Pharaoh (53 page)

She has energy now only for her last desperate act. She has loaded the entire treasure of her ancestors and of her kingdom
into the mausoleum meant as her burial chamber. It is a magnificent Greek temple by the sea, with high windows that will keep
out Alexandria’s grave robbers, but will allow the sea air to be her companion in death. She has made an inventory of the
contents-sapphires, rubies, pearls, bars of gold and silver so heavy that pulley systems are used to unload them. The aromas
of saffron, myrrh, and cinnamon dance under the noses of great alabaster and bronze statues of the gods and of her ancestors.
The temple is a monument to lavishness. She has added a sinister element as well-timbers, logs, kindling, so that if Octavian
refuses her final offer, she might send the entire treasure up in flames. She will time the fire so that he will smell the
smoke as he arrogantly walks into the city. He will accomplish his goal of taking Egypt from her, dishonoring the memory of
her ancestors, but he will inherit a bankrupt country. Kleopatra would like to die watching the look on his face as he realizes
what she has done, but she has not yet figured out how to arrange this detail.

Antony acquiesces to her plan, though he calls it perverse. When you hear that I am dead, Kleopatra, and you are still breathing
the sweet air of the city, you will change your mind and choose to remain in the world of the living. Philip will be clinging
to your dress, Selene asking you to fix her hair, and you will not be able to follow my example. He says these things and
means them. But Kleopatra knows Octavian’s plan.
She will not let it be said that she let Antony die so that she might live. She made the vow twenty-five years ago before
Artemis:
I will happily face death rather than live a life devoid of dignity. This I swear before She who hears and knows all. Death
before humiliation. Death before supplication before the might of Rome.

All her life she has tried to negotiate with the beast. She wonders if her sisters were not right after all. Should she have
chosen a path of war and not alliance with Rome? Should she not have answered the summons of Julius Caesar, instead going
in secret to the kings of Parthia and Armenia and mobilizing an army against him? If she had done that, would she be sitting
in her palace, dining with her Parthian king while captured Roman slaves served them dinner?

She had thought about it, had she not? But everyone was against it. Archimedes, Hephaestion, the entire War Council. None
wanted to back the savage Parthian king. She was not even twenty years old then, a banished queen exiled in a foreign land,
watching as Caesar and Pompey squared off for control of the world. Now she thinks that is what she should have done-turned
her back on all things Roman and united with the eastern kings. They are treacherous men, but no more so than the creature
calling for Antony’s death.

She tries to brush away regret, shaking her hands in the air like an old conjuring woman batting away the demons. She has
always believed it a disease, an evil spirit that takes hold of the mind and turns it to waste. What good is rumination over
the past? She chose long ago, welcoming the sons of Rome into her kingdom, into her treasury, into her very body. It is hard
to regret past actions when children-not one but four glorious children-are the consequence.

“Kleopatra, you must give me your word that you will not take your own life without providing for our children.”

Antony is right; if she dies, she must die only after ensuring their safety and their futures. Yet there is a sickness in
her stomach at living without him. At living in a world in which she is captive to Octavian and his dark will. But her own
desires must be sublimated. That is the Fate of a queen and of a mother.

“In those little bodies, great dreams are sown,” she says to him. “I will never abandon them.”

“No, of course you will not. I know that you’re in despair right now,”

he says in his new matter-of-fact tone. “But I also know that as long as the children live, the triumvirate of Caesar, Kleopatra,
and Antony and all that they envisioned for themselves and for the world, is not dead.”

The banquet moves in the slow motion of a dream. It is as if they are acting in a theatrical production in which everyone
knows the outcome but has agreed not to reveal it. It seems that minutes pass in the time that food is lifted from a plate
and put into a gaping mouth. A hand floats languidly in the air to acknowledge a joke. Wine pours from jars sluggishly like
clotted blood. Everyone is laughing in a kind of dizzy delusion, but the sound in Kleopatra’s ears is hollow. She can make
no sense of the spoken words gushing from anyone’s lips.

Privately, she and Antony are calling it the Final Performance for the People, and they are playing their parts as splendidly
as any Athenian thespians. Octavian’s feet are on Egyptian soil, but that grim reality has not been admitted into the dining
hall at the palace. A giant roasted boar surrounded by heaps of greens and grapes sits on every table as if it were just another
evening among the fortunate few Antony and Kleopatra call friends. Eyes close in delight of the taste, lips smack, teeth grind
away like machines. Kleopatra watches wine funnel into eager mouths, throats gulping like plumbing pipes. The boy soldier
with tawny eyes who performed so valiantly today still wears the golden breastplate given him by the queen. A woman, drunk,
knocks on it and he asks, laughing lasciviously,
who’s there?
His table bursts into peals of laughter.

They are pretending that Antony’s coup today over a small reconnaissance party of soldiers from Octavian’s army at Canopus
is a great military victory. They are pretending that they do not know what will happen tomorrow when tens of thousands of
Roman soldiers fall upon them; that they cannot hear the inexorable gait of the Roman army as it marches hastily toward their
city. They are pretending that Octavian’s entrance into the fort of Pelusium was not painless, that troops did not go over
to him immediately, and that Kleopatra did not order the execution of the fort’s commander and his entire family for the betrayal.
But that, too, was just more theater. It no longer matters so much who lives and who dies; the end of the game is at hand.

