Kleopatra

by Karen Essex

  “It has all of Rome in an uproar.” Kleopatra lowered the vial of oil of carnation from her nose and looked up and over the partition into the next stall. A Greek bookseller was unrolling a scroll. After reading it, he shot a dirty look at the manuscript’s owner, a stocky Roman merchant in white robes smattered with the remnants of his lunch.

  “You call this poetry?” The outraged Greek read the poem sotto voce, “‘Cock fornicates. What, a fornicating cock? Sure enough this is the proverb, the pot finds its own herbs.’”

  He threw the scroll back to the Roman, who fumbled it against his chest indignantly.

  Catullus. It could only be the infamous one, the Roman poet whom Demetrius had declared off-limits to her impressionable young mind. Kleopatra was dying to read his poetry, but her tutor said that he was a pervert, a catamite, and an anarchist. Now, finally, on this, her third escape to the marketplace, she had struck gold. For the past three Thursdays, while the Household Guard was busy rehearsing its marches, she had slipped down the stairs, into the kitchens, and out the back door, shivering as she called out a greeting in Egyptian to the indifferent guard at the palace gate who had yet to look up from cleaning his fingernails with a knife. With the sun warming her face and the sea breeze pushing her on, she skipped along the Canopic Way to the rambling city of stalls, where every luxury and amenity the world had to offer was to be found, as well as a few items—back scratchers, lice repellent, tooth pickers, tonics for sexual potency—that she had not heretofore known existed. Hoping to overhear treasonous material that she might report back to her father, she trailed peripatetic philosophers—notorious troublemakers—who flailed their arms as they pontificated, their hands like paddles volleying their speeches to the throng of boys who followed them. She listened to languid men playing chess who groused about everything—humidity, dust, flies, taxes—and she spied on merchants as they discussed the politics of the day. Despite her efforts to discover incendiary material, her only victories to date were learning the Ethiopian word for “fuck,” and getting a lesson from an old cook on picking ripe melons.

  The owner of the perfume stall, wrinkled and sour as last year’s apple, eyed Kleopatra suspiciously as she put down the vial of carnation oil and picked up essence of lotus, inhaling it as she tried to eavesdrop on the bookseller’s conversation. “Let me see your money, girl,” the woman demanded, and Kleopatra produced from her pockets some silver coins. “Oh all right then,” she said, too greedy, Kleopatra thought, to throw anyone with coinage out of her shop.

  “Smut. Filth. Licentious nonsense. Twaddle!” The Greek bookseller continued to sputter over Catullus’s new poems. “What’s happened to the boy?” Sighing, hand over heart, eyes fixed on the heavens, the bookseller recited from memory:

  You ask how many kissings of you, Lesbia, are enough for me and more than enough. As great as is the number of the Libyan sand that lies on silphium-bearing Cyrene, between the oracle of sultry Jove and the sacred tomb of old Battus …

  “That was poetry. This is dung!”

  “My dear fellow, you may not think it’s poetry, but it’s got all of Rome talking. The muse Lesbia found herself a new cocksman. Now the poet claims she’s no better than a trollop. His heart is broken. He cares for nothing, so he slings shit in every direction. He’s gone mad; he’s even taken on Julius Caesar.”

  The bookseller took the scroll back from the Roman. “Show me.”

  Julius Caesar. That name again. He would merit further study. She knew that he had subdued Spain and had been its governor, and that he had a very large army. Hammonius had said he was rivaled as an orator only by the great man Cicero; that he could talk anyone into anything, and often did.

  “Right here, see? He calls Caesar an abominable profligate pansy. Says he pokes another pansy named Mamurra.”

  The Greek read the poem silently; even with his lips moving in an animated fashion, the princess could not make out the words. He looked back at the Roman. “Thought you Romans didn’t go in for all that.”

  The Roman shrugged. “Our Caesar does. He bedded Nikomedes, the king of Bithynia, when he was on his first naval mission. His men still call him the queen of Bithynia behind his back. I should know. My brother-in-law’s a centurion in the Tenth.” He fumbled in his valise for another manuscript. “What do you make of this one?”

