Free The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George

clothes, and even took to wearing a tight garment underneath to squash myself down whenever I had to see my queenly sisters; I wanted to look young and innocent as long as possible. But in my own quarters I could not bear to wear the binding garment; it was terribly painful.
    I had no “wise woman” to help guide me in all this. If I had had a mother…but she might have been too shy to discuss it. What I really needed was a bawdy nurse or attendant. The male guards placed on me by my sisters would definitely not serve the purpose.
    Had things been normal, I might have been able to talk to those very same older sisters. But they were Ptolemies first and women and sisters second and third.
    And then it came, the great dividing line between childhood and womanhood. I became capable of bearing children, that summer I was twelve and Father away for over a year now. I was prepared for it; I did not think I was dying or any of those things that ignorant girls sometimes do. I knew well enough what had happened, but still it was a momentous change in the way I thought of myself. Never again could I feel there was little essential difference between me and other children, boys and girls alike; that the category “child” applied to us equally and was the most important designation, the most descriptive term, that fitted us all.
    Now I would have this element—this fundamental, awesome element—to me for the rest of my foreseeable future. Marriage…I could be married, they would say I was ready. I could be sent away from Egypt! I might have to make my home in a foreign court, wife to some prince. Have children…worry about them…and the cycle so short, myself so recently a child….
    The possibility frightened and threatened me as nothing else had—not my sisters’ illegal rule, not the Romans, not even the cruel water in the harbor. It was nature that had done this to me, not another person, and nature could not be pleaded with or dissuaded.
    Only Isis, my kindly guardian and wise guide, could understand. During the first days after the great change in me, I spent hours in the temple by the sea, looking at her statue.
    She was all these mysteries taken together—womanhood, wifehood, motherhood. Little wonder that women adored her; she personified all their aspects. I could only beg her to protect me in this voyage into the unknown, the frightening land of adulthood, of woman, that lay before me.

6
    Partly to stave off these thoughts, partly in rebellion against the role nature was assigning me—without my permission!—I determined to form a group composed of people of my own choosing. I would call it the Society of Imhotep, after the legendary physician and master builder of Old Egypt. In order to belong, someone had to be interested in Old Egypt, of what lay far back both in time and distance. They had to wish to study the Egyptian tongue, and learn the old writing; above all, they had to feel the spirits of those long departed, and listen to what they might want to whisper to us.
    A surprising number of students from Mardian’s class wanted to join, as well as both boys and girls who were the children of various palace officials. I suspected it was because a princess was leading it, but as time went on that was forgotten. No one stayed in the group unless he or she was genuinely interested, because we worked so hard that the fainthearted fell away. We wanted to be able to read the inscriptions on the old monuments by ourselves.
    One of the great inducements of belonging, though, was that the group, and its outings, had to be secret. Why? I suppose because children—and I was determined not to relinquish my childhood without a fight—love secrets, and it made us feel important and daring. In a palace rife with spies, we took pride in having our impenetrable secret society. (It never occurred to us that no one considered our doings weighty enough to spy on. Also, time and complacency had made my sisters relax their