Steampunk Cleopatra

by Thaddeus Thomas

  Cleopatra smiled, but Amani was not yet done.

  “Grandfather says men have promised the moon ever since.”

  Cleopatra covered her mouth and laughed, and I realized that I had nothing to teach Amani in the art of befriending a princess.

  For their next meeting, Cleopatra joined us in the Library. She led Amani to one of the astronomy rooms and looked up the moon phases for the coming month. “See the next crescent? We’ll stay up all night. Maybe we'll see the falcon looking down at us.”

  “But we won't see her,” Amani said. “The lighthouse is too bright.”

  Cleopatra clinched her lips in solemn thought. “You're right. We will have to get away from the city, and maybe then we can see the lion, too.”

  I did not like the sound of that.

  If I had thought the parade of bodyguards that escorted Cleopatra to the Library was impressive for an eight-year-old, second-born princess, she was about to show me one better. With the soldiers that accompanied us onto the barge and the two other ships that sailed alongside us, we could have invaded a village.

  More soldiers lined the shore and circled the harbor square where a pillar stood, raised one hundred and fifty years earlier by Pharaoh Ptolemy Epiphanes. In three languages it proclaimed a single message: Epiphanes had begun a great work in Cyprus as a tribute to the god, Amun.

  That Cypriot temple was now a ruin; the boast had outlasted the work, and maybe that was the way of life.

  We sailed into calm waters as the sun set beyond the desert. Cleopatra called for the lights to be extinguished, but the captain of the guard kept his light and extended it over the water. It returned to us in moon-like reflections from the eyes of a half dozen crocodiles. No one had yet noticed that our barge had slipped a little lower in the water and continued slipping deeper still.

  We would later uncover evidence of sabotage. Not long after that, four suspected agitators would pay with their lives. For now, the girls stared up at the moon and swore to themselves they could see the goddess perched upon its tip. When they looked out across the water, which was almost even with their heads, it seemed her lover swam right to them.

  “The world is magical,” Amani said. “I've believed that my whole life.”

  Two years later, after the choosing ceremony and after Amani and I wept in the Library, I took her to Dio's house. He took her to the peristyle garden while I made arrangements for my trip to the Egyptian quarter. She sat in his lap, watching the suggestion of fish beneath the dark water.

  “Philostratos explained the situation,” he said. “We were meant to depart for Athens, but your education has become a passion for him. I’m willing to give you four years.”

  “Four?” Amani asked.

  “Four years is a very long time to you, little one, but it's only a moment to me,” he said. “I'm an old man. I've seen four years many times over, and I'm not likely to see many more. You can have him these four years. After that, he's mine again.”

  She buried her face in his chest. “Don’t take him from me.”

  The next day, I became not only her tutor, but Cleopatra's, and Amani had a bedroom in Cleopatra's palace. Dio moved me in with him, and with his arms around me, I could sleep.

  Papyrus 2.02

  Despite the concerns of the elder Cleopatra, I took Cleopatra and Amani to the Museum as often as Pharaoh would allow and spent hours introducing them to the breadth of knowledge within the Library. Berenice watched us leave each day; until, finally, I heard her ask Ganymedes, her tutor, if she could go. But she was the future queen of all Egypt. The Library must come to her.

  Late that afternoon, Theodotus found us in the Library. “Berenice has stirred up emotions in the palace. Tonight might be a good time for Amani to visit her family.”

  “What has she done?” Cleopatra asked.

  Theodotus looked sour, as if he were sucking on a mystery he would rather not share. I assumed he guarded the secret for its sweetness, but I was only half right. It had no taste for him, but he resented the joy we would find in it.

  “The two of you have a reputation for being clever,” he said. “She may be jealous.”

  “Of us?” Amani’s voice echoed off the walls.

  That night, I took Amani to stay with her grandfather. She hugged him gingerly as if she feared she might break him, and then the three of us sat around his table, drinking goat’s milk.

