by Karen Essex
“I am a mind who wishes to keep its body.”
Kleopatra ignored Charmion’s cautious advice whenever possible. “Today I wish that I could be omniscient like the gods, for I want to be in all places at once. Oh, it is terrible to be in the parade, when all I want to do is see it!”
“You have been warned about the dangers today. Do not move from my side. You can see most of it from here,” said Charmion sternly.
“I cannot. I am too short.” Why was she not tall like Berenike, who had inherited her father’s height but her mother’s face? Kleopatra was stuck with those traits in reverse. It wasn’t fair. “Let us promenade the Grand Pavilion while we have time. That’s where all the important people are!”
“No. You will just lose yourself in the crowd, and I shall be to blame when the Procession begins and your float is empty.”
“Please, Charmion. I promise to hold your hand and be very, very good.”
The Grand Pavilion umbraged Auletes’ most significant subjects and eminent foreign visitors under a tent of tautly woven deep crimson linen, held high above the crowd by tall Ionic columns. Just being inside its luxury made Kleopatra feel important. Statuary of gold, bronze, and marble—gods from every nation east and west, and her own deified Ptolemaic ancestors—lined the boundaries of the tent, as if every deus in the universe sanctified the event. The princess studied the scrupulously groomed guests, who struck calculated poses as they talked among themselves. Women, laughing, threw their heads back, flaunting necklaces of creamy pearls or startling red garnets, or sometimes simply their gorgeous powdered necks. Kohl-rimmed eyes fluttered about like nervous insect wings; quivering crimsoned lips heightened the meaning of the spoken word. Kleopatra dropped Charmion’s hand and threw her head back trying to mimic their sensual ways, but it made her neck hurt.
“Cousin, you are glorious in red. Heavenly, some might say,” said a wry young voice. Kleopatra snapped her head upright to see her cousin Archimedes, nineteen years old, riding a black horse decorated in the purple and gold colors of the king’s Brotherhood.
“Cousin! Could it be true, or have you stolen that horse?” the princess asked, praying he had not seen her at her play.
“This very morning a messenger came to my mother’s house to inform me that on this day I was to be inducted into the Order of the Brotherhood of the King. Cousin, I am a Kinsman!”
“My father has always held you most dear,” Kleopatra said. Archimedes’ mother was Auletes’ second cousin; his father, unknown. Auletes retained a soft spot in his heart for any and all bastards. Sometimes Kleopatra fantasized that her father was also the mysterious father of Archimedes. She loved her handsome cousin and wished with all her heart that he was her brother, for then they could marry.
“Report to me, Cousin, what is at the head of the Procession, for I cannot see it all,” requested the princess.
“Magnificence and mayhem, my dear. The Marshals are dressed as Silenoi in cloaks of crimson and purple, draped in vines. They are wearing white sandals that all the ladies say will be filthy by the end of the day. And they are led by a particularly handsome military man who is far too young to be a general. The ladies are wondering who got him the appointment.”
“How do you know so much about what the ladies say, Cousin?”
“Because where the ladies are, Archimedes aims to be,” he replied.
“Never mind the ladies. What am I missing at the front of the Procession?”
“Satyrs and Maenads, six hundred in all, each carrying a sacred object. Very splendid. The Satyrs are smeared with purple and vermilion dyes, and they have put mud and leaves and moss into their hair, which they have grown wild for the event. The barbers in every quarter are starving, my dear.”
Archimedes never failed to delight his cousin. “What else? What else?”
“Goat ears and tails adorn heads and behinds. Asses dressed like asses. These fellows are taking their roles as Dionysians very seriously. They are all quite drunk and already chasing the Maenads, who are also drunk. I predict fornicating in the streets by noon.”
“Oh, I wish I could see it all,” said Kleopatra, feeling very wicked. “I wish, I wish, I wish.”
“The wishes of the throne are a Kinsman’s command,” said Archimedes. He swooped down and offered Kleopatra an arm to mount his horse. She looked around for Charmion, but only saw the back of her head as she engaged in gossip with one of the chatty ladies-in-waiting. Riding sidesaddle and not caring a bit about wrinkling her red robe, she hung on to the steed’s mane as Archimedes negotiated his way through the throng.
