Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  The marketplace of Ptolemais was set well above the level of the floods, and hence was some distance from the docks. The main street was busy, with the evening crowds buying and selling after the heat of the day. Tiathres bought leeks and parsley, coriander, cucumbers, and figs, which she put in a basket she had brought along for the purpose. Some of the things went into a second basket, which was handed to Melanthe. Nobody suggested that Caesarion carry anything, which relieved him of the necessity of refusing such a menial chore.

  When they arrived in the market square itself, Melanthe was sufficiently excited by the attractions of a new town that she forgot her indignation. “Look at that temple!” she exclaimed delightedly.

  It was a graceful building in the Greek style, facing the marketplace from behind a forest of statues and votive altars. It was, Caesarion supposed, different from the rather heavy native style of the temples of Coptos. Ptolemais had been since its foundation a Greek town, a center of Hellenism in the deeply traditional reaches of Upper Egypt.

  “It looks so light and elegant!” the girl went on. “Can we go see it? Please, Tiathres?”

  “Which god owns it?” Tiathres asked Caesarion nervously. She was clearly uneasy, here in this town where she knew no one, and she didn’t want to go worshiping any strange deities.

  Caesarion had never visited Ptolemais before and was not entirely certain, though he had an idea. They crossed the marketplace to find out, and the altars proved his suspicion right: they were dedicated “to the Savior Gods Ptolemy and Berenike” and “to the Loving Brother and Sister Gods, Ptolemy and Arsinoe.” The temple had been founded by the first Ptolemy, and was dedicated to the dynastic cult of the Lagids.

  Melanthe and even Tiathres were delighted by the dedications “to the Savior Gods,” and at once decided that worshiping the patrons of the renamed boat was practically a necessity. Tiathres bought some wine and oil to offer, and they went on through the open doorway into the shadowy sanctuary.

  There were more statues here. They stood along the walls, singly or in pairs, twice life-size, dressed in robes of faded purple worked with gold, their stiff marble faces painted with smiles, their glass eyes gazing solemnly down upon their worshipers. Many of the altars were dark, but some flickered with lamps, and in the unsteady light the statues seemed alive. Caesarion felt suddenly unable to breathe. He took a step backward, his heart thundering. They’re merely statues of men and women, he told himself. Calling them gods is just propaganda. Anyway, even if they were gods, they’re my ancestors, and they’d want to help me.

  It was not what he felt. These generations of Lagids were staring with shame and anger at the degraded outcome of what they had so nobly begun.

  Melanthe caught the edge of his cloak. “What’s the matter?” she asked. The alarm on her face added silently, Are you about to have a fit?

  “I will wait outside,” he said, with an effort. “This … this is all lost now, and I can’t bear it.”

  “In truth, it is hard for anyone to bear,” said a voice from the shadows behind them.

  They all turned, and saw that a priest had been burning incense at one of the side altars. He wore a white cloak, and his head was covered. He came forward into the light from the open doorway, and became at once less mysterious and more ordinary, a middle-aged, middle-class, Greek official. “What do you want?” he asked anxiously.

  “We have an offering for the Savior Gods,” said Melanthe, after a hesitating look at Caesarion.

  The priest was silent for a moment, and his anxiety relaxed into relieved approval. “This is good,” he said. “The spirits of the Savior Gods are still with us, still working to benefit their people. I’m very glad that you have come to make offerings to them, especially at a time like this.” He looked keenly at Caesarion. “You are a Greek, and just now you spoke like a man who was loyal to the queen and distressed by her fall. Don’t go outside. Go up and make the offering to the Savior Gods with your friends, and then make another offering, to the spirit of the divine Cleopatra. That will ease your distress.”

  The whole world seemed to go faint and blurred. A cold numbness grew about his heart. I will not have a seizure, he thought desperately. Please, no! I owe her that much!

  “Friend,” he said, breathlessly, “I have been out of Egypt. The last news I heard was that the queen had been taken prisoner. If you have heard more news since, I beg you, tell me!”

