Lily of the Nile Page 30

  I stood up, climbed the stairs out of the bath and snatched a robe from where Chryssa cowered. Today I’d been the vessel of Isis. I’d seen life beyond life. I didn’t shrink from Livia this time. “If the emperor finds no fault with me, why should you?”

  Livia sputtered, “I find fault with you because he doesn’t. You’re a dangerous little viper! You’re a distraction to good Romans, just like your mother was. You cloud his senses. He thinks he’s using you, but you’re using him. Why am I the only one to see it? His good judgment fades the longer you’re in this house, but I won’t allow my husband to become another Roman seduced and brought low by an Egyptian whore.”

  I squinted. “The emperor is a father to me.”

  “Liar!” Livia shrieked. “I know what women like you are, what you really want and I swear that I’ll ship you off with Juba as soon as possible now that all Rome knows you dabble in bestiality with crocodiles.”

  “Bestiality?” It was even more absurd than it was insulting.

  “Your mother was no stranger to perversion,” Livia hissed. “So why should anyone expect better of you?”

  How could I endure this from the woman who scoured the city for unwilling virgins to bring to her husband’s bed? After all that had happened this day, it was too much to bear. “Livia, of all people, you have no standing to attack me on the subject of perversion.”

  Involuntarily, my eyes darted to Chryssa and Livia took my meaning at once. Then the emperor’s wife turned scarlet and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Livia gave Chryssa a murderous glance before taking the measure of me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I struggled with the certain knowledge of my error, hoping to quickly cover it up lest Chryssa pay the price. “I spoke nonsense. You upset me, and I’ve had a long day. I’d like to retire to bed.”

  Livia stared at me for moments that seemed to stretch on interminably. “I don’t think so. You plan your words carefully, Selene. You always do. So, I dare you to make yourself plain.”

  I could almost feel Chryssa’s fear. I kept my eyes on Livia and now I knew, for certain, that Julia was right. “I just mean—”

  “Livia?” Octavia was in the doorway, rescuing me from another fabrication. “What are you doing here?”

  Livia turned toward her sister-in-law and her voice dripped with poisoned honey. “I came to tell Selene that wedding gifts have already started to arrive.”

  “You might have sent the message with a slave,” Octavia said. “You needn’t have troubled yourself.”

  “I wanted to trouble myself,” Livia said. It was plain she didn’t appreciate Octavia’s intrusion, but neither did she want the emperor’s sister to know her secret. “I came to speak to Selene, if you don’t mind.”

  “Well, I do mind,” Octavia said, standing her ground.

  This time, it was Livia who blinked first and took her leave.

  AFTERWARD, Octavia ushered me into bed and snuffed out most of the oil lamps. It seemed that I fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes. I slept a dreamless sleep, the kind where there’s only peaceful blackness, oblivion to pain, as if Isis took me back into her womb. So when I woke, I was surprised to find Octavia still there.

  “Is the light disturbing you?” she asked, coming to the side of my bed to put her hands upon my forehead.

  “No,” I whispered. My tongue was thick in my mouth and my head was pounding. “But I’m thirsty.”

  “I have some cool broth for you. It’ll help,” she said.

  Her simple kindness moved me. I wished to ease her mind, I wished I could tell her that I hadn’t worked magic, but this time it would be a lie. Philadelphus and I had made this happen, and I wasn’t sorry.

  Octavia sat beside me on the bed. “It takes a heavier toll each time. You worship a cruel goddess.”

  “She’s the kindest one, if only you could understand,” I said. “Thank you for before. With Livia.”

  “I’m capable of taking care of the children in my home without Livia’s help.”

  It occurred to me then that it needn’t have been Octavia that took us in. If the emperor had wanted to keep us as wards, we could’ve lived with Livia instead. “Why did you take us?”

  Octavia’s fleshy hands drifted down to tuck the linens in around my shoulders. Her eyes were guarded. “It was something that I could do for your father.”

