The indistinct images haunted Amani, something few artworks had ever accomplished. For a moment, she wondered what this said about the future of Kush, but that was the point. Meaning was to be drawn out of her, not the paint. She tried again. What meaning did the room take from her? She turned to the broadest wall, across from the window looking out at Jebel Barka. She stood in the spot where the ghostly form stood and stared at it as it stared back at her.
She saw Cleopatra. It was only for a moment, but she saw her clearly. They had stared into each other's eyes, and as the vision passed, Amani thought she saw fear distort and pinch Cleopatra's features. It disappeared too quickly to be sure, but the emotional certainty remained heavy.
Teriteqas was watching her. She forced herself to smile.
“Are you well?” he asked.
“It's beautiful.”
“Something's wrong,” he said.
She tried to keep smiling, but her lower lip curled. Her breathing turned shallow and jerky. She went from fine to tears in the span of a breath, and, almost as quickly, he held her.
With another breath, she brought herself under control and pulled away. “Thank you, but I am well.”
“Of course you are.”
“I didn't expect to feel this way.” She dabbed at the corner of her eyes. “It took me by surprise.”
“I feel the same,” he said.
She nodded and looked back at the painting, hoping she would see Cleopatra again.
“When you work with someone for a long time,” he said, “sometimes you don't realize how you feel until it's right there in front of you.”
Amani remembered Cleopatra's constant presence as she had healed from her burns. She had become aware then that their love might go beyond friendship, and it had surprised her beyond comprehension. “You can't believe it's real, and you wonder if you're the only one.”
He turned her face toward him. “I'm going to see my parents. When I get back, I want to share something with you. You’ve spent time in Jerusalem. I think you’ll appreciate the significance.”
She nodded, and he wiped away another tear.
“I'll be back in a few days.” He drew in closer, but a sound outside the room caught his attention. He went out to greet the artists and lavish them with praise.
Amani turned back to the painting.
Papyrus 6.26
Jerusalem
The smell of earth, sweat, and breath fills the dark. I feel the tunnel wall to my left and the emptiness of space before me. Miriam becomes the pattern of her breathing. I know the weight of my clothes, the path of each drop of sweat, and the shape of each strand of hair that plays against my face.
“How far have we walked?” Miriam asks.
I have no answer for that, nor for how far remains. The tunnel has gone on too long. My lungs ache. My knees and feet hurt. My fingers are raw from where I drag them along the wall.
I try to answer her, but I cannot find the air. My thoughts fly away in panic. I lose my sense of direction and grope, searching for whatever it is that has made it so hard to breathe. Miriam cries out; I let go of her and sit.
The sound of my breathing reaches my ears, loud and gasping, but no relief comes.
Miriam's hands find my face. “Be calm. God is with us.”
Her voice sounds normal. I hear her breaths, same as before. If she can breathe, maybe so can I. Be calm.
“It cannot be much farther,” Miriam says.
I feel a fist let go of my chest, and I breathe in.
“We'll be out of here soon,” she says.
“I need to rest,” I say.
She sits beside me, and I am aware of the surrounding space, endless in every direction but below and at my back. There I am anchored.
“We're in the tunnel,” she says. “Only one direction to go.”
I hear water. A harbor. Waves lap against the hull of a boat. I smell salt and fish and the hint of flowers from the horticultural gardens or maybe from the garden on Cleopatra's island.
“You're in Jerusalem,” Miriam says.
I'm sitting on the harbor walk, with my back to a palace wall. Above me, the shutters are thrown open on a second-story window, letting in the night breeze.
“Philostratos,” Miriam says, “stay with me.”
I'm here. Just resting.
“We're going to make it,” she says.
A metallic arm snakes out the window.
“We're almost there,” she says. “Walk.”
Ancient Moira climbs out and up the wall, Urban cradled in an arm. He clutches something to his chest, something I cannot see.
“Don't stop,” Miriam says. “You can do this.”
Moira climbs up onto the roof and disappears just as Salvius and several Gabiniani pour out onto the harbor walkway. Salvius looks up at the window, just as a soldier peers through from inside.
Salvius barks orders: find them. Rouse every man to duty. They must not escape.
I follow Salvius, feeling my way in the dark, my left hand stretched out to touch the palace wall. I hear the breathing of soldiers beside me.
“Malachi died to get you out of here,” one of the soldiers says. “He claimed not to remember the way, but that wasn't true. He'd had his second chance at happiness. Now, he wants you to have yours.”
The soldier has me by the tunic. He pushes me forward while holding me up. My legs are weak; I'm ready to fall, but we circle to the front of the palace where a mob has gathered, angry and loud. More Gabiniani pour out into the street. They surround Cleopatra. The bloodthirsty cries of the crowd fill the city.
My legs collapse, and they push Cleopatra forward to be judged and executed. I close my eyes. This is the end. I will go no farther.
I awake into darkness and the taste of dirt. The air is cold against my sweat, and something scratches at the silence. I call out, and a voice answers. Miriam.
