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Berenice found herself nodding at the complaints. They didn’t surprise her; the woman’s boldness did. Usually it was the father or the husband, even the local priest, who voiced such accusations. “We avoid the messier scenes that way,” her father had explained once, as he detailed what payments were warranted in such cases as these. A premium should be added if the woman was of Greek ancestry, he’d told her, or the crime was committed in Alexandria, or permanent damage had been inflicted. The hapless woman before her scored poorly on all accounts. “As often as not, they’re making it up, or at the very least exaggerating,” her father had said, chuckling. “I suppose even lowly whores must make their way in the world.” Where had they been that day? Berenice must have been young, seven or perhaps eight. An only child and only heir, she’d been counseled in matters of rule. It had made her feel so important when her father had spoken to her as he might have to a woman grown. Before Cleopatra had usurped his love.

“Could you recognize these men? The ones who did this to you?” Berenice asked.

A hush fell as tension snared the guards who lined the eastern wall. They shifted in their sandals, these sometimes soldiers—the very ones she’d come to charm and whip into enthusiasm for her Cyprus campaign. Greek, Galatian, Syrian, their lineages mixed and muddied, mercenaries to a one who traded army stints for Egyptian grain and land. Could she trust them to fight Roman legions? She studied their bare faces. Not one man dared meet her eye. Good: they feared her, at least. They’d fight all the more fiercely when she called them to battle for Cyprus. The petitioner stood silent; across the gymnasium echoed only her babe’s wails. The woman bounced the child to soothe it.

“Yes, I’d recognize them, my queen, daughter of the Sun.” The woman spoke slowly, addressing Berenice by the Egyptian appellation. “I can point them out right now. All three stand there.” She pried her wrist from her elder child’s grasp and pointed to the line of soldiers. The impudence of the gesture sent the men into chaos. Mumbles erupted into yells. Above the other shouts one voice rang clear: “It was an honor for her. Her husband’s got nothing that compares with this.”

A few of his fellows broke into laughter. Berenice heard Pieton clear his throat, urging her toward caution, as he always did. That was a fair course for eunuchs, but not for queens. Thais, on her right, was no better: a taut and nervous grin spread quickly across his sunken cheeks. Though his fortunes had changed since Pieton had first summoned him before her, his manner remained stubbornly fixed. He flitted about as fearful as ever, as though the slightest sound might send him reeling back into disgrace. She wished Dio had come instead. She recalled the penetrating look in his eyes when she’d last seen him, as he’d lifted her hand to his lips—how her blood had bolted to her cheeks. She shook her head at the thought. It was better that he remain at a distance, that she surround herself with safe men like Thais, who trembled when she sneezed.

“You think you’re amusing, don’t you?” Her voice was calm and cold as she addressed the blustering offender. She’d come, after all, to make an impression and show her strength, not to serve up dull justice in her father’s absence. “Arrest that man.”

The soldiers quieted, but none moved to take up against their friend.

“Has farming my lands turned you all deaf to orders? I told you to arrest him.”

An older guard shuffled forward to do her bidding. He didn’t look like much of a match for his young comrade: his wispy hair had already begun to gray. Yet the loudmouth wilted at the soldier’s touch. Marched before the queen by one of his own, he dropped his swagger. He was young—Berenice saw that now: scarcely old enough to grow a beard, and not for lack of trying. A few pathetic tufts puffed proudly from his chin.

“Was this one of the men?”

“Yes, my queen.” The woman answered with a steady voice. She was braver than she looked.

“Can you pick out the other two?”

The petitioner pointed to a second beardless boy. He shook even more violently than his companion. His eyes welled, and Berenice feared that he might weep. These two were scarcely more than children. Perhaps her father was right: this woman had concocted a tale for a quick coin. Her husband could have just as easily given her those bruises.

“And the third?”

The woman clutched her babe closer to her breast. Her head jerked—a nod—but she made no move to point out the final soldier. Her elder child quaked, his fingers picking at the bandage on his cheek. Perhaps some injury had been inflicted on him too. Maybe he’d tried to shield his mother from the blows. Berenice’s stomach churned at the thought, as did the bile that rose within it. Finally, the woman’s finger rose and picked out the last guard, a stocky man well into his middle years. He chortled through crooked teeth, first at his victim and then at his queen.

