Kleopatra

by Karen Essex

  Turning to her father, she continued, her voice colder now and full of confidence, as if she were not the one on trial but the prosecutor in a guaranteed victory. “I assure you, Father, if I had had better access to our treasury, you and I would be in different seats today. As it is, you have the money. Or, rather, you have the moneylenders.” Berenike smiled disdainfully at Rabirius, who rebuffed her gaze by raising his bulbous eyes to the ceiling. “That is why Gabinius ignored the senate’s decree giving Lentulus the commission. He began the westward march across desert and marsh only because you agreed to produce ten thousand talents. And now, I leave it to you to do just that.”

  “This is an outrage! Silence the girl,” yelled Gabinius, jumping out of his seat, words and spit flying from his mouth like sleet. “She is a treasonous bitch who thinks she can save herself by indicting me. Your Majesty, let us leave this room. Let us not suffer the insults of a traitor.”

  “The blood of my husband is on your hands, Roman,” Berenike fired back. “May the gods see that you have the same unhappy Fate as Archelaus.”

  No authority rose to stop the altercation. Kleopatra could see that the magistrate, his smile shiny like a crescent dagger, was enjoying the exchange.

  “Enough of this,” the king said finally. He stood, facing Berenike, pointing an accusing finger at her. “Your very soul is stained with your husband’s blood. His and that of many others. Loyalty has never figured into your character. You attached yourself to your stepmother, a woman you loved all your life, and when she became inconvenient to you, you did away with her. I will never forgive Thea, and I will never forgive you. I cannot hear you out, Daughter. You speak the words of an enemy.”

  “Ah, Father, as if you could recognize a friend,” Berenike said quietly. She looked at Kleopatra, her eyes deadly cold. “Behold, Sister, a premonition of your Fate. You were always an ambitious child. I am warming the seat of the condemned for you.”

  Kleopatra said nothing, but averted her eyes from her sister. “Do not listen to her,” whispered Archimedes. “The condemned never wish to suffer alone.”

  “Are we not ready to pronounce the verdict?” sighed the king.

  Berenike threw back her head and began to cackle like a crone, her laugh bouncing off the marble floor and echoing through the room. Kleopatra made two shells out of her hands to protect her ears from the unholy noise, but she only muffled the sound. She tucked herself under Archimedes’ shoulder and he held her close.

  “The court finds Berenike IV Ptolemy guilty of the murder of Kleopatra VI Tryphaena, of the philosopher Demetrius, and of the eunuch and Prime Minister Meleager. The court finds Berenike IV Ptolemy guilty of illegally seizing the throne. Therefore the court finds the accused guilty of three counts of murder, and of treason against the crown, all of which are capital crimes”

  Berenike continued to laugh through the reading of the verdict. When the magistrate finished, she wiped her watery eyes and stared at her father, a look of triumph on her face. Was this courage or madness? wondered Kleopatra. What kind of person celebrates receiving the grim gift of death for their crimes?

  “Does Your Highness wish to have a final word?” asked the magistrate of the king.

  Kleopatra wondered if her father might exonerate her sister—not dismiss her crimes, but lessen the sentence to exile. Berenike was a full-blooded daughter, the firstborn of the king and his beloved, dead Tryphaena. If Tryphaena had lived, none of this would have happened. Tryphaena, gentle, lamblike, caring only for music and thought. How had she begotten Thea, whose fault this was entirely? Thea had infected Berenike, Kleopatra thought, infused her dirty ambitions into the child Berenike’s susceptible mind. Perhaps Kleopatra needed to be grateful to Berenike. Perhaps if she had been the firstborn, Thea would have cast her poisonous intentions onto her, and she would be sitting in Berenike’s place. She had never thought of that, and she wondered now if that might be true. Perhaps the gods were good to Kleopatra as Auletes always swore they were to him. Thinking of her mother, Kleopatra was certain that the king, too, would remember the delicate nature, the lovely face of his long-dead first wife and palliate the punishment doled out hastily to their daughter.

  Auletes took a deep wheezy breath and blew the air out through his lips. “I am still weary from my voyages abroad,” he replied. To Berenike, who still looked at him defiantly, he said, “I shall see you dead in the morning.” He rose, gathering his white linen robes about him like a cloud, and floated from the chambers.

