by Karen Essex
Where is Hammonius? she asks herself. Why is he not here? But she knows. Hammonius is seventy-two years old and living out his last years bouncing Archimedes’ little daughter on his knee. He is much too old to serve the queen in the ways of the past, which is a pity, for no one knows the eastern trade routes like him; no one has bribed more greedy merchants along the way, and no one is craftier at hiding a mission of espionage behind a jovial face and a good joke. She would like to call upon Archimedes himself to see her sons safely across Egypt, but she cannot ask him to risk his life for her again.
She would feel much better if she were entrusting the welfare of her sons to Hammonius or even Archimedes instead of the tutor Rhodon who has sworn to protect the king and the prince, but whom Kleopatra does not trust. He wears too much pomade in his hair and is overly delighted with the gifts of jewelry Caesarion has given him. Kleopatra does not believe that scholars should concern themselves with hair and jewels. Besides, Rhodon is a disciple of Arius, another philosopher Kleopatra cannot abide. But the tutor offered to accompany the boys into this hastily planned exile, and Kleopatra wants her sons to have the comforts on this journey of at least one who is close to them. Once the boys are separated, Caesarion will be entirely without familiar companionship. Kleopatra is sending him with a goodly fortune, but an entourage would attract too much attention.
“Why do we not all go at once?” he asks. “Why must Alexander and I be separated from Antyllus and Selene and Philip?”
She does not want to share with him the realities. Octavian’s sister is fond of Antyllus, and Antony is certain that under no circumstances would Octavian harm the boy. He is not quite fifteen. Octavian had been courteous to Antyllus when the boy came to him with Antony’s offer, though he confiscated the money and sent him back to his father without an answer. Still, if he were going to harm Antyllus, he would have done so then. But Caesarion is the son of Caesar, and Octavian, who now calls himself Caesar, will not look favorably on Caesar’s true and only son. The stamp of Julius Caesar is on Caesarion’s face, and Kleopatra wants to keep that face out of Octavian’s sight forever.
Caesarion waits patiently for an answer to his question, so she offers him one that is slightly less frightening than the truth.
“We must not travel together because if we are intercepted, our family line is ended.”
He takes in that information without any expression of surprise. He is sixteen and a king, and has never been protected by the consolations afforded an ordinary youth. “I’m not leaving until I know your plans, Mother.”
If only she knew them herself. She has none and a thousand all at once. “As soon as I am guaranteed a clear route, I will join you and we will make the journey through Media to India, where a great palace awaits us. We shall either live there in peace, or we shall wait for the day when we might regain our kingdom, or both.”
“And if you do not join me? What am I to do?”
She is anxious for the boys to leave. She will not feel secure until they are safely out of the city, out of reach of the monster. She tries to cover the impatience in her voice.
“You may either proceed in the journey without me, or you may remain with Apollodorus and learn the ways of piracy.” She tries to smile at him, knowing she cannot answer his question more directly because she does not possess such an answer. “If I do not join you, you must rely upon your own intuition and your wits. Pray to the gods for enlightenment, and then follow the course they set for you. Even if it frightens you.”
She looks him straight in the eye and is hit with a pain in her gut. If only his father were alive to protect him. “All my life I have known fear. But I have acted in spite of it. I urge you to do the same. Your father used to say that it is preferable to die rather than to live fearing death. It was the philosophy by which he lived. Your father was a great man, but he was only able to accomplish great and impossible things because he believed that Fortune would protect him. While you are on that ship, staring into the blue waters of the Nile, think on Caesar’s words and let them become a part of you, and let them guide you throughout your life. It is the very best advice I might offer.”
She thinks he stands a little taller now. She hopes he has taken her words to heart. She is unsure about Caesarion’s future. He has had such an easy life in so many ways. Indoctrinated from birth with the details of his illustrious lineage, he grew up having very little to prove. He is happier reading than accompanying his mother on her duties. He has none of Caesar’s desire to conquer lands, none of his mother’s ambitions to unite the eastern half of the world under one great monarchy. She feels that if he is handed the throne, he will try his best to be an intelligent and benevolent ruler, but she wonders if these qualities will be enough to survive the challenges of being a king. Perhaps he will go to India and live a peaceful life while Alexander marries the Median princess and brings to fruition all Kleopatra’s dreams and ambitions. She allows herself one brief moment of comfort in this thought.
