Kleopatra

by Karen Essex

  Kleopatra was charmed by the rituals of the Egyptian religion, but she was so hungry that she could not focus on the details of the stories. She hoped that she would soon be offered a refreshment; instead, the tour continued into the sanctuary of the Sacred Boat of Amon, a chapel built by Alexander to honor his newly adopted divine father, with wall paintings of the Greek king honoring the Egyptian gods. Finally Kleopatra was taken into the Birth Room, where the reigning pharaoh who built it had depicted himself as an infant with Isis as his midwife. Brusquely, the priestess called for the purification rites to begin, which included mandatory fasting until the ceremony of the bull was concluded.

  Lightheaded and nauseous, Kleopatra knelt for hours on the thinnest of cushions in the dank air of the inner temple, while the holy men and women read from the sacred books. Every time she sat back on her ankles to give her wretched knees a rest, the presiding priestess, now adorned in a ceremonial wig—a fountain of snaking black curls—gave her an admonishing look, as if to defy her earlier victory with the people on the dock; as if to say to her that she had a long way to go to reach the heart of this country.

  Sweaty and starving, Kleopatra was relieved when the priestess announced that it was time to bathe in the holy waters. Wrapped in linen, she was taken to a small pond in a dark room in the temple, where she glided gratefully into the granite bath, only to realize that the waters were not warmed, but kept chilly and still by the stone. Faint, she suppressed the desire to call for help. It would not do to let them know her limitations. She wondered if the Egyptians were taking the opportunity to torture her, to make her pay a singular price for the occupation of many generations of her family; for the luxuries of the Ptolemies extracted from the stooped backs and empty pockets of the native people.

  At the end of the long day, Kleopatra was anxious for sleep, which she thought would come easily despite the day’s travails. She announced that she would prefer to spend the night with her staff aboard the barge, but the priestess explained that sleeping in the shrine of Isis—so that the goddess might inspire her dreams—was the most important element in the rigorous purification rites. The priestess silently guided her to a small cell with a mattress on the floor and a shrine to the Lady Isis at the foot of the bed. Kleopatra took one look at the makeshift bed and winced at the bedding, longing for her capacious bed at home, stuffed with the softest feathers of young geese. With barely a nod in her direction, the priestess closed the door, leaving her alone in the darkness.

  Nothing to distract me from the goddess, she thought as she lay down. Except the worry that one of the Egyptian clergy might sneak in and kill her in her sleep, ridding their nation of at least one Ptolemy. She tried to cast the sinister thought aside, but as soon as she got comfortable, the linen shift began to make her backside itch. She decided to ignore the sensation, but every time consciousness threatened to slip away into night’s mysteries, either the lumpiness of the mattress or the harshness of the nightgown, or the precariousness of her political position, brought her back to her waking mind. She knew full well the softness of fine Egyptian cotton, the firmer caresses of carefully woven linens upon the skin of the body. Why were they making her sleep in this agonizing garment?

  Craving sleep, yet knowing it would not come, she rose, opening the door slowly, quietly, cognizant of the smallest creak breaking the silence of the sleeping priestesses in their cubicles. Barefoot, Kleopatra went to the goddess’s altar. The room was still lit, torches casting a numinous glow in the quiet night. She took a tall candle from the altar and decided to investigate the older parts of the shrine that she had not yet seen. Down a narrow corridor, cold tiles casting a chill into her bare feet, she slipped through an opening and into the shadows. Holding the candle up to the wall, she found herself in a dead stare with a pair of furious eyes. She jumped back, and the candle lit the rest of the stone tableaux. Like a spirit, a woman’s figure floated above hundreds of drowning men, heads bobbing frantically above the waves hoping for a reprieve from the female terror lurking above.

  A tall shadow rose on the mural in front of her. She let out a small cry, but could not make herself turn around.

  “Lady Kleopatra?” came the disapproving voice. Kleopatra turned to find the youthful priestess staring at her with folded arms. “Can you not sleep without the presence of your retinue? I am sorry to have caused you anguish.” The formal cadence of her speech palliated any nuances of sarcasm, but Kleopatra gleaned the insubordination and wondered how one so young had the courage to so address a queen.

