The Memoirs of Cleopatra (20 page)

Ptolemy looked apprehensive. Could any news that was good for Caesar be likewise good for him? “Yes?” He braced himself.

Caesar unrolled the little scroll and read it. “As you can see, your subjects long for your presence. Who am I to stand in your way? Perhaps this will be the heaven-sent opportunity we yearn for to end the war. Go to them!” He gave a theatrical wave of his arm.

Ptolemy was puzzled. “But…why should you force me to leave the palace and join them? I have no wish to do so.”

“What sort of talk is that for a king? A king must do what is best for his subjects, for his kingdom! Sacrifice, boy, sacrifice!”

At being called “boy,” Ptolemy bristled and drew himself up taller. He was thirteen now. “I fear they wish to sacrifice
me
. Arsinoe and Ganymedes will attack me. No, I will not go!”

“And I say you shall,” Caesar insisted. I watched his face carefully, and I could tell he was enjoying Ptolemy’s discomfort.

“No, please!” Ptolemy’s face wrinkled up, and he burst into tears. “Please, please, don’t send me away! I wish to remain with you! My loyalty is with my sister and you!”

“Ah.” Caesar looked touched. “How this pleases my heart.” He solemnly laid his hand over his breast. “But you must have pity on your poor subjects, go to them and help recall them to sanity, persuade them to stop scarring the city with fire and desolation. Thus will you prove your loyalty to me, and to the Roman people. I trust you; why else would I send you directly out to join an enemy under arms against me? I know you will not fail me.”

He grabbed Caesar’s arm. “Don’t send me away! There is no sight so pleasing in my eyes as you! Neither my kingdom nor my people—only you, great Caesar!”

Caesar disengaged Ptolemy’s clinging fingers and grasped his arm in a commander’s grip. “Courage!” he exhorted him. “Courage!”

Weeping, Ptolemy scurried from the room.

Caesar examined his arm for scratches. “He has a nasty grip, and long nails.” He shook his head. “It felt like being grabbed by a monkey.”

“So now he’s gone,” I said. “How long until he comes at us at the head of his troops?”

“Before sunset, no doubt,” said Caesar.

He was off by only two or three hours. Indeed, before the day was over, Ptolemy had been received by his troops and, raised up on a royal sedan chair, denounced Caesar and me in such vitriolic language that the spy who reported it had to stammer, “ ‘The—word unfit for repetition—tyrannical, unprincipled, greedy Julius Caesar and his whore, the—another word unfit for repetition—pleasure-soaked, lustful Cleopatra, must be destroyed, and the evil—yet another word unfit for repetition—gluttonous Romans stopped in their tracks as they seek to devour us,’ the King said.”

“I see Theodotos installed an extensive vocabulary in his charge,” said Caesar. Then he laughed, and the messenger breathed a sigh of relief.

“He makes me sick!” I cried. That heart-wrenching display of loyalty he had put on only that morning—disgusting!

“You can understand why there are those who likewise question your loyalty to me?” said Caesar. “I am afraid that over the ages the Ptolemies have earned their reputation of being deceitful. Your brother is a classic example of his lineage.” He leaned over and then whispered into my ear, so low I could barely hear him, “But those who question do not know what I know of you. How could they?” He slid his arm around my back and squeezed the flesh near my hip. I am embarrassed to remember how it excited me, bringing back memories of the long nights with him, making me look forward to the coming one. The sun had already set. Oh, had Ptolemy unknowingly been correct in describing me as pleasure-soaked and lustful?

Caesar’s purpose had been fulfilled. Ptolemy would be destroyed, separated from us, who would ultimately prevail. Had he not sent him away, Ptolemy would have been able to stay on the throne with me after the war was over, claiming Caesar’s victory as his own. Perhaps Ptolemy had not been altogether untruthful when he begged not to be sent away; he could see what his miserable end would be.

The war now came to its height and closure. Mithridates of Pergamon, Caesar’s ally, was even then at the gates of Pelusium, at Egypt’s eastern borders. He stormed the city and took it, then began to march through Egypt to join Caesar. But Pelusium is a long way from Alexandria, and Mithridates had to march diagonally across the Delta until he reached the spot near Memphis where the Nile is but a single river, before he could cross it and head for Alexandria. Ptolemy and Arsinoe set out to intercept him to prevent him from reaching Caesar, and hurried toward that spot on the Nile where he would be crossing.