But now Alexander rushes into the queen’s quarters with his sister hanging on his travel cloak. She is crying, and he is trying very hard to refrain from tears himself. Kleopatra pries the girl away from her broth-
er and holds her. Selene buries her face in her mother’s dress and sobs. “You are going to see the great lands conquered by the man whose name you carry,” she says to the boy. It is he whom she must bolster first. There will be time later to comfort Selene. “Are you not excited and proud?”
The boy tries to be strong. “I want to take my sister. Mother, they say that in Egypt for many thousands of years, princes married their sisters. That only you have put a stop to the tradition. Why can I not marry my sister and stay here?”
Odd that Kleopatra had not once thought of this possibility-that her twins would resume the tradition of both the Egyptian pharaohs and the Ptolemies and marry one another and rule together.
“You are a prince, Alexander, and princes may not simply do as they like. Your responsibility is to go to Media and remain betrothed to the princess there. That is what Egypt needs at this hour to make her strong. If it turns out that you do not marry the princess, you may come back to Egypt and do as you like. With my permission, of course.”
“But Mother. It is being said that you and Father have pledged to die together. We can’t leave you here to die.”
Hearing these words, Selene’s sobs turn into a howl. What else have her children heard? Rumors about the kingdom are rampant. Octavian is coming to kill Antony and to marry Kleopatra. Octavian is coming to kill them both. Antony has a secret army with which he will vanquish Octavian once and for all. She has heard all of these things.
“Your father and I are determined to keep ourselves and our children safe. You must cooperate with us by doing your duty.”
Alexander puts his arms around his sister, and Kleopatra embraces the two of them, holding back her own tears. “My darlings. I won’t let anything happen to you, and neither will Caesarion.”
But Selene breaks away. “I’m going with them and you can’t stop me!”
Kleopatra is almost relieved to see fire in her daughter. She likes the way Selene’s eyes quiver with the power of her own words. She is lovely in her defiance, and for one moment, Kleopatra sees a flash of her sister Berenike in the girl’s face. She prays that Selene’s newfound defiance does not lead her to Berenike’s end. “My darling daughter, you must stay here and keep me company and help me soothe the little one. He would be lost without you, but your twin is almost a man. Alexander will happily sacrifice your companionship to his more vulnerable little brother. Correct?”
She knows Alexander will be gallant just like his father. The boy thrusts his small chest forward. He kisses his sister’s forehead. “It’s just for a little while,” he whispers in her ear, and then looks to his mother’s eyes for confirmation of what he has just said. She answers him with all the trust she can muster.
“Yes, darling. A very little while.”
/> She sends jewels beyond reason, money, ivory, exotic spices unknown in the west, with the message that she and Antony will go into exile if her children may inherit the throne. He sends back a curt message that he has already put forth the only acceptable terms, and she is free to comply. Antony intercepts the message, has the messenger flogged, and sends the beaten man back to Octavian with a letter saying he is free to flog in retaliation any of the traitors who left Antony and are now in his camp.
The creature is trying to drive a final wedge between Antony and Kleopatra so that he may have the pleasure of saying that in the end, they had even turned against one another. Kleopatra is certain of this, but this game she will not let him win. How he would love to spread the twisted propaganda that Kleopatra betrayed Antony to save her own life. That would the last stroke of false color on the ugly portrait he was trying to paint and put before the world’s eyes.
So this is despair, she thinks. This is the darkness she has seen fall over Antony, to which she once believed she was immune. She sits in its black cauldron, and it buffers her against the rest of the world. She knows now how her husband spent all those months in his remote post on the sea, watching the waves and drowning himself in anything that offered relief from the agony of failure. She is sitting in the suffocating vacuum left by hope’s departure.