  I loved my father, but he’d never been a constant presence, even before his death. It was hard, even for me, to understand how and why my father had so many children and former wives. “Everyone knows how poorly he treated you. Why do you feel you owe him anything?”

  She sighed, as if in pain. “I owe your father, because had I not loved him, he might still be alive.”

  I was silent, prompting her to say more.

  “It’s true that Mark Antony was my rightful husband,” Octavia said. “It’s also true that your mother took him from me and from Rome. But there’s another truth, which is my sin: I took him away from your mother first.”

  I swallowed, and some inexplicable impulse made me touch her hand, as if to give her permission to stop, but now that she’d started her story, it all came out. She took a deep breath and said, “When things went sour with Fulvia, your father could have divorced her and taken a new Roman wife, but he stayed in Egypt. Your father was happy with your mother, especially after she bore him twins.”

  I tried to keep the judgment from my eyes, but her cheeks crimsoned. “You must understand that I’d loved Mark Antony since I was young. I met him at my uncle’s home—at Julius Caesar’s table—and he was like no man I’d ever met before. With a booming laugh, a lion’s skin over one shoulder like Hercules, and a leer in his eye … there was no one like him.”

  “It’s not wrong to be drawn to a strong persona,” I reassured her, though it made me feel disloyal to do so.

  The truth was, my mother had hated Octavia, but I no longer did. And now her eyes met mine as if for absolution. “I couldn’t accept that he loved a foreign woman. I couldn’t believe that he meant to make a life with Cleopatra. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t legal. So when my brother sought a way to make peace with your father, I offered myself. Leave Cleopatra and her twins and marry me. It was the most immodest proposal I’ve ever made, and many people died because of it.”

  “Because he couldn’t give us up,” I whispered.

  Octavia stared at her hands. “He tried to love me, I think. But once he saw her again, he was bewitched. He divorced me to marry Cleopatra and appeared to the entire world as having divorced Rome for Egypt. My fault. It was all my fault …”

  “No.” Didn’t she realize that her love for my father had only been convenient to the emperor’s purposes? “The war would have come anyway.”

  “The war might have come anyway,” she agreed. “But it wouldn’t have been for my honor. Every effort I made to be a good wife to your father was turned into propaganda against him, for Romans saw his rejection of me as a rejection of them.”

  She laid one of my hands over the other and clasped them softly in her own. “Your father lives now only in his children. So I pay my debt to them. I don’t understand what happened today in the Temple of Isis with the crocodiles, and I don’t condone it. But before you marry Juba and go to Africa where I may not see you again—well, I’d wish for you to remember me kindly.”

  Lady Octavia was her brother’s creature; it was true. She would always choose the emperor over everything, even over her own heart. But I had a brother too—one that I loved just as much. It was hard for me not to feel sympathy. “Octavia, in my faith, the most sacred thing a person can do is to honor the lives of those they love by gathering the torn pieces and putting them together again. You did that with my father’s children, so I hope you’ll remember me kindly too.”

  Octavia had allowed herself to be more sentimental than she perhaps intended. Smiling softly, she blew out the lamp beside my bed, shrouding the room in darkness. But before she left, she stooped ov
er my bed, and pressed her lips to my cheek.

  As tender a kiss as a mother might give a child.

  And I thought to myself as I drifted to sleep, Isis dwells in her too.

  Thirty

  IN the morning, I dressed and wandered the curiously empty house. It was a market day, so I hoped everyone was just visiting the Forum and not avoiding me. The family had seen me bleed before, at the Trojan Games, but how would the girls treat me when they heard that crocodiles had submitted themselves to me and flowers had sprung from my blood?

  In the kitchen, I found only slaves who were cleaning up the mangled remains of a rat that Bast had helpfully dropped at the threshold for them. The slaves stopped talking when I entered, and they curtsied. It was rather awkward, so I took some sun-dried dates and went to find Philadelphus. He was in his bedroom, in the middle of the day, sitting cross-legged on his bed. He rolled some bone tali dice, playing a game the emperor had taught him. He looked pale, and he was still in his bedclothes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, putting the bowl of dates near his bed.

