by Jo Graham
The palace was not the only thing in the Palace Quarter, not by far. Many nobles maintained houses there, some grand enough to have their own walls and gardens, their own orchards of sweet fruit, and little pavilions hidden among the trees where dinners and revels might be held. And of course there was the park and the tombs.
When the city was built, two hundred years ago, the cemetery had been outside of town, but the city had grown up around it. It was parkland, now, with trees and pleasant walks, fountains playing in the sun. White mausoleums and the entrances to tombs were scattered about, some with plain markers, and some with more grand ones. Beneath it all was the city of the dead. The catacombs stretched beneath the entire park, connecting some tombs and not others in a vast unmappable net.
Since the incident of the riot, Cleopatra had to stay in the palace unless escorted. Apollodorus was inflexible on this. No doubt he was simply green with fear at what might have happened, but we thought it wildly unfair.
Our world was remarkably safe. Yes, of course there was Pharaoh Ptolemy Auletes, our father and our master, but we saw him once every six months, and he did not enter our world. Our world, the world of the palace, was the world of women. Pharaoh might speak to his Major Domo about something, who would in turn speak to a eunuch, who might speak to the chief housekeeper, or to Asetnefer. They would then assign tasks, rewards, and blame. The authorities of our life were women, with the exception of put-upon Apollodorus. We did not know, yet, that there were sterner masters. Our greatest challenge lay in The Game.
The Game was this: The three of us should go together into Cleopatra’s rooms, talking loudly and being seen, our himations about our shoulders. Then once we were alone, Cleopatra would change clothes with either Iras or me. We took turns. Dressed anew, two of us would take our leave of “Cleopatra,” the same himations draped about our heads. The one who waited would settle down in Cleopatra’s rooms to read. The other would explore the palace with her sister.
It was a wonder to us how easy it was. People see what they expect to see. We were three little girls of the same age, and there was a resemblance between us. Iras was taller, and we had to be careful lest that be marked, and my eyes were the wrong shade, but that should pass except for close inspection. Differences in skin color are difficult to see in semidarkness, and could to some extent be remedied with the cosmetics we experimented with lavishly.
Language was more difficult. The palace, like the city, relied upon Koine Greek for most public business, but outside of the corridors of power native Egyptian was still the language of the people. Proclamations and such were generally done in both languages.
Iras and I had learned both together from babyhood, as both were spoken in the slave quarters. At first it drove Cleopatra wild that Iras and I could converse in front of her in a tongue unintelligible to her, but that didn’t last long. With the facility of a child, it was not long before she spoke the native language too, and could sound like me if she wished.
Thus the three of us had many innocent adventures, and thought ourselves daring as any hero of old.
I HAVE HEARD IT SAID that everyone longs for some lost paradise, some golden age, which is really no more than the state of things in infancy, a half-forgotten nursery where nothing ill ever happened. I have had that. My golden age was in the palace by the sea, with Asetnefer and Apollodorus and my sisters. But of course that ended. We do not stay children forever.
I expect that in due course of time Cleopatra would have married. Perhaps it would have been one of the Jewish princes, as we had discussed, or perhaps some scion of the royal families of Numidia or Pontus. It would not have been one of her brothers, not with two sisters her elder. While the Ptolemies marry their kin in the Egyptian fashion, it’s only Pharaoh who does so. The third daughter is for making alliances with, not for making queen. Even when the eldest of her brothers died, it was of little account in these plans. Her second brother should follow Ptolemy Auletes on the throne, matched with her eldest sister, Tryphaena, or with the second, Berenice.
If I have said little of these other sisters, it is because I knew them very little. Both had their own households before I joined Cleopatra’s. Tryphaena was eleven years Cleopatra’s senior, and Berenice eight, so they were great ladies of the court while we were in the schoolroom.
Arsinoe was the sister we knew. Three years younger than we were, she was the daughter of Ptolemy by his second queen, and had two little full brothers. The three of them had a separate nursery to themselves, with an extensive household staff, five tutors, a physician, a teacher of rhetoric from Athens, and a great deal else. But Ptolemy’s second queen cared little enough for the children of his first, and least of all for a third daughter who was the heir to nothing. It was quite enough to allow Cleopatra to amuse herself with her studies until she could be married off to the advantage of the dynasty.
It had never occurred to us that if she were to marry elsewhere in the great wide world, she might go to a husband who did not think that wives should enjoy the freedom of women in Alexandria. We should have been shocked had we known that in Athens respectable women did not go about unveiled in public, and that in most places in the world there were no women who pled cases in courts of law, or who studied medicine in the Temple of Asclepius. Only in the Hellenized east were these things true, in the kingdoms of the Successors that followed after Alexander, of which Egypt was chief. We lived in the freest place the world had ever known, and we did not understand at all but took it entirely for granted.
All of that changed when we were eleven.
For more than a hundred years, the Ptolemies had held the island of Cyprus as part of the empire. Now it was lost to the Romans.
