Pharaoh

by Karen Essex

  She offered him her hand to kiss and he took it, lingering over it, and then looking straight into her eyes. “Your Majesty. It is a pleasure to address you as such, because in you alone does the literal meaning manifest.”

  Caesar smiled broadly at his friend’s flirtation with his mistress as if at a precocious child, and Kleopatra thought he looked like a proud parent whose firstborn had just performed a new feat. She wondered if her lover would have been so gracious if he understood that the dignified countenance with which she answered Antony’s coquetry concealed an alarming internal combustion.

  The last time she had seen Marcus Antonius she had been a twittering girl whose knees shook every time he looked at her. She felt that he had known this, and had played with her girlish affection, staring directly at her with his deep, unabashed eyes, teasing her, and making her blush. She had looked forward to their reunion so that she might let him see how, as a woman, she had control over the way others affected her; that she governed not only a nation and its people, but the entirety of herself, heart, body, and mind.

  But years of living and warring had also enhanced Antony so that he, at thirty-seven years of age, was no less formidable an invasion to her composure than he had been ten years prior. He had the gift-even more highly developed than Caesar-of communicating with women on many levels all at once. Kleopatra felt that he was treating her as if she were girl, queen, mother, mistress to another man, and, of course, potential lover, in every glance sent her way, in every sentence. It seemed that even the things he said to Caesar also contained some hidden meaning for her. She could not reckon what it was, exactly, but she was aware at every moment, he was considering her; that despite the fact that the topic of discussion was war, the business of seduction whorled around every strategy. In ways, he was even more disturbing to one’s calm than Caesar, who ruffled virtually everyone with his opaque irony. Antony caused a different sort of disruption-more visceral, easier to locate in the body.

  Caesar and Antony treated one another with great solicitousness, like a married couple who had had a serious rift now put right and were careful not to upset their newfound rapport. Caesar had presented Antony to her as “my son,” and she immediately felt a threat to her own son. Now that Caesar had been given the additional title Father of His Country, he called every breathing Roman male his son. How many sons did a man require? Caesar had taken the step of formally adopting the boy Octavian, he said, as a show of familial loyalty to his sister. An ancient Roman custom, he said. Simply a formality designed to bring one’s family members into civic life. For how else was a youth to succeed? Caesar called Brutus-a man who had fought against him and who publicly honored the memory of Caesar’s enemy, Cato-his son. Marcus Lepidus, Caesar’s Master of the Horse, was also occasionally called son, which did not bother Kleopatra so much because, privately, Caesar had said to her that it was for Lepidus’s money that he kept him so close. And now this great hulking warrior who had only recently ingratiated himself back into the dictator’s life, and who did not appear to need the patronage of anyone, much less a father, was also given the term of endearment. What was the place of Little Caesar in this pond swarming with sons? How would a little boy, a minnow, survive in this pool of sharks?

  Why were so many sons appearing just as she had become one step closer to securing her position? She had felt so hopeful as she sailed away from her paradise by the sea and back toward the hot chaos of Rome. With the death of the boy king, Little Caesar had been elevated to co-regent, unrivaled by any male in the dynasty The child had been in a most positive mood ever since, as if he had understood that he had been given a great gift. As they sailed from Alexandria, he was laughing in the arms of his governess, sticking his tongue into the wind and for once acting like a baby.

  “Now that he has the crown, he is not acting at all like a king,” Kleopatra said to Charmion.

  “I believe he is behaving exactly as many kings before him,” Charmion said, and they both laughed, remembering not only the less dignified elements of family history, but the histrionics of her own father, who had loved playing the child.

