Steampunk Cleopatra

by Thaddeus Thomas

  Now, Clodius had power. He sent Cato to Cyprus, and the Cypriot Ptolemy sent messengers to his brother, our Ptolemy, seeking the funds he thought necessary to bribe his way out of trouble.

  I'm not sure whom he thought he might bribe. Cato was famously a man who could not be bought.

  We continued our work following the verses of the song, and the last location suggested was the temple. Its inner recesses were not meant for the public. The priests intervened between gods and men, and the holy places were theirs alone to occupy.

  I trained Amani for days, perfecting her plea before Numenius.

  Amani met Numenius at a temple dedicated not to a god, a particular Pharaoh, nor even a cult, but the ascendancy of kings. She entered among stone pharaohs who watched over the city and passed through the colonnade to the court of Thutmose.

  A small crowd emerged from the temple. Guards preceded a crier who announced Numenius. Numenius emerged in flowing robes and bade Amani join him among the pillars. She pleaded her cause with a prepared speech and found him unmoved.

  “I am the priest of Ptolemaic gods, child,” he answered. “My temple will not betray him.”

  “This temple was first dedicated not to the king of men but to Amun, the king of the gods,” Amani said. “These walls, these stones, they still remember their Egyptian duty, and they need not hurt Pharaoh to see it done. I serve Cleopatra, and she is the smartest and best equipped to be Queen among her sisters. Never would I hurt her or her family. I won’t hurt ours, either.”

  Numenius stepped back. “Our family? We are as different from one another as the Greeks are from us. There is no family between us.”

  “We started here. We were born of the Nile.”

  His eyes stared into hers with sorrowful compassion. “This is a dangerous time. Rome would claim both our wealth and our lands as their own. Do you know why they haven't?”

  “Pharaoh's gold?”

  Numenius shook his head. “His last trip was successful, but we can't forever bribe the beast to feed elsewhere. Wild men arise in Rome, men who know no fear, and we cannot keep them away forever. Already, their teeth are bared for Cyprus. Once they take that from us, it will be impossible to sate their hunger.”

  “Before they come, give me this,” she said. “Let me search.”

  Numenius stretched out his hand and took hers. “In three days, Pharaoh will name the tutor for his eldest son. Preparations for the event will keep the family busy and focus the city's attention. You have until then.”

  Over those days, she copied not the scrolls but the inscriptions on the walls. Each night she returned to give me her notes, and I wove them together with what we had already learned.

  I had begun this journey out of obligation and honor and carried with me through it all the burden of doubt, but this, what was this the hieroglyphs were suggesting? Out of antiquity, something new.

  There must have been a moment in the lives of the great minds when they perceived the possibility of what they would later discover. Perhaps, this was one of those moments, the first of such moments, not just for me but the first for Alexandria in many years. On the seas of intellectual wandering, I had spotted land.

  We had spotted land, Amani and me, and for three days I sailed on winds of ecstasy. On the fourth day, Amani went back, but Numenius had gone to the Museum for the ceremony. Time had run out.

  Papyrus 2.04

  The day of the ceremony had arrived, but we could not bring ourselves to go. We stood outside the Museum as all the illustrious names of Alexandria entered. Illustrious in politics and in war. In thought? Illustrious in knowing the works of those who had come before.

  Pathetic. Vile. Mediocre.

  “We’re missing something,” Amani said, her words barely audible.

  “We’re missing everything,” I said. “It’s not enough to know the knowledge once existed. We need the books. We need the science.”

  “We’ve run out of options,” she said. “The evidence we’re looking for doesn’t exist. At this point, Pharaoh himself could decree otherwise, and I wouldn’t believe it.”

  Her words cut through my flesh and stabbed at my heart. “You want a decree? We would have protected those books. It goes against everything we believe ourselves to be to let a single word be forgotten.”

  Lights twinkled in the blacks of her eyes. “A decree! The Southern Sanctuary establishes.”