Caesar kept abreast of all this by a constant stream of messengers. I will never forget him standing on the rooftop terrace of the palace and gazing out over the harbor while he formed his plan. His eyes searched the horizon as if he expected a ship, but that was just his way of thinking. Other men’s eyes grow clouded and dreamy when they confer within themselves, but Caesar’s were focused like an eagle’s.

“When the sun sets,” he said resolutely, “then I go.”

“How?” I asked. I had learned that he always had a plan, and it was one I never could have guessed. “Part of Ptolemy’s army is blocking the route from the city. They mean to keep you bottled up here.”

“Do we not have ships? Did I not retain sea power, while destroying theirs?” He smiled slowly. “Tonight, at sunset, I will leave the harbor and sail east, in full view of the enemy. They will look for me to land at one of the mouths of the Nile. Then, as darkness falls, I will turn the fleet. We will sail due west, and land to the far side of Alexandria, on the desert. Then we will march south, circling Ptolemy’s forces, and join Mithridates.” He nodded. It was all so simple—for him.

That was exactly what happened. I heard all the details from my messengers and the soldiers who reported each engagement. Ptolemy had taken his forces by way of his patched-up vessels down the Nile, then set up a fort alongside it on a bit of high ground protruding above the marshes. Caesar approached, to the shock of the Egyptians, and they sent out cavalry to stop him. But the legionaries forded the river by makeshift bridges and chased the rebels back into the fort. The next day Caesar’s forces attacked the fort, having ascertained that the highest sector of it was weakly guarded because it was the most naturally secure point. They stormed it, and the Egyptians, in a panic to escape, hurled themselves over the walls, heading for the river. The first wave of them tumbled into the encircling trench and were trampled to death by those behind them, who rushed to the little boats and attempted to paddle away in the reeds and papyrus. The boats were never meant to hold so many, and they sank. Ptolemy was on one; it capsized and he disappeared into the water, vanishing among the reeds.

The rebels surrendered. Arsinoe was brought before Caesar, her hands behind her back, her dress spattered with swamp slime, her shoes gone. She spat at him and cursed him before she was trussed up and led away.

“Find Ptolemy!” ordered Caesar. “Where was he last seen?”

One of his soldiers pointed to a dark, oily-looking area of reeds. Birds were clinging to the swaying stalks.

“Dive for him! Bring me his body!” He knew that a drowning in the Nile was considered sacred to Osiris, and he also knew that a king who mysteriously disappeared had the potential of reappearing years later—in the form of an impostor.

It was a nasty business. The shallow swamp had many fetid, oozing beds, home to snakes and crocodiles. Time and again the men emerged from the water, gasping for breath, covered with black decaying matter, empty-handed. But at last one surfaced, holding the slight body of Ptolemy, his eyes wide open, his mouth streaming dirty water. He was wearing a corselet of pure gold, and its links gleamed through the tangle of weeds entwined in it.

“The weight is what drowned him,” Caesar said, staring at the corpse. “The gold sent him to the bottom.” He reached out and touched the finely wrought show-armor. “Exhibit this to the troops, and the people. Let them all see with their own eyes: The little King has perished. He will not rise from the Nile to lead them again.”

Caesar left the battlefield and, mounting his horse, set out immediately for Alexandria with his cavalry. Darkness had fallen before he reached it; but from the palace I saw streams of people making their way to the city gate to receive him. A thousand tapers flickered as they moved slowly through the streets, dressed in mourning. They had been beaten; for the first time, Alexandria had fallen to a conqueror.

Alexandria, and Egypt, had fallen to Rome: the very fate that I had always seen as the worst misfortune that could befall us, that I had vowed to prevent at all costs. Now I was waiting in the palace, watching, eager to receive the conqueror, with child by the general who was even now approaching the city that lay supine before him. I should have been torn with shame had I been told, in these very sentences, these simple facts a year ago. (Of what purpose are oracles, then, if they veil such major events from our sealed eyes?) But the general, the conqueror, was Julius Caesar, and in those two words, in that name, was the reason why I was waiting, happy, to embrace him. True, he was a Roman, formed of that race, with their habits and way of thinking, but he was so much more. He would not remain only a Roman, but would grow into something incomparably greater, something new.

