The Memoirs of Cleopatra (25 page)

I always admired Mardian’s astounding ability to collect gossip from far-flung places. It was as if he had an outpost in Rome. How did he do it?

“It is the international brotherhood of eunuchs,” he once said, and I half believed him. Nothing else could account for it.

“What else are they saying at Rome?” This was delicious.

“That he lost his reason in Egypt, dillydallied when he should have been going about manly Roman tasks like pursuing the last of Pompey’s rebels, indulged himself with the effeminate pleasures of the Nile, and so on. It’s done wonders for your reputation and created quite a sensation: a woman whom Caesar actually changed his plans for! His veterans made up verses about it, something to the effect that ‘Old Caesar wallowed in the mud with the daughter of the Nile, and swelled her banks’…I don’t, er, remember the rest.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. I felt my ears grow warm. I’ve often been thankful that my face does not blush with embarrassment, but only my ears. And they were invisible beneath my hair today. “Now, about the coin. I think it should be bronze. And it will show me nursing Caesarion.”

“Like Isis,” he said flatly. He understood the significance.

“Yes,” I said. “Like Isis and Horus. And Venus and Cupid. Cyprus was, after all, the birthplace of Venus.”

“And Venus is Caesar’s ancestress.”

“Yes.”

“How a simple coin can send so many messages!” he exclaimed, nodding in admiration.

I was posing for the coin. One of our Alexandrian artists had come to make the likeness, and I was seated on a backless chair, holding Caesarion. He kept grabbing at my hair, and I kept gently removing the hands. They were fat, soft little things, as smooth as yogurt. A baby’s hands give you immense sensual pleasure just to touch; a miracle that soon fades—like tender new leaves, like the mist of early dawn, like all new things that cannot last, but change into something more prosaic as the day goes inexorably on. Caesarion’s hands were still precious.

The artist was making a model in clay, and I would have to approve it. I wished I had more conventional beauty. Although I now knew that my features, taken all together, produced a pleasing effect, they looked best when viewed from the front. A profile showed only the size of my nose and lips, not the harmony of the whole. Nonetheless, coin portraits traditionally showed a profile. Oh, for the profile of Alexander!

“Head higher,” murmured the artist, and I lifted my chin.

“You have a regal neck,” said the artist. “It has a lovely curve,”

A pity that necks are not dwelt upon in poetry, I thought. No one ever mentions necks.

“Your hair should show up well on the coin,” he said. “Shall I portray the curls?”

“Certainly,” I said. They always portrayed Alexander’s tousled curls. My own hair was thick and wavy, not unlike Alexander’s. But mine was black, whereas his was fair. The advantage to black hair was that you could rinse it with herbs and oils and make it shine like a raven’s wing.

“The eyes. Shall I have you looking straight ahead?”

“As you wish.”

It was almost impossible to show life in the eyes from the side. And of course you could never indicate color. I had found it curious that Caesar, the Roman, had had dark eyes while mine were a lighter, amber green. Caesarion’s had darkened; they would be like his father’s. Had I not borne him, I would wonder what I had contributed to Caesarion’s heredity.

I sat for what seemed hours. I had to hand Caesarion over to Iras, because he began to squirm and cry. Just when I thought I could bear it no longer, the artist said, “I believe I am finished. Would you care to look?”

There is always a moment of dread in first looking at one’s portrait. It is how another perceives you, and you are sure their view must be truer than yours. I got out of the chair—my legs were almost asleep—and came around to look at what he had created.

It was ugly!

Without thinking, I burst out, “Is this what I look like?”

He looked crestfallen. “I—I—”

“This woman looks like an old Hittite axe!” I cried. Stolid, jaw clenched, the matron glared out across the coin. The infant at her breast—was it an infant or a stone globe? It had no features but an abnormally large, round head.

The ridiculous infant made me feel better. I knew that Caesarion looked nothing like that.

“You have to change it!” I said. “I know I am not as beautiful as Aphrodite, but neither do I look like I am sixty years old. I am not the size of the Apis bull! And my child has eyes!”

“I thought—I thought you wanted to stress the dignity of the throne,” the artist said.

“I do,” I said. “But age and size do not automatically confer greatness. Look at the rotting old hulks of burnt-out warships! Come to think of it, that is what you have made me look like here!”

