Lily of the Nile Read online

  Philadelphus skittered behind me for protection while Helios held his unlit torch like a club to ward off the barrel-chested Roman who stood in the doorway wearing a carved Roman helmet with a general’s crest. The stranger also wore the familiar armor of a Roman soldier, but the weathered lines of his face made him even more intimidating. When he spoke, it was in accented Greek. “So, you’re the bastard whelps of Antony?”

  Helios gasped. “How dare you?”

  With one mighty swing of his fist, the Roman struck Helios on the side of the head, knocking him to the floor and sending his torch skimming across the marble. Rough hands had never been laid upon us, and now I was more angry than frightened. “By what right do you strike my brother?” I demanded to know. “He’s King Alexander Helios of Armenia, Media, and Parthia. Have you no respect for kings?”

  “Rome has little respect for kings,” the Roman answered. “And I respect them even less.”

  By now, Helios had scrambled to his feet. The beaded belt of his tunic was askew and his golden vulture amulet swung wildly. Where the stranger had struck him, his face, neck and ear were red, but he schooled his fair features to a royal demeanor nonetheless. “It was my father, a triumvir of Rome, who made me a king.”

  “He had no right,” the stranger replied. “Your so-called kingdom Parthia isn’t even yet conquered. We should send you there and see if you can hold it, you treacherous boy.”

  Helios glared. “What treachery do you speak of, Octavian?”

  “Octavian?” The man laughed deep from his belly. “Did you think he would stoop to question the children of that woman? I’m Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.”

  I knew this name. Agrippa had defeated my father at the naval battle of Actium and was Rome’s most able fighter. Philadelphus must have recognized Agrippa’s name too, for he tightened his grip on my skirt until I thought it would tear. Meanwhile, Agrippa folded his meaty arms, stepping closer to Helios. “Besides, when you meet your new master, you’ll address him not as Octavian but as Caesar.”

  Helios said what my mother would have. “Octavian has no right to the name Caesar. My brother, the Most Divine, King Ptolemy Caesarion, is Julius Caesar’s only son.”

  “Boy,” Agrippa began. “You’re in no position to talk of rights or quibble about titles. Caesar promised your mother that he’d torture and kill you if she took her own life. It’ll only be Caesar’s clemency that saves you now, so I suggest you call him whatever he likes.”

  “I’ll use his title if he uses mine,” Helios replied, his hubris owing as much to our upbringing as to the fact he was still a boy. He was rewarded for that hubris with a slap that brought blood to his mouth. Helios swung back at the giant but missed. Then Agrippa grabbed Helios by his golden hair and seemed ready to beat him in earnest.

  “Please don’t hurt my brother!” Philadelphus cried.

  I had to do something, but what? “Lord Agrippa!” I shouted. Though my hands trembled, I clutched the amulet my mother had given me and adopted my most adult voice. “You’ve introduced yourself. Permit me to do the same. I’m Cleopatra Selene, Queen of Cyrenaica.”

  “Girl, I didn’t address you.” The Roman clenched his fist, ready to strike Helios.

  I hid my shaking hands. “Nonetheless, you’re a guest in our royal palace, and I insist that you behave like one.”

  Agrippa peered at me from beneath the crest of his helmet, then released Helios with a shove. “How old are you?”

  “Nearly eleven,” I said.

  “You don’t speak like a child.”

  “I speak like a queen.” Or so I hoped. “How can We help you, Lord Agrippa?”

  I had used the royal We and the brute of a man seemed disarmed. “You can tell me how your mother managed to cheat Rome of seeing her dragged through the streets in chains. We know you were with her before she died. Who helped her?”

  I did, I thought, and my knees went weak with fear.

  Several Roman guards crowded near the doorway. They didn’t enter but seemed to pay close attention to what was said behind their veneer of professional disinterest. But I didn’t answer Agrippa’s question. I couldn’t answer.

  As if to coax me, Agrippa said, “Caesar allowed your father an honorable burial and Queen Cleopatra promised not to kill herself. She broke her bargain. So who helped her? How did she do it? Was it poison?”

  My heart thumped dully in my chest but I tried not to react. Philadelphus peeked at me, but I dared not meet his eyes. Helios and I stood like statues, a conspiracy of silence between us.

