Lily of the Nile Read online

  For my part, I pretended that I didn’t loathe the man I was to marry. I smiled at senators. I waved to children and merchants. All the while, my eyes searched the crowd for Helios. Would I glimpse his golden curls beneath a farmer’s hat? Would I see Euphronius first, sun gleaming off his bald head? I looked past braying mules with packs on their backs and searched the faces of young men gathered by the cisterns. I squinted in the sunlight, past the glitter of coins being exchanged, but I didn’t see Helios.

  We left Julia and Marcellus to their admirers, for the new King of Mauretania and I still had work to do. “Selene, can’t you enjoy this day with me?” Juba asked as we passed the rostra which the emperor had adorned with the battle rams of my mother’s defeated ships. “We’re friends at least, aren’t we?”

  “We were friends,” I said, a wisp of my hair escaping and lifting on the breeze. “That was before I learned that you’re a traitor, and a liar.”

  “I never lied to you—”

  “Yes, you did. You told me that you watched your own father die, but you can’t have remembered that. I’ve studied my history. You were too young. If I weren’t such a fool, I’d have realized it sooner.”

  Juba looked pained. “Selene, I only wanted to win your trust. To make you feel less alone. Besides, I have heard the story of my father’s death told so many times I feel as if I do remember it. I’ve always been your friend. What can I do to prove that to you?”

  I thought about this earnestly, and then lifted my eyes to answer. “You can swear by Isis you’ll never help the emperor to hurt Helios or my family or Egypt.”

  Juba stared into the blue sky but didn’t swear. “Can’t we get past this?”

  A tavern keeper toasted us in the street outside his shop, and I forced a tight smile. When I spoke to Juba, my teeth remained clenched. “Can we get past the fact that my parents and two of my brothers are dead because of you? I don’t think so.”

  “Not because of me,” Juba protested. “It was the emperor’s war, Agrippa’s war, your parents’ war—not mine. How can you hold me responsible?”

  “Because the emperor, for all his vileness, is convinced he fought for family and country. What’s more, it may be said for Agrippa that he at least met my father in open battle. But you’re no Roman and you did your part in the shadows, with bribes and lies.”

  Juba’s public face was slipping. “If I’m a traitor because I sided with the Romans, what does that make your mother when she fought beside Julius Caesar?”

  “Are you comparing yourself to my mother?” I laughed. “Did you roll yourself out at his feet before your Caesar took you to bed?”

  Juba blanched. I knew he would. His Roman dignity couldn’t withstand the taunt. His footsteps stopped, there beneath the shadow of some unsightly brick building, in the middle of the street. He trembled with anger. “Selene, you go too far—”

  “Oh, Juba, you mustn’t scowl,” I singsonged, holding fast to his arm. “Aren’t we to be seen as the happy couple? If I must endure it, so must you.”

  Juba worked his jaw. “I suppose I shall just have to be grateful that the people aren’t rioting.”

  Our wedding announcement had taken attention off my missing brother and helped give the impression that the emperor meant my mother’s children no harm—in fact, it gave the impression that he meant to glorify us. It also meant that the emperor was playing one Ptolemy sibling off the other, just as the Romans had done in my mother’s time. In the end, my mother’s brother ended up drowned by Roman soldiers, and she in Caesar’s bed.

  That wasn’t a fate I relished for Helios or for myself.

  MY heart soared as the temple came into sight on the Campus Martius. Bright red, blue, and yellow pillars were a welcoming balm to my weary spirit—a speck of color in a more drab Roman world. Though the Senate had desecrated, destroyed, and banned Isiac temples before, my father promised to bring Isis back to Rome because the people demanded it. Now here she was, waiting for me.

  Roman temples opened to the street, but the Temple of Isis was a quiet sanctuary for the faithful. A walled-in garden surrounded the temple, and from it I could smell magic. I could feel the heka, as if it hummed from every fuchsia acanthus flower I passed. So bright and silvery were the multitudes of lamps and candles that warmed the sanctum, the temple interior shone like the full moon at midnight. A reflecting pool glistened green as only the water of the Nile could—or was it a trick of the mosaic stones beneath?

