Cleopatra Occult (6 page)

Mark put a hand up. “Hey, wait a minute. Slow down, there. Not so fast. Are you sure you’re in his will like that? How could you even know? How could you have seen his will? That’s improper for you to have seen his will. Nobody can see that—that’s secret!”

Octavian smiled. “If it’s there and I can read it, I shall. I’m as curious as anybody else. You would have done the same. Don’t act so righteous around me.”

Mark maintained, “That’s illegal.”

Octavian shrugged. “Too late. I saw it and it can’t be unseen.”

“You have to be alive to inherit.”

Octavian sardonically raised his well plucked eyebrows. “Is that a threat?”

“Play your little games, the big game isn’t over. I have to go to Egypt to do the work of my Caesar. Later we’ll have to continue our little squabble.”

Octavian grimaced and stomped out.

~

Phaedra sat at her handmaiden’s sickbed, a few blankets on the floor of the back porch. It overlooked a walled courtyard and fountain filled with statues of Greek mythological characters in their modern Roman guises.

Phaedra wept, “Please, Circe, get well. Please get well. I don’t know what I’d do without you. You have to get well so we can leave. I can’t stay here.”

Circe whispered, “Your husband is here, I know.”

“Oh my Pegasus! How did you know that?”

Circe nodded. “I could just tell. Truth be told, you shook like you’d seen a gryphon.”

“Close. He has evil in him. He was cursed by the gods, surely. He came later with all those poets.”

Circe asked, “Has he seen you? Does he know you’re here?”

“I don’t think so. We were already wearing our masks. He only seems to enjoy his wine and the other men who are also mad drunk poets.”

“He’s a mad poet?”

Phaedra moaned. “That’s why I first fell madly in love with him. He swept me off my feet and I felt so dizzy. But then I finally came back down to the ground and I realized he was mad. Truly and terribly mad. The gods must have punished him. At the temple school I was warned that love was madness… any and all romantic love was insanity. Sometimes we pulled it off and sometimes it destroyed us. I wouldn’t listen to my teachers. I resented them too much, anyway, because they weren’t my mother. She made me live at school so that she could be a whore while Father was always away on business. So I was confused and foolish and needy. I didn’t listen to anybody and went head over heels for him, making my home there. I was obsessed with his every word… day and night wasn’t long enough to be with him. I thought he was so smart.”

Circe said, “That all sounds good and wise to me.”

Phaedra shook her head. “One day after we were married he took me to the barn to mate with me… making terrible animal sounds.”

“But…”

“I know, I know, I know… as a husband that’s his right… but then he tried to make me mate with a horse. He said it was so I’d give birth to a centaur. He insisted we all had magic spells in us and it would work. He said the modern age needed centaurs back. Of course I’d have been killed trying such a horrible thing. I ran away. I’ve been running ever since. It’d be so horrible if he ever found me and took me back to be his wife. It’d kill me!”

“We mustn’t die!”

“I’ve been careful with men ever since. Never let crazy feelings get in the way. Never get crazy. Be careful with men. Be careful with your feelings. You only have one heart, don’t ever throw it away, foolishly.”

Circe wept. “Hold on to life!”

“Plato has even stated that love is a serious mental disease and Socrates agreed when he once said that love is a madness.”

Circe gasped for air.

“You’ll be okay. You have to be okay! I love you too much for you not to be okay. I love you! You’re my right hand. You’re in my thoughts all the time. That means I love you! I’m madly in love for you but that’s okay and safe because you’re not a scary man.” She kissed her forehead. “You just need a warm nap to burn off any fever and you’ll wake up feeling much better. You sleep until you’re all better!” She tucked the top of a wool blanket under Circe’s chin.

Tears rolled down Circe’s cheeks. “I’m sorry Cleopatra.”

“No, no. Of course I’m not Cleopatra! It’s
Phaedra
. I am Phaedra. Look at me. You poor dear. Can’t you see me?”

“I’m sorry Cleopatra. We failed. The plague got to us first.”

“It’s Phaedra! It’s Phaedra! You don’t serve Cleopatra.”

“I serve the queen. I serve the queen. I serve...” She died.

Phaedra painfully clutched at her own heart. “You can’t die! I love you too much and that has to do something about it!” She sobbed.

A thin red snake slithered out of Circe’s mouth.

Phaedra jumped back, horrified. 

Chapter seven

Deep under the Sinai Desert, in the temple to the snake god Apophis, the glowing jewels dimmed. The meandering tunnels went dark.

Cleopatra cried, “Iset? Are you still there? I can’t see!”

Iset called out, “Yes, and until the moon is full again to recharge the lights we must see with different eyes.”

“But I can’t! I’m afraid!”

Iset said, “It’s only the loss of eyes. All of eternity will be spent in Hades where there is no sun or moon. Learn to see with other eyes.”

Cleopatra reached out for the wall. “Can
you
see?”

“Yes I see with my snake eyes.”

“You have snake’s eyes?”

Iset said, “Yes, many of them.”

“What do they all see?” 

Iset moaned. “Failure.”

Cleopatra gasped. “For
everything
?”

Iset answered, “I can’t see that far. But I see that the servant girl has died.”

Cleopatra asked, “My brother’s witch got to her?”

“She died of the plague.”

“But… but how can that be? You sent the plague in the first place, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I sent it to push them here.”

Cleopatra inarticulately complained.

Iset answered her, “For every action there is a reaction and we can’t control them all. We just have to think on our feet and change plans.”

Cleopatra asked, “How can your magic do that… how can you have lost control?”