Now it is Antony who tries to cheer her. Her suicide threat has rein-vigorated him, and he is full of plans for, if not victory, then survival. He resurrects the memory of Caesar, of their unofficial triumvirate in those early days in Rome when the three of them made plans to divide up the world. He recites her own speeches of yesterday about the lineage of their children; the fickle nature of the Roman senate that will turn against Octavian if he gets too powerful; the loyalty of the armies not to a general but to a paymaster. You could be that paymaster, he tells her. We must only put out the word. He reminds her that the gods manipulate the Fates of men for their amusement and then right the wrongs they set in motion at the last moment. He is certain that is what is happening here. He spins lengthy scenarios of how their fortunes may change, and how she will soon be laughing with the gods at their trickery. It is as if he has memorized everything she has said and now regurgitates it back to her like a pupil trying to please his teacher. He repeats the wisdom of taking his own life in exchange for her safety, and she repeats her threat: My spirit will join yours immediately.
She has energy now only for her last desperate act. She has loaded the entire treasure of her ancestors and of her kingdom into the mausoleum meant as her burial chamber. It is a magnificent Greek temple by the sea, with high windows that will keep out Alexandria’s grave robbers, but will allow the sea air to be her companion in death. She has made an inventory of the contents-sapphires, rubies, pearls, bars of gold and silver so heavy that pulley systems are used to unload them. The aromas of saffron, myrrh, and cinnamon dance under the noses of great alabaster and bronze statues of the gods and of her ancestors. The temple is a monument to lavishness. She has added a sinister element as well-timbers, logs, kindling, so that if Octavian refuses her final offer, she might send the entire treasure up in flames. She will time the fire so that he will smell the smoke as he arrogantly walks into the city. He will accomplish his goal of taking Egypt from her, dishonoring the memory of her ancestors, but he will inherit a bankrupt country. Kleopatra would like to die watching the look on his face as he realizes what she has done, but she has not yet figured out how to arrange this detail.
Antony acquiesces to her plan, though he calls it perverse. When you hear that I am dead, Kleopatra, and you are still breathing the sweet air of the city, you will change your mind and choose to remain in the world of the living. Philip will be clinging to your dress, Selene asking you to fix her hair, and you will not be able to follow my example. He says these things and means them. But Kleopatra knows Octavian’s plan. She will not let it be said that she let Antony die so that she might live. She made the vow twenty-five years ago before Artemis: I will happily face death rather than live a life devoid of dignity. This I swear before She who hears and knows all. Death before humiliation. Death before supplication before the might of Rome.
All her life she has tried to negotiate with the beast. She wonders if her sisters were not right after all. Should she have chosen a path of war and not alliance with Rome? Should she not have answered the summons of Julius Caesar, instead going in secret to the kings of Parthia and Armenia and mobilizing an army against him? If she had done that, would she be sitting in her palace, dining with her Parthian king while captured Roman slaves served them dinner?
She had thought about it, had she not? But everyone was against it. Archimedes, Hephaestion, the entire War Council. None wanted to back the savage Parthian king. She was not even twenty years old then, a banished queen exiled in a foreign land, watching as Caesar and Pompey squared off for control of the world. Now she thinks that is what she should have done-turned her back on all things Roman and united with the eastern kings. They are treacherous men, but no more so than the creature calling for Antony’s death.
She tries to brush away regret, shaking her hands in the air like an old conjuring woman batting away the demons. She has always believed it a disease, an evil spirit that takes hold of the mind and turns it to waste. What good is rumination over the past? She chose long ago, welcoming the sons of Rome into her kingdom, into her treasury, into her very body. It is hard to regret past actions when children-not one but four glorious children-are the consequence.
“Kleopatra, you must give me your word that you will not take your own life without providing for our children.”
Antony is right; if she dies, she must die only after ensuring their safety and their futures. Yet there is a sickness in her stomach at living without him. At living in a world in which she is captive to Octavian and his dark will. But her own desires must be sublimated. That is the Fate of a queen and of a mother.
