When We Were Gods, page 1
WHEN WE WERE GODS
Colin Falconer
When We Were Gods Copyright © 2017 by Colin Falconer. All Rights Reserved.
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Colin Falconer
Visit my website at www.colinfalconer.org
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Colin Falconer Books
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHEN WE WERE GODS was originally published in the United States by Crown Publishing. It was later published for Kindle as ‘CLEOPATRA, Daughter of the Nile’ by CoolGus Publishing.
This edition has been extensively edited from the original.
PART I
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’
- Shakespeare, ‘Julius Caesar’
Chapter 1
the Brucheion Palace
Alexandria, 51 BC
His eyes were closed, his lips composed in a beatific smile; the parting with life had been gentle. Her father, yet not him. Without the tension of life, he looked only vaguely like himself.
I am on my own now, she thought. For the last few months I have ruled as his co-regent, but now, with his passing, the knives will be out.
From this day on and to all the world I am Cleopatra the Seventh, Queen of the Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt. But they were just words. The truth is, I am eighteen years old, without experience, without help, and without friends. And everyone around me wants me dead.
‘I have given orders for him to be borne to the Monument,’ someone said. ‘He will lie there with his ancestors and Alexander.’
She turned around, was confronted by a great slab of Macedonian lard with oiled ringlets and far too many lapis and carnelian rings on his fingers. He wore the unctuous expression all Greek secretaries seemed to acquire with their robes of office. He was Privy Councilor to the House of Adoration, one of her father's closest advisers. She imagined his ambitions did not end there.
‘That is for me to command, Pothinus.’
‘It is proper. I seek only to lighten your burden at this hour of grief.’
‘Of course. I did not doubt your intention.’
Already they chip away at my power, even before my father's body is cold.
The Regency Council filed in, her younger brother Ptolemy shoved ahead of them, like a prisoner. Look at him; arms no thicker than spear shafts, and a face like a spanked child. They had dressed him in a man’s robes, although he was yet to sprout a beard.
Pothinus had filled his head with mischief, no doubt.
She indicated a gilded chair on the dais and Ptolemy sat down beside her. The Regency Council sat at another bench below her.
Her prime minister was also there, she could smell his perfume. He was almost as lovely as her sister, Arsinoë. And last of all her little brother Antiochus, still a child in a short white tunic, a look of pale apprehension on his face.
Not a soul in the room she trusted. This was her first big test.
Once the formalities were dispensed with, Pothinus was eager to be down to business. ‘We must move quickly to arrange your marriage to Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘It will allay the fears of the population. And we must have an orderly succession so that we do not arouse the interest of the Romans.’
‘You think the succession has not been orderly, Brother?’ she said.
‘Indeed it has, Majesty. I merely point out the wishes of the people. It is imperative you uphold the tradition without delay.’
The tradition. The pharaonic practice that had been adopted by the Ptolemies, of royal brother marrying royal sister, a sop to the priests and the masses. Her father had married his own sister and Cleopatra's two older sisters, now dead, had issued from that union. Such depravity was supposed to ensure the purity of the royal line. But this was not the Council's purpose here today. What they wanted was to remove her from power and put Ptolemy on the throne as their puppet.
‘When our father became ill,’ she began, ‘he arranged for our coronation as his co-regent to ensure an orderly line of succession. In our view the wishes of the people and the needs of state have already been served.’
‘You do not intend to rule without a king, surely?’
‘Ptolemy is not a foreign prince come courting. You are not hoping for issue from our loins, are you Brother?’
‘Pothinus said I should be king,’ Ptolemy blurted out.
‘You are still a boy,’ she snapped at him. ‘That is why these men have appointed themselves your Council.’
He scowled, his eyes on the floor.
The argument went back and forth, couched in the polite language of the court. She had no intention of giving ground and they could not force her to do so, outside of outright rebellion. They would not risk that with the Romans waiting to intervene.
‘It was your father's wish that you marry your brother,’ Theodotos said.
She smiled to cover her anger, something her father had taught her to do. ‘He did not express such a wish to us.’
‘Surely your accession was but a temporary measure?’
‘Do you presume to question your queen?’
To her relief, Theodotos subsided like the lamb he was, head bobbing.
A long silence followed, as she stared them down; all but Pothinus, who glared back at her from beneath heavy-lidded eyes.
It was her prime minister who broke the tension. ‘There is another matter,’ he said.
She felt herself relax. To her own surprise, she had won this first encounter.
‘Rome is on the brink of war, once more,’ he said. ‘Julius Caesar vies with Magnus Pompey for power. He has defied his own Senate and thrown Pompey and his armies out of Italy. Pompey has sent to us for our help in the conflict.’
Pompey had been her father's ally and he owed his throne to him. Now the Roman was calling in his markers.
‘We must ignore this request,’ Pothinus said.
‘Ignore it?’ she said. ‘And how will that benefit us?’
‘We are not slaves to the Romans. Should this Caesar gain victory we will only provoke him by supporting his enemy.’
