by Mike Ashley
“Renenutet!” The high priest’s voice carried its full weight of authority. “Renenutet, in the name of Isis, I command you –”
The screams cut him off.
For a few ghastly seconds, Renenutet seemed to hang in the air. A white pleated cloud frozen against a backdrop of azure.
Then the billowing gown disappeared –
Kames was the first to react. In an instant, his soldiers had surrounded their Queen, tried to hustle her through the nearest doorway for safety.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “It’s not me that needs helping, it’s Renenutet. Kames, take some men and see if you can do anything for her. Benet. Go with him, if you will.”
The Captain of Archers met her eye and nodded in mute understanding. If Renenutet’s fall had proved fatal, it was from him that she wanted to hear it.
As the soldiers trotted off, their bronze helmets and greaves jangling, Cleopatra’s instinct was for her child.
“Take Caesarion home,” she instructed his nurse.
She must remove him at once from this tainted scene.
“No, wait.”
It would not do to have Pharaoh run from a crisis. Even if he was only a babe and fast asleep!
“Tuck this into his clothing instead.”
She handed his nurse the amulet Renenutet had given her earlier.
“The sacred amulet of Isis,” the priestess had hissed, her voice barely recognizable under the silver cat mask.
Flushed with the priesthood’s recognition of the Queen as Isis incarnate, the public attestation of their powerful support, Cleopatra had barely glanced at the tiny object when Renenutet pressed it into her palm.
“Set with carnelian,” she’d whispered, “washed in a tincture of ankhamu flowers, fashioned from the trunk of a sacred sycamore tree.”
This had been at the very start of today’s ceremony, at the moment the priestess was supposed to pay homage to her Queen and nothing else. To cover the delay, Renenutet pretended to disengage the panther tail which hung at her waist from Cleopatra’s gold belt, as though the two had become somehow entangled.
“Isis is the goddess from whom all being arose,” she murmured, her eyes glittering behind the metal mask. “From her feathers came light. From the brush of her wings came the air. She is the Enchantress, the Speaker of Spells, who protecteth the living and extendeth her protection even beyond, unto eternity.”
Oh, Renenutet. You should have kept the amulet, Cleopatra thought, picturing the nightmare vision of Renenutet frozen in space. You should have kept the amulet to protect your own soul from self-destruction.
“Let the wings of Isis cover you instead, little Caesar,” she whispered, stroking her son’s soft, dark hair. She bent to kiss his cool, dry forehead and wondered how long the effects of the poppy juice would last. As she straightened, Kames and Benet came striding across the shaded courtyard, their white kilts swinging in unison. Their expressions said it all.
“I deeply regret, the priestess Renenutet has already begun her long journey to the West,” Benet said softly.
The two men knelt beside the Pool of Purification and allowed the priests to splash their eyes with sacred water to wash away the contamination of having gazed upon a corpse. Cleopatra felt no disrespect. To have deferred the task would have been to taint the Queen with their polluted sight.
Poor Renenutet, she thought. A suicide. Whose imperfect soul was destined to wander the dark paths of the Underworld for ever. “I suppose we shall never know what drove her to take such drastic action,” she added sadly.
“On the contrary,” Benet said. “I know exactly what drove the poor woman across the Far Horizon.”
He hesitated. Pursed his lips.
“Someone else’s hands,” he said quietly. “Renenutet, I regret to inform you, was murdered.”
Whether for business or pleasure, the Field of Mars on which the temple complex stood was arguably one of the busiest places in Rome outside the Forum. Sited on a bend in the Tiber, it was home to seven other temples, as well as a whole host of public baths, theatres, race courses and libraries, offering works of art to admire, tombs to revere, groves to picnic in, trees for the children to climb, steps on which bearded philosophers could debate the meaning of life and open spaces for athletics. The air was never silent. Until now. Snake charmers stopped playing their flutes. Beggars’ bowls ceased to rattle. Pedlars stopped hawking. Only the jackdaws continued to chatter.
