Cleopatra: The Carpet Queen

Chapter 1 —

The fire knows me.

I have never said this aloud. I am not certain I believe it — not in the way my priests believe it, not with their prostrated foreheads and their chanted invocations and their absolute, unquestioning faith.

But I have watched fires long enough to know that they behave differently in my presence.

The flames lean.

They orient. As if something in the combustion recognizes something in me and turns toward it the way a sunflower turns toward light it cannot see but knows is coming.

It is dawn on the Syrian shore and I am kneeling before a small fire that has no reason to still be burning.

The wood ran out an hour ago. The embers should be grey and cold.

They are not grey.

They are not cold.

They are the deep amber of old honey and they pulse with a rhythm that almost — almost — matches my own heartbeat, and I press my palms flat against the sand and I pray.

Mother, I say, in the old language, the language my tutors taught me before they taught me Greek or Latin or the seven other tongues I carry like weapons behind my teeth. Mother, I am still here.

The fire bends toward me.

No wind.

The air on this shore is absolutely still, the Mediterranean silver and flat in the early light, and there is no wind that could account for what the flame does.

It reaches.

It orients. And then it subsides, and I am left kneeling in the sand with my hands pressed to the earth and the knowledge — not belief, knowledge, the kind that lives in the body rather than the mind — that I have been heard.

I rise.

My name is Cleopatra VII Philopator, Queen of Egypt, Daughter of Isis, and I am living in a tent.

This is the thing they do not account for when they drive a queen into exile — the indignity of it.

Not the danger.

I have always understood danger.

Danger is clean.

Danger has edges you can map and account for and plan around. No — the indignity is what they intend to break you with. The smallness.

The reduction.

A queen in a tent on the Syrian border with four hundred soldiers who are loyal because I am paying them and will become considerably less loyal the moment I stop.

I have been here for three months.

I was eighteen when my father died and left me the throne of Egypt. I was twenty when my brother’s advisors decided I was too dangerous to share it with.

My brother — Ptolemy, thirteenth of that name, ten years old and entirely owned by a eunuch named Pothinus who whispers in his ear and moves him like a piece on a game board — my brother has Alexandria.

He has the palace.

He has the treasury and the fleet and the army and the weight of the most powerful city in the world behind his borrowed authority.

I have four hundred men and a fire that will not go out.

It is enough. It has to be enough.

I have decided it is enough.

The intelligence arrives with the morning — my runner, a small dark man named Apollodorus who has served me since before the exile and who I trust more than I trust anyone alive, which is to say I trust him with logistics and nothing else. He comes across the sand at a pace that tells me the news is significant before he opens his mouth. Apollodorus never runs. He is running now.

“Caesar,” he says, when he reaches me.

One word. He knows I will not need more than one word. This is why I keep him.

Gaius Julius Caesar — Consul, general, the man who crossed the Rubicon and made Rome blink — has landed at Alexandria. He came pursuing Pompey, his former ally turned enemy, the man he has been chasing across the known world for the better part of a year.

He did not find Pompey alive.

My brother’s advisors, ever eager to curry Roman favor, presented Caesar with Pompey’s head upon his arrival as a gift.

By all accounts, Caesar wept.

I file this away. A man who weeps for his enemy is a man who understands loyalty. A man who understands loyalty is a man who can be made to feel its absence. A man who can be made to feel its absence is a man who can be reached.

I look out at the Mediterranean.

Alexandria is on the other side of that water.

My palace is on the other side of that water.

My throne — my throne, the throne of the Ptolemies, the throne of a dynasty that has ruled Egypt for three hundred years — is on the other side of that water, currently occupied by a ten-year-old boy and the eunuch who owns him.

And Caesar is standing in my throne room.

“How long has he been there?” I ask.

“Three days.”

“And Ptolemy’s people — have they reached him?”

“Pothinus presented the head of Pompey on the first day. Caesar received it. He has not yet received Ptolemy himself.”

He has not yet received Ptolemy himself.

I turn this over in my mind the way you turn a stone to find what lives beneath it. Caesar has been in Alexandria for three days. He has accepted a gift from my brother’s court. He has not yet given my brother an audience.

He is waiting.

He does not know what he is waiting for. But I do.

I go back to my tent and I sit with the knowledge for exactly as long as it takes me to understand it fully — which is not long. I have always thought quickly.

My tutors called it a gift.

My father called it inheritance.

My enemies call it dangerous, which is the most accurate of the three.

The situation is this: I cannot retake Alexandria with four hundred soldiers. I have tried to build a larger force and I have failed — not for lack of resources but for lack of time and for the uncomfortable reality that soldiers follow strength and I am a queen in a tent on the Syrian border, which does not project strength regardless of what the fires do when I pray.

I cannot reach Caesar through conventional channels. My brother controls Alexandria’s harbor.

Any approach I make by sea will be intercepted.

Any message I send will be read, altered, or destroyed before it reaches him. Pothinus has been in this business longer than I have and he did not get where he is by leaving gaps.

I cannot negotiate from outside.

I have to get inside.

I call for Apollodorus.

He appears at the tent entrance with the expression of a man who has served me long enough to know that when I call for him immediately after receiving intelligence, whatever comes next is going to be either brilliant or catastrophic, and he has learned that with me these categories are rarely distinct.

“I need a boat,” I say. “Small. Fast. Crewed by men who know how to be invisible.”

He does not ask why. This is another reason I keep him.

“And I need a carpet,” I say.

He pauses. Just slightly. “A carpet.”

“Rolled. Large enough to contain a person. Fine enough to be a plausible gift.

The kind of thing a merchant might bring as tribute to a Roman general who has just arrived in a foreign city.”

Apollodorus is quiet for a moment.

He is a man who measures his words the way other men measure gold — by weight, by purity, by what they will purchase.

“You intend to be inside it,” he says.

“I intend to be inside it.”

Another pause. Then: “The crossing will take most of the night.”

“I know.”

“If you are discovered—”

“I know.”

“My queen.” He stops.

He looks at me with the closest thing to open emotion I have ever seen on his face, which is to say a slight tightening around the eyes that on anyone else would be imperceptible. “Is there no other way?”

I think about the fire that burns without fuel. I think about the flames that bend toward me in the absolute stillness of a windless dawn.

I think about my mother — Isis, the great mother, the goddess who reassembled her murdered husband piece by piece through pure refusal to accept the permanence of loss. Isis, who did what was necessary. Who always did what was necessary.

“There is no other way,” I say.

He nods. Once. And he goes to find me a carpet.

That evening I sit again before my fire and I spread my hands and I speak to the goddess in the old language, and I tell her what I am going to do, and I ask her — not for protection, I have never asked for protection, protection is for people who are not paying attention — I ask her for clarity.

For the particular quality of stillness that lives at the center of me when everything external is chaos.

For the thing that has no name in Greek or Latin but in the old language is called something that translates roughly as the eye of the storm knowing it is the storm.

The fire burns.

It bends toward me.

I close my eyes and I feel, in the center of my chest, the steady warmth of something I have felt since childhood — something that is either the presence of a goddess or the particular confidence of a woman who has never once in her life doubted that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

I have never been able to determine which one it is.

I have decided it does not matter.

Tomorrow night, I cross.