Pharaoh

by Karen Essex

  “Again?” he asked, smiling, disbelieving.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  He pulled the pins out of her hair and smoothed it around her shoulders. “You are as fertile as the Nile itself, Mother Egypt,” he laughed. He picked her up, put her on the bed, and made gentle love to her-not his normal way, but out of fear and respect for the baby growing inside. Every night thereafter, he would put his lips to her stomach and talk to the baby, apologizing that he would be off to war when the little creature came into the world. He told the baby stories of gods and goddesses, of war, and, in case it was a boy, he said, dirty stories of nightlong orgies with prostitutes. “A man must know these things,” he told Kleopatra.

  “And what if it is a girl?”

  “Then she will be haughty like her mother and turn a deaf ear to me.”

  Kleopatra did not turn a deaf ear to Antony’s stories but let them be a catalyst to her own desire-and her desire for this man never ceased. She did not let his four-year absence fester like a wound but let it heal in the passion of their reunion. She had even consulted Hephaestion, though he was not one to discuss personal matters. But this matter transcended her heart; her kingdom and the future of her children depended on Antony’s maintaining the level of trust with which she endowed him.

  “I know that you consult me as a political adviser and not a philosopher, Your Majesty,” the eunuch answered. “But I believe that the life you are making with the Imperator is a calculated risk with acceptable odds in your favor. Besides, Your Majesty seems, how shall I say it? Happy?”

  She was happy, happier than she’d ever been. Everything contributed to her growing affection for Antony: his playfulness with his young children; his loyalty to anyone to whom he gave his word, be it a fine shoemaker whose station he promised to improve or king of a nation; his light sense of humor as he sped through his day readying the very high-

  est and the very lowest of his men for war; and finally, his unwavering vision of an empire that united all the peoples of the world.

  Before he set out on his long march to Parthia, he and Kleopatra issued a coin with both their images. On one side, it was dated in the traditional way, the Fifteenth Regnal Year of Queen Kleopatra, and on the other side, it was dated the Year One. It was meant to signal the first year of a Golden Age of Joint Rulership between the Egyptian queen, who was the dynastic successor of Alexander, and the Roman general, who was the king’s spiritual scion.

  “The foundation is laid, my darling,” Kleopatra said when they were shown the impression of the coin for approval before it went to the Royal Mint. “Our empire will celebrate the highest and best in all the civilizations of the world.”

  They explained it to their children, not expecting the small ones to understand, but to begin to make them see that they were to be a crucial part of something that was greater and bolder and more beautiful and important than themselves. Antyllus accepted everything that was said with hawklike interest, but Caesarion, the philosopher, asked Antony if he thought it would always be necessary to go to war to make peace.

  “The strong do as they will while the weak suffer what they must. A famous expression, one that Caesar used to say often. But it is no less true for its overuse. If we are weak, we have no power. The only way not to be weak is to be the very strongest. And there will always be those who wish to take that power from us. So that the only way to maintain the peace that we hold paramount is by maintaining absolute and resolute strength. Julius Caesar also used to say that there simply must be a master. Otherwise there is chaos. Rome’s recent history is the most blatant example of his wisdom.”

  “And why is it that we are to be the masters?” Caesarion asked, his twelve-year-old face as worried-looking as an old man’s.

  “Because our bloodlines and our experience give us the divine right,” Kleopatra answered. “Because we uphold the principles of Alexander that will make the world and all its inhabitants great: harmony among nations, respect for all the gods and religions and people of the world, devotion to the Greek ideals of Knowledge, Virtue, Science, and Beauty.”

  “And what will we do to make that the law of the land?”

  Kleopatra wondered if Antony felt as she did, that the boy was like a tutor who was testing his star pupils. Antony answered: “A few years ago I held a conference with as many of the leaders of the world as I could assemble. And I determined at that time that the best and most humane system of administration in the territories of the Roman empire under my jurisdiction was to continue to allow the people to govern themselves. Instead of imposing a Roman governor upon them-a man whose own greed might incite him to invoke hardship on the native people-I gave the power back to the existing governments. Now they have more incentive to remain loyal to me, and not to raise nasty rebellions behind my back. And yet they have all the force of my power behind them should they require it.”

