Kleopatra (6 page)

Taking in a copious amount of air, Auletes began to sound a reedy melody, music to entice the god to continue his good fortune.
He concentrated fervently, batting his eyelashes when he strained to reach the upper regions of the instrument’s capacity,
furrowing his brow and bending his knees until his belly rested on his thighs to hit the low notes.

Kleopatra swayed dreamily. Her love for her father swelled, exceeding even her admiration for his gifts.

T
he sounds of the king offering his gift to the Greek god wafted through the palace and into the upper chambers. Egyptian,
Libyan, Ethiopian, and Nubian servants laid down the tools of their tasks and listened to the music, while in a chamber tucked
away at the end of a corridor, it resonated without harmony for an angry Macedonian princess and her besmirched eunuch mentor.

He was insulted—he, the keeper of Ptolemaic tradition. That was how Meleager regarded himself, for it befitted his history
as a noble courtier of altered sex. “We have been here as long as the Ptolemies,” he told himself. “We are high priests in
the temples and shrines, we are advisers to kings, regents and tutors to the royal children of each generation, keepers of
the oral history of the family, and arbiters of court ceremony.”

In each generation, Meleager’s family, longtime aristocrats, selected a special male child to serve the goddess. At seventeen
years old, Meleager, the favorite son, entered the mysteries of Kybele. “You are to become the consort of the goddess,” his
mother told him. “You shall be the earthly representation of the god Attis, Kybele’s priest, lover, and servant. There is
no higher honor. Besides, it is the quickest way to a high position at court.”

All his life Meleager had dreamed of being chosen to represent Attis, son of the virgin Nana, He-who-is-fatherless, the beautiful
youth who offered his masculinity so that he could marry no mortal woman but only the goddess. He was the savior god who was
sacrificed by the people, castrated, crucified on a pine tree, and whose very blood washed over the earth and purified the
land. The god whose flesh, in the form of flatbread, nourished the people. The most holy god who was raised from the dead
on the third day, whose resurrection demonstrated the power of the Mother Goddess. The god who was carried to Rome with her
after the defeat of Hannibal to give her honor for the victory.

On a sultry summer evening lost to the past, the young Meleager donned a wreath of violets—the flower that sprang from the
spilt blood of Attis—and drank the solution given to him by the priest that made him see hallucinations from the life of the
god: his sexual love with the goddess; the sacrifice of his body and his blood; his flesh and blood sprinkled over the crops,
and the crops shooting up in response. From somewhere he could not see, Meleager heard drums, cymbals, horns, and flutes,
making a symphony to the glories of the god. The music seemed to flow from his own heartbeat, from his own veins. The priestesses
tossed their heads to the pounding drums, the priests slashed their arms and chests with knives and shards, and Meleager—drugged,
inflamed, impervious to pain—took his testicles in his left hand and, with his right, castrated himself with a sacred dagger.
He felt an agony too severe to be described as mere pain, passed out, and awoke two days later in the care of a physician.
Death and rebirth, he had said to himself upon regaining consciousness, just like the god Attis, Now his genitals rested in
the cave of the goddess as an offering, and he served the court of Auletes.

Meleager believed that it was neither his family nor the Royal Family who chose him for service, but the Mother Goddess herself;
therefore, he tolerated the disdain of no one. “I took my evening meal with the princesses and the queen,” he would say in
response to derision of his kind. “Where did you dine?”

“Alexander himself once took a eunuch as a lover,” he would remind those Greeks who criticized the tradition of altering men,
those who considered themselves above him because they retained a few additional ounces of flesh between their legs. They
were foolish enough to believe that manhood and pleasure were centered in those small round saggy things. Was it not the great
conqueror Cyrus—hero of Alexander—who praised the strength and loyalty of the castrated male? Cyrus observed that castrated
horses ceased to bite, but were not deprived of their strength. On the contrary, in times of both war and hunting, they still
preserved in their souls a spirit of rivalry. Cyrus found the same qualities in the eunuchs who served him in battle and at
court. Unencumbered by the sentimental attachment to either wife or offspring, the eunuch was free to offer unqualified fidelity
to his master. So what if the eunuch lacked the ideal manly musculature? As Cyrus said, on the battlefield, steel makes the
weak equal to the strong. There were many battlefields in Alexandria, and many different kinds of metal. Meleager had chosen
the object of his fierce loyalty. He was armed with knowledge and ready for battle.

Pity the fools who were deceived by the eunuchs’
lack
. Meleager lacked nothing. He wore extravagant jewels bestowed upon him by the royals for his service. He lived in lavish
apartments adjacent to the Inner Palace. His view of the harbor was dazzling, his cooks second only to the queen’s. Curiosity-seekers
of both sexes admired and courted him for his boyish good looks, for his sophistication, and for his access to the Royal Family.
Mature ladies of the court came to his apartments at night complaining that they no longer cared for vigorous intercourse
but sought more delicate pleasures. Virile and beautiful youths who trained for the Royal Macedonian Household Troops requested
audiences to ask his advice on how to behave in the presence of the king and often ended up in his bed. Even members of the
king’s Order of the First Kinsmen dined with him, discussing protocol and policy, and then sealed the friendship in an evening
of sexual delight. He experienced passion and he could give pleasure, even if he could not impregnate.