  “I have a cough,” Philadelphus said, and then proceeded to hack phlegm as if in demonstration.

  As we talked about what had happened in the temple, I sat upon Helios’s abandoned bed and ran my fingers over the fabric, searching for a trace of him. I imagined that I could smell him, like faint echoes of sea breeze and sun-bleached sand. It brought out a pain in my heart at once sweet and sorrowful. “It seems odd that in a temple where Isis teaches that war pollutes the world, I should get a message declaring a just war against the emperor.”

  “Not all wars are about killing. Maybe some wars are about ideas.” Philadelphus took some dates and began to eat them. “I don’t really understand everything I see. But I think someday you’ll be a great queen.”

  “You do?” I played with a stray hair on Helios’s pillow. It was curled and blond.

  “I’ve seen it. In so many of the rivers, I see that you restore a throne to Isis. You’ll bring her back home. You’ll preserve her worship right in the center of the Roman world …”

  I stared at him, hungry to believe. If what he said was true, then maybe I was meant to marry Juba. What if Rome and the emperor were stepping-stones to my destiny?

  TEMPERS in the imperial compound were blistering. Agrippa’s soldiers terrorized Isiacs, slaves, and freedmen searching for Helios. That Augustus had “misplaced” Cleopatra’s son lowered his esteem in the eyes of the people, and it made Agrippa—who had won so many battles and built so many public works for the Romans—look like an incompetent. All the while, my star rose. Word of my miracles spread throughout the city, and the glamour of my impending wedding added to the allure, so the emperor kept me by his side.

  Some days he asked me to translate; others he simply wanted me to play the kithara for him. I knew that he kept me close out of fear that like my twin, I might run, but there was something else too. He watched me, always looking for my mother in my eyes. For my part, I gave him no cause for alarm. I’d shaken him enough with the last bloody message; now I did everything he asked, without complaint. Like Isis, I plotted in the reeds. I didn’t show how desperately I missed Helios and I busied myself with the emperor’s concerns. I willed myself to care about the things he cared about. I forced myself to appreciate his good qualities—for the best lies require you to believe them, in part.

  One day, when we two were alone in his office, he looked up from his correspondence and asked, “What are you reading?”

  I shifted upon the plush carpet at the foot of his desk, rolling to one side. “I’m learning Punic,” I explained. “I want to be able to speak to Juba’s people in their native tongue.”

  I wondered how the Africans would see us, as we entered with legionnaires and Roman settlers. Would they view us as Romans come to conquer, or would they celebrate Juba at the helm? It had been no exaggeration when I told the emperor that he needed a Ptolemy in Africa. It would be my task to make Roman settlers remember that my father was Antony and to remind the natives that my mother was Cleopatra.

  I’d have to do it all for my husband’s glorious reign. I knew that my crown was to be only symbolic and that Mauretania did not belong to me, but I’d been raised to rule and wanted to learn everything I could about the kingdoms my intended bridegroom had been given. Of Juba’s two kingdoms, Mauretania would be the richer by far. The fish swam so plentifully, it was said you could cast a net into the water and draw it out moments later with your dinner.

  Juba and the emperor hired architects. They recruited settlers. They chose officials and administrators, and I watched as the machinery of nation building began to turn, as I served only as a figurehead. I was my mother’s daughter and a Ptolemy and I wanted more.

  PHILADELPHUS was ill.

  “He has a fever!” Octavia cried, guiding me into Philadelphus’s room. “He collapsed while playing ball in the courtyard today. I thought it was just the heat at first, but now Chryssa says he won’t eat anything.”

  Philadelphus was on his back, the bed linens twisted around his legs and his tunic plastered to his chest with sweat. His hair clung to his face in wet ringlets, and though his skin was red and hot to the touch, he shivered. “Selene!” he shouted when he saw me, his eyes wide and feral as they’d been when last he looked through the Rivers of Time. I could see that he was lost in visions now, looking at me and through me at once. He whimpered, fingers curling around mine. “Don’t feel sorry, Selene. You have to go.”

