Kleopatra by Karen Essex Page B

Virtue?”
    “Does your royal and Immortal Soul have the will and desire?”
    “It does, Demetrius. I know it does. I shall remember Knowledge and thereby gain Virtue.” She closed her eyes tight, attempting
     to recall the lost Knowledge of the Soul, but all she could hear was the sharp chirping of a sparrow. “I am getting nothing
     just yet,” she said slyly. “But it will come.”
    “I believe it will require some time and meditation, Your Highness,” said Demetrius. “The wings of wisdom are not necessarily
     swift.”
    “That’s enough for today.” Kleopatra looked up at the clear, cloudless sky. “How I wish I could go for a ride.”
    “Your Highness, sometimes you seem utterly dedicated to your lessons, but at other times you are entirely distracted.” Demetrius
     put his hands on his hips to demonstrate his displeasure.
    “I am dedicated to my lessons, Demetrius, but I do suffer from a strange condition.”
    “What is that?” The philosopher looked skeptically at the girl.
    “Knowledge arouses something in me that I cannot name.” She had noticed this disconcerting feeling and did not know what to
     do about it. She only knew that these days, when ideas coalesced in her mind, she could no longer just sit and contemplate.
     She felt something that was either excitement or anxiety or both, and only physical exertion would rid her of the feeling.
     “It makes me want to get up and go somewhere or do something.”
    “What do you mean?” asked the philosopher. “You must not run away from Knowledge. You will never have an extended thought
     if every time you learn something new you have to run to the stables.”
    “Remember yesterday, after we finished reading Sophocles’ play
Philoctetes
?”
    “Yes. Not two minutes after you read the last line, you were out of the library and begging your father to let you go riding.
     Impatience is intellectual suicide!”
    “Well, I was just so elated that everything turned out for the best, that Philoctetes did not have to spend the rest of his
     life in pain and alone on that island, that I just wanted to celebrate with a gallop in the fields.”
    “I do not follow your logic,” said Demetrius.
    “I felt a spirit rise up inside me. And I just had to get it all out.” How to explain to this austere person the exuberance
     she contained within her small body? How to explain to him—pale skin, brittle bones, all mind—that as much as she loved her
     studies, she also loved the freedom of the outdoors, and was always torn between the two? That in these long days of confinement
     inside the palace walls, she was bursting to get away?
    “I am not in control of myself at these times,” she said, face flushed. “I was entirely out of sorts with the grim atmosphere
     in that room. I had to escape. I wanted my pony.”
    “Perhaps you would prefer that we study the great poets at the stables?”
    “You do not understand, Demetrius, for you are like Charmion. You are all mental faculties.”
    “I suppose it is bred into the blood,” sighed the philosopher. “Here, let us sit on the bench and rest ourselves.” He waited
     for Kleopatra to sit down on the knobby cypress bench and then lowered himself slowly to sit beside her.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The women of your family have always been obsessed with horses. At the Olympic games two hundred years ago, the queen of
     Egypt annoyed all the other horse tamers with her superior steeds. She and her sisters were the great equestrians of their
     day—much to the chagrin of the Spartans, who tried to have them eliminated from the contests.”
    “You sound like Meleager, obsessed with Ptolemaic history,” she said. “How do you know these things?”
    “Because I am a scholar, which I suspect you shall never be. Pity, too, for you certainly have the mind for it. The spirit,
     though, is rebellious.”
    “You insult me, Demetrius. I wish to be a scholar.”
    Demetrius cracked a wry smile. “A noble