by Karen Essex
“I never dreamed I would be king. I was a bastard, an exile, and a musician—hardly a fitting candidate to rule the land of Ptolemy I Savior. When my father died, my lunatic cousin, Ptolemy XI Alexander, became king. He married his elder stepsister to follow custom, and then three weeks later, had her murdered. One day a mob of citizens pulled him out of the gymnasium while he exercised and slit his throat. They dragged his corpse through the streets of the city chanting, “Who are the king-makers in Alexandria? We are!’
“Well, my dears, we were out of heirs except for me. One day I was sitting in my garden with my beloved mother, reading to her the prayers of Callimachus, when a breathless messenger arrived and told me I was the new king. And that was that.”
A polite round of applause was given to the king. He took a deep breath and then a deep drink of his wine.
“And what about Mother? Tell us about how you married her,” Kleopatra said.
“Ah, gentle Tryphaena. Many is the night I feel her spirit around me, especially on a starlit night such as this.” The king hung his head. The princess Kleopatra sidled up to her father and took his hand. “Do you think she is with us now, Father?”
“Perhaps,” the king said wistfully. “She was like the air itself—light and essential.”
“If she is with us now, Father, would she not like to hear us speak of her?” asked Kleopatra. “Would that not please her gentle soul?”
“Yes, I suppose it would,” said the king. “And I suppose it would please your soul to hear talk of your mother, would it not?”
“It would,” replied the princess.
“And you, Berenike?” the king questioned his elder daughter, who had not looked at him while he spoke.
“As you wish, Father,” she replied without meeting his eyes directly.
“Well then. Tryphaena. She, too, was the daughter of my father, Laythrus, but of his first wife, Kleopatra IV. Father made a political marriage for her to the son of the Syrian prince, and sent her there to live with her new husband. And that is where I, Auletes, then a young man, made the acquaintance of my half sister. Immediately, I fell in love.”
Auletes clapped his fists to his chest and shut his eyes tight. “She was beautiful. The most beautiful. She had an innate artistic quality, much like my beloved mother. When she read poetry, I wept. When she played the lyre, I sang. And when I saw her bathing in the nude, I lusted.” He gave a wink to his audience. “But what could I do? She was a married woman, and, regrettably, pious.
“As the gods would have it, ladies and gentlemen, soldiers, hunters, cooks, and thieves, as soon as I became king, Tryphaena’s husband—may the gods rest his heroic soul—died in the Syrian war. And poor widowed Tryphaena was left alone in Syria.
“Upon hearing of her untimely widowhood, I went straight to the Cabinet and I said, “I am going to take a wife.’ And old Menander said to me, ‘Well, Auletes, you’d better give yourself a while to make sure the people aren’t going to murder you, too, before you bring poor innocent Tryphaena back here.’”
Everyone laughed. The king raised his cup and a boy quickly filled it with more wine. Kleopatra took a big sip from her father’s goblet, causing him to laugh more.
“In the spring of that year I found myself quite alive—if not yet adored—and so I sent for my beloved. And she arrived within the month with her little Thea, only five years old.
“The very next year, you were born,” the king said to Berenike. “But then we thought the gods had ceased to smile upon us. Five times thereafter, my beautiful queen lost her babies long before their birthing time. In the tenth year of our marriage, the queen made a pilgrimage to the temple of Hathor at Dendara. It was a long and dangerous journey, but she insisted that the Egyptian goddess would bless her womb. I thought her mad and tried to forbid the journey, but there is no interfering in the plans of the women in our family.
“On the very evening she returned home from the journey she asked me to give her a child. I said, “My dear, you know what a voracious lover I am. Do you not require a period of rest from your trip before I consume your small body in the adventure of lovemaking?’”
The Kinsmen made catcalls as if to avow to the king’s prowess. Kleopatra put her head down. She did not like to imagine her father as a lover.
“But Tryphaena insisted that I satiate my lusts. She believed that the goddess had decreed that night for conception. Miraculously, nine months later, this small creature arrived from the bosom of the goddess.” He ruffled the hair of the princess, who had begun to cry.
