0316382981 (12 page)

Here, now, the crowd had thinned, already dispersing through the western arches. The show had ended, and there was nothing more to see. Only a few lingered—old women, mostly—grousing to each other, and soon they, too, vanished. Berenice turned her attention to the soldiers who remained.

“You are angry,” she told them, looking each man up and down, goading one to challenge her. “There’s no use in denying it. The fury is written clearly on your faces. That’s no concern of mine; rage is the better part of life. Perhaps you hate me. So be it. I don’t need your love. But perhaps you think me weak and womanly. Perhaps you think it is because I have no cock that I took pity on that woman. Perhaps you think I wish to take away your spoils, the spoils for which you’ve fought so hard. To that I say, you are the ones who are coddled. You have grown weak tending your crops and hoarding your riches. I am not my father, and what loose laws he set upon you will not stand under my rule. When we conquer Cyprus, you may take what you like. There you will find your spoils. But don’t confuse the women of Thebes with our enemies. When you’ve won battles, you’ll reap the rewards. The easy work of tilling fields and counting coins merits no such prizes.”

Her voice echoed through the hall. She drank in her rebounding words, the only sounds that pierced the air. She dared these soldiers to defy her, as she stared down each man in turn. But shorn of Agapios, the clerics grew subdued. Not one would look her in the eye, let alone speak out against her. They had a good lot, these men, with their farmlands and their slaves. The rules had changed—and they would heed them. They had no other choice.

The moment bloomed and passed. No one would challenge her now; their silence had lingered on too long. And so she nodded to her advisers, and quit the gymnasium.

Outside, the hot Theban sun scorched her face. The street before her swarmed with life. All those prostrated forms had risen, belongings and babies strapped to their backs. If her guard hadn’t cleared the way before her, she could have scarcely squeezed through the teeming masses. They spilled off the sandstone pavement and clambered onto the sphinxes that lined the way. The statues saddened her, their golden faces flecked to reveal the ordinary stone underneath. Several figures had even lost their noses. And though she’d heard that their eyes had once been inlaid with lapis lazuli, they all now glared at her with blank sockets of granite. She shielded her own eyes with her hand and headed toward her litter. Suddenly, she hated this place. Its waning struck too close to her heart. The sooner she returned to the barge, to Alexandria, the better. She clambered into the carrier, and, with a jolt, her bearers lifted its poles.

“My queen.” A shrill voice cut through the curtain.

Pieton. With an agile leap, he jumped into the litter. She didn’t bother to tell him she wished to be alone; she was sure he wouldn’t listen. The vehicle lurched forward.

“You can’t appease these men with a few bold words,” Pieton told her. “The punishments you’ve given out are too harsh for that.”

“What’s done is done.” She hated his small-mindedness. Why couldn’t he let the past lie in peace? She couldn’t stand sitting still and dwelling on it all. It made the emptiness excruciating. She’d been forced to act, and so she had. She’d shown these men that she was strong and unflappable, worthy of a fight.

“You are strong,” Pieton went on, to spite her, maybe. “And you rule well, but here you’ve stumbled. Your men serve as much from a desire for plunder as from loyalty.”

“I’m not a fool,” she snapped. “I know why my men serve. Just as I know that they must respect me if I expect them to fight for me, to wrench Cyprus from Rome’s grasp.”

The eunuch frowned. “They may not need to go as far as Cyprus to face the eagle standard. Your father has begun to curry favor in Rome.”

Berenice stared, speechless, for a moment. The echo of fear thudded in her chest, but she ignored it.

“What?” She pursed her lips. And waited for the ax to swing.

“The Piper is poised to return. Your Dio sent a letter.”

The name seared her ears. She missed him, her fat Alexandrian friend, but she’d hoped she hadn’t been so obvious with her favors.

“
My
Dio?” she scoffed, as though she found the appellation absurd.

“I merely mean that you lean heavily on his counsel.”

“Never mind,” she muttered. Pieton’s mockery, too, was a sign of pettiness—and defending Dio would only stoke the eunuch’s jealousy. “What does he write? What news of that piping idiot who calls himself king?”

“Your father has reached Rome, where he’s had an audience with Pompey, whom they call the Great.”

“I see.” She nodded slowly at the news, at the twist of her fate. Pompey could provide her father with legions that she might never match. The eunuch had been right: she’d been foolish and childish in her attempts to teach her soldiers a lesson. They would flock now to her father when he returned at the head of Rome’s army.

Ahead, Berenice could see the sandstone temples of Karnak surging from the desert sands. She’d long admired those grand monuments to the ancient gods Mut and Ammon-Re and Mantu, the ones who ruled the earth before memory began. They’d stood for ages before her forebearers had set foot on this land—and they’d stand for ages to come. They cared little about who ruled: Berenice, her father, Rome.

There was no time to linger here, either with her thoughts or in some vain effort to repair the wreckage she left in her wake. If her father sailed across the sea, she needed to be at the shores to meet him, with any army she could muster.

“And so we must return to Alexandria at once.”

“Precisely, which is why I urge you to mend your bridges. It would not—”

“If I shift course, I’ll be called weak. I needn’t teach you that,” she told Pieton squarely. Whatever damage she might have caused, it would be worse to show herself changeable. “Don’t speak to me of this again. It’s done.”

“As you say. But in the future, my queen, if you take rash actions, let them be ones that might win friends. They tend to be more valuable than enemies. And you already have plenty of the latter.”

The eunuch was right, though she hated to admit it. Her rashness only painted her nearer her father’s image. But forward, onward, no regret. For now, she would need friends, until she’d won her soldiers’ hearts.