  “He keeps saying things like that,” Octavia said, taking a wet cloth from his forehead and rinsing it in a basin before gently laying it upon his brow once again.

  I put both of my hands over my throat, trying to calm myself. “I don’t want Livia to see him like this,” I finally said. Truthfully, I didn’t want anyone seeing Philadelphus like this. “Please, let me tend to him. Leave us.”

  But Octavia stood firm. “Selene, Philadelphus needs a healer. I know a physician who specializes in fevers. His name is Musa. I’ll send for him.”

  “Is this physician at least Greek or Egyptian? Is he competent?”

  “He’s helped the emperor before.”

  If the often sickly constitution of the emperor was Musa’s best recommendation, I had much to fear from this physician. I’d heard of the fevers that ravaged Rome in the summer. Julius Caesar himself had once drained the marshes to prevent the spread of the illness, but children still died of it each year. Philadelphus was the last of my family with me and I knew I couldn’t bear to lose him.

  “His name is Antonius Musa. He was your father’s freedman and though I have never demanded that he confirm it, I believe he worships your goddess. We can trust him and you must trust me, my dear.” Octavia glanced down at my little brother, where he writhed with discomfort. “If I’d given Antony a son, I think he’d have been just like Philadelphus … I won’t let anything happen to him.”

  How Roman Octavia looked in her dowdy garments and with her hair so severely pulled back. How my mother and father had detested her. How loyal she was to her brother—at least as loyal as I was to mine. But I remembered her motherly kiss in the dark. “Do you promise? Do you promise me?”

  Octavia nodded solemnly. “I promise. Make Philadelphus understand that he must be quiet when the healer is here.” Then Octavia’s eyes fell upon the Collar of Gold that hung from Philadelphus’s neck. “I only let you children keep those amulets because I thought them similar to the bullas that Roman children wear, but now I think he shouldn’t be wearing things that invite evil and illness.”

  I self-consciously wrapped my free hand around the frog amulet I had once removed but would not now part with for my life. “It’s the last thing my mother ever gave him. She’d never give him something that would make him sick.”

  Octavia pursed her lips again in matronly disapproval, but when Philadelphus clutched at his amulet, the issue seemed to decide itself. “Selene! I see Helios and he wants to stop you from marryi
ng Juba.”

  I forgot how to breathe. I looked at Octavia desperately. “Whatever he says about Helios, you can’t tell the emperor!” I was asking her to commit a grave act of disloyalty and we both knew it.

  Octavia’s pinched expression became more pronounced, then she shook her head, retreating behind denial. “There’s nothing to tell. It’s fevered ranting. I’m going to fetch the healer.” With that, Octavia strode from the room and left us alone.

  “Philadelphus, they’re going to bring a healer to you, and you mustn’t say anything about the Rivers of Time or tell them anything you see about Helios. Do you understand?”

  Philadelphus’s eyes were wild. He was somewhere else, in another place. “Helios doesn’t want you to marry Juba, but you almost always marry Juba. Euphronius knows that too.”

  I put my hands on my face. If the healer came and heard Euphronius’s name, it would be that much worse. Up until now, I’d kept to myself the identity of the priest with Helios. If the emperor found out, he’d smell conspiracy. “Don’t look into the Rivers of Time anymore today. You’re too sick,” I said as I brought the water basin to his side.

  I had to calm him before the physician came. I made Philadelphus sit up and remove his tunic, discarding the sweaty garment as he reached with both hands into the water basin, splashing water onto himself. At first I thought he did it to cool off, but then he cupped water into his hands and stared. “You marry Juba.” Then he dropped that handful of water and took up a new one. “You marry him again.”

  Fevered as he was, I didn’t know whether Philadelphus was having true visions, but he’d been right the last time he saw things. He’d been right about the blood causing my stigmata too. “You can see that in the water? I always marry Juba?”

  “Sometimes Helios raises an army,” Philadelphus said.

  My heart leapt to my throat. “What about this time? What about in this River of Time? Is Helios trying to raise an army?”