Pharaoh Read Online Free Page A

ever be, she held his
     elbow and led him out of the room as if he were blind.
    Kleopatra let out a sigh and fell back on her pillow, grateful to have awakened in her own bed, no matter what the circumstances,
     after two years of exile. She had not slept, really slept, in months, and even last night, she and Caesar were awake almost
     until dawn negotiating and making love. Fortunately, her energy for both of those activities was of the torrential sort. She
     had had years of practice for the former, both in her father’s government and in exile where resources were limited. The latter,
     she was accustomed to with a man half Caesar’s age, so that the passions of this older man, so distant, so polite, hardly
     troubled her at all. She thought of Archimedes-cousin, lover, comrade-still in exile, of his eyes as deep and dark as Nile
     silt, of his strong square shoulders, of the way he lost himself in a private frenzy after he had done with pleasing her,
     of the way his cries while making love seemed like prayers to some taunting goddess, and she ached with her betrayal. But
     what choice did she have? For here was Julius Caesar, undisputed Master of the World, who had made it safe for her to be in
     this room once more, where the sounds and smells of the sea rolled into her window. How many times had she wondered if she
     would ever set foot upon Egyptian soil again, much less sleep in her own goosedown bed? She had made a coldblooded choice,
     but she had made the correct one
. In matters of state, let your blood run cold.
Her most trusted adviser, Hephaestion, whom she had left back in the Sinai with Archimedes, had drilled those words into
     her head for so many years now that she chanted them to herself day and night. She must have no regrets.
    Caesar looked older this morning. The wine they had drunk last night in their orgy of conversation had blurred the lines around
     his mouth and eyes and the brown spots that covered his skin like tiny mushrooms. Archimedes would have been on top of her
     as soon as the last soldier had left the room, and she waited for what she assumed all men needed to do upon awakening, but
     Caesar merely yawned, stretching his arms in the direction of his toes, and groaning when he could not quite reach them. He seemed extraordinarily slim
     and fit underneath his aged skin, she had to admit. Not one ounce of fat marred his taut, lean physique. He had a narrow Roman
     nose and an elegant and knowing face, not handsome, fringed by his thinning brown hair. The frown lines at his mouth and the
     deep crevice under his lower lip formed a severe triangle. His ears were aristocratic and small, just as his fingers and toes
     were aristocratic and long. It was a well-proportioned face sitting upon a youthful neck that had yet to fall into jowl.
    “What a fine, long neck you have,” she said to him.
    “Like Venus,” he answered, nonchalant, and she smiled, remembering that Caesar claimed direct descent from that goddess. “We’ve
     all got it in the family.
    “And you,” he said, stroking her face. “The gods grace the faces of the young with morning dew. It won’t be so when you’re
     old like me.”
    Kleopatra accepted this with a smile while she assessed the new order of things. She was no longer in exile, waiting for the
     right moment to attack her brother’s army. She was again the queen of Egypt. Caesar had overwhelmingly defeated Pompey and
     the Roman senate, thus making him the most powerful man in the world. And Caesar was now her benefactor and lover.
    Yet she did not know whether her country was in fact occupied or not. Caesar acted like a guest who had made himself overly
     comfortable, rather than as a hostile commander who had entered the city with his standard raised, immediately engaging in
     a skirmish with the Alexandrian army. Kleopatra did not care what version Caesar put forth of the story. She believed he had
     entered her city with the intention of taking it. He