  “You’ve searched the temple.”

  “There is another inscription in Alexandria, a decree from Pharaoh, like the pillar outside the Southern Sanctuary.”

  Not far from the Southern Sanctuary stood a pillar raised by Ptolemy Epiphanes, and on it, he had written the seventeenth decree in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the common writing of the people.

  “Everything the song referenced was built when Alexandria began,” I said. “Epiphanes erected that pillar a hundred and fifty years later.”

  She ignored me and ran to the harbor, where Ptolemy Epiphanes had raised the pillar south of the city wall. It was a proclamation for all to see, but it had become visual noise, barely seen, rarely read.

  We stood before the pillar. It told us the same story three times. Despite the native revolt, Pharaoh was building a temple to Amun across the sea.

  Such a temple had existed in Cyprus. Seven years earlier, an earthquake left nothing of it but ruins. If it were once a secret annex to the Library, all that would be gone now, and we had no proof it ever existed, only the suggestion that Epiphanes built it to protect the dynasty's most treasured books from the Egyptian uprising.

  It was possible.

  Amani fixed on my eyes with an almost tangible expectation. Her own eyes crinkled as her cheeks rose in a toothy smile. “I’m right, aren’t I? They shipped the knowledge of my people to Cyprus.”

  Although my heart pattered, I hesitated, thinking it foolish to raise our hopes high. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “You say that, but your face tells another story.”

  “What my face does, I can’t control,” I said.

  “Which is why your face is bolder than your words.”

  “We can’t know without seeing it for ourselves,” I said.

  She raised herself on her tiptoes, even though she had grown so tall the gesture was hardly necessary. “Can we go?”

  Cyprus was at the center of the tension between Egypt and Rome.

  “Maybe we can’t go,” I said, “but Alexandria can.”

  Amani clung to me as we wormed our way through the Museum. Crowds gathered to hear Ptolemy name his son’s tutor.

  Amani pulled at my tunic. “If we give it to Pharaoh, we'll lose my people's history forever.”

  “It's okay,” I told her. “You're safe.”

  “Let's just leave,” she said. “Please.”

  I peered past the crowd to the platform where Ptolemy stood. Elsewhere, voices raised. The crowd surged and parted, and Theodotus pushed his way through the crowd to stand before Ptolemy. I had recommended Theodotus as a tutor for the prince. It was strange for him to be late for his own ceremony.

  “I have news for Pharaoh's ears only,” he announced.

  The crowd roared with a hundred whispers. Ptolemy called Theodotus to him, and they pulled back for a modicum of privacy. With everyone distracted, Amani and I risked squeezing forward and reached the front just as Ptolemy addressed the crowd.

  “Matters of government demand my attention,” he said. “My family welcomes Theodotus as my son’s newly appointed tutor.”

  Pharaoh signaled for the guards to escort me in. Amani and I followed him and Theodotus as they hurried out of the main room. When we had entered a more secure and private space, Ptolemy instructed us to wait while he and Theodotus withdrew to couches against the far wall.

  Amani brought her mouth to my ear. “What's going on?”

  I glanced at the guards. “Trust me.”

  Theodotus looked at me as if sensing our conversation. He was a masculine eun
uch, with dark, searching eyes.

  “Don't tell him,” Amani said.

  “Our news has nothing to do with this,” I said.

  Across the room, Ptolemy rose to his feet and beckoned for me to follow him. His eyes were heavy and his pace slow, and he stopped just outside a passage that led back to the palace. “I must save my brother from Rome.”

  He left me, and the doors closed behind him.

  Theodotus's eyes were wide. “Did he tell you?”

  “Ransom?” I asked. “If he pays, the people will revolt.”

  “And if we lose Cyprus?” he asked.

  Amani gripped me.

  If the possibility of a Cypriot annex was to be explored, it had to be done now. I spoke without knowing I would. “I have to go.”

  Amani's grip tightened. “I'm going with you.”