  Like the plague itself, the substance slipped to Kleopatra’s brother had been quick poison. Within days he was dead, his body burned in a spectacular funeral pyre-for no embalmer would touch a body that had contracted plague, not even a king’s body-and his ashes were placed in a golden sarcophagus along with a respectable amount of treasure, including the little red robes he liked to wear as a child when he pretended that he lorded over the eastern lands once conquered by his forefathers. The Royal Body and Treasure were placed in the Royal Catacombs near the temple of Isis by the sea. No one could understand how he had been so unlucky to contract the disease that had been lurking around the cheap inns and back alleys of the harbor but had not spread to the palace quarter, and it was put into the ether that like so many of his ancestors, the boy king had an exotic secret life that must have put him in touch with many questionable characters who might easily have contracted the disease elsewhere and brought it into his very chambers.

  With the expedient demise of the king, Hephaestion wished to arrange to administer the same dose to Arsinoe, but Kleopatra would not allow it. Arsinoe was the prisoner of Caesar, and he alone must decide her Fate.

  Caesar was now too preoccupied to take up matters of rivalry in Egypt. He was ready to take the bold, final step necessary to equal the achievements of Alexander, the conquest of the vast eastern territory of Parthia that had confounded the Roman dominators for so many decades. And that, Kleopatra realized, was the true reason he had so completely accepted Antony back into his affairs. He appointed Antony governor of Macedonia, a key location in the operations against Parthia. She also knew an even deeper truth of the reconciliation. Antony was a commander to whom the Roman legions were fiercely loyal. It would not do to have Caesar away on the other side of the world fighting a war while a man like Antony remained in Rome and could call up so many troops to do his bidding. And that bidding might just be to unite with his rich friend Lepidus and a few of Caesar’s most potent Roman enemies, and take the city for himself in the name of the Republic. In that event, Caesar and his legions would be banished from Rome unless they marched the thousands of miles back home and fought another civil war. Kleopatra knew that if she had the shrewdness to foresee this possibility, then Caesar did, too.

  Antony had a naturalness to his demeanor, though, that made it difficult to suspect him of any participation in conspiracy. His smile, though lascivious, seemed to come from his heart, and not from some dark agenda of sexual or political conquest. If Antony intended to seduce her, he made it seem that it was merely because he wanted to, not because he had a larger purpose other than the dictum of his brawny male desire. And if he had any inclination that Caesar’s affection toward him was based on suspicion and not love, he did not let on, nor did he behave toward Caesar as anything other than an admiring lieutenant and repentant son.

  Kleopatra snapped to attention. This was no cat-and-mouse game for the affections of the queen. The stakes at hand were not a position between a young woman’s loins but the position of her kingdom and its resources at her command to be utilized in their bid to conquer a powerful enemy.

  Caesar opened the map slowly, as if he were spreading the folds of a maiden’s nightgown, and Antony’s rapacious eyes scanned the territories as they revealed themselves, as if they were the untouched mounds of the young girl’s breasts. Caesar smoothed the parchment, his long fingers grazing the many lands he had already marched across and claimed for Rome. His hands so easily owned the world, she thought. He pinned the edges of the map with metal pegs. With his index finger, he pointed to Parthia.

  He explained his plan. On the eighteenth of March, he would set out across northern territory, amassing along the way some sixteen legions and ten thousand cavalry Following the River Euphrates south, he would launch the initial attack from that direction, sweeping through Carrhae and avenging the humiliating dea
th of his former ally, Crassus. After his ignoble defeat, Crassus’s head had been served up in a production of The Bacchae to satisfy the barbarous humor of the Parthian king. “The gods will curse us if we put off Crassus’s revenge another year,” Caesar said. “Some nights, I do believe I see his poor headless ghost.” After vindicating Crassus, he would march north through Dacia, meeting up with Antony and his legions, and confront the barbarian chief Burebistas, who had been striking out against Roman settlements in Illyricum. It seemed that he found the consumption of wine intolerable and wicked and set about burning down Roman vineyards in the region.

  “The man is a menace,” Antony said. “I will have to control myself to wait for you to dispense with him, Caesar.”