“Forgive me, forgive me! But I thought, your being a woman—that it would be better—I mean—”

I knew what he meant. For unknown reasons, if one wished to show that a woman was powerful, or intelligent, the way to signify it was to portray her as being physically unattractive. For a man, however, it was the opposite. Alexander’s beauty was not felt to detract from his generalship. Nowhere was it hinted that a handsome man could not be a good ruler, or clever, or strong, or brave. In fact, people longed for a resplendent king. But for a woman…I shook my head. It was as if beauty in a woman rendered all other traits suspect.

“I know there is a hidden code in all this, and coins must abide by the code,” I said wearily. “A young woman who has any physical charms at all is seen as incompatible with queenship. That is the convention. But this is too much!”

“Gracious Majesty, I will change it,” he said. “Please allow me to adjust it to your approval.”

Mardian and I were looking at the almost-finished product. A facsimile of the coin had been rendered in bronze by another artist, and then a die would be cut. Assuming, of course, that it met with my approval this time.

“Well,” said Mardian, trying to suppress a giggle. He failed.

“Have you ever seen anything so—grim?” I asked. The artist had made little change.

“It serves you right,” he said. “It is an antidote to your vanity.”

“I am not vain!” I believe this is true. I have never dwelt on myself, but I do try to have an honest appraisal of my traits, that is all.

“It was vain of you to think of the coin at all,” he insisted.

“It was a political statement, pure and simple.”

“It was a political statement, but not pure and simple.” He rotated the coin. “You do look formidable. Rome will tremble.” He laughed. “They will also wonder what Caesar saw in you.”

I sighed. I was anxious to know what had happened to him, how he was faring. Why had he not written me?

“Mardian,” I said, trying not to sound plaintive, “have you had any word about his whereabouts?” If anyone knew, Mardian would.

“I have heard that he landed in Antioch, then made his way to Ephesus. I think he is still there.”

“What is the date?”

“He was reported to have reached Ephesus in the latter part of Quintilis.”

It was now the last day of Quintilis. He had sailed away in early June. Caesarion had been born on June twenty-third, almost exactly the summer solstice. Why had I not received a single message from him?

“Is he going directly to Pontus, then?”

“That is the assumption,” said Mardian. “He wants to strike quickly.”

“That is what he always does,” I said.

He strikes quickly and then moves on, I added to myself. He moves on and never looks back.

Veni, vidi, vici:
I came, I saw, I conquered.

Even today, those words have the power to excite my soul. They were the three laconic words Caesar used to describe what happened when he finally met King Pharnaces of Pontus. After traveling hundreds of miles, Caesar pursued the King into his own territory, and then, on the very day of sighting him, joined battle. It lasted only four hours, and ended in the utter defeat of the braggart King. The forces of Pharnaces were flushed with enough bravado to attempt a chariot charge uphill toward Caesar’s stronghold. The result was inevitable. Later Caesar reportedly said that it was no wonder that Pompey had been regarded as an invincible general, if such was the caliber of his enemies.

The battle had taken place on the first day of the Roman month of Sextilis, less than two months since he had left Alexandria with his one-quarter legion. Once again his speed and feat had seemed superhuman.

I wish those words,
veni, vidi, vici
, had been written to me, along with a description of the battle, but they were not. They were in a letter addressed to a certain Gaius Matius in Rome, an old confidant of Caesar’s. Of course, spies picked them up and echoed them throughout the world. The same spies, as well as Mardian’s “international brotherhood of eunuchs,” reported that he returned to Rome in September, after redistributing offices and appointments in the troubled territories.

I made my way almost every day to your shrine, O Isis, to give you thanks for his deliverance. My constant apprehension about his safety was difficult to bear. I felt, even then, that the gods were almost mocking him, as if they were preparing him for a sacrifice. We pamper the bulls and pigeons we have selected for the altar, as if we thereby render them more choice. We deck them with garlands and give them the sweetest grass and corn. We shelter them from the heat of the noonday sun and the chill of night. Nothing can touch them. Nothing but their supposed guardians. But you, Isis, alone of the gods, are compassionate. You have known the sorrow of a wife and the joy of motherhood. I knew that you would not turn a deaf ear to my pleas and prayers.

Almost at the same time as Caesar’s victory over Pharnaces, the Nile began its annual rise. At the time I took it as a good omen, meaning that both our fortunes were swelling on a great tide upward. It was the New Year of the Egyptian calendar, and all along the riverbanks the festivals began to welcome the first perceptible rise of the water. At Thebes, the sacred boat of Amun-Re was taken in procession by the priests, with thousands of lanterns swaying in the warm night. At Coptos and Memphis, they flung open the gates of the canals to welcome the water, to let it take possession of the land like a man with a woman. This turned into a great festival of love, nights of feasting and marriages, as young men sang:

And his sweetheart would answer:

I would hear Iras singing this song, and it filled me with longing for Caesar, as I thought of all the lovemaking and night festivals going on up and down the land, while I, only twenty-two years old, remained in the palace alone in my bed, in a room that suddenly seemed stifling.