Meleager had no legitimate claim upon the elongated, regal young girl who paced his room in anger, yet he knew in his heart
that she belonged to him in the same way that he belonged to the Mother Goddess. The goddess had selected him for service
to this girl whom she had favored to rule Egypt. He could not attach himself to the girl as a lover, for the female Ptolemies
usually remained chaste until marriage. He could not claim her as a husband, for he possessed no royal blood with which he
might petition for her hand. But he knew that Berenike was the true queen of Egypt, that her beautiful stepmother had less
claim to the throne than she, and that by Thea’s treachery in seducing the king, she had intercepted Berenike’s rightful position
as Auletes’ co-regent. These things he knew because the goddess had revealed them to him, her servant. But he could not reveal
them to the girl because she had attached herself to Thea in childhood and remained blind to her duplicity. Instead, he pretended
the same loyalty to the queen in order to stay intimate with the princess. One day, he would reveal to her the goddess’s will.

“My father is a fool,” said Berenike, pacing. She removed her dagger from its sheath and sliced the air in crisscross motions
as she stalked the chamber. “An overblown, Roman-loving fool.” Her long dress, open at the sides, followed her, outlining
the burgeoning woman’s form. The eunuch felt a stirring in his bereft lower region. Already she was taller than Thea, though
not as beautiful in the feminine way. Her eyes were bright, angry, vigilant. Her teeth and lips were too large on her young
face, Meleager observed, but in years to come, when the rest of her caught up with her features, they would serve her handsomely.

“Your father is king,” Meleager replied evenly. It would not do to say disparaging things against the monarch, however impeachable
his policies.

“The men in our family are fat and stupid. They say it is because we marry our brothers and that the intermarriage has ruined
the men. My father is evidence of this, do you not think?”

It was true; for the last many generations, the Ptolemies had produced idiot men, obese, indulgent, strange. “
I
shall not speak against the Crown, princess.
History
may substantiate, however, that in recent years the Ptolemy kings have been rather more stout of body than of heart. Yet
incestuous marriage has not diminished the caliber of the female. Without fail, each generation has produced a Ptolemaic queen
of extraordinary intelligence.”

The princess stopped pacing, pointing her knife at the tutor. “You sound as if you are speaking of farm animals. You had better
remember that the women in my family are queens of an ancient dynasty. Men do not breed us as they breed hunting dogs.”

He might have been angry at the haughty girl, but he was aware that it was he who had instilled in her this pride and arrogance.
“Princess Berenike, forgive me for my indelicacy.”

“You do not have to be delicate with me, Tutor,” she said, still brandishing the knife at him. “But you do have to remember
to whom you speak.”

Berenike whisked the front panel of her dress aside, exposing the leather garter on her thigh. She placed the knife back in
its sheath and sat on a divan, ceremoniously smoothing her gown over her legs. Meleager produced a long scroll that seemed
to have the weight of a saber.

“Oh, not more family history. Must we incessantly resurrect the dead? Why am I not free to spend the day hunting?” Berenike
asked, contrite.

Meleager continued to unroll the large document, struggling without his scribe present to help. It would not do to have an
interloper today. He stretched the papyrus lengthwise to reveal an illustrated chart of the Ptolemy dynasty, with small, painstaking
portraits of each royal in the family tree. He braced it on a wooden stand, which held taut.

“You will enjoy today’s lesson. We are going to study the female line.”

Berenike settled into her seat. “Then let us pay attention to the interesting ones, and leave out the fools who fell to the
poison of courtiers.”

A rap at the door interrupted the tutorial. The small princess entered, trailed by Charmion. “The princess Kleopatra joins
her sister for the lesson,” she said formally to the eunuch, escorting the princess to her seat. Charmion and Meleager bowed
stiffly to each other.

“Stay with me,” Kleopatra urged her governess. She was never more nervous than in the company of her sister.

“Why must you always be a disagreeable baby?” asked Berenike.

“I am not a baby,” she replied vehemently. “I am merely smaller than you, and I shall speak to Father about this.”

“The world awaits his response to your complaint,” Berenike said dryly.

Charmion exited promptly, and Kleopatra, though still afraid, summoned into her face as much spite as she could. She saw the
outline of the sheath under her sister’s dress and wondered if Berenike would dare murder her, and if so, would the eunuch
move to prevent it? But presently, Berenike suffered more from ennui than from anger.

“Our tutor is giving the history of the Macedonian queen,” she said. “Which we must learn in the unlikely event that father
does not lose the throne, and I actually
become
a Macedonian queen. Proceed,” she commanded the eunuch.

Meleager took a breath. “We are going to begin with Olympias, the mother of Alexander.”

“Everyone feared Olympias,” interjected Berenike. “She wore wild snakes in her hair!”

“Yes, supposedly in tribute to Dionysus. In fact, she wished to frighten her husband, Philip of Macedonia, a devout polygamist
who married indiscriminately for political alliance and bred bastards with every barbarian wife he took.”

Meleager explained that Olympias’s main objective was to see that her favorite son, Alexander, became king. “The Macedonian
court was an unruly place, and there was a lot of competition. Philip had an older wife, Eurydice, an Illyrian warrior woman.”
The eunuch pointed to Philip’s senior wife on the dynastic tree. “She and her daughter Cynane used to go into battle with
Philip for the sole purpose of killing rival queens. Olympias had to become just as fierce, and quickly.”

“No wonder Alexander fell in love with an Amazon!” Berenike exclaimed. Alexander’s supposed love affair with the warrior was
her favorite part of his legend.

“Alexander was quite used to fierce women. He knew that it was his mother who put him on the throne. They say she had Philip
murdered to ensure it.”

“Really?” asked Kleopatra, suddenly more interested in the long-dead queen. She did not like to demonstrate interests in common
with her sister, but she could never stifle her aroused curiosity.

“Oh yes. Olympias had her way. Greek queens inevitably do,” he said slowly, piercingly, aiming his words straight into Berenike’s
eyes as if he might plant them there. “This is the blood of your mothers. When the king does not rule wisely, or when the
proper heirs are threatened, it is up to the queen to see that tradition is carried out, that the will of the gods is done.”