Kleopatra Read Free Page B

Thea, kneeling to the child’s level, conjuring with great effort her most solicitous voice.
     “Do help your mother out on her wedding day and do as you are told.”
    “My mother is dead. I saw her body.”
    Berenike rolled her eyes. Thea widened her patient smile. The Royal Seamstress winced, but did not remove her eyes from the
     garment she pinned at Berenike’s side.
    “Our sister is our mother now,” Berenike declared, admiring herself in the mirror. “It is very simple, Kleopatra. Thea is
     to marry our father. When I was small, Thea and I used to pretend that she was the mother and I was her baby. Our pretend
     game has now come true.”
    “The aunties say it’s all wrong. They say mother hasn’t been dead long enough for father to marry,” Kleopatra said, parroting
     what had been said in vicious, hushed tones, knowing she was not supposed to repeat it. “They say that mother is cursing Thea
     for doing this.”
    “Do they?” shrieked Thea. “What do they know, those old hags? Are you going to listen to them, or to your mother?”
    “You are our sister. Our mother is dead,” Kleopatra insisted.
    “I am going to put an arrow through you, Kleopatra, if you do not stop saying that,” said Berenike, lifting the sleeve of
     her gown and showing Kleopatra the muscles in her upper arm. “And you know I can do it. I am an Amazon princess and you are
     just a little four-year-old girl.”
    Kleopatra glared at the taller girl. Berenike was one to be feared. She had read the ancient accounts of the Amazons’ training
     practices with her tutor, Meleager, who indulged her fascination, as it was the only way he could persuade her to read Greek.
     Convinced that she was descended from these mighty warrior women, Berenike put herself through the same rigors—shooting, riding,
     swordsmanship—and now she was as lean and muscled as any of the palace boys she challenged to wrestling matches.
    “I have taken our mother’s name, Kleopatra,” Thea said insistently. “Henceforth, I am Kleopatra VI Tryphaena and I am your
     mother.”
    “You are Thea,” Kleopatra countered, though this time in the Syrian tongue, a language Thea had heard in her childhood, but
     which she had long ago forgotten.
    “Don’t you do that!” Thea ordered. “You will speak to me in Greek or you will be silent.”
    Pleased that she had frustrated Thea, Kleopatra let loose a stream of dialogue in Syrian, all insulting, all aimed at Thea’s
     face.
    “Shut up, shut up!” yelled Thea. “Why do you speak these foreign tongues? What is wrong with you?”
    Kleopatra smiled innocently. She did not understand how she knew the dialects; they were like magical gifts bequeathed to
     her during her sleep. Regardless of the language, Kleopatra looked into the eyes of the speaker and understood the meaning
     of the words. She was three years and a half before she spoke at all, but by the time she was two months shy of her fourth
     birthday, she was able to mimic full sentences in Egyptian, Syrian, Ethiopian, Troglodyte, Numidian, and Arabic—the languages
     of the international cast of slaves and attendants in the palace. She did not adopt the heavily accented Macedonian Greek
     of her family; rather, she imitated the more refined speech of the scholars who visited her father. Word of her linguistic
     gifts had spread throughout the city like an outbreak of typhoid, and she knew it, taking pleasure in the fact that her sisters,
     who had thought her dim, were now made to hear others speak of her with awe.
    “You are jealous,” said Kleopatra quietly. “Because I am special and you are not.”
    “How are you special, you odd creature?” Thea seethed through her small teeth.
    “I am the first of the Ptolemies to speak the language of the Egyptian people. The first in almost three hundred years to
     speak anything but Greek. That’s what the Egyptians say. That I am an oracle.” She saw Thea’s mounting anger so she added,
     “Anyone