Kleopatra (40 page)

The king had already taken his supper and was seated in the gaming room with Hekate at his side. At his feet were two boys
who looked like, but were not, twins. With skin that was not brown or black or fair but instead pale yellow, they were wrapped
in shiny red triangles of cloth. Their faces had the same angular three-sided shape of their dress. They sat cross-legged
on the floor, shoulders touching, each leaning against one of the king’s calves. He stroked their fine, silky black hair as
he sat staring into space. Hekate sat very erect, pretending either that they were not there, or that she did not object to
their presence. Kleopatra found herself torn between irritation at her father and concern at the ashen color of his face.

She began gently, though in a firm tone. “Must we discuss the affairs of the kingdom in the company of such unfamiliar faces?”

“Oh, do not mind them,” said the king. “They speak only some singsong language that no one understands. Not even you, I’ll
wager. They do not care for official business and such.”

“Very well. Hephaestion has read to you the demand letter from Rabirius?”

“Yes, yes,” said the king curtly.

“And what action do you recommend?”

“Send him some money. Or if you would like to meet Julius Caesar, do not send him some money.” The king laughed at his joke.
“For myself, I should like to meet Caesar. I hear he is a splendid conversationalist and an art lover. I should like to play
my flute for him.”

“The doctors recommend that you do not play anymore, Your Highness,” said Hekate quietly. “It takes away your wind.”

“Nonetheless, I would happily play for Julius Caesar. Perhaps he would forgive the debt if I enchanted him.”

“Father, I do not wish to meet Julius Caesar under such circumstances. Hephaestion believes we must send Rabirius a payment,
but only after we have gathered support from the people.”

“Do what you wish,” Auletes said. “You are queen.”

Kleopatra looked at the Prime Minister and shook her head. So this is what it had come to. Her father had lost his mind and
he no longer recognized her. “Father, I beg your indulgence. You are king. I am your daughter. There is no queen.”

“No queen?” Auletes replied as if he had just been given startling news. “We shall have to remedy that. I thought I had married
you.”

“Father, I am Kleopatra. I am your daughter, not your wife.”

“I once married my daughter.”

“Yes, Father, that was Thea, the daughter of your wife and my mother. I am neither your first wife nor your second.”

Kleopatra tried to conceal the alarm in her voice. She looked at Hekate, who lowered her eyes. What was she to do? Her father
was no longer her father but some madman who did not even know her. She felt the protection she had enjoyed all her life as
his most favored and loyal daughter drain away like water out of a tub, leaving her empty and alone.

“You are how old?”

“I am almost eighteen, Father,” she said.

“Already eighteen years old? Very well. As of tomorrow you are queen.” He shrugged, saying to Hephaestion, “Draw up the papers.
Bring them to me in the afternoon.” And then to Hekate, “Oh, I am tired. I want to be carried to my bed.”

The queen held the coin between her index finger and thumb, admiring the favorable way the craftsman had dignified the prodigious
profiles of herself and her father. Was there any possibility that her face was as lovely as it looked on the coin? She feared
not; she had too often held a mirror to the side of her face and appraised herself from that angle. But the artist had managed
to capture the intelligence in her eyes, the dramatic levity of her cheekbone, and the enticing, upward curve of her lips.
In the thirtieth regnal year of King Ptolemy XII and the first regnal year of his co-regent, Queen Kleopatra VII
, it read. Cheek to cheek, they stared forward, as if into the future.

She flipped it again, catching it in the cup of her palm and bouncing it a few times. No one, she was sure, would notice her
handiwork, her alchemy, except the foreman at the Royal Mint. And he was a reasonable man.

Once Kleopatra’s joint rulership with her father was made official, she requested that the government issue a coin with the
images of her and her father to announce to his subjects that his daughter now ruled at his side. But Hephaestion brought
her the grim news that the treasury’s supplies of bronze and silver were severely diminished, due to the extortion of Gabinius
and the machinations of Rabirius. There is simply not enough metal, Hephaestion explained, to issue coinage at this time.
The supplies are almost twenty-five percent lower than in previous years. Perhaps later, he said, when we have solved some
of our financial problems. She did not like the way that her first command as queen had been summarily dismissed. That evening
in her bath, breathing the aromatic steam, skimming her hand over the oil-slicked surface of the warm water, Kleopatra came
up with the idea. She leapt to her feet, almost losing her balance on the slippery marble floor of the tub and startling the
bath attendant. She allowed herself to be wrapped in a towel, dancing, almost, in bare feet while she reviewed her inspired
idea for possible flaws. They would issue the coins, but with less bronze, twenty-five percent less, to be exact. She brought
the plan to Hephaestion the next day.

“How can we do that, Your Majesty,” he asked, “when the coins are weighed for their worth?” He looked at her as if surprised
at her naiveté; as if she were a child with an unreasonable demand who had manufactured an impossible, silly solution just
to get her way.

“It is simple. We will stamp the worth of the coin on the coin itself. Just as we stamp our image, we will imprint the worth
of the coin directly into the metal. Then no one will be able to contest the worth. It will also save considerable time in
the trading process. No one will have to weigh anymore. They will know what the coin is worth because we will tell them.”

“But that has never been done,” he replied politely.

“Precisely. Then there is no law against it.”

The man looked astonished, but whether in admiration of her or fear that she had lost her mind, she could not guess. She continued,
“A coin of forty drachmas will be stamped forty drachmas. But it will weigh thirty. In this way, we will make a full twenty-five
percent profit on every coin we issue. The surplus can be used to make a payment to placate the scoundrel Rabirius.”

