Steampunk Cleopatra

by Thaddeus Thomas

  “Cleopatra.”

  “All of us. If you go, maybe you'll survive.”

  “I don't want to go,” Iras said, “and Cleopatra wishes you'd come back.”

  “How is she?”

  “Sleepless,” Iras said. “She's worried Theodotus knows about Pelusium.”

  “What about Pelusium?”

  “I thought you'd know.” Iras ran her fingers along the cloth that cushioned them. “Visit her.”

  Amani promised she would.

  Amani requested an audience through proper channels, an unnecessary formality, but one she chose. It felt safe, emotionally distant, and it reminded her how unique her life had been, how unfettered her access. As part of that standard routine, she had to state the purpose for the audience. She gave them one word: Pelusium.

  As Alexandria sat on the western end of the Nile delta, so Pelusium sat on the east. It was a city with a harbor and fortress and was surrounded by marshland that slowed armies and made fighting difficult. Gabinius had reclaimed Alexandria for Ptolemy by first taking Pelusium.

  Amani expected to be given a few minutes in the middle of a busy day. Instead, the audience was granted for late in the evening, after the day’s work was done and Cleopatra had hosted the regents to dinner.

  Amani returned to her room in the city and set out clothes and perfume and a necklace, all purchased that day. The tunic was delicate and, maybe, inappropriate. She wanted my help but wouldn't ask for it. She feared I would not understand her nervousness nor what drove her choices.

  Cleopatra met her at the revolving bridge. They walked hand in hand between the red granite columns, but instead of continuing to the palace, Cleopatra turned them aside to the temple of Isis, the place of their childhood confidences. They sat together at the feet of Isis.

  Amani prepared herself to ask about Pelusium. She could almost believe that was why she had come, but all of it faded away when Cleopatra spoke.

  “Why have you stayed away?”

  “I have become a burden and a danger,” Amani said. “I cannot risk your safety and rule.”

  “You've been neither. You are my greatest champion.”

  Amani's answer was a kiss. It lingered. It ended. “This is why I've stayed away.”

  “We should talk.” Cleopatra glanced at the severity of the temple. “But not here.”

  They walked together through the gardens, still hand in hand, their grip tighter now.

  “There are reasons we held back,” Cleopatra said.

  “I know.”

  “But not for the reasons you think. Your love would not endanger me with my brother or the people.”

  “What then?”

  “All we can ever have is love.”

  “What else is there?”

  “We should talk, but if we talk, it will ruin tonight.”

  “Then don't talk.”

  The glow of the palace lay ahead, with stone lions at its steps.

  “I want to make love to you,” Cleopatra whispered.

  Amani pulled Cleopatra’s hand to her breast and kissed her, cutting off her final resistance.

  Papyrus 6.15

  Amani awoke in the night. The room was blue, and the ceiling shimmered. The gentle lap of the water soothed her. She turned to go back to sleep and looked into the eyes of Cleopatra.

  Cleopatra moved in for a kiss, stopped herself, and placed a single finger against Amani's lips. “You asked me what else there is besides love. It's all the things politics will require I give a man.”

  “I'm not threatened by your brother.”

  “Either his role in Alexandrian history or mine will soon come to an end. I thought it might be different, but I was wrong.”

  “You're concerned.”

  “I am.”

  “About Pelusium.”

  Cleopatra's eyes drew sharp.

  “Tell me why,” Amani said.

  “When I do, you won't want to stay.” Her eyes softened into sadness. “Yet, that is all the more reason to speak. If you hate me, I will have earned your hate honestly, and that is better than to be loved through deceit.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Almost a year ago, you came to me with an idea,” Cleopatra said. “We were in Thebes at the ceremony of the Buchis bull. When we returned to our rooms, you laid out the plan, and you've worked it ever since. You asked only one thing of me. I was to stop the shipments from Cyprus and convince the regents it was an act of Rome. One thing, and I couldn't do it.”

  “You did. The shipments haven't come since.”

