Cleopatra Occult by Peter Joseph Swanson Read Free Book Online

secret!”
    Octavian smiled. “If it’s there and I can read it, I shall. I’m as curious as anybody else. You would have done the same. Don’t act so righteous around me.”
    Mark maintained, “That’s illegal.”
    Octavian shrugged. “Too late. I saw it and it can’t be unseen.”
    “You have to be alive to inherit.”
    Octavian sardonically raised his well plucked eyebrows. “Is that a threat?”
    “Play your little games, the big game isn’t over. I have to go to Egypt to do the work of my Caesar. Later we’ll have to continue our little squabble.”
    Octavian grimaced and stomped out.
     
    ~
     
    Phaedra sat at her handmaiden’s sickbed, a few blankets on the floor of the back porch. It overlooked a walled courtyard and fountain filled with statues of Greek mythological characters in their modern Roman guises.
    Phaedra wept, “Please, Circe, get well. Please get well. I don’t know what I’d do without you. You have to get well so we can leave. I can’t stay here.”
    Circe whispered, “Your husband is here, I know.”
    “Oh my Pegasus! How did you know that?”
    Circe nodded. “I could just tell. Truth be told, you shook like you’d seen a gryphon.”
    “Close. He has evil in him. He was cursed by the gods, surely. He came later with all those poets.”
    Circe asked, “Has he seen you? Does he know you’re here?”
    “I don’t think so. We were already wearing our masks. He only seems to enjoy his wine and the other men who are also mad drunk poets.”
    “He’s a mad poet?”
    Phaedra moaned. “That’s why I first fell madly in love with him. He swept me off my feet and I felt so dizzy. But then I finally came back down to the ground and I realized he was mad. Truly and terribly mad. The gods must have punished him. At the temple school I was warned that love was madness… any and all romantic love was insanity. Sometimes we pulled it off and sometimes it destroyed us. I wouldn’t listen to my teachers. I resented them too much, anyway, because they weren’t my mother. She made me live at school so that she could be a whore while Father was always away on business. So I was confused and foolish and needy. I didn’t listen to anybody and went head over heels for him, making my home there. I was obsessed with his every word… day and night wasn’t long enough to be with him. I thought he was so smart.”
    Circe said, “That all sounds good and wise to me.”
    Phaedra shook her head. “One day after we were married he took me to the barn to mate with me… making terrible animal sounds.”
    “But…”
    “I know, I know, I know… as a husband that’s his right… but then he tried to make me mate with a horse. He said it was so I’d give birth to a centaur. He insisted we all had magic spells in us and it would work. He said the modern age needed centaurs back. Of course I’d have been killed trying such a horrible thing. I ran away. I’ve been running ever since. It’d be so horrible if he ever found me and took me back to be his wife. It’d kill me!”
    “We mustn’t die!”
    “I’ve been careful with men ever since. Never let crazy feelings get in the way. Never get crazy. Be careful with men. Be careful with your feelings. You only have one heart, don’t ever throw it away, foolishly.”
    Circe wept. “Hold on to life!”
    “Plato has even stated that love is a serious mental disease and Socrates agreed when he once said that love is a madness.”
    Circe gasped for air.
    “You’ll be okay. You have to be okay! I love you too much for you not to be okay. I love you! You’re my right hand. You’re in my thoughts all the time. That means I love you! I’m madly in love for you but that’s okay and safe because you’re not a scary man.” She kissed her forehead. “You just need a warm nap to burn off any fever and you’ll wake up feeling much better. You sleep until you’re all better!” She tucked the top of a wool blanket under Circe’s chin.
    Tears rolled