The Memoirs of Cleopatra

by Margaret George

“Ahh,” he said. “She is here.” He looked as if something wonderful had happened to him—the way another man would look if his wife had just had a wished-for son. Slowly he raised his arm and I saw, clinging to it, a big dark snake.

  “Edjo,” he said, his dry old voice a caress. “Protective goddess. You know who has come, do you not? Your own.”

  The snake seemingly paid him no heed, but twined around his arm like ivy around a tree.

  “Is there no question you have to ask, my child?” he said to me gently. “I think I could answer it. The gods reveal much to me.”

  “I—I—” My throat was stuck fast. Yet I knew he spoke the truth. Did I dare ask? And would they part the curtain of the future and divulge what lay behind it? “I would ask the gods…I would know…if they will look with favor on Egypt, on the east?”

  The man closed his eyes, while the snake crept up his arm and onto his shoulder. It then draped itself across his neck. Just then Ipuwer spoke; I almost closed my eyes, unable to look at the snake, which surely would strike him, annoyed at the movement of his throat.

  “The gods grant that Egypt will endure, even to the end of time,” he finally said.

  “As it is now? Free? And what of the west, what of Rome?”

  Now he waited an even longer time.

  “As for Rome, the gods of Egypt are silent,” he finally said. “And they have indicated that although Egypt will endure, they themselves will be silent after a certain time. They will speak no more.”

  “Will they still be, or does their silence mean they are not?” I had to know. How could Egypt endure without her gods? She would not be Egypt if her gods did not survive.

  “I do not know,” he said. “They do not say.”

  The snake had coiled around his neck, and now its head was burrowing down under his robe. I saw another movement: a second snake was on his lap.

  “You must not fear them,” he said. “They are creatures of Isis, dear to her. And they confer immortality on her chosen ones. I see them as my friends.”

  “Friends?” I felt a faint stirring near my foot. Isis, I prayed, please keep your creatures from my person. I knew I could not move suddenly or try to push them away or they might strike.

  “Death comes to us all, but the sacred asp brings it in a beautiful guise,” he said. He stroked the first snake’s back. “The hood spreads, the little teeth bite, and death steals over us quickly, painlessly.”

  “Painlessly?”

  “Indeed. Of all poisons it is the gentlest, the kindest. It takes you quickly, and leaves you looking asleep. No blood, no bloating, no writhing. Just a little sweat, a falling asleep, a serenity…I have seen it myself.”

  Yes, Mardian had mentioned the bite of the asp as a pleasant poison.

  “How many have you here?” Were there baskets and baskets of them?

  “I have never counted,” he said. “A great many.” He removed one and put it on the floor. “There.” He smiled. “I told you they are my friends. But for you, for the Pharaoh, they can be more than that. Their bite can be the instrument of death decreed by Anubis at the appointed hour. They are manifestations of the Lady of Power, the goddess Isis, wearing the crown of Lower Egypt.”

  My fear was ebbing away in the calm, droning voice explaining all this. He seemed to exert some spell whereby I felt safe, even among the snakes, against all common sense.

  “It was long ago revealed to me, by the stars I have studied, that my life would last until I beheld the Pharaoh who is also Isis. Now I have. It is today. Now I can—indeed, must—depart.”

  Before I could realize what his words meant, he grabbed one of the asps and clasped it to his neck. The creature did not like the rough handling, and spread its hood immediately. Instead of releasing it, he pushed it harder. A hideous hissing ensued.

  I dared not move. I could not grab it. All I could do was watch while it sank its teeth into his neck, wriggling and trying to free the other part of its body. He had closed his eyes as if receiving great pleasure. Finally he released the snake and let it drop onto his lap.

  I felt one of the snakes moving over my foot. I held as still as possible. But I whispered, “Good sir, what have you done? I must call a physician!” But I knew I was trapped in the room with the snakes; any hurried movement toward the door would make them strike me, too.

  “No. Do not keep me from my god,” he said. “Do not move.”

  I was forced to sit absolutely still while he dreamily described the feeling of numbness creeping up his neck, the coldness, the paralysis. Then his words stopped. I could see the sheen of sweat that lay on his face.

