Steampunk Cleopatra

by Thaddeus Thomas

  They ran along the hill, above the path, making up lost distance. On the path, twenty soldiers walked two-by-two. Their pace maintained its rhythm, unbroken and unworried. The woman walked alongside Theodotus, guiding the way.

  Somewhere beyond what they could see, timber snapped. Birds took flight with cries of warning. Amani and Malachi stopped. She expected to see a flock silhouetted against the sky, marking the source of the sound. She saw nothing.

  She looked at Malachi and placed a finger to her lips.

  Wind swayed the canopy and then fell still. The woods cracked, and the ground thundered. The elusive birds now filled the sky.

  Theodotus and the others stopped. The soldiers came between the civilians and the threat, their shields interlocked. No one moved. Even nature held its breath.

  Amani saw something. Ahead, through the trees, a shadow raced downhill. The soldiers scrambled out of the way as it crashed down the hill and through the double line. Men tumbled.

  The colossal figure stopped in the woods on the other side of the path. It stood still in the shadows and light. Steam puffed out its back, out of skin both gray and dull.

  Theodotus and the woman looked up from where they had fallen. The creature turned to face them. Amani could see its head now, squat, flat and wide, barely rising above the highest peak of its rounded shoulders.

  The soldiers scrambled to their feet, but as they did, shadows moved uphill. Two more creatures emerged.

  Malachi's fingers dug into Amani's tunic. “Demons.”

  Malachi and Amani had dropped to their knees and clung to spindly trees that could not hope to hide them. The creatures looked like nothing out of any story she had ever heard. Their flesh was metal, but they stood erect like men, like fat, globular, metal men.

  This was science, not magic. Amani took a deep breath to steady her quaking nerves and pulled herself to her feet. She tried to call out, but the world around her felt off-kilter and dangerous, exposing her while concealing unknown dangers. She closed her eyes and forced herself to find the courage. “Philostratos!”

  Malachi pulled her down. “What are you doing?”

  Many of the soldiers shot a glance in Amani's direction, but for a moment, nothing else happened. Then Theodotus hissed an order, and the soldiers laid down their weapons in surrender.

  And everybody waited.

  Malachi breathed in successive staccato beats. The metal men did not move. The world was silent.

  A figure moved through the woods and stepped out ahead of Amani.

  “They've found us,” Malachi said.

  The figure was lean.

  “It's not one of the creatures,” Amani said.

  It moved into a break of sunlight, and Amani leaped to her feet, thinking she had found me. She had not.

  His Levantine skin was darkened and muscles hardened from work in the fields. His hair fell long, a strand of it dangling across his scruffy face; it was the most perfect face Amani had ever seen. Even behind the slight beard, the leanness pronounced his features, each a delight: the kind and soulful eyes; the full lips, with straight and strong lower and the bow’s kiss atop, tender and deep.

  Malachi rose beside her. “Andros.”

  Amani called to him across the hill of brown leaves and green underbrush. “Is Philostratos with you?” She glanced down at Theodotus and his men. The days of hiding were gone. “My name is Amani.”

  Papyrus 5.05

  Amani stood in the presence of metal men who breathed steam, and if Andros was to be believed (which he was), it was all armor with no soldier inside. She had found Theodotus. His men sat in the dirt with their hands on their heads. Theodotus and his guide, Sosanna, sat with them, their hands in their laps. Amani, Malachi, and Andros talked. All this wonder surrounded Amani, and by her side stood Malachi, who had traveled with her selflessly this last week. So why did she catch herself staring at Andros?

  His jawline cut sharp, perfect lines, but she had seen beautiful people before. The men and women Pharaoh paraded through the banquets never interested her. Beautiful meant boring. She had decided that long ago, and she repeated those words to herself now.