  “I'll propose the trip to Ptolemy as a reconnaissance mission. He'll agree to that, but not if you're coming along.”

  “You’ll tell Ptolemy?” she asked.

  “Not now,” I said, “but we can't hide it forever.”

  “Hide what?” Theodotus asked.

  I took pity on him. “I'm going to Cyprus.”

  “Impossible,” he said. “People will think we’ve sent you with Rome's payment. They will riot.”

  Amani planted her feet and pointed up at me. “See? You’ll cause a riot.”

  Theodotus took her hand in his. “I'm saying we have to be political about this. He'll need a cover story, one of which Pharaoh will approve and the people will believe.”

  I hated to trust him, but he was my friend. “What story?”

  “There’s one thing you could claim that everyone would believe,” he said. “You're taking time to study at Plato's Academy.”

  I grimaced as at the taste of sour fruit. “That's not something I'd care to lie about.”

  I sent Amani to be with Cleopatra, while I sought an audience with Pharaoh who was still in the harbor-side palaces, attending to business. Theodotus followed me.

  “By the time you’ve finished meeting with him,” he said, “I’ll have your cover established.”

  We waited in the banquet hall, as we had the day Pharaoh made me his daughter’s tutor. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Ptolemy may have other ideas.”

  “For anyone who knows you, there is no other way. You talk about the Academy, constantly.”

  “I’ve made plans to go with Dio.”

  “And you will,” Theodotus said, “after you return the conquering hero. Dio will understand, and, when you go, he’ll be with you.”

  “After my audience--”

  “It will be too late. You have a private audience and everyone wants to know why. If I spread the word now, everything is different. There is no mystery. Instead of convincing everyone, you’ll have the time you need with Dio to say goodbye.”

  It made sense, and we would want that time, Dio and I. He would know the truth and see me as the protector of Pharaoh and Alexandria. The four years I’d promised to serve as tutor would be over by the time I got back, and Dio and I would sail away to Athens.

  I imagined a little house against the city wall. Dio would spend most of his alone time at our writing desk, recording his life story, and, when I was free, he would show me his favorite places and introduce me to his oldest friends. I would care for him through sickness and old age, and he would live to be ancient, a hundred and ten, like the great men of times gone by. When he died, I would burn his body on a pyre, remembering him the way Alexander remembered Hephaestion.

  Kings, queens, and generals at war would see the fire’s glow and wonder at the love it declared.

  Papyrus 2.05

  Pharaoh took some convincing, and the lighthouse burned against the night sky by the time I left the palace. At the gate to Dio’s home, my home, the servant refused me entrance.

  “Tell me this is a mistake,” she said. “Let me go to him with news that you are taking him with you.”

  “This isn’t what he thinks,” I said. “Open the gate.”

  She fumbled with the latch and then ran to tell Dio. I entered and waited. The grand space felt claustrophobic.

  When at last Dio came, he kept the space of the room between us. “Am I going with you?”

  “Cyprus...” I saw the hurt in his eyes and could barely speak. I crossed the room, meaning to take him in my arms, but he held up at hand to stop me.

  He couldn’t even look me in the eye. “No, then.”

  I wiped back tears. “It's not what it seems.” In a moment, he’d see. Everything would be explained, and we would be okay. The months apart would mean little compared to the lives we would share for all the years to come.

  “Go,” he said. “Maybe, it's best. Ptolemy sold us out in Rome, and I'd hate for you to be here when he falls. It's always been inevitable. I think you know that, and if not, maybe you knew I believed it. I tried not to hassle you over his incompetence because of the position you're in, but, now, it's best you go.”

  My mouth opened to answer him, but nothing came out. He had called Ptolemy incompetent, and, though close to the truth, such things were not said. Dio knew better. He was just angry. That’s all it was. Once he understood, everything would be okay.

  “I met with Pharaoh...”

  “And it's best you go alone,” Dio said. “If you can't see what a fool Ptolemy is, then you're not the man I want you to be. If ever a Pharaoh deserved the wrath of his city, it's your flutist.”

