“He has fevers, Your Majesty,” the Royal Physician replied. “Yet his liver is excessively chilled. The traditional cures have not worked. There is not a physician or a scientist at the Mouseion that we have not consulted. We have brought in the native women to administer the secret healing herbs of Egypt. We have also written to our colleagues in Athens and Rhodes for advice.”
“By the time we receive an answer that compensates for your lack of knowledge the king will be dead,” she said curtly. But she knew the truth. Auletes was a spent man. The long years trying to placate al the disparate factions of his kingdom and his family, the familial betrayals, and, most of all, the humiliation he had faced time and again at the hands of the Romans had defeated him utterly.
Kleopatra flipped the coin into the air, catching it in her palm. She clutched it tightly and smiled. She would bring it to the king directly. This symbol that his lineage continued into the future would cheer him. He had held the throne of his ancestors in the lace of his family’s rebellion, his subjects’ displeasure, and the Roman menace. The coin was the greatest evidence she could show him, other than her abject loyalty, that his life had been a success.
“How is the king today?” she asked the physician she met coming out of the king’s chamber.
“He is in most decent spirits, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “He ate a splendid breakfast of dates, quail eggs, and milk, and then called for an orange. He insisted upon peeling it himself. I believe he is mending. The gods are good to those who serve them.”
The king lay in his bed, his head propped on an immense silk pillow. His perspiration had discolored the patch that haloed his head, making a mock crown. His eyes seemed out of symmetry. Though Hekate swabbed his forehead repeatedly, his face glistened, giving him an ethereal countenance. What could that physician have meant by his spirits?
When Hekate saw the queen she began to rise, obeying the protocol for her new status, but Kleopatra silently stopped her with her hand.
“Father,” she began in an uncharacteristically perky voice. “Look here what I have.” Auletes attempted to focus his eyes on the small, metallic orb that she held in front of his face.
“Look, Sire,” said Hekate. “It is the coin of the joint rulership between our new queen and yourself. How handsome you look, Auletes. It is a wonderful likeness.”
The king squinted. “Yes, it is, by god. Look at me. How fine I am. But do you not think I am portrayed as too fat?”
“Not at all, my darling,” Hekate said. “You are pictured at the height of health and prosperity. It is a fine tribute to you and to the queen.”
“And how lovely my wife looks, though she does not appear herself at all.”
“It is a likeness of myself, Father,” answered the queen. “Kleopatra, your eldest daughter.”
“But why do you wear the ring of my wife? Have you stolen it from her? Where is she?”
“My mother is dead. She died when I was but a child.”
“Ah, so it is. Come close to me.”
Kleopatra sat on the enormous state bed beside the supine figure of her father. Hanging above them was the eagle of Ptolemy, nesting directly above, serving as a canopy over the ailing king. The beast’s sharp beak curved ominously, pointing its tip at Auletes’ belly. Kleopatra had never before been on the bed of her father. Would she someday sleep in this room? How could one get a good night’s rest when the eagle threatened always to swoop down and hit the bed’s tenant in his most vulnerable spot?
Auletes’ hand was limp and hot. She smelled the odor from the wet poultice that covered his liver. Kleopatra’s first instinct was to withdraw her hand, but she let it rest in his palm. He closed his hand around hers, immediately causing her to perspire, whether from the temperature or from nervousness, she did not know. “You are Kleopatra, as was your mother and her mother. Or so it says on your new coin.”
“That is correct, Father.”
“You are not an impostor or a usurper, are you?” he asked wickedly. She did not know if he joked with her or if he was still in a confused state.
“I am not an impostor. I have remained true to my father the king even when his wife and his other daughter and his own people turned against him,” she said, wishing she did not have to make this bedside defense of herself.
“The name Kleopatra means ‘glory to her father,’” he said. His eyes were now focused intently on hers. She believed she felt heat emanating from them. “Swear to me that you will honor that name always.”
