Excerpt
Cleopatra
Chapter One51 BCEI bit into the flesh of the fig, its skin warmed by the heat of the sun.
Charmion watched me through half-lidded eyes as I chewed. The wind tousled her linen dress and tugged the collar to reveal the sun-touched glow of her skin.
For all the years of my life, Charmion had been my companion and handmaiden. Her mother had been my nursemaid. And so, we were forever bonded by the milk that had strengthened us as babes. At eighteen years of age our eyes still sparkled with possibility, but our cheeks had slimmed from the plumpness of youth.
Though there were some remarkable moments in the years prior, my story for you starts here. The day I became Pharaoh.
The crunching of the fig’s seeds in my mouth were the only sound between us.
Then Charmion spoke, her voice solemn. “You cannot deny the inevitable.”
I placed the half-eaten fruit on the ground between us. With my other hand I lifted the playing sticks and clenched them in my fist.
“I do not think your win is inevitable.”
We spoke to each other in Arabic, one of the nine languages we had been schooled in. Though we used both Egyptian and Greek in court, Arabic was just for us.
It had all started when a travelling hakawati had passed through Alexandria from the great city of Gaza. I was eleven years old and had already developed a fondness for stories.
I begged my father to invite the storyteller to the palace. For three nights the hakawati took up residence in the temple. And for all three nights that was where Charmion and I stayed. His tales filled us with wonder, so much so that I requested to keep him.
“I am not yours to shelve like an ornament or trinket,” the hakawati said. The guards by the temple entrance bristled but I paid them no heed.
“Why not?” I asked with genuine curiosity. I had not yet found something I could not make my own. I was a Ptolemy. My blood was lit with the spark of divinity.
The hakawati smiled politely, far more conscious of the guards at his back than I. “Would you ask a fish to stop swimming?”
I thought about it. The truth was, yes, I would if I wanted to eat it, but that wasn’t the answer I thought he was looking for. “No.”
“Would you ask a hippo to stop smiling?”
“Never.”
“Then you cannot ask a hakawati to stop travelling. It is in our nature. Without it, we will run out of stories. And without stories I would have nothing to tell.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. That sounded very dire indeed.
The hakawati saw my distress and kneeled on the ground beside me. “Do not worry, there is another way to keep a part of me here. Tell my stories, again and again.”
My smile returned. I could do that.
For years Charmion and I had repeated the hakawati’s tales, every story blossoming into something new with each retelling. It was then that Arabic became the language between us.
I looked at Charmion now. The sincerity of her expression had melted away into something more playful.
“Look at the markers—you may as well concede,” she said.
I stood up with the pretence that I needed a better vantage point to view the senet board. I was cunning that way, always performing something or another. Manipulative, the unkind would go on to claim, but I did not see it that way.
From the moment my first cry rattled from my chest, I was taught to be something more than I was. I wanted to be a babe, but I had been born a pharaoh’s daughter. So they wiped the birthing ichor from my skin and swaddled me in gold-trimmed cloth. My cries were silenced by a polished amber stone, a poor replacement for a mother’s teat.
Despite being too young to remember the stone’s weight, sometimes I still imagined it lying heavy against my tongue. It tripped my words and filled out my cheeks, especially when I chose to be bold.
“C-concede? I will not.”
We were playing on the balcony in the lighthouse, my place of serenity and solace. Close enough to the god Re to feel his gaze beating against my brow, and far enough away from my duties at the palace. Even with the furnace above us radiating heat, it was preferable to the burning of many eyes wherever I went. Sometimes, if the wind blew east, the smoke would wind its way to my bedroom window, seasoning my sleep with embers and ash.
The board game lay on the ground between us. Charmion was the better player, but I was too proud to admit it. Instead, I began each game with the same foolish hope that one day I’d best her.
I rolled the playing sticks in my hand in frustration. “Amun’s wrath,” I cursed as a splinter pierced my palm.