“D’you think this’ll make a difference?” he taunted his prey, this smug stain of a man who’d never been denied anything. “The queen’ll pay you for your troubles. That won’t help you sleep at night. I know where you fetch your water, and when your husband works the fields, and how your little boy shrieks when his mother sucks a fine Macedonian cock.”

His strutting sickened her.

“Quiet,” she told him. “I’m not some bureaucrat from Alexandria here to measure your crops. I am the Shining One, Queen of the Upper and the Lower Kingdoms, daughter of the Sun, Lady of Diadems, and you’ll address me as such. Tell me: what is your name?”

“Agapios, my queen, the Shining One, Lady of Diadems.” Smirking, he bent into a deep bow, so low that the crown of his head dipped past his buckled knees. “Your father never took such an interest in his men’s business in the south. Perhaps you like what you see.” He gestured to his body.

“I don’t know if you’re drunk or stupid or both. Honestly, I don’t much care.” Berenice turned back to Pieton and Thais. “Fifty lashes for each of the boys. And as for this creature, sever his right hand and relieve him of all duties and privileges of a soldier.”

The soldiers quieted, their fear curdling. Even the petitioners who crowded the balconies and walkways stared in silent awe. The world grew still, as though she gripped Medusa’s head and had turned her onlookers into stone. Their terror buoyed Berenice. They should be frightened.

“My queen,” Pieton broke in. “May I have a word?”

At her nod, the eunuch approached to whisper in her ear. “Your actions may be noble but they aren’t wise. These men expect certain rewards for their loyal service. And not merely the right to till some land in peacetime. They serve with the understanding that they might take what they please. Under your father, compensation to the woman was the standard and mutually amenable practice.”

Slowly, Berenice shook her head—his words cloyed at her. She didn’t need pleas to become more like her father. There were reasons that eunuchs could never rule. These soldiers had never respected the Piper—no one had. The answer, surely, wasn’t to cast herself in his image.

“Do you think Agapios would serve me loyally on the battlefield?” she asked quietly. “That he wouldn’t turn to Rome at a moment’s notice? He’d treat me as he treated her if given half a chance. He insulted me before my own guards. I can’t imagine he’d be more likely to esteem me as his commander.” There were men, she knew, too many men who would bear her little respect, queen or no. Who would always see her as an interloper, a blushing flower, a naïf. But her father was the weak one, not she.

“He’s a noxious creature,” answered Pieton, “unworthy of the army, and you’re right to punish him for his impudence—execute him, even. But don’t punish him for this nonsense, or soon we’ll have no soldiers at all.”

She didn’t believe that. She refused.

“And what of her?” Berenice looked to the woman, whose hands shook beneath the weight of her babe. Her older boy tried to comfort her, wiping away her tears with the grubby hem of his tunic. He was naked underneath, but that didn’t seem to bother him. That made sense, she supposed. She recalled that Egyptian children of that age rarely wore clothes at all. His mother had probably only forced him into an outfit for this occasion.

Pieton laughed, a hacking sound at the back of his throat. “You think she cares what happens to these men? She cares only for some coin, and even if there is some grain of truth in her story—and trust me, it’s never more than a grain—she no doubt saw any molestation by the royal army as a stroke of luck. It’s well and good to take note of the common folk’s concerns, but don’t make too much of them.”

Berenice looked at the woman and her wounded child. The boy touched his bandage with tender fingers, as if to unstick the cloth from the oozing wound. His mother’s hand batted his away. The silence had broken like a fever. The petitioners gossiped amongst themselves, servants jostled through the crowd, Thais crouched his bony shoulders over a fresh scroll. Only the soldiers remained quiet, eyeing the three plucked from their midst.

“I hear your point, Pieton, and I’ll consider it carefully.”

“You are wise, my queen,” he murmured as he retreated with a slight bow. He held himself with grace and pride. Berenice was prepared to crush all that.

“My trusted adviser,” she announced, “brings several important details to my attention. In addition to the punishments I’ve handed down against these criminals, the court of justice in Alexandria will provide a sum of fifty drachmas to the petitioner to compensate for her pains.”