The people of Alexandria met him on their knees, bowing down, lying prostrate before the Gate of the Sun, placing statues of Anubis, Bastet, Sekmet, and Thoth on the street to submit themselves to his authority. Dressed in blue mourning cloth, unshaven, barefoot, throwing dust on their heads, the city elders wailed in chorus, “Mercy, O Son of Amun! We submit, we bend our necks and back before you, mighty conqueror! Hail, Caesar, descendant of Ares and Aphrodite, God Incarnate, and Savior of Mankind!” I could hear the dirgelike sound of their lamentations, thin, like a eunuch’s voice, rising in the night air.

I heard the groaning as the gates were flung open, and Caesar rode past the rows of hunched Alexandrians, past the gilded statues of the gods who silently let him pass through the shattered, torchlit street to the palace.

He strode into the wide, pillared hall where the windows admitted only the perfumed air of the palace garden to fill the space. I was waiting, scarcely able to breathe. I held out my arms and embraced him.

“Egypt is yours,” I said.

“You are Egypt,” he said. “The most precious conquest I have ever made.”

Caesar wished to see his new possession, and I wished to show it to him in its entirety: Egypt from Alexandria to Aswan, over six hundred miles up the Nile. We would travel in the state barge of the Ptolemies. I counted on it to take his breath away; this conqueror of forests and wild vales of Gaul would now behold the riches of the east, fabled and ancient.

As large as a warship, dedicated to pleasure and power, the barge rode on the bosom of the Nile. It stretched over three hundred feet from its lotus-flower bow to its curved stern, propelled by many banks of oars, and the decks contained banqueting rooms, colonnaded courts, shrines to the gods, and a garden. The cabins and corridors were of cedar and cypress, with the dazzling colors of carnelian, lapis lazuli, and gold everywhere. Caesar marched on board and then, as I had hoped, he stood stock-still and looked about him, letting his eyes sweep over the room in hungry appreciation.

Suddenly I had an apprehensive thought: What if he decided to annex Egypt after all? It was his by right of arms. He had given no indication that he wished to do so, but every other defeated country had been made into a Roman province. Was it only my person that prevented him from doing so? And might this trip whet his appetite for my country, rather than appeasing it?

“Ah,” he finally said, turning his gaze back to me, “Rome suddenly seems mean and squalid, her buildings cramped and dark, even her Forum plain and limited.”

Again, that hungry look in his eye. “We have much to learn from you.”

When we cast off, and the stately vessel began slowly to make its way under silken sails, Alexandria was gleaming white under the spring sun, as pure as the clouds racing overhead. Most of the buildings had been spared after all: the Museion, the Serapion, the Library, all were visible from the ceremonial deck. But there was much damage in the city, and I knew that it would take years to restore it to its former perfection. The people lining the harbor were dressed as Greeks, and shouting in Greek.

“Now we leave Alexandria for Egypt itself,” I said, as the city grew smaller. “You will hear less and less Greek. But never fear, I speak Egyptian.”

“Fear?” he gestured toward the four hundred smaller ships following us, loaded with his soldiers. “Not as long as I have my legionaries.”

“What, are you naked without your soldiers?” I teased him.

“Any general is,” he said, “but particularly a Roman one. I learned that, in spite of my services to the state, they would have rewarded me by killing me after I returned from Gaul, had it not been for my soldiers.”

“I am happy you have brought them. Egypt needs to see us both, to be reassured. They need to see the strength of the army that will prevent any further civil wars here.”

As we sailed in majesty, slowly, as befitted a procession, I relived the time I had come this very way, on a child’s adventure with Mardian and Olympos to the pyramids. Now I would show them to this man I loved, show them with the pride of possession.

The royal bedroom was as large and sumptuous as the one in Alexandria. There was a square bed, covered with leopard skins, and hung around on all sides with the sheerest silk netting to keep out insects. Elsewhere in the chamber were couches inlaid with ivory, gilded ebony footstools, bowls of rose petals, and alabaster oil lamps. Caesar and I retired here soon after the setting sun had stained the broad waterway of the river with its dying. We watched the night mists begin to rise from the reeds on the banks, and then pulled the silk curtain across the square cabin window.

“My world has shrunk down very small, into this crystal of luxury and pleasure,” he said, kicking off his sandals and stretching out on the couch.

“Is this not the whole world?” I said, coming over to him, and seating myself on one of the footstools. “For lovers, is not their private room the center of the world?”

“The center of their world,” he agreed. “But when the lovers are Caesar and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt—then their worlds reach far beyond these walls.”