  “Remember how much more we become when we are partnered, my son,” Caesar said. “Together we are greater than a mere two.” They smiled at one another like cats sharing a dead bird. Kleopatra did not know if she was suspicious of this mutual solicitousness because she feared for her son’s position, or if the bond between the men indeed lacked a genuineness that they tried to disguise with calculated affection. It was nothing as sinister as the chill she felt when she was near Brutus, whose eyes turned into sad, small slits when he looked at Caesar, even if he was mouthing generous words. Perhaps it was the subtle rivalry between the two men for her attention that was causing the little flutters in her stomach. Something was amiss, but she could not define it.

  “General, I thought you planned to come through Alexandria for supplies on the way east.” Kleopatra thought she would broach this now rather than hold it in until they were alone. How long would it be before she saw him again if he did not come to Egypt? She had already made plans to ride with him as far as Judaea, visiting the Nabataeans to renegotiate the rental of their lands for date orchards.

  “There is too much talk of moving the capital there, my dear. It would not do to fuel it by marching one hundred thousand soldiers past your door. I would like you to send the Egyptian contribution to the war-the grain, weapons, animals, and horses we discussed-straight on to Antioch, and Dolabella will see to the delivery.”

  So that was the plan. Kleopatra’s contribution would be enormous, but her participation minimal-crucial to victory, but invisible to the world.

  “The route through Alexandria is too long, Your Majesty,” Antony offered. “Though it would certainly have its rewards.”

  “It wasn’t too long for Alexander,” she blurted, her tone wiping the smile from his face. She had offended him, but she did not at this moment care. The two men were grabbing the world for themselves while demanding that the queen work behind the scenes for their glory.

  She worried that a wedge was coming between herself and Caesar, and she did not know its origins. She did not particularly think Antony was the cause. But her instincts were rarely wrong. In private conversation, Caesar always held close to the vision of empire they had created together-dictator of Rome and queen of Egypt united in the body of one small boy; Caesar presiding over the eastern Roman empire from Alexandria and over the west from Rome. Partnered with the queen but not her lord and master, until her son rose to be king of Egypt and eventually inherited his father’s powers. He always said that once Parthia was conquered, there would be no stopping them. Kleopatra believed him, but also realized that his own plan provided him with an empire with or without her.

  Caesar had called her all the way back to Rome-urgently, even- but since their reunion, he had been aloof. A change had occurred. He went about his duties as usual, including his duties in the bedroom, but with a detachment even greater than the distance he usually maintained between himself and all other humans. It was not as if he had lost interest in any of his endeavors, but he seemed to Kleopatra to float through the days like a shade revisiting the earthly plane, resuming the life he had led while living, but with only an illusion of the solid corporeal body of his human form. He had aged. Never one to eat enthusiastically, he had lost weight in Spain. His cheeks hung like empty saddlebags on his narrow face. Violet rings rimmed his eyes. Compared to Antony-skin flushed red, flesh pumped with muscle, radiant snow white circles making gleaming brown marbles of his eyes-Caesar looked yellow and ill. She remembered where she had seen that awful color on a face before. It was her father in his last, desperate days.

  “After settling things at Dacia, we’ll march along the River Danube until the tribes of Germania are subdued. That should take us all the way into Gaul, in the event that Brutus requires assistance in keeping the peace there, and then southward home.”

  “It’s an ambitious plan, Caesar,” Antony said. “My only hesitation is that I won’t be with you for its entirety.”

  “There is too much Roman empire and far too few able Roman men to run it,” Caesar replied. “That is the biggest problem we face. I have stationed you where you are most needed. And if you will notice, it is not so far from me that I won’t be able to call upon you if necessary.” He turned to Kleopatra. “Or upon you, my dear.” Caesar looked at his two protégés. “What beautiful bright stars you are. How marvelous the three of us are together. You realize the potential?”

