Free Kleopatra by Karen Essex

have the privilege.”
    “A wise man,” sighed the young Kinsman.
    “What a time my father had deciding what necklace, what bracelet, what ring, would be worn by which of those girls,” Kleopatra
     said, feeling very sly and like a grown person, tattling on the king’s silliness. She let her voice assume the same inflection
     and furtive intonation the ladies of the court used in their gossip.
    “They are terribly winsome,” said Archimedes wistfully. “I should like to see them beg.”
    “Let us move on,” said Kleopatra, annoyed that her cousin would not take his beautiful brown eyes off of the auburn-haired
     siren. When he made no motion to move, Kleopatra kicked the side of his horse.
    “You are not at your most regal, Cousin,” Archimedes snapped, trotting past the nymphs. “You’d better behave. The holy ones
     are looking.”
    The princess sat up tall on the horse and gave her most solemn demeanor to the priests and priestesses of Dionysus who filled
     the next cart, their white robes billowing lazily against their rigid bodies like makeshift sails. They were guarded by snarly-haired
     Maenads brandishing hissing snakes with wild, dancing tails.
    The crowd fell silent as the Maenads passed, not from fear of them, but because of what followed—a golden phallus two hundred
     feet tall, crowned with a shimmering nine-foot star, a meteor in slow motion shooting into the air. It rested on a cart pulled
     by dozens of men, but the awestruck faces of the crowd turned slowly as if on an axis, following the missile until it moved
     past them. Boys dressed as Priapus, impish offspring of Dionysus and Aphrodite, scampered in its wake, balancing plaster phalluses
     as tall as their torsos between their legs and pointing them merrily at maidens.
    “Have you seen enough?” Archimedes asked. “Charmion is probably summoning the guard. I shall spend my first night as a Kinsman
     in prison.”
    “In that case I shall see to it that you receive generous portions of gruel while you are incarcerated,” offered Kleopatra,
     turning her eyes upward and staring at him out of their corners as she saw Auletes’ mistresses do when they wanted something.
    “You are very magnanimous, Kleopatra,” he said. He smacked his horse particularly hard, and laughed at his cousin when she
     had to grab his vest so that she did not fall.

    The eunuch Meleager had paid fastidious attention to the historical accuracy of every detail of the Procession, but in these
     more modern and enlightened times, he wondered if the effect of all this ostentation was not a bit lugubrious. Would the spectacle
     evoke the desired response of increased approval of the Royals? Or might it produce the opposite effect—a joke the gods often
     played on careful, man-made plans. The choreographer of this opus let it all pass before him as if a dream: Barefoot Ethiopian
     chiefs carrying elephant tusks and logs of ebony; a thousand camels from Arab lands with saddlebags of saffron and orris;
     aviaries of peacocks, pheasants, and other resplendent African birds all floated past his eyes like phantasms in a keen night
     vision. Albino leopards. Giraffes. A rhinoceros, or was it two? Meleager felt like the steward on that great ark from the
     Jewish holy books; was there any beast of the earth that he had not seen today?
    How could one fourteen-year-old princess make her mark amid all of this? And on the masses, intoxicated to sloppiness with
     pageantry and wine? It was his own fault; he insisted on having the wine flow freely into the streets for one and all. When
     Auletes had balked at the cost of getting the population of the city good and drunk, Meleager had asked, Is it not appropriate
     for the New Dionysus to gift his worshippers with his favorite drink?
    Now Meleager watched as six hundred slaves coaxed along the unwieldy wine barge. The vessel carried thirty thousand gallons
     of that blessed drink in a drum of lion skins stretched to maximum strain