  My breath left me.

  “Turn me in if you wish.” He turned away. “You've already killed me. What more could Pharaoh do?”

  “This is not who you are,” I said. If he really believed these things, it would be treason to tell him my plans. One public word of the truth, and the city would erupt into riots. Ptolemy would fall, and those around him would suffer.

  But I knew Dio. He was no crazed conspirator.

  He growled at me; his lip curled, and hatred burned in his eyes. “Rome would be better than the fool you serve.”

  I stumbled back as if pushed.

  “The people favor Berenice,” he said. “One way or another, they'll see she comes to power.”

  If the mob chose to replace Ptolemy with Berenice, that would not save her sisters, nor those close to them, like Amani.

  No matter how much I wanted it, I knew now I could not tell Dio the truth. One betrayal and Amani would be trapped. I would be helpless to save her.

  For a moment, no one spoke. I would have abandoned Cyprus for Dio, but my commitment to Pharaoh made that impossible; Dio’s hatred of Pharaoh made it impossible to explain.

  “I loved you.” The past tense horrified me.

  “I gave you everything.” He held out his hand, weighing my worth. “How have you loved me? Like this? The Academy meant everything to me, but now it will remind me only of you. May its ground rot beneath your feet.”

  I wanted so much but saw no option but to leave. He turned, but, still, I stayed. My love for Dio outweighed my loyalty to Pharaoh. Let the kingdom fall, as long as we were together. Even if I told him, he would never use that knowledge. He would understand that Amani’s life would be forfeit, and he loved Amani as much as I did. He might lose sight of our love, but he would never betray me in this way. He would keep my secret rather than sacrifice Amani for political gain.

  The memory of Cleopatra’s sinking barge came to me, with every hand but mine reaching to save Cleopatra. I, alone, rescued Amani, and it was not even Cleopatra they saved. It was power.

  Alexandria was capsizing. Would Dio sacrifice a chance at power to save Amani, purely because of what she meant to me? A day earlier, I knew what my answer would have been, but not now. His condemnation of me was a betrayal of all we had been to each other. This was his great evil. He had known and loved me, but when it mattered most, he failed to trust me. With something that simple and great, all our hopes unraveled. That which mattered most to us was now destroyed.

  I swore t
hen I would never be that man. I would never fail to trust the ones I loved.

  The fishermen readied their boats for a night on the water, but Amani and I sat on the seaward side of the island. Further down the short beach began the agora, the barracks, and the keeper's quarters. From there, a man-made jetty stretched to the lighthouse, and my gaze followed it to the lighthouse, our lighthouse, a wonder of the world. We had a book in the Library that said so. It was the kind of book we produced these days, a book of lists. True scholars were rare. Cleopatra was a scholar. Her father was not, nor were so many of the pharaohs before him. Ptolemy liked a library that created lists. It honored him without bringing glory to itself.

  When I returned with the ancient secrets of Egypt, not even Pharaoh could refuse them. The Library would be glorified once again, and I with it. They would carve my name into its stone and tell my story throughout the generations. My name would last for all eternity, a scholar, an adventurer, a hero. Both past and future would have my fingerprints upon them. I would be immortal.

  Amani found her voice. “If you and Dio aren’t together, you don’t have to go away.”

  I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and pulled her into me. She rested her head against my chest for a long, quiet time.

  “There are Egyptian ruins on Cyprus, somewhere on the western end of the island,” I said at last. “I'll have to see Ptolemy's brother and meet with Cato, but I'll get away. If there's anything left to find, I'll bring it back. I promise.”

  3

  The House of Ptolemy

  Amani watched Berenice study the workings of the statue, which marked the passing time. The mechanics of the clock were hidden outside the palace, but she studied the artwork of the sculpture with displeasure. Amani suspected she had no concept of the complex system of tanks, gears, and siphons that resulted in an accurate measuring of the hours at any time of the year.