  The Greek read it to himself, and then slowly again out loud. “‘I have no very great desire to make myself agreeable to you, Caesar, nor to know whether your complexion is light or dark.’”

  Kleopatra could not figure out what this poem meant; nor could the bookseller, who looked quizzically at the Roman. “Were these more pleasing in the Latin?”

  “The translations are excellent, and if you don’t want them, I’m sure Nikias up the street would be happy to buy them.”

  “No, no, I’ll take them,” the Greek said, grabbing the manuscripts out of the merchant’s hand. “Boy!” he called to his servant. “Get these to the scribe. One hundred copies, and no time for his fancy marks in the margins. I need them straightaway.”

  “One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman.

  “They’re nasty bits about famous people; everyone will want them.”

  Money was exchanged and the servant took off on foot with the documents. “You may not be getting anything new from me for a while,” the Roman said. “I think there’s going to be trouble at home. I just might stay on here.”

  Kleopatra, stomach queasy from a prolonged inhalation of lotus oil, capped the vial with its plug of wax and listened attentively.

  “They say that Caesar and Pompey are going to unite their armies and take over Rome. They’ve got Crassus’s money behind them, and believe me, that is more than the treasury of many a country. It won’t happen without bloodshed, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Just stay out of it, my friend. Men in power come and go, but men like us need only make a living.”

  “You are right, my friend. How long can this “love affair’ between Caesar and Pompey last? All of Rome knows that Caesar used to visit Pompey’s wife, Mucia, when Pompey was away. He still might, who knows? He put his own wife away after he caught her with his friend Clodius. He said that his wife had to be above suspicion.”

  “Even though he’s got his poker in this king and that queen, or in this pansy, Mamurra, or in Pompey’s wife? You Romans make mockery of morality.”

  “We learned that from you Greeks.”

  The two men threw their heads back, laughing so hard that Kleopatra could see the black void of their missing teeth.

  “Well it serves Pompey right, being a cuckold,” said the Greek, collecting himself. “He’s got our king in his pocket. He’s got our treasury in his pocket, too.”

  Kleopatra strained harder to hear what was said. “Are you going to buy that oil or not?” the perfume-monger asked her sharply. “Let’s see a bit of that metal, sister.”

  Kleopatra hurled an angry coin at the woman, turning all her aural powers to the conversation.

  “The Flute Player sent your Pompey eight thousand Egyptian troops to help his war against the Jews, and a big fat lump of gold from the treasury. It’s got our people mad as Hades. There’s going to be trouble here, my friend. If I were you, I would take my money and run.”

  “What makes you think Rome is safer than Alexandria? The rabble-rousing that goes on here is nothing compared to what we see every day in the streets of Rome.”

  “I’m just trying to be a friend to you,” said the Greek. “I hear rumbling. And when the mob rumbles, things do not stay quiet for long.”

  From: Gnaeus Pompeius, General

  To: Ptolemy XII Auletes, King of the Two Lands of Egypt

  My great friend and ally,

  Regrettably, my forces are still engaged in the conflict in the Palestine, each man a necessity. Though I have them utterly surrounded and besieged, the Jewish tribes continue to resist, conducting religious ceremonies in the midst of an a
ttack if it occurs on their Sabbath, or some such other holy time. I wonder if they mock me. Until we prevail against them, I must ask that the friendship between us stand as a reminder that if I could respond to your present needs, I most certainly would.

  SIX

  Kleopatra loved the Delta, the land at the mouth of the river where the Nile splintered into narrow arteries like fingers climbing up the continent. She loved the sudden flash of a flock of heron across the gray skies, or the grace of a lone egret startling the silent horizon. The north country’s damp misty air coated her face, plumping her skin. The land was thick and marshy, making it hard to keep a seat on her disobedient pony, Persephone, a very stubborn young filly—a kindred spirit to the princess herself. Persephone was a fine example of the equine species, but there were things she did not like—snakes, mosquitoes, spiders, small rodents with sharp teeth, and most of all, Berenike, who shimmied her big steed, Jason, so close to Kleopatra that Persephone shuddered nervously, almost toppling her rider into the slush below.