  Agrippa removed his polished helmet, tucking it under one arm. Its gleam reflected a distorted image of my silent green eyes back at me. “We already have Euphronius in custody. It was the old warlock that brought her poison, wasn’t it?”

  I envisioned our frail old wizard chained in the jail, and I shuddered. Still, if they were questioning us about Euphronius’s guilt, they must doubt it. So we still said nothing.

  A light breeze rustled the netting over my mother’s bed.

  A soldier coughed in the hall.

  An oil lamp flickered.

  “Don’t you want to prove your worth to Caesar now?” Agrippa asked. “Your mother’s deception does her no honor.”

  But the fact she’d deceived the enemy inspired me. With my eyes, I motioned toward the cosmetics on my mother’s dressing table. “My mother wouldn’t need Euphronius to bring poison to her. We keep it everywhere.”

  Agrippa glanced over at the colorful bottles then back at us, horrified. Motioning to a soldier behind him, he said, “Get rid of that. Dump it in the Nile and let the Egyptians drink Cleopatra’s venom.”

  The soldiers collected each harmless vial as if it contained a monster that might be unleashed with the cork. Their fear and loathing of poisons, potions, and magic was evident to me even then. If only I’d known how to use it against them. “So, your mother did die of poison?” Agrippa pressed.

  I wasn’t sure why it was important how my mother died, but the fact the Romans wanted to know meant that they shouldn’t find out. I resolved to give nothing away, but Helios said, “She died by snakebite, which made her immortal. You can’t hurt her now.”

  I wanted desperately to throttle him. Throughout our childhood, my twin’s compulsive truth telling had gotten me in trouble, but now the stakes were so much higher. What would the Romans do to me if they found out that I’d delivered the snake to her concealed in a basket of figs?

  Perhaps Agrippa sensed my fear. “Girl, is this true? Did Euphronius bring Cleopatra a serpent?”

  “My mother always had serpents with her,” I said, and prayed my brothers wouldn’t contradict me. “Three cobras adorn her headdress. My mother made them come to life whenever she wished. She said it would bring her to my father. Euphronius is only our tutor—he knows all the tongues, even the holy ones—but he’s not a snake handler or a poisoner.”

  I said the last in Latin, because it seemed very important that the Roman understand me, and Agrippa blinked in surprise. Had he expected us to be unschooled barbarians? I was the daughter of a Roman triumvir; I spoke Greek, Latin, and many other languages.

  “So, your story is that Cleopatra made a snake magically appear from her headdress and used it to end her life?”

  “Yes,” I said with conviction.

  After all, Egypt was famed for snake magic. My mother had been a powerful magician and I’d seen her turn staves into snakes for our amusement. But when it came time to die, she’d had me bring her the serpent. If the Romans found that out, would they kill me too?

  “It would have taken two cobras to kill her and her handmaidens together …” Agrippa’s face seemed unbearably close to my own. His Roman breath was like vinegar.

  “It was two, then,” I said, remembering the coiling motion in the unbearably heavy basket. I doubted I could have carried two and the figs besides, but perhaps they had been small. Or magical. Or young. Perhaps there had been two. Perhaps the snakes had been lovers,
or siblings, or twins. I dared not look at mine.

  Agrippa sneered at me. “When I have the old warlock crucified and he screams a different tale, do you think I won’t return to make an end to your miserable, spoiled little lives?”

  I felt dizzy because I knew crucifixion was a terrible death that the Romans used to prolong suffering. “Please don’t hurt Euphronius. He is just an old man!”

  “He’s a magician and a priest of Isis,” Agrippa growled. “The Isiac priesthood is nothing but a den of witches, warlocks, and whores. Curse the day a soldier like Antony fell into their clutches.” At the mention of my father, Agrippa’s features twisted with sadness and regret. It took him a moment to recover, and when he did, he changed the subject entirely. “Where is Caesarion?”

  At last, Helios and I exchanged glances. This question was unexpected and we both knew what it meant. If the Romans didn’t know where Caesarion was, my oldest brother had escaped, after all. My heart soared with hope.

  “The King of Egypt is in exile,” Helios said.

  “In exile where?” Agrippa asked.

