Ptolemaic Mauryan

Copyright © 2010-2021 Paula Gonzaga de Sa

Chapter 1

‘Meli!’

The familiar reedy voice followed her as she trod the inner halls of the Palace of the Ptolemies on her way to her apartments, with the prospect of refreshing eatables and pleasant exercise awaiting her, after a full day spent in the Royal Archives. Its unwelcome intrusion reiterated in her mind the oft-rehearsed conviction that, delightful home as the Palace might be for her, the Ptolemies – past and especially present – who populated it were all irredeemably gross. And that conviction had been strongly formed, from her being, to her inexhaustible displeasure, very closely related to them all.

‘Meli! Meli!’

The source of this call was only the latest whelp in this uninterrupted line of grossness: her half-brother, Pharaoh of Egypt, King Ptolemy the Manifest and Beneficent Divinity, fifth of his name since the time of the all-conquering Alexander. Which all sounded very grand, whereas in fact His Obnoxious Exaltedness was an annoying fourteen-year-old boy with a tendency to chubbiness which no amount of tedious weaponry practice had yet cured; with the lamentably long nose and pointy chin typical of Ptolemaic dynasts; and, to her certain first-hand knowledge, no grasp whatsoever of even the basic tenets of the analytics, natural philosophy and geography, which the founder of the dynasty, as Companion to Alexander, had had the honour to imbibe from the great Aristotle himself.

‘Meeellliiii!’

The clapping of his sandals on the stone floor told her that he was running up directly behind her. Such unseemly haste could have been thought undignified in a ruling Pharaoh, but this particular Ptolemy was, so far, a King in name only. A succession of regents had carried out the actual ruling and in this, the eighth year of his reign, the latest and longest-lasting of them, Aristomenes the former captain of the King’s Guard, was the one truly in charge. She turned towards her brother as he came to a halt with a last clatter of his soles, whilst the obligatory handful of bodyguards appeared, more sedately, at a respectful distance. She levelled her gaze at him with as much disinterest as she could arraign, as he stood catching his breath after his spurt.

The eyes, though. She could not deny that the one striking feature on this otherwise underwhelming face were his eyes; and those, he had inherited directly from their father, and he from his forefathers, all the way back to the General. They were an unusually pale green, and she remembered Queen Arsinoe, her aunt and mother to this half-brother, declaring that she had it on family authority that the Ptolemy eyes were the colour of the mountain streams in northern Macedonia as they came down from the winter snows.

Her own colouring was nothing like that. Her mother’s family did not have an ounce of either Greek or Macedonian blood in them. They were old Egyptian nobility, who had become courtiers to the Persian satraps before the Ptolemies, and that heritage showed in her thick black hair, in skin the muddy shade of the Nile in flood, and eyes the rich dark brown of date syrup. When in the full glare of the Egyptian sun, however, those dark eyes streaked with gold; and at such times her nurse, who was a slave from Crete, used to say that they were like the mountain honey from her homeland. And that was how she had picked up the nickname that her brother was shouting so freely in his halls.

‘Why didn’t you answer me?’

She could tell that he was not really cross with her. There was an animation in the eyes she had been locked on, which must be the effect of some happy event he wanted to share with her, and which she immediately became, for that very reason, even less interested in hearing about. He was, generally, rather a pain; and after what she had endured from his fifth to his twelfth year, as the assigned helpmate for his studies, she was sure she would fare the better, the less she had to do with him. And yet humouring him was an unfortunate necessity. Any privilege she might want to lay claim to, would be ultimately in his power to dispense; and it had been only on his special permission that she had been admitted to the Royal Archives at all. She therefore checked the tart reply forming behind her teeth, and settled for sauciness instead.

‘I will answer to my proper name.’

‘Very well,’ he said, pulling himself straighter, in hopeless oblivion of her archness, ‘from Ptolemy King to the Lady Bastmehyt, daughter of Ptolemy the Father-Loving Divinity, hail! I have news.’

‘Is it urgent news? I’m hungry and Nedjem is waiting for me.’ And she turned round and resumed the trod towards her apartments, Ptolemy falling in with her steps.

‘It’s exciting news! A ship has come into harbour carrying my governor in Cyprus, Polycrates of Argos, and I’ve been told he has asked to meet all my senior officials.’

‘All of them? Wouldn’t it be enough for him to meet the regent?’

‘Of course not, silly. He means to meet all of them except the regent, because obviously he’s come to push him out.’

