The Memoirs of Cleopatra (142 page)

“Oh, take them, too,” I told him.

“Wait,” ordered Gallus. He suspected me of something bad, and he was right. Perhaps I could get Proculeius and Gallus to dishonor themselves by fighting over the gold, and stealing from Octavian. A small victory, but it would be of some consolation. “Leave it.” He turned to me. “You and your servants must come with us,” he said. “It is time to rest.”

At swordpoint we were led away, through the drinking soldiers sporting themselves on the grounds. They all stared as I passed, undressed and bloody, and fell silent.

A prisoner in my own palace. Marched past the majestic portals, the marble rooms, the polished, shining hallways. My own quarters barred to me. Mardian deprived of his. I turn my head toward the passage leading to my apartments, am told roughly, “Not that way!”—as if they know my home better than I, these strangers.

We are steered down a vaulted passage, toward the lesser guests’ quarters, but not before a swinging litter passes, its occupant unmoving, face discreetly covered. There are two stiff, sandaled feet protruding.

The litter has come from the direction of Antony’s apartments.

“Is that the last of it?” one of my guards asks.

“Yes. All clean now.” And they move briskly off.

“Eros?” I ask. I know the answer. They have removed him from where he fell in Antony’s room.

“Yes,” my guard snaps.

Poor Eros. If I had been capable of feeling anything more, my heart would have ached. But after so many horrors, another cannot increase the depth of pain.

They would reuse Antony’s apartments, lodge his enemies there. And mine? For whom was mine reserved?

“Who has the honor of staying in the Queen’s apartments?” I ask.

“He is already there. Imperator Caesar.”

So Octavian had entered Alexandria already, seized possession of it all.

“When did he arrive?” I keep turning my head to ask, as we are shoved along.

“He entered the city late this afternoon,” the soldier says. “He rode in in a chariot, with the philosopher Areius by his side. He called all the officials to gather in the Gymnasion, and there he assured them he would spare the city, out of respect for Alexander, its founder, and also for the sake of the beauty of the city itself; and finally to gratify his friend Areius.”

“How noble,” I say. Now he was posing as the philosopher-king. “How Alexandrian.”

“He addressed the assembly in Greek,” the man says.

“That must have been a feat,” I scoff. Everyone knew his Greek was painfully poor. More playacting, from the master masquerader.

“Here.” They stop abruptly, and indicate a door. The room inside waits.

It is a lowly thing, something I would only assign an envoy’s secretary. But Octavian must needs spread himself out in mine.

“Inside.”

Charmian, Iras, Mardian, and I are all herded in.

“Clothes and food will be sent,” they say. The door clangs shut.

The room had four small beds—cots, really. There was a washstand, one lamp stand, a window so newly fitted with bars that the smell of ground stone and hot metal still lingered. From it I could see the wing of the palace that this morning—this morning!—had been mine.

Charmian had grabbed up the writing materials, but when I asked her what of the fateful basket, she shook her head. “I forgot, my lady, I am sorry. That, and the trunk, remain behind.”

Another blow! Even that taken away from me.

In a few minutes a box of clothes and blankets was delivered, as well as some bread and fruit. In stubbornness I wished to refuse both, but the truth was I had to remove what was left of my torn, bloody gown. I let Iras take it off, and Charmian sponge away the blood with a wet cloth. The water in the bowl grew rosy, as Antony’s blood dyed it. She emptied it out the window, which grieved me.

“Now…” She wrapped one of the coarse common gowns around me. “Rest.” I lay down, but knew I would never sleep. Outside I could still hear the soldiers carousing on the grounds. It went on all night.

Early in the morning a soldier entered, without knocking or asking leave.

I sat bolt upright. It was time to end this. “I demand to see the Imperator,” I said. “Immediately.”

He looked puzzled. “The Imperator has a full day,” he said. “He intends to visit the tomb of Alexander, and then to meet with the treasury officials—”

So he would ignore me! How much lower could he grind me? How much pain inflict on me? “Tell him to postpone Alexander,” I said. “He won’t leave his tomb. Like all the rest of the world, he will await the Imperator. But I must speak to him now about the funeral of Antony. Please!”

Mardian and the women were now watching, listening.

“Already he is besieged with requests to bury Antony,” said the soldier. “Some of the eastern kings, and his Roman kinsmen—they are competing for the honor.”

Would that they had competed for the honor of serving him when he needed them! “It should be I, and only I, who buries him with my own hands,” I insisted. “Am I not his wife, and a queen?”

“I will tell the Imperator of your request,” the man said, as if it were something minor.

“And my children! Where are my children?”

“Under a trusted guard,” he said.

“They live? And are unharmed?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you swear it?”

“By the honor of the Imperator,” he said. “Not a hair on their heads has been touched.”

“May I see them?”

“I will have to ask.”

I was reduced to a menial, a mother who wished to see her children, a wife to bury her husband, denied even asking for it except through a messenger.

“What is the Imperator doing that he cannot see me within the next hour?”

“He is overseeing the treasure being taken from the mausoleum. It must be inventoried.”

“Of course.” There would be no tearing Octavian away from counting his booty. “But there is something more precious there—the body of my husband.”

“It will be removed, and treated with honor,” he said. “I can assure you of that.”

The day passed slowly, my first day of captivity. In its own way it was a blessing to be held in such strict confinement, for I was so stunned and weak all I could do was lie on the bed, or sit looking out the window. With my three faithful friends, I could unburden myself, weep and sleep, as the moods took me.

There was no word from Octavian, just a supper tray shoved in the door after dark.