As the Dictator’s concubine, ensconced in the very villa from which his lawful wife had been evicted, Cleopatra was accustomed to being gawped at by the populace. Suddenly, like wasps to honey, they swarmed to the scene of the drama, but their interest, thank Horus, lay not in the dead priestess, rather in the bejewelled Egyptian whore. Cleopatra could handle that standing on her head. No person, living or dead, had ever witnessed a crack in her armour. They certainly would not do so today.
However! As the consort of the most powerful man in the Roman Republic, she was also expecting a different kind of attention. Any minute, Caesar’s legionaries would arrive.
She turned to Kames. “I assume from your contemptuous tutting that you disagree with Benet’s conclusion?”
“Your Majesty, we all saw what happened,” Kames replied. “There was no one else or we’d have seen them. With respect, that roof’s flatter than the sole of my boot.”
The Queen turned to her young Captain of Archers and raised one finely plucked eyebrow in query.
Benet inhaled. Released his breath slowly. “Because of the angle at which the body was lying, because of where it was lying, close to the wall, because the blood which had dried round the head wound doesn’t correspond with the copious amount of fresh blood inside her mask – all that adds up to only one thing. Renenutet was murdered.”
Kames’ bluster was shot out of the water. At last, he understood what the Queen saw in Benet. Drawing himself up to his full height, he cleared his throat and squared his shoulders.
“Benet’s deductions are correct,” he admitted. “Renenutet leapt off with arms outstretched, yet the body was found with one arm pinned beneath it. Likewise, when a person jumps they make a trajectory.”
“A trajectory?” she queried.
“Imagine throwing a javelin or spear from that roof, your Highness. This is the same principle. The body lands at the end of that arc. Renenutet, as Benet said, lies close in.”
Kames dropped to his knees, his forehead touching the ground.
“Your Majesty, as a soldier I should have recognized the signs –”
How fortunate, Cleopatra thought, to have two such pillars to lean on. Benet, alert to nuances, unafraid to put forward an unpalatable theory. Kames, man enough to admit his mistakes. Or clever enough to know he could no longer get away with the suicide theory . . .?
“Don’t whip yourself, Kames,” she said, bidding him rise. “You fell into the same trap we all did. You took Renenutet’s death at face value.”
Hobnail boots echoed on the Via Triumphalis, the rhythmic clink-clink-clink of scale armour, the jangle of bronze medallions as the legionaries drew closer. Grief and shock would no doubt set in later, but Pharaoh was raised to consider emotions an indulgence – never more so in a crisis. As the centurion halted his troops, Cleopatra summarized the points in her mind.
The priestess Renenutet had been murdered.
Renenutet . . . priestess of Bast.
Bast . . . the gentle daughter of Isis.
Isis . . . . . . . . . Protectress of the Pharaoh.
Cleopatra steepled her fingers. More crimes than murder had been committed today. Sacrilege, for one. The sanctuary of the Great Goddess had been defiled by the spilling of blood. Furthermore, the outrage of Bast had been invoked by the assault on her priestess.
But, worse than that, by embroiling the Queen in this apparent suicide, someone had tried to pull the wool over Cleopatra’s almond eyes.
And that was their biggest mistake.
/> In retrospect, she should have realized Caesar would not let it go at a lowly centurion.
Cleopatra studied the corded muscles of the man dismounting from his pure white stallion, noted the purple stripe on his tunic which pronounced him patrician. He had a strong face, a handsome face, and in spite of herself a shiver of desire rippled the length of her backbone. Contrary to rumours put about by certain viziers, the Queen had only ever taken one lover, and that had been a matter of expediency. The gods do not bestow virginity for it to be taken lightly. The night she had had herself smuggled through enemy lines in a rug, knowing that if she was discovered her own kinsmen would cut her throat like a dog, was the night she had given herself to the Roman Dictator.
Fast-track negotiations, some might say.
The Regency had usurped the throne. Cleopatra was in exile, Alexandria was in the hands of the rioters, the palace in the hands of the Romans. To survive, she had had to act fast. Her first move was to throw her army of Syrian mercenaries behind Caesar. Afterwards –? Well, what greater assurance of Egypt’s allegiance than the Queen’s precious virginity?