Her mother, Tryphaena, was a woman blessed by the goddess, a holy and pious queen. Why could she not have lived? Why did the gods take her away? And how could Thea have betrayed such a woman? Kleopatra wiped the tears from her face, suddenly embarrassed by her outburst. The hated one! She had forgotten about Thea for one blissful day. The hunting trip had been an example of what their lives might have been without her malignant presence.
“Father, what might have happened to us if you had not married Thea?”
“What do you mean, child?”
“If my mother had had no daughter, would you have taken another wife?”
“I might have, in my loneliness. I am hardly an old man!”
Kleopatra looked at her sister. Berenike sat quietly as one of her Bactrian girls laced her long hair into small braids.
“Father, if you had not married Thea, would Berenike be queen?”
The king shrugged. “By custom, the eldest daughter is named co-regent upon her eighteenth birthday—that is, in the absence of a queen.”
“Then it is a very good thing that Berenike loves her stepmother and carries no resentment, don’t you think?” Kleopatra addressed the question to her father, but looked at her sister. Berenike had jerked her head forward, yanking her braid out of the Bactrian girl’s hand.
Berenike’s fair skin was whiter still in the moonlight. Her full lips were as pale as the mouth of a statue. Kleopatra felt a chill and reached again for her father’s warm hand. Was this the first time Berenike had realized that Thea, by seducing the king, had sabotaged her own chances of reigning as co-regent with Auletes? Kleopatra had known this fact for several years, and often wondered how it had escaped Berenike, who doted so on Thea. But Berenike resided in her own mythological kingdom where she alone was queen. What would it take to allow Thea’s betrayal into her solidly walled mind?
The princess could not sleep. The smell of the sharp, citrus incense that kept away mosquitoes and other night-crawling insects sickened Kleopatra to her stomach, while Mohama, breathing monotonously, slept on a pallet not four feet from her bed.
Kleopatra was troubled by the harrowing stare of Berenike when her father uttered the awful truth. What would Berenike do now? Would she turn on Thea, or would she move against Kleopatra, who had goaded Auletes into saying the awful thing?
Tradition stood like a wall between the royal sisters, for no two women might rule together, and no woman might rule without a male co-regent. The elder sister generally married the elder brother and ruled together with him. With these equations indelibly inscribed upon the dynasty, the only sensible thing for the females to do was to find ways to eliminate one another. In that case, Kleopatra had no doubt that she would be the one vanquished.
Kleopatra would offer her theory to Berenike: Now that Thea had a daughter, Arsinoe, and two little sons, she had every reason to move against the other daughters of Tryphaena in order to insure the position of her own children on the throne. Ptolemaic mothers had done as much for almost three hundred years. Had not the eunuch Meleager informed them of that particular habit of their ancestresses?
Was Berenike either naive enough or oblivious enough to think that Thea would support her over her own children? As far as Kleopatra knew, no Macedonian queen in history had ever done that. Kleopatra would make Berenike an irresistible offer—she would happily support her against Thea.
An allegiance of blood, that is what she would p
ropose. The sisters would cut their fingers and mix together the life force. There was no love between them, but there was the bond of blood. The blood in their veins that traced itself back to Alexander and the beak-nosed Ptolemy, whose dream figure bestowed upon the princess the form of the eagle—the symbol of the House of Ptolemy, of their dynasty, of their very blood. Their blood bond was stronger than their bond with Thea, who also shared their heritage, but whose blood was diluted by her Syrian father. Berenike, too, was an eagle, not merely a half-member of the House of Ptolemy like Thea. Had Berenike not proved that today at the hunt?
Kleopatra gingerly rolled the linen blanket away from her body and slid from the mattress, stepping slowly around the sleeping Mohama. Delicately but firmly she opened the flap of the tent. The night air had a subtle chill. Two guards, their bare feet outstretched, snored around a lazy fire. All was hushed inside the tents of the Kinsmen, but without, the night creatures sang their nocturnal hymns. The haunting cry of the owl, the chatter of the crickets and other insects of the marshes, the cries of the unknown animals that inhabited the glade—these did not frighten the princess, or so she told herself. A quick prayer to the goddess of night, and she slithered into the dark.
