Steampunk Cleopatra

by Thaddeus Thomas

  Urban could only shake his head.

  Cato turned his gaze to Amani. “Why did you come?”

  “Berenice sent me to Cleopatra,” she said.

  “And so you went to Rome, but why are you here? Why are you all here?”

  When Amani hesitated, Urban spoke. “Philostratos.”

  “Philostratos,” Cato asked, “not Theodotus?”

  “He was my tutor,” Amani said.

  “Then you know him well,” Cato said. “What treasure would you send such a man to find?”

  Amani said nothing.

  “Knowledge,” Urban answered.

  Amani shifted her weight.

  “Amani has asked to cross the island to join Theodotus's search.” Cato circled the bed. “Would sending a child on such an errand not be cruel?”

  Urban cupped Amani's hand in his. “She's stronger than you imagine.”

  Cato came alongside Amani, looming over her. His lean form slight compared to Urban's brutish strength. “What have you heard of Caesar during your time in Rome?”

  “Only that he is a great general,” Amani said.

  “A great general, but not a great man,” Cato said. “He rose to power as a man of the people, pushing for land reform, but he ruled as a tyrant, attempting to imprison senators who stood in his way. Afterward, the Senate appointed him the rural lands of the Italian peninsula. This was not enough for him, and such was no surprise to me. The Senate sought to limit his power and deny him glory. His friends have since appointed him two more territories, and he now storms through Gaul, provoking war. He went proclaiming one purpose, to protect the interests of Rome, but his true purpose seems to be paying off his debts.”

  Amani stared at him, uncertain what she was meant to say. She had heard some of this in Rome. During Caesar’s tenure, the other proconsul, Bibilus, had attempted to thwart him, only to have the crowd capture him and pelt him with feces. Humiliated, Bibilus had retreated from public life.

  “The requests of great men do not move me.” Cato gripped her by the forearm and shoulder, an intimate but dominant gesture. “Those of good people do. You will report in one month. Pharaoh should have no trouble with me hearing your findings.”

  Papyrus 5.01

  Accompanied by Cato's men, Amani traveled inland. Forested lava flows cut a ribbon to the coast. Black rock showed itself in jagged fissures in groves of olive trees and fields of potatoes. They brought her to Bethzayith, whose people farmed on the borders of mining country and whose land carried the marks of geological violence.

  A leader of the synagogue went out to meet her. His hands and arms were rough from work in the field, his skin was sun-kissed, and his hair had turned gray at his temples and in tufts around his chin. He had all his teeth except for one upper canine, and it left an obvious gap that he seemed to take joy in showing off as he smiled and laughed. His name was Malachi.

  He led Amani away from her escorts and through the olive groves.

  “I’m looking for Philostratos,” she said. “I’m told he lived here for a time.”

  “I knew Philostratos,” Malachi said. “I think I knew him well. There's a house just outside of town. It's open to gentiles. Perhaps, you can stay there.”

  “I'm more interested in finding my friend,” she said.

  “He lived there from the time he first showed up in our village. If Andros is home, he can tell you what you need to know.”

  “If he's not?” she asked.

  “He'll want you to have the upper room, in any case, but especially since you were Philostratos's friend. The room was his.”

  “I would like that.” She had listened for him to contradict her, to say that Philostratos was dead. He corrected her hope with the subtle use of the past tense, but that was all.

  “You've spent your life in luxury,” he said. “You're a scholar and uncomfortable away from the city and your books, but you’ve ventured far from home and encountered great tragedy.”

  “Someone told you,” she said.

  “Philostratos did.”

  She stopped and waited.

  “He told me who you were,” he said. “The rest of it, I see in your face. Why have you come to my village? Theodotus searches the mines. Why did Cato not send you there?”

  “Cato was impressed with the comfort you gave him at the death of the king.”

  “Do you believe I can do the same for you?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “It's difficult to receive comfort,” he said. “It starts with a sense of belonging and you no longer know where you belong.”

  She dared not move, fearing other secrets might tumble free.

  “I have counseled people who were told they didn’t belong,” he continued. “I’ve risked my standing in the village to do so. A society develops to protect its concepts of family and faith, and it settles into traditions that comfort many but not all. Given time, the many seem enough, and the few are made to feel it's their sin, being different. I choose to care for the few.”

  “Is that why a Cypriot Jew traveled to Paphos to comfort his Roman conqueror?” she asked.

  “I felt it was my duty.”

  “You have an odd sense of duty,” she said,

  “I came to Cyprus to cope with my grief, but for a long time, the people had little comfort to give. They were polite but separate, leaving me to my pain because I was not one of them. Eventually, I realized they had accepted me as their own, but it came too late. I'd been left alone with my thoughts, and, by the time they embraced me, I knew we needed to do better.”

  “And this is you trying to do better,” she said.

  “While we walk, tell me about yourself, if you're ready.”

  He led her out of the village. She told him of recent events, of Cleopatra and Dio. They walked along a road beyond the northern edge of town toward a house and a field that abutted a forest. A single olive tree cast its shade over the courtyard wall.

