Free Kleopatra by Karen Essex Page A

around a circle of metal spikes. What an engineering
     feat it had been to get it just right. Despite his worries, he could not help but feel some pride. The men and women, forty
     in all, who stood inside the drum, laboriously stomped and jigged over the grapes while the scarlet liquid gushed into the
     street. It was an illusion that they caused the flow, of course, but it was a nice touch. As soon as the flood began, the
     dignified spectators in the Grand Pavilion became as greedy and anxious as any thirsty peasant. Several wine enthusiasts broke
     the ranks of the slaves to fill their conical leather flasks, big enough to hold ample drink to weather the long nights of
     the coming winter.
    “Move on, move on,” a Satyr ordered one of the gluttons. He picked him up and threw him back into the crowd, where he landed
     next to Meleager. The man’s friends pulled back his head and sloppily emptied a pouch of the elixir into his mouth. The eunuch
     felt the sticky surplus creep into his sandals and between his toes. By the time Berenike reached these spectators, they would
     be entirely blacked out from the spirits.
    Auletes’ subjects were in a jovial mood as their king approached on a swaggering elephant. Under a canopy adorned with ivy
     vine, fruits, crowns, drums, and masks of comedy and tragedy, the sun highlighted just enough of the gold in his costume to
     make him appear a great shimmering god. Flanking His Majesty on horseback was the Order of the First Kinsmen, including the
     newest member, a good-looking, longhaired youth whom Meleager resolved to invite to his next dinner party.
    The next sight filled him with loathing. Thea, as Aphrodite rising out of the sea, was not nude, but wore transparent green
     drapes about her body and tiny conch shells under her breasts. Sparrows and doves, the lascivious birds known to take to the
     air with Aphrodite, fluttered in golden cages on either side of the queen. Thea’s second-born, the infant boy Ptolemy XIII,
     represented the god Dionysus as a baby. Meleager had argued with Thea about the inappropriateness of her costume, patiently
     explaining that the product of the union of Aphrodite and Dionysus had been the grotesque Priapus, and that people would laugh
     at her baby son if they made the connection. Meleager, you are too rigid, she had said. Not everyone is so exacting about
     the gods.
    How fitting, he thought, that the queen chose to represent the whore of Mount Olympus. Then, ashamed, he chastised himself
     for sounding like any crude person who did not understand the old religions. The Fates had assigned Aphrodite the duty of
     lovemaking; it was her divine destiny. Aphrodite did not seduce her promiscuous father, Zeus, though it was said he desired
     her. The same could not be said of Thea.
    A ray of light shot into the crowd. Meleager and those about him looked everywhere for the origin, but had to turn their faces
     away from its intensity. Then he saw the source: On an elephant-drawn float, Berenike stood as still as a statue, holding
     her shield at just the right angle to catch the sun. She was dressed as Pallas Athena, goddess of war, in her battle gear.
     Her baby sister, the Princess Arsinoe, firstborn to Thea, shared Berenike’s float and her glory, wearing a goatskin and representing
     the goddess at birth. The float carried all that the goddess invented—flutes, horse bridles, spinning wheels, ox yokes, numbers,
     small-scale models of chariots and ships. Atop the entire production was a banner with the goddess’s motto: “Athena never
     loses the day.” Dozens of maidens in war attire surrounded the radiant Berenike yelling
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, the victory cheer, into the crowd, and a troop of little girls armed with light shields and lances followed on foot like
     a diminutive Amazon army, echoing the cry of the young warriors.
    The princess looked like the goddess herself—fierce, distant, numinous. Her combative nature was well served in the