As the waters continued to rise, everyone rejoiced. During the first two years of my reign there had been insufficient water, causing famine. Now, on this first flood since I had been restored to the throne, a restoration in nature seemed promised as well.

But then the waters kept rising, and rising. They came up into the very precincts of the sacred temples, lapping at the portals of the inmost sanctuaries. They overwhelmed the dikes and basins and flowed out over the desert sands. The mud-brick houses, which were supposedly set a safe distance away, were overtaken and began to disintegrate back into Nile mud.

My engineers at the First Cataract, where the floodwaters initially appeared, sent frantic dispatches. There the Nilometer, the gauge by which the floodwaters were measured, already had a marking higher than any in living memory. And it was “thin” water, not the deep brown that signified fertility. Something was wrong.

Water. That night I sat staring at a beaker full of freshly drawn Nile water from Upper Egypt. It sat innocently on my table, betraying only the slightest hint of color. It was completely unlike its usual self, which at this time of year should be opaque with the life-giving black substance that came down in the flood. Egypt called itself the Black Land, after the black ribbon of rich soil the Nile left behind on its banks each year. Not to have that gift was not to be Egypt. And after two previous years of too little water!

Was there anything to be done? What caused the black soil to enter the river in the first place, and where did it come from? Surprisingly enough, neither Olympos nor Mardian seemed to have any clear idea, or even an opinion.

“It must gush out wherever the source of the Nile is,” said Mardian. “And you know no one has ever found that.”

“I thought the Nile god Hapi brought it,” said Olympos innocently.

“You, who mock all the gods on Olympus and in Hades, give me a disappointing answer,” I said.

“I think someone at the Museion might know,” said Mardian. “Let us sound the call rousing those most formidable beasts, scholar-scientists.”

A soft breeze, scented with jasmine from a nearby walled garden, blew over us. I sighed. I wished I could just give myself to this delicious night, rather than concerning myself with meetings and scientists.

In a window on the second story of a villa overlooking the colonnaded street, I saw a lamp being extinguished, and the glow of the room faded. Someone, one of my subjects, was doing just that. But I, the Queen, must stay awake so he could sleep in peace.

“Tomorrow we will consult with them,” I told Mardian and Olympos. And tonight I will lie awake thinking of what I must learn from them, I thought.

My bed, spread with bleached linen sheets, felt soggy to me. There was moisture everywhere. I remembered being told that engineers set out unfired pottery near the Nile and weighed it after a night to see how much water it had absorbed; in this way they predicted the river’s rise. If it was true that the Nile gave off a foggy breath, then his exhalation was full of dew now.

No one can stop the Nile, I told myself. All we can do is to move things out of its reach, dig bigger basins to contain the water, and collect manure to spread on the fields that will not get any silt. As for the vermin and the snakes—I must inquire about those snake-people, the Psylli, they say they have magic powers….

Despite the oppressive air and the tangle of heavy sheets, I slept.

I had sent word that a council of scholars and scientists should be assembled at the Museion to help me plan how to combat the threatened disaster. Have I recounted the history of the Museion? It is an academy devoted to the Muses—hence its name—and attached to the Library; they share a common dining room. But in the years since it was founded, it had grown into a beehive of scholars, who were supported by the Ptolemies. We provided for their every need, gave them perfect working quarters—a magnificent Library with manuscripts at their fingertips, lecture halls of polished marble, works of art brought from sites all over the world to inspire them, and laboratories in which to study the phenomena of nature—while asking only one thing in return: that they should put their monumental knowledge at our disposal. We seldom called on them for it, outside of asking them to be royal tutors, and so they had the better part of the bargain. But now I would require their help.

I met with them in the great rotunda, flanked by my advisors and scribes. Ever optimistic, I hoped there would be a great deal of useful material for the scribes to write down. The engineers, historians, geographers, and naturalists were waiting; they clustered around a large potted plant with thick, sole-like leaves, examining something on its trunk. They snapped to attention when we walked in and abandoned the plant.

I felt relief at seeing so many of them, as a sick patient does in seeing a shelf full of medicine bottles and jars. Surely the remedy must be in one of them!