“You called me Queen of Egypt, but to yourself you gave no title.” I tried to say it lightly, but I knew the omission meant something. “Surely there are many you could choose from. Some you already hold: Consul, general. One you are: master of the Roman world. And Amun.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Amun! Oh yes, I wore his robes once. And a miracle happened.” He leaned over and put his hand on my abdomen. “The god must have brought this about.”

I covered his hand with my own. “You know he did.” I was sure that it must be the divine wish of the gods, for with all his wives and lovers, he had begotten only one other child, and that was over thirty years ago, before I was born. So lavish in their benefices to Caesar in every other way, the gods had withheld from him the gift of offspring. Was that not their way: to make someone master of the world, and then give him no one to leave it to? It had happened with Alexander as well.

“What will we name him?” I asked, not idly. What would the name signify? Would Caesar acknowledge this child as an heir? And what would it mean if he did?

“You may choose,” said Caesar, taking his hand back and resting it across his chest.

“By that, do you mean there will be no official Roman recognition of him—or her? No name conferring membership in a family?”

He looked pained. “It can be no other way. You are not my wife, and under Roman law a foreign marriage is not recognized. The children of such a union have no status.”

I was incredulous. Was this the conqueror, the man who smashed all the Roman laws, who had delivered the death blow to the Republic with his armies, and revealed the Senate for the impotent thing it was? “Roman law?” I asked in wonder. “What does Roman law mean to you?”

He looked alarmed, and sat bolt upright. He took several deep breaths as if to steady himself. “That is a thought that should not be voiced aloud.”

“It is a thought that is in everyone’s minds. You have shaken the Roman world to its foundations. Now you can rewrite the laws to please yourself.”

He reached out very slowly and took my face in both his hands, and guided it toward his, where he kissed me lingeringly. “Egypt, Egypt, you are very dangerous,” he murmured. “If I stay longer, I am lost. I left Rome a general, and I shall return—”

“A king,” I whispered. He
should
be a king; all the fates shouted it.

“I was going to say ‘Amun,’ ” he said with a smile.

Like the conquering general he was, he picked me up and carried me to the bed, pushed aside the sheer floating curtains around it, and laid me carefully on the leopard skins. They felt cool and slippery under me, and I made myself comfortable on them, waiting for him to come join me, to hold me close to him. How I had missed his touch in the past weeks, when he had been either absent or absent in mind while the war had produced ever more taxing problems. I realized with sadness that I had come to need him the same way that I needed rest, and fresh air, and the scent of flowers in the wind. His presence was joy itself to me. Just as I could exist without rest, or fresh air, or the perfume of flowers—in a prison—so I could exist without him, but his absence would make it a prison, no matter how sumptuous.

In his lovemaking it always seemed as if he had never touched anyone but me. I knew that was not true, and whenever I let myself imagine it, picture where he had got his learning, it sent stabs of jealous pain through me. I consoled myself with the thought that together we made a perfect whole: he my first love, and I his last. In that way I could bear to remember Pompeia, and Calpurnia, and Servilia, and Mucia, and…always Cornelia, his early love.

Now darkness enveloped the room as he extinguished the lamps, and I heard his footsteps coming toward me. Then he was beside me in the still, fragrant night, and when he held me and pressed me close against him, I could only tremble with anticipation of what pleasures he had planned for that night.

For many long moments he did not move, but lay quietly breathing, his chest rising and falling almost in rhythm with the slight movement of the water underneath us. The stillness that he was able to keep within himself was powerful. Where other men would lunge and grab, he held back. I began to wonder—had he gone to sleep? Was he so deep in his own thoughts that once again he was absent? Just when I myself had begun to wander away in my thoughts, I felt him stir and turn to me. One arm reached over to touch my neck, and he turned easily on his side, leaning on his other shoulder.

His hand—not as hard and callused as I would expect a soldier’s to be—caressed my neck, my cheek, my ear, lightly. He was running the backs of his fingers across my skin, as if he only needed to feel the slightest contours. I closed my eyes and enjoyed each feather-light touch, finding it very soothing, but arousing at the same time. It made me feel like a precious relic, a carved gem that a collector would touch reverently, in awe. His touch grew firmer as he seemed to be memorizing all the planes and hollows of my face and neck, like a blind person who sees only through his fingers. All the while he said nothing. Finally he rose a little higher and turned and kissed me, a kiss as light as his earlier touches. It caused such a surge of pleasure in me, it was as if he had ravished me; the light, teasing promise of more ignited a fiery impatience of desire within me.

