Page 2 of Cleopatra

Though there were some remarkable moments in the years prior, my story for you starts here. The day I became Pharaoh.

The crunching of the fig’s seeds in my mouth were the only sound between us.

Then Charmion spoke, her voice solemn. “You cannot deny the inevitable.”

I placed the half-eaten fruit on the ground between us. With my other hand I lifted the playing sticks and clenched them in my fist.

“I do not think your win is inevitable.”

We spoke to each other in Arabic, one of the nine languages we had been schooled in. Though we used both Egyptian and Greek in court, Arabic was just for us.

It had all started when a travelling hakawati had passed through Alexandria from the great city of Gaza. I was eleven years old and had already developed a fondness for stories.

I begged my father to invite the storyteller to the palace. For three nights the hakawati took up residence in the temple. And for all three nights that was where Charmion and I stayed. His tales filled us with wonder, so much so that I requested to keep him.

“I am not yours to shelve like an ornament or trinket,” the hakawati said. The guards by the temple entrance bristled but I paid them no heed.

“Why not?” I asked with genuine curiosity. I had not yet found something I could not make my own. I was a Ptolemy. My blood was lit with the spark of divinity.

The hakawati smiled politely, far more conscious of the guards at his back than I. “Would you ask a fish to stop swimming?”

I thought about it. The truth was, yes, I would if I wanted to eat it, but that wasn’t the answer I thought he was looking for. “No.”

“Would you ask a hippo to stop smiling?”

“Never.”

“Then you cannot ask a hakawati to stop travelling. It is in our nature. Without it, we will run out of stories. And without stories I would have nothing to tell.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. That sounded very dire indeed.

The hakawati saw my distress and kneeled on the ground beside me. “Do not worry, there is another way to keep a part of me here. Tell my stories, again and again.”

My smile returned. I could do that.

For years Charmion and I had repeated the hakawati’s tales, every story blossoming into something new with each retelling. It was then that Arabic became the language between us.

I looked at Charmion now. The sincerity of her expression had melted away into something more playful.

“Look at the markers—you may as well concede,” she said.

I stood up with the pretence that I needed a better vantage point to view the senet board. I was cunning that way, always performing something or another. Manipulative, the unkind would go on to claim, but I did not see it that way.

From the moment my first cry rattled from my chest, I was taught to be something more than I was. I wanted to be a babe, but I had been born a pharaoh’s daughter. So they wiped the birthing ichor from my skin and swaddled me in gold-trimmed cloth. My cries were silenced by a polished amber stone, a poor replacement for a mother’s teat.

Despite being too young to remember the stone’s weight, sometimes I still imagined it lying heavy against my tongue. It tripped my words and filled out my cheeks, especially when I chose to be bold.

“C-concede? I will not.”

We were playing on the balcony in the lighthouse, my place of serenity and solace. Close enough to the god Re to feel his gaze beating against my brow, and far enough away from my duties at the palace. Even with the furnace above us radiating heat, it was preferable to the burning of many eyes wherever I went. Sometimes, if the wind blew east, the smoke would wind its way to my bedroom window, seasoning my sleep with embers and ash.

The board game lay on the ground between us. Charmion was the better player, but I was too proud to admit it. Instead, I began each game with the same foolish hope that one day I’d best her.

I rolled the playing sticks in my hand in frustration. “Amun’s wrath,” I cursed as a splinter pierced my palm.

“Are you well?” Charmion asked with concern. A light sheen of sweat glistened above her top lip.

I took the opportunity to brandish my hand towards her. But instead of displaying my wound, I surged forward and thrust the playing sticks over the balcony.