Hephaestion did not answer, but rubbed his palms together slowly as if he were praying on the idea. “It has never been done
before, but it shall be done now,” he said, offering her his characteristic modest smile, as if a broad grin would crack open
his unlined skin. “Your Majesty, the gods enlighten you. I hope you are aware of that gift. I believe you are specially blessed.
I shall remember to honor that as long as I am in your command.”

“I am aware of the goodness of the gods,” she said. “But if you really wish to please me, you should offer me a more extravagant
smile.”

Thus edified and feeling terribly like a queen, Kleopatra went into the Royal Vaults and extracted her mother’s ring of the
Bacchant, a heavy, gold-sculpted rendering of the god, naked and at his most manly and beautiful, his tousled curls capped
with an ivy crown. She liked wearing the ring of the last true queen of Egypt, as she liked to think of it, and to have that
link to a mother whose voice, features, and demeanor she could not recall, even in dreams. Perhaps the ring would please the
ailing Auletes, bringing back pleasant memories of his first wife, whom he had lost not long after his daughter was born.
In the past month, the king had forsaken his sexual indulgences as well as his duties and had taken to his bed Kleopatra visited
her father daily; sometimes he knew her, sometimes he mistook her for others long dead.

Hekate hovered over Auletes day and night, holding his hand for hours and hours as he lay gasping for breath, laying soothing
herbs and presses on his forehead. When the king did not show improvement either in mind or in body, Kleopatra called a meeting
of the physicians and demanded to know why they could not revive her lather, who was not an old man.

“He has fevers, Your Majesty,” the Royal Physician replied. “Yet his liver is excessively chilled. The traditional cures have
not worked. There is not a physician or a scientist at the Mouseion that we have not consulted. We have brought in the native
women to administer the secret healing herbs of Egypt. We have also written to our colleagues in Athens and Rhodes for advice.”

“By the time we receive an answer that compensates for your lack of knowledge the king will be dead,” she said curtly. But
she knew the truth. Auletes was a spent man. The long years trying to placate al the disparate factions of his kingdom and
his family, the familial betrayals, and, most of all, the humiliation he had faced time and again at the hands of the Romans
had defeated him utterly.

Kleopatra flipped the coin into the air, catching it in her palm. She clutched it tightly and smiled. She would bring it to
the king directly. This symbol that his lineage continued into the future would cheer him. He had held the throne of his ancestors
in the lace of his family’s rebellion, his subjects’ displeasure, and the Roman menace. The coin was the greatest evidence
she could show him, other than her abject loyalty, that his life had been a success.

“How is the king today?” she asked the physician she met coming out of the king’s chamber.

“He is in most decent spirits, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “He ate a splendid breakfast of dates, quail eggs, and milk,
and then called for an orange. He insisted upon peeling it himself. I believe he is mending. The gods are good to those who
serve them.”

The king lay in his bed, his head propped on an immense silk pillow. His perspiration had discolored the patch that haloed
his head, making a mock crown. His eyes seemed out of symmetry. Though Hekate swabbed his forehead repeatedly, his face glistened,
giving him an ethereal countenance. What could that physician have meant by his spirits?

When Hekate saw the queen she began to rise, obeying the protocol for her new status, but Kleopatra silently stopped her with
her hand.

“Father,” she began in an uncharacteristically perky voice. “Look here what I have.” Auletes attempted to focus his eyes on
the small, metallic orb that she held in front of his face.

“Look, Sire,” said Hekate. “It is the coin of the joint rulership between our new queen and yourself. How handsome you look,
Auletes. It is a wonderful likeness.”

The king squinted. “Yes, it is, by god. Look at me. How fine I am. But do you not think I am portrayed as too fat?”

“Not at all, my darling,” Hekate said. “You are pictured at the height of health and prosperity. It is a fine tribute to you
and to the queen.”

“And how lovely my wife looks, though she does not appear herself at all.”

“It is a likeness of myself, Father,” answered the queen. “Kleopatra, your eldest daughter.”

“But why do you wear the ring of my wife? Have you stolen it from her? Where is she?”

“My mother is dead. She died when I was but a child.”

“Ah, so it is. Come close to me.”

Kleopatra sat on the enormous state bed beside the supine figure of her father. Hanging above them was the eagle of Ptolemy,
nesting directly above, serving as a canopy over the ailing king. The beast’s sharp beak curved ominously, pointing its tip
at Auletes’ belly. Kleopatra had never before been on the bed of her father. Would she someday sleep in this room? How could
one get a good night’s rest when the eagle threatened always to swoop down and hit the bed’s tenant in his most vulnerable
spot?

Auletes’ hand was limp and hot. She smelled the odor from the wet poultice that covered his liver. Kleopatra’s first instinct
was to withdraw her hand, but she let it rest in his palm. He closed his hand around hers, immediately causing her to perspire,
whether from the temperature or from nervousness, she did not know. “You are Kleopatra, as was your mother and her mother.
Or so it says on your new coin.”

“That is correct, Father.”

“You are not an impostor or a usurper, are you?” he asked wickedly. She did not know if he joked with her or if he was still
in a confused state.

“I am not an impostor. I have remained true to my father the king even when his wife and his other daughter and his own people
turned against him,” she said, wishing she did not have to make this bedside defense of herself.

“The name Kleopatra means ‘glory to her father,’” he said. His eyes were now focused intently on hers. She believed she felt
heat emanating from them. “Swear to me that you will honor that name always.”

“I swear it, Father. I shall care for you always and never desert you or fail to heed your wise counsel. The kingdom suffers
from your sick leave. Every day I pray to the gods that my father recovers quickly, that one morning I will awaken to the
sound of his flute.”

Hekate smiled her approval for Kleopatra’s patronage of her father, while Kleopatra wished that there was even a modicum of
hope behind her words; that her father were himself and that together they could attend to the thousand details and problems
of government as they had in what seemed now like times long past.