume One is dedicated to the memory of
Professor Nancy A. Walker, and also to
my mother. Without the former’s intellectual guidance
and the latter’s generosity,
it may never have been completed.
Kleopatra’s Genealogy
Part I
ALEXANDRIA
ONE
There was something about the air in Alexandria. It was said that the sea-god, Poseidon, who lived near the Isle of the Pharos, blew a divine whisper over the town. Depending on his mood, he sent various sorts of weather. In the winter, the air might be arid and unforgiving, so dry that it left old men gasping for breath and wishing for the balmy ether of spring. In the summer, it hung over the city like a sea-damp gum. Sometimes it was but a carrier of flies and dust, and sometimes the harsh winds of the African desert merely returned the sea-god’s breeze to its watery birthplace. But this morning, in spring disposition, the god murmured a smooth rhythm toward the jewel-by-the-sea, teasing its way to the land, lifting the tender smell of honeysuckle from the vine, and filling the air with essences of lemon, camphor, and jasmine.
In the center of town, at the intersection of the Street of the Soma and the Canopic Way, sat the crystal coffin of the city’s founder, Alexander the Great. The Macedonian king had lain in his final resting place more than two hundred years, his youthful mummy preserved against time so that all might pay tribute to his genius. Sometimes, the Egyptians would pull their sons away from the coffin of the great warrior, forbidding them to say the prayer of Alexander’s cult taught in all schools, and scolding them for their allegiance to foreign blood. But the dead Greek had envisioned this paradise, outlining in chalk the symmetrical grid of streets. He had built the Heptastadion, the causeway that reached through the waters of the glimmering sea like a long, greedy tongue, separating the Great Harbor from the Harbor of Safe Return. Alexander’s successors, the big-nosed Greek Ptolemy and his children, had erected the Pharos Lighthouse, where the eternal flame burned in its upper tower like the scepter of a fire god, guiding ships safely into the low, rocky harbor. They built the great Library that housed all the world’s knowledge, the columned promenades that lined the paved limestone streets and shaded the pedestrians, and the city’s many theaters, where anyone—Greek, Egyptian, Jew—could see a comedy, a tragedy, or a special oration. All in Greek, to be sure, but every educated Egyptian spoke the language of the conqueror, though the favor was not returned.
The city was still a paradise, even if the once-great Ptolemies had degenerated into a new species—walrus-size monsters as large as any creatures in the zoo, with appetites just as greedy. Sycophants who happily bled the Egyptian treasury to appease the new Masters of the World, the Romans. Every few years, it was necessary for the Egyptian mob to assassinate at least one Ptolemy, just to remind them that time brings down all races.
But on a day like today, where lovers nestled in shady groves of the Park of Pan, and stalky spring blooms jutted into a gaudy lapis sky; where falls of white bougainvillea toppled from balconies like rivers of milk, it was easy to forget that the House of Ptolemy was not what it used to be. Today, the god’s sweet sigh brought everyone into the streets to enjoy the parks and promenades and open air bazaars. Today, everyone smiled as they inhaled the sea-god’s whisper. They did not care if it was Greek air, Egyptian air, African air, or Roman air. It had no national character. It simply filled their lungs and made them happy.
The Royal Family, whose ancestors had made the city great, saw none of this. The palace compound by the sea was a lone respite from the city’s gaiety, its shutters closed tight against the delicious air and the extravagant day. Workers went about their chores in silence, heads bowed like fearful worshippers. A thick haze of incense hung about the ceilings of the cavernous rooms. All happiness had been shut out; the queen was ill, and the most famous physicians in the civilized world proclaimed that she would not get better.
Kleopatra watched from her vantage point on the floor as the shimmering doors opened and the king rushed the blind Armenian healer into her mother’s bedchamber. The girl’s eyes, sometimes brown but today green like baby peppercorns, widened as they met the milk-white craters under the holy man’s brow. With tattered garments hanging about him like feathers, he hobbled toward the child on what appeared to be two crooked sticks of kindling. Kleopatra leapt out of the way, barely escaping a swat in the head from his saddlebags. She climbed onto the divan where her sister, Berenike, and her half sister, Thea, sat locked in a silent embrace. Though neither moved, Kleopatra felt their flesh harden as she scampered to the end of the sofa and perched herself on its arm.
“Should the little princess be present?” the Chief Surgeon asked the nurse, acting as if the child could not understand what he said. “The situation is grave.”
Kleopatra’s mother, Queen Kleopatra V Tryphaena, sister and wife to the king, lay listless on the bed, gripped by a strange fever of the joints. Frantic to keep his post, the Chief Surgeon had recruited physicians of great renown from Athens and Rhodes. The queen had been sweated, bled, cooled with rags, massaged with aromatic oils, pumped with herbs, fed, starved, and prayed over, but the fever won every battle.
“The child is headstrong,” whispered the nurse. “No one wishes to hear her incessant screaming when her will is challenged. She is a headache. She is three years old and she cannot speak even one sentence of passable Greek.” They must have thought she could not hear as well. Kleopatra jutted her bottom teeth as she did whenever she was angry.