“I wish I had bigger eyes so that I could see it all at once,” she said. The more she tried to take it all in, the more it amplified, spreading out before and behind and all around her. But Archimedes had removed his attention to three tall girls, bare-breasted but for the ropes of braided gold necklaces that dipped into their cleavage. They stood at the head of twelve columns of golden-winged, well-muscled young women costumed as Nike, the girlish goddess of victory.
“Do you recognize those three in the front of the line? They are my father’s concubines,” Kleopatra said, pointing rudely at the girls.
“How nice it must be to be a king,” Archimedes said, his eyes riveted to the red-haired girl in the middle, who at that moment lifted her mane off her neck, making a tunnel for the breeze and raising her left breast ever so slightly higher than her right. Her ringlets fell behind her like a tree shaking its autumn leaves.
“Oh, they fought fiercely with one another for the honor of leading the Nikes. My father finally gave in and let all three have the privilege.”
“A wise man,” sighed the young Kinsman.
“What a time my father had deciding what necklace, what bracelet, what ring, would be worn by which of those girls,” Kleopatra said, feeling very sly and like a grown person, tattling on the king’s silliness. She let her voice assume the same inflection and furtive intonation the ladies of the court used in their gossip.
“They are terribly winsome,” said Archimedes wistfully. “I should like to see them beg.”
“Let us move on,” said Kleopatra, annoyed that her cousin would not take his beautiful brown eyes off of the auburn-haired siren. When he made no motion to move, Kleopatra kicked the side of his horse.
“You are not at your most regal, Cousin,” Archimedes snapped, trotting past the nymphs. “You’d better behave. The holy ones are looking.”
The princess sat up tall on the horse and gave her most solemn demeanor to the priests and priestesses of Dionysus who filled the next cart, their white robes billowing lazily against their rigid bodies like makeshift sails. They were guarded by snarly-haired Maenads brandishing hissing snakes with wild, dancing tails.
The crowd fell silent as the Maenads passed, not from fear of them, but because of what followed—a golden phallus two hundred feet tall, crowned with a shimmering nine-foot star, a meteor in slow motion shooting into the air. It rested on a cart pulled by dozens of men, but the awestruck faces of the crowd turned slowly as if on an axis, following the missile until it moved past them. Boys dressed as Priapus, impish offspring of Dionysus and Aphrodite, scampered in its wake, balancing plaster phalluses as tall as their torsos between their legs and pointing them merrily at maidens.
“Have you seen enough?” Archimedes asked. “Charmion is probably summoning the guard. I shall spend my first night as a Kinsman in prison.”
“In that case I shall see to it that you receive generous portions of gruel while you are incarcerated,” offered Kleopatra, turning her eyes upward and staring at him out of their corners as she saw Auletes’ mistresses do when they wanted something.
“You are very magnanimous, Kleopatra,” he said. He smacked his horse particularly hard, and laughed at his cousin when she had to grab his vest so that she did not fall.
The eunuch Meleager had paid fastidious attention to the historical accuracy of every detail of the Procession, but in these more moder
n and enlightened times, he wondered if the effect of all this ostentation was not a bit lugubrious. Would the spectacle evoke the desired response of increased approval of the Royals? Or might it produce the opposite effect—a joke the gods often played on careful, man-made plans. The choreographer of this opus let it all pass before him as if a dream: Barefoot Ethiopian chiefs carrying elephant tusks and logs of ebony; a thousand camels from Arab lands with saddlebags of saffron and orris; aviaries of peacocks, pheasants, and other resplendent African birds all floated past his eyes like phantasms in a keen night vision. Albino leopards. Giraffes. A rhinoceros, or was it two? Meleager felt like the steward on that great ark from the Jewish holy books; was there any beast of the earth that he had not seen today?
How could one fourteen-year-old princess make her mark amid all of this? And on the masses, intoxicated to sloppiness with pageantry and wine? It was his own fault; he insisted on having the wine flow freely into the streets for one and all. When Auletes had balked at the cost of getting the population of the city good and drunk, Meleager had asked, Is it not appropriate for the New Dionysus to gift his worshippers with his favorite drink?