Men. Such fools, she thought. In seducing the young Cleopatra, Caesar believed he was annexing the rich lands of the Nile through the back door, a mission he could not hope to accomplish by force. But with his entrenched Roman attitudes towards women, he had not stopped to contemplate the alternative. That she might be using him . . .
Within days, Cleopatra achieved her first goal. She conceived. In the simple act of giving him an heir, something Caesar was sorely lacking, the tables turned. By the time Caesarion was of an age to rule, his father would be dead. And Rome would be annexed to Egypt, not the other way around!
In a journey which had taken her from royal princess to queen to pharaoh to goddess, Cleopatra quite literally held the power of the world in her hands.
The power felt good.
Nothing – and no one – would be allowed to change that.
Which wasn’t to say her blood could not be stirred by a lopsided smile here or a bunched muscle there! Benet, although he did not know it, was one such contender. The patrician dismounting from his stallion, another.
“Your Highness,” he murmured, making obeisance Egyptian fashion.
“It is good to see you again, Mark Antony.”
Nothing would come of these flirtations, of course. Cleopatra was neither stupid nor reckless – she had Caesar in the palm of her hand, and with it the eagle of Rome. But Caesar was old, he was bald and, let’s be frank, when it came to the art of love, his was more a quick sketch than an intricate fresco. Other décor could still be admired.
“Caesar salutes you,” he said, rising, “and offers his escort to the Queen, that she may return to the villa without incurring unwarranted scrutiny or gossip.”
The weight of so much gold jewellery was exhausting her, the heat from the wig almost unbearable. But when Cleopatra smiled at Mark Antony, you would think she had just risen from her bath, calm and refreshed.
“The Queen sends her grateful thanks to the mighty Caesar,” she replied.
Heavenly Horus, she would need all her diplomatic skills here! Strictly speaking, she was a foreigner on Roman soil, subject to Roman law. If the most powerful man on earth decreed she must leave the Field of Mars, then leave she must and in the three years they’d been lovers Cleopatra had never gone head-to-head against the Dictator’s wishes. Let him think he was in control. Illusion was everything.
“But the Queen has no desire to impinge upon Caesar’s generosity,” she told Mark Antony. “The Queen shall be remaining at the temple.”
The tall patrician blinked. “Is that wise, your Majesty?” Likewise, only a fool would go against Cleopatra’s wishes. Julius Caesar would not wish to lose his hold on the Nile’s treasures just because some clot upset his mistress!
“Wise is a contentious word, Mark Antony.”
She linked her arm through his and led him to the shade of the Pool of Peace, where papyrus plants swayed in the hot, sultry breeze. The silvery sound of sistrums filled the air and fragrant incense filtered out from the temple.
“Was it wise of the Queen,” she asked, as handmaidens fluttered up with plates of fresh fruit, “to devalue Egypt’s currency by one third in order to keep export sales strong? Or a gamble which happened to pay off? Was it wise of her to have her portrait stamped on our coinage, to prove to the world that Egypt’s economy was stable in the hands of a woman? Or was it nothing more than female vanity?”
Cleopatra dabbled her hands in the cool, clear water.
“For that matter, was it wise of the Queen to muster an army of mercenaries to fight her own brother? Or simply the banner-waving of a power-mad female with no hope of success?”
“Life, I agree, is entirely a matter of perspective,” he said, a twinkle lighting his eyes. “Which is precisely why I am now offering my services to escort you personally to the safety of Caesar’s villa.”
Cleopatra bit into a peach. “Your concern is touching, Mark Antony. Unfortunately, it would be disrespectful for me to leave until the rites are over.”
When the Roman general smiled, the lines round his eyes fell into deep crinkles. “The ceremony finished an hour ago,” he pointed out, selecting a cherry.
“To honour Isis, yes, but we have yet to venerate the cobra goddess and sing the hymn to Nut,” she replied, and watched as he bought himself time by slicing an apple.
Mark Antony had not bought the lie. True, he was ignorant of the rites conducted here, but he was keenly aware that a surprisingly large number of Roman women made devotions at this shrine. Isis had become popular in Rome, more so since the Queen’s arrival last September, when additional aspects had been added. Bast, for instance. Hathor the cow. Plus numerous other female deities who, together, presided over motherhood and love, beauty and healing, all the issues important to women, Roman or otherwise.
Mark Antony might not know the details. But he knew, dammit, when a ceremony was over and done with. Selecting a date, the Roman general changed tack.
“Listen to the baying crowd,” he said. “Perhaps the Queen does not appreciate how much resentment her royal presence causes in the city . . .?”
“The Queen knows exactly how Republicans view the concubine and her bastard son,” she said tartly. “Keep the mistress – flaunt her, even – is the general consensus. After all, the Queen of Egypt is a prize for Caesar to parade, is she not? Just don’t play house with the whore.”
Another lie. Marital scandal was a minor issue, the cause of gossip rather than resentment. The real fear among the Senate – Mark Anthony included – was for the future of their hard-won Republic. They suspected Cleopatra of dripping poison in the Dictator’s ear every night to serve her own ends.
They were not wrong.
Come next March – no later than April – she would have Julius Caesar declare himself King of Rome, with herself crowned as Queen. Upon his death (and who knows how quickly that might come to pass) Caesarion would inherit the title.
Then all of Rome’s dominions would belong to Egypt –
The scent of the oil of marjoram drenching her wig wafted in the sultry air. The gems glistened like raindrops.
“As to the mood of the crowd, my answer is this,” she said carefully. “Rome likes its spectacles. I say, let the people enjoy this one.”
Renenutet was murdered on the sacred soil of Isis wearing the insignia of Bast. Now that Cleopatra was to be venerated as Isis, this comprised a triple sacrilege and the perpetrator must be punished. Pharaoh could not simply walk away this afternoon. It was her duty to stay and see justice served. In any case, she thought sadly, she owed it to Renenutet to find her killer. Renenutet should not journey into the West without the feather of truth on her shoulder. The journey was long enough as it was.
She held out a small, sandalled foot.
The sparring light in the general’s eyes died. She inched her foot out further. His expression darkened. There
was no mistaking the Queen’s message.
Or defying it . . .
As Mark Antony knelt to kiss the royal toe, anger and outrage pulsated from every Roman pore. He! an aristocrat! a general! one of the world’s greatest power brokers! had been . . . dismissed! There was a very different glint in his eye as he rose.
She watched him stride away, barking orders to the centurion to keep the crowd back. One day, she reflected, this man would return for more of the same. His type always did.
And Cleopatra would be waiting.
Inside the sanctuary, prayers were being said for Renenutet’s journey into the Afterlife. Yntef, Tamar and the rest of the attendants had lost no time in shaving their eyebrows. They would have done this had just a temple cat died, much less one of Bast’s holy disciples.
The atmosphere inside the sanctuary pulsed with emotion.
Cleopatra glanced at the sky. The sticky, midsummer heat could not last and the first rumble of thunder could be heard in the distance. Excellent. She would be able to interpret the storm as Bast’s anger made manifest. Thunder would be the cat goddess’ growling, lightning her ferocious spitting. Magic and superstition played a pivotal role in Egyptian life. Only a fool would fail to capitalize.
“Benet. Kames.” She beckoned them over. “No one is to suspect this was not a straightforward suicide.” If the Romans sniffed murder, this would become a civil investigation. Much better to keep these things in-house. “We will deal with this quietly, between the three of us. Do either of you have any clues as to who killed her?”
“None,” Benet admitted. “But we know Renenutet was killed inside the temple.”
Cleopatra’s eyes flashed. Was there no end to the insult? “How can you be sure?”
“There is only one place on this site where people must bare their feet, even your Majesty. Inside the sanctuary. Renenutet was barefoot.”
Cleopatra picked up a sloe-eyed kitten mewing at her feet. The kitten began to rattle like a chariot over cobblestones, snuggling its head into her collarbone.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Dried blood around the head wound suggests Renenutet died an hour before the simulated suicide –”