“I swear it, Father. I shall care for you always and never desert you or fail to heed your wise counsel. The kingdom suffers from your sick leave. Every day I pray to the gods that my father recovers quickly, that one morning I will awaken to the sound of his flute.”
Hekate smiled her approval for Kleopatra’s patronage of her father, while Kleopatra wished that there was even a modicum of hope behind her words; that her father were himself and that together they could attend to the thousand details and problems of government as they had in what seemed now like times long past.
Auletes sighed, his chest rattling like the annoying toy of a child. He tried to catch his breath, shaking Kleopatra off the bed with his convulsion, Hekate quickly called to the servants to hold the king upright to expel the poison that had arisen from his lungs. She took Kleopatra to the foot of the bed and whispered, “Your Majesty, forgive my interference, but I fear for the life of the king.”
“Hekate, you are family to us. Nothing you do on behalf of my father’s health can be construed as interference. Speak your mind.”
“The fever has settled on the king’s brain. The Royal Physician says that the king improves, but the medicine woman has told me that once the brain absorbs the fever, nothing can be done.”
“The physician told me as I entered the room that the king is on the mend.”
“The physician wishes to abdicate responsibility for the king’s illness. Behind his back, the old woman and I have administered all the remedies known in our family for many hundreds of years, but we have failed him. I wish to die with him, Your Majesty. What am I, a courtesan, without her king?”
Kleopatra understood the meaning. A middle-age courtesan was admired if she successfully parlayed her love into lifelong financial security, and despised if she failed to do so. She suspected that Hekate would not have manipulated such an arrangement, believing it beneath her dignity. “Hekate, has the king not provided for your future?”
“I did not request it,” she said.
“You have been a most loyal and tender friend to my father. Another woman might have abandoned him or ridiculed him for his recent foolishness. But you have given him love. Whatever the Fate of my father, I promise you a pension for life to supplement the king’s many gifts to you. If you desire it, I shall arrange for you to return to your family in Mytilene upon the king’s death.”
“You shall be a queen unlike any other, known to all for your compassion.” The older woman knelt before the girl whom she had known since before her eleventh birthday.
“Hekate, please,” said Kleopatra, helping the woman to her feet. “The king needs you.”
Hekate returned to her nursing post. Kleopatra took a moment to watch the delicate hand sweep a sage-soaked cloth over the king’s heavy forehead. The king smiled sweetly like a small boy given an unexpected piece of candy before his dinner.
He closed his eyes and breathed peacefully.
NINETEEN
Kleopatra squinted into the rising sun. The farmers who lived in misshapen mud huts along the banks of the Nile had already hung out their wash, and it fluttered in the torpid morning breeze, the first movement of air she had felt in days. Clusters of palm trees with fronds like worn-out combs swayed softly against a pearl-blue sky. Papyrus, brown and dry as beavers’ tails, choked the shoreline. Despite the subtle wind, there was an unearthly stillness to the river at sunrise. Kleopatra was accustomed to feeling dawn stir the city back to life, and she felt unsettled in this static land
where, beyond the verdant stripe that lined the river, the solemn dunes of the desert lolled toward an eternal horizon.
Though it was barely May, summer had descended upon Egypt, but this year without the spring rain that relieved the relentless heat of the land. The river looked deadly low. If the rain did not come, if the river did not rise and flood the crops as it did yearly, there would be famine. Surely the people feared it, and surely they were in no mood to receive the daughter of the Greek monarch who had appointed the Roman Rabirius—the swine who, two years ago, had raped them of their last good harvest. Kleopatra added these thoughts to her list of woes, letting the weight of it settle into her viscera along with her other anxieties.
