Kleopatra

by Karen Essex

  Mohama would have wanted him so.

  The boys were appalled when she pointed to the steed. They shook their heads wildly, eyes pleading. She breathed very deeply and closed her eyes. May the power invested in me by the goddess make them see me as a queen. Opening her eyes, she spoke to them in their own tongue, amazing them.

  “I am Kleopatra the Seventh, daughter of the Twelfth Ptolemy, King of Egypt. I am the descendant of Alexander, conqueror of Persia. I command you to move aside while I mount this steed.” The boys fell to their knees, begging the princess not to ride this particular horse. This was no ordinary horse; this was Pompey’s horse. If anyone rode this horse, if a girl rode this horse, if a. foreign girl rode this horse and did anything to it, the master would have them flogged, or perhaps killed. The boys’ big kettle-colored doe eyes urged her to reconsider.

  “Perhaps he will have you flogged, too!” one suggested boldly.

  She was not going to back down. She wanted the horse and she convinced herself that Pompey, should he be acquainted with her equestrian prowess and her love of the equine, would wish her to ride his steed. This was no warhorse. The animal had not a flaw, not a mark upon its glimmering dark coat. This was an animal bred for the pleasure and status of its owner, a work of art, a thing of beauty. Kleopatra turned away from the boys and opened the gate of the stall. She would ride the creature bareback.

  She approached him slowly as he looked down at her with his great luminescent ovals. Curiosity mingled with disdain. She put her hand to his mouth. After some consideration, he nuzzled his wet nostrils against it.

  “Can anyone tell me why my stablehands are kneeling on the ground like the suppliant maidens while this girl is trying to steal my horse?

  Kleopatra froze. The horse butted her arm with his snout, a signal to continue the petting. She did not respond, nor did she dare turn around. The man spoke a formal Greek, learned at school and polished in diplomatic relations. The voice was that of a commander—deep, assured, mature, beyond reproach. A voice so resonant with authority and intelligence that no one would question the man who possessed it.

  It was he, the great man Pompeius Magnus.

  “My friend, I apologize,” came the rueful voice of her father. “The little thief is my daughter the princess Kleopatra. Please forgive her. She has been known to steal off with my own horse at dawn. She is a lover of the creatures. She cannot resist such a mount.”

  Kleopatra slowly turned around, eyes lowered. The horse snorted behind her, a witness to her humiliation.

  “Your Highness.” The man bowed low and then rose to meet her eyes. “Please remove yourself from the stall before you get hurt. Strabo is rather unpredictable.”

  The princess noted that Pompey had named the horse for his father. She could not be certain if the tribute reflected mockery or honor, since the father of Pompey was generally despised, or feared, or—oh, she could not remember. As soon as she met Pompey’s gaze, every detail of Roman history disappeared from her memory. He caused an instantaneous reaction in her of confusion and titillation,

  Pompey snapped his fingers, signaling the kneeling stable boys to get to their feet. They skirted Kleopatra as if she radiated poison. One of them secured the gate of the stall while the other inspected the horse as if for injury.

  Kleopatra knew that Pompey was well advanced in age, a man of at least forty-six. Yet he had not lost his legendary handsomeness. His hair was thick and tousled about like a schoolboy’s; in fact, his boyish face reminded her of Alexander. Though as old as her father, he remained without fat. Tall, very tall. She found herself exhilarated by the sheer size of the Roman. His hair was fair with small glinting streams of gray, and his eyes were pale brown and languid, as if he had not a care in the world. His skin was tanned and leathery but not wrinkled. His face, nose, cheekbones, brow, were what one might call fine.

  Auletes stood silent, for once inscrutable—a sure sign that she had disgraced him. Pompey said nothing, but let his eyes dance over her small figure, enjoying now that he had caught the little royal in her cunning. “Your Majesty, I see that your princess is rather shy,” he said to her father, not taking his eyes off her.

  Auletes did not speak but gave his daughter a look of irony at Pompey’s miscalculation of her character.

  “We must find her a proper animal to ride.”

