Pharaoh (5 page)

Julius Caesar’s vanity saved their lives.

Though he had not much hair, his visits to the barber were frequent and regular, and he preferred a good Greek barber to all
others, or so he claimed. He liked the way the man took time to heat and moisturize the face before removing the stubble with
a razor, and he also liked how the barber let the thickest part of his hair grow longer than the rest, using the volume to
cover his ever-receding hairline. He confessed all this to Kleopatra, who declared that Rome would never reach the
Greek standards of Beauty because what they treasured in life was not beautiful.

“I don’t know why I suffer your insults,” Caesar told her. “You are just a grandiose girl.”

“Perhaps because you know I am right,” she said.

They were snuggled in bed, falling into a deep, postcoital sleep, when the fighting broke out. Kleopatra heard the clash of
swords and the rumble of men’s battle cries coming through the window, startling her from the beginning of a hazy dream. Before
she could articulate a thought, Caesar was up and dressed and telling her to neither worry nor leave the room. She thought
of General Achillas at the head of the army, the preening, swarthy commander who had once tried to entrap her into a sexual
liaison with him in exchange for protection against her brother and his regents. How she would like to see Caesar bring this
man to his knees in defeat.

Luckily, when Caesar had been to the barber a few days earlier, the man had whispered in his ear as he leaned over the bowl
of steaming water: “General, I shall pretend to clip the hairs from your inner ears so that I may whisper to you. There are
things you must know.” And Caesar, intrigued, gave his permission, though he was privately mortified that anyone might think
he had unsightly ear hairs that required removal. The barber informed him that Pothinus and another eunuch, an army commander
named Ganymedes, had sent to Achillas demanding that he march his army of almost twenty thousand men into Alexandria in secret
and launch a surprise attack on Caesar and his small legion of two thousand. It was only a matter of days before the palace
would be under attack. “And he plans to have you murdered, sir. Just as he murdered the Roman general Pompey.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Caesar asked.

“I am a very old man, sir, and I have seen many fat and worthless Ptolemies and their eunuch advisers come and go. This lot
is no different. When you throw these creatures out, I believe you will be most kind to those who helped you.”

“You have correctly assessed the situation on all fronts,” Caesar said. While the new information necessitated immediate action,
he did not act so impetuously as to leave the barber’s company without a fresh haircut and shave. Groomed, he revealed to
Kleopatra what he had learned
and what action he had taken. He had immediately dispatched a messenger to his allies in Asia Minor for reinforcements, with
a special offer to Antipater, Prime Minister to Hyrcanus of Judaea, giving the Jews a last chance to redeem themselves for
aligning with Pompey in the recent civil war by sending troops. Caesar knew his men could hold out against the superior numbers
for a few weeks but not forever. He explained to Kleopatra that lesser numbers often worked to one’s advantage because it
inevitably made one’s opponents lax. And then he sighed. “Poor Pompey.” He also reinforced the barricades around the palace
quarter, denying anyone admittance or leave. “We are going to be besieged,” he said to Kleopatra. “At the right time, I shall
engage Achillas in combat. But in the meanwhile, we are not going anywhere.”

“That is as I wish, General. I want to get to know you in the extreme.”

“By the way, you didn’t need to say good-bye to Pothinus, did you?”

“Where is he going?” To Hades, I suppose.

“Oh?”

“It is the Roman custom to avoid inauspicious language. An old superstition, but customary nonetheless. Let us just say that
he
did
live, but it is no longer true to say so.”

Now Kleopatra went to her bedroom window, stood next to Caesar, and watched the Egyptian fleet sail into the harbor, effectively
blockading Caesar’s smaller navy and cutting him off from supplies and reinforcements by sea.