As the litter passed along the river, the lanes grew full of ugly sorrows: bloated children and twisted lepers and bedraggled cats, mewing at each passerby. No one paid them any mind, save a half-grown beggar boy who kicked a scrawny tabby aside when it rubbed against his calf.

“You know a city suffers when the cats starve,” Berenice said. Even in Alexandria, much of the native populace worshipped the beasts—and many Greeks had taken up the practice too. Years ago, she’d watched a mob tear a Roman limb from limb for killing a cat. And in the heart of the Upper Kingdom, these creatures were held even dearer.

“Cats starve as people do,” Pieton remarked. “There are no scraps to put out for strays. The town is even stripped of rats.”

It was true. Even as they passed the heaps of refuse along the river, not one rodent stirred among the rot. Still, Berenice dreamed of Cyprus—even as she distributed grain, even as her own kingdom withered before her very eyes. She, too, was guilty of distraction, of her eyes widening beyond her powers. Was that the curse of being a Ptolemy?

“The street children eat the rats now,” the eunuch went on. “And they aren’t the only ones.”

A filthy hand plunged through the curtains. “Please,” bleated its filthy child, running alongside.

“Get away, you brat,” one of the litter bearers hissed.

“Please,” the boy repeated. “Please. I beg of you.”

“Get him away,” Berenice mouthed to Pieton. He sickened her, this reminder of collapse and degradation, of the kingdom’s wilting. Besides, she’d refilled the granaries of her favored priests; it was up to them to dole out the wheat. Already, though, it was too late. A crowd had begun to gather along the street. She’d win no favors cursing at a child.

“Stop!” she commanded. The litter jolted to a halt. After bracing herself with breath—she didn’t want to inhale the stink outside; it might pollute her further—she pushed aside the silk. Up close, the boy made an even more malignant sight. Sores oozed around his lips; it must have pained him even to speak. Berenice realized that her petitioners had been culled: only ones untouched by this plague had been allowed to enter. Even her vision of deprivation was skewed, directed by her advisers.

“Please, my—my queen,” the boy stammered. He seemed to know no other Greek, for after that he babbled in his native tongue, one she’d no hope of understanding.

Berenice snatched a loaf of bread and a twist of grapes, the only food she had within. The boy grabbed them and bowed his head as he repeated, “My queen, my queen.”

The crowd closed in on her. They disgusted her, these harbingers of famine and its devastations. They recalled the ruin her father had wrought and how much poorer the kingdom had grown under his decadence. It hadn’t always been this way; when last she had visited the city, the streets had been clean and the farmers fed. A monument to times gone by, yes, but a well-kept one. But now the lingering sandstone facades were caked with dirt, ready to crumble at the slightest touch.

“Go on,” she shouted as she jerked the curtains shut. “Go on.”

Returned to the royal barge, Berenice ignored Leda’s bath and dismissed her nurse. She wanted to be alone. The faces haunted her. And that boy, that pleading boy, with his filthy sores and filthy hands. She needed wine and food and sleep to sate her body and wash down those sights. Something caught her eye—a speck glittering on her coverlet. When she approached, she saw that it was an amulet. An iridescent vulture spread her wings along a golden chain. Beneath lay a piece of papyrus, creased over once. She unfolded it and read, “The mother goddess knows her friends.” And though Berenice flipped the page over and back a dozen times, she could find no seal.

“Leda,” she cried out. “Who cleaned these chambers?”

“I did myself, my queen,” came the nurse’s answer. Footfalls followed. “Is something the matter?”

“No. No, it’s nothing. All is well.” She turned the token over in her palm. “Only make sure everything is ready for our return to Alexandria.”

“Yes, my queen.”

Berenice listened for her nurse’s receding steps. Then she crossed to her gilded trunk and flung open its lid. She rooted through the shawls and chitons and tunics until her hand struck cold, hard ivory. With care, she fished out the jewelry box. Across its lid a carved savage drew his bow. “It comes from Nubia,” her father had told her when he’d given it to her on her eighth birthday, the last one before Cleopatra bulged in the concubine’s belly. It was the only talisman Berenice had of his; if there’d been other gifts, she couldn’t recall them. She couldn’t say why she carried it on every voyage; in her softer moments, she feared that it was because she wished to remember the Piper as he’d been during her childhood—or rather, as she wished he’d been: an indulgent father who would break the royal coffers for his daughter’s whims. On her stronger days, she knew that her reasons were quite different. The ivory box embossed with gold and turquoise proved the perfect souvenir of all she would never become: a king who cared more for trinkets than for armies.

The hinges squeaked as she opened the case; they needed oil to cure their rust. With care, she placed the vulture pendant inside. She would not lose it there.

Younger

A
rsinoe rocked from side to side. The bench swayed beneath her, but its pitching didn’t disturb Alexander. His stylus stayed steady on the page, a serpent pouring from its point. She couldn’t fathom his focus. Her own eyes darted over the reading room to the dog mosaic sprawled across the stone; she always thought the pup looked lonesome, staring up from the floor by an abandoned helmet, waiting listlessly for its master to return. She let her gaze drift over the twin columns with their snaking Medusa heads toward the door that framed the larger atrium beyond. Out there, a few scholars lingered, thumbing through the scroll nooks and spreading chosen ones across their cedar tables, bolstering some shred of the ordinary. She didn’t recognize them, though, so she knew they belonged to her sister’s reign. They looked too young to be learned men; no doubt they were only permitted near the royal reading room because their betters had all fled.