  “The Divine Lady did not allow sleep,” the queen said with controlled flippancy. “Perhaps she wished to inspire my waking mind and not my dreams. I would like to ask you some questions about the temple. What is your name?”

  “I am Redjedet, named after the glorious queen who gave birth to triplet kings.” Redjedet’s bald head gleamed against her candle as she made a patronizing bow. Earlier, in her wig of elaborate black curls, she looked older and very beautiful. Now, unadorned by hair, the strong lines of her face, the broad nose, triangular cheekbones, and eyebrows like black arrows made Kleopatra think of Mohama, though the young woman was not so tall. Her square shoulders, though, and her tawny luminous skin, made her seem more substantial than her modest height.

  “These murals are astonishingly beautiful,” Kleopatra said, wondering if the priestess shared a touch of Mohama’s warmer qualities. “What is their meaning?”

  “They were carried here by ferry from the temples of the old city of Amarna, which was long ago swallowed into the desert. They are portraits of queens who ruled the Two Lands of Egypt. Like yourself, they also served the goddess, and so have been preserved in her shrine.

  “Who is this ferocious one?” Kleopatra inquired, looking back into the angry eyes on the wall.

  “Beautiful Queen Nitocris, wife of a pharaoh who was murdered by traitors. She built an underground banquet room and invited the murderers to feast. Then she opened secret flood gates and let the waters of the Nile drown them.” Nitocris’s head was thrown back, eyes wide with madness and vengeance as she watched her enemies perish in rushing waters.

  Kleopatra walked deeper into the dark room, her candle illuminating a different pair of eyes, black, serene, inexorable.

  “The great Nefertiti performing Pharaoh’s duties,” Redjedet said. Nefertiti wore the uraeus on her forehead, the cobra that was the sign of her pharaonic powers, ready to strike her enemies. Bare-breasted, scimitar drawn, she held an enemy by the hair, prepared to decapitate him. “The time depicts her life after his death, when she alone was king.”

  When she alone was king? Kleopatra paused. It was not possible for an Egyptian queen to rule without a male consort. That is why she and all her ancestresses had to marry their own brothers, in imitation of the Egyptian ways.

  “Why do you call the queen a king, Redjedet?”

  The priestess looked quizzically at the queen, as if impatient with her ignorance. “When the Lady on this wall ruled the Two Lands, there was no king. The king was dead. She had to be king. Egypt needs kings. Egypt needs Pharaoh,” she said pointedly.

  Kleopatra wondered at this Egyptian logic, hoping that hunger and fatigue had not made her lose command of the language. In many nations a queen may be a ruler, but only in Egypt could a queen be a king. In some parts of this strange land, would they call her King Kleopatra?

  Without speaking, Redjedet departed, leaving Kleopatra alone. She hurried down the tight corridor, its sweating stone walls threatening to scrape her elbows, until she followed the priestess into a room that was no larger than a tomb.

  Redjedet lowered herself to the floor, holding her candle against a faded painting beneath their feet. Kleopatra stepped aside in order to view its entirety. The cow-goddess, Hathor, suckled a pharaoh, who received Divine Powers through her milk, while the vulture-goddess, Nekhbet, and the cobra-goddess, Buto, watched. The pharaoh wore a long beard and the double crown, red and white, of the Two Lands.

>   “I do wish I could decipher the old Egyptian letters,” said Kleopatra.

  “Some say it is enough that you speak to us in our tongue,” the young woman said, giving no indication that she consented to the opinion.

  “The inscription says ‘Hatshepsut is the Future of Egypt,’” Redjedet explained. “‘No one rebels against me. All foreign lands are my subjects. Everywhere Egypt bows her head to the King.’”

  In one portrait, Hatshepsut was wearing a royal woman’s clothing; in the others, the traditional costume of the pharaoh. “Was Hatshepsut not a man?” Kleopatra asked.

  “I have heard the Greeks say as much. King Hatshepsut was a woman who ruled the Two Lands. It is said that she married Pharaoh when she was twelve years old. When he died, she became king. Egypt needs kings,“ Redjedet repeated impatiently. “That is why Hatshepsut appears as king in the paintings. In Egypt, there is no queen. There is only Pharaoh’s Consort. Queen is a Greek word.”