  “It’s a brilliant system,” Kleopatra added, “and perfectly faithful to the ways of Alexander.”

  “I see, Father,” Caesarion said. He had asked permission to call the Imperator his father, and Antony had replied that he would be honored if the son of the man whom he himself called father called him such. “And what of the other man who calls himself Caesar? Will he wish to govern this empire with us?”

  Antony and Kleopatra exchanged looks. They had agreed not to frighten their children with anxieties over the duplicitous Octavian. Besides, they hoped that when they had defeated the Parthians and had gained control of the land from the River Indus to the western borders of Egypt, from the Sudan to the northern territories of Greece and the Balkans, that Octavian would begin to see the wisdom in cooperating with them.

  “He will be in charge of the city of Rome and the Italian lands, and those countries on the western side of the Mediterranean Sea,” Antony replied. “Those are very far away and need a closer hand to govern them. We shall live here in Alexandria and take care of the east.”

  “I shall strive to make myself a worthy heir to your efforts, sir,” Caesarion said. Kleopatra smiled; it was the sort of thing she would have said to her father, in the same overly earnest tone.

  “Oh, come here, boy,” said Antony, grabbing the thin young man and ruffling his hair. “You are far too serious for your tender years. Why don’t you go have some fun for a change?”

  “I’d like to go to war with you, sir,” Caesarion said, straightening his chiton. “I would like to be there when you take the ancient city of Phraaspa, where the Parthians hide their national treasure!”

  “In due time,” the Imperator replied. “In due time, all my sons will be called upon to serve with me. And at that time, and that time only, will they truly be able to call themselves men.”

  “You won’t be prejudiced against me, sir, because I am not so fit for soldiery as my brother?” Caesarion said, looking at the larger, more muscular Antyllus. “He defeats me every day at swordsmanship and in races. If I weren’t his brother, he would kill me!”

  “Let me tell you something, my boy,” Antony said. “Never was there a finer, fiercer man in battle than your father. And never was there a thinner and less healthy man. Caesar taught us the greatest lesson of war-that a man’s finest weapon is his mind. You have inherited that mind, and like him, you will learn how to use your physical characteristics to your advantage. I am sure of it.”

  Caesarion went away from the encounter full of confidence. Just like any one of Antony’s men, Kleopatra thought. No one was exempt from Antony’s charm, no one left his presence less than he was when he entered it. It was a gift. Just as Caesar’s gift was to inspire awe for himself, Antony’s was to inspire confidence in others. Kleopatra admired both talents, but remained uncertain as to which was of greater use to her cause.

  When Kleopatra arrived with supplies in the village of Leuce Come, Antony put his head in her lap and sobbed like a baby. She was disturbed at his despondency. Here was the man in whom she had placed her life and her future, weeping over
the thousands of men lost, either from the menacing Parthian arrows or from the treacherous snow that plagued them in Armenia. Most of the men were from warmer climates, he said, and had never faced such conditions. Not only that, they had been betrayed by Monaeses, who changed his allegiance and turned on the baggage train full of siege equipment when Antony and the majority of his legions took a swifter road to Phraaspa. When they arrived, the city had been fortified, and the siege equipment needed to take it was destroyed. They tried to build their own fortifications with the timber and rocks in the area, but it wasn’t enough. They failed to take Phraaspa, so they turned back, finding themselves confronted by snowstorms in the mountains, Parthian archers, and a scarcity of food.

  Antony wept now at his own bad judgment. “Their deaths are on my head. If only I had made the decision to set out earlier, when victory might have been taken before winter set in.”

  “But you did not know that this year the storms would be worse than in decades,” Kleopatra offered. “There is no way to predict such a thing. And you had to wait for Canidius to negotiate with Media and to secure the regions for the march. You were correct in your strategy, Imperator. One does not just go sprinting off to war!”