  “If you please, sir,” she began by stammering. “I prefer this one. Strabo, so named in honor of your late father, I believe.”

  “Why, that is correct.” He beamed at her as if she were his own precocious child.

  “A great man. A great warrior. Perhaps wronged in death.” The details of her education—the histories of Rome she so painstakingly had studied—came back to her.

  “You honor me with your knowledge of my family, Your Highness. I must find you a pony you can ride while you stay with us. Come, let us review my inventory of beasts.”

  Kleopatra did not move when offered Pompey’s arm. Auletes widened his eyes in warning.

  “May I ride your horse, sir? I do believe he will like me.”

  “I am sure he will love you, but he is a large and cantankerous animal like his owner, and I do not believe he will obey you. I fear he will harm you. And then, my princess, I would not be able to live.”

  “I wouldn’t concern myself about that,” Auletes said. “She has a way with them.”

  Pompey, skeptical, shrugged his shoulders in resignation, giving the boys the signal to saddle Strabo. Kleopatra watched them carefully. She had known stablehands to sabotage a rider. When they finished, she took the reins and led Strabo outside.

  The princess got her way, but she did not care for Pompey’s horse. Clearly, the steed had but one master to whom he gave his obedience and best performance. He did not try to get away from her. That was a challenge she would have welcomed. Instead, he was slow to the command, unwilling to take his head even when she gave it willingly. Then, when she least suspected it, when she had resigned herself to the careless trot and to the enjoyment of the Roman countryside, he lurched forward, pushing her backward so that she almost fell over behind him. She hoped she was not being watched. She was now in a contest with this conniving beast, a contest they both knew she could not win. Yet she would not let the spectators know who was really in control.

  Suddenly she thought of strangers riding Persephone—Berenike, perhaps, who would beat her if she disobeyed—and she began to worry for her horse’s safety while she remained in exile. Glumly, she let Strabo gallop back to the stable. She saw that her father and Pompey observed her, so she made the most of the ride in the last furlong, and hoped mightily that the horse would obey her command to stop. Pompey watched her descend upon the stables at a breakneck speed. She was being foolish; the distance was too short for such a spectacle as she put on. But she did not incite his ire as she expected. He helped her dismount, and she blushed when his large hand engulfed hers.

  “I have only seen one woman dominate a horse like that,” he said. She hoped he thought the redness in her face the result of the ride.

  He leaned close to her as if revealing a secret. “Hypsicratia,” he whispered. “The concubine of Mithridates.” At the utterance of the names of those fearsome persons, the stable boys began to mutter incantations to their native deity. “Mithras! Mithras!” Pompey looked askance at them and they quieted.

  “A vicious bitch,” he sighed. “I do not miss her.” The princess did not like being compared to a concubine, but she met Pompey’s eyes, hoping he would elaborate. “Small as you, and always dressed like a boy. She rode with the king, fighting as he fought, tending his horses. Though she was small and she didn’t wear the buckskin I believe she was an Amazon. She certainly fought like one,

  “Mithridates loved her most, though he had hundreds of beautiful women in his harem,” he said. He emphasized the word “hundreds,” and Auletes raised his eyebrows, wondering if he was diminished in Pompey’s eyes for appearing in Rome with a solitary mistress
. Should he have brought women to Pompey? “I saw them, you know, but took none for myself. I sent them home to their fathers,” he added, shrugging. Auletes appeared relieved.

  Shy again, the princess looked to Auletes for permission to pursue this conversation. She had never before been in the company of a mighty warrior. An Imperator. A Master of the World. She did not know if they enjoyed sharing the details of their conquests. Auletes nodded his consent.

  “What happened to Hypsicratia?” she asked.

  “She was afraid that many men would want to have the mistress of a man so feared. Rather than risk a woman’s Fate, she took poison with her king. They say she died claiming that she chose her lovers, and not they her, and that for her new lover she chose death. At any rate, they both saved me a lot of trouble.” He did not seem at all pleased about the victory. “I have their weapons on display in my home. You must see them,” he said dryly.

  “I shall make a point of it, sir,” she replied.

