Kleopatra

by Karen Essex

  He had all the qualities of his father that had made her blush as a girl. The size, the broad shoulders, the inviting eyes, the voice that soothed and enchanted. She let his question linger while she wished with all her heart that, at that moment, she was anyone but the queen of Egypt. She would have linked to forget duty and position and throw herself upon Cnaeus like the commonest of whores. But it was not to be. She reminded herself that after dark, her only illicit meeting would be with those who were risking their lives for her sovereignty.

  “The marriage of brother to sister has always been the custom of the pharaohs, and my ancestor Ptolemy adopted it to please the native people. The Egyptians believed the pharaohs to be gods, with deified blood that could not mix with that of ordinary mortals. It seems strange, I know, but my family has successfully followed the tradition for almost three hundred years. I believe that when my brother comes of age, we will make many children together and live quite happily.”

  She wondered if she sounded convincing. All the while, her mind raced for any possible advantage in aligning with the elder son of Pompey. Was there any bargain she might seal in lust that might benefit her? It was tempting to use one so close to a source of power. But she simply could not convince herself Pompey would prevail against the intriguing Julius Caesar, as much as she desired to lean slightly forward and offer her lips to the glorious-looking man who sat beside her.

  She took one more long look into the eyes of Cnaeus and, regretfully, excused herself to her chambers, where Charmion was packing her cosmetics.

  “I want you to reconsider making this arduous trip,” Kleopatra said. “This is no elegant exile at Pompey’s mansion. You and I both know that you are a lady of refinement with no aptitude for rough travel or outdoor living. We will endure plenty of both. You will be guaranteed neither comfort nor safety.”

  “What?” Charmion said in a low, indignant voice. “I thought you cared for your Charmion. You wish me to stay here and receive Arsinoe’s knife or Pothinus’s poison?” She rose to her full height, which was not tall, but Charmion’s Greek carriage and mien made her more formidable than her height.

  “I do not want you to stay here, but I will send you somewhere—Greece, for example—until it is safe for us to return to the city.”

  “And who will see to your diet? Who will see to your wardrobe? At a time when you need appear most queenly, do you expect slaves and soldiers to care for your linens? To curl your hair? After a week without my care, you’d look like a ragged foot soldier. You’d be frail and thin for want of the proper foods. I know you. I raised you from a girl, remember?” Charmion, only eleven years older than the nineteen-year-old queen, still assumed the role of the stern mother.

  A guard interrupted them to inform the queen that Achillas was outside her chambers, requesting a private audience. She avoided Charmion’s face so that they would not exchange alarming looks that might alert the guard. She could not think what to do. To deny him would be to arouse his suspicions. To admit him would pose the danger of being found out. Did he already know her plan of escape? Had she been betrayed?

  “Tell him I shall meet him in the antechamber,” Kleopatra told the guard.

  She realized that she had to calm herself, to transport herself, somehow, to a different state of mind, or else her nervousness would easily give her away. She needed to don a cloak of implacability. She sat quietly and closed her eyes, forgetting even the presence of Charmion. She pictured herself calm, revealing no thoughts and no emotions. She prayed to the goddess. Lady of Compassion, let me wear this mask. Let it descend over my body like a sheath. Allow me to project only sobriety where I feel anxiety. Protect me from the suspicious and I shall continue to honor you now and all the days of my life.

  Still she felt nervous as she entered the room.

  Mercifully, Achillas stood alone in the antechamber and not, as she had feared, with a guard to take her away. He wore formal military dress. Despite the severe attire, he was all perfume, oils, and smile. A beautiful man, no doubt, but so different from the Roman Cnaeus. Though he was a warrior of the first class, he had a certain Greek delicacy. He had been raised by his father, a Greek officer, and it was rumored that his mother was an Egyptian prostitute. Seeing him, Kleopatra had the thought that the Greeks and Egyptians should perhaps intermarry with more frequency, so exotic and lovely were their offspring. She gave him leave to sit but he remained standing. She sat, and he began to pace, circling her. The effect was disconcerting, sinister. Finally, he knelt before her.