  Here the public gathered to view the statue of the goddess, rising in stone before us. I went soft to see her, my heart squeezing with unexpected joy.

  Oh, Isis!

  For so long I’d been away from her, from her mercy, and here she was seated, her carved gown tied in the mystical tiet knot between her breasts. Horus, the divine child, was suckling. For a moment, I forgot Juba and I forgot Rome, transfixed by the serenity of Isis’s face. The features weren’t my mother’s, yet I could feel my mother’s presence here, as if she’d just walked past me and the air was still tinged with her perfume.

  In a chamber to the right of her statue, sacred crocodiles lay side by side at the end of their chains and the public steered clear of their dangerous jaws. I looked into their cold reptilian eyes and still found warmth. They, like me, were so far away from home.

  “Selene, remember why we’re here,” Juba told me, guiding me by the arm. The emperor had made clear what was expected of me. I was to undo the damage Helios had inflicted by raising the hopes of the rebellious against the emperor’s reign.

  Turning to the crowd, Juba announced, “I present to you Cleopatra Selene of House Ptolemy.”

  Priests and priestesses dropped to their knees before me and some of the commoner citizens too. “Sacred twin,” they whispered, but I stood before them a living being, of flesh, close enough to touch and without my other half.

  “Daughter of Isis,” one priestess said reverently. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  These were the Isiacs that the emperor so loathed and feared—these holy people? With Juba watching, I knew I must be careful with my every gesture. “Please, rise. I’m honored the emperor has seen fit to allow me to come. He’s a great man of much wisdom and he wished for me to spend time with the worshippers of Isis and share the news of my good fortune.”

  “You consider your fate good fortune, my lady?”

  Everyone strained to listen for my answer; they seemed hungry for everything I had to say. It felt wrong to tell them half truths, but what choice did I have? “It’s good fortune for me and good fortune for those who love Isis that I’m to be wed to Gaius Julius Juba, soon to be King of Numidia and Mauretania.”

  I forced a smile and the artifice ached inside me.

  “You’ll be King and Queen Consort of Mauretania but not of Egypt?” the priest asked.

  The Isiacs understood the twining of religion and politics. My throne was deeply relevant to them and even everyday worshippers gathered around me to listen. “No, not Egypt.” In a sudden flash of inspiration I added, “But in Mauretania, we’ll build the greatest Iseum the world has ever known! A new harbor, a new world to let Isis be a throne once more, to give her a home where her worshippers may find safe harbor.”

  This was only a dream or a lie—which, I couldn’t tell. Given the way Juba stared at me, a hint of warning behind his eyes, I knew he’d never let me do such a thing, but he dared not interrupt me now. Not when they were listening with rapt attention. Not when I’d captured their imaginations. This was the moment. “But to do all this, to honor Isis, I’ll need my twin brother, Helios, by my side.”

  “So it says in the prophecies,” someone whispered.

  I spoke quickly. “By now, you must have heard that Helios ran away from the emperor’s home. I worry for him and want him back home with his family, under the emperor’s protection. If you’ve seen my brother—any of you—I beg that you ask him to return. I can’t bear to be apart from him. I need him.”

  My thro
at tightened with emotion because that last part of my statement was true. Without Helios, I was desperately adrift and I let them see it in my eyes. If any of them had seen Helios, though, they didn’t reveal it.

  I adjusted the brooch at my shoulder and smoothed down my gown while they absorbed what I’d said. More crowded into the temple to see me with questions on their faces: Could it be true that Octavian, who had denounced Cleopatra, denounced Egypt, denounced Isis—could he possibly allow Cleopatra Selene to renew the faith? I had to convince them. “The emperor has given me leave to join your worship today.”

  “Come, then, for the Lamentations,” the priestess said. “Wash your hands with the tears of Isis, which I bear in this consecrated bowl. As the tears of Isis are sacred to us, know that your tears are also sacred to her. It is Isis who wails for us and we are washed by her tears.”