  Somehow, still, Andros distracted her. She saw the way his chest moved when he breathed. Veins crossed hands cut from stone, and his forearms, while not huge, were dark and smooth. She watched his muscles move beneath the flesh as he picked up a chunk of earth and tore it in two as if it were nothing in his hands; it was only a clump of clay, and a child could have done the same, but it didn’t matter because he just looked so powerful doing it, and what was wrong with her? Why was she like this?

  Malachi said something about returning to his village, and Amani felt she was swimming up into wakefulness. Andros told Theodotus to have the men build a camp.

  “What about Sosanna?” Malachi asked.

  “When Cato comes,” Andros said, “point him in her direction, but send us word.”

  “Will I see you, again?” Malachi asked.

  Andros shook his head. “We sail with the next full moon.”

  “I’m sorry for the way it ended.” Malachi and Andros gripped each other in a hug that, Amani suspected, would have broken her bones. Then he turned to her. “You’ve given me a chance to say goodbye. I will always owe you for that.”

  She almost asked if it was safe for him to leave her with Andros, but the question tasted like sacrilege. “I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Did he mention Philostratos?”

  Malachi hugged her. “You’re going to see him now. I wish I were going with you, but that part of the journey is not for me.”

  He called for Sosanna to travel with him. They left together as Amani stood next to Andros, having forgotten his beauty for the moment. She watched them walk away as the forest filled with the sounds of Theodotus and his men building camp.

  “The sentries will watch over you until we return,” Andros said.

  “The what?” Theodotus asked.

  “The metal men,” Amani said.

  “Oh,” Theodotus said and avoided looking at the creatures.

  “What about me?” Amani asked.

  Andros smiled at her, and, Beloved of Amun, what a smile. “You and I have farther to travel.”

  Malachi and Sosanna had left in one direction, Andros and Amani now walked off in another. Between them, the metal men stood watch over the camp.

  Leaves nestled beneath blue-green shadows as Amani and Andros followed the path to a stream. In recent days, the rains had been heavy on Troodos, and the runoff engorged the stream. They left the path and followed the water.

  The stream emptied into a valley where it had overrun its banks and created a shallow lake through which grass and saplings grew. Halfway across the lake, the waters flowed through a broken colonnade. A rippling current rushed into the ruined temple.

  The gods of the Ogdoad decorated the fallen columns, and hieroglyphs pronounced this to be the temple of Amun.

  “Is it here?” Amani asked. “Is this the annex?”

  The temple stretched back across the lake and came to a dry finish, far up the wooded hillside. In the distance, black smoke billowed above the trees, a reminder of Cyprus's volcanic origins.

  An inappropriate, perhaps impossible, mist roiled through tilted structures. This late in the day the temperature differences between the air and water should not have created such a mist. The surrounding woodlands, the fields, and the lake were clear. She'd seen the cliffs that overlooked the sea to the north, and they were all clear. Yet, among the ruins, the mist lingered.

  Not mist, she realized.

  Steam.

  Papyrus 5.06

  Back in Alexandria, Amani had researched all she could find on the temple and its ruin. Seven years earlier, the year Crassus proposed Egypt become a Roman province, an earthquake struck Cyprus, Antioch, and areas as far north as the Black Sea. If in that crisis, the Egyptian temple had received little help from the locals, she saw it was by design. Its stone skeleton rose out of the forest
as if planted there by the gods. There were no roads. It simply existed, the way mountains needed neither road nor help from man.

  Andros led Amani through the lake’s cold waters and into the crumbled ruins to a fissure in the earth. The water roared into its depths. He held Amani's arm to keep her from being swept over.

  He had touched her. His skin touched hers. Why was her heart beating so quickly?

  She peered into the chasm and saw the ornate stonework that supported the mouth of the fissure. Hieroglyphs decorated their faces. The temple continued underground. “The library, it's down there?”

  “So is Philostratos.”

  He led her away from the chasm, deeper into the temple. They walked up a set of stairs and out of the water. He led her around fallen walls and through ruined archways until another set of stairs set them back on dry ground. Mist trailed through tall grasses that rippled around their legs, and, again, Andros took hold of her arm. Another chasm opened in the earth, and it seemed to speak with the voice of roaring waters.