This was indeed a bit of news, which surprised her. The surprise was not that the governor of Cyprus, the most important Ptolemaic possession aside from Lower Egypt itself, would plot against the regent; there had been many such upheavals in this reign, and Aristomenes himself had ousted his predecessor in similar fashion; but he had been in office long enough now, for her to forget to think of how suddenly the arrangement could become impermanent. ‘Would he be able to do it? That easily?’

‘Oh yes. The war with the Seleucids has been going pretty badly against us, so Aristomenes has lost all support in the court.’

That, she sighed, was a disadvantage of her locking herself away in the Royal Archives. She knew a whole lot about the dynasty’s past, but not that much of what was going on in the realm at present. The Seleucids were, like the Ptolemies, descendants of another of Alexander’s Companions, and the jostling for territory and supremacy between the two near neighbours had gone on for as long as they had both existed. She had seen the letters exchanged with their current King, Antiochus the third of his name, on his coming to the throne around the same time as her father; and she had read the series of despatches leading up to the start of this latest conflict, shortly after her own brother’s accession. Yet of these recent reverses, she was utterly ignorant.

‘But what is it to you? One regent or the other, surely it’s all the same?’

‘It might be different this time. I’ve been told Polycrates wants to discuss a new role for me.’

That was what his excitement was about, then. As for her, she could not decide whether this new development would be desirable, or not. Entrusting her brother with any responsibility whatsoever she could not conceive of ever producing a sensible outcome; she was sufficiently familiar with all the deficient traits of his, observable in their education together, to consider the exercise of intellect on his part in the governing of his affairs, let alone those of his kingdom, an impossibility. But perhaps a more apt question was on the probability of anything actually happening as he was expecting.

‘You’ve been told, you said … By whom, exactly?’

He smirked. ‘I have my sources.’

‘Yes, and they are … ?’

‘What would you give to persuade me to tell you?’

They had reached the doors to her apartments, and the end of her willingness to entertain him. The wish to be alone to enjoy what would be waiting inside easily overrode any lingering curiosity.

‘Fine, I can’t be bothered with your sources. I’m hungry, and after eating and changing I’ll want exercise, not chatter. So go do your deed with Polycrates, and when I’m at leisure again, then you can tell me all about it.’

He was checked, and not well pleased with this dismissal. He must have been hoping, she guessed, that she would think his information valuable enough to merit further, presumably lengthy, discussion in the privacy of her apartments. He had not been admitted inside since the death of her mother, and if she had had a choice in the matter, would not have graced it even before then. The darkening of her brother’s brows was soon enough followed by this forceful declaration:

‘This is my Palace, and all the women in the Palace are my women.’

‘That I might acknowledge when I see you with the Double Crown on your head. Until then, you know what’s what.’

She went in and closed the door behind her without any apprehension of his following, or imposing himself on her. The upside of the seven years of enforced companionship for his education, and of the collection of bruises on her body which she had had to subject to in his weaponry training, was in making his mind, when it really mattered, fairly bendable to hers. She had taken over these apartments immediately after her mother’s death, when she was thirteen, with an authority which he had never doubted, although deriving solely from her own assertion of it; and established the principle of the inviolability of her abode, except by express invitation, so firmly to the then ten-year-old King, that he had never questioned it since.

And what comfortable apartments they were. Her father had been keen enough to take on the traditional attributes of Pharaoh of Egypt as to marry his own sister and make her his Queen, and distribute a half-dozen of his Greek and Macedonian favourites, such as the mother of Sosobius and the sister of Agathocles, around the women’s quarters; and had topped it off with installing her mother in these rooms in the role of minor consort, pleased with the added gloss which the Lady Isitnofret’s native aristocratic ancestry laid on the Egyptian credentials of his court. Her mother had decorated them with a luxuriance of Nile Valley appurtenances as would not have shamed the Thebes halls of the Great Rameses, and apart from the obvious minor alterations on coming into possession of them – such as removing herself from the nursery to what her been her mother’s room, and converting the former into her personal library and study room – the apartments had remained as the Lady Isitnofret had made them.

She bowed to the altar on the east wall, where the tutelary deities for her mother and herself, Isis the Throne-Crowned and Bast the Cat-Faced, were installed, and clapped to announce her presence. The sight she was really impatient to see emerged directly from the servants’ work rooms: Nedjem, her Nubian beauty, lithe and fluid of movement, with platters of sweetmeats in both her hands, ready to be deposited on the low table before her. The Nubian, in anticipation of their dancing together later that evening, was clad only in her lustrous black skin and the barest of loincloths. She smiled at her mistress with dazzling white teeth resting lightly over her full lower lip. Bastmehyt smiled back and quickly walked up to her, encircling her waist with her arms.