  Not wishing to spend another moment in the same room with the condemned, Kleopatra took Archimedes’ hand and quickly followed her father, who waited for her to catch up to his side. She did not look back at Berenike. She did not know if she would ever see her sister alive again, but she did not want to meet that mad gaze, the gaze that implied that she, Kleopatra, presently the king’s favored child, was also a candidate for the king’s proscription.

  “Father, do you believe the things Berenike said about Gabinius?” she asked, searching her father’s face for remorse over condemning his own flesh and blood. But she merely saw the face of a tired man. The sacks under the king’s eyes hung low, his mouth turned downward. “Do you think Gabinius was in an alliance with her at one time?”

  “It is not inconceivable, my child. Who among the Romans we have met is a loyal man? Anyway, it hardly matters,” said the king. “Tomorrow we shall put the past behind us for good.”

  Berenike was executed before their eyes. Kleopatra was startled to learn that she was to witness the death of her sister. She thought the king would spare his children the spectacle, but Auletes announced the news stone-faced, his features so rigid that Kleopatra knew he was not to be challenged. She had never watched a person be executed, much less her own flesh and blood. That evening, she listened to Auletes consider the traditional Greek means of putting to death—hemlock, casting the criminal off a cliff or into a pit, even the brutal cudgeling that was customary in the execution of slaves. After much discussion, he decided that the first was too merciful, the second, unseemly for a royal, and the third would leave him with a reputation for cruelty. After all, he wanted to be as fair to the condemned as possible. So that the next morning as the sun crept its way into the courtyard of the magisterial building, the remaining children—Kleopatra, Arsinoe, and the little boys, five and three—stood silent in dawn’s roseate glow, waiting for the executioner’s sword to decapitate their sister. “A lesson,” said Auletes to the lot of them, including Kleopatra, who was not allowed to sit with the Kinsmen, but had to forsake the comfort of Archimedes’ strong arms and stand next to Charmion. “A lesson and a warning.”

  Defiant to the end, Berenike, pink-skinned and lustrous in the morning light, stared directly at her father as if she awaited the arrival of a good meal or a swift new pony rather than the sword upon her neck. In her long black robes, she looked, to Kleopatra, like the moon goddess; as if she might rise from the platform of the condemned and drive her white chariot across the sky, wiping out the sun’s light with her cold blanket of darkness.

  When the executioner raised the sleek, gleaming instrument of death, Kleopatra tensed her feet, legs, and stomach muscles so that she would not lose her balance at the sight. She believed that she must see this thing through, must watch every gruesome detail of it and survive it, remaining distant, glacial to its horror. Kleopatra told herself over and over that she had never cared for Berenike—had despised her in youth for her alliance with Thea, detested her even more for her betrayal of Auletes. That Berenike deserved to die in this horrible way, that the king must punish, must send the message, must smite his enemies or risk another rebellion. She even told herself that her father was killing Berenike for her sake, so that Berenike would not harm her in the future. That attending her sister’s execution was, strictly speaking, an act of duty. That she must not flinch; that she was present in an official capacity.

  That this could never happen to her.

  Kleopatra could not s
uppress the sickness in her stomach, the rise of bile into her throat, when she saw Berenike’s eyes pop wide upon the impact, as if they were trying to free themselves from either the pain, or from death itself. She willed the putridness back into the pit of her belly and blurred her eyes so that all she saw was an awful gush of red. The little princes, chubby and bleary-eyed, turned into the skirts of their governess when Berenike’s head toppled forward, but Kleopatra noticed that Arsinoe, a pretty but distracted girl of ten, did not recoil. Arsinoe had spent her childhood at the feet of Berenike, listening to her stories, learning her ways. How did the girl numb herself for this event? Kleopatra could almost detect a tacit smile. The executioner quickly covered Berenike with a black cloth, and Kleopatra lowered her eyes to the ground, remembering that last grimace on Berenike’s face. Nineteen years old and already having led a rebellion, Berenike IV Ptolemy died smirking and alone, one husband murdered by her own hand, the other killed in battle, her faithful Bactrian attendants having committed double suicide in prison.