  The priest frowned, taken aback by his intensity. “Haven’t you … ?” he began—then deliberately rearranged his face into solemnity, and said, “The news came up the river days ago. The queen is dead. She refused to bow to the will of Caesar Octavian, and she took her own life. They say that she had a serpent smuggled to her in a basket of figs. They have buried her body next to Antonius, but her spirit is immortal.”

  Caesarion fought for breath. He had known, all along he had known, that she would not endure captivity, that she would refuse to walk behind Octavian’s triumphal chariot and suffer the jeers of the crowd. She was a great queen, a Lagid, the last heir of all these smiling divinities …

  … apart from himself, who had stupidly survived to be spat upon by slaves.

  “Where is her altar?” he asked the priest.

  The man pointed back to the place where he’d been standing, the place immediately to the right of the door. An onyx bowl of incense smoked on the small altar, and lamps on a gilded stand cast a soft light on a smiling statue: Cleopatra, wearing the serpent crown of the goddess Isis, holding a child in her arms.

  She had had many such statues made; she had even set a similar image on her coinage. Isis was usually shown holding her son, whom the Egyptians called Horus and the Greeks Harpokrates, and Cleopatra had adopted the pose after Caesarion’s birth. She had identified herself with Isis and Julius Caesar with Serapis, king of the gods; later she had mourned Caesar as Isis had mourned her murdered husband. Later still, she had claimed that, just as Serapis had been restored from the dead, so the god had found a new human incarnation and come back to her in Marcus Antonius. Caesarion was familiar with every cynical manipulation of the myth—and yet, faced with the image of his mother cradling the infant that was himself, he found himself trembling, his face wet with tears. He had known that she would die, yet still the event struck on an unguarded heart.

  “Friend, do you have a knife?” he asked the priest. “I wish to mourn for her.”

  Puzzled, the priest handed him a small knife of the sort used to cut off sections of incense. Caesarion went over to the altar with it, pulled off his hat, and began to hack at his hair, cutting it off in handfuls and dropping it onto the bowl of incense. The black strands crinkled and burned, momentarily making the sweet smoke stink. He sliced his scalp, and felt the blood trickle down onto his ear, but the pain was almost unnoticeable in the roaring agony of grief.

  “Arion!” said Melanthe, shocked.

  He ignored her. Hair cut raggedly short in mourning, he stood staring at the coals, breathing hard, the knife hilt hard and slick in his sweating hand. Behind him, Tiathres was anxiously demanding to know what was going on—she had not understood the Greek conversation with the priest. Melanthe began to whisper a Demotic explanation.

  “Do you know what happened to the queen’s children?” Caesarion asked the priest, without turning round.

  “The young king Ptolemy Caesar is dead.” He sounded nearly as shocked as Melanthe. “A Roman troop passed this way five days ago, carrying his ashes.”

  “We know that,” Melanthe informed him, breaking off her whisper to Tiathres. “Arion was a Friend of the king. He was wounded trying to defend him.”

  “He never counted for anything,” Caesarion said harshly. “I meant the queen’s other children—Ptolemy Philadelphus, and Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. Do you know if they are alive?”

  “No,” said the priest, still shocked, though now impressed as well. “I’ve heard nothing about them.”

  Probably they were dead. Even if
they lived, how could he do anything to help them? No one had helped his mother while she lived, and who was going to oppose the Romans now that she was dead?

  The edifice of excuses in which he’d lived since Berenike collapsed around him. There was nothing he could do in Alexandria. He should have died as soon as he realized that there would be no escape from Berenike—no, he should have died on the pyre. The queen had taken her own life rather than accept humiliation by Rome, but he had blindly and stupidly submitted to every sort of degradation, to preserve a life which even Rhodon had known was worthless. He looked up again at his mother’s face, glassy-eyed and smiling under the serpent crown. Once again, as so very often before, she had had to show him what to do.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, aloud. “I failed you. Forgive me. I will make what amends I can.” He looked vaguely at the knife in his hand, then brought the edge down hard across the base of his left thumb.