  “Your Majesty, I was very disturbed by your brother’s outburst yesterday.”

  “Which outburst was that?” she asked, staring into his thick-lashed eyes.

  “His threat to allow the soldiers to defile you. As long as I am in charge of the armed forces of Egypt, no harm shall come to you by my troops. I believe we should work together, you and I,” he said.

  She was torn between feigning appreciation for his gallantry and letting him know that she was not fooled. This was a lesson she was still struggling with: refraining from too quickly revealing her perceptions. What did he want? She said nothing.

  “I’ve come to offer you my protection,” he said. “I believe you need it.” Still he remained on one knee, closer to her than protocol allowed. “You are in danger,” he added.

  “Not if you have assigned yourself to be my protector,” she answered sweetly. “Then I am perfectly safe, am I not?”

  “I see no reason why we cannot consider ourselves partners,” he said.

  “What would be my role in this partnership?”

  Achillas put his hand on her knee. She stiffened, but made no move. She was not tempted to succumb to this man as she was with Cnaeus, but she did want to play out this scene so that she would know his intentions.

  “To be my friend.” It was a carefully considered and articulated word.

  “Is my brother your friend?” she asked innocently.

  “He is. But you would be a different kind of friend, a more intimate friend.”

  She remained detached from Achillas’s seductive eyes, his hand on her knee, his coy smile, his gleaming white teeth that seemed ready to devour her. She swallowed her fear, calling again on the grace of Isis. These things must not be hurried. She could not be certain that he was not acting as a covert agent of Pothinus. She must repel him so that he would stay away from her long enough for her to escape.

  “You are proposing that we become lovers. In exchange, you will protect me from my brother giving me to your army as if I were a slave whore. Is that correct? Instead, you would have the queen of Egypt as your whore?”

  “I see that Your Majesty is caught by surprise and needs time to think,” he said, standing. For one brief moment, she regretted not aligning herself with Cnaeus. She could have had him slay this insolent creature. Perhaps she would do it herself when the time came, after she returned to the city with the army that she intended to raise in the provinces where her brother and his regents were starving the people. When she rose up against Ptolemy and his monsters, she would remember to kill this one first.

  “I shall come tomorrow night, Kleopatra. May I take your hand?”

  “As you wish,” she said. Perhaps if she gave him hope, he would not return until the appointed time, when she would be long gone.

  He took her hand, turned it to face him, and kissed the inside of her palm, working his fingers up her arm until they stroked the flesh of her interior elbow. Then he put his mouth to it, kissing, sucking, biting. It was not unpleasant to her, though she did not wish it to be enjoyable. He discerned from the tiny gasp that she allowed to escape from her mouth that she was favorable to his advances.

  “Tomorrow night, then? Will that be enough time for you to make a decision?”

  “We shall see,” she replied coyly.

  “May I taste your lips?” he asked.

  She feigned maidenly fear but did not reply. He leaned toward her face. She did not stop him. Gently he kis
sed her, letting his tongue linger on her lips. “Tomorrow, Lady.” She watched his cape float after him as he left.

  Charmion rushed in when she heard him leave.

  “It appears that men are standing in line to relieve me of this menacing condition of virginity,” Kleopatra said, catching her breath and projecting more nonchalance than she felt inside. “Little do they know that the god has already done so.”

  “He attempted to seduce you?” Charmion asked, incredulous.

  “And he is coming back tomorrow evening to complete the act. If I join with him, I will be at his mercy. He will be free to report my adultery to my brother. If I fail to escape tomorrow, and I refuse him, he will surely find a way to destroy me.”