“She is very small for her age. Perhaps she is slow to learn,” the physician pronounced, making Berenike laugh. The eight-year-old sneered at Kleopatra, who glared back. “Her presence is always disruptive. I shall take it up with the king.”
The king—fat, melancholy, and agonizing over his wife’s mysterious illness—paid no attention to the physician. “The child is exercising the royal will,” the king replied, his glazed, bulbous eyes staring at nothing. “Let her remain. She is my small piece of joy.”
Kleopatra glowered victoriously at her sister, who kicked at her with a strong brown leg. Thea hugge
d Berenike tighter, stroking her long coppery mane, settling her. The physician shrugged. Kleopatra’s father, King Ptolemy XII Auletes, had already sent five doctors into exile. Others he simply abused for not curing his wife. If Kleopatra’s presence amused him, then all the better. Perhaps no one would be slapped or dismissed or become the target of his verbal spew that day. He was a king famous for his volatile temper. His subjects called him Auletes the Flute Player or Nothos the Bastard, depending on their mood and mercurial allegiance to him. He preferred Auletes, of course, and adopted it as his nickname. Like his subjects’ loyalty, his temper was notoriously changeable. But no one doubted that the king loved his sister-wife. It was said that theirs was the first love match in the dynasty in two hundred years. The queen’s illness only heightened his choleric disposition.
The tonsured priest praying over the queen raised his slick head, astonished to see that the blind healer was to be given access to the patient. With the attending physicians, he stood stationary, a human shield against the execrable creature.
“Move aside, fools,” said the king, thrusting his capacious royal body through the cluster hovering about the queen’s bed. “This man is here to compensate for your ineptitude.”
“But Your Majesty,” protested the priest. “What unholy presence might this conjurer evoke?”
“Strip this idiot of the priest’s robe and send him to the mines,” the king said calmly, almost lightly, to one of his bodyguards. The priest fell to his knees, his face on the floor, murmuring low incantations to the cold, deaf surface. Satisfied with the effect of his threat, the king winked at Kleopatra, whose glowing child eyes smiled back at her father’s weary ones.
Kleopatra wanted the healer to hurry his magic. She longed to see the queen once again sit up, put on her makeup and shiny robes, and take her place beside the king in the Royal Reception Room where the three princesses were allowed to sit from time to time while their parents entertained visitors from faraway places. Though Kleopatra saw her mother only at these occasions, she was awed by her ethereal beauty and by the songs she played on the lyre. Fair and delicate, Tryphaena was not a real person like herself or her father or her sisters, but one of the Muses come down to earth to make them smile.
Out of the healer’s saddlebags came small statues of naked deities: one headless, one with fearsome eyes and a hawk nose, one with a crooked phallus. Kleopatra strained to hear the unimaginable secrets he whispered to them as he removed them from the bag. From the bottom of his sorcerer’s well he produced a thick cluster of herbs, weeds, leaves, and roots, bound together into a ratty tangle, and called for someone to light it with fire from one of the queen’s oil lamps.
“Mithra, Baal-Hadad, and Asherah who slew and resurrected him.” The healer raised the torch, summoning the terrible gods of the east. Mithra, Mithra! Kleopatra prayed silently with him as he danced about the bed drawing circles in the air with his smoke stick. “Mother Astarte who creates and destroys. Kybele, goddess of all that is, was, and ever shall be,” he invoked.
Suddenly he bent over as if in great pain, spewing guttural noises, thrashing in the air, warring with the unseen forces of the queen’s illness. He carried on this way for what seemed to Kleopatra like a very long time. Then he raised his arms, ran to the bed, and passed out cold over the queen’s delirious body. Kleopatra willed with all her might that the queen would open her eyes, but Tryphaena, lovely features bathed in the sweat of her fevers, did not flinch.
The king hung his great head as the servants carried the healer from the room. He called for his flute and began to play, offering a desolate melody to the gods in a final bargain to save his wife. Kleopatra wanted to be near him so she crawled to his feet, chasing with her fingers a bright green cricket. The king paused, and Kleopatra hoped he would pick her up. But she realized that he was waiting for the faint strings of the queen’s song. They had played music together, he on the flute, she on the lyre, and often passed evenings in this pursuit. When his duet partner failed to move, he began to play once more.
One by one, the old women of the court, relatives whom Auletes sheltered in their dotage, came to keep vigil for the queen. With piteous eyes, they patted Kleopatra’s hair, commenting on its lovely sable color, or kissed her forehead as they passed her. She knew that her father did not want the old ladies in the room. Auletes housed the dowagers in the family palace on the island of Antirhodos, so that they had to commit to a boat ride before they could interfere in his affairs. But they could not be kept from the chamber of the dying queen, where they burned herbs and incense and appealed in prayer to Isis, Mother of Creation, Mother of God. Four solemn-faced red-robed priestesses of the goddess came to inspire and anoint the ladies of prayer while the doctors applied compresses to the queen’s hot brow and listened to her fevered murmuring.