  Antony was not appeased. If only he had not made the decision to leave the heavy baggage behind, so sparsely guarded.

  “But you had no choice, Imperator,” she said. “You couldn’t very well slow down the entire army with the baggage, especially when you were trying to beat the weather.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But I made the treaty with Monaeses. I was convinced of his loyalty, if only because it served his interests.”

  To this she had little consolation to give. It was true that no one could be counted on for unswerving loyalty. Betrayal had orchestrated its wickedness through her own family’s schemes for control of Egypt. Why would a barbarian king behave differently?

  “Caesar made such mistakes,” she told him. “How many alliances had he made with the chiefs in Gaul, only to have them turn against him as soon as his back was to their village?”

  Still Antony blamed himself.

  “As I blame myself when the river doesn’t rise and the crops don’t grow and there is hunger and suffering among my people,” she said. “But this is nothing from which you won’t recover.”

  She tried to cheer him with a report of Philip his son, who was born in his own image, but Antony only replied that he was glad the baby was just an infant and could not comprehend the disgrace his father had brought upon him.

  “I have had a lengthy conversation with Canidius Crassus, who claims that your leadership was an inspiration at every turn; that you made the most of impossible conditions and turns of fortune, and that had you been less a leader, every man would have fallen either to the enemy, to starvation, or turned loyalties to avoid those things.”

  “Then I should have Canidius flogged for his lies.”

  But after he had cried enough and chastised himself enough and paced and moaned enough and hit the wall enough times with his fist, he changed moods and began to talk of future victories. He was so unlike Caesar, so unlike any of the Romans Kleopatra had known. His emotions ran high, as high as a Greek’s, but as he let his temper loose, he also seemed to dispense with his grief. A few hours later they were sipping wine with Canidius and planning the next step.

  “Are the men comfortable in their Syrian winter quarters?” Kleopatra asked.

  “They will be when they have been presented with your generous supplies,” Canidius replied.

  “Good. Then the next step shall be decided in Alexandria.”

  “I cannot face your people,” Antony said. “I promised victory, and I have delivered humiliation.”

  “Then we shall declare it a victory, Imperator. You are alive and well. That is victory enough for me.”

  “Kleopatra, thank the gods that you answered my call for help.”

  “What was I to do? You are my husband,” she said. “Whatever I have is at your disposal.”

  He looked very bitter. “Would that my other partners had the same sense of honor.”

  “Enough grief over Monaeses’ betrayal, Imperator!” she said. “A man like that has no sense of loyalty but does the bidding of whoever’s pockets he can reach into. You were simply out of his range at the time.”

  “I mean my wife.”

  Kleopatra’s heart thumped loudly in her chest. Had someone started rumors about her meant to sabotage Antony’s trust? “What on earth do you mean? Am I not here with everything you requested, even though our baby is barely out of my womb?”

  “My darling, I apologize. I was speaking of Octavia.”

  “Octavia has betrayed you?”

  “Or her brother. Or the two of them. When I returned to the Syrian headquarters, I received a letter from Octavia. She was in Athens, on her way to meet me in Syria with two thousand troops for my war effort.”

  “I see,” Kleopatra said, feeling more ill by the moment. Was she expected to receive Octavia?

  “No you don’t. Octavian pledged twenty thousand troops. He is sending one-tenth that amount. He means to undermine me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I wrote her back and told her to take her troops and go home. I’m not a fool. I see exactly what he is doing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “He is breaking our alliance, but he is not man enough to do it directly.”

  “We knew it was coming,” Kleopatra said.

  “That is not all. He has dismissed Lepidus from our coalition without consulting me. Can you imagine the audacity? He’s taken the entire domain of North Africa away from Lepidus and claimed it for himself. I sent word immediately to Rome demanding an apology from him and my share of the confiscated lands. Do you know how he dared to answer me? He said that he would be delighted to share North Africa when he receives his portion of Armenia.”

  “After you’ve spent a grueling year and lost so many men in the service of Rome? He is depraved.”