  “We don’t know where,” I replied. For that much was true. But wherever he was, Caesarion would raise an army to rescue us. Men would rally to him in the name of his dead father, Julius Caesar—the real Caesar.

  Agrippa seemed to know it. “Is Caesarion still here in Alexandria? Will you tell me or will I have to burn down every house in the city to find him?”

  The way Agrippa’s face was lined with rage convinced us he was willing to do just that, so I said, “We don’t know where he is. My mother wouldn’t tell us.” And I tried not to betray my smugness. Julius Caesar had been invincible in battle, falling only to the knives of treasonous assassins. Would not the gods shine on his son? Caesarion would save us!

  Agrippa growled. “If you’re lying to me, I’ll see you crucified, royalty or no. Your mother’s last wish was for an honorable funeral and to be interred beside your father. For reasons that escape me, my lord has granted her request. Were it up to me, I’d dump her body in the Nile for the crocodiles and you children along with her.”

  Just then, Agrippa’s eyes drifted to the far wall where a banner hung beside my mother’s bed. Upon that banner was emblazoned our Ptolemy family motto: Win or Die.

  I had been looking in the wrong place for a note from my mother. It was not amongst her papers but here, on the wall, a message for her enemies, and for her children both. Beneath it, we stood as regal as my mother expected us to be. Knowing that Caesarion was alive, we stared at Agrippa as if he were contemptible rabble. The gods would smite him as surely as he breathed.

  Helios took my hand, protectively, and I held Philadelphus in my other arm. We stood before the Roman, staring, but silent. We were Ptolemies.

  “You’re unnatural,” Agrippa said. With that, the admiral slammed out of my mother’s chambers leaving behind him wood splinters, blood, and frightened children.

  Three

  FOR seventy days, Octavian held us prisoner in my mother’s chambers while he tightened his stranglehold over an eerily silent Alexandria. And all the while, my brothers and I waited to be liberated. When my mother’s embalming was complete we were finally allowed out of our palace prison to accompany her sarcophagus in the funeral procession. We had hoped to hear the sounds of Caesarion’s army marching upon Alexandria. We had hoped to hear the cheers of the crowds as they flung open their doors and windows to greet their young king. Instead, the city only came alive again to say farewell to my mother. Though it was unseasonably warm, citizens emerged from their hiding places and poured into the blistering streets. Under the pitiless sun, they jostled for shade beneath the palm trees.

  As King of Egypt, it was Caesarion’s duty to bury my mother, but with Caesarion missing, the duty fell to us. My brothers and I were obliged to play the trinity—Isis, Osiris, and Horus—and when the people saw us, they cried, “We love you, children of Isis!”

  Though white-robed priests tried to keep them back, nobles and peasants alike wept and reached out to us. Their faces were marked with grief and fear, but the mourners offered their jewelry and furniture to replace what the Romans had stolen so that my mother wouldn’t enter the afterworld as a pauper.

  While citizens waved from doorways, adding their wails to the haunting music of our national sorrow, my brothers and I walked to the somber notes of panpipes. With Octavian’s Roman soldiers posted on every street corner, it felt as if we mourned not only my mother but Egypt too.

  Our procession passed the Soma where all my ancestors were buried beside the famous sarcophagus of Alexander the Great, but our mother wouldn’t be buried there. She embraced in death, as she had in life, her native people; she asked to be buried in her own sepulcher in the tradition of all the great Pharaohs of Egypt.

  Our old tutor hadn’t confessed when the Romans flogged him, and he’d been released, which meant that he was on hand to see that those traditions were observed. Clad in a blue wig and panther hide, and carrying a clay vessel filled with purifying natron balls, Euphronius joined the highest-ranking priests of Egypt to lead my mother’s funeral procession.

  Some held my mother’s organs in canopic jars and other masked priests pulled the wheel-mounted hearse carrying my mother’s sarcophagus. One priest wore a false beard and the others wore masks of dogs, baboons, and falcons.

  I walked behind them in a glittering goddess mask of my own, fighting tears. My neck ached from the weight of the silver moon headdress, and my black gown—which was knotted in the sacred tiet—seemed to soak up the heat of the bright Alexandrian sunshine. Beside me, my twin’s skin sparkled with gold and he wore the sun-disk headdress that symbolized Horus; he wore it because his namesake was a sun god and because the costume was even heavier than mine. His bare arms were dewy with sweat from the effort to walk in it. Fortunately for little Philadelphus, his Osiris crown was made of dried stalks.