“I'm here,” she says. “I've explored a little farther, and the path is clear and flat. Do you think you can move?”
I tell her I'm too weak, even though I haven't tried. I don't need to. Weakness weighs upon me.
“We can rest a little longer,” she says.
Don't wait for me.
“I don't want to leave you,” she says.
I tell her I'm not going anywhere, and I think of Malachi. He's not going anywhere, either. This is his tomb, and perhaps it is mine. I don't know if I feel death coming, but I think it should come. I have had a life given to me. My intentions for it were grand, but by use of it, I have proven myself small. I could focus on the moments when I magnified the existence of others, if only I could snip out those stories and let the rest crumble into dust. Yet, the whole remains, and, with the whole, I struggle.
No one survives his own story. Does hope fair better? Am I the only man to have outlived the certainty of his value?
I am no villain. I am something worse, and you either know this or you cannot understand it. It is either truth or nonsense, and I will never convince you otherwise, either way.
I think of Ma'nakhtuf in the library, a place he never entered. I think of Cleopatra in the fields. Pain radiates through my arm and sets fire to my fingers, and my eyes screw shut.
I feel a weight upon me and, from within, an otherness. My eyes snap open, wide with the shock that something long expected has come.
Papyrus 6.27
Kush
Amani and Iras drank wine together in Amani's palace rooms--rooms Teriteqas had assured her were nearly as grand and spacious as his own. The curtains hung open and still. Beyond the shade of the peristyle, moonlight and moon shade played upon an interior courtyard, striking statues among the trimmed and trained trees.
“You and Teriteqas have been busy for months,” Iras said. “You need to rest.”
“I have a few days. He's going to see his parents.”
“Will you actually rest?” Iras asked. “Get away from the books? I need my cousin.”
“We’ll spend more
time together. I promise.”
“Good, the books will be there when he gets back.”
Amani took a long sip of wine. “He says he wants to show me something that connects Kush and Jerusalem.”
Iras say upright. “He said Jerusalem?”
“Yes, why?”
“Is there something you're not telling me?”
Amani must have drunk more than she realized. A bubbling numbness spread itself across her face. She laughed.
“He must see it as history repeating itself,” Iras said. “I just don't know if he's in love with you or sees you as a threat. Maybe, both.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The connection between Kush and Jerusalem,” Iras said. “It’s Moses. He married a Kushite woman.”
“And you think that has something to do with the relic Teriteqas means to show me?”
“He may find himself understanding how Tharbis felt.”
Amani laughed again, more boisterous than before.
“It's not funny,” Iras said.
“Our relationship is purely academic.” Amani felt a little dizzy now. She put down the wine.
“Academia does not require a trip to see his parents.”
Amani tried to frown, but the weight of her lower lip told her it was more of a pout. Iras could not be right. She simply couldn't be.
Papyrus 6.28
Teriteqas held before Amani an ancient Egyptian crown with not one cobra but two, a crown unique to the Kushite pharaohs. “This belonged to Tirhakah.”
Amani had spent enough years in Jerusalem to know the stories of the Jewish king, Hezekiah, and the pharaoh he was tempted to trust in God’s place. She smiled and stifled the laughter that threatened to come at Iras's expense. “It is beautiful.”
“As the qore of Kush and, later, as pharaoh of Egypt and Kush, he fought the Assyrians until they fled from the land of Judah. His brother was made pharaoh over him, but the gods knew Tirhakah's faithful heart. When Shebitku died, all the lands fell under Tirhakah's rule.” He turned to the window and the view of Jebel Barka. “Tirhakah was faithful to Amun, and Amun was faithful to Tirhakah.”
Amani saw how deeply Teriteqas identified with his ancestor. His brother would succeed their father as qore, but Teriteqas saw himself as possessing the faith Amun would reward. It was a belief he would have to keep hidden from his brother.
His religion was sincere, but that had not kept it free of politics.
“There's something more I want to show you,” he said, and Amani followed him out of the great temple and around Jebel Barkal to the western side of the great monolith. From this side, it resembled a uraeus, a cobra with a sun-disk on its head, the symbol worn upon Egyptian crowns.
Two temples bored into the base of the mountain.
“These were built for the goddesses Hathor and Mut,” Teriteqas said, “the consorts of Amun and the mothers of his children. They are places of rebirth, the anointing of the qore, and the celebration of the birth of his offspring.”
She followed him into the first temple, through a series of staggered stairs and landing courts, each court lined by a series of pillars carved into statues of stout, bearded men. They stood guard and loomed close, making Amani feel small.
These were the exterior chambers, but as they stepped up into the first room cut from the rock, she could see past the stone guards into the fire-lit interior with golden images and hieroglyphs painted against azure backgrounds. Beyond, in the inner chamber, stood a statue of the goddess, herself.
He brought her to the painted story of a serpent who turned into a lion until her father's messenger talked her into coming home again.
“This is the Eye of Ra,” he said, “and when I think of her story, now, I think of you.”
She saw kindness in his eyes.