  I had no way of knowing when he actually died; it was very subtle. And he was right, it had been gentle. He looked happy, and as if he were alive.

  How long was I to be a prisoner in here with a dead man and snakes? Surely not all night! Surely Nakht would return!

  The time stretched out like a thin wire. I had the opportunity to review my entire life, to pray and compose myself for death, but I could do nothing but strain for deliverance. I wanted to live, and I was not concerned with the particulars, with my mistakes or future plans beyond the instant I would escape from this fetid chamber.

  The curtain rose. A young priest peered in, and immediately sensed what had happened. “So he has departed,” was all he said. “Our revered father, who—”

  “Get the snakes away!” I said. “Get them away!”

  “Oh. Yes.” He acted as if it were a peculiar request. He dropped the curtain and disappeared, then returned with a cage of mice, which he released on the floor. The snakes all rushed in that direction, almost tying themselves up in knots.

  I made my escape, and dashed from the room. “Isis!” was all I could gasp out. My heart was hammering like a rowing-master beating out an attack speed. “O dear Isis!”

  The young priest stood in the courtyard and raised a high, quavering wail; other priests streamed toward him, seeming to understand exactly what had happened. At length Nakht strode toward Ipuwer’s doorway, stopped and led the others in prayer. The litany droned and rose in a dull surge of voices.

  Then he summoned two priests, who stepped forward and entered the chamber, seeming not to feel any danger. I was still stunned, unable to believe what I had just witnessed. The old, mummylike man…the snakes…the suicide…

  They emerged carrying the limp body of Ipuwer. His sticklike legs swung to and fro, with surprisingly large feet dangling from them, encased in sandals that looked too heavy for him to lift. His even more withered arms barely gave the men anything to grasp. On his face the same peaceful smile remained that I had seen spread across it when he first felt the snakes.

  “Our holy one has departed,” said Nakht. “He must be prepared for the journey to eternity.”

  By that I assumed he must be sent to the embalmer’s. Only after the priests with their burden, followed by the other priests, left the courtyard, did Nakht turn to me.

  “You have granted him the desire of his heart,” he said.

  “So you knew he was going to do this? And you subjected me to it, and to danger?” I could not forgive him.

  He looked hurt. “No, indeed, Goddess, how could I? I did not know when Anubis would summon him! I only knew he had wished to live until the woman Pharaoh, the daughter of Isis, would rule. He spoke of it, how she would crown the line of Pharaohs, and e—glorify them.”

  He had meant to say “end them.” Was that what they foresaw? Was I to be the last Pharaoh? “I have ruled now for sixteen years,” I said. “There is nothing new in that. You must be honest. He meant until he met the woman Pharaoh, the last Pharaoh. Is that not what he meant?”

  “I do not know, Goddess,” he said. “I do not know what he meant. But it was easy to foretell that he would perish by snakebite. After all, he lived surrounded by them. They say anyone who handles snakes eventually gets bitten.”

  What a prosaic interpretation! Yet true.

  “How old was he?”

&
nbsp; “Over ninety,” Nakht said. “I believe I heard him say once that he had lived as priest, studying the holy mysteries, through the reigns of six Pharaohs—counting yourself.”

  “Six Pharaohs…our reigns must have seemed like the passage of the stars through the sky, quickly rising and quickly setting.”

  “Yes, to one stationary in the world, that is how it must have appeared. Come, the night barque of Re has set out beneath the earth. It is time to rest.”

  There were no longer any shadows; the sun had set and the first stars were emerging. The air, warm and scented from the flax fields and wildflowers, stirred against our skin, touching it tenderly. In the villages, people would be walking, meeting by the river, savoring this last sweetness of day as it extinguished itself. But here in the temple, which followed the movements of the sun, it was time to lie down in silence and darkness.

  Now I wished I had not agreed to stay. But it was too late.

  The chamber I was taken to was large, immaculately clean, bare. It was reserved for guests of the highest order; therefore it sometimes stood empty for years. A bed, itself unremarkable except that it was called the Bed of Dreams, waited to share my night hours. In one corner a very old statue of Isis stood on a pedestal, keeping watch over the chamber. A snake curled around each of her arms, spiraling upward like bracelets.