  “That bratty nag will be the death of you, Sister,” Berenike said, riding past.

  Kleopatra caught her balance, but Berenike’s new companions, two muscular, compact Bactrian girls, quivers in leather pouches slung jauntily over their shoulders, galloped dangerously close to Persephone, their knowing asplike eyes slanting back at Kleopatra as they slipped past.

  “Mohama!” she called, looking about for her servant. The desert girl appeared beside her, wild coiling ringlets escaping the Greek-style braids, black ramparts framing her pronounced cheekbones.

  “Did you see them? If they are trying to scare me, they will not succeed,” she said, masking her fear in front of the older girl.

  “Those bitches better not give us any trouble,” Mohama said in her throaty, newly learned Greek, her lips spreading high and wide across her face like two peaked mountains. Her eyes were almond-shaped and startlingly yellow; her skin, dark—not as dark as a Nubian, and not as light as the strange fawn color of ancient Egyptian structures, but a shade somewhere in between. An aged bronze. “Do not worry for yourself. My two watchful eyes plus the one in the back of my head are on them.”

  Kleopatra had taken notice of Mohama a few months earlier when the girl was lighting the lamps in the upstairs hall. Riveted by her height and her strength as she hoisted the covers from the lamps, easily filling them with oil from enormous jugs, Kleopatra approached the slave. “Are you an Amazon?” she asked timidly. The top of her head barely reached Mohama’s sinewy neck.

  “The Amazons are from the east. I am from the western desert.” The girl explained in rather impressive if halting Greek that she was sixteen years old, or so she thought by the counting of the moons, and that she had been captured when she and her brothers attacked Royal Cartographers on a mapping expedition. When she saw that the party was armed, she circled their wagons with her horse, kicking dust into their faces so that her brothers might escape.

  “You sacrificed yourself?” Kleopatra asked.

  “It was no sacrifice. They had the food.”

  Over the next several days, Kleopatra watched Mohama at work while considering her usefulness. Though she was not an Amazon, she looked like one, if the renderings Kleopatra had seen on vases and tombs were accurate. Perhaps she also possessed some of the skills for which the women warriors were known—skills Kleopatra’s sister and her new companions had perfected. Berenike was older, taller, and meaner than Kleopatra, who worried that her sister’s new Bactrian companions might be assassins.

  Kleopatra confessed these fears to Mohama. The next day the slave produced from the folds of her garment a curved dagger with an ebony handle inlaid with small pieces of polished ivory. “I have brought the princess a present,” Mohama said, holding the gift in front of her. “A Samartian dagger.”

  “I knew it!” Kleopatra cried, taking the weapon. “You are an Amazon. The Samartians are the descendants of Scythian men and Amazon women. They are the best knife fighters in the world.”

  “I am not a Samartian, but got this knife from a Samartian soldier.”

  “Stole it, you mean,” said Kleopatra, searching Mohama’s face to see if the insult wounded. The girl shrugged. “No, the soldier wanted something from me. I gave it to him in exchange for the knife.”

  “What did you have to give him?”

  “Nothing I cannot afford to lose time and time again without losing a thing.”

  Kleopatra did not know how to respond. Mohama blithely went on. “There is trouble everywhere in the city. The Royal Family is not safe, not even inside the palace. And you might not even be safe from your own sister. If you will allow it, I will sleep on the floor of your chamber next to your bed. But you must sleep with this under your pillow. Whoever enters your room will have to kill me first. Perhaps while he wrestles with me, you can cut his throat. I will show you how.”

  “Splendid!” said Kleopatra.

  Mohama handed Kleopatra the dagger and told her to lie on the pillows and pretend to wrestle with an opponent underneath her. The princess dropped down, carefully holding the dagger with her right hand. She flailed her arms into the pillows, jabbing the dagger into the cushions and kicking with her legs. Suddenly she felt a large foot between her shoulders. Her arms were paralyzed. Mohama grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. She reached around and traced her finger across Kleopatra’s throat in a slow, taunting motion. She put her lips right up to the princess’s ear and whispered in a hot breath, “There, enemy of the crown. Your head is no longer part of your body.”

