Page 1 of Cleopatra

Prologue

You know my name, but you do not know me.

Your poets have sung about my tainted crown, your bards have spoken on my infinite variety.

For millennia you have tried to pull straight the threads of my life to see the tapestry whole. But those threads are unruly, curling away from you to obscure the truth.

Besides, I have ever favoured carpets over tapestries, as you well know.

You have tried to parse the tones of my skin and sift through the crimson rubies of my blood, upon which you weighed my worth.

There are those of you who seek my bones. But my roots lie deep beneath the dirt and soil of every woman who has drawn breath.

Like the blue veins that flutter under the translucent skin of your wrist, I am the Nile of your body and the surging waters of your heart.

I was a pharaoh once, a wife twice, a mother more than thrice.

I have ever been what people sought to find. Some called me Queen, lover, Mama. Others called me witch, villain, whore. Each archetype is a brick that has raised me up like the great pyramids, further and further away from my humanity until I have become nothing more than a myth.

It is hard to know me at such a great distance.

My image shimmers behind the sand-filled haze of Egypt’s sunset. Am I a mirage? Or the water you seek?

You know my name, but you do not know me.

I am Cleopatra. This is not the story of how I died.

But how I lived.

“[She] had the power to subjugate

the hearts of all she met.”

—Cassius Dio, Roman History

“The noble ruin of her magic.”[*]

—William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

“The contact of her presence…and the character that

attended all she said or did, was something bewitching.”

—Plutarch, Life of Antonius

Skip Notes

* To be ruinous and noble, both! Sometimes, when I stand very still, I hear the whispers of each rendition on the wind. From children reciting lines on rickety stages, to wizened elders savouring the bard’s words like aged wine. Though no matter their age or experience, all players know not of what—or whom—they speak.

Chapter One

51 BCE

bit into the flesh of the fig, its skin warmed by the heat of the sun.

Charmion watched me through half-lidded eyes as I chewed. The wind tousled her linen dress and tugged the collar to reveal the sun-touched glow of her skin.

For all the years of my life, Charmion had been my companion and handmaiden. Her mother had been my nursemaid. And so, we were forever bonded by the milk that had strengthened us as babes. At eighteen years of age our eyes still sparkled with possibility, but our cheeks had slimmed from the plumpness of youth.