  “You are certain of this? That Hatshepsut was a female?” Kleopatra asked skeptically.

  “The reign of Hatshepsut was predicted in an oracle made in this very chamber when she was a young girl. It says in the inscription that on the third day of his festival, Amon himself here proclaimed that Princess Hatshepsut would become the ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt. Hatshepsut had the approval of the gods. Only then did she have the approval of the priests of Egypt.”

  Kleopatra stared at the strange symbols, trying to make sense of their lines and figures. Did the priestess not understand the message she was sending to the queen? That Egyptians, not once but several times, had readily accepted a woman as Pharaoh, without the sanction of a male partner. Was Redjedet aware that for centuries the Ptolemies had followed the Egyptian ways, or what they had assumed had always been the Egyptian ways? Kleopatra wondered if Ptolemy the Savior—unable to communicate directly with the Egyptians—had misinterpreted Egyptian custom. More likely, Kleopatra suddenly realized, he had interpreted the Egyptian customs to suit the ways of the Greek monarchy, in which women, no matter what their royal lineage, were always dependent upon a male consort.

  “And you say these pharaohs, these kings at one time or another ruled Egypt alone?” Kleopatra asked again, not wishing to reveal her own intentions, but wishing for the priestess to clarify the issue.

  “That is why they are kings. Egypt must never be without Pharaoh, or the gods will not be pleased.” The priestess looked up at Kleopatra. The candle lit her face from below, making deep shadows beneath her eyes. “Pharaoh may not please the people,“ she said. “But Pharaoh must please the gods. We are here only a short time. The gods are forever.”

  Redjedet stood, but did not release Kleopatra from her stare. I am being challenged, Kleopatra thought, but I do not know how or why. Is she telling me that the Egyptians will accept me as Pharaoh? Kleopatra stared back at the formidable creature, whose black eyes were as beautiful and as inscrutable as those of Nefertiti. She may not be any older than I am, Kleopatra guessed, but she has exemplary self-possession. The kind of self-assurance it would take to capture the loyalty of the people of the Thebiad and use it to her benefit back in Alexandria; the kind of composure Kleopatra would need to wrest power from her brothers’ cunning courtier. The kind of strength she would need to rule a nation on her own.

  “Will you pray with me before the statue of our Lady, Redjedet?”

  “The one who serves the goddess also must serve the queen,” she said coldly, quietly, her first concession to Kleopatra’s position.

  Kleopatra and Redjedet knelt before the smiling goddess, the Lady of Compassion. Redjedet lowered her head but watched Kleopatra from the corner of her eye.

  “I am praying for the abundance and happiness of the Egyptian people,” Kleopatra said. Redjedet turned away, unbelieving, and Kleopatra looked into the tilted eyes of the goddess. Straining her neck, she waited until the goddess seemed to invite her prayer, until she was swallowed into the deity’s enormous eyes.

  “Do not forget to pray for your own family,” Redjedet said caustically, erasing any advancement Kleopatra hoped she had made with either the priestess or the goddess.

  She felt anger rise, but held her temper. “In my mind and in my prayers, the people of Egypt and my family are one and the same,” she replied. She sat back on her heels, turning to the young woman. “I want you to understand what I am saying to you, and I want you to spread the word to whomever you think must hear it. If I have the support of the people of the Thebiad, I promise you, with the goddess as our witness, that I will never act in conflict with that fact. The Egyptian temples shall profit from my rule all the days of my life. So help me Isis.”

  “As the Romans have profited from the reign of your father and his father and his father?”

  Kleopatra had to force back the desire to call for her guard and to have this young insurgent arrested and flogged for insubordination. She summoned as much control as she could on an empty stomach, with nothing filling her insides but anger and fear. Trembling, she kept her voice very low. “If not for my father and his father and his father, you would be nothing but the toy of a Roman soldier’s lusts. Only by my father’s design can you still call yourself an Egyptian and not a Roman’s slave. But we are not talking of my father, who is presently very ill. I am speaking of myself, and of my assurances of prosperity to those who demonstrate their loyalty to me.”