  “They haven't come to Alexandria. We thought we were being clever, but we should have trusted you.”

  Amani rose to her feet. “Trust?”

  “I'm sorry. We failed you.”

  “Who's we? Philostratos? Neither of you could trust me?”

  “You'd been gone so long. We told ourselves we were being prudent, and while we deprived my brother of the fuel, we'd stockpile it for ourselves.”

  “In Pelusium?”

  “And now the regents know, which means I've deprived them of nothing.”

  Amani thought of the year's work, weapons created in the factories and stored at the Serapeum and in Thebes. Though formidable against men, her designs could not compete against a fleet of fully fueled steam engines.

  In a moment, everything was lost.

  Cleopatra had not moved. She lay as she had when Amani awoke, only now the restraint that once hid her emotions were gone. In her face, Amani saw her heart, and that turmoil gripped her own heart as well.

  “Don't go,” Cleopatra said.

  “My work has meant nothing.”

  Cleopatra held out her hand, as if, at a distance, she might restrain her. “I chose poorly, and that choice may yet destroy me.”

  Amani backed to the door.

  Cleopatra crawled toward her. “If you wish to save yourself from my fate, I will not stop you.”

  Amani lingered. Cleopatra stood, their bodies a breath apart.

  “My one,” Cleopatra said as if quoting an ancient song, “my peerless sister. My heart flutters, like a bird who chases unseen flies and darts at crocodile teeth. In truth, a fool, the fool my own reflection knows. Life and death move, hidden within your waters. I part my lips to drink, and there my sister feeds.”

  Amani laid her head upon Cleopatra’s shoulder. “My one, my peerless sister.”

  Papyrus 6.16

  As spring passed into summer, and the flood season came with no rising of the waters, Amani made morning treks to the lakeside dock. When I saw what she was doing, I asked if I might join her. She gave me a long look, and I thought she would refuse me. I knew Cleopatra had told her what I had done.

  “Come,” she said. “I'm not doing anything but waiting for the inevitable.”

  We stared out across the lake's vast body and then back again at the exposed shore. The Nile, during the floods, would fill the lake through its connecting canals and ditches. The other two-thirds of the year, the waters pulled back, as they were now.

  I offered an apology. She didn't respond. I tried again.

  Amani stared at the dry rocks and took hold of my hand. That small gesture filled me with a guilty comfort. For an instant, all that mattered was that Amani held my hand as she had done as a child.

  “The floods are so late, I've had the strangest thoughts,” Amani said. “Sometimes, I wonder if the gods really are against us.”

  I could not rebuke her, and it was not simply for fear of breaking the spell the moment had upon us. Superstitious or not, the same thought had come to me, unbidden, unwelcome, but there.

  “The whole country watches their hopes fade for next year's crops,” I said, “and Cleopatra will take the blame.”

  “She's ready for the worst,” Amani said. “All we can do now is push through and hope that something beyond logic guides us to a different end. I don't know if I'm as prepared. You chose this path, not me, but I've chosen to walk it with both of you. I
just don't see why it had to be made any harder.”

  Amani had spent the remainder of harvest season preparing for Wepet Renpet, the celebration of the first flood and, with it, the new year. The timing of that flood could be measured by the heavens, and it rarely varied. Now, it seemed reluctant to come at all.

  “When you invoke the gods,” I ask, “are you being literal?”

  “When my people developed their science,” she said, “they connected it to the Ogdoad, the primal forces of creation. Even if their personification is only myth, the forces are real. They are the foundational structures for the workings of the world and how we, in turn, can understand those workings.”

  “Your ancestors' understanding was transcendent, even just within the books we could save.”

  “And I've helped reduce it to warfare. Maybe I am to blame, and maybe the gods should be against us.”

  “We are a superstitious lot if we take the blame for what we cannot control.”

  “If there are gods,” she said, “they have the advantage of scope. Every possibility is open to them. Whatever choices we make are made within our limitations, but that does not mean we blame ourselves in error. If moments like these force us to face our guilt and strip away the excuses we've hidden behind, that is not superstition. It is the honesty we only find in crisis.”