The royal barge, long, flat, and sleek, sailed at a languid pace through placid waters, but Kleopatra felt the boat’s motion in the pit of her belly. She had not taken food in two days, and her stomach was empty and queasy all at once. Her hands shook from the fast; her head felt light, as if it might ascend to the heavens without the rest of her body. Two tall servants stood beside her shaded chair on the deck, fanning her with feathery plumes, but the heat had penetrated well beyond the skin and into the very core of her body. No amount of hot breeze would unseat her burden. As the wind teased her face, she wished it would lift her and carry her away to join her father, who at this moment was probably playing his flute for the gods. She was certain that her father’s spirit was precisely where it wished to be—free, finally, from the untenable dilemmas of politics; weightless, at last, no longer bound to soil dominated by Rome.
The last several days had been unreal, time she floated through by steeling herself against the tide of sorrow and panic that descended upon her at Auletes’ death. She could not reveal the slightest weakness, the smallest insecurity, the tiniest inkling that all was not well within the palace. When a stray emotion threatened to surface, she tensed her body fiercely to scare the grief or the fear away. She had yet to catch a full breath since the moment she was informed of the king’s demise, and now her body was exhausted and her mind relentless.
On that evening, she had dressed hurriedly and run to her father’s chamber, Charmion ahead of her lighting the hall with a heavy oil lamp. The first thing she heard was a low, murmuring sob. Hekate was on her knees at the bedside, gently beating her breasts with her fists, crying an almost inaudible lament. The king’s eyes were closed, his face at rest, his hair slightly damp. He looked as if he had just expended himself in one of his licentious pleasures and slept the deep and remorseless sleep of the hedonist. His tranquil face was in odd juxtaposition with the angry stare of the Ptolemaic eagle above him. Kleopatra moved toward her father, but was stopped by the large hand of Hephaestion upon her shoulder. “We must talk,” he said.
“My father is dead,” she said angrily, shocked that he would choose the hour of her grief to address official matters.
“Yes, I am sorry. Tonight, before I rest, if I rest, I shall pray to the gods for his soul. But at present, the dangers to you and to the kingdom do not allow us to express the normal emotions.” The eunuch’s voice was filled with the authority that Kleopatra did not, at this moment, possess. Her source of authority lay dead, his burly arms folded across his stomach. Kleopatra wanted to go to him, unfurl his arms, and curl inside the woolly shelter of his chest as she had done as a child. Just once, just one more time before he was gone forever.
“Please listen to me before something of irretrievable harm is done,” Hephaestion said, breaking protocol and taking her firmly by the shoulders with his hands. “Your life depends on it. You are not two months a queen. The coins announcing joint rule with your father have not yet reached the provinces. You have no official support outside your father’s status as king.”
Kleopatra stood silent, unprepared for both the death of her father and for the news that she was queen in name only. She had spent her life preparing to embrace power, but her will and vitality seemed to have disappeared along with the spirit of her father. How easy it had been to assume power when her father was alive, when the force of his years and his title and his heritage were pushing her on. How would she manage alone? Where was Archimedes? Hammonius? Why did they not come to her now when she needed them most? She longed to cry upon the shoulder of a Kinsman, but the only person before her now was this inscrutable eunuch demanding her attention.
“We are going to pretend that your father lives,” he said to her astonishment. She looked again at her father’s body. “You must stifle every emotion and carry out this ruse.”
Kleopatra listened as the eunuch informed her that she was not going to mourn the death of her father, but rather, was going on a crucial diplomatic mission. He had already arranged for her to leave the next morning for Hermonthis in Thebes. Buchis, the sacred bull at the temple of Amon-Ra, had died, and a new bull was to be installed in the holy place. Kleopatra did not speak, but looked skeptically into Hephaestion’s genial brown eyes for any sign of treachery.
“To the Egyptians, the bull is the living soul of the god. He is the symbol of the Thebiad region. He is not a Greek deity like the Apis bull at the temple of Sarapis, but a god of the native people from ancient times. He is a reminder to them of the days when all men feared even the name of Pharaoh. By leading the procession, you will secure the loyalty of the priests and the politicians of the Thebiad. While you are gone, I will open discussions with those who wield power in the city.”
“Are these sinister methods really necessary?” asked Kleopatra. Was Hephaestion succumbing to the eunuch’s archetypal delight with intrigue? “Or are you trying to get rid of me for your own purposes?”
