Kleopatra (51 page)

“You look well, if unhappy, my friends,” said the queen. Both the priest and his wife were gaunt in the face, but neither
appeared to have suffered too much physical damage from lack of food. The woman had purple circles under her dark eyes, unusual
for the Egyptian complexion.

“Your Majesty, who could feign happiness in such times?” said the priest. “Who knows the wisdom of the gods? I apologize that
no one is here to meet you but myself and my wife, but so many are dead and the rest have gone. And now what little food remains
must leave us today, just as you are coming to grace our city.”

“What do you mean?” asked Kleopatra.

“Your Majesty, the soil here is particularly fertile. We did not have a full crop this year, but, with the blessing of the
god, we managed to harvest enough grain for our own people to survive. We might still survive the year if we were allowed
to keep our portion of the crop. But, you see”—he turned his placid brown face to the barge—”what remains of our food leaves
today for Alexandria. The people in the city feast while we who grow the food must starve. They are leaving us nothing. Nothing.”

Happy Kettle turned her face away from her husband so that the queen would not see her tears. The priest continued. “In some
villages, the people have resurrected the custom from the. Old Time of sacrificing a young virgin to the river god. We have
not seen this kind of desperation in our lifetimes, nor in the lifetimes of our fathers and their fathers’ fathers.”

“Can we not stop this travesty?” Kleopatra said to Hephaestion.

The priest leaned as close as he dared to the queen in order to whisper to her. “I know why the Nile does not rise, Your Majesty,”
he said solemnly. “When god is pleased with Pharaoh, the river rises. When god is pleased with Pharaoh, god gives us his gifts.
God is not pleased with the boy Pharaoh.”

Though her command of the native language was excellent, Kleopatra sometimes found the Egyptian manner of explanation utterly
abstruse. But she knew what the priest meant. The people would believe that a proper pharaoh—a conduit between the deities
and the people—would be able to protect them from such a disaster as drought.

“How do you know this?” Kleopatra asked.

“Because the god Sarapis, who loves the Egyptians and the Greeks equally, has told me. And I have spread his message.”

“You mean that the boy king does not please the god?”

“Until the boy is deposed, the god will not bless us with the waters of the river. The ones who starve the people must be
punished.”

“Is the god pleased with me, Father?” Kleopatra asked quietly, aware that the support of the people of the district hung precariously
on his answer.

“The god sent you to us. Just as you led the procession of the sacred bull, so shall you restore the waters of the Nile.”

Kleopatra was about to tell the priest that she did not know how to control the flow of rain when she stopped herself. She
turned to Hephaestion. “Prime Minister, I now issue a new policy concerning grain raised in the Thebiad, to be implemented
immediately.”

“What does Your Majesty have in mind?” he asked.

“The food must stay. That is all. Go to that well-fed Egyptian whose scribe stands at his side. Undoubtedly he is the district
officer here. Tell him that the queen demands that the shipment remain at the dock.”

“He will say that the Greek military governor of the
nome
will have his head if he does not obey the edict from Alexandria,” said Hephaestion.

“You may answer that the queen will have his head if he does not obey her command now.”

“Your Majesty,” began Hephaestion in a low voice. “You are bringing trouble to these people.”

“How can I worsen their condition? What is worse than slow starvation?” She waved to the captain of her guard. “Follow me.
If anyone makes a move against me, you know what to do.” She turned on her heel, leaving Hephaestion with his mouth agape
and no choice but to follow her.

The district officer’s tense face slackened into a look of surprise as the queen, the Prime Minister, and her guard approached
him. He looked to either side of himself to make certain he was the destination of this regal assemblage.

He stood stiff and frozen and then found refuge from the queen’s determined stare by bowing to the ground. His guard followed
his example, all falling to one knee. The agitated crowd of onlookers, too, quieted and fell into the submissive posture.

“Stand and face your queen,” Kleopatra said, speaking to the district officer in Egyptian, not for his own benefit, for all
district officers were well versed in Greek, but to make herself heard by his men and by the spectators. He raised his face
and then came to his feet. All others remained on the ground.