  I would have taken what happened next as proof, had I been a superstitious man. Where the water had lapped at the shore, it lapped a little farther, leaving once-dry pebbles glistening with the remembrance of its kiss.

  It could have been the wind or the movements of some beast beneath the surface, but within the hour we knew otherwise. The first flood had begun.

  Papyrus 6.17

  Beneath blue skies and a renewed garden, workers swarmed both the Serapeum and the factories. Everywhere Amani turned, people struggled into costumes. Machines cycled through test runs. Supervisors came to her with their reports and returned to their groups with her orders. It was the most beautiful chaos she had ever seen.

  When Cleopatra's litter and entourage arrived, Amani ran to present herself at the Serapeum's grand staircase. Soldiers circled the litter and lined the promenade. People gathered with cries of joy, bathing Cleopatra with adoration as she crossed the promenade.

  With the arrival of the floods, Cleopatra's popularity had redoubled, and Amani wished she could find victory in the emotion of the moment. The late floods meant another year of poor harvest. Cleopatra's popularity would wane as bellies grumbled, and then young Ptolemy and his advisors would strike.

  At the top of the stairs Cleopatra waved to the crowd, and then, together, they entered the privacy of the temple. In the shade of the agora, they kissed.

  “The moment has come,” Cleopatra said. “After today, I expect you back in my bed. I've missed our time together. You were always the one constant in my life.”

  Amani led her past the statue of Serapis and down the stairs into the library annex. “I need something from you. I’m asking you to trust me.”

  “Anything within my power.”

  “The true constant is the way the world works. Everything else we do will change. The great secrets of today will mean nothing tomorrow, but a true knowledge of how something works, that is forever. If it is lost, it will be found again. Everything else is a vapor.”

  In the top level of the Library, arched windows let in light and air, and Amani looked back over the city to the palace district.

  “Even us?” Cleopatra asked.

  “Even Egypt. Even Rome. When we are to history what the pyramids are to us, it won't matter to them how late the floods were this year. How the flood comes and how the ground is made rich for planting will always matter. That is eternal.”

  Amani went to a section set aside for her writings. Backing up important works held in the main library was the primary job of the Serapeum. “The Zeus-Amun of that day will be knowledge, and our importance will be measured in how we added to that knowledge.”

  “Then you and I should be measured well.”

  Amani held Cleopatra as a child clings to a parent, as a parent clings to a child. “My people's role must not be forgotten.”

  Cleopatra enclosed her arms about her. “Never again.”

  “I will either die by your side or see you secure upon the throne,” Amani said.

  Cleopatra kissed her. Amani intertwined their fingers.

  “If we die,” Amani continued, “I must know my people's knowledge is secure, that it may never be lost, again.”

  “How?” Cleopatra asked. “Where?”

  “After the parade, after our weapons of war are hidden within the city, I wish to travel to Kush. With the river flooded, and you temporarily secure in the glory of that flood and this celebration, it is the only opportunity I'll have.”

  “You’ll take the copies out of Egypt?” Cleopatra asked.

  “And make sure the knowledge stays where it belongs.”

  They held one another in silence until Cleopatra ended the moment with a kiss.

  “I’ll trust you, but tonight, you come to my bed.”

  Papyrus 6.18

  Cerberus crept out into the open street. Each of its three heads peered into the crowds, searching. One lifted its muzzle and howled, a fierce, piercing sound. It turned our way, sniffing, searching. Then it stopped. One of the heads snapped at the crowds. Someone screamed.

  A woman dressed like Cleopatra sprung into the street, a royal staff in her outstretched hand. Cerberus snapped at her, and she held it back. It snapped again, and she lunged forward, striking its center head with a wide swing of the staff.

  Cerberus jerked back, wobbled, and then crumbled to the ground.

  The crowd cheered as the false Cleopatra ran forward, waving. She disappeared into the crowd, and Cerberus rose to its feet, ready to play the charade all over again.

