Cleopatra Confesses Read Online Free PDF

days with Antiochus and his other advisors, and at night there are the banquets. We have had no more private conversations. In less than a month we are ready to embark on our journey up the Nile. Perhaps now he will have time for me.

P ART II

    T HE N ILE
    On the river, during my eleventh year

Chapter 7
    T HE R OYAL B OAT
    Before we leave Alexandria to begin our journey, my father, my sisters, and I climb a hundred steps to reach the beautiful golden-roofed temple built to honor the god Serapis, protector of the city. Set on the highest point in Alexandria, the temple houses the statue of Serapis, brought here from Greece by the first Ptolemy. The enormous statue with curly hair and beard has a basket of grain on its head; at its feet sits the snarling three-headed dog, Cerberus, a frightening figure that sends Arsinoë to huddle close by my side. We leave our offerings—mine is the blue-glazed figure of a hedgehog—and descend the stairs. Our bearers are waiting to carry us in our chairs to the royal boat, which is anchored in Lake Mareotis, south of the ancient city walls.
    When my sisters and I were still young children, Father gave us each a boat just large enough to carry a princess and a smallentourage of servants and oarsmen. I have sailed on these calm lake waters many times on my own little boat. But this is the first time I or any of my sisters have been a passenger on the king’s vessel.
    The king’s royal boat is an awesome sight, built of rare cypress and cedar brought here from Lebanon. It is some two hundred cubits long and thirty cubits wide—a cubit being the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger—and gilded from end to end. It will take me days to explore it all.
    The king’s boat lacks nothing. A palace built on the smooth wooden deck has an open area sheltered from the sun by striped awnings. The dining hall, its walls hung with crimson silk and its floors tiled with polished stone, is large enough to seat about two hundred guests. Trees and flowering gardens line the paved walkways, and bright-colored fishes dart about a reflecting pool. There are shrines to the great goddess Isis and to Father’s favorite deity, Dionysus. Each of us has our own large apartment with quarters for our servants. My trunks of clothes and jewels are already in place. Demetrius and the other tutors who accompany us share quarters. Father says we must continue our studies, though I am sure my sisters will avoid it if they possibly can.
    Dozens of luxurious small boats decorated with pennants and flowers are fitted out to carry the noblemen and their wives. Cooks and servants and the musicians and dancers who will entertain us travel on smaller, crowded boats. Barges manned by oarsmen will tow the royal boat through the canals and pull it when the winds are not strong enough to drive it upstream against the current.
    The oarsmen bend their backs to the rhythm of a muffled drumbeat. The boats cross the lake and enter a canal leadingto the Canopus, the most western of the seven branches of the Nile that stretch like fingers northward toward the sea. Soon we are in the great swampy river delta, where men are cutting down tall, feathery papyrus reeds and loading them onto rafts. Wading birds stalk through the reeds on thin, naked legs. Geese and ducks rise into the air on a whirr of wings, and boys propel little papyrus boats through the shallow water with long poles and shoot at the water fowl with bows and arrows. Crocodiles with dark bronze backs glide by, only their green eyes glowing above the surface.
    Arsinoë, watching with me, shudders. “I’m afraid of them,” she says, pointing at the crocodiles, and I put my arm around her shoulders to comfort her. She seems so young and innocent, lacking our older sisters’ hard outer shell and inner selfishness and pride.
    Then Demetrius summons me to my studies. “You must not waste your time simply gazing at the scenery, Cleopatra,” he says. “We