  “Arion!” screamed Melanthe. She threw herself at him and tried to snatch the knife. He shoved her off, and dragged the sharp little blade across his wrist once more. Blood spurted out, hot and red, hissing on the coals. The same blood that ran in Ptolemy the Savior, he thought triumphantly, unclean and degraded perhaps, but still capable of being purified in death.

  Then there was a blow against his side, and he found himself on the floor with the priest on top of him. The man’s knee caught his right side. The wound flared agony and he screamed. Melanthe wrested the knife out of his suddenly nerveless fingers.

  “How dare you profane this temple!” shouted the priest furiously.

  “Profane it?” Caesarion gasped, trying to free himself. “No! Never! O Apollo!”

  Tiathres caught his injured hand and began winding the hem of her cloak about his wrist to stop the bleeding.

  “You pollute the altar with human blood,” said the priest, more calmly. “This does not honor the queen’s memory, young man; I tell you, it does not!”

  He moaned, catching the first whiff of carrion: still less would it honor the queen to throw a fit over her altar. “Let me up,” he pleaded. “Let me go out, where I won’t pollute the temple.”

  The priest got off him. He tried to get his hand away from Tiathres, failed, staggered to his feet with her still pressing it. Pain he had not felt a moment before hammered in his wrist. He leaned against the altar, clutching his side. The bowl of incense had stopped smoking, drowned in blood, and the statue’s robe was spattered with dark droplets. The priest took his arm and tugged, escorted him as far as the door. He stood swaying in the evening sun, fighting the seizure. Tiathres was still pressing her cloak to his wrist, holding the wound closed. “Give me a bandage,” she begged the priest, “—or a knife to cut a strip from my robe. He’s still bleeding.”

  She spoke Demotic, and the priest only looked at her blankly. Melanthe, her voice thick with distress, translated.

  “Take it off!” Caesarion begged, shaking his arm weakly. “I’m not polluting the temple now.” Tiathres did not let go, and moving the hand hurt and made him dizzy. The priest caught his arm again as he staggered.

  “Come to my house,” said the priest, gathering himself together and addressing Melanthe. “It’s across the street. My wife will help you bandage him and clean up. You can’t go through the marketplace like that: somebody would call the guard.” Caesarion, stumbling, allowed himself to be led down the steps. The world was swinging around him in circles, and it reeked of carrion.

  The stink and the fragmentary images gave way at last to a paved courtyard. He was sitting on the ground, his back against a column. Tiathres was kneeling beside him, dressed only in her tunic, wrapping a strip of linen around his wrist and hand. Beyond her another, unfamiliar, woman was filling a tub with water.

  Melanthe came over, holding a cup of unglazed pottery. She, too, had stripped to her tunic, and her bare upper arms glowed the color of dark honey. She knelt down, on the other side of him from Tiathres, and held the cup to his lips.

  He was thirsty, so he drank. It was watered wine, mixed with a little honey and something bitter. He drained it, not caring what drug he was swallowing. Melanthe set the empty cup down and looked at him angrily.

  “You’re awake again, aren’t you?” she said. “Why did you do that?”

  He was beginning to feel that he had indeed done something stupid and disgraceful, and he tried to defend himself. “She had the courage to kill herself,” he explained hoarsely. “I should have had it, too. It was a mistake, thinking there was anything left for me to do.”

  “Why should you kill yourself?” she demanded. She was almost in tears. “Why? What good would it do anyone?”

  “I do no one any good alive,” he told her. “I have never counted for anything, and I never will. My life was a burden to me before, and now I am a deadweight on the earth. Everything I lived for is gone. I only survive by betraying everything I was.”

  “Cleopatra wasn’t even a good queen!” objected Melanthe.

  He glared. “How dare you utter such a foul lie!”

  “All those wars!” Melanthe protested tearfully. “All those taxes to pay for all those wars, and the tin in the coinage, and she never paid for anyone to repair the dykes and the ditches, or the roads. And she killed her sister and her brothers and …”

  “Hush!” said the strange woman, coming over from the washtub. “I agree with you, dear, but it’s just as well my husband’s next door, or he’d turn you out of the house. He always believed in the queen, and he’s been in mourning ever since she died.” She squatted down in front of Caesarion. “And you’re another of the same breed, are you, young man? Herakles, what a mess you’ve made of your hair!”

