Page 4 of Cleopatra

“You are needed at the palace.” The messenger’s shoulders slumped as if his life’s purpose was complete. Perhaps it was.

“Death courts the Ptolemy name,” my mother had once said.

I was little more than eight years old when she spoke those words to me. A man lay dying at my feet, his blood pooling between my small toes. I wriggled them, watching the blood ripple. I remember thinking how plain the knife at his throat was, no gold or silver embellishments.

My thoughts were those of an eight-year-old: If I were to kill myself, I’d be sure to do it with something finer than copper.

Though, as you know, it was poison in the end.

“Why did he kill himself, Mama?” I asked as the guards removed the servant’s body from the throne room.

She stood next to me, the hem of her priest robe now soiled with blood. The eyes she turned to me were sorrowful, like those of the heifers blessed by the goddess Hathor. “He could fathom no greater honour than serving a pharaoh’s daughter. There was nothing else to accomplish in this life that could eclipse it.”

He was the first servant to end their life after speaking with me.

And in a few decades, Charmion would be the last.

I turned to the messenger, shaking away thoughts of my mother and death. “What has happened that I am needed in the palace so urgently?”

He quivered and didn’t immediately answer. When he eventually mustered the strength to speak, his voice was a croak. “Your father. He has departed this life into the next.”

Charmion’s quick inhalation sounded like the hiss of a snake. I didn’t hear anything after that.

My eyes stung with the cinder of grief. Each breath came slow and laboured as if smoke choked my throat.

Father is dead.

Though I had known this was coming, nothing prepares you for the loss of all the unclaimed moments yet to pass.

I lifted my gaze to the top of the lighthouse, where a statue of my ancestor crested the cylindrical tower just below the furnace.

The lifeless eyes of Ptolemy I, the founder of my dynasty, stared back at me. Sōter, he was called—saviour. Hundreds of years separated the two of us, and there was little to be seen of me in his Macedonian features. His chiselled alabaster chin dipped towards the mainland, looking over the empire he had come to rule.

“Sōter, welcome my father to the field of reeds,” I murmured quietly to myself.

Heavy tears blurred his image into that of my father. His brow became wider, his jaw softer. Even his stomach grew prouder.

My father had been prone to indulgence. His love of festivities was one of the many things that set us apart. I saw the frivolities of my status as a burden, he saw them as a joy.

“We must live like gods to honour the gods, daughter,” he would rumble. “It reminds our people that we reign above them. You will understand more when you are Pharaoh.”

Pharaoh. It had been a far-off thing to conceive of back then. Now, the title set my heart stuttering behind my ribs.

Sōter’s face wavered once more before my unshed tears. The alabaster distorted until I looked into one of the many faces of my dreams.

Is this a premonition of the future?

I tried to parse the vision I was seeing: Was she wise? Was she merciless?

I had not the plays and sonnets and books that told me of my future demise. Though worry not, a demise you will still have.

I had the one thing we all have: time. And only that would reveal to me the pharaoh I was to become.

—

During our descent from the lighthouse, the sun had set. The god Re’s journey through the clouds had tarnished the sky from gold to a deep orange.

I picked my way down the cragged shoreline where the waves lapped at the rocks.