“Make use of your young eyes and count the vessels,” he said. “I believe they are seventy-two in number, more than twice what
we’ve got.” Kleopatra confirmed his count and asked his strategy. “Oh, it’s all been done before,” he said. “When I’ve lulled
them into thinking victory is certain, I shall entice them into combat. The Egyptians are excellent sailors, but not known
for fighting man-to-man. We’ll lure them close to our boats and then we’ll board their vessels. They will be easily defeated
on those terms, I assure you.”

“You’re awfully confident,” she said. She could not yet hear the sounds of confrontation, but she remembered how frightened
she had been as a child when the mob rioted against her father outside the palace walls.

“Fortune makes confidence unnecessary, my dear.”

She was not sure when the moment of clarity had arrived. She had not plotted it, exactly. But when she realized that she was
securing the Fate of herself and her nation, she was pleased.

Caesar was not Archimedes, her childhood friend, Kinsman, and subject. She could hardly dictate to Julius Caesar where he
placed his semen. With Archimedes, she could tell him that she would not produce a royal bastard, and he could agree with
her that it was the wrong thing for both herself and for Egypt. He was a bastard himself and he knew the precarious Fate of
such children. She could tell Archimedes that he might penetrate her as much as he wished, but he might not deposit his seed
inside her body. And Archimedes had been content with the arrangement and had disciplined himself to arrive at the moment
just before climax and then quickly withdraw. All men know how to do this, he had told her, but few wish to bother. Few are
making love to queens, she retorted. And he agreed.

If fifty-two-year-old Julius Caesar did not know how babies were made, then it was not Kleopatra’s job to tell him. He had
had only one daughter, Julia, whom Kleopatra had met while visiting the home of Pompey with her father. Caesar had married
Julia off to Pompey to secure the two men’s alliance. But Julia had died trying to give Pompey a son. Kleopatra knew that
Caesar had been in Gaul when his daughter had died and that he had regretted not being there at the hour of her passing. Kleopatra
told Caesar that she and Julia had become dear friends when she and her father were exiled in Rome, that the older girl had
been somewhat of a mentor to the twelve-year-old Kleopatra. In truth, Kleopatra had thought Julia a silly goose and had avoided
her company. But it heartened Caesar to listen to an eyewitness to Julia’s happiness with the elder Pompey, who was even older
than Caesar, and this was not fable. Julia and Pompey were rarely out of one another’s arms, as nearly as Kleopatra could
tell.

She had not yet brought up the subject of another heir. She had never been pregnant, and she did not know the signs. She would
send for Charmion as soon as possible; though Charmion had never been pregnant either, she would know precisely what to anticipate
and how to tell if one were with child. At present, there was no one in whom
Kleopatra might confide. Though her bleeding was only a few days late, her body had begun to stir-not in ways she had heard
women speak of, but as if an odd energy had manifested itself and come to mingle with her.

One morning after Caesar left her bedroom, she had the vision. She was accustomed to rising early, meeting with her advisers
and her War Council, sending correspondence to foreign leaders to raise an army, and negotiating with governments and independent
merchants and importers to keep her retinue and soldiers fed. These days, there was little she might do but lie in bed like
a courtesan, imprisoned as she was in her own palace, while in the streets Roman and Alexandrian soldiers engaged in heavy
fighting. She would like to have joined them; she had ridden with her troops in the Sinai, leading them to their encampment,
making speeches to rally them to her cause. It seemed unnatural that a woman of her temperament should be cut off from the
action of battle, from the events that were to determine her own Fate, and yet when Caesar demanded that she stay away from
the fighting, she acquiesced-not because she wanted to obey him, but because she suspected that she held within her body the
key to their future. Not the future of Egypt or the future of Rome or the future of Kleopatra or Julius Caesar, but the future
of the world. And only before this phenomenal goal would she lay down her desire to participate in the war.