I understood little of the politics at the time, but we all understood the mobs in the streets, tearing their hair and casting their cloaks over their heads, wailing, “Cyprus is lost! We have lost Cyprus!” Worse was what they did not cry, but muttered together on corners. “Cyprus is lost, and Ptolemy Auletes did not lift a finger to save that land which belongs to us. See how our fleet sits in the harbor still? He would not send a single ship to defend Cyprus against the Romans!”
It angered me, for I had always thought of my father as a good ruler. Perhaps he looked nothing like the fine carvings of kings on the walls of the Serapeum, being instead fifty and somewhat stout, with round smooth-shaven baby cheeks and rather less hair than desirable, but looks are not the measure of a man. They are absolutely not the measure of a king. Ptolemy Auletes was no Alexander, but I had taken a certain pride that he was a good king, and a tolerably fair man, at least as fair as a ruler may be.
I decided to ask Asetnefer. It was true that she was not a scholar, but she heard a great deal as she went about her work, and knew everything worth knowing in the royal household. Moreover, she was not the least afraid of Pharaoh.
After Cleopatra had gone to bed, I waited until Iras was also asleep in the small chamber off the Court of Birds that we shared. Then I went in search of Asetnefer.
She was sitting with some other women around the fountain, enjoying the cool of the evening, and the end of the day’s work. I came and stood beside her.
“Still awake, little cat?” she asked me, the pet name of my childhood. “Can’t you sleep?”
“No,” I said. “Will you talk to me?”
She came with me and we sat under the stars, listening to all of the insects of the night. “What’s the matter?”
I lowered my voice. “Why did Pharaoh lose Cyprus?”
Perhaps she had expected some trouble of the heart, not politics, or the news that I had begun my woman’s blood. I was eleven, after all, and Iras had bled first of us the month before.
“I know it’s difficult,” I said. “But I truly want to know.”
“Mind you, I am no diplomat or soldier.”
“I know,” I said.
She lowered her voice. “We lost Cyprus because we could not keep it. If we had sent ships, they would have
been defeated. The Romans had too many ships, and all we should have done was to provoke war with them.” Asetnefer leaned back, and I could see her profile against the stars, elegant and fine. “These are not the ancient days, when the Black Land could stand against all of the kingdoms of the earth, or even the days of the first Ptolemies. No kingdom can stand against Rome, so Ptolemy Auletes tries to walk a careful course, being the friend and ally of Rome while maintaining our independence. If he had gone to war with Rome over Cyprus, we should lose, and Egypt would become one more province.”
Her words were bitter in my ears. “Can it be that there is no way to win?”
Asetnefer shrugged. “Not without some second Alexander. And how often is one such born?”
“If he were born,” I heard myself say, “why should he be born to the House of the Ptolemies? There is all the world to stretch beneath his feet, and there are more lands than this, which do not await him like a bride the bridegroom.” The stars were very bright, Sothis rising in the darkness. “The Black Land knows her lover, and will welcome him as she did at Siwah.”
“Sometimes you say the oddest things,” Asetnefer said.
“I do,” I said, but I was learning not to.
APOLLODORUS WAS VERY STERN about this—the mark of an educated person was a rational mind. In ages past, people believed that the Nile rose and fell by the will of the gods, that sickness came because of evil spirits, that everything that happened was blessing or curse. Now we knew better. The Nile rises and falls because of the rains in Africa, far to the south. Sickness comes because of filth or bad water, and things happen because science provides explanations. To believe in prophecy or the intervention of the divine was no more than sloppy thinking.
Once, when I told the other girls of some dream I had that came true, Apollodorus frowned. “If you say things like that, people will think you are no more than another silly superstitious woman. I am training you to be rulers, the three of you, royal Ptolemies conversant with philosophy and able to hold your own with any man in the world. If you believe in prophetic dreams and other nonsense, you are no better than the most ignorant old woman in the market.”
I turned deep red, and felt a shame so acute that I shook. I had not told him the half of what I dreamed.
It was Cleopatra who came to my rescue. “But Apollodorus, why is it wrong to tell of dreams if they do come true? Charmian dreams true all the time, about small things. What harm can it do?”
Apollodorus was grave, and his eyes strayed to Iras. “There are many in the world who do not think that women or people who are not born Greek are capable of learning, who will look down on you because you are female, or because Iras’ skin is too dark and Charmian’s too fair, who will say that they are both barbarians. If you descend to silliness and womanly superstition, you lower the regard of all women and all people of your bloods. You merely confirm the worst prejudices—that women are stupider than men and more prone to error, and that barbarians cannot learn science and rational thought.” His eyes fell on me again, concerned. “Do you not understand that when you talk of these things, Charmian, you harm all women?”
“No,” I said very softly. I felt the tears starting behind my eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
“You would not want to do so, I know,” he said kindly. “You are young, and some of these superstitions are entertaining. But you are an example. If, with your education, you are frivolous, you provide men with reasons why women should not attend lectures at the Museum, or should not publish books. You must do twice as well as a boy so that opportunities will not be denied to other girls because of your behavior.”
“I will not speak of it again, Master Apollodorus,” I promised, blinking back tears. I could not cry without piling further disgrace on my sex. So I did not.
Yet it did not escape me that Cleopatra still looked rebellious, though she said nothing.