Poor Pieton. Poor, foolish Pieton. She almost pitied him as she caught sight of his deflated form in the corner of her eye. The eunuch thought she’d come only to soothe the starving throngs and to rally troops to fight her battles. But she wouldn’t let her strings be pulled by men and eunuchs. She was a queen in her own right, like Hatshepsut of old. And she would prove it. As a child, she’d visited that woman’s mortuary temple, its half a hundred columns glistening in crimson and ocher beneath the cliffs. “But where is the queen?” Berenice had whined to her father after she’d gazed at a half dozen reliefs of crowned men. “That’s her,” the Piper had rejoined, laughing. “Right there. And there. And there.” He had pointed at each of the men carved into the wall. That had been her first taste of what it meant to rule: there were no queens in Egypt—only women who became kings.

Before her, here and now, one of the boys collapsed in tears; his friend stared dumb and silent at his fate. But the older man betrayed no nerves at all. “You’ll lose your hand, you fool,” Berenice cursed under her breath. He even smiled as her gaze lingered on him, as though this case was of no particular relevance to him, as though some other man had been condemned to a life of begging, unable to claw his way in the world.

His mockery whipped her irritation into fury. She’d been dismissed for too long, by too many men, by her father and all the idiots who followed him.

“Agapios, I see that you’ve ignored my warning. I said you were to be stripped of all rights and privileges of a soldier, and yet you stand there in your clothes. Royal coin paid for that tunic. You have no right to wear it.”

“You want me to take off my tunic?” the man scoffed, pacing back and forth before his fellows, rallying passions to his cause.

“Yes,” she snapped. “Now. Before I have my men do it for you.”

The soldier gaped, speechless at last. Beside her, she heard Pieton inhale sharply. “If you want to retake Cyprus,” he’d tell her, “you’d best show her men a touch more indulgence.” She shrugged off his objections. If these men didn’t trust her to be harsher than her father, then she’d show them what it meant to have a woman king. And if the eunuch didn’t see her purpose, that was his folly.

“Guards!” she commanded. “Strip this man’s tunic, unless the rest of you wish to throw your lot in with his.”

Agapios didn’t give them the chance. He gripped the collar of his shirt and tore it to expose his chest. The fabric strained and groaned as it split away.

“That too.” Berenice pointed to the filthy loincloth belted about his waist. This time, one of the younger men stepped forward to loose the girdle, perhaps enjoying watching his superior get his due. As the linen fell away, Agapios shivered, and his cock shrank beneath his prodigious belly. A few of her guards sniggered.
Good. Let him know some humiliation.
The gods knew she’d been laughed at in her time. She still remembered the mockery she’d endured when her mother had been cast out of the palace. A girl of eight, she’d stood on the marble steps and watched, her stomach writhing with hatred. At that moment, she couldn’t tell whom she loathed more: her father for elevating his concubine to wife, or her mother for letting him. In every day that followed, she’d felt the sharp sting of derision. Even the slaves snickered in her wake.
There walks the girl who thought she would be king.

“Take him away. He ought to spend a few hours alone with his hand before he loses it at dawn. If he can find that fine Macedonian cock of his, he might even discover a use for it.”

The man didn’t struggle as he was dragged, naked, from the gymnasium. He went quietly now. The silence was maddening. They should cheer. Berenice looked back to the woman she had rescued. The creature looked as beaten as before, though her babe had stopped its howling. Peasants were never pleased.

“I’ll see no more petitioners,” she said. “Our time in Thebes is short, and we have other matters to address.”

Such announcements were usually met with a certain degree of grumbling; no doubt those gathered had waited long months, even years, to bring their cases before their monarch. The Piper hadn’t proved the most present of kings. Once, when she’d been a child attending her father on a rare journey to the Upper Lands, a doleful wretch had thrown himself before their litter, begging for his time before the king. “Please,” he’d whispered. “I’ve waited so long.” Without a second glance, her father had spat and ordered on the carrier. Berenice wondered what had become of that petitioner, whether he still waited somewhere to make his plea or if he’d grown old and died, unanswered. She wanted to push her father’s foibles from her mind, but the harder she tried, the more they consumed her. It was as though that emptiness inside her, drained of her driving hatred, demanded to be sated by other thoughts of him, by this obsession of picking apart each failed aspect of his rule. As though he were someone else’s father, someone else’s enemy.