  “Have you made progress on your promise?” Ma'nakhtuf asked.

  “We’ve learned so much,” Amani said. “You wouldn’t even believe.”

  “There’s something there,” I said, “something that’s not there.”

  “Riddles,” Ma'nakhtuf said.

  “Two thousand years of riddles,” Amani said. “Egypt is older than you, grandfather.”

  Ma'nakhtuf laughed and took Amani’s hands. “If you’re to find the truth, the search must become your own. It has to be more than just a promise to me.”

  “Like what, grandfather?”

  He glanced at me. “Tonight, I’ll tell you a secret. I will tell you who you are, and you’ll understand. The history you seek is ours, but it’s also very much your own.”

  With that, Ma'nakhtuf said no more, and I knew it was time to leave them to their discussions.

  When I returned home, Dio was waiting for me in the back courtyard, at a table by the pool. He poured me a drink.

  “Arius visited me, today,” he said. “Berenice has lodged a complaint through that tutor of hers. At Pharaoh’s behest, the Library is investigating what you’ve been teaching his daughter.”

  I waved off his concern. “Pharaoh trusts me. This is nothing.”

  Dio lowered his voice. “He’s dangerous.”

  I set down my glass to keep my hand from shaking. The emotion in Dio’s voice gnawed at me.

  “Come away with me,” Dio said. “You’re not meant for politics, and teaching someone was only ever a way to broaden your mind to prepare you to be a better scholar. Cleopatra doesn’t need you. The world of knowledge does.”

  “There’s time. Cleopatra and Amani both will be scholars one day. If the gods smile upon me, maybe we’ll even work together.”

  “Those girls will never do anything,” Dio said. “They won’t be scholars. Amani is a companion to second-hand royalty, and that’s all she’ll ever be. You can be more, but you’ll never move us into the future by staring into Egypt’s past.”

  I kept my gaze focused on his. “Don’t ask me for the evidence. I don’t have it, yet, but something is missing in our understanding of Egyptian history and science. There are hints of it scattered everywhere, foreshadowing discoveries we credit to Alexandria. It’s as if something had been yanked out of time, and all I can find are the torn edges. Ma'nakhtuf required a history of this place before Alexander, but I think it goes much deeper than that. It may be that what we’ve developed here had its origins in times past and that history I’m searching for, it could explain that and so much more. If we’ve lost knowledge, then maybe the way forward is to find it again. When I’m gone and all those who knew me are dead, I want my name remembered in the Library. I want it carved into its walls, and, if what I believe is true, this is how we do it.”

  In response, he leaned across the table and kissed me. “I may not agree, but I trust you.”

  “Ultimately, I’ve always been a scholar, and this is my way to contribute.”

  “It’s a worthy ambition,” Dio said. “I’m at a point where I know there are more days behind me than ahead, I just want them to be worthwhile.”

  “How could they not be?” I asked.

  “Time is easy to waste, but when we met, I knew you were the key to everything. I placed upon you my need to be of value.”

  I kissed him. “Your life has more value to me than you can know, and I promise you this: we will go to Athens, and I will be by your side for as long as life may give us.”

  Papyrus 2.03

  When Amani’s parents told her about your
people’s past, they had said your family was Nubian, but that is neither a single country nor people. Nubia describes all the land south of Egypt, of which the most immediate neighbor was Kush.

  Hear me. Kush grew when the world ended.

  Once, all the world’s civilizations collapsed. All its kingdoms fell, but Egypt struggled on. A few hundred years into this dark age, the pharaohs of Egypt lost control of the south, and many Egyptians left the destabilized and chaotic upper Egypt to join with Kush.

  It took a little over fifty years for Kush to journey north and conquer Egypt. Its kings became pharaohs over the combined lands. They ruled until the old kingdoms clawed their way out of the dark ages, seeking their lost glory.