She had begun to think of the seed within her as a son, and she hoped she was correct. How much more difficult it would be
if she bore Caesar a daughter. Even the Egyptians, who had been governed by women of will, would never accept the daughter
of a Roman intruder as their queen. To Rome, the child would be a mere bastard born to a foreign mistress. The girl would
not even be a Roman citizen. But a son-Rome might be coerced to change its customs and its laws for a son of Julius Caesar,
even if that son was born out of wedlock and even if Caesar was already married to that woman Calpurnia about whom he never
talked, whom he had married for political expediency. Divorce was not only recognized but easily attained in Rome. Why, Romans
seemed to marry only for political alliance anyway. What was a Roman woman with a few connections in that city compared to
the queen of Egypt, the descendant of Alexander the Conqueror, who not only commanded the treasury of her ancestors, but whose
country was
the door to the countries of the east, the territories Rome had been trying to subdue once and for all for over a century?

The boy would be the unity of east and west, of Caesar and Kleopatra, of the three hundred dynastic years of the Ptolemaic
empire and the sweeping landscape of the Roman conquests. In his small and fragile body would run the bloodlines of Venus
on his father’s side, and of Dionysus and Isis on his mother’s. Of Alexander the Great and his mother, Olympias, who wore
snakes in her hair and put terror in the hearts of men. Of King Philip of Macedonia, one of the great warriors of the Greek
world. Of Ptolemy the Savior, first Macedonian pharaoh of Egypt, and Julius Caesar, conqueror of Gaul, Britannia, and Spain,
and dictator of Rome. These would be just a few of the boy’s ancestors. Their legacies would collect in his small body, nurture
him into manhood, and then reveal themselves in his ability to rule the world in peace and harmony. The boy would put an end
to Greek and Roman rivalry, for in him, the very highest and best of those cultures would make itself manifest. He would be
the first of a new race of men, a hero, a new kind of Titan. The people ruled by his father and those ruled by his mother
would unite in a joint government that would go beyond the limits of either republic or monarchy. It would complete the vision
of Alexander, who did not live to see his dreams come to fruition. The locus of the new ruler’s power would be Egypt, the
land whose fertile soil fed half the world, whose civilization had achieved greatness thousands of years before either Rome
or Greece was born.

Kleopatra remembered the dream she had had long ago. She was walking in the forest when she came upon Alexander, who was hunting
the lion with his legendary Kinsmen, including the founder of Kleopatra’s dynasty, Ptolemy, the great king’s companion, general,
and historian. Ptolemy shot Kleopatra with an arrow that, instead of killing her, turned her into an eagle-the symbol of the
Ptolemaic dynasty. The palace crones had interpreted the dream to mean that Kleopatra would one day rise to become queen.
But that was merely one level of its meaning. Now she understood the complete message. Alexander had chosen her, his spiritual
daughter, to carry out his vision. He had subdued the bellicose Greeks into one nation. Then he had ridden across Asia Minor,
Egypt, Persia, and into that strange and impenetrable land called India. Wherever he went, he was welcomed. What other man
or
god in history was hailed by the very people he conquered? It was because Alexander did not bring hardship upon his conquered
people, but rather alleviated it. He brought a vision of harmony and unity even if he used military might to do so. Did he
not love all the peoples and religions of the world? Did he once impose his Greek gods on any nation or tribe of men? But,
depressed over the death of his beloved Hephaestion, he had let himself get weak with fever and drink and died on the road
to Babylon. Now-some two hundred fifty years later- Kleopatra would carry out his ambitions. As soon as she was able to leave
the palace, she would visit his tomb and tell him what she planned to do.

She had watched her father grow old and feeble in his efforts to negotiate with Rome, to appease Rome’s appetites for Egypt’s
money and resources. She had vowed before the goddess that she would not repeat the pattern that put him in his tomb. And
now she had the solution. She need not appease Rome. She would give birth to a new kind of Roman. And if she and Caesar could
have one child, why could they not have many, one to preside over every nation of the world? She was young and in optimum
health, and he, old as he was and engaged in military actions the day long, still came back to the palace every night and
made love to her.