He was younger than she had anticipated, perhaps not even thirty years old. He must have been very smart to have risen so
quickly in the provincial bureaucracy. His face was set in the stern features of an older man, one whom experience had hardened.
Yet there was a dreamy quality in his small, dark eyes. Perhaps it was that they were shaped like teardrops, round and then
sharply upturned in the corners.

“I am Kleopatra, Lady of the Two Lands of Egypt, daughter of Ptolemy XII, descended from Alexander the Great, who many hundreds
of years ago conquered this land and made it his own. I am your sovereign queen.” The man fluttered his eyelashes at the young
queen. He moved to bow again, but the queen interceded. “Remain standing. And listen to me. Command the dock workers to unload
the food on the barge.”

He stared at her as if he did not comprehend her words. He was not a man given to think for himself. She looked past him and
saw the ubiquitous royal edict nailed to the dock:
No one may do as he likes; everything is organized for the best of all concerned!
Kleopatra tried to remain patient.

“What is the matter, District Officer? Do you not speak Egyptian?” she asked slyly.

Several of his men stifled snickers. The man looked imploringly at the queen.

“What is it you wish of me, Your Majesty?” he asked in a low, reverential voice, hoping that she would issue any request but
the one she had previously uttered.

“I wish you, command you, to take the food off the barge. The food remains with the people who grew it. The food does not
go to Alexandria, where there is already plenty of food. Command the workers to unload the food. Quickly, or we shall all
be here in the darkness, working by the light of the moon goddess.”

“Your Majesty, I am under direct order from the military governor. The penalty for disobedience is death.”

“That is understandable,” she said. She saw his chest sink with a sigh of relief. She prolonged a stare into his upturned
eyes. Then she turned to her captain.

“Kill him.”

The captain drew his dagger. Several of the district officer’s men stood, not knowing whether to defend their superior against
the queen’s orders or to watch as the captain killed him. As the district officer’s men moved, so did the remainder of the
queen’s guard. Within seconds a palpable tension encircled the assembly. The captain looked to the queen for final confirmation
of her order. The queen folded her arms. “You men look rather well fed considering the circumstances,” she said.

The district officer did not respond.

“Are you taking food off your own tables?” asked the queen, who knew very well the policies of her nation’s bureaucracy. “Have
you no family in this region whose welfare concerns you? Were you not sired by a man and born of a woman? Did you not have
cousins with whom you swam naked in the river, or sisters who depend on you for protection?” The queen addressed her questions
to the entire guard. As she spoke, heads bowed to avoid her eyes and her words.

“My brother, the boy king, and his regime do not care if your families starve, so long as they might fill their own bellies.
But I will not have those loyal to me suffer. Unload the food. If the military governor insists upon starving the people in
the district, I shall execute him with my own hands.”

Though she spoke with complete authority, Kleopatra was amazed when she was not challenged. The officer sighed, and nodded
to his crew to carry out the queen’s orders.

“We have begun a civil war,” said Hephaestion. “And we do not yet have an army to fight it.”

K
leopatra regarded a small gold coin stamped with her image. The artist had rendered her face more grave, more mature than
the visage she saw daily in the mirror; nonetheless, it was flattering. The nose was considerably smaller than its real counterpart,
the eyes slightly larger, the lips a good resemblance to the full ones that the queen thought one of her finest features.
She looked regal, imposing, and beautiful in a tragic way. If this is how the people
view
me, then so be it, she thought.

“This is a most hopeful sign,” said Hephaestion. “Their decision to issue coins with your image means that the people of Askalon
and the Sinai region are ready to accept you as their queen. Word will spread that you have great loyalty outside the city
of Alexandria. And without using military might. Few Ptolemies, living or dead, could claim such.”