  The familiar words of ritual came back to me from my childhood as Juba washed his hands in the sacred water. As soon as I dipped my fingertips into the bowl, my amulet warmed at my throat. I saw the Nile as I saw it the day my mother died, green as my twin brother’s eyes. Teeming with life that danced at my fingertips. Something was happening to me and the world seemed like only one stream that fed an ocean in which all things were possible. In which Egypt was ascendant and in ruins. In which Rome was conqueror and conquered. In which Golden Ages died and dawned. It was the hum of heka!

  As I struggled to come back to myself, my fingers dripping with the sacred water, I realized that the priestess was telling the story of Isis. “Once Isis ruled in partnership with her husband and their reign was glorious. But the dark god became jealous of their love. He murdered Osiris, dismembered his body, and scattered the pieces. Isis wandered the world in great sorrow and collected her husband’s remains. Crying each night, searching each day, she walked the world leaving a trail of tears. Let us now walk the Path of Tears.”

  I’d missed the beauty of this ceremony and it made me miss Helios even more.

  “As Isis unbound her hair in her mourning, so we unbind our hair,” the priestess said.

  I unfastened the ribbons that held my hair, and let it spill over my shoulders, braving Juba’s admonishing glance. Then the priest walked past me carrying an urn and he smudged my face with ashes, chanting, “As Isis streaked her face with ashes in her pain and in her weeping, so do we streak our faces and weep with her.”

  I felt raw, naked, exposed. I felt the weight of my heart in my chest and tears sprang to my eyes.

  Juba pulled me toward him. “This emotion is unseemly.”

  I ignored him.

  A priestess took up a chant. “We weep for the poisoned earth that warfare makes unclean.”

  The people repeated the phrase, and like any good Roman, Juba tensed at the mention that war was not glorious. But there was more yet to come that made me understand why Rome, and particularly the emperor, wished to silence the Isiacs.

  I’d been a little girl when last I shared the rites. Now, with new eyes, I realized that our ceremonies weren’t merely spiritual but also profoundly concerned with the political. And profoundly un-Roman.

  “We weep for those who deny that there’s an afterworld in which we’ll all be judged,” the priestess said. “We weep for the greed that breeds humiliation, and poverty, and slavery.”

  This startled even me. The temple was challenging temporal authority based on moral precepts. The temple was calling for a new order between man and the divine, between man and each other.

  “Brother, what do you weep for?” the priestess asked a peasant.

  This too departed sharply from any Roman religion. To have the common masses participate in ritual—so personally—was unheard of. “I weep for my father, lost in a battle in Spain,” was the peasant’s answer.

  “Sister, what do you weep for?” the priestess asked the woman closest to me.

  Her hair was red as copper and her back bore the mark of lashes; she was assuredly a slave, and she said, “I weep for a barren womb.”

  One after another, people confessed their fears, their hurts, their sorrows and regrets. They opened themselves to the judgments of complete strangers, and it humbled me.

  “Sister, what do you weep for?” Now it was my turn. I was sharply aware that every person in the room had offered his or her pain to Isis. They took strength from her. They’d come here with honesty whereas my heart was heavy with guilt. I wanted to weep for so many things, but my weeping would have to wait. Isis, forgive me. I couldn’t even look at the priests when I spoke. “I weep that Helios has fled an honorable and loving home and that people should think the emperor has done him harm.”

  This time, I could see that my words touched the Isiacs and was grateful when the priests handed out blindfolds, so that I could hide. With the linen wrapped around my eyes, I reached out into the darkness, where the faithful Isis gathered the pieces of Osiris’s body and used her heka to restore him, giving him new life. I too embraced the night. My frog amulet wasn’t merely warm at my throat but hot. With one hand I touched it, and thought my silent prayer. Isis, please bring Helios back to me. Without him, I’m so alone.

  I heard a voice in my mind, familiar and terrifying. You are not alone. You are never alone. You are the daughter of Isis.

  AmIatraitor? I wondered.

  You know what you are, the voice said.

  I did know. The words came out of me, clear and bold. “I am the Resurrection.”

  Isis was with me. She was in me. She was everywhere!

  I shouted it. “I AM THE RESURRECTION!”