  “Yes, a man can be dishonest to the point of depravity. He’s not even twenty-five years old, that little sniveling, pale catamite of a creature. He feigns illness in every battle, did you know that? As soon as the fighting starts, he takes to his tent with a sudden high fever!” Antony’s whole body shook as if he were trying to slough off his disdain. “If he didn’t have Marcus Agrippa to lead his armies, he would be nothing.”

  “Then that is the key,” Kleopatra said. “We must send an assassin after Agrippa. I wonder if Ascinius is still alive.” She remembered the man with the grim countenance who had easily dispatched twenty of her father’s enemies one chilly morning in Puteoli. Even at twelve years old, she had recognized that his efficiency was extraordinary.

  Antony turned his anger on her. “Do you really think I would be party to the murder of a Roman general who has not declared himself my enemy? What kind of man do you take me for? That is an action worthy of Octavian, not me.”

  “It may take adapting his tactics to best him. It is not always the honorable man who triumphs. What about negotiating with Agrippa?”

  “It’s worth a try, but I don’t think we’ll be successful. Caesar himself bound Agrippa to Octavian. He gave his family money and position in exchange for the loyalty. I believe the two are in solidarity for life.”

  “Why did Caesar yoke us with this menace?” Kleopatra said quietly. “I have prayed for an answer to that question, but I have none.”

  “I thought I knew the man, Kleopatra.”

  “I thought I did, too. But I was not privy to that portion of his mind.”

  Antony’s face tensed, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. Kleopatra thought that he might be trying to contain the hurt he carried at Caesar’s slight to him of naming the frail underage nephew his heir, and not the man who had fought with his very soul at Caesar’s side, whose courage and bravery and daring had been responsible for some of his most celebrated victories. It was something they shared that b
ound them together in a way that no vow of marriage could-they had both been loved by Caesar and betrayed by him in death.

  Antony broke the silence. “I have made my peace with Caesar’s memory by choosing to believe that he did not for a moment think that Octavian would pose a threat to either of us or to your son. I cannot believe that he knew what dark possibilities lay inside the mind of that boy.”

  Either that, Kleopatra thought, or else he identified them, and decided in the end that he admired them and wanted to give them free reign.

  Rome: the 17th year of Kleopatra’s reign

  Was the queen, some kind of magical Egyptian cow? How could she produce sons at will? Surely she must be a student of the dark magic known to be a common practice in those wicked lands that lie far to the east, those places where fat potentates ensorcelled their populations and lived lives of decadent luxury off the backs of their poor, bewitched subjects. First, she had used her magic to give Julius Caesar a son-proof of her collaboration with dark powers. Caesar had bedded hundreds and hundreds of women in countries all over the known world, and never had anyone claimed to have given him a son. He had produced only one child, a girl, and then his semen had turned bad.

  Octavian wondered if Caesar’s homosexual affairs had diminished the potency of his semen, and if so, would the same thing happen to him? Octavian had only done what he had had to do, and who would have made a different choice in his position? It was a small price to pay for what came after, and, truth be known, not unpleasant at all, especially for one’s first sexual encounter. Caesar was an old greekling, no doubt about that, loving every art form, every mode of philosophy, every piece of drama and comedy, and every tradition that had come out of that small country. No doubt he was thinking of Plato and the Symposium when he took Octavian into his tent in Spain and explained the proper way for a man of stature to pass his power along to the boy of his choice, to groom him for his duties in society. Octavian was amazed at the proposal, but he also had been told by his mother that he must appease Caesar no matter what-that disobedience or making himself unpleasant or unliked in any way was not to be. “Julius is your future,” she had said plainly. “His patronage will raise you above all men. If he chooses to place his generosity elsewhere, you shall be on your own, with only your talents and your abilities to take you into the future.” And then she gave him the look that made him understand that this latter notion was not a very good idea, considering the gifts he had demonstrated thus far in his young life. Ah well, he laughed to himself, so many have given so much more for so much less.