  Malachi accompanied Amani to a hundred paces of the courtyard door, but he would approach no closer. “I'd be ceremonially unclean until nightfall. You understand. The people will be watching.”

  The home accepted gentiles, he had said. Were the owners not Jewish, or did they not worry about ceremonial standing?

  “Thank you for sharing your story,” he said. “It took bravery.”

  She tried to answer, but, thinking of the many who had died, she found the word caught in her throat.

  “You’re a faithful person, dedicated in your relationships, and you expect others to be the same,” he said. “See people for who they are, not for who they should be.”

  Something stung as if his words were barbed. She waited for him to continue, but he gestured to the house. It waited for her, as desolate as she was.

  “Cleopatra is my everything,” she said.

  “You’ve learned to interpret life through your relationship with her. You will learn to experience it all anew, if this is the end of your time together. It will be painful, but you will discover that a world exists beyond her touch.”

  “And if our time isn’t over?” she asked.

  “The world exists, all the same.”

  Papyrus 5.02

  Alone, Amani knocked at the courtyard door. She received no reply and pushed. A busted lock hung from the interior wall. She called into emptiness space and waited to see if anything would emerge. Nothing did.

  She let the door close. Its edge fell shy of the wall by a digit, wide enough to peer through. She looked back at Malachi and saw him praying. A dog barked in the distance.

  The property had an outbuilding in the courtyard. Stairs ran along the outside of the main house to the roof and an upper room, but it was the main house that filled her with foreboding. A wooden beam lay propped against the wall. Upon the door, someone had secured large brackets. She'd seen such things before, but only on the inside of a building. Whoever had constructed this had meant to keep something locked within.

  Boards ba
rricaded the windows.

  She called out, “Philostratos?”

  She knocked. Nothing stirred, so she pushed the door open. A stench of rot rolled over her. Atop the cluttered debris of lives forgotten, lay the carcass of a dog. Amani fixed upon the lipless snarl and the black depths where eyes should have been. Flies billowed around her in black currents, tickling her cheeks, her lashes, and the tender edges of her nostrils.

  She slammed shut the door and batted away the flies. She forced herself to remember everything she'd seen in the room: a table and toppled chairs; chalk plates and cups; a feeding trough; and scattered farming tools.

  What did it tell her? It told her nothing.

  The outbuilding was empty. A linen sheet lay over a bed of straw, which explained the trough and tools being inside the house. She glanced up at the upper room. Whoever created the bed had chosen not to sleep in the main house; the rotting carcass seemed reason enough for that. They hadn't slept upstairs, either.

  Outside the upper room, she found the remnants of a small fire. Close by it, a hole in the roof had once let the smoke of the home’s cooking fire escape. Flies buzzed around the hole, bringing with them the aroma of rot and decay.

  From a hundred paces, Malachi watched.

  The door swung open, revealing the upper room and a mosaic that covered the far wall in tile and broken pieces of clay and glass, presenting patterns, but no meaning. The colors flowed onto the adjacent walls and ceiling, and she found herself caught in that flow. She forgot everything else. The undulating hues of blue and gold settled upon her chest and lodged itself in her throat.

  She sat, unwilling to leave. Flies landed on her forearm, but she hardly cared. She knew the beauty of Pharaoh's palace, but never had she experienced anything so moving.

  The quality of light changed around her as the sun descended toward evening. Reluctantly, she pulled herself away. She needed a place to sleep for the night, and it would not be here.

  Malachi remained where she had left him.

  “Have you seen what's in there?” she demanded.

  He waited, his eyes creased with sorrow, but if he expected an explanation, she was not ready to give one. The words to process what she had seen failed her, and she could not understand what any of this had to do with me.

  “None of us have been inside,” Malachi said at last.

  “You knew Philostratos well?” she asked.

  “I want to think so,” he said.

  He needed to walk through that gate. Evening had come. If entering would render him unclean until...now...what did it matter? Other reasons held him back, and she was not yet ready to understand.

  Papyrus 5.03

  In an outbuilding, Malachi prepared a bed for Amani. She lay with a full stomach but could not sleep. Her thoughts tumbled over one another.

  Though the owners had welcomed gentiles, the house by the woods was still a Jewish home, and their law forbade capturing images in art. That left abstraction and color, but color had meaning. From her studies, she knew that, in their scripture, blue symbolized heaven, and gold, God. The upper room suggested an afterlife in God's presence. She drifted to sleep with tears in her eyes.

  In her dreams, the death house returned. She saw the dog carcass, rotten, torn open, laying atop scattered farming tools. She startled awake, the image vivid in her memory.

  The dog rested upon the farm tools, which came from an outbuilding that someone had emptied to make a place to sleep. Someone had been sleeping in the outbuilding before the dog's corpse entered the main house. She imagined a vicious beast trapped inside the house, secured by the beam at the door, and left to die. But that made no sense.

  People killed dangerous animals; they did not give them the house, and the animal had left no claw marks in any desperate attempt to claw its way to freedom.

  Someone, having found the dog, dead and half-devoured, had dragged it into the house and left it to rot.