  Antony and Kleopatra did not look at Caesar but at each other. Something passed silently between them, something that could not be given a name, but was solid and real. Something that had everything and yet nothing at all to do with Caesar. It took place in less than a flash of a moment, but Kleopatra felt that whatever was planted in that fleeting instant was now an indelible part of her world. Antony knew it, too, she believed, because he was, for once, at a loss for words, holding his face in a stiff smile. Neither of them dared look at one another again, nor did they respond to Caesar’s question. They waited for the dictator to elaborate, but he was lost in thought over his map.

  “Potential, General?” Kleopatra finally said, breaking the silence in a halting tone.

  Caesar took a piece of chalk and drew lines from Italy to northern Greece to Egypt and then back again to Rome. “And it doesn’t have to stop there, does it?”

  Antony dropped his smile and looked utterly serious. “No, it does not.”

  With his left hand, Caesar took the hand of Kleopatra; with his right, that of Antony. “The two of you will look glorious flanking me in my victory parade.”

  Kleopatra sat in a box seat in the Forum reserved for foreign dignitaries, squinting against the sky’s white glare. She had left her son at the villa because Caesar worried over his safety. But she was not going to miss the drama today, not one that had been so carefully staged by the threesome they secretly and jokingly called the New Triumvirate-Caesar, Kleopatra, and Antony, the threefold partnership that would someday form a mammoth triangle of invincible power, its ambitious and ever-reaching angles searing across the vast portion of the earth’s soil.

  She had feared that she would not make it into the Forum. Throngs of people covered every stone of Rome’s narrow Via Sacra in crowds so thick that the guards flanking Kleopatra’s litter bearers had to barrel through them, shouting orders to let them through, and pushing people aside to make way. From inside the litter, Kleopatra could see nothing, but listened to the horrible drunken curses hurled at the men as they navigated her through the streets and into the Forum. Released finally from the vehicle, which though lavishly padded seemed to her as an early tomb, she could see that even more people were cramped into the Forum-men of every rank and class from senator to beggar, militia protecting the former while the latter groped the unprotected for coins. Children perched atop their fathers’ shoulders to get a better view, and young women dressed in white were pushed forward to the front of the crowd so that they might participate in the festival. A strange energy hovered over the Forum, too restless and unruly for a religious celebration. She had felt that energy before in her own city, when she was trapped outside the palace gates while a mob of disgruntled citizens pelted her father’s quarters with flaming arrows and fiery threats. Though there was no sign of trouble, the feeling that hung in the eth
er was unmistakable.

  The fourteenth of February by the new calendar marked the Feast of the Lupercalia. Kleopatra inquired about the origins of the ritual, but no Roman seemed entirely certain. It was an ancient rite, said to have begun many hundreds of years ago to honor the sacred She-wolf who suckled the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus, after their father had sent the twin infants to the riverbank to be carried away by the floods and die. Others said the ceremony preceded even those days and was in honor of Inuus, the name the ancient Romans gave to the god Pan, who made the land and the beasts and humans upon it fertile.

  Julius Caesar presided over the crowd, sitting on his golden throne, draped in a resplendent purple toga, the color of victory. He sat high on the new Rostra that he had recently built, looking over the assembly. Antony had overseen the construction of the Rostra, and for that, Caesar had his name inscribed on the platform, crediting him for his work. Caesar leaned forward to talk to those who approached him, one arm resting along his knee while he huddled close in intimate conversation with whomever wished to get a word with him.

  “Why does he make himself so vulnerable with rumors of plots against him swarming the city like flies?” Hammonius asked the queen. “A powerful man must be ever cautious. A man feared as much as he must respect his opposition.”

  “He is like a sixteen-year-old boy impressed with his new virility. He thinks himself invincible!” Kleopatra whispered into the burly Greek’s ear.

  “Old men return to the foolishness of youth,” Hammonius said. “I see the tendency in myself, wise as I am in these late years.”

  “You are not old. I will not allow you to say it.”