Kleopatra (14 page)

“I grew up in Syria at my mother’s side. She did not have a tutor for me, but taught me to form my letters and then read with
me all that is worth reading. She had a fine voice for reading, grand and dramatic. At the right time, she sent me to Athens
to study. And that, my friends and Kinsmen, is where I learned to play the flute.

“I never dreamed I would be king. I was a bastard, an exile, and a musician—hardly a fitting candidate to rule the land of
Ptolemy I Savior. When my father died, my lunatic cousin, Ptolemy XI Alexander, became king. He married his elder stepsister
to follow custom, and then three weeks later, had her murdered. One day a mob of citizens pulled him out of the gymnasium
while he exercised and slit his throat. They dragged his corpse through the streets of the city chanting, “Who are the king-makers
in Alexandria? We are!’

“Well, my dears, we were out of heirs except for me. One day I was sitting in my garden with my beloved mother, reading to
her the prayers of Callimachus, when a breathless messenger arrived and told me I was the new king. And that was that.”

A polite round of applause was given to the king. He took a deep breath and then a deep drink of his wine.

“And what about Mother? Tell us about how you married her,” Kleopatra said.

“Ah, gentle Tryphaena. Many is the night I feel her spirit around me, especially on a starlit night such as this.” The king
hung his head. The princess Kleopatra sidled up to her father and took his hand. “Do you think she is with us now, Father?”

“Perhaps,” the king said wistfully. “She was like the air itself—light and essential.”

“If she is with us now, Father, would she not like to hear us speak of her?” asked Kleopatra. “Would that not please her gentle
soul?”

“Yes, I suppose it would,” said the king. “And I suppose it would please your soul to hear talk of your mother, would it not?”

“It would,” replied the princess.

“And you, Berenike?” the king questioned his elder daughter, who had not looked at him while he spoke.

“As you wish, Father,” she replied without meeting his eyes directly.

“Well then. Tryphaena. She, too, was the daughter of my father, Laythrus, but of his first wife, Kleopatra IV. Father made
a political marriage for her to the son of the Syrian prince, and sent her there to live with her new husband. And that is
where I, Auletes, then a young man, made the acquaintance of my half sister. Immediately, I fell in love.”

Auletes clapped his fists to his chest and shut his eyes tight. “She was beautiful. The most beautiful. She had an innate
artistic quality, much like my beloved mother. When she read poetry, I wept. When she played the lyre, I sang. And when I
saw her bathing in the nude, I lusted.” He gave a wink to his audience. “But what could I do? She was a married woman, and,
regrettably, pious.

“As the gods would have it, ladies and gentlemen, soldiers, hunters, cooks, and thieves, as soon as I became king, Tryphaena’s
husband—may the gods rest his heroic soul—died in the Syrian war. And poor widowed Tryphaena was left alone in Syria.

“Upon hearing of her untimely widowhood, I went straight to the Cabinet and I said, “I am going to take a wife.’ And old Menander
said to me, ‘Well, Auletes, you’d better give yourself a while to make sure the people aren’t going to murder you, too, before
you bring poor innocent Tryphaena back here.’”

Everyone laughed. The king raised his cup and a boy quickly filled it with more wine. Kleopatra took a big sip from her father’s
goblet, causing him to laugh more.

“In the spring of that year I found myself quite alive—if not yet adored—and so I sent for my beloved. And she arrived within
the month with her little Thea, only five years old.

“The very next year, you were born,” the king said to Berenike. “But then we thought the gods had ceased to smile upon us.
Five times thereafter, my beautiful queen lost her babies long before their birthing time. In the tenth year of our marriage,
the queen made a pilgrimage to the temple of Hathor at Dendara. It was a long and dangerous journey, but she insisted that
the Egyptian goddess would bless her womb. I thought her mad and tried to forbid the journey, but there is no interfering
in the plans of the women in our family.