My keepers delighted in stepping into the room unannounced, at odd hours. Before it had grown light, the same officer appeared, opening the door loudly.

“Madam!” he said, bending over my bed.

“You need not shout,” I said. “I am quite awake. But please light my lamp.” He was carrying a torch.

“Certainly.” He turned obligingly to do it. He was not unkind, this loud soldier.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Cornelius Dolabella,” he said. “I have known the Imperator many years, and served him since the last campaign.” He hung the lamp on its stand. “I wish to tell you that my commander has graciously granted your wish. You may make all the funeral arrangements for Antony, conduct it however you please. And you are to be moved into more comfortable quarters. He has also assigned one of his most trusted and esteemed freedmen, Epaphroditus, to you.”

Epaphroditus! What a strange thing, that he should also have a favorite companion with that name. It had always been a fortunate name for me; might it prove so again?

“I thank the Imperator,” I said.

“He says you may spare no expense,” said Dolabella.

“The Imperator is generous.” He could afford to be, now that he had my treasury.

Antony’s funeral…how shall I write of it? That it was magnificent, befitting a king? No earthly tokens and salutes were withheld; and the glittering trappings of majesty that had so offended Rome in advance—in his will—surrounded him. He was borne in a golden coffin, on a heavy, gilded hearse. The funeral cortege was thronged, with the chief mourners keeping pace behind the hearse, solemn dirges playing—like a very slow, drawn-out repetition of the Dionysus procession that had played its way out of the city three nights earlier. The same pipes, the same drums, the same cymbals, now wailing a sad melody. It began in the palace grounds, then wound its way through the city, past scenes where we had been so happy, had had our glorious moments. The Museion…the Gymnasion…the Temple of Serapis…the wide Canopic Way…Alexander’s tomb…and ended back at the palace, once our place of joy.

Then into the mausoleum, where the granite sarcophagus was waiting, its lid off. The great coffin lifted, placed within it, the lid slid over it, the sad, melancholy thud as the two pieces locked together, sealing him in. I knelt and laid a necklace of flowers on it, like those placed on the Pharaohs; leaned across the cool stone and whispered, “Anubis. Anubis at last, my dearest.” My farewell.

That was what the people saw.

But I…I saw other things. Before the coffin had been closed, I had come to the chamber where it rested on its bier. The best funeral directors in the world had taken charge of my beloved Antony, doing everything in their earthly power to prepare him for this journey. Four great torches flared at each corner of the bier, fixed in iron sockets. I stood beside the coffin and looked in, dreading what I would see.

He looked different, smaller, all the robust joy of him having fled with his spirit. And so still. He lay so still, more still somehow than a stone statue, because it is not in the nature of flesh to be so utterly without movement.

I could stand it. This was not him. This need not be my last memory of him, the picture I would carry with me. I clutched the side of the coffin, leaning over to give him a formal farewell kiss. And then I saw it.

His hands, still exactly his hands, looking so alive. The scar on his right hand, where Olympos had treated it, that I knew so well, that
was
Antony. All of him seemed to be there in his hands, clasped quietly. It was the hands that undid me.

I remember little of what happened next, although some snatches of scenes remain, oddly clear like a painting, that allowed me to recount the details above. But such a frenzy of grief overtook me that it was all I could do to stumble behind the hearse and make the journey through the streets. There were crowds, all staring, but I saw them not, saw nothing but the slow, groaning hearse, felt nothing but the pain of loss. I knew now what I had lost, Antony gone, Egypt taken, the dregs of defeat. The waves of heat rising from the white marble streets and buildings blinded me, overcame me. I ripped my clothes like any village widow whose life is ruined, beat on myself without even knowing it, tore at my hair. They say I wailed, too, like a common woman, and cried out in pain to the gods. But all I remember is the pain itself, blurring everything else, not what I said or did. I had ceased to exist, obliterated under a crushing mound of anguish.

Upon returning, I collapsed into my bed. There was one other thing…something I had not noticed at the time, but that now nagged at me, an ugly question.

Dolabella was on duty. I saw him standing by the door, keeping a discreet distance. But I called for him, knowing he would tell me.

“Madam?” He was leaning over my bed, where I was lying shivering, even in the heat of this day.

“Antyllus,” I said. “Antony’s son. Where was he? Should he not have been among the mourners?”

His face clouded. “The young Marcus Antonius is dead,” he finally said. “He was killed by soldiers as he took sanctuary in the shrine of the deified Caesar.”

“No! How could he have been? How could such a mistake have happened?” But in the confusion of an invading army, anything is possible. Antyllus!

“It was—it was not a mistake, my lady,” the honest Dolabella said. “The Imperator ordered it.”

“O sweet Isis!” I breathed. He would slay my children, then, too. We Ptolemies were doomed. If he was pitiless to Antyllus—Antyllus, who was no threat to him, who claimed nothing that Octavian wanted, whose only crime was being Antony’s son—how could mine, doubly damned by being Cleopatra’s as well, escape?

That is when the fever took hold of me and I entered the delirium.

They said it was because I had lacerated my breasts and they had become inflamed and caused the fever. But no, it was all that I had beheld in the last three days, and all I knew. All was over, gone, and I was determined to die. The sacred serpents, my weapons of deliverance and seal of my daughterhood of Re, had slipped from my possession, but there still remained a way open to me. I would refuse food, give in to the fever, waste away. When we want to die, our bodies will oblige. They cannot hold our spirit captive for long. Our wills are stronger than our flesh, and can drive it to shrivel up and cease to live. No food, no water, I would take nothing, but lay tossing and thrashing on the bed, bathed in sweat, and tortured by such dreams as would make the blackness of death a gentle friend.