“In those little bodies, great dreams are sown,” she says to him. “I will never abandon them.”
“No, of course you will not. I know that you’re in despair right now,”
he says in his new matter-of-fact tone. “But I also know that as long as the children live, the triumvirate of Caesar, Kleopatra, and Antony and all that they envisioned for themselves and for the world, is not dead.”
The banquet moves in the slow motion of a dream. It is as if they are acting in a theatrical production in which everyone knows the outcome but has agreed not to reveal it. It seems that minutes pass in the time that food is lifted from a plate and put into a gaping mouth. A hand floats languidly in the air to acknowledge a joke. Wine pours from jars sluggishly like clotted blood. Everyone is laughing in a kind of dizzy delusion, but the sound in Kleopatra’s ears is hollow. She can make no sense of the spoken words gushing from anyone’s lips.
Privately, she and Antony are calling it the Final Performance for the People, and they are playing their parts as splendidly as any Athenian thespians. Octavian’s feet are on Egyptian soil, but that grim reality has not been admitted into the dining hall at the palace. A giant roasted boar surrounded by heaps of greens and grapes sits on every table as if it were just another evening among the fortunate few Antony and Kleopatra call friends. Eyes close in delight of the taste, lips smack, teeth grind away like machines. Kleopatra watches wine funnel into eager mouths, throats gulping like plumbing pipes. The boy soldier with tawny eyes who performed so valiantly today still wears the golden breastplate given him by the queen. A woman, drunk, knocks on it and he asks, laughing lasciviously, who’s there? His table bursts into peals of laughter.
They are pretending that Antony’s coup today over a small reconnaissance party of soldiers from Octavian’s army at Canopus is a great military victory. They are pretending that they do not know what will happen tomorrow when tens of thousands of Roman soldiers fall upon them; that they cannot hear the inexorable gait of the Roman army as it marches hastily toward their city. They ar
e pretending that Octavian’s entrance into the fort of Pelusium was not painless, that troops did not go over to him immediately, and that Kleopatra did not order the execution of the fort’s commander and his entire family for the betrayal. But that, too, was just more theater. It no longer matters so much who lives and who dies; the end of the game is at hand.
The single sober dining guest is the Prime Minister, Hephaestion. He whispers into the queens ear, Only those who survive will be able to negotiate. Antony’s Fate is sealed because he, a general, will not surrender himself into the hands of the creature, but Kleopatra’s is still negotiable. Hephaestion has been in private consultation with Charmion, who also chants the tune of survival to Kleopatra day and night. The two of them, the eunuch and the woman who disdains men, have become an unlikely couple. It is as if they have somehow made a chaste marriage and Kleopatra is their only child.
She feels that she has entered a timeless zone. Was it yesterday, today, or has the time not yet come when she sends Selene and Philip and their governess to the island palace on Rhodos? When she kisses their frightened faces and tells them to enjoy their time with the old aunties on the island? When she says that she will call for their return as soon as she can? When she lets the governess pull Philip from her gown, watching the tears fall as he latches on to Selene, who is as serious as a statue? How could that have happened already? And yet it has.
Antony has already sent Antyllus to safety at the Mouseion, for who would violate the world’s temple of Knowledge? The boy said angry words to his father for treating him like a child; for not allowing his fourteen-year-old chest to wear slats of metal or his young arms to carry sword and shield. Antony’s great love for his son has squashed the boy’s burgeoning masculine pride. His last words to his father hissed through his lips like steam. Still, Antony took him into his arms and held him, squeezing the anger out of him until his body was slack with resignation. If they do not speak again, the boy will always carry the pain of the last encounter. Nothing she will say will allay that grief. Strange to be sitting next to one’s husband, encircled in the warmth of his aura, hearing his deep voice ring out with a story she’s heard ten times, smelling his woody scent, and thinking to a day when he will be no more and she will be explaining his last acts to those who loved him. But her mind is in such a state that she cannot be sure she has not already done that. Has someone put a potion in her wine? Perhaps she is poisoned, and unbeknownst to her, her brain is in the process of dying.