0316382981 by Emily Holleman Read Free Book Online

Nonsense characters jostled together on the page. No matter how she stared at them, the symbols refused to coalesce into words. It must be a cipher, she realized. She tried to remember which code Ganymedes used. He’d told it to her once, in passing. First, she replaced each letter with the third following, but the corresponding words made no sense. That scheme belonged to her and Cleopatra. She tried again, this time swapping out the second, and then the fourth. Xi became sigma, and pi turned into upsilon, and slowly she hit upon the meaning: “You haven’t been forgotten. Devise a visit with your sister. It’s always better to act.”
    This message soothed her. Its words gave her a goal, though she couldn’t imagine how she’d meet with Berenice. When she had memorized every word, every line, every curve of the eunuch’s hand, she dangled the message over her oil lamp’s spout and watched the papyrus curl into flames.
    The days settled into a routine. In the mornings, she’d awake and dress all on her own. The first time she tried, she’d failed—pathetically. She’d taken out her favorite tunic, a turquoise one whose silver stitching matched its cinch, and stared at it awhile. Myrrine would tell her to lift her arms above her head and slip on the garment all at once. When she tried to put her head through first, her arms wouldn’t cooperate—and more than once she’d ended up squirming from a tangled heap. But she didn’t give up so easily; after all, she’d have to wear fresh clothes if she was ever to meet with Berenice.
    After a few more attempts, she mastered it: by slipping her arms in first, she could then get the linen over her head. Dressed, she’d sit by the window, mouthing the words on the new scrolls the maid delivered: Ganymedes’s steady diet of Sophocles and Euripides, Aeschylus and Homer. Thankfully, he sent only stories, her favorites among them. “In the spirit of action,” the note on each scroll read. She hadn’t puzzled out, precisely, how these works should teach her to act, but she gathered that she must prepare some sort of speech for her sister. And so she’d study them until late in the afternoon, when her silent servant came, bearing plates of bread and fruit and cheese.
    She struggled through the first two Theban plays. The familiar tales of overweening fate, of cruel incest, and of dark love. She could never understand Oedipus’s horror at his discoveries: he was a great king, not some ordinary man. Why should it matter if he’d slain his father, if he’d taken his mother to bed? Her own family history was riddled with more twisted stories. Her great-grandfather had coupled first with his sister, and then with that same sister’s daughter by his brother. And her father’s sister had been wed first to her uncle and then to that uncle’s son. Oedipus’s paucity of brides was more surprising than his choice of them.
    Ganymedes always scolded her for such thinking: “The House of Ptolemy might abide by incest, but the rest of the civilized world does not.” And she tried to take these matters seriously—she did. And once she’d buried blind and crippled Oedipus in his grave, she came upon the play that sparked her spirit: Antigone . In a desecrated city, one brother’s body lies unburied, the other’s celebrated and raised up to the gods. The words of caution echoed in her ears: “Now look at the two of us, left so alone.…Think what death we’ll die, the worst of all if we violate the laws and override the fixed decree of the throne, its power—we must be sensible.” She pleaded with Antigone just as Ismene did: “Why rush to extremes? It is madness, madness.” How often she’d urged Cleopatra to caution: not to spur her horse so hard, not to swim so deep, not to provoke Ganymedes’s rage. Sometimes Cleopatra would listen, but more often than not, she’d merely laugh and race her pony all the faster. And Ismene’s words would echo in her head: