Page 8 of Cleopatra

We reached the entranceway to my father’s tomb, marked by red granite pillars. The cool stone grazed my leg as we passed, and for a moment I stood between two hard things: my sister and the pillar.

“You are too soft.” My father’s words came to me like the unwelcome cloud of dust from behind an old chest. Musty and best ignored.

“I am as the gods will it,” I had retorted in response.

Father’s fever had been high, and his words looser than usual. It was rare he picked at the flaws of my character so deeply.

“Soft and powerless,” he had insisted.

“I am not.”

And then, like a serrated knife drawn back against my skin, he said, “I should have dealt with you like I did Berenice.” He had not spoken her name in many years.

“Do not say these things, Father; you cannot mean them.”

“Did you say something, sister?” Arsinoe’s question brought me back to the present.

I shook my head, releasing the last plume of dust from the memory.

“No, I am fine.”

Rushlight flickered in clay pots around the temple. The warm smell of the burning tallow thawed the cold that had crept into my bones.

Shadows shifted as the priests of the temple moved to the far corners of the room to grant Arsinoe and me privacy. I cannot say I was ever truly comfortable under the gaze of the priesthood. Even my mother, who was one of the few people who truly loved me as a child, seemed to see the entirety of my shortcomings through the eyes of her god.

I rubbed at the Isis mark on the back of my neck. The skin there was smooth as though unblemished, and I often asked Charmion to hold up a polished mirror so I could see Isis’s sigil. Every time, I let out a sigh of relief to see the mark still there.

I took the last few steps towards my father’s body. He lay upon a stone slab, cloaked in a linen robe. His hands were clasped across a stomach that had, in bygone days, been plump and full of laughter. Cheeks that had once budded with smiles were now emaciated and wan.

“You will smile once more in the great beyond.” My throat was hoarse and the words came out as a rasp.

In four days, my father’s body would be taken by the priests for purification before being interred in this temple seventy days from now. His body would be hollowed out, the fragile cage of his chest pulled apart to replace the vital organs with myrrh and cassia.

I placed my hand on the soft skin below his throat. Soon the flesh there would be marred with stitching, the skin drawn taut to keep the aromatics within.

He was a shadow of the great man he had been two years earlier. But day by day, season by season, Osiris had beckoned for him to cross into the afterlife.

“The only other body I have ever seen was Berenice’s.”

I started at Arsinoe’s voice, having forgotten she was there. “You were so young, I did not think you could remember.”

She turned her cold brown eyes to mine. “It is hard to forget the bloodied neck of one’s sister.”

I grimaced. I was twelve when my father had killed my older sibling. You see, I was never meant to lead Egypt. Berenice was the one destined to follow my father’s legacy.

“She would have been made Pharaoh today,” I said.

If Berenice was still alive, I would not have to take the throne. I felt a wave of guilt as I realised my wish for my sister’s resurrection was rooted in my misgivings towards ruling Egypt.

Arsinoe snorted. “She was never going to be Pharaoh, not with the divine power gifted to her.”

When Berenice had been born, she had been marked with the swirl of a snake on the back of her calf. There had been much celebrating, as Hapy of the Nile was a generous god, and when a Ptolemy was marked by him the harvest was always plentiful.

But the soothsayer who had read the signs of Berenice’s mark had been wrong. It was not the blessing of Hapy but the snake of Apep, the Lord of Chaos.

Instead of a bountiful yield, the crops dwindled year on year and Father claimed Berenice’s power was wilting the plants. My older sister always denied her gift was to blame, but when a swarm of locusts ravaged the fields on her fifteenth birthday, she could no longer hide the truth of it.

Her feud with Father had incited a civil war, but the throne would not be taken from him easily. For as joyful as my father was, he was equally ruthless. He had Berenice’s throat cut in her sleep.