  Auletes hugged Kleopatra, and then embraced his other children one by one, as if to demonstrate that he held no malice toward them. Kleopatra watched as he took the small boys into the folds of his robes, remembering that as they sailed back to Alexandria, he had said, “We must not despise the little ones. They’ve committed no crime but to be born to a traitor.” She had nodded in agreement, looking out to sea, but recalled Arsinoe, as a child of eight, gleefully following Berenike around like a pet. She thought: Even after this, he is naive about the potential treachery of his remaining children.

  The execution, a private affair for family and officials only, was followed by a parade for the king down the Street of the Soma so that his subjects might welcome him back to his kingdom. Gabinius’s army led the procession, glimmering in the slats of bronze armor that bound their chests, their tall helmets beacons in the sun, their only vulnerability bare legs, but those as solid as any stone column. Berenike had faced this legion, Kleopatra thought, had stood at the fort at Pelusium on the eastern border of Egypt and watched this glistening force of destruction march in her direction, herself and her bridegroom their primary targets. Perhaps she was mad. Most certainly she was mad. Yet, with nothing but the force of her madness, or some internal sense of power, of entitlement, she had negotiated with the Romans she so hated, and when that negotiation failed, she had raised an Egyptian army and faced her enemy. Kleopatra heard it said that when the Roman legion marched into Pelusium, they were so impressed with the size of the opposing army that they threatened to turn around and go back to Syria. Perhaps Gabinius bolstered their courage by handing out coins at the fortress gates. Berenike was a traitor to her own father, that much was incontestable. But she had lived and died by her own aberrant convictions.

  The king—smiling and remorseless—rode in an open carriage in the midst of the army as if he commanded it. Gabinius and Rabirius paraded with the king, the latter hanging on to the king’s robes, as if waiting to catch any coins that might magically fly from his purse.

  Despite the grim event that had begun the day, the mood was festive. It seemed that all of Alexandria had turned out for the event. Egyptian vendors sold water, wine, and beer to the spectators, while their children hawked small trinkets—cheap bangle bracelets, phony signet rings, toy crocodiles on wheels. Kleopatra, riding Persephone behind her father’s carriage, noticed that many people were drunk for the occasion, carrying big smelly leather flasks of wine that spilled the liquid down the sides of their mouths as they drank.

  Kleopatra could not believe that the population had changed its mind about her father. Perhaps two years of chaos had reconciled them to the king and his policies. Or perhaps her father had arranged for supporters to appear. Both were likely. And perhaps the citizens had to get intoxicated to go along with the charade. She wondered if she would ever be reduced to paying for her subjects’ approval. It appeared to be a family tradition.

  Exhausted after the parade, Kleopatra tried to excuse herself to go to her chambers, but her father did not wish to be alone.

  “We are very busy today. One must be tireless, young lady,” said the king, who had many times excused himself from his duties on the excuse of fatigue. Today he seemed younger, resilient, as if energized by the death of Berenike. Kleopatra wondered how he had so easily erased from his mind the image of his firstborn dying a bloody death by his own command. Perhaps he was merely cloaking his grief behind this facade of vivaciousness.

  “Your Majesty,” said Archimedes. “The young cavalry officer Marcus Antonius wishes an audience with you.”

  “Marcus Antonius. Do I know the man?”

  The princess’s heart quickened. “Father, do you not remember what we heard about him in Rome? He was the friend of Clodius who had an affair with his wife, Fulvia. When Clodius found out, Marcus Antonius went to Greece to study oration, but the real reason he left was because Clodius was going to kill him!”

  “From what impeccable source did you hear this idle gossip?” asked the king.

  “From Julia. She said that Antonius is a favorite of Julius Caesar. And that he is the most handsome man in all the world. And that he is the most famous lover of women, too. And the bravest soldier. And the most daring horseman and swordsman in the empire. I think Julia loved him, though she could not say so in her husband’s house.”

  “That sort of loyalty would seem extreme when practiced by a Roman woman,” said the king dryly.

  “The princess does have several facts correct regarding Marcus Antonius,” said Archimedes. “He is handsome, for a Roman. And brave. Have you not heard of his many services on your behalf?”