“Are you well?” Charmion asked with concern. A light sheen of sweat glistened above her top lip.
I took the opportunity to brandish my hand towards her. But instead of displaying my wound, I surged forward and thrust the playing sticks over the balcony.
Charmion’s eyes met mine, one dark eyebrow quirked. “So, you do concede?”
“Never,” I said with a grin.
Charmion laughed and together we peered over the balcony’s edge.
Alexandria lay before me. The city had neither the beauty of Rome nor the grandeur of Babylon. No, Alexandria was not a city to be admired, it was far more than that. It lived and breathed like a beast.
Sailors called to one another across the harbour, the cacophony of many languages resonating throughout the city like a pack of wolves yipping and howling in the hunt. Though we were far above the docks, I could smell the brackish char of eels being cooked over fire. Boats undulated on the waves along the expanse of the coast, their many-coloured sails glittering like scales on a sea snake.
To the south, the Heptastadion causeway connected the lighthouse’s isle to the mainland. Beyond that, the awnings of market stalls lined the streets and though I couldn’t see them, I imagined the traders gesturing emphatically to their customers.
You could not separate the citizens from the city’s heartbeat; they were one and the same. Asiatic, Parthian, Greek, Egyptian; no matter their origin, the silt of the Nile Delta thickened their blood. It brought a wildness to the city, tamed only by the pharaohs who ruled over it—my family.
Soon to be me.
But I was not sure I had the fortitude to bridle the people of Egypt.
My doubts were not new, though they had grown more prominent since my father’s affliction. He did not have much time left before departing this world for the next.
As he got sicker and sicker, I became tormented by dreams of my own reflection; like the facets of a jewel, each side a different version of the pharaoh I was to be. One was cruel and callous, another gracious and gentle. Every echo of my being was a stranger to me, and I would awaken bathed in a chilling sweat, haunted by the outlanders in my mind.
I was not ready to be Pharaoh. Though I wonder if I ever would have reached true readiness. Without the skill of prophecy, I was always going to be ill-prepared for the years that followed. No one could have been prepared to live the life I would go on to lead. I must forgive my younger self this flaw, if nothing else.
Charmion leaned over the balcony, her brows pinched, unaware of my dark thoughts. “I don’t think we can see what you rolled from here, so we shall presume I won.”
A sudden breeze plucked a braid from the knot above my head. Charmion immediately moved to tuck it back into my diadem.
Her fingers grazed the mark on the back of my neck. Black, as if drawn in kohl, the three-stepped shape of the throne ran from the edge of my hairline to the top of my back. It marked me as the chosen of the goddess Isis.
I shivered from her touch and Charmion drew away.
“If we cannot see the sticks, then we will never know. So we must call it a draw,” I teased her.
Charmion laughed, tossing her head back until her curling hair crested the tips of her shoulder blades. “Every time you do not win it must be a draw.”
“I am a Ptolemy; we were not born to lose.” Though I smiled, my words felt a little bitter. Like the rind of a pomegranate, the reminder of the duties that awaited me tainted the sweetness of the day.
Charmion heard the footsteps first. “Someone comes.”
“Who knew we were here?” I asked with a flash of annoyance.
“I do not know. But since your father has been bound to his bed, I have long suspected Pothinus has been watching you.”
I felt my lips twist at the eunuch’s name. He lingered in my father’s shadow like a crocodile amongst the reeds of the riverbank.
For the last ten years he had been a tutor to my younger brother. But since the onset of my father’s illness, his interest in teaching had seemed to wane. Instead, he turned to politicking, circling my father in the murky shallows of the throne room.
I tightened my gold belt where I had loosened it from sitting on the ground. Charmion tutted behind me and moved to help.
She twisted the metal links until the belt bound my ribs like armour. I dusted away the sand that clung to the weave of my skirts and waited for the newcomer to present themselves.
The slapping of sandals on stone slowed as the servant approached.