  In the quiet of his house, Ma'nakhtuf said, “During the reign of the Kushite pharaohs, they sent family to act as governors in Egyptian cities. For eighty years, those governors and their families established themselves in Egypt, and, when Kush left, some of those families remained behind.”

  Amani held his hand. “Our ancestors stayed behind.”

  “There are things about ourselves that we believe, and then there are those things we know,” he said. “When they steal our knowledge, we tell ourselves they cannot take away what we believe, but there comes a time when you realize belief is not enough. Belief will not sustain us through the generations. I tasked Philostratos with returning that knowledge to us, and now, you know why, my child. We cannot let this family forget who we are and where we came from.”

  Amani curled against him. “Does it matter so very much? Does it have to be more important who my ancestors were than who I am?”

  He was quiet a long time, and she apologized for upsetting him.

  “No, child,” he said. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Maybe, one day, who we are will be the only thing that matters, and nations will no longer select kings by their heritage of oppression. Maybe, there will be no kings, at all.”

  “But now?”

  “If you remember that your blood ran through the veins of a pharaoh of Egypt,” he said, “you’ll remember what may be the world’s most important truth; they are not better than we are. We stand eye to eye with the pharaohs, and, one day, we’ll prove it.”

  Dio’s home had been mine for over a year when the servant's voice called me out of bed. A messenger had come from the palace. A second son was born to Pharaoh, and Cleopatra's mother was dead.

  I taught Cleopatra to mourn her mother in Dio's fashion. She commissioned a water clock to be installed. The figure who held aloft the sword to count out the hours of the day was her mother, and the sculptor captured her likeness with tenderness and precision. Contrary to our tradition, the clock remained after the appointed period of grieving, forever ticking away Cleopatra's longing and pain.

  As I watched the hours count away, I felt time shorten. Three years remained to pay my debt to Ma'nakhtuf, and I had made little progress.

  I had hoped to find some clue as I taught the girls Homer, Euripides, and Herodotus. In The Odyssey, Homer had a sea god named Proteus imprison a ship's crew on the island of Pharos, the same island where our lighthouse now stood, only Homer placed the island a great distance from land. The writings of Euripides and Herodotus included Proteus, and they called him Pharaoh. None of it amounted to anything.

  Amani admitted our defeat to Ma'nakhtuf as they sat on the street’s edge, watching the world go by.

  “I’ve told Philostratos about the knowledge in our songs,” Ma'nakhtuf said, “but he doesn’t listen. Everything has to be the Greek way.”

  “What songs?” Amani asked.

  “In them, our people say Pharaoh built a secret library to hide our books during the days of the revolution.”

  “We can't find any trace of a secret library,” Amani said.

  “For once, the answers won't be in your books, because the books you need are hidden.”

  “Then there are no answers.”

  He tilted up her chin and kissed her forehead. “Look for something permanent.”

  Two generations earlier, Pharaoh had thinned the scholarly ranks of Alexandria. Tired of those who outclassed priest and pharaoh alike, Pharaoh drove out the foreigners. Creation is politically dangerous. The Library was safer now. In place of creation, it cataloged, and it had learned to be quiet and content with its lists.

  Even so, we still held some of our former glory, and I saw it anew in Ma'nakhtuf's eyes as we escorted him through the great arch for the first time. He never left the Egyptian quarter anymore, but he made one last exception for Amani. Now, he was our guest at the Royal Library.

  He sat where he could see the scope and depths of the buildings. We brought him scrolls, and his fingers stretched out over the papyrus, hovering over it and caressing it at the same time.

  “Can you imagine what Menephtheion must have been like in its day?” he asked.

  I smiled. The Royal Library of Menephtheion had predated Alexandria. What survived of its collection would be housed here, and yet, when Ma'nakhtuf saw the Library of Alexandria, he thought of the lost wonder of Menephtheion.

  Amani knelt beside him and lowered her voice so only we could hear. “There's something permanent we want to show you, but it means more stairs.”