  As we made our way down the Street of the Soma, between rows of palm trees, I saw my father’s smashed statues. Chunks of marble littered the ground. Yet my mother’s statues stood proud and unharmed for Euphronius knew the Romans always had a price; with the help of wealthy friends he’d helped to ransom my mother’s statues with all the gold in the temple treasury.

  I was glad; seeing my mother’s statues, left whole, lent me strength with every step. They reminded me of my mother’s passion—how she could rain curses down upon us with one breath and clutch us to her breast with the next. It could sometimes be forgotten in horseplay that my father was a ruler of men, but even my mother’s kisses couldn’t make us forget that she was the pharaoh; as we walked behind her sarcophagus, we couldn’t forget that now.

  We also couldn’t forget about our enemy. I wanted to see the man who’d brought such misery to my family and who now called himself master of Alexandria. But Octavian remained a mystery; he’d allowed my mother a proper funeral, but he didn’t attend. Instead, he sent other Romans, including Plancus, one of my father’s generals who had betrayed us.

  Plancus and the other Romans kept close watch on my brothers and me. Their armor gleamed menacingly in the sun, but their threatening glares at the citizenry were in vain. Alexandrians defiantly waved the Ptolemy Eagle in violation of Octavian’s orders that all such banners be burned.

  My mother had chosen as one of her epitaphs Philopatris—Lover of Her Nation—and on this day, there was no doubt her nation loved her in return.

  AT last the procession reached my mother’s tomb, and the bloodiest task of the funeral fell to Helios. His job was to help slaughter the sacrificial bulls and offer their meat to sustain my mother’s spirit bodies.

  The priests held the bull and stood ready to assist my brother if his boy’s strength was not enough for the task. But Helios plunged the blade into the bull’s throat with quick, merciful force. Blood sprayed crimson dots across my twin’s face as the animal staggered and fell. Then it was time for the symbolic Opening of the Mouth ceremony.

&nbs
p; This was Caesarion’s task, and the crowd seemed to hold its breath waiting to see what the priests of Egypt would do in the king’s absence. With a shrewd look in his eye, Euphronius lifted the iron wand to speak the holy words, and the crowd gasped at his heresy.

  Only the next pharaoh could open the mouth. Not even the most holy priest in Egypt had the right. Euphronius stopped, paused dramatically, then gestured with the wand to Helios, whose blood-spattered costume glittered in the sun. “Oh, Egypt, shall Pharaoh’s son open the mouth?”

  At first there was silence. Then a cheer. Confused Romans looked on, the drama lost on them until the crowd began to chant. “He’s Horus! Helios-Horus!”

  In the Egyptian stories, Horus was the divine son of Isis, secretly nursed in the Nile marshes until he was old enough to avenge his father’s murder. It was a potent Egyptian tale that the people were unable to resist. Euphronius must have known they would make the connection; he’d dressed Helios for the part.

  “Helios-Horus the Avenger, open the mouth!”

  As the people shouted, my brother looked to me, as if for permission. I couldn’t imagine why. I was a queen of other places, but I was only a princess of Egypt, and Helios never asked my permission for anything before. Then I remembered, in this funereal play, he was Horus and I was Isis. Isis, who suckles her babe at her breast, her body seated in the shape of a throne a so that the pharaoh may rest upon her as she nourishes his people. As Isis, I wasn’t merely maiden, mother, and crone. As Isis, I was also the throne.

  As such, it was my assent Helios needed.

  Slowly, deliberately, I lowered my head, so that the moon-disk headdress dipped and signaled the blessing of Isis. Then, responding to his cue, my twin brother took the wand in his bloodied hand and the Alexandrians roared their approval.

  Helios then lifted the iron to the mouth of the sarcophagus to bring my mother breath. Then Helios lifted the bloody leg of the bull in sacrifice to the mummy’s mouth, to give my mother sustenance.

  Euphronius shouted, “Helios-Horus hath opened the mouth of the dead, as he in times of old opened the mouth of his father, Osiris. And just as Osiris then rose from the dead, so too shall the deceased Cleopatra walk in the great company of the gods.”