  “Well then, so be it,” Redjedet huffed, with so little conviction that Kleopatra knew she would spend the rest of the night wondering whether she was heard and understood, or whether she would be slain in her sleep.

  The Sacred Vessel of Ra was not a slim wooden riverboat, but a golden snake; the bow, his glimmering cobra head, the stern, a sleek, pointy tail. The low arcing belly of the asp sank into the water, which this morning was a dark orange. The serpent’s eyes were giant orbs of silver-veined turquoise that focused warily ahead on the shiver of amber that the boat cast through the river at sunrise. Oarsmen were already aboard, as was the bull, Buchis, chosen for the unusual black spots dappling his white back, his horns dipped in gold to attract the sun. He was restrained in his pen by leather straps, but he stood still, his big brown eyes facing the opposite shore as if he anticipated the sight of his new home.

  The queen had been awakened long before dawn from her few moments of rest. Sleepless, famished, Kleopatra was sure her body had begun to feast upon itself; her already slight frame had dwindled, and as she waited for her dress, she ran her hands against the hollow of her abdomen, feeling a new sharpness to her ribs.

  Now on the deck of the vessel, she awaited the full sunrise, the holy time when she would preside over the crossing of the river. The oarsmen dipped the long golden paddles into the water. Slowly drifting into the Nile, the vessel began its voyage down the river to the small city of Hermonthis, home of the Bucheum. The bull was behind the queen, and she was flanked by the high priest of the temple on one side and by Redjedet on the other, their shaven heads floating through the morning mist like stellar orbs. Neither holy person looked in the direction of the queen but stared ahead at the river as if their glaring eyes lit the path of the boat.

  The heavy crown of Isis—a silver sphere cradled by the bronze horns of Hathor, the cow-goddess—pressed against Kleopatra’s wig, giving her a headache. She had to strain her neck muscles to prevent the horns from going askew. Surely, she thought, it would take the divine powers of a goddess to tolerate this headdress every day. She stood deadly still, focusing on her posture just as Charmion had taught her to do as a child, until finally the snake glided round a gentle bend in the river, revealing the small cluster of buildings that was Hermonthis. Both the eastern and western banks of the river seemed to have a strange foliage cluttering their shores. Kleopatra had never seen anything like this white flowering brush that relentlessly covered the rich dark lining of the slow-moving river. It was as if she were entering a new country, where nature yielded an unfamiliar bounty.

  As the fo
rms on the banks became clearer, her knees weakened and her already shallow breath caught in her throat. No one had prepared her for the multitudes that were present for the ceremony. No foreign species of tree choked the banks, but thousands of people, dressed in their finest white garments, laundered into stark whiteness for the event. Where in this desolate land—uninhabitable but for the fertile strip of life along the banks of the river—had this magnificent assembly come from? Kleopatra wished to be joyous but could not repress the thought that her small escort, following the snake boat in the royal barge, would be defenseless against the crowd should they turn against her. She remembered Redjedet’s comment about the Romans prospering from her ancestors’ rule. Not so long ago, Kleopatra had been stranded outside the palace gates listening to the Egyptians call Auletes a Roman-lover. She had watched a Roman sacrificed at their hands. She tried not to think of the lifeless face, of the limp body of the Roman Celsius, dead in his own courtyard after killing a cat—a foreigner’s gaffe that had so inflamed Egyptian ire. But the man’s image kept coming back to her, along with her father’s serene death countenance. Auletes would be of no help to her now. No one could help her now. She, alone, was queen.

  The inflexible Redjedet registered no surprise at the great crowd that covered everywhere there was space to stand. The priest also did not alter his expression. Their lack of response made Kleopatra shiver.

  As the boat sailed closer to the crowd, Kleopatra was relieved to see the uniforms of Greek military governors from the neighboring states, as well as local Egyptian authorities and the banners of Temple Councils from every nome representing their districts—though in this part of Egypt, nationality was no guarantee of loyalty. The officials filled special tiered seats that were set up on either side of the river so they could watch the bull-god cross the water to his hallowed destination. Sitting cross-legged or squatting in front of the bleachers were the peasant farmers who had been given a morning’s reprieve from working the land.