  He patted her with a hand like leathery bones. “Show me.”

  Amani led him to the grand staircase that descended into the subterranean hall, its high wall etched with hieroglyphs and figures of the Ogdoad. At the top of the stairs, the old man gripped the marble balustrade and stared open-mouthed at the wall.

  “Can you read it?” Amani asked.

  “No one reads hieroglyphs,” he said, “but I can make out a few words.”

  “That's a start,” I said.

  He looked at me. “The glyphs are Egyptian, but not the language.”

  As we worked together on the translation, what emerged was fantastic, and, as such, nonsensical and irrelevant. It spoke of waves rippling unseen through the air, and machines communicating with one another at a distance.

  He admitted defeat, having translated as much as he could. The language was that of the kingdom of Kush but was not Meoritic, the written language developed after the last Kushite Pharaoh left Egypt. These carvings were only two hundred and fifty years old. Kush had retreated from Egypt three hundred and fifty years before that. These carvings purposefully used the outdated mode of writing the Kushite language using Egyptian symbols.

  “Menephtheion was first,” he said.

  We did not respond.

  “We capture generational memories in song,” he said. “They are messengers across time, but this one was always a mystery. I think you may have shown us its meaning.”

  “How so?” Amani asked.

  “Menephtheion was first,” he said. “That is one of the song's only three lines, and I think it points to this wall. Menephtheion was first, and the Library of Alexandria followed.”

  “And the rest?” I asked.

  “Menephtheion was first,” he sang. “The Oasis of Sekht-am was promised. The Southern Sanctuary establishes.”

  Amani held her grandfather’s hand. “I’ve studied those places.”

  “But that is as far as it goes,” he said, “and what do you do with that? Travel to Memphis and Thebes and the barren lands?”

  “Those locations are scattered all over Egypt,” I said, “but they all point to Alexandria. The Southern Sanctuary is mirrored by the temple Numenius leads.”

  “Alexander's tomb is here,” Amani said, “but the Oasis of Sekht-am is where he was supposed to be buried.”

  We had other locations to search, but, as I looked back at the great wall that had mystified me for so many years, I worried anything else we found would prove just as fantastic.

  In the heart of the royal quarter, I entered a pit woven with oblique rays of light. Law forbade additional torches. The architects had designed the serpentine fires to light the smooth marble pyramid that covered Alexander's sarcophagus; they assumed the figures on t
he wall served a supernatural purpose of blessings and wards of protection. In two-and-a-half centuries, I don't know that anyone had read them, and where I moved, my shadow washed over them. They were always on display but impossible to read.

  The law forbade fire but not mirrors, and I brought several with me. The mirrors caught rays from the windows above and directed them as I chose, allowing me both to light the walls and draw close to the figures. Sometimes, they were hieroglyphs. Often though, they were figures of the twelve gods associated with the twelve gates of the Duat. Their names were inscribed as a reminder to the dead, for, at each gate, the deceased would have to proclaim the name of the associated god. The first was named Sia; the name meant perception.

  I wrote down everything I saw.

  Amani and I brought the records to Ma'nakhtuf. The pieces he could translate described power flowing through thin strips of metal and ships traveling through the air.

  As I pondered the absurd magic I had worked so hard to transcribe, news came from Rome. Clodius was sending Cato to claim Cyprus.

  Why? Hear me. When Clodius was a young man, he was taken by pirates. The pirates thought they had a prisoner of value and demanded a ransom from the ruler of the nearest island. The island was Cyprus, and the ruler was Ptolemy's brother, who was also named Ptolemy, because, of course, he was.

  Instead of meeting their demands, Ptolemy sent a few coins as a miserly measure of Clodius's worth. The pirates thought it funny and let Clodius go.

  Clodius never forgot it. He held a grudge that lasted down through the years. It couldn't be enough that he had been set free, unharmed, not when the monetary exchange rate for his existence had been so undervalued.