After that, I did not dream so much, and they were not half so clear. Perhaps they had never meant anything at all.
THERE HAD BEEN RIOTS in the city when the news from Cyprus came, but now there were rumors and counter-rumors, stories that Ptolemy had been paid off by Pompeius Magnus not to intervene in Cyprus.
At our lessons, we could hear the shouts as a dull and distant roar beyond the wall that encircled the Palace Quarter. Apollodorus had slept in the palace the night before; he did not dare leave and try to walk through the streets to his house. All night the mobs had been camped before the gates.
“Don’t worry, girls,” he told us. “Pharaoh has soldiers on every gate, and people will get tired of shouting soon and go home.”
They didn’t. The next night there were fires in the city, and none of the slaves would leave the Palace Quarter on any business after a man who was sent on an errand was set upon and beaten. Our lessons were quiet and tense.
“It’s because of the bad harvest,” Cleopatra said. “The flood was low last year, and the harvest poor. If the flood is good, things will change.”
Already the flood was late. Each year the Nile rises at the appointed time, in more or less accord with the heliacal rising of Sothis. It may be a few days more or less, but until the river begins to rise, everyone must wait. The flood comes pouring down the cataracts from the mountains far to the south of Nubia and Kush, bringing life-giving sediment to our fields. Alexandria is on the sea, and served by the canal to Lake Mareotis rather than the river, but the Nile is the blood of Egypt. We waited to see if the river would rise.
Because of the messengers, we knew one day before the people. The river was rising, but again the flood was short. Great stretches of fields escaped the Inundation, lying baked in the sun. Even with all of the floodgates open, even with each sluice and barrier wide, the flood was too little. It was the day the Queen and her children took ship to Rhodes. Everyone bustled about the palace, slaves and courtiers alike. On the afternoon tide the great ship sailed from the palace harbor, carrying the Queen, her two small boys, and Arsinoe away.
Iras and I looked at one another, watching the ship making for the breakwater, her mighty oars moving in unison. Another ship was being prepared by the docks.
“Do you suppose it is for us?” I asked.
“Not likely,” Cleopatra said. “I expect it’s for my older brother.” Ptolemy would want to keep the heir to the throne safe.
Cleopatra should have been sent with the younger children, but the Queen did not want her, and we hardly expected Pharaoh to remember. After all, she was no more than a piece in the marriage game, a third daughter of little account.
“Will Tryphaena and Berenice go?” I wondered aloud.
“I doubt it,” Iras said. “They will not want to.” Which was true. They were twenty-two and nineteen, and had factions of their own at court. “Where does the ship go?”
“Rome,” Cleopatra said, and I looked at her, startled.
She shrugged. “I know no more than you,” she said. “But where else would it go? My father has risked the peace of his land to keep faith with Pompeius Magnus. Who else should he appeal to for aid?”
Iras looked glum. “We should not have to owe them anything.”
“I know,” Cleopatra said.
“Maybe we will go with him,” I said. I was curious. I wanted to see this city across the sea that was the source of so much strife, much as a moth wants to see the flame of a lamp, not knowing what flame is.
IT WAS PTOLEMY who took ship with his heir, Pharaoh himself stealing away at night with portable valuables, bound for Rome and his ally. We did not know he was gone until morning, waiting in the half-deserted palace like an afterthought, left to the mob.
Cleopatra clenched her lips, and looked toward the window, toward the harbor where the ship’s sails were fast disappearing around the breakwater toward Pharos.
I put my arm around her. I had not thought that Auletes loved me. “Are you very hurt?” I asked.
“I’m angry,” she said. “That’s all.” Her shoulders were unyi
elding under my arm, and I moved it. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
Iras, more wisely, said nothing, but she shared a look with me behind our sister’s back.
“We won’t leave,” I said. “We’ll never leave you.”
Apollodorus burst in. “Are you ready?” He had a cloak about him, though the day was warm.
“Ready for what?” Cleopatra got to her feet, her long chiton pooling gracefully in a way mine never did.
The Jewish Quarter, I thought. If worst came to worst, Dion would hide us. We could go into the city unremarked as always. Dion would help us. We could wait until the fury of the mob was past.
“There is a ship to take you to Pelousion. Get your things.”
“Tryphaena,” Iras said. While I had been thinking of ways to survive, she was parsing out the politics of it. Tryphaena would declare herself queen. And what she might do with a younger sister she barely knew was an open question. House arrest, probably. But murder is tidy, and not unknown in the House of the Ptolemies.
“Pelousion?” Cleopatra said.
“Pelousion is fortified and loyal to Pharaoh. Come on!” Apollodorus urged. “Come, Cleopatra.”
WE SAILED AT SUNSET, under a leaden sky. Clouds had come in off the sea, and the variable winds hindered our passage. We beat out to sea on oars only, around the massive breakwaters. The sun slipped toward the sea, and Pharos kindled, bright flame flashing out over the waves, brighter than the dying sun, fire from heaven.
I stood beside the rail, Iras next to me, looking back. The waves lifted us and the ship swayed strongly in the currents around the islands, but it seemed a familiar kind of movement, more pleasant than frightening. I had only to look at Iras to know she was thinking the same thing.