  He looked at her vaguely. She was stout, dark, dressed in a white linen shift, and he’d never seen her before in his life. Why should she be worried about his hair when all he wanted was to die? He looked questioningly at Melanthe, but she only frowned.

  The stout woman took his left hand from Tiathres and inspected the bandage. “That should hold it,” she said in Demotic. “Sweet Isis, what a thing to do! Not a good time to do it, either. The Romans are here in the city, and there’ll be gossip. People will have seen you coming out of the temple all covered in blood, and they’ll talk.—I’ve got your things soaking, sister. Fresh blood comes right out, and your cloaks should be fine once you’ve wrung them out.”

  “We are very grateful,” said Tiathres, and went over to the washtub. When she squatted down over it, Caesarion belatedly remembered how she’d used her cloak to stop his bleeding. He realized dimly that someone had taken his own cloak as well … and Melanthe’s. He must have got blood everywhere. The strange woman must be the priest’s wife; the priest had said she’d help them clean up. He wondered for a moment where the priest himself had gone—then remembered that he’d got blood all over the altar and statue as well. The pious man would want to clean it off.

  He had been spectacularly stupid and foolish. Cleopatra had planned her death carefully. He had cut himself wildly, in the fury of a moment, in front of people he should have realized would try to stop him. All he’d succeeded in doing was making a fool of himself—and dirtying his mother’s statue. His eyes stung, and he wiped at them wretchedly with his good hand.

  “The Romans are here?” asked Melanthe anxiously.

  “They arrived from Panopolis about noon,” replied the priest’s wife. “A great army of them. Their emperor has sent one of his generals up the river to secure the kingdom. They’re camped outside the city now, but they’ve announced that tomorrow the general will come into the city to receive oaths and hear petitions. My husband has been sitting in the temple all afternoon, worrying about whether he should give his oath.”

  “Does he have to?” asked Melanthe.

  “He’s on the town council,” said the priest’s wife unhappily. “The whole council will be required to swear. I don’t know what will happen if he refuses. And the Romans are demanding that the town hand over the templ
e treasuries, to pay for the war, and my husband …” She trailed off, afraid to say what her husband might do, then glanced anxiously at Caesarion. “I don’t like to ask, but—is he a fugitive?”

  “No,” said Melanthe at once. “Papa said the Romans came and questioned him at Berenike, but they discharged him. Papa offered to take him to Alexandria with us, if he’d help by writing letters along the way. My papa is a merchant.” She added the last with pride.

  The priest’s wife nodded in relief. Caesarion guessed that she knew that her husband would have insisted on sheltering a fugitive Friend of the king, and that she’d feared the family would suffer for it. In the middle of his own misery, he felt a pang of shame that these good, kind people should expect to suffer for their loyalty to the house of Lagos.

  A door banged, and the priest came into the courtyard. He was carrying Tiathres’ two baskets and Caesarion’s hat. He set them down beside a column and came over; his white cloak was still smeared with blood.

  “We gave him some hellebore,” the priest’s wife told her husband, getting to her feet. “I don’t think the amount of blood he lost was as much as it looked. He was prevented in time.”

  The priest nodded in acknowledgement and squatted down in his wife’s place. “Young man,” he said sternly, “I understand your grief. I share it. But such desperate actions do no honor to the queen. If you were, as your friends said, a Friend of the king, then remember that the queen sent her son out of Egypt to keep him safe, and sent you with him. If you destroy yourself, you defeat her purpose. It is by our lives and worship that we honor the gods, not by bloody self-murder.”

  “I am sorry, sir, if I polluted your temple,” Caesarion replied faintly—the uncomplicated truth he could utter, rather than the muddled and desperate one he could not.

  “I fully believe that you never intended any disrespect to the gods,” said the priest, relenting. “Were you truly a Friend of King Ptolemy Caesar?”

  “As much as such a man has friends,” he replied—and wondered why he didn’t just tell them the truth. Why go on pretending, when all he wanted to do was die?