  “I had hoped Pompey’s young wife would be a good companion for you. After all, she is the daughter of Julius Caesar. Can you not find common ground with her?”

  Auletes, lying on the sofa next to his daughter like a bloated fish while she sat up against a pillow, whispered these words into Kleopatra’s ear, careful to prevent the servers and the other dinner guests from hearing what he said.

  Kleopatra wished she had not partaken of each type of food offered at the Roman banquet. She was not accustomed to the weighty feeling in her stomach, but Auletes said that one must be polite and act like the natives. The first course of the dinner consisted of several kinds of lettuces, snails, grilled eggs, smoked fish, olives, beets, and cucumbers; the main course brought oysters, fish, sow’s udders, stuffed pheasant, lamb, and the ribs of pigs, all doused in a coarse fish sauce called garum that was strangely sweet and sour at the same time; lastly, there were cheeses, fruits, breads, and small sweet things to finish. None of it was very good, in the opinion of the princess, lacking the subtle flavoring and careful preparation of the food served at home. Wines of many kinds, stronger than Kleopatra had ever tasted at her own court, were poured lavishly—sloppily, even—throughout, laying waste to the austere posture of temperance and restraint that the Romans publicly assumed. Far from living like the hardworking men of the land they pretended to be, they indulged grossly—crassly, she told herself—in princely excess, to the point of having ice brought in from the mountains to cool their wines.

  “Father, Julia disgusts me,” Kleopatra whispered back to the king. “I do not believe a woman should act like a kitten any more than a kitten should do the reverse. She is appalling.” The princess had made her judgment. “Look at her.”

  The object of their discussion, Julia, only daughter of Julius Caesar, presently was writhing her body like a dancing Arabian slave girl to get Pompey’s attention. Kleopatra had heard much talk of the piousness of Roman women, but she had seen little evidence to support it. Perhaps, like the image of the stoical farmer, it was a ghost of the Roman past. Earlier, on her way to the lavatory, Kleopatra had overheard two elderly ladies gossiping over Julia’s behavior. They had agreed that in their day, a Roman girl knew how to be useful, how to spin cloth, keep house, raise chickens, maintain the hearth, honor the gods, and advise her husband. “Oh, that one is useful,” one of the ladies said cryptically of Julia. “For one thing and one thing only,” agreed her companion. Kleopatra’s enjoyment of their indictments was cut short when the blame for the degeneration of the young people fell upon “that fat Egyptian potentate and others like him,” whose debauched ways had crept into innocent Roman minds. Kleopatra wanted to reveal that she had understood their derision, but instead she dismissed it as the prattle of a generation on its way to the grave.

  “Does Daddy want more wine?” Julia asked her husband. Pompey lay prone on a dining couch, looking straight into the barely covered bosom of his child bride, caressing her midriff through the gauzy wisp of a dress. She wiggled as she fed him pieces of fresh melon, bitten into tiny morsels by her teeth and then inserted into the mouth of the general, whose eyes rolled back as he chewed.

  Seventeen, tall and lanky like her father, she would not be an attractive woman in later years. But presently she had the fresh charm and girlish naiveté that grown men seemed to find irresistible. Pompey the Great was no exception. Kleopatra, who had held his attention earlier in the day, was caught between jealousy and disgust. She had thought better of him. Now she had cause to reevaluate his character. Senex bis puer. A handy Roman expression. The old man is twice the fool.

  She disliked Julia, but no more than she disapproved of all the brassy Roman women. Earlier in the day, she, Charmion, and Hekate expressed their unilateral disdain of the breed. They listed their objections to the Roman female systematically.

  They had no physical prowess outside the arts of seduction.

  They did not go to gymnasium, they did not ride, they did not hunt.

  They were as loud as soldiers and used abominable language.

  They cared for nothing but adorning themselves with gaudy jewelry, bossing their men around, and attracting attention.