“On the very evening she returned home from the journey she asked me to give her a child. I said, “My dear, you know what
a voracious lover I am. Do you not require a period of rest from your trip before I consume your small body in the adventure
of lovemaking?’”

The Kinsmen made catcalls as if to avow to the king’s prowess. Kleopatra put her head down. She did not like to imagine her
father as a lover.

“But Tryphaena insisted that I satiate my lusts. She believed that the goddess had decreed that night for conception. Miraculously,
nine months later, this small creature arrived from the bosom of the goddess.” He ruffled the hair of the princess, who had
begun to cry.

Her mother, Tryphaena, was a woman blessed by the goddess, a holy and pious queen. Why could she not have lived? Why did the
gods take her away? And how could Thea have betrayed such a woman? Kleopatra wiped the tears from her face, suddenly embarrassed
by her outburst. The hated one! She had forgotten about Thea for one blissful day. The hunting trip had been an example of
what their lives might have been without her malignant presence.

“Father, what might have happened to us if you had not married Thea?”

“What do you mean, child?”

“If my mother had had no daughter, would you have taken another wife?”

“I might have, in my loneliness. I am hardly an old man!”

Kleopatra looked at her sister. Berenike sat quietly as one of her Bactrian girls laced her long hair into small braids.

“Father, if you had not married Thea, would Berenike be queen?”

The king shrugged. “By custom, the eldest daughter is named co-regent upon her eighteenth birthday—that is, in the absence
of a queen.”

“Then it is a very good thing that Berenike loves her stepmother and carries no resentment, don’t you think?” Kleopatra addressed
the question to her father, but looked at her sister. Berenike had jerked her head forward, yanking her braid out of the Bactrian
girl’s hand.

Berenike’s fair skin was whiter still in the moonlight. Her full lips were as pale as the mouth of a statue. Kleopatra felt
a chill and reached again for her father’s warm hand. Was this the first time Berenike had realized that Thea, by seducing
the king, had sabotaged her own chances of reigning as co-regent with Auletes? Kleopatra had known this fact for several years,
and often wondered how it had escaped Berenike, who doted so on Thea. But Berenike resided in her own mythological kingdom
where she alone was queen. What would it take to allow Thea’s betrayal into her solidly walled mind?

The princess could not sleep. The smell of the sharp, citrus incense that kept away mosquitoes and other night-crawling insects
sickened Kleopatra to her stomach, while Mohama, breathing monotonously, slept on a pallet not four feet from her bed.

Kleopatra was troubled by the harrowing stare of Berenike when her father uttered the awful truth. What would Berenike do
now? Would she turn on Thea, or would she move against Kleopatra, who had goaded Auletes into saying the awful thing?

Tradition stood like a wall between the royal sisters, for no two women might rule together, and no woman might rule without
a male co-regent. The elder sister generally married the elder brother and ruled together with him. With these equations indelibly
inscribed upon the dynasty, the only sensible thing for the females to do was to find ways to eliminate one another. In that
case, Kleopatra had no doubt that she would be the one vanquished.

Kleopatra would offer her theory to Berenike: Now that Thea had a daughter, Arsinoe, and two little sons, she had every reason
to move against the other daughters of Tryphaena in order to insure the position of her own children on the throne. Ptolemaic
mothers had done as much for almost three hundred years. Had not the eunuch Meleager informed them of that particular habit
of their ancestresses?

Was Berenike either naive enough or oblivious enough to think that Thea would support her over her own children? As far as
Kleopatra knew, no Macedonian queen in history had ever done that. Kleopatra would make Berenike an irresistible offer—she
would happily support her against Thea.

An allegiance of blood, that is what she would propose. The sisters would cut their fingers and mix together the life force.
There was no love between them, but there was the bond of blood. The blood in their veins that traced itself back to Alexander
and the beak-nosed Ptolemy, whose dream figure bestowed upon the princess the form of the eagle—the symbol of the House of
Ptolemy, of their dynasty,
of their very blood.
Their blood bond was stronger than their bond with Thea, who also shared their heritage, but whose blood was diluted by her
Syrian father. Berenike, too, was an eagle, not merely a half-member of the House of Ptolemy like Thea. Had Berenike not proved
that today at the hunt?

