Kleopatra (11 page)

Sekkie knocked three times—the code they had agreed upon—and slinked into Kleopatra’s room, looking both ways down the hall
before she entered.

“I am going to reward you for this,” whispered Kleopatra as the girl handed her the bundle. “I am going to make certain that
you are promoted to my personal body servant.”

“Then what you said yesterday is no longer true?” asked the girl gingerly.

“What did I say yesterday?”

“That you would have me tortured and killed.”

“I said I would have you tortured and killed if you did not help me,” Kleopatra corrected her, slipping the cotton gown over
her head. “But you have helped me, and therefore I am going to reward you by having you promoted. You see, if I am to be my
father’s spy, then you are to be my spy. Do we understand each other?”

Sekkie reluctantly nodded her head.

“How do I look?” With her tawny coloring, the woven basket she carried, and her gift for the inflections of the native speech,
she was sure she could pass as a servant. Sekkie took a few cleaning towels from her pockets and tucked them into the belt
at Kleopatra’s waist to make her look more like one of the upstairs maids.

“You could pass for my sister,” Sekkie offered boldly.

“It has all of Rome in an uproar.” Kleopatra lowered the vial of oil of carnation from her nose and looked up and over the
partition into the next stall. A Greek bookseller was unrolling a scroll. After reading it, he shot a dirty look at the manuscript’s
owner, a stocky Roman merchant in white robes smattered with the remnants of his lunch.

“You call this poetry?” The outraged Greek read the poem sotto voce, “‘Cock fornicates. What, a fornicating cock? Sure enough
this is the proverb, the pot finds its own herbs.’”

He threw the scroll back to the Roman, who fumbled it against his chest indignantly.

Catullus. It could only be the infamous one, the Roman poet whom Demetrius had declared off-limits to her impressionable young
mind. Kleopatra was dying to read his poetry, but her tutor said that he was a pervert, a catamite, and an anarchist. Now,
finally, on this, her third escape to the marketplace, she had struck gold. For the past three Thursdays, while the Household
Guard was busy rehearsing its marches, she had slipped down the stairs, into the kitchens, and out the back door, shivering
as she called out a greeting in Egyptian to the indifferent guard at the palace gate who had yet to look up from cleaning
his fingernails with a knife. With the sun warming her face and the sea breeze pushing her on, she skipped along the Canopic
Way to the rambling city of stalls, where every luxury and amenity the world had to offer was to be found, as well as a few
items—back scratchers, lice repellent, tooth pickers, tonics for sexual potency—that she had not heretofore known existed.
Hoping to overhear treasonous material that she might report back to her father, she trailed peripatetic philosophers—notorious
troublemakers—who flailed their arms as they pontificated, their hands like paddles volleying their speeches to the throng
of boys who followed them. She listened to languid men playing chess who groused about everything—humidity, dust, flies, taxes—and
she spied on merchants as they discussed the politics of the day. Despite her efforts to discover incendiary material, her
only victories to date were learning the Ethiopian word for “fuck,” and getting a lesson from an old cook on picking ripe
melons.

The owner of the perfume stall, wrinkled and sour as last year’s apple, eyed Kleopatra suspiciously as she put down the vial
of carnation oil and picked up essence of lotus, inhaling it as she tried to eavesdrop on the bookseller’s conversation. “Let
me see your money, girl,” the woman demanded, and Kleopatra produced from her pockets some silver coins. “Oh all right then,”
she said, too greedy, Kleopatra thought, to throw anyone with coinage out of her shop.

“Smut. Filth. Licentious nonsense. Twaddle!” The Greek bookseller continued to sputter over Catullus’s new poems. “What’s
happened to the boy?” Sighing, hand over heart, eyes fixed on the heavens, the bookseller recited from memory:

You ask how many kissings of you, Lesbia, are enough for me and more than enough. As great as is the number of the Libyan
sand that lies on silphium-bearing Cyrene, between the oracle of sultry Jove and the sacred tomb of old Battus …

“
That
was poetry. This is dung!”

“My dear fellow, you may not think it’s poetry, but it’s got all of Rome talking. The muse Lesbia found herself a new cocksman.
Now the poet claims she’s no better than a trollop. His heart is broken. He cares for nothing, so he slings shit in every
direction. He’s gone mad; he’s even taken on Julius Caesar.”

The bookseller took the scroll back from the Roman. “Show me.”

Julius Caesar. That name again. He would merit further study. She knew that he had subdued Spain and had been its governor,
and that he had a very large army. Hammonius had said he was rivaled as an orator only by the great man Cicero; that he could
talk anyone into anything, and often did.

“Right here, see? He calls Caesar an abominable profligate pansy. Says he pokes another pansy named Mamurra.”

The Greek read the poem silently; even with his lips moving in an animated fashion, the princess could not make out the words.
He looked back at the Roman. “Thought you Romans didn’t go in for all that.”

The Roman shrugged. “Our Caesar does. He bedded Nikomedes, the king of Bithynia, when he was on his first naval mission. His
men still call him the queen of Bithynia behind his back. I should know. My brother-in-law’s a centurion in the Tenth.” He
fumbled in his valise for another manuscript. “What do you make of this one?”

The Greek read it to himself, and then slowly again out loud. “‘I have no very great desire to make myself agreeable to you,
Caesar, nor to know whether your complexion is light or dark.’”

Kleopatra could not figure out what this poem meant; nor could the bookseller, who looked quizzically at the Roman. “Were
these more pleasing in the Latin?”