  Two small lights flickered at her feet. I was alone in the chamber, with no one to undress or attend me. I could not remember the last time I had been alone; although I often longed for it, tonight I felt abandoned. The cold, hard bed waited, and I steeled myself to lie down on it.

  Utter silence surrounded me. I was accustomed to sound during the night: the sea itself moving in the harbor below the palace, the faint voices of people in the city streets, sandaled feet passing outside my door, distant music from other quarters. Here, nothing. I felt as though I were Re, making my passage through the twelve hours of night under the earth. Indeed, the long, narrow bed felt like a barque.

  Here there were no distractions, no lute-player to flavor the hours delicately with music, no Iras or Charmian to come help me pass sleepless hours, no letters to read or reports to digest. Here there was only myself, watched over by Isis as the night deepened.

  What I had witnessed today…what I had heard…I did not know which was more disturbing: the old priest killing himself with the asps, or what he had said—about the gods of Egypt falling silent, and then seeing the last of the Pharaohs. Could he be believed? Or was he just a mad old man, dwelling too long in the temple, becoming as enfeebled as the wobbly setting sun he worshiped? In the sacred stories, Isis had tricked the weak sun into revealing his name, Re. It was Isis who had outsmarted him, challenged him. And it was Isis who had resurrected Osiris through her own determination. Isis did not accept defeat; no matter how hopeless the circumstances, she fought with all her skill and might, and triumphed.

  The statue of the goddess seemed to waver in the light. I turned my head and looked at her. I wish to be like you, I thought. I must be strong as well as compassionate. You never accepted fate as something immutable, but you remade your own fate against all odds.

  All my life that was what I had tried to do. If the old priest had glimpsed the end of the line of Pharaohs—why, it was but a glimpse, it was not something already written. It was only a warning. I could change that. I would change that.

  I slept; or, rather, darkness fell around me and entered my head. And then the Bed of Dreams lived up to its frightful name. I was visited, through all the night hours, with my own fearful glimpses of the past, the present, and the future. I saw the beginnings of Egypt, shadows riding in old costumes, driving old chariots; I recognized in human form some of the Pharaohs I knew only by statues (and was surprised at how small they had been in life). I saw my own self as a child, dressed in Greek clothes and living in my Greek palace, white stone instead of native brown and gold, saw Antony come to Egypt, and Caesar too, and then saw a swarm of other Romans, descending like locusts, blotting out the land. And other costumes, too, odder ones, followed them, surrounding the pyramids like a flooded Nile, lapping at their bases. Then the Nile subsided, and did not rise again, neither did it shrink. And I saw Heliopolis itself a ruin and a sandy mound, only the obelisks remaining to mark the center of the world.

  “Awaken, Exalted One.” A soft voice spoke in my ear.

  I did not wake up so much as I was delivered from these apparitions. Nakht stood by my bedside, lamp in hand.

  “Khepri nears the eastern horizon,” he said. “Soon he will emerge from behind the persea tree, and we must greet him there.”

  I felt so disoriented, so transported from my familiar world, that it seemed of utmost importance to greet the rising sun—I who allowed him to arrive unheralded each morning in Alexandria. Indeed, there were times when he was already high in the sky, sending beams into the middle of the room, before I even noticed him.

  “Yes, of course.” I rose. The lamps were still bright in the gloom. Isis stood watching.

  Outside there was no hint that dawn was coming except that the birds had awakened. Somehow they sensed the passage of time, the minute change in the intensity of the dark, in a way we could not. Walking down the avenue of obelisks, the palms behind them still invisible, we passed into the orchard, then to a mound where a circle of priests was waiting, their white robes swimming like mist out of the gloom. In the center stood the sacred persea tree, its bushy branches making the tree appear rounded. No one spoke, and we took our places silently in the circle.