  She gathered her things and headed back to the house. It beckoned her. She passed through the gate and found the stairs as cold air cut through her tunic and cloak. The sky blushed with the first touch of the false dawn.

  She stood outside the upper room and opened the door to a space as black as the void. Nothing stirred, and she waited for the sun to cast its first rays upon heaven.

  The smell of death wafted up from beneath. Flies spiraled like demons at the mouth of the underworld. Underworld, she thought, and looked again.

  The entire house was an artwork, and she sat between heaven and hell as the sun peeked over the horizon and scrolled its brilliance across the face of the upper room. Inside, glass and gold sparkled among the lesser shine of the tile and the dull earthiness of pottery. Drawn to the dance of light, she reached out her hand to the mosaic and brushed her finger against a piece of gold, not painted pottery or tile, but coins sprinkled throughout the work.

  Egyptian coins. Ancient. Unlike anything the Ptolemies ever minted.

  She stared at the blue-painted wall and the pieces of gold. A lowness settled in her gut, a weight that threatened to buckle her knees and shove her to the floor. She would have given in; she wanted to, but something else pumped through her veins, something that made her fists clench in a futile search for someone to tear apart.

  Malachi stood in the distance and called to her.

  She stepped out of the upper room. “Why was this house open to gentiles?”

  He stood in the tall grass and said nothing. Through the distance and her tears, she could not judge his emotions.

  “The man who lived here was a Jew.” She emphasized the word man.

  He glanced over his shoulder, and then he came to her. She sat at the top of the stairs, and he stood at the bottom, looking up.

  “The people who lived here experienced a significant loss,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a work of grief,” she said.

  He looked away, into the courtyard. “What Andros experienced in Jerusalem haunted him. The people we lost.”

  “Philostratos showed Andros how to express that grief through art.”

  “What art?”

  She showed him. She took him upstairs first to see heaven and then stood at the door to the main house, ready to show him hell.

  She opened the door without looking in. Malachi threw his hands before his face and backed away. She waited, even as the flies landed.

  “What is that?” He ran to the gate, shaking, nearly retching. He grabbed the latch. The gate remained closed.

  She touched his arm, a sign of gentleness and compassion. He recoiled as from the bite.

  “Philostratos has been missing for months, but that dog hasn't been dead long. He's still rotting.”

  “He told us Philostratos was dead.”

  “Who told you?” she asked.

  “Andros, but then a few weeks ago, Philostratos returned. I found him leaving the upper room one morning.”

  “You didn't tell Cato that you'd seen him?”

  “I didn't tell anyone. He asked me not to.” Malachi tilted his face to the upper room. “Philostratos will want to see you, but he’ll never forgive me if I send you out alone.”

  Papyrus 5.04

  For three days, Amani and Malachi tracked Theodotus. He had spent months investigating the mines that claimed to send coal and fiery gasses back to Egypt but found nothing.

  As Amani and Malachi camped in the forests outside the mines, watching, but unseen, she wondered if Philostratos had enjoyed better success.

  “He found records of payment with Egyptian coins,” Malachi said, “but no record of a shipment leaving the docks.”

  “What does it mean?” Amani asked.

  Malachi shook his head.

  No one had taken a shipment since Theodotus arrived, a shipment the miners insisted was overdue. When he abandoned the mines in search of the temple, Amani was there to follow them.

  Light cobwebbed through the canopy, dappling a woodland floo
r born out of Cyprus's volcanic soil. Among the trees, Amani and Malachi crept with an eye to the path below as it cut through the hill, its soil trampled by a procession of men led by Theodotus.

  “You came to the village to grieve,” Amani whispered.

  “In Jerusalem, I had a family,” he said, “a daughter who would have been about your age now.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said.

  “When General Pompey took Jerusalem,” he said, “he slaughtered us.”

  Amani placed her hand on the trampled earth. Through much of that journey, they had darted through woods that showed little sign of the existence of men. Here, Amani found branches dangling from fresh breaks. The sides of massive trees were gouged, narrow bands with the bark stripped clean. Smaller trees were snapped in two or uprooted. She stopped when she came upon the footprint.

  Seeing the deep impression, round like the foot of an elephant, Amani developed an awareness of her own flesh's weight and fragility.

  Malachi knelt beside her.

  “There's something else here,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He glanced back the way they had come.

  “It's too late for that,” she said.

  She peered across the wooded hills but saw nothing. Theodotus’s troop continued. She was afraid now to follow, afraid to stay behind. She wanted to join them and to stay away. There seemed no right answers and no safety. She felt alone and vulnerable, an outsider.

  “Tell me about Andros,” she said.

  Malachi looked almost as frightened as she felt. “Andros came from Jerusalem about the same time I did. He’d fled his village and became a soldier just before Pompey came. By the time he reached Cyprus, I’d been here for a few weeks, and he heard stories of another refugee from Jerusalem. He came to the village looking for me.”

  She could barely see Theodotus’s group of soldiers on the trail ahead. The time had come to follow or let them go. Walking away was an option. They had seen the farm on the coast where Theodotus had hired a local woman as his guide. Amani could always do the same.