“The translations are excellent, and if you don’t want them, I’m sure Nikias up the street would be happy to buy them.”

“No, no, I’ll take them,” the Greek said, grabbing the manuscripts out of the merchant’s hand. “Boy!” he called to his servant.
“Get these to the scribe. One hundred copies, and no time for his fancy marks in the margins. I need them straightaway.”

“One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman.

“They’re nasty bits about famous people; everyone will want them.”

Money was exchanged and the servant took off on foot with the documents. “You may not be getting anything new from me for
a while,” the Roman said. “I think there’s going to be trouble at home. I just might stay on here.”

Kleopatra, stomach queasy from a prolonged inhalation of lotus oil, capped the vial with its plug of wax and listened attentively.

“They say that Caesar and Pompey are going to unite their armies and take over Rome. They’ve got Crassus’s money behind them,
and believe me, that is more than the treasury of many a country. It won’t happen without bloodshed, I’ll tell you that.”

“Just stay out of it, my friend. Men in power come and go, but men like us need only make a living.”

“You are right, my friend. How long can this “love affair’ between Caesar and Pompey last? All of Rome knows that Caesar used
to visit Pompey’s wife, Mucia, when Pompey was away. He still might, who knows? He put his own wife away after he caught her
with his friend Clodius. He said that
his
wife had to be above
suspicion.
”

“Even though he’s got his poker in this king and that queen, or in this pansy, Mamurra, or in Pompey’s wife? You Romans make
mockery of morality.”

“We learned that from you Greeks.”

The two men threw their heads back, laughing so hard that Kleopatra could see the black void of their missing teeth.

“Well it serves Pompey right, being a cuckold,” said the Greek, collecting himself. “He’s got our king in his pocket. He’s
got our treasury in his pocket, too.”

Kleopatra strained harder to hear what was said. “Are you going to buy that oil or not?” the perfume-monger asked her sharply.
“Let’s see a bit of that metal, sister.”

Kleopatra hurled an angry coin at the woman, turning all her aural powers to the conversation.

“The Flute Player sent your Pompey eight thousand Egyptian troops to help his war against the Jews, and a big fat lump of
gold from the treasury. It’s got our people mad as Hades. There’s going to be trouble here, my friend. If I were you, I would
take my money and run.”

“What makes you think Rome is safer than Alexandria? The rabble-rousing that goes on here is nothing compared to what we see
every day in the streets of Rome.”

“I’m just trying to be a friend to you,” said the Greek. “I hear rumbling. And when the mob rumbles, things do not stay quiet
for long.”

From: Gnaeus Pompeius, General

To: Ptolemy XII Auletes, King of the Two Lands of Egypt

My great friend and ally,

Regrettably, my forces are still engaged in the conflict in the Palestine, each man a necessity. Though I have them utterly
surrounded and besieged, the Jewish tribes continue to resist, conducting religious ceremonies in the midst of an attack if
it occurs on their Sabbath, or some such other holy time. I wonder if they mock me. Until we prevail against them, I must
ask that the friendship between us stand as a reminder that if I could respond to your present needs, I most certainly would.

K
leopatra loved the Delta, the land at the mouth of the river where the Nile splintered into narrow arteries like fingers climbing
up the continent. She loved the sudden flash of a flock of heron across the gray skies, or the grace of a lone egret startling
the silent horizon. The north country’s damp misty air coated her face, plumping her skin. The land was thick and marshy,
making it hard to keep a seat on her disobedient pony, Persephone, a very stubborn young filly—a kindred spirit to the princess
herself. Persephone was a fine example of the equine species, but there were things she did not like—snakes, mosquitoes, spiders,
small rodents with sharp teeth, and most of all, Berenike, who shimmied her big steed, Jason, so close to Kleopatra that Persephone
shuddered nervously, almost toppling her rider into the slush below.

“That bratty nag will be the death of you, Sister,” Berenike said, riding past.

Kleopatra caught her balance, but Berenike’s new companions, two muscular, compact Bactrian girls, quivers in leather pouches
slung jauntily over their shoulders, galloped dangerously close to Persephone, their knowing asplike eyes slanting back at
Kleopatra as they slipped past.

“Mohama!” she called, looking about for her servant. The desert girl appeared beside her, wild coiling ringlets escaping the
Greek-style braids, black ramparts framing her pronounced cheekbones.

“Did you see them? If they are trying to scare me, they will not succeed,” she said, masking her fear in front of the older
girl.

“Those bitches better not give us any trouble,” Mohama said in her throaty, newly learned Greek, her lips spreading high and
wide across her face like two peaked mountains. Her eyes were almond-shaped and startlingly yellow; her skin, dark—not as
dark as a Nubian, and not as light as the strange fawn color of ancient Egyptian structures, but a shade somewhere in between.
An aged bronze. “Do not worry for yourself. My two watchful eyes plus the one in the back of my head are on them.”

Kleopatra had taken notice of Mohama a few months earlier when the girl was lighting the lamps in the upstairs hall. Riveted
by her height and her strength as she hoisted the covers from the lamps, easily filling them with oil from enormous jugs,
Kleopatra approached the slave. “Are you an Amazon?” she asked timidly. The top of her head barely reached Mohama’s sinewy
neck.

“The Amazons are from the east. I am from the western desert.” The girl explained in rather impressive if halting Greek that
she was sixteen years old, or so she thought by the counting of the moons, and that she had been captured when she and her
brothers attacked Royal Cartographers on a mapping expedition. When she saw that the party was armed, she circled their wagons
with her horse, kicking dust into their faces so that her brothers might escape.