‘And if Magnus Pompey should prevail?’
Pothinus did not answer her.
Already, her first decision on foreign policy. But this was not a difficult one to make. She knew her own mind on this, for years she had been impatient to have her say. Her father had called her opinions unschooled; she had thought him too timid.
‘My father owes this Julius Caesar nine talents of gold,’ she said to them. ‘If he wins he will be here to claim it. You still wish to see Magnus Pompey defeated, Brother?’
‘Pompey asks for sixty ships and three hundred soldiers.’
‘Then we shall give them to him.’
‘The people will say you are a slave to the Romans.’
Cleopatra stared at him. So, that is the rumor you intend to spread about me. At least you did me the honor of letting me hear it first. ‘They will say many things about me before I am dead. Now do as we command.’
She stood up and swept from the room.
Alone at last in her private apartments, she sat down, her limbs trembling with anger and nervous exhaustion. She was totally isolated.
She ruled Egypt, but nothing was really hers, not even this room. The thick Cappadocian carpets and the carnelian encrusted chairs were her father’s choice.
She heard a noise behind her and she started. It was Mardian, her tutor since childhood. The closest thing she had to a friend. He was fat, as many eunuchs were, his blue robes as voluminous as the royal pavilion and his face as crumpled as a discarded gown.
‘Pothinus has the intelligence of a roof lintel,’ he said.
‘Will they move against me?’
‘Not while Achillas and the army are on your side.’
She considered this.
‘You have little support here in the city. The people disapproved of your father's policies towards Rome. They will not like yours any better. Nothing short of war with Rome will please the mob.’
‘How can we stand against the Romans unless we have an army to match theirs?’ She closed her eyes. ‘I run a nation of shopkeepers and slaves who riot in the streets if the sun goes behind a cloud. The Romans are breathing down our necks looking for just one excuse to ransack our Treasury.’
She turned away and gazed out of the window.
Such a beautiful nest for vipers, this glorious white city, the Brilliant City as the Romans called it. Gypsum-plastered palaces glittered in the spring sunshine all along the sumptuous curves of the Lochias peninsula, right down to the Royal Harbor. An arched causeway divided it from the Harbor of Good Return to the west.
Behind the forests of masts, the warehouses creaked with the wealth of Egypt. Ivory trunks were piled up like cypress logs, pearls tossed in jute sacks like pine nuts. There were tottering bales of silks and muslins, great mountains of henna and cardamom and cinnamon.
A fresh salt breeze whipped the silk hangings, ghosts dancing her father's last revel.
Even Alexander would have been astonished by the city that bore his name. But there were no more Alexanders left to defend Egypt, just the rabble of pirates, escaped slaves and outlaws Achillas called an army. The city’s population were mainly Greeks, Syrians and Jews, whose loyalty was only to their purses and whose first reaction to any crisis was to storm the palace. They were utterly indifferent to that other Egypt that brought them their wealth, a hinterland of peasants who prayed to crocodiles and still believed their overlords were pharaohs.
Someone had to bring them all to heel if Egypt was to survive. She would do it somehow. She didn’t yet know how.
Chapter 2
The temple of Isis stood on the promontory of Lochias, facing the sea, a private sanctuary reserved for members of the royal house.
The salt wind whispered through the fluted columns, sand filtered along the marble tiles. Isis gazed unblinking at the ocean, her left hand holding a jug containing the waters of the Nile, a crocodile beneath her left foot.
From somewhere in the temple Cleopatra heard a priest singing a hymn in a high-pitched voice. She laid the offerings of fruit and flowers at the goddess’s feet and asked the Great Mother for her help.
She walked back through the palace gardens, brilliant with the white flowers of spring, to the news that the sacred Apis bull had died.
Cleopatra lay face down on a smooth bench of alabaster, while Iras, her Nubian, massaged balsamic oil into her back and shoulders. Another slave rubbed her hands with almond cream while yet another massaged her feet with mint water. Charmion, her hairdresser, brushed through her long dark hair with a tortoiseshell comb.
She sent for Mardian, but did not draw the fretted cedar wood screen for the interview. She never minded him seeing her immodestly. There was no one who knew her better and besides, all masculine feeling in him had been razored away when he was ten years old.
His fleshy jowls danced as he walked, like dewlaps on a bull. A poignant image, in the circumstances.
‘Majesty,’ he said and touched his head to the floor.
‘The Apis bull is dead.’ The bull was said to be the incarnate of Ptah, the god of Memphis. It was chosen for its characteristic markings; black, with a white diamond on its forehead, a crescent moon on its right flank, and the mark of the scarab on its tongue. During life it was pampered as no other animal on earth and when it died it was mummified and placed in a special tomb with its forebears, like a pharaoh.
It was a bad omen that the bull had died so soon after her father. In the bazaars they were saying it was a sign that the gods were unhappy that a queen now ruled Egypt without a king at her side. She had no doubts where that rumor had started.
‘I will attend the funeral myself.’