She smiled at the eunuch’s words of encouragement and returned the coin to him. They sat in a small room with narrow, shuttered
windows closed against the day’s heat, in the house given to her by the people of Askalon. She had fled there after her brother
and his regime had had her officially deposed. They had wiped her name from the national documents and banned the use of her
coinage. To make matters worse, Pompey had issued a decree thanking her brother for his support and declaring himself the
boy’s guardian. This terrified Kleopatra more than being deposed, because it might have meant that Rome recognized her brother
alone as Egypt’s monarch. But the fact also remained that, at present, Pompey was not doing well in his war against Caesar,
who had just been named Dictator in Rome. Caesar had already run Pompey and those senators loyal to him off to Greece, and
now, according to a recent letter from Archimedes, Caesar was in Greece with his army. It was assumed that Caesar would now
vanquish Pompey once and for all. Archimedes assured Kleopatra that Pompey’s decree would not carry much weight once Caesar
defeated him.

“So it is actually better that Pompey has not named himself my guardian?” she had asked Hephaestion. The eunuch simply nodded
his head thoughtfully. “Perhaps,” he had said, with not enough enthusiasm to give her much comfort.

In any case, Hephaestion determined that Kleopatra was no longer safe on Egyptian soil and arranged for her to take refuge
in the small city of Askalon in the Sinai territory, which her grandfather had liberated from the Judaean kings. She was assured
that its population would receive her warmly. Besides, it was a perfect location from which she might raise a host of armies
from the east.

Kleopatra’s party had sailed up the eastern branch of the Nile, and before reaching Pelusium, had abandoned the ship and stole
away to Askalon, resuming their disguise as a caravan of merchants. It was an efficient and appropriate masquerade in which
to enter the region. Her new home was a one-story white rambling plaster structure, shaded from the undulating sandy mounds
of the northern desert by a date grove. The queen had spent many mornings wandering about the grove with Hephaestion, watching
in the distance as merchants in camel-caravans, wrapped in stark white layers of gauzy cotton without a morsel of skin exposed,
carried their goods back and forth over the desert. Not far from the sea, the area held little else except the turquoise mines
farther to the south. The coast was dotted with villages of peasants who made a living from the fruits of the ocean. Kleopatra
longed for the sight of the great green of the Mediterranean, but she was not allowed to venture so far from her headquarters.
She was only thirty miles from the Egyptian fortress of Pelusium, where Alexander the Great had accepted the surrender of
the Persians so many centuries before, and where her brother’s army was presently stationed.

“What is the news of the day, Prime Minister, who is now War Minister?” the queen inquired.

“Or perhaps Minister of Foreign Affairs is more appropriate?”

“You are my Cabinet,” she answered, smiling at him.

“The news is the same, Your Majesty. The war between Caesar and Pompey makes raising an army impossible. I am afraid that
every inquiry we have sent comes back with the same answer, a cordial but solemn response of regret from our neighbors that
their armies have already been demanded by Pompey. His plan, of course, is to call upon the armies of the eastern territories
he once conquered in the name of Rome. I believe the supply is inexhaustible.”

They had hoped that Pompey’s demand for soldiers would eventually work to their advantage; that he would call upon a large
number of her brother’s troops. Then, they would use the opportunity to strike. At that moment, Kleopatra possessed five thousand
foot soldiers, three hundred archers, and five hundred cavalry—comparable to the size of a Roman legion, she thought with
pleasure. But she did not have the money to keep such an army for long. If the gods were with her, Pompey would soon call
away half of her brother’s army, and she would challenge the remaining troops. If the gods were against her, she would eventually
have to strike against the full force of Achillas’s men—some fifteen thousand in all, with seven thousand at Pelusium alone—or
reconcile herself to losing the kingdom. But the best possible solution, the one for which she most stridently prayed, was
for Caesar to defeat Pompey and then to punish her brother and his regents for coming to Pompey’s aid.

A servant interrupted her thoughts, allowing an unannounced party into the room. Kleopatra was about to reprimand him, but
found herself staring at a face wrapped in white gauze, wondering if a creature living or dead resided within. He—she assumed
it was a he—was bound tightly from head to toe, and walked toward her like a moving, breathing mummy, stiff slow, and cautious.
She expected to see the golden amulet of the vulture around his neck, meant to carry the protection of Mother Isis with the
body into the next world. Despite the creature’s laborious movements, alert brown eyes peered from the swaddled face and darted
around the room.