  “If you wish, I'll take you inside.”

  She found her voice gone and could only nod.

  Andros used a hook to pull up a series of safety lines out of the chasm. He taught her how to use the lines and harness and then dropped into the abyss. She lingered on the edge, her back to the earth’s open maw, and then let herself go. Several cubits down, he tripped a hidden lever and self-burning lamps whooshed to life, casting pockets of light to guide their way. With each revelation, conflicting feelings rushed through her, but she forced herself to focus on easing down the rock face, breathing silent promises that she would not die.

  Their feet touched down on a metal grid suspended above the troubled and swollen stream at the bottom. At one end of the tunnel, the waterfall roared and billowed through a single, fluttering ray of sunlight. The other end disappeared into darkness.

  Andros pulled more levers, snuffing out the lights on the cliff face and lighting what was more than a tunnel. It was a broad chamber, and the stream ran out through a grand archway on the far end. The chamber itself was unadorned, hewn rock, but the far wall and its archway replicated the designs of the temple above. Reliefs of the gods, Amun and Amunet, stood on either side of the archway. Beyond, there was only darkness.

  As they approached the archway, thumping and whooshing sounds, as regular as drum beats, rose above the sound of the waters. Andros lit the great room before them with lights built into copper lily pads, from which flames rose like budding flowers. A colonnade lined the path, which was now no longer the rigid grate but a series of bronze stepping stones just above the water's reach. The colonnade would have bordered the stream, but it had overrun its banks. Gossamer cloths hung from the ceiling and dangled from the columns.

  Beside the stream, a mechanical cat sat and stared, motionless, until a fish swam by. He scooped it up with a strike of its paw, gripped it in its mouth, and carried it to a chute in the wall. With the fish deposited, it pranced back, head held high, and reclaimed its spot, guarding the stream.

  Dragonflies, suspended from wires, buzzed in the distance. Their wings beat in blurs of gold and green. Amani looked up at Andros, but saw that he did not share her wonder. He was simply giving her time to see it all. The room brought a greater depth of sadness to his eyes, not joy.

  A metal man stood on a platform, seeming to watch their progress. His squat head resembled a fish. Andros led her in that direction, and she wanted to tell him she had seen enough of the metal men for the moment. They would make for a fascinating story when the sight of them no longer sent her heartbeat into a flurry. He led her across bronze stepping stones, past the metal man as he slowly turned, watching them go.

  In the far wall, he pulled another lever, and a hidden door, tall and wide, slid open. The drum-steady breathing that was the heartbeat of the outer room now grew to a deafening cacophony. Fire in the wall lamps flickered and grew. A magnificent machine stood before them, loud and hot and billowing steam. A mighty arm turned a giant wheel. The wheel translated the lateral motion of the arm into rotation.

  “The smoke it produces is terrible,” Andros said, “but underground chimneys carry it uphill.”

  “Is that what lights the lamps?” Amani asked, raising her voice to be heard over the tumult.

  He shook his head. “Gas.”

  “What does the wheel do?”

  Andros pointed back to the outer room. “It powers all the little wonders you see.”

  He turned off the lamps and closed the door against the pounding noise. The metal man continued its slow turn, and the archway at the end of the colonnade opened to a grid-work stairway.

  Water cascaded down the slopes on either side of the stairs, creating disorientating sounds and splashes of light. Amani's leg throbbed, but she fought the urge to limp.

  They stepped from between the waters onto another walkway. The water ran beneath them and out into a huge cavern, grander in scope than anything they had passed through. In the distance, the floor of the cavern fell away before opening into a seaside cave. The stream became indistinguishable from the waves that lapped over the floor's edge.

  Above them, seven boats hung from the ceiling with space for three more. Something metal and serpentine moved in those heights, several, all at once, as if they struck upon some unseen prey. In the stillness that followed, Amani half believed she had imagined it.