  Archimedes looked around for interlopers. He leaned closer to the king and the princess, explaining to them that Gabinius’s troops were, despite the impressive show they put on for the population of Alexandria, an undisciplined bunch with no particular loyalty to either Rome or Gabinius. They had refused to cross the desert into Egypt even on Gabinius’s command, preferring to stay in Syria to loot and drink. Gabinius was paralyzed, but Antony took command. He spun fantastic stories of the untold riches and exotic sexual pleasures that awaited the soldiers in Egypt. “He is most eloquent, they say, a natural teller of tales. He convinced the troops to make the long and waterless march through the deep sands.”

  “Does this Antony believe these mythic stories of our country?” asked Kleopatra, wondering if Antony was just another Roman come to Egypt to fleece her father. “Does he think my father is like Darius the Persian?”

  “I do not know, Cousin, though that is what many Romans think. But Antony’s sheer enthusiasm and his own willingness to endure the hardships of the march shamed the lazy soldiers into crossing the waterless desert.”

  “Then he is remarkable, is he not?” said the king. “The gods shall be with such a man.”

  “There is more, Sire. When Gabinius’s men saw the multitudes of enemy soldiers awaiting them at the fortress at Pelusium, they tried to turn around. But Antony roused them by leading the charge. He made them ashamed of their cowardliness, and they followed him into battle. That is why Your Majesty is at home today.”

  So it was this man’s courage and not Gabinius’s gold that motivated the men. “Is it possible that there is one Roman who is truly brave and good?” Kleopatra asked. “One we can depend upon for action?”

  Archimedes paused. “He wishes to take up the matter of Archelaus’s funeral with you, Sire. It seems that he was a friend of Berenike’s late husband.”

  “What? You tell me of this man’s good qualities and his services on our behalf and then you tell me that he was a friend of my most egregious enemies?” the king said, offended.

  “Oh, please, Father,” cried the princess. “Marcus Antonius is a powerful man. If already he has performed such services to us without knowing us, think of what use he may be to us if we befriend him?”

  “Of course we shall meet with the man. But I am warning you. I will not be overruled!”


  There was no sight more arousing to a girl of fourteen than Antony at twenty-seven. Kleopatra could not look directly at him, nor could she turn away. She met his eyes—brown, lambent, and as penetrable as rich soil—swallowing her as if she were a fresh seedling. They were deep-set beneath a broad, lordly brow, and full of merriment despite the solemnity of the occasion. Though she longed to gape at him, she could not manage more than a furtive glimpse in his direction. It was as if he knew it, too, and could read her embarrassing thoughts. He stared as much as she shied away, forcing her to look again at the aquiline, fine nose, the cheekbones like proud peaks, the acute cleft in his chin, the broad neck with muscles like taut rope. His red cloak hung carelessly over one massive shoulder. He wore his tunic girt low about his narrow hips; a sheathed sword hung at his side. He had removed his breast armor, so that Kleopatra could see the muscles in his chest distorting the folds of his garment. He was so majestic of body that she wondered if he had been fathered by a giant, a Titan. The girlish titillation caused by Pompey, even by Archimedes, became a shattering earthquake in the presence of Antony. She could take no more and quickly dropped her eyes to his feet, quivering at the sight of the leather straps of his sandals snaking up his sharply hewn calves.

  “Your Royal Highnesses,” he said, bowing low to the king and his daughter. “Welcome home.” He waved his arm around the room as if it was he who had invited them there.

  He is reminding us of our debt to himself, Kleopatra realized through her infatuation. The man was both beautiful and crafty. A deadly combination in a woman, thought Kleopatra. How much more dangerous in a powerful man?

  “Thank you for hearing my plea on behalf of the Syrian Archelaus. I realize that he caused you some harm, but in the end, is it not better to demonstrate charity? You have won, Your Majesty. You have prevailed. Archelaus was once quite the favorite of your friend Pompey. Did you know that? Pompey rather admired him and bore him no grudge for being fathered by Mithridates. I do not suggest that Pompey condoned the marriage to your daughter and the actions against yourself. Only that death does inspire sentimentality in old friends. Pompey may not take kindly to Archelaus being humiliated in death. After all, none of us, no matter how bold, wishes to be haunted by those who have gone before us.”