  Kleopatra picked up a hand mirror that Charmion had not yet packed and regarded her face. Her lips had filled out, becoming, apparently, the kind of lips men would like to kiss. She was nineteen years old, and ready for love, perhaps too ready. She worried that her desire would eventually overcome her good sense. She must learn more restraint, but she could tell that it would never come easily.

  Kleopatra awoke to the murmuring bass tones of men’s voices. She lay dead still. From the moment she left her bed and proceeded with this deceit, she would be a rebel, a renegade—a Caesar. Would that she had his reportedly dauntless disposition and indubitable confidence.

  She calculated that it was less than one hour before dawn, the appointed time when the guard outside her chamber would change, replacing the two sentries with Hephaestion’s men. She heard the rustle of fabric; when her eyes adjusted, she saw that Charmion was already awake and loading the remainder of their personal belongings into large laundry baskets. Quickly, Kleopatra left her bed, splashed water on her face, shed her fine silk sleeping gown, and slipped into a simple cotton shift. Without a word, Charmion put an Egyptian wig over her own head, adjusted it, and then settled one atop the head of the queen. Far from the mane of virgin girls’ hair she had worn in Thebes, these were cheap horsehair wigs purchased at a stall in the marketplace, made for those who could afford no better.

  The door opened and the guards let in the women who would accompany the queen into exile. Large women, capable of bearing whatever hardships might be encountered, they hoisted the baskets atop their heads and left. Kleopatra took a final look around the bedchamber of her childhood, the habitat of all the days of her life. Would she ever see it again? She tried not to think of all the things she was leaving behind. Why bother with material goods? If she remained, if she perished at the hands of Pothinus and her brother, these same belongings that she cherished would decorate her burial chamber. She turned her back on all she knew and walked out of the room.

  The halls were dim and silent, the day still hidden behind night’s dark sheath. They walked without lamps, unwilling to risk awakening the household. A squatting Egyptian hall attendant raised his head. He murmured, “Getting an early start, eh?”

  The queen herself answered, in as humble an Egyptian dialect that she could muster. “It is the day I am allowed to visit my mother, but only after the queen’s laundry is done.”

  He smiled knowingly and went back into his predawn musings. Kleopatra’s blood quickened, remembering the days of her adventures with Mohama, when she had slipped by these same servants and successfully freed herself from the boring rituals of court life. She felt her fear turn into excitement. She was practiced at the art of escape, a master of the skill. But Charmion, who neither engaged in the art of disguise nor spoke Egyptian, walked tautly by her side, and Kleopatra wondered if Charmion’s imperious posture would be the thing that gave them away. The two women walked arm in arm through the kitchens and out the door that led to the loading dock as the early morning staff coaxed the fires of the ovens so that they might begin the day’s work.

  Outside, in the darkness, Kleopatra did not see any members of her staff and retinue. The rear entrance of the palace was deserted except for a small caravan of merchants delivering food and supplies to the kitchens. The confidence drained from her body like melting ice. Which wagon was she supposed to approach? Where was Hephaestion? Where was her escort? Had they deserted her at the last minute?

  The guard at the top of the platform eyed them suspiciously. Kleopatra did not wish to meet his glance. She could not be certain that he was not the same soldier who had rescued her from the mob on the day she and Mohama had gotten caught up in the incident of the murdered cat. Almost eight years had passed since that day. Surely the guard had moved on to another post.

  Her eyes did not adjust as quickly as she would have liked, nor had the sun begun its ascent. She grabbed Charmion’s hand as if she were still a little girl. Out of the darkness, a large man grabbed her elbow and whispered for her to follow him. She could tell by his cloaked physique that he was older, perhaps as old as her dead father would have been. Sixty, perhaps. Stout. Greek. He wore a low-brimmed hat. He led her to a wagon and helped her and Charmion into the rear seat. Soft hands.

  The soldier on the platform called out. “Where are you going, girls?” A friendly, flirtatious question.