  Power surged through me. Life force. Heka. It filled me and overflowed. I was like a jug in a waterfall. I’d always thought the frog amulet gave me power, but I knew now that it only amplified what was inside me. It was more like a lever, something to center my magic and intensify its force. Only at the Temple of Isis did I finally understand. Here, where thousands, maybe millions, of worshippers had come to leave their tears as a well of magic for me to draw upon. This is what had been missing since leaving Alexandria. And now that it had returned, I opened myself to carry a message for Isis.

  I felt the stinging fire in my hands, words carving themselves into my flesh. I ripped off the blindfold and held up my fingers. Blood already dripped from them. But I wasn’t surprised this time. Nor would I hide it. My shouts had caused a commotion and people began removing their blindfolds, crying out as hieroglyphics scrolled down my arms.

  Juba grabbed at me, trying to cover my wounds but my blood dripped to the marble floor between us and flowers sprung whole, blossoming like a fortress of petals around me. Someone gasped. The barren slave with the red hair screamed. I turned to her in my fit of ecstasy and put my bleeding hands on her belly. “I am the Resurrection! I put my hands in the Nile and fish dance to life. The dried brown plants become green. The dead snake shimmers to life for me. So too will your womb become fertile!”

  “Savior,” she called me, and wept.

  “Selene,” Juba hissed, daring to pull me from the woman.

  “Let go of me.” I threw off his hand as if it were something putrid with rot.

  Then, before he could reach for me again, I broke away, fleeing toward the shelter of the divine statue. I wasn’t mindful of where I was running, and people screamed, warning of crocodiles.

  In that moment, it seemed better to be eaten by sacred beasts than defiled by Juba. Before she died, my mother warned me that one day crocodiles would be my judge. If my acts were wicked, let them eat my heart. If my heart was light, let it be saved. The largest crocodile rushed toward me, legs splayed widely as it slid its belly along the floor, powerful tail whipping water into the air. I feared it would catch me up in its jaws and tear me to pieces, but when we collided, I fell and the creature dropped before me, resting his head in my lap like the most docile dog.

  “No, Selene!” Juba cried.

  I paid him no heed. The hide of a Nile crocodile is rough and scaled, and the animal in my lap was of a dark oliv
e hue with brown cross bands. I embraced the head of the great beast and leaned over to kiss him, my blood dripping upon his majestic snout. He was a dangerous creature to whom I’d run for safety, and he, in turn, put his trust in me. He sighed, his reptilian eyes closing in bliss while temple-goers stared.

  We were one another’s refuge. Here, we felt safe—the crocodile and I—refugees from Egypt.

  Juba lunged to grab me and the other crocodile rushed him. A snort reverberated through the temple. Flashing teeth snapped and narrowly missed taking off Juba’s arm at the elbow. My betrothed leapt back as the crocodile thrashed at the end of its chain and Juba’s voice rose in pitch. “Selene, come here this instant.”

  “You do not command me,” I said.

  I knew Isis more completely now and I was forever changed.

  “Drag her away from those beasts,” Juba said to the priests and worshippers.

  But none of them obeyed.

  I held my hands aloft to read the twisting hieroglyphics while the barren woman knelt on the marble, weeping. The crowd gathered with eyes glistening and dreamy. Some trembled. Others murmured prayers and clutched hands. As I looked upon their faces, I knew that I’d unleashed something more powerful than myself.

  I was the Resurrection.

  Like Isis, I would gather every piece of my parents’ legacy. I would collect their family, their beliefs and ambitions, their faith, and foster them in the swamp of my heart.

  “Selene, if you don’t come, I’ll call for the praetorians,” Juba threatened.

  Yes, he would do such a horrible thing. He would bring soldiers into this holy sanctuary, and being Romans, they would kill the crocodiles. For once, I didn’t fear the Roman soldiers, but neither would I allow them to desecrate this place, so I rose and walked toward Juba, eyes afire.

  The crowd parted as I stepped over the crimson flowers born of my blood, and Juba took a step back. The magic in me was powerful; even he could sense it. Pain burned through my arms and blood dripped off my fingertips as I stood before him like a gladiatrix. I wasn’t helpless, not this time. I had only a few words for him, and they were: “I have a message for the emperor.”