  Cerberus looked as if it were a series of men beneath a textured cloth, with three in the front, playing the heads. No one in the audience could have known the costume concealed not only men but Amani's machines.

  Amani moved, and I followed her through the crowds as they roared and cheered at the pageantry of men on stilts and dancing girls. Dyed-blue, woven cloths connected the men, and as they moved among the dancers, the cloth became the surface of the water as seen from below, opaque only at the ripples. The dancers wore identical Isis costumes, and they searched the street below the waves, finding, one by one, pieces of a body, scattered along the imaginary Nile. These fourteen dancers each took a piece and danced in tightening circles until at last, they rebuilt the body of Osiris.

  All the pieces were found and reassembled, except for one. Isis never found her husband’s penis. It was eaten by an Oxhyrinchus fish and lost forever. No longer whole, Osiris descended into the underworld to rule Duat and judge the dead.

  Osiris was famous for being the first mummy, but I saw him, too, as the first eunuch. In him, I saw a little of me within the pantheon. When the Ptolemies adopted Serapis as a replacement for Osiris, that was lost.

  The dancers finished reassembling the puzzle-man, and the crowd gasped as Osiris walked forward, all on his own. He didn't get far before the men on stilts snatched him up, piece by piece, and scattered him again, beginning the drama anew.

  With each performance, they would leave a phallus on the street behind them to be snatched up by some brave soul to the cheers and laughter of the crowd.

  “On the surface,” Amani said, “the dance appears much less political than the battle between Cleopatra and Cerberus, a metaphor that only works against the current power structure. With the Osiris story, it is the adherence to the mythology that makes it political.”

  As the pharaohs of old were associated with Osiris, so the queens have identified with Isis, a connection Cleopatra had worked hard to magnify in the eyes of her people. The dances reenacted the murder of Osiris and Isis's journey to find his fourteen missing pieces and knit him back together.

  What made thi
s political was that the first Ptolemy had adopted the Serapis variant of Osiris, a sun god for whom there was no murder, no scattering of the pieces in the Nile. The dance symbolized the work of Cleopatra to bring back the floods and the role of Osiris, whose restoration brought with it the fertile grounds. It had only the weakest of connections to her brother. He shared in none of the moment’s glory.

  I felt something brush against my shoulder and turned to look. It was Andros. He held my gaze as he walked on, and I saw an apology in his eyes, regret for what was to come.

  A break in the parade signified a change while music assured the crowds the spectacle had not ended. Musicians staged throughout the route played in rhythm, as if invisible bands marched out of the west and passed into the east, only to be followed by another band playing another tune. The effect mesmerized me, and if, beneath those waves of beauty, I heard the stutter-puff of steam engines, the sound never reached my consciousness.

  Dancers came carrying poles, animating the limbs of giant spider legs, designed to mimic Moira's. Intermixed among the marionettes walked the true marvels, metallic spider legs that moved on their own. They were slower and more delicate than Moira's, lacking the strength of the steam engine that drove hers, but mathematical engines operated them. Like the joined Osiris, they required no human interference.

  The crowds screamed in excitement, overcome with what they were seeing, almost all of them understanding the reference to the mythical woman locked away in the palace's second floor. We listened to their astonishment and waited for the big moment. When the first spiders reached the end of the parade route, the last of them would be leaving the Egyptian quarter. At that moment, all at once, the mechanical spiders would leave the parade route. They would scurry down streets, crawl up buildings, and hide.

  The chugging of steam engines drew closer. We heard it now, and Amani looked to me, not in terror, but disappointment.

  Huge, man-driven machines lumbered out of their hiding places and into the Canopic Way. The crowds cheered while dancers froze, stumbled, and fled. The mechanical spiders identified the threat and tried to flee. Cranes plucked a few into the air. Mobile water cannons blew others onto their backs where they writhed helplessly. Others crushed Amani's creations beneath metal feet and wheels. A revolving retinue of steam-powered machines dragged the metal carcasses to the harbor.