The lamps were already extinguished; Berenike’s tent, a square stillness. Kleopatra got down on her knees and slipped inside the flap without making a sound. She knelt in the darkness while her eyes and ears adjusted to the new conditions inside. She saw nothing at first but two empty pallets with white linens tossed aside, beds that should have been occupied by the Bactrian attendants.
She heard a low moan and froze. Someone sounded hurt. Not knowing whether to cry for help or to investigate more, she waited. Another moan, this time lower and more desperate. She remembered how Mohama taught her to attack by surprise from behind, slitting the throat of the intruder. She had brought her knife for the exchange of blood. Could she kill in the defense of her sister? She allowed the thought of her sister’s death to enter her mind. If Berenike was dead, the equation of accession to the throne would change in her favor.
Kleopatra crawled farther into the tent and squinted. On Berenike’s bed, in silhouette against the white walls, the Bactrian girl who had saved her friend now held the hands of the other high above her head. She was naked, legs spread wide open. Berenike sat between the girl’s knees, her dress torn open in the front and her breasts exposed. Her hand, hidden inside the girl’s body, appeared to lift her pelvis up and down in a mesmerizing cadence. Berenike’s arm was like a handle that controlled the girl’s body as she arched herself up and down to the command of Berenike’s buried hand. Each time she rose, her full breasts fell to the side. The other girl, who had saved Berenike from the beast with her well-placed quiver, pulled her friend’s arms tautly over her head while she called incessantly to the gods. Berenike raised her dress and straddled the girl, moving against her, head thrown back, eyes shut tight.
Kleopatra sat rapt but for a foreign stir deep within the dark and unknowable part of her body. She dared not move, though she found herself unconsciously imitating Berenike’s rhythmic movement, while the two tribeswomen bit at each other’s lips, spilling deep sighs into the other’s mouth. Berenike pulled fiercely at the girl’s nipples, as if trying to see how far she might stretch them. The girl bucked under Berenike, who let out a sharp cry. Berenike’s head fell forward, and she rocked herself back and forth very slowly. Finally, she fell forward and onto the girl’s shoulder.
The unwitting witness slowly backed out of the tent. She had heard about the women who pleased one another without men. She had heard that this was the habit of the Amazons, who only fraternized with men to get with child. She had even heard that the king enjoyed watching such performances between his mistresses who were from the places where this love between women was the custom. Perhaps many adult women engaged in this sexual sport together. Kleopatra did not know, though she had seen vase paintings that insinuated as much. But she now saw that her sister lived in a separate sphere. She had a secret life—far different from the secret life Kleopatra lived when she escaped the walls of the Inner Palace and blended into the marketplace.
Kleopatra crawled back into her tent, relieved to see Mohama still overtaken with sleep, her position unchanged. She let herself back into her bed, pulling the linens up to her chin. She noticed, for the first time, how little space her body took in the large mattress. Small, alone, curling into herself, she pulled the blanket over her head and tried to succumb to sleep.
SEVEN
In the spring of Auletes’ twentieth regnal year, while Kleopatra passed her eleventh birthday, a tall, thin man sat in a suite on the Via Sacra in Rome looking at a map of the world. Months before, he had been elected consul, the highest office a Roman of senatorial rank might hold. Already he was Pontifex Maximus, the most illustrious religious official in the land, which entitled him to this convenient office just a brisk walk from his home in town and from his new consular duties at the Forum. He had decorated it sparsely, for he cared not at all about his surroundings. Or his foods or his wines. Or the fluffiness of his beds or the sumptuousness of his sofas. He was not a creature for comforts. His friends and associates had developed all sorts of voluptuous fetishes, which they supposed were the adjuncts of power. For these luxuries he cared not. He liked power, not its accessories. But he did fuss about his garments and his bath. He was a fanatic for the soft caress of freshly pressed linen against smooth clean skin. And he was delighted with the wardrobe of purple-edged togas that came with his religious title, so flattering to his lean physique.