“The creator, he whom the Egyptians called Ra but learned to know as Amun, gave birth to a goddess and named her Eye. In the form of a cobra she was his protector, and only through her could he see. They fought, and Eye left Egypt for Nubia and there transformed herself into a magnificent lion.”
She followed the story through the carvings on the wall. Ra sent Eye’s brother, Shu, to find her, and he drew her out with his magic. As they returned home, Eye transformed into a human, and, once returned to her father, she transformed back into a serpent and resumed her place in his forehead.
“You were the eye of Egypt,” Teriteqas said. “You protected them and gave them vision, and now you have come to us as a mighty lion with the science of our ancestors and the knowledge that will keep the foreigners from invading our lands, ever again.”
“And like the Eye of Ra,” she said, “I must return.”
He smiled. “Without you, Cleopatra is blind.”
“I don't know about that.”
“I do.” He leaned in as if to kiss her, but he lingered there with the patience of a priest, not the assumption of a warrior.
Shame burned in her chest. She wanted his kiss.
She lifted her hand to his cheek and kept it there. “If Amun grants that you be qore, I know you will lead your people well, but you must understand; I love Cleopatra.”
“I didn't tell you why I left to see my parents. Amun gave me a dream, and I felt it necessary they hear it from me before I shared it with you.”
“You saw Amun anointing you above your brother?”
Teriteqas shook his head. “It wasn't about me.”
“Then...”
He took her hand in his. “I saw you return to Kush and lead it as both qore and kandake. Your machines fought with you as you stood against the Romans and drove them away from our land.”
Amani’s hand trembled.
Papyrus 6.29
Jerusalem
Maybe I hold on to hope for its veneer of self-respect, but where I should be moved to action, I am unmoved. When death comes, it will find me an old man, content in a history of my own making and unwilling to risk the illusion. Is the warrior queen also the girl I once knew and loved? If I knew that to be true, in the way that Malachi knows his God, I would be somewhere else other than here. I would be doing something sweeter than writing lies.
I ask Andros if we can sit inside, away from the dark and the smell of dirt. Andros is bearded and graying and still so very young, at least to an old man like me. He worries about what he will do when I'm gone, or, at least, he says he does. I don't think there's much to worry about. He will do just fine.
Do you know you're beautiful? I ask him.
Only because you tell me every day, he says.
Only because I have to, I say. It is a routine of ours, and he smiles without understanding. I have never told him why.
I'm hearing more stories, I say, of the one-eyed queen of Kush.
His smile turns bittersweet and pitying. Don't do this, Philo.
She alone leads her country.
You spend all your time looking for her, he says, but she's nowhere to be found.
She's defeating Roman armies and controls the southernmost lands of Egypt.
He's not heard that before, and he falls silent.
They call her Amanirenas. Do you know what that means? I ask.
It means Her-name-is-Amun. This part he's heard.
Maybe he's right, and the time to let her go has come. It's not fair to him. I tell him he's the love of my life, but I keep holding on to other things.
A monstrous cry echoes in the distance. The beast has devoured another soul.
Amani, I say. It means Her-name-is-Amani.
Andros does not answer because I am alone in the house. I am alone, and the land outside my window is not Egypt, nor is it Jerusalem. There is no sky, only rock, and I know it is night because Ra has risen out of the west. He will fly through the land all night until he leaves this place to arise in the land of the living, tomorrow morning.
Ra is flying east, and I must follow him. I know this, and, yet, I can also stay. I want to be here when Andros returns, and t
he history of Amani and Cleopatra lays waiting for me on the table, more scrolls yet to be written.
The scrolls draw me to them. I write:
A mob had gathered, angry and loud. Gabiniani poured out of the palace and into the street. They surrounded Cleopatra. The bloodthirsty cries of the crowd resonated through the library where I stood at a window, weapon in hand, one of Amani's designs.
I aim and fire. An arrow pierces through the skull of a Gabiniani. Another arrow loads in its place. I fire, and as my arrow strikes one in the chest, another soldier is struck in the back of the neck, the arrow almost perpendicular to the ground.
Swords drawn, the Gabiniani turned to see their latest attacker, but Moira was already upon them. Her metallic arms struck down some and blocked the attacks of others. Arrows sliced through the air, cutting down those around her until she reached Cleopatra and snatch her up in her arms. She plunged through the startled crowd, crossed the Canopic Way, and disappeared into the city.
A year would pass before I saw Cleopatra again.
I feed the scroll my ink, but it only wants more. The ink is red, and my pen is bone. It protrudes from my broken wrist.
Startled, I stumble away from the table. Outside, I can still see Ra, his barge dimly visible within the sun disk.
Eastward. I must go eastward to be judged.
There is a god whose name I remember, the god of perception and intellect, a favorite in the Library. I speak his name, Sia, and the door to the house opens. I cross the threshold and feel the floor pull away behind me. The house spits me out and slowly sinks, its windows staring at me. It settles into the sands of Duat to await the arrival of another soul.
Steampunk Cleopatra Page 28