“Good scholars and scientists of the Museion—famed throughout the world—I come to you today in hopes you can help me save Egypt.” I paused to let those blunt words soak in. “The report from Upper Egypt is that the river is cresting higher than it ever has, but that life-giving substances are not in it. So we have a double catastrophe: all the damage of a flood combined with the crisis of a famine. I ask you: Is there any known help from science?”

They stared back at me, silently. I saw them shifting their eyes back and forth, watching to see if anyone would speak. Finally a young man stepped forward.

“I am Ibykos of Priene,” he said. He had a thin, wavering voice, completely at odds with his compact, overmuscled frame. His arms, shiny like swelling fruit, bulged out of his upper tunic. “I am an engineer. All I can suggest is that we raise the earth—or else lower it—to contain the river. Build dams or dig enormous reservoir basins. Perhaps both.”

“And how could we do this in time?” asked another man. “It would require more workmen than built the pyramids! The Nile is hundreds of miles long!”

“Most villages already have irrigation basins. Perhaps each could enlarge the ones they already have. That would not be so prodigious a task,” I said. “But as for building a dam—is that possible?”

Another engineer said, “No. The Nile is too wide. We could not stop it up long enough to dam it, and as for diverting it—again, it is too wide. And the current is too strong.” He blinked a few times, as if to emphasize his words.

“Very well, then.” I believed that exhausted the subject. There was little we could do to hinder the flood itself. “What happens in a flood? What can we expect? Can anyone here tell me?”

A huge mountain of a man stepped forward. “I am Telesikles,” he said. “I come from the Euphrates valley, where we often have floods. Indeed, there is a poem about our great flood, the epic of Gilgamesh. The great Utnapishtim had to build a gigantic boat, six stories high, in order to survive. ‘As soon as a gleam of dawn shone in the sky, came a black cloud from the foundation of heaven. Inside it the storm god thundered. His rage reached to the heavens, turning all light to darkness. Six days and nights raged the wind, the flood, the cyclone, and devastated the land,’ ” he intoned.

We all just looked at him. His flesh was shaking as he recited the poetry, as if the wind were blowing over his limbs.

“And in the Hebrew holy books of Moses, there is also a flood, and an ark is built,” said another.

“We are not going to build boats or arks for everyone in Egypt,” I said. “After all, the flood is not going to cover all the dry land. I am not interested in poetic descriptions of floods, but in what actually happens as a result of a flood. When Noah stepped out of the ark, everything had been destroyed. What will happen to us?”

“ ‘And all mankind had turned to clay. The ground was flat like a roof,’ ” Telesikles recited ominously.

“That is absurd!” another man said in a shrill voice. “The Queen has asked us for details, not a lot of poetry. Everyone will not turn to clay, and the ground in Egypt is
already
flat like a roof. Be quiet, you fool!”

“If I may be permitted—” A hawk-nosed man stepped forward, and I saw that he was fairly young. Although his face was creased, his hair was still dark and fairly thick. “I am Alkaios of Athens, an engineer with an interest in history. I have lived here in Egypt long enough to acquaint myself with what happens in the countryside when too much water descends.” He looked around, and saw that no one was going to challenge him. “Dangerously high floods are rare, but memory has recorded them. In the first place, what happens when the tide comes in along the seashore?”

No one answered.

“Come, come. Have you never walked along a beach? Never been in Judaea? What a bunch of parochials! Well, the tide comes in and destroys everything built of sand. All the little houses children construct—they’re washed away. Children aren’t the only ones who build of sand. What are the Egyptian villages made of? Sun-dried brick. What happens when brick gets wet?” He gestured toward a tub of water that was standing near the mysterious plant, waiting for his demonstration. Then he tossed a mud brick into it, sending a spray of water out onto the floor. “Watch this. In an hour or two it will revert to mud.”

The other scholars drew up the hems of their gowns. “Must you be so vehement?” one of them asked.

“I wish to make a point,” he said. “Thus the buildings will collapse. No great loss or expense, if in advance new ones are built out of reach of the floodwaters. Unlike the floods of poetry, this one comes gradually. There is time to prepare.” He paced a little before whirling around and announcing, “Standing water, however, is quite different from running water.”

This fellow was quite a showman, I thought. But what he was saying needed no flourishes.

“It breeds insects, frogs, and scum. It stinks. Diseases rise up out of it. It seeps into things out of its reach as it creeps underground. Stored grain, unless it is kept some distance away, will become wet and moldy. Then mice will multiply like mad. There will be a plague of mice!” His voice rose like a thunderclap.