Kleopatra gingerly rolled the linen blanket away from her body and slid from the mattress, stepping slowly around the sleeping
Mohama. Delicately but firmly she opened the flap of the tent. The night air had a subtle chill. Two guards, their bare feet
outstretched, snored around a lazy fire. All was hushed inside the tents of the Kinsmen, but without, the night creatures
sang their nocturnal hymns. The haunting cry of the owl, the chatter of the crickets and other insects of the marshes, the
cries of the unknown animals that inhabited the glade—these did not frighten the princess, or so she told herself. A quick
prayer to the goddess of night, and she slithered into the dark.

The lamps were already extinguished; Berenike’s tent, a square stillness. Kleopatra got down on her knees and slipped inside
the flap without making a sound. She knelt in the darkness while her eyes and ears adjusted to the new conditions inside.
She saw nothing at first but two empty pallets with white linens tossed aside, beds that should have been occupied by the
Bactrian attendants.

She heard a low moan and froze. Someone sounded hurt. Not knowing whether to cry for help or to investigate more, she waited.
Another moan, this time lower and more desperate. She remembered how Mohama taught her to attack by surprise from behind,
slitting the throat of the intruder. She had brought her knife for the exchange of blood. Could she kill in the defense of
her sister? She allowed the thought of her sister’s death to enter her mind. If Berenike was dead, the equation of accession
to the throne would change in her favor.

Kleopatra crawled farther into the tent and squinted. On Berenike’s bed, in silhouette against the white walls, the Bactrian
girl who had saved her friend now held the hands of the other high above her head. She was naked, legs spread wide open. Berenike
sat between the girl’s knees, her dress torn open in the front and her breasts exposed. Her hand, hidden inside the girl’s
body, appeared to lift her pelvis up and down in a mesmerizing cadence. Berenike’s arm was like a handle that controlled the
girl’s body as she arched herself up and down to the command of Berenike’s buried hand. Each time she rose, her full breasts
fell to the side. The other girl, who had saved Berenike from the beast with her well-placed quiver, pulled her friend’s arms
tautly over her head while she called incessantly to the gods. Berenike raised her dress and straddled the girl, moving against
her, head thrown back, eyes shut tight.

Kleopatra sat rapt but for a foreign stir deep within the dark and unknowable part of her body. She dared not move, though
she found herself unconsciously imitating Berenike’s rhythmic movement, while the two tribeswomen bit at each other’s lips,
spilling deep sighs into the other’s mouth. Berenike pulled fiercely at the girl’s nipples, as if trying to see how far she
might stretch them. The girl bucked under Berenike, who let out a sharp cry. Berenike’s head fell forward, and she rocked
herself back and forth very slowly. Finally, she fell forward and onto the girl’s shoulder.

The unwitting witness slowly backed out of the tent. She had heard about the women who pleased one another without men. She
had heard that this was the habit of the Amazons, who only fraternized with men to get with child. She had even heard that
the king enjoyed watching such performances between his mistresses who were from the places where this love between women
was the custom. Perhaps many adult women engaged in this sexual sport together. Kleopatra did not know, though she had seen
vase paintings that insinuated as much. But she now saw that her sister lived in a separate sphere. She had a secret life—far
different from the secret life Kleopatra lived when she escaped the walls of the Inner Palace and blended into the marketplace.

Kleopatra crawled back into her tent, relieved to see Mohama still overtaken with sleep, her position unchanged. She let herself
back into her bed, pulling the linens up to her chin. She noticed, for the first time, how little space her body took in the
large mattress. Small, alone, curling into herself, she pulled the blanket over her head and tried to succumb to sleep.