  The fiercest indictment was the nasty way these Roman matrons treated slaves. At this moment, Julia had taken her focus off Pompey and was chastising an old Spaniard—probably captured years before by her father—for spilling the juice of a plate of olives that he attempted to place on the table. The old man had fallen to his knees to wipe the liquid with the hem of his tunic when another woman, a guest, hit him on the head with her fist.

  “Miserable old oaf,” she said. “Pompey, you must retire these pathetic creatures that Caesar captured in Spain. When was he there? Was it in this or the last century?”

  Pompey simply laughed at her and continued to stroke his wife’s body.

  Earlier in the week, Kleopatra had winced and had to hold her tongue when Julia slapped a girl for neglecting to secure a lock of her hair in the elaborate coiffure she had just executed. She witnessed this at their “get-acquainted” time, during which she had to relinquish an opportunity to accompany her father and Pompey on a morning hunt.

  “Yesterday I rode the animal Strabo,” the princess said stiffly, trying to make a conversation. “A fine steed. And so generous of the great Pompey to allow a stranger to mount it.”

  “Isn’t Daddy handsome?” Julia asked Kleopatra when they were alone.

  “I have not had the honor of meeting your father,” she answered. But she had specifically heard that Julius Caesar was too tall, too thin, and had too little hair.

  “Oh, Your Highness,” Julia said patronizingly. “I mean my husband.”

  To be fair, Charmion said, perhaps Julia was trying to make the best of a political marriage made to a man older than her father. Hekate had given a knowing nod of agreement. Kleopatra did not care. She would spend the rest of her visit at the Pompey residence avoiding contact with the goose, even though Auletes thought it in the best interest of their cause that the two young females forge a friendship. They had no common ground; Julia fully dwelled in the lower regions of sensual pleasure that the princess had yet to discover. She had given herself completely to its service.

  In truth, thought Kleopatra, what else did Julia have to do with herself? She would never be called upon to rule a people, to administrate a government, or even to solve a serious problem. She was the political tool of her father and the toy of Pompey the Great. Until he tired of either her or of alliance with Caesar. Kleopatra could not decide if the Roman women—boisterous and insistent, always clamoring to be heard—were more fortunate or less than the sequestered women of Greece, who more readily accepted the feminine destiny. She could not decide, and she settled for being very happy to have been born a princess who might do as she liked, for she was not cut of the cloth of an ordinary woman.

  Auletes reached across the dining couch, placing his great paw behind his daughter’s neck, bringing her closer to him. “My child, I am very frustrate
d. I do not know what is wrong with Pompey. Have you noticed that he does not leave the house? Would you not think that the most important man in Rome would have business to attend to? I believe he is hiding.”

  “From what?”

  “I do not know. More than that, he refuses to discuss my situation!” said the king.

  Kleopatra tried to recede from the smell of wine and fish sauce on her father’s breath, but his hand held her firmly in place.

  “That is why I wish you to cultivate Julia. She may be able to help us.”

  Earlier in the day Pompey had given Auletes and Kleopatra a tour of his garden, and appeared to listen patiently to Auletes’ arguments for support in regaining the throne. But never did he come forth with an offer of help or a plan of action, even after the king asked directly when he would take his case to the senate. “Would you like to hear me play the flute?” Auletes asked Pompey, trying to prolong his time in the man’s company. Pompey replied that he would enjoy that a great deal, but not at the present moment. After the walk, he absented himself to another part of the house.

  “I am losing patience with Pompey’s evasive tactics,” said the king. “He wants to tell me all about his varieties of rhododendron while Thea’s behind sits on my throne.”

  “I know, Father, but Julia is like a small toy. She has no political sway.” Kleopatra whispered in Greek, hoping that the Roman woman next to them was either too uneducated or too drunk to understand them.

  “And now that bloodsucker, Rabirius, is after me.” Rabirius the moneylender had driven to the villa to ask for repayment of the six thousand talents he had lent in order for the king to become Friend and Ally of the Roman People. “You must go ask my wife for it,” the king had replied, and then poured his troubles out to the portly man. By the end of the visit, Rabirius had promised to intercede on behalf of the king with his influential friends in the senate, and Auletes had borrowed more money.