‘You’ll make me drop your food, Meryt.’

What a difference a nickname could make, Bastmehyt mused for the umpteenth time, rolling off a different tongue! Greek was the language of the Ptolemaic court, whereas Egyptian was the vernacular of her mother’s apartments; and all that was irksome in Ptolemy’s abuse of the Greek word for “honey” became sweetness in the Nubian’s mispronunciation of her name into the Egyptian for “beloved”. She moved in closer with no fear for the platters, trusting the perfect balance of the dancer, and started brushing the Nubian’s neck with the tip of her nose, making her giggle, ‘… Meryt!’

She warded off any more protests, whispering into the hollow of the black throat, ‘Be still, and let me have my way.’

She reached up and kissed the Nubian’s fleshy lips, softly, insistently, breathily, until she could feel the brush of bare breasts against hers through the thin linen of her dress, and her groin pushed tight against the folds of the dancer’s loincloth. These were the moments which had always, always, always made long dreary days melt away, and banished Ptolemy and his gripes to the furthest edges of the goddess Nut’s star-sprinkled fingertips.

Moments with Nedjem. Her slave, her dance mistress since she was twelve, and her lover since she was fourteen.

Chapter 2

In the end Ptolemy was right, but even he could not guess how right. Within a few days of his arrival, Polycrates had met with the most influential courtiers, and it emerged that what he proposed was nothing less than having the young King assume the reins of power himself. Since this would do away with the post of regent, it would accomplish the courtiers’ aim of getting shod of the unpopular Aristomenes; and since a grateful King could not but reward such a loyal servant with the most important post in the new administration – something which Ptolemy gleefully admitted to Bastmehyt he, himself, thought of as only natural – it would also answer to Polycrates’s ambitions. This proposal had been swiftly bruited about the capital, the populace had been just as speedily roused to roar their approval outside the steps of the Palace, and the disgraced Aristomenes could not but acquiesce to the inevitable.

Polycrates was now busily organising the transition to the new regime. To that end, a formal ceremony was being arranged in Alexandria for the public declaration of the King’s coming of age, as Greek and Macedonian tradition dictated, and preparations were begun for his coronation as Pharaoh. This was to be carried out by the priests of the ancient and holy city of Memphis, in keeping with the Egyptian rites, as soon as practicable after the King’s majority.

These developments, so significantly beyond even Ptolemy’s expectations, had inflamed his excitement to levels unsuspected to his sister until then; and as she was the only relative whom he could trust for pouring out his growing exhilaration to, Bastmehyt had to put up with his hovering around her vastly more than usual. This was distracting in the extreme for her, because she found herself less able to push him away. She had been used to manoeuvring Ptolemy tolerably well within the little scope of what he had been allowed to do by his regents, but now he was acquiring much greater consequence. Once his coming of age proclaimed, he would be effectively ruling the land, and Polycrates seemed intent enough on giving flesh to a King whose duties beforehand had been entirely air. Ptolemy’s instatement as Pharaoh by the priests in Memphis, too, would be a powerful milestone for his native subjects; and more specifically, to her, a serious trumpet call to consider her position; the sight of the Double Crown on her brother’s head, which she had previously thought as distant a possibility as his fulfilling Alexander’s vow of sailing on the River Ocean, was drawing realistically near.

Unlike her brother, she was only half of royal blood, and neither her mother nor herself had ever been given a royal title. Yet she was a daughter of Pharaoh, and by an Egyptian noblewoman; and despite his recent boast, Ptolemy did not have that many other females at his disposal in the Palace.

Most of the older members of the royal family had been driven away or disposed of at the start of their father’s reign. Their father and Ptolemy’s mother had died – court gossip whispered, as it unavoidably would, that they had both been murdered – within a short interval of each other, and their father’s Greek and Macedonian favourites had become the proverbial casualties in the successive regents’ struggle for power. At the time, her mother’s Egyptian descent and absence of royal status had made her unremarkable enough to avoid being caught up in the bloodbath. On this next round, however, Bastmehyt was groped by a growing, perplexing uncertainty as to whether the reckoning would come to her, or not; and by a real and more worrisome anxiety, in relation to Ptolemy, on being safer in, or out of his royal circle.

. . . TO BE CONTINUED.