Mardian blinked in surprise. For once she had her tutor at a disadvantage. ‘At Memphis?’ he said. ‘No Ptolemy has ever paid court to the Egyptian gods.’
‘Then this will be the first time.’
‘I see,’ he said.
‘Ask my prime minister to prepare the state barge. We are going to pay our last respects to the Apis bull and welcome the next.’
‘Is it wise, Majesty?’
‘They may not love me in Alexandria, Mardian. But I am not queen of just this one city. I am Mistress of the Two Lands. There are other ways to power in Egypt. You will see.’
She reclined on a couch on the deck of her royal barge, shaded by a golden fringed canopy of pure silk, surrounded by Nubian slaves with long-handled jeweled fans. Her hair fell round her shoulders in tapering ringlets and on her head she wore a golden band with the two feathers of justice, above her brow was a round disc that shone like a mirror, the silver face of the moon. Her pure white linen gown was knotted at the center with the sacred knot, and her bare breasts were painted blue. There was a golden snake coiled around the flesh of her right arm.
This was an Egypt unknown to the Greeks and Jews of Alexandria; mud villages clustered under dom-palms and donkeys pulled creaking waterwheels. In Alexandria, the colors were the blue of the sea and the white of the buildings and there were so many nationalities that the whole city looked like a bazaar; here every face was the same, hooked nosed and nut-brown.
They had left the capital in the middle of a rainstorm, but down here the Nile was fat and sluggish, the skies clear.
It was only the second time she had come to the chora, the vast hinterland of Egypt. The first time was with her father on the occasion of her coronation as co-regent, a few months before.
A shaven-headed priest had handed her the royal crook, scepter and flail and placed the double pharaonic crown on her head; the cobra diadem of Lower Egypt and the white bulbous-tipped vulture headdress of Upper Egypt.
It had struck her then as vaguely ridiculous. But her father had admonished her. ‘Royal life is all a show,’ he had said. ‘The people do not wish to know of you, the girl with a fear of snakes and the darkness, and a fondness for olives; they do not want a mortal with all the faults of Nature that they have. You must seem other-worldly for them to love you. This ceremony enshrines your person as a goddess. Now you must live like one.’
Silver-tipped oars sparkled as they dipped and rose. Small children ran from the mud-brick houses to stare and farmers with sun-browned skins and white loin cloths gaped at the goddess queen returned.
Is it really her, Isis, our queen, here in the chora?
This theatre was intrinsic to her destiny. The uncertainties that had plagued her after her father’s death sloughed away the further they sailed up the Nile.
Saqqara
The priests poured from the temple of Apis to greet her, dressed in the blue of mourning. She heard dismal music coming from inside, as she was borne on a litter past the sacred pool. Pshereniptah, the High Priest of Memphis, was waiting for her. Clouds of incense hung in the still air.
‘Dread Queen,’ he murmured, ‘you do us great honor.’
‘On the contrary, the honor today belongs to Ptah,’ she said, and she saw from his face that she had chosen her words well.
She followed the priests down a long underground gallery into the bowels of the desert. It was dark and breathlessly hot. On either side were the enormous black sarcophagi of Apis bulls from a thousand years past.
The dead bull had been mummified and was carried on a litter by a sweating phalanx of slaves. It was huge in death, wrapped in white bandages so that only the horns protruded. Other slaves followed, bringing the canopic jars that contained its viscera and vital organs. The bull was lowered into a sarcophagus of pink granite and the stone lid was levered into position.
The sacred Apis was at rest, ready for his next incarnation.
That night, at the feast held inside the temple to commemorate the passing of the Apis, Pshereniptah leaned towards her and whispered: ‘Your presence here today will never be forgotten.’
Chapter 3
Every morning, Cleopatra held court in the Audience Hall, receiving petitions and requests, dispensing justice herself. She never failed to enquire after the health of the divine bull from the chief priest.
There were endless rounds of council meetings to discuss every detail of governance; from the dredging of irrigation canals to the administration of import taxes and the appointment of officials.
The problems she had inherited were far graver than she had realized. The country was paralyzed by its vast bureaucracy. Many peasants had fled their lands, unwilling or unable to pay the increased taxes raised by her father, and the onset of another famine had led to uprisings in Upper Egypt.
Every day, she waited for news from Greece on the outcome of the conflict between Caesar and Pompey. Everyone in Alexandria believed the old general would win and her decision to send Pompey soldiers and supplies would be vindicated.
But then two Roman envoys were murdered by drunken legionaries in a camp outside the city.
A hush fell over the Great Hall of Pillars as Cleopatra entered. She was dressed in the formal robes of state, with pectorals of lapis and ivory and a thick belt of heavy gold. She held the crook and flail of the Great House of Egypt, on her head was the vulture and serpent headdress of the Two Lands.
Charmion had spent long hours applying her cosmetic, paying special attention to her eyes, which were accentuated with black kohl and green malachite. Her mouth had been reddened with a special ointment made from ram's fat mixed with red ochre, and her hair gleamed with oil and juniper juice.