  Kleopatra’s heart pounded. She could not move. She could not breathe. It seemed a very long time that Mohama held her body prisoner, hurting her, pulling her hair, straining her neck. She felt powerless to say anything. Finally, the girl released her, helped her to her feet, and straightened her garment. Kleopatra folded her arms around herself, protecting something she could not name.

  “Now I’ll be the enemy and you be yourself, coming to our rescue.” But Kleopatra was frozen. Mohama picked up the dagger and handed it to her.

  “If one is to fight, one must be brave. Take the dagger, but please do not use it on me.”

  The warmth of the handle sent an energy through Kleopatra’s body. She felt as if she had awakened refreshed from a long nap and was ready to play. “Yes, I am ready. I am ready to strike a blow against the enemy,” she cried, raising the dagger into the air.

  “The princess is too full of glee. Killing is a sober business. Perhaps we shall practice without the dagger until you have more skill. I am only a slave, and my neck is not worth very much, but I like it.”

  Kleopatra giggled and put down the dagger. As Mohama knelt on the pillows, the princess put her foot in the middle of her back, forcing her down. With the full force of her weight, Kleopatra jumped on her back. Mohama’s arms flew out to the sides, leaving her in a crucified position. The princess tried to pin her arms down, but before she knew what was happening, they had rolled off the pillows and Kleopatra’s back was against the cold tiled floor, Mohama straddling her with her arms pinned above her head.

  “There is much for you to learn, Princess. Luckily, you already have the heart.”

  Kleopatra went straight to the Domestic Supervisor and demanded that the desert girl Mohama be made her personal attendant.

  On Meleager’s advice, the royal party had left Alexandria before dawn, while the disgruntled mob were still cozy in their beds. Kleopatra knew the trip would be rigorous, but she did not hesitate when Auletes proposed “a little hunt in the Delta” to get away from the dangers in the city, particularly when she learned that Thea, pregnant again, would remain at home.

  The party formed a long caravan, cutting an intrusive swath through the hush of the marsh. Carriages of hunting dogs—greyhounds used for chasing hare and the bulkier Indian hounds that worked by smell and by sight for tracking big game—all barked at once, as if in competition for a prize. Twelve carriages followed the king’s party; three carrying bo
dy servants to the royals and the Kinsmen; two full of cooks and their helpers; two loaded with heavy pots and pewter plates and utensils for feeding the party; and four hauling tents, bedding, and other supplies of the camp. The final, ornate carriage housed the king’s mistress and her women, who in accordance with court decorum would remain sequestered waiting for the king’s possible visit.

  One dozen of the king’s personal guards flanked the royals and their attendants. Auletes rode a sleek Greek-bred steed, the kind he preferred over the Nisaean and Arabian breeds, which, though superior in strength and endurance, had large heads that interfered with the precise throw of the spear. Away from the city, the king seemed to forget his urban woes entirely.

  “They say that Alexander preferred the Indian hound to the Molossian. He took thousands of them from the palace of Darius in Persia,” the king proclaimed over the din of the dogs to Demetrius, invited as a reward for his excellent instruction of the princess. “Demetrius, today you shall see my Indian hound Aura in action.”

  “Father named her after the dog of Atalanta,” Kleopatra said to the philosopher.

  “O virgin goddess, great huntress of the Calydonian boar, look kindly on our expedition!” Auletes cried. “O handmaiden to Artemis, bless our weapons, open the scents of the wilds to our dogs, point our spears and bows to the heart of the kill, and cause no man and no animal to suffer needlessly in our endeavors. We shall lay the slaughter on your altar and consume the flesh in your holy name!”

  Demetrius’s skinny frame jostled in the saddle, his lips frozen in a half-moon smile. The princess knew he cared neither for life outdoors nor for spilling the blood of an animal outside the sacrificial ritual.

  “It’s in my blood, my friend,” the king exclaimed. “The Ptolemies have been inveterate hunters, dating back to Ptolemy the First, who hunted with Alexander.”

  “Ah, that most legendary hunter from time out of mind,” said Demetrius, indulging the king as he had learned to do. “There was no greater hunter but the god Herakles.”