  Papyrus 5.07

  I swung out onto a water-driven hoist, which lowered me as if by the hand of some unseen god. Even at this distance, I saw Amani’s eyes widen. She covered her mouth, shut her eyes, and doubled over, shaking as if ill. Before my platform reached the floor, she ran to meet me.

  The ride down imprisoned me. I could not go to her. I could do nothing but hold the handle that controlled my descent, but, internally, I became two things at once: the actor whose only act was to feel and an emotionally removed spectator, as if observing the moment from outside my body. The actor wept. The spectator thought it incongruous. In this moment of extreme joy, I convulsed as if in grief.

  Amani had come. I could scarcely believe the evidence of my eyes. She had grown and matured. As for myself, I don’t know how she recognized me. Free of Egyptian lice, I had given up shaving. Through grief and focus on work, grooming concerns were minimal. The viewer part of me puzzled over the way we had become different people and yet knew each other, instantly. The actor only wept.

  The platform settled onto the rock walkway, and Amani tackled me with her hug. I tried to speak but only made wet choking noises. Amani clawed at my tunic.

  Andros arrived behind her. “It’s Theodotus. Sosanna was with him, but I sent her home. Malachi, too.”

  I made myself speak. “Malachi?” My focus returned to Amani. “Oh, right.”

  “You were gone so long,” Amani said.

  “It was never meant to be that way,” I said. “I promise.”

  Smiling, Andros excused himself.

  “So much has happened.” Amani pulled away from my embrace and wiped tears from her eyes. “Is it here? Show me.”

  “The library?”

  She nodded.

  “It can wait,” I said. “It's here, but not here. This particular cavern is too humid. The books would have been destroyed long ago.”

  “Berenice is Pharaoh,” she said. “Cleopatra is in Rome. And Dio.”

  “What of Dio?”

  “Dio is gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “So many, murdered,” she said.

  The actor fell silent, stunned and still, holding Amani but staring out at nothing. The viewer wondered at the way joy looked like grief and grief looked like nothing--a moment between thoughts, a sleepy respite before the morning’s work begins.

  “I’m sorry,” Amani whispered.

  We walked back through the tunnel to the waterfall and sat, enveloped by its protective roar. We stayed up into the night talking about the lives we had missed, and when we had grown tired and the conversatio
n was smoldering and ready to go out, she told me about Cleopatra and the hundred delegates.

  “When we go back to Alexandria,” I said, “we'll live in Dio's house; we'll work in the Library and be done with pharaohs and princesses, forever.”

  She went quiet.

  “I'm sorry,” I said.

  “Life is full of crocodiles,” she said.

  “That's why we're here for each other.”

  “You've been gone a long time,” she said.

  “Have things changed between us?”

  She smiled. “We'll see.”

  “You're not a child anymore.”

  “I don't know what I am.”

  “I think that is the definition of early adulthood,” I said.

  “I don't think so,” she said. “I think most people very much know who they are. From the moment they're born, there is no doubt. With few exceptions, their lives follow a predictable path, either one set down by their ancestors or one bought by their parents. I find myself something else.”

  “You're on a journey I can't tutor you through,” I said. “As much as I'm able, though, I'm here.”

  She lay her head against my shoulder. The spray of the fall chilled us, but we stayed as long as we could bear.

  Ptolemy was coming, and, soon, Cato would come looking. Men would arrive in Bethzayith, and Malachi would send them to Sosanna.

  Andros had known a farmer who understood the northern forests. The farmer’s husband and sons were dead, and she tended her animals alone. Her hard life had aged her but blessed her with strength.

  “Sosanna was the one who led you to the temple,” Amani said.

  “She knows the land and how to survive it. She knows its stories, too. Aphrodite emerged from the sea at Cyprus. It was here that she and Adonis first saw each other and fell in love.”

  Amani glanced back down the tunnel. I didn't know then she was thinking of Andros.

  “Malachi will send Cato to Sosanna?”