  Gradually the sky lightened, and—never has anything seemed more solemn, deliberate, and majestic—a gray bed was prepared for the sun by the clouds on the eastern rim of the earth. Finally a wink of sunlight was seen, strong and true, putting the night to flight. It gleamed through the branches of the tree, painting each of the leaves so they shone, hundreds of little mirrors.

  The priests burst into song, rejoicing. Then, as the sun climbed above the horizon, they turned and walked swiftly back to the temple, passing into the open room with the gold-clad obelisk, standing before it in reverence.

  The shining surface of the obelisk, its beaten gold giving back wavering reflections, waited. A spark seemed to touch its pointed apex; a star grew there. It hurt my eyes to behold it.

  “Ahh,” the priests exhaled.

  “The sun is reborn,” they intoned. The burning spot at the apex intensified; then it faded. Along the ridge of the obelisk a flame seemed to appear, spreading up and down its length. The sun was growing in strength, climbing into the sky. Overhead it was no longer black, nor deepest blue, but a clear, jubilant, bursting azure. The day was here. The sun, the life, had returned.

  “Thanks be to Re,” they sang joyfully, celebrating their deliverance.

  As long as the sun rose each day, as long as they could behold it, their life was secure.

  It was their task to live each day as something contained unto itself, whereas I…I must try to anticipate the future, manage the present. How much easier just to celebrate the supreme achievement of another night passed….

  Now the priests turned and walked toward the ceremonial chamber, where the statue of Re must be ritually washed with purified water, and celestial food offered him by priests wearing the masks of stars. I watched as they lovingly wiped the face of the statue, as they had for more years than could be counted, and attended his imagined needs.

  Stars…how lovely to be attended by stars.

  Alexandria, Rome, Octavian, Antony—how far away they seemed, how small against the Egyptian gods.

  66

  In my strange life, I played many parts. I was Isis, I was daughter of Re, I was a Ptolemy—most scheming of ruling houses—I was Queen of Egypt, I was mother of the next Pharaoh, I was wife of a Roman Triumvir, I was Caesar’s widow, and Octavian’s implacable enemy. How fate had cast me in so many parts, I could not understand. How I could play them all, and keep them separate—if indeed I did—I understood even less.
/>   Antony had returned from Armenia some months after I had returned from Heliopolis. Of our two ventures, I think I was more changed by mine, although I had set out on it in all innocence, thinking only to inspect my balsam bushes—a mere business trip. He, who had high matters of state on his mind, had ended by conducting a campaign whose outcome was predictable. The might of all the east turned against Armenia. How else could it end, but with Artavasdes in chains, a royal prisoner?

  That he was in silver chains—that was the only novelty in it all. That, and Antony’s sudden, fierce desire to celebrate his victory in Alexandria. Rome had been silent toward him, despite the proud announcement of his conquest that he had sent posthaste to Rome. No feasts or celebrations were held, no days of thanksgiving decreed in the capital in his honor.

  “It is as if…as if they no longer look upon me as a Roman,” he had said. I could not tell, from his tone, whether he was insulted or shaken: perhaps a little of both.

  “I am sure your supporters in the Senate are trumpeting it,” I assured him.

  “No, my enemies are muffling it,” he fumed.

  “It cannot stay muffled.”

  “They should invite me for a Triumph,” he said. “I have earned it! How dare they not?”

  “As long as Octavian can counter it, he will.”

  “Octavian is still in Illyria,” said Antony stubbornly. “I want a Triumph. I have earned it!”

  He had never celebrated a Triumph, although his grandfather had, in the days when they were not easily awarded. But Triumphs were meant to mark victories over foreign foes, and Antony’s successes had been primarily in the civil wars. He had been hailed as Imperator three times, but those had been for actions against Pompey, against Cassius and Brutus, only finally against the Parthians. He and his general Bassus had been granted Triumphs for their success against the Parthians who had earlier invaded the Roman territory in Syria; Bassus had returned to Rome to celebrate his, but Antony had postponed it.

  “Yes, I know.” For a Roman general of his stature never to have celebrated a Triumph was a great void. He was aching to fill it; he wanted recognition. He wanted to ride in a chariot, be acclaimed, have prisoners of war march behind him, hear the shouts.