Hephaestion dismissed the accusation by refusing to address it. “Your sister Arsinoe and the two boys are in the thrall of the eunuch Pothinus. Do not be fooled by his ridiculous, garish exterior. He is as conniving a creature as we’ve seen at this court. I have been watching him for years, and he knows it. He intends to rise to power through your sister and brothers, which of course calls for your demise. The moment he knows your father is dead, he will begin a campaign against you.”
Kleopatra cursed herself. How had she become so vulnerable? How had she imagined she would retain power after her father’s death? By magic? Had she been so busy with her duties that she had failed to keep an eye on her siblings? She still considered them children—surely not allies, but hardly formidable enough to be dangerous. At least not yet.
“Your brother is ten years old, and when he becomes your co-regent, Pothinus and others of his choosing will govern as his Regency Council. He is a boy and they can have their way with him. You are of age, and may make decisions by yourself. With you out of the way, they could have eight years of uninterrupted power. You are the only challenge to their authority. They know you have run the kingdom in the last months, and they fear you.
“But if you are strong, if you demonstrate that you have the loyalty of those who served your father, they will have to respect your position.”
“How can we keep my father’s death a secret?”
“I have instructed the doctors to declare him quarantined,” said Hephaestion. “They are issuing a Royal Order that no one be allowed into the chambers of the king except themselves, who bring food and medicines.”
Two physicians entered the room waving smoking incense burners, releasing an acrid, wicked scent. Kleopatra covered her nose and mouth with her hand. “Why this horrible smell?”
“To deter the curious,” Hephaestion said, a tiny smile cracking the tension in his face. While Kleopatra took short, shallow breaths, Hephaestion explained that an expert embalmer was on his way from the Necropolis. Should anyone burst into the room, the king would have a lifelike appearance. Pothinus and the nurses of the children were being informed that deadly diseases lurked in the room. At the sacrifice for the king’s health in the morning, the priests would predict horrific fates—instantaneous disappearance of the tongue or untimely death by plague—to those who intruded upon the king.
?
??How can I leave the city at this time? Is it safe?” She had learned to trust Hephaestion without question; intuition, her best adviser, had told her to do so. Now, panicked, feeling as if the very floor under her feet might at any moment give way and betray her, intuition vanished, leaving a vacuum quickly filled by insecurity and a desperate, futile desire to change the unfolding events.
“You must go. You will be the first Greek monarch to perform this ceremony in the three hundred years your family has occupied Egypt. Can you think of a better way to consolidate support among the native people? Must I remind you of the very words you uttered to move your father to act? The Egyptians honor those who honor their gods.”
Without spending a decent expanse of time at her father’s side while his spirit escaped his body, without repeating the proper prayers or incantations for the dead, without shedding a tear for her king and father, Kleopatra left his chamber to prepare for her voyage.
The royal barge sailed deeper into the mysterious land of Upper Egypt, so far away from the Greek city of Alexandria that most considered it another country. Auletes, like most of his dynasty, was often called King Ptolemy of Alexandria and the Two Lands of Egypt. And that was how he had viewed himself—an Alexandrian first and foremost. Yet here was Kleopatra, sailing farther and farther from Hellenism and into the strange country that she hoped would accept her as queen. She stuck her index finger under her dark black wig and scratched her sweaty scalp. She wore the robes of the goddess Isis, the deity with whom the Egyptians associated their royal women. Her sleek linen dress was long and knotted at the breast, with tiered, draping folds. The wig’s two long curls snaked down either side of her face. She prayed that she looked dignified and grand, and not like the ordinary Egyptian girl she passed for in the days when she used to run wild in the marketplace. In the morning, without her cosmetics, she still looked so young. She hoped that her heavy face paint, the goddess’s elegant robe, and the gold filigree bracelets lining her arms would prevent her girlish face from betraying her. My power is yet so fragile that it must be painted on, she thought.