Now Meleager watched as six hundred slaves coaxed along the unwieldy wine barge. The vessel carried thirty thousand gallons of that blessed drink in a drum of lion skins stretched to maximum strain around a circle of metal spikes. What an engineering feat it had been to get it just right. Despite his worries, he could not help but feel some pride. The men and women, forty in all, who stood inside the drum, laboriously stomped and jigged over the grapes while the scarlet liquid gushed into the street. It was an illusion that they caused the flow, of course, but it was a nice touch. As soon as the flood began, the dignified spectators in the Grand Pavilion became as greedy and anxious as any thirsty peasant. Several wine enthusiasts broke the ranks of the slaves to fill their conical leather flasks, big enough to hold ample drink to weather the long nights of the coming winter.
“Move on, move on,” a Satyr ordered one of the gluttons. He picked him up and threw him back into the crowd, where he landed next to Meleager. The man’s friends pulled back his head and sloppily emptied a pouch of the elixir into his mouth. The eunuch felt the sticky surplus creep into his sandals and between his toes. By the time Berenike reached these spectators, they would be entirely blacked out from the spirits.
Auletes’ subjects were in a jovial mood as their king approached on a swaggering elephant. Under a canopy adorned with ivy vine, fruits, crowns, drums, and masks of comedy and tragedy, the sun highlighted just enough of the gold in his costume to make him appear a great shimmering god. Flanking His Majesty on horseback was the Order of the First Kinsmen, including the newest member, a good-looking, longhaired youth whom Meleager resolved to invite to his next dinner party.
The next sight filled him with loathing. Thea, as Aphrodite rising out of the sea, was not nude, but wore transparent green drapes about her body and tiny conch shells under her breasts. Sparrows and doves, the lascivious birds known to take to the air with Aphrodite, fluttered in golden cages on either side of the queen. Thea’s second-born, the infant boy Ptolemy XIII, represented the god Dionysus as a baby. Meleager had argued with Thea about the inappropriateness of her costume, patiently explaining that the product of the union of Aphrodite and Dionysus had been the grotesque Priapus, and that people would laugh at her baby son if they made the connection. Meleager, you are too rigid, she had said. Not everyone is so exacting about the gods.
How fitting, he thought, that the queen chose to represent the whore of Mount Olympus. Then, ashamed, he chastised himself for sounding like any crude person who did not understand the old religions. The Fates had assigned Aphrodite the duty of lovemaking; it was her divine destiny. Aphrodite did not seduce her promiscuous father, Zeus, though it was said he desired her. The same could not be said of Thea.
A ray of light shot into the crowd. Meleager and those about him looked everywhere for the origin, but had to turn their faces away from its intensity. Then he saw the source: On an elephant-drawn float, Berenike stood as still as a statue, holding her shield at just the right angle to catch the sun. She was dressed as Pallas Athena, goddess of war, in her battle gear. Her baby sister, the Princess Arsinoe, firstborn to Thea, shared Berenike’s float and her glory, wearing a goatskin and representing the goddess at birth. The float carried all that the goddess invented—flutes, horse bridles, spinning wheels, ox yokes, numbers, small-scale models of chariots and ships. Atop the entire production was a banner with the goddess’s motto: “Athena never loses the day.” Dozens of maidens in war attire surrounded the radiant Berenike yelling olulu, the victory cheer, into the crowd, and a troop of little girls armed with light shields and lances followed on foot like a diminutive Amazon army, echoing the cry of the young warriors.
The princess looked like the goddess herself—fierce, distant, numinous. Her combative nature was well served in the deity’s guise; the long limbs, elegant neck, and feral grace all conspired with Athena’s warrior persona to create an ineffable grandness. Either ignited by their own happy intoxication, or moved by her regal attributes, or guided by the will of the Mother Goddess herself, the people raised their fists and yelled back.