Iset answered, “Magic is always a bit out of our control. There are always many unintended consequences to any action. The one who does magic best not only plans ahead, and tries to avoid doing more harm than good, but also must keep moving as the waters flow about you. The wind always blows in layers.” She loudly sang out into the dark, “
Sky above and water below, you are a hundred things at once, with a hundred eyes
.”

Cleopatra wrung her hands. “I can’t think! I can’t see! I can’t think this way!”

Iset reminded her, “You lie awake in the night and think all the time.”

“But… only if I’m in bed and it’s calm!”

“You must be calm now. You’re still just as safe as you were when the crystals were glowing and lighting up the path.”

“I need to see the path!”

“Let your feet feel the path.” 

Cleopatra cried, “What’ll we do? You told me that the servant girl was from a long family of witches. She was our last hope!”

Iset said, “No, it’s the woman who she was serving who is our last hope. We must change plans and put all of our eggs in one basket now.”

Cleopatra moaned. “Phaedra is our
one basket
? Is that going to be enough? She doesn’t come from a great family of witches from the island of Aiaia, like Circe did. The Circe witches were once strong enough to turn Odysseus and his men into animals.”

“Not everything great comes from families, and nobody needs to be turned into an animal unless you’d rather be one—cats can hunt in the dark.”

“I’d love to be a black cat right now, full of magic and sight! If only they’d allow a cat to sit on a throne.”

“This Phaedra has strong intuition for the wild ways of the witch. And her mother put her in a temple school. They taught her the cultivated ways of the priestess.”

“Is that enough for us now?”

Iset assured, “Not only will she have to do but there is great promise.”

Cleopatra moaned. “I have to leave and get to Alexandria as soon as possible, I know that much. My army is too far away for now but I have ten loyal men in Suez. From there, pray to the gods that I get to my throne directly.”

“We pray for your speedy journey. Everyone must converge at the palace on the first full moon of the year. It’s midsummer soon, when the Nile overflows her banks—the Egyptian New Year. All the gods of all the lands marvel at the Nile’s consistency.”

Cleopatra said, “The New Year is best to begin new things, yes.”

“My magic will be strongest at that juncture, as all the gods watch the Nile. The resurrection story of Persephone is universal to all farmland and must play out.”

Cleopatra asked, “
Play out
… for them or me.”

“For us all. Out of death comes new life.” Iset began to sing an ancient work song of the field peasants, “
Bury the seed, a burial today, the dead seed must be buried for a springtime resurrection...
”  

As her singing echoed in the dark, invasive bats filled the tunnel in a teeming aerial flush. Cleopatra followed the sounds of the wings.

~

Overground in the Sinai Desert, Cleopatra found herself amongst the fourteen Mounds of the West where spirits traveled to be rejuvenated for a new life of eternal death. Cleopatra prayed, “Magic Stars, appear upon the sand and lead me away. Be my guiding light.”

She remembered what Iset had instructed, “…follow the locusts from dune to dune or you will go in circles.”

Cleopatra watched the horizon. Finally, far away in the sky, two swarms of locusts lifted, merged and mingled. She waited to see where they’d head and then she followed them off.

A vaporous skeleton flickered before her, crying, “Don’t go that way, you’ll step off the turtle’s back and fall off the face of the earth… the
real
earth!”

Another phantom skeleton appeared long enough to warn her, “Don’t follow the demons of lust, stay with us! Don’t let their wings brush you or you go mad with lust and all manner of desire!”

Cleopatra answered, “Fly the teeth of the wind. Share my wings. Follow them to the gardens of life.”

Skulls blew in the wind and begged her not to go.

She maintained, “I will go where there is life blooming!”

A skeleton rose out of the sand and said, “The fallen angels are those who wanted flesh and blood for their own arms and legs. They trick you into thinking those are good things! Stay in the greenless garden east of Eden where all things are still unborn and holy—where everything is still a perfect seed!”

Many skeletons appeared, to cry, “You will make barren all that was green! Stay away from the garden of evil!”

Cleopatra said, “I’m hungry and it’s growing for me to eat it.”

“No!”

“I will eat with the locusts and I will give thanks!”

“No!”

Cleopatra insisted, “That is the way of the tree of life. We grow so we can consume. You go to Hades. I am still alive so must follow the demons to the garden. I must go to where there is green. The devil is all things made physical.”

“
No
! The Hebrew Garden of Eden! The Nubian Mound of Benben! The Zoroastrian Tree of Gayomard! It is all one place of one sunrise and one birth! Stay behind! Stay away from the world of growth and pain! Come back into the realm before the womb… the eternal state of unconsciousness and peace!” The flying bones became bright and solid, clanking together loudly.

Cleopatra picked up a handful of sand. “You are as unsubstantial and as uninteresting to me as this sand! Go back to your eternal oblivion! Go back to how you were before you were born!”

“No! You don’t want to rot!”

She yelled, “The seed is not as interesting as the tree!”

“The branches break!”

She yelled back, “At least that is
change
!” She threw the sand and all the screaming bones were gone.

As Cleopatra stepped through the veil of life and death, and entered mundane desert, she saw that the sun was in a different place in the sky. Two white Egyptian vultures were soaring. She walked for an hour until she came to a deep ravine. A leper colony was at the bottom at a chain of caves. A blind woman put her fingerless hands out and called up to Cleopatra, “Are you the one I prayed for? Will you heal us?”

“You prayed for a healer? Only Isis can heal... yes, I am Isis.”

The blind woman asked, “Can you heal all us lepers?”

As Cleopatra looked down into the ravine she saw hundreds of people coming from the caves, missing eyes, noses, legs, arms and legs. Some got on their knees to her. Some stayed indifferent or oblivious. Cleopatra asked, “What did the priests say to do?”