“Lady of Compassion,” cried the women in craggy aged voices. “Lady of Healing. Lady who eases our suffering.” As the queen’s condition worsened, they made frightful appeals to the goddess’s dark side, scaring the small princess, who clutched at her father’s ankle with each rancorous invocation.
“Devourer of men.”
“Goddess of the Slaughter.”
“Lady of Thunder.”
“Destroyer of the souls of men.”
“Destroy the Fates that conspire to seize the life of our queen and sister.”
The Chief Surgeon wiped his hands on his apron. The king put down his instrument. Kleopatra stared at the sandaled feet of the two giants above her, wondering how toes got so big and skin so crusty.
“The queen’s blood is poisoned by the high temperatures in her body,” the Chief Surgeon said, more confident of his position since the foreigner’s magic had failed.
The doctor’s assistants walked solemnly from Tryphaena’s bed carrying pots of contaminated rags, brown with sweat and dried blood. The surgeon motioned for them to show the contents to the king. Kleopatra got to her knees, sneaking a look at the putrid blood-brown cloths. How could such ugliness come from her beautiful mother?
Trying to avoid the king’s face, the Chief Surgeon looked to the ground, where he saw the little princess staring at his large feet. “I have bled her as much as I dare, Your Majesty. I cannot remove the fever. It is up to the gods now when and if we shall lose the queen.”
The ladies fell into supplication. “O merciful Lady, Divine One, mightier than the eight gods of Hermopolis. Source of All Life. Source of All Healing. Do not take our queen Tryphaena.” Despite their age, they beat their chests unmercifully, fists thumping hollow, sunken breasts.
Kleopatra waited for her father to dole out a punishment to the Chief Surgeon like he did the others. The doctor dropped to his knees and, with the impetuousness of a young lover, kissed Auletes’ ringed hand. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, if I have failed you. I would happily pay for the queen’s life with mine.” Auletes did not respond.
The doctor seemed surprised that he had been sentenced neither to death nor to exile. He recovered his dignity with a nervous cough. “I must supervise the chemistry for the queen’s sedatives. Her Majesty must be made comfortable on her journey to meet the gods.” With a hasty prayer, the doctor excused himself.
Auletes remained standing, slumped, bewildered, unattended. Kleopatra picked up the cricket and offered it to her father. A sad giant, he shook his head and closed his eyes. Kleopatra settled between his feet, sheltering the cricket with her hands, thwarting its escape.
Fifteen-year-old Thea, the queen Tryphaena’s daughter from her first marriage to a Syrian prince, held Berenike in her lap, her cat eyes darting from the little princess on the floor to the king. Kleopatra shuddered. Thea was the image of her mother, but a darker, shadow side. Her black hair fell extravagantly down the length of her back, for she did not yet bind it into the tight knot favored by adult women. Her white, even teeth were perfectly set against her burnished complexion. She had inherited the queen’s aquiline nose and triangle-shaped face, but her features were
sharper and more acute than her mother’s gentler angles. Her contrasts heightened her conspicuous beauty, whereas Tryphaena’s softer attributes meshed into a timid gracefulness. Tryphaena, even when in perfect health, looked like an immortal creature merely visiting the harsh world of the living; Thea was clearly designed to live in the earthy, physical world. Though her time had not yet come, her body was developed and at odds with her childish clothes and undressed hair. Her young charms were bursting through the last vestiges of childhood, which she was ready to shed like a snake discards last season’s skin.
Thea held Berenike tight, leaving Kleopatra to wonder what it felt like in that closed circle. “I will always take care of you, darling,” she said into the child’s ear. Thea’s words were a song to Berenike, who adored her older half sister; her promises, a salve to Berenike’s wounds.
“Now I will never know her,” cried Berenike, who was precisely the age at which the queen should have begun to take an interest in her, though it was unlikely that this would ever have happened. Before she took ill, Tryphaena had spent her days playing music, reading books, and having earnest debates with the Sophists. Berenike liked to hunt small prey with her bow, wrestle with her pack of dogs, and chase the little slave brats through the courtyard with her sling.
Thea did not join in Berenike’s activities, but was an enthusiastic audience for Berenike’s feats, applauding any new progress she made with her weapons. Berenike dreamed of a day when she would be plucked from the nursery to have special audiences with her mother and show her how she could already hit the center of a target. But she had not had a conversation with her mother in more than two months, and her memory of the queen had already begun to dim.
Thea mouthed words of consolation, but she was not thinking about her mother or her stepsister. Thea pondered her own Fate. She was not the daughter of the king. She was not in line for the throne. Once her mother died, she would be sent to one of the outer palaces to live with the meddling old women who wailed in the queen’s chamber, until someone in the king’s service suggested a marriage to a house in a foreign land. Or until she was sent back to the court of her dead father in Syria, a country now occupied by Tigranes of Armenia, who was at war with the Romans. If the Romans won, which they always did, she might be thrown to one of them as a trinket, a small toy to quench their lusts. That was what she heard the brutal Romans demanded in victory, even from women of royal blood. No, there was nowhere for her to go.