The single sober dining guest is the Prime Minister, Hephaestion. He whispers into the queens ear,
Only those who survive will be able to negotiate.
Antony’s Fate is sealed because he, a
general,
will not surrender himself into the hands of the creature, but Kleopatra’s is still negotiable. Hephaestion has been in private
consultation with Charmion, who also chants the tune of survival to Kleopatra day and night. The two of them, the eunuch and
the woman who disdains men, have become an unlikely couple. It is as if they have somehow made a chaste marriage and Kleopatra
is their only child.

She feels that she has entered a timeless zone. Was it yesterday, today, or has the time not yet come when she sends Selene
and Philip and their governess to the island palace on Rhodos? When she kisses their frightened faces and tells them to enjoy
their time with the old aunties on the island? When she says that she will call for their return as soon as she can? When
she lets the governess pull Philip from her gown, watching the tears fall as he latches on to Selene, who is as serious as
a statue? How could that have happened already? And yet it has.

Antony has already sent Antyllus to safety at the Mouseion, for who would violate the world’s temple of Knowledge? The boy
said angry words to his father for treating him like a child; for not allowing his fourteen-year-old chest to wear slats of
metal or his young arms to carry sword and shield. Antony’s great love for his son has squashed the boy’s burgeoning masculine
pride. His last words to his father hissed through his lips like steam. Still, Antony took him into his arms and held him,
squeezing the anger out of him until his body was slack with resignation. If they do not speak again, the boy will always
carry the pain of the last encounter. Nothing she will say will allay that grief. Strange to be sitting next to one’s husband,
encircled in the warmth of his aura, hearing his deep voice ring out with a story she’s heard ten times, smelling his woody
scent, and thinking to a day when he will be no more and she will be explaining his last acts to those who loved him. But
her mind is in such a state that she cannot be sure she has not already done that. Has someone put a potion in her wine? Perhaps
she is poisoned, and unbeknownst to her, her brain is in the process of dying.

She will be surprised neither if the evening ends abruptly nor if it never ends; if this is her death sentence, to remain
at this banquet for eternity pretending that reality is not reality. But the evening does end,
because Antony stands and announces his leave. He has taken his party by surprise-their New Dionysus has never before put
an end to an evening’s revelry He is the jokester who orders the servants to close the shutters against the dawn so that the
festivities may go on and on. He is the one who shouts,
Why should Helios be the arbiter of day when Dionysus desires the night to remain?
Kleopatra understands that on this evening, he feels his mortality more than ever, and so he must succumb to the quotidian
need for sleep. One by one, those who have drunk and dined with him for thirteen years embrace him as if they expect to see
him on the morrow. She sees that few meet his eyes, but many turn away in tears.

She walks with her friends to their carriages, begging them to go into hiding. Their names are known. There will be retribution.
They must leave this very night-she will give them a vessel to sail to Greece-taking few possessions and waiting to see who
will be forgiven. This is our home, they say. And all the earth now sits on Roman soil. There is nowhere to go. Cleon says,
Our lives will feel like death without him wherever we are.
They thank her for dinner, kissing her cheek, her hand, her ring, depending on prior intimacy, as if they hope to be invited
back next week to another of her lavish events.

Antony comes to her bed. She takes him in her arms and asks him if he will change his mind. We are past words and wars and
schemes, he says. I am to die and you are to live, but which of us is facing the better prospect is known only to the gods.
She sighs. Do not quote Socrates to silence me, she says. I will silence you one last time, he answers.

He pours himself over her and into her. They swim together, slick-skinned and silent, like dolphins at sea. His breathing
is the most real thing she has heard all evening, every exhalation a nail pinning her to the bed. The more she sinks into
the mattress the more she feels her desire rise up to meet him. This is desire’s last stand. If she lives to be an old crone,
she will never again open this way to a man. If she is forced to give herself to someone else, it will be a hollow act. The
love that comes from deep inside her belongs to him alone. She wraps her legs tighter around her husband, trying to send all
her desire into his body so that his spirit may take it with him on his journey to the gods. She wants him to have all of
it; every last vestige of pleasure her womanhood has to offer must become an indelible part of his soul now. She tries to
will
all her sensuality, all of her sex, to leave her muscles, her skin, her nose and mouth and arms and hands. She pushes everything
she has- breasts, belly, vagina-into him, imagining her soul seep under his skin and into his blood. She sees it now coursing
through his veins, filling him up. It will strengthen his spirit and help him to die with a feeling of power and not defeat,
with hope and not despair. She clings to him like a baby lion to the breast of its mother as they flee the hunter’s arrow.
She has given him the best part of herself and is emptying out. He brings her closer to the moment of her last climax, and
she squeezes every muscle in her body before she releases, letting the last gush of her sexual self pour into him.

Tears flow like tiny streams down her temples and into her ears. He feels her cry but he does not stop. He moves faster, but
not so fast that he finishes. She will lie there and let him do this until morning if that is what he wishes. He puts his
hands on her wet face and kisses her, going deep into her mouth, sucking her tongue savagely. It does not hurt. She is beyond
pain.
That’s it,
she pleads,
take the very last of me.
But she feels herself begin again to quiver around his penis. No, she prays, there is no more passion in me. Take it away.
She tries to free herself from that muscle’s will, but it will not stop pulsing around him.

Empty me,
she says to him.
Finish me.

You will live on after me,
he says,
but tonight, we go together.
She lets him grab her buttocks and move her body against him the way he always does so that she has no choice but to feel
the tension rise, no choice but to reach for that final release. It takes her by surprise this time, bursting like a shooting
star all the way up her spine and exploding into her head until she sees a cold blackness before her eyes.
I’m dying with you,
he breathes into her ear, and releases himself into her.