“Olulu! Olulu!” shouted Meleager, to the surprise of his peers, who had never seen the reserved eunuch lose his composure. Meleager saw that suspicious eyes were upon him but he did not care. The shouting rang in his ears, filling him with joy. The response of the crowd to Berenike was an omen from the goddess—a sign of her destiny. He closed his eyes in prayer, his feelings of loyalty to Berenike affirmed.
But his sense of victory was short-lived. On a small float in the shape of the stone boat of Isis, the Mother Goddess of all Egypt, stood the favorite daughter of the king, the red robes of Isis a striking contrast against her dark long hair and her small child’s face. She was attended by twenty priestesses, all wearing sacramental black wigs of long springy curls and blood-bright robes. The mass of red hit the eunuch’s eye like an assault. He felt his spirit sink into the depths of his bowels as if he had taken sick.
Kleopatra stood at the rear of the cart, holding her thin arms out to the people as if to embrace them, to protect them like the Mother Goddess herself. The crowd, moved by her solemnity, applauded her, and the tribesmen lifted their totems in homage, which they did not do, Meleager could not help but notice, for Berenike. Seeing the emotion she evoked from the people, the child herself thought: I have a flair for this kind of thing.
The eunuch Meleager noticed the same. This one will be trouble, he thought. She would never possess the beauty of her step-mother nor the regal bearing of her older sister. She was petite, almost diminutive, but it did not seem to matter. Luckily, she was yet so young. Luckily. For unlike her stepmother, this one had an acute intelligence and could present real danger.
Meleager was driven at the end of the day through the back streets of the city to the stadium to observe the sacrifice of the bulls. The bulls would be butchered on the stadium floor, roasted on the spits, and, along with free fruits and breads and the remaining flow from the wine cart, given away to anyone willing to wait their turn.
The royal women had abandoned their floats, and Auletes, his elephant, and the family sat upon thrones that had been transported to the bleachers. Meleager and a few select courtiers sat under the royal canopy, the eunuch happy that he had missed the artistic events though he was a great lover of the theater. He felt genuine abhorrence when he watched Auletes get carried away at these affairs. At least on this day when he presented himself to the people as a god, Auletes did not insist on competing with his subjects for the grand prize. The flautist who had taken first prize also sat with the Royal Family, his golden Delphic trophy behind him. He was a beautiful youth with ringlets of marigold hair grazing his shoulders, and against this blond lushness, startling dark brown eyes. Tonight, Meleager was sure, the lad would sleep with the king after being forced to listen to him play the flute. But the eunuc
h made a mental note to find the location of the boy’s lodgings and invite him to breakfast. He was not a local and would undoubtedly love to see the view of the sea from the eunuch’s balcony.
Kleopatra sat next to Archimedes, not sure which was more exciting, the procession of the bulls, or her cousin’s hot young hand on her forearm. She did not dare breathe as the bulls—five hundred in all—moved into formation. Perhaps half an hour passed, but time seemed to stand still as the animals were led into the stadium, each one restrained by three men, and escorted by a priest wielding a scythe and four attendants carrying a large silver vessel into which the sacred blood would drain.
“It is the most solemn thing I have seen,” she whispered to her cousin.
“The blood of a sacrificial bull must not be spilt sloppily,” he replied, “for when the people eat of the flesh and drink of the blood, they consume the god himself.”
The late afternoon sun slashed a streak of harsh yellow across the stadium. A choir of priestesses silently entered the field, facing the bulls. All at once they began the invocation to the god: “Come hither, Lord Dionysus, god of the underworld who resurrected his mother from Hades. Come hither, Zagreus, son of Zeus, child who wielded the lightning bolt. Come hither, Lord of the vine, of the crops, of all that is green. The Titans tore your flesh; now we sacrifice you so that you may rise again.”
The priestesses flung themselves to the ground.
“Save the bulls and kill the king!” An angry choir of voices from the center of the stadium, opposite where the royals sat, split the reverent silence. “Save the bulls and kill the king!” More voices joined the chant, growing louder—and closer, Kleopatra could swear—gaining ground on the royals. She grabbed her cousin’s arm, but he shook her off, jumping to his feet to shelter her with his body, while the other Kinsmen protected the king, queen, and Berenike with their shields.