Now he began to touch my shoulders, my breasts, my abdomen—all with that slow deliberateness that was beginning to be torture. Outside the windows I could hear the low gurgling noise of the Nile as it flowed past, liquid and yielding. I felt my own legs begin to loosen, like one of those floating flowers on the Nile, and to twine themselves around his. His legs were long and muscled, and I loved the hard, sleek feel of them.

I had been wearing a silken gown that was the color of the Alexandrian sky at dusk; it was one of my most prized possessions, because the silk had come not from Cos but from somewhere even beyond India, and it was as transparent as early morning fog. Now, pressed against Caesar, it seemed to exist only as a layer of silken mist, almost a sheen on the flesh rather than a covering. I had forgotten it was even there—although no natural flesh is so shiny and perfect—until he deftly untied its laces and peeled it away.

“The serpent’s skin must be shed,” he said. “Come to me all new.”

And I did feel as if I had left off a skin, or a former part of my being. The gown fell to the floor beside the bed, so light it made no sound of settling.

“The tunic must follow,” I insisted. It was already off his shoulders, and his chest was bare. “It is not wanted here.” I pulled it off.

Around us the slight breeze was puffing out the filmy bedcurtains.

“The Aurae of the light, playful winds keeps us company,” I said.

“The Aurae should depart,” he said. “I wish no witnesses to our private hours.” He kicked at one of the curtains, deflating it.

“So even the gods obey you,” I said. I was longing for him to take me, almost shaking with desire for it.

“Sometimes,” he said, taking me in his arms. But he seemed in no particular hurry to do the rest. He slowed when I would have hurried, and to this day I am thankful, because I remember every bit of it, prolonged as it was, and at each stage I was like a thirsty man who got a half-cup of water, so that no water seemed cooler or more delicious. In the end he did not disappoint me.

“Just as winning Gaul conclusively was worth the nine long years it took,” he said, “I have learned that there are times that call for speed and others that call for a stretching of the time.”

I sighed; I could hardly speak as yet. Finally I said, “Pleasure should always be stretched and pain shortened.”

“No matter what they are in life, in memory they always seem to rearrange themselves in the opposite manner. All pleasures are seen as foreshortened and hasty and fleeting, and all pain lingering.” He raised himself on one elbow, and I could feel him staring at me in the dark. “But I swear to you, I will never forget these days with you. My memory may shorten them, but it can never erase them.”

I felt a deep, shadowy presence passing above us. “How darkly you talk!” I said. “Why, I have made you sad!” Nervously I leapt up from the bed and fumbled for a way to light one of the lamps. “We must have some spiced wine, to make us merry.”

I managed to get the lamp lit, and it sputtered feebly into life. I looked back at where he lay, sprawled in the bed linens, one sheet draped over his shoulder. Around him the bedcurtains made a frame.

In the dim, flickering light he looked as bronzed as a statue, and for a moment his solemn expression made me think perhaps he had somehow been transmogrified into one. Then he laughed, and held out his hand for the spiced wine I was pouring from the gem-encrusted gold pitcher into an onyx cup.

The royal barge plied its way up the Nile, and from our shaded pavilion on the upper deck we watched the countryside slide past—bristly-topped palms, flat-roofed mud-brick houses, creaking waterwheels, and fields of glowing green. Our sails billowed and flapped; from every village the people sighted them and hurried down to the banks of the river to stare at us as we passed.

“The richest country on earth,” said Caesar, shading his eyes against the sun. “Mile after mile of bright green, producing grain to feed the world.” Was it wonder in his voice—or greed? Again, I felt a bit of fear. “Italy looks barren beside this, with its stony hills and little scrubby pines. And Greece—a bare, rocky ground is all Greece is. No wonder Greeks have to leave and live abroad.”

“Oh, but Egypt is green only near the Nile. Wait until you see the desert. Egypt is mostly desert,” I assured him.

“A long ribbon of fertility,” said Caesar, seeming not to hear me. “Six hundred miles of garden.”

“We shall be at the pyramids tomorrow,” I said. “And I shall show you the Sphinx.”

“You have already shown me the Sphinx,” he said. “You are the Sphinx.”

“I am no riddle! Nor am I unknowable,” I protested.

“Does the Sphinx know he is what he is?” he said. “You are more of a riddle than you imagine. I know less of you than of any other person I have spent so many hours with.”