  The man quickly answered, “I am giving them a lift. They wish to buy the first fish brought into the market today. By orders of the eunuch Pothinus, who adores fresh cod.”

  The soldier laughed and waved them on. The other wagons, five in number, with horses and camels now attached, pulled in line. So this was her party. She herself had not suspected a thing.

  The old man waved to the guards as they passed through the palace gates. The wagons followed. How would they pull this off, she wondered, leaving the palace walls with so many of the possessions of the monarchy—livestock, wagons, and, presumably, copious supplies of food and weapons hidden under the blankets that covered the wagons? Yet no one stopped them, no one questioned why a caravan was leaving the palace at dawn.

  “Hello, Kleopatra,” said the old man in a taunting voice, reviving her fear.

  “Hello,” answered the queen, puzzled. He sounded so familiar, and yet she was certain she did not know him. The man removed his cloak and hat, turned around, and looked at her.

  “Hammonius!” Her old friend, her father’s faithful man, his most loyal and crafty agent. “Oh, I am so thrilled to see you. How is it that you were able to disguise yourself from me?”

  “You were not expecting me. And it is dark. I would not have recognized you save that I was told to expect you and a lady slightly smaller than yourself, the unforgettable Charmion, to be at that door at precisely this hour.”

  “No wonder we had an easy escape,” Kleopatra said.

  “That’s right. The guards are accustomed to seeing my wagons deliver goods to the palace.”

  Kleopatra dared not look back at the palace. She looked ahead. The sky cracked open at the horizon, giving birth to an unfathomable luminescent pink sky—auspicious weather for their cause.

  “Dawn flings her glorious robe across the earth,” said Kleopatra, her spirits lifting with the sun’s golden orb that peeked over the white buildings of the city.

  The caravan exited the southern gates of Alexandria, quiet, unharmed. The soldiers hidden in Hammonius’s wagons emerged from under the tarps and raised their faces to catch the warmth of the morning sun. Outside the city, a small troop of foot soldiers and cavalry fell in with them. Words of encouragement poured from those who had chosen to cast their lots in with the queen. Kleopatra removed her disguise, standing to greet all who joined her.

  Hephaestion, emerged from a wagon and now on his horse, had done a magnificent job of spreading the word of the queen’s defection. It was a small band of soldiers and supporters, but it was a splendid beginning.

  Hephaestion trotted to the queen’s wagon.

  “Are we prepared?” she asked.

  “We have good men with us, and good men who have remained behind and will work for us on the inside.”

  To the south, at the dock at Naukratis, a ship awaited Kleopatra and her supporters. Hammonius left them, making
plans to communicate with the queen regularly. “You shall hear from me, my dear girl, my darling Majesty. I shall send Archimedes to you at the appropriate time. He is with me always, now. I have ruined his life by introducing him to the business of export.”

  “I am very sad not to see more of my cousin at court,” Kleopatra said. “Is he well? I am certain that his letters to me were intercepted by my brother’s monsters.”

  “He is well. But I hate to go anywhere with him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all the ladies gather around him and ignore me.”

  “I would like us all to return to happier times,” said Kleopatra, remembering the days when Hammonius and her handsome cousin would come to court and regale them with stories of Roman intrigue. “But I understand his reluctance to truck with the prevailing order.”

  “He was your father’s man. But he is your Kinsman, and now that you require his services, he will be your man. Do not worry. He has become rather a genius at gathering information. Almost as good as myself. But not quite so. Not yet.”

  Kleopatra stood at the ship’s plank and greeted her supporters, thanking each one for joining her. As they set sail for Thebes, Kleopatra descended to her quarters to check the condition of her belongings. She held her breath as she opened the latches of her trunks. Relieved, she saw that everything was in its place, which reinforced that those to whom she entrusted her life were unconditionally loyal. No one but Charmion, Hephaestion, and the queen herself knew of the treasures hidden in her personal luggage. She had learned from her father at a very early age never to leave home without ample money.