He had offended everyone in power with equanimity, but it had not seemed to matter in the end. He was a fish out of water, the one who swam against the current. Whatever they believed was fine with him. The previous year, he had negotiated an alliance among the extraordinarily rich Marcus Crassus, the awesomely powerful general Gnaeus Pompeius, and himself. Though slightly younger than his two new allies, Caesar intended to exceed each man’s respective superiority by the time the game was up. For the moment, however, they were essential. Crassus—may the gods bless him—had mobilized the equestrians in his favor. Pompey made the patricians feel better about him. And the rabble loved him anyway.
It was called the Coalition. With Caesar’s preference for sparse, clean language, he characterized it thus, for now no other existing coalition mattered. The arrangement had proved frighteningly simple to manipulate. Pompey charitably ignored Caesar’s carnal relations with his wife, Mucia, calling her a latter-day Clytemnestra and promptly divorcing her, while Caesar conveniently left town for Spain. And it was never spoken of again. That was what he admired so about Pompey; he was inordinately proud and vain, but he never held a grudge. In return, what else could Caesar do but reject Mucia himself and marry the melancholy Calpurnia, daughter of his rich supporter Piso? Then he offered his own coltish daughter, Julia, to Pompey. Julia was the love of Caesar’s life, the child of his beloved first wife, Cornelia, who died when Julia was just a baby.
Despite the thirty-year difference in their ages, Julia was all for the marriage. “Oh, Father, the general is so, so handsome.” That is what all women, no matter how young or old, thought of Pompey, who was a natural with the ladies. He had old-fashioned, grand, formal ways, probably from emulating his mentor, Sulla, whereas Caesar, though only a few years his junior, had the rakish, cavalier charm of the younger set. Women had always loved Caesar, too; loved his facile abilities with poetry and words, his height—for women loved tall men—his dry wit, his impressive lineage, and, last but not least, the way he encouraged their lusts. He was adored for many and varied reasons, though he was hardly a handsome man.
So the girl Julia was pleased with her Fate, and he was glad, for she was all he had left in the way of family besides his sister, and they were no longer close. At the wedding, Pompey had given every indication that he would put his energy into romancing her. And that suited Caesar, who intended to put his energies into surpassing Pompey in
terms of square miles conquered and added to Rome’s empire. Pompey looked tired; Caesar felt vigorous. Pompey dominated the east, but the west—Gaul—awaited Caesar and he knew it. All he needed now was the funding.
He felt that he was a new man. Not a novus homo, a newcomer to the nobility like Cicero, for Caesar’s family was as old as Rome itself. Rather, he was a man for new times, a new man from an old family, a patrician with populist leanings, a member of the intelligentsia who had the devotion of the common throng. He had new ideas, vital ideas, and his opponents were those who clung to the old ways. He had no issue with the old ways, but they were no longer applicable. He had no patience with those who did not share his vision—Cato, Cicero, even Pompey.
Ah, but Pompey had played his part beautifully as a supporter of innovation when Caesar pressed him to do so. Had not he stood with a serene smile before the popular assembly and said before many a stunned senator that yes, he was fully in support of Caesar’s land bill because it would grant plots of land to his own deserving and loyal soldiers? Pompey had stationed those very same men all around the Forum to demonstrate just how far he was willing to go in support of Caesar. And then, in a beautiful moment, the imbecile Bibulus, Caesar’s co-consul, opened his mouth to disparage the bill, and a basket of excrement was showered upon his head by men who quickly escaped. A gorgeous piece of theater. Bibulus, poor fool, went back to his house and didn’t leave it for the remainder of his days in office.
But then people began to complain that Caesar had gone too far, and began to call his year in office the consulship of “Julius” and “Caesar.” And Bibulus coined the annoying little joke—now in widespread use throughout the city—that Pompey was king and Caesar was queen. No matter. Caesar was content with the role of queen until the king abdicated. Besides, women were perfectly capable of ruling both nations and men, he reminded his detractors. Semiramis had once ruled all of Syria, and the Amazons terrorized the better part of Asia. He would dance on the heads of his enemies. Let them call him Woman.