Authors: Emily Holleman
A quiet knocking echoed in her ears. She ignored it. She was queen, and if she wanted solitude, the world should grant her that. But the banging didn’t yield. It grew louder, more insistent; it demanded a response.
“Leave me,” she shouted. Her voice was too loud, too angry. She regretted it at once. She didn’t want anyone to imagine that her mother’s death had an effect on her.
It didn’t,
she told herself firmly.
It doesn’t touch me.
“Please, my queen,” a trilling voice said. “Let me join you.”
“I told you to leave,” Berenice repeated.
But the door opened, and a girl slipped in. Berenice recognized her, but barely. It was the accent that had tipped her off, that lilting of the Upper Lands. The girl, she thought, had joined her entourage in the days after her return from Thebes.
“Get out,” she mouthed. She could breathe no sound into the words.
And so the servant lingered. In time, she even ventured to speak again. “Your mother is truly gone, then.”
“So it would seem,” Berenice answered dully, swallowing the lump rising in her throat. She had not—would not—shed tears. But somehow it soothed her to talk. “I thought she’d outlive us all. My father and my bastard siblings and I would be dead and buried, but she would thrive, sowing some new generation against another.”
“I, too, believed my mother would live forever. If fourteen childbirths could not kill a woman, what could?”
“What did?”
“A soldier.”
The next morning, Berenice awoke to a world unchanged. The morning sun spilled through her eastern window, lighting the charioteers who raced along her wall. She studied their faces, the inky black of their eyes and the earthy red of their hair, to see if she could detect any difference. But each seemed as eager to spur on his horse as he had the day before. Her mother hadn’t risen from the dead, and the palace itself seemed not to care at all. When she called for Leda to come and dress her, her nurse didn’t even mention the previous day’s events. The woman smiled brightly through her rotten teeth as she gently pinned the violet chiton along Berenice’s underarms.
Perhaps that was the way of it. She should ignore the emptiness wearing at her gut, and go about her business. When Leda offered a mirror, a heavy handheld one inlaid with ivory, to check her face, Berenice even smiled at the kohl-eyed woman who met her gaze. She held her head high as she crossed through the great courtyard and into the royal atrium. At first, the gold overwhelmed her: the leaf embossed atop the head of each column, the specks ingrained in the Dionysus mosaic on the floor, the whole hunk molded to form the throne. But no one else—not Dryton nor Nereus nor Pieton—seemed to notice the glaring incongruity of it all. That the palace remained untouched by her mother’s death, as though Tryphaena had been just some other feckless resident, of no more consequence than a slave.
The moment Berenice took her seat, the nattering began. Each of her advisers seemed to hold a strong opinion on the necessary rites and rituals. None of them appeared the least surprised—they’d all known this day would come. She alone, Berenice realized, had imagined that her mother would live forever. These men had foreseen Tryphaena’s death; they thought it natural. To them, she’d been nothing more than a weak old woman. How had Berenice been so blind?
“And then we must decide what items she should bring to the next life,” Nereus droned. “Her furniture, of course—what little is left of it—and all the jewels given to her by the king. I imagine the set of heirloom scarabs from Ptolemy the Benefactor would do nicely as well.”
The recommendations scratched like rough-spun wool against her skin. The thought of her mother buried among golden diadems dripping with enamel and faience cosmetic boxes embossed with ivory irked her. Berenice knew that these were the standard fare for women of her mother’s station, far removed from the actual items that Tryphaena valued in life. No one thought to include the copy of Herodotus’s beloved histories that her mother had pored over each evening, nor the switch she had used upon her horse, nor the dagger she had kept tucked under her bed.
In death, we all become concubines.
“The embalming will require—”
“That’s enough,” she interrupted. “My family has been buried in the same manner in these same lands for three hundred years. I trust you four will be able to execute it to my satisfaction. But the world doesn’t pause for death, not even for Tryphaena’s.” Thrashing around desperately for some fresh topic, something innocuous to divert her mind from her mother’s passing, from the emptiness that lingered in place of rage against not one parent but two, she turned to Thais. “Tell me, Thais: how fares Dio in Rome?”
“We’ve had no word of him for some weeks now,” he replied. “But we do know he and his party have put their case before the Senate.”
“What use is that news to me?” She tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a cough. She pressed onward—always onward. “I need to know how the proceedings went, not that they occurred. If I’d known that Dio would prove such a dismal correspondent, I’d have sent someone else in his place.”
“Don’t blame poor Dio,” her eunuch said.
She didn’t like these kindly words from Pieton. He’d never liked the Alexandrian, and she didn’t want to imagine what might bring him to speak gently of the man now.
“It isn’t good to heap aspersions on the dead, my queen.”
The dead.
Not him too. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t believe that her dearest adviser, her most trusted, had been snatched from this world. She thought of Dio the last time she’d seen him, vibrant and full of life, his broad smile spread across his round face. The smile that had somehow made him handsome. A tightness gripped her chest. She ignored it; she couldn’t spare her tears for Dio either. Tears were weakness. Weakness and death.
“Why didn’t I hear of this at once?” She hated when the eunuch kept things from her.
“The message came earlier this morning.” Pieton waved a piece of parchment before the council. “There was no time to break the news quietly.”
“So the Romans are now so bold as to murder Alexandrian citizens in the street?” That fury, sweet and familiar, filled Berenice with heat; she relished it. It made her feel as though she might swell to the far reaches of the atrium, her head cresting the red granite that arched above. “Have we sunk so low in their regard that our men might be hunted as boars?”
“I don’t think it fair, my queen, to blame the Romans for this trouble,” Pieton told her. “It was, by all accounts, your father’s doing.” He glanced down at the letter and read: “‘As we returned to the inn, we were ambushed by half a dozen men. At first, we assumed they wanted our purses, but when we handed over our coin, they told us no money would be adequate to appease their master. And when they spoke, it was with an Alexandrian accent. I can scarcely write what happened next without weeping. The tallest among our attackers, a great brute of a man, lunged at Dio with a knife.’ Or so writes our Laomedon, one of the few delegates who survived the attack by your father’s ruffians. Poor boy…”
Her father had murdered Dio. Berenice’s fury twitched in her spleen.
“‘Poor boy’? Perhaps you’re to blame for this, Pieton, for sending boys when you should have sent men.” Her rage displaced her sorrow. It relieved her—she wanted the fury to swallow her whole.
“My queen, it was merely a figure of speech. What I meant to say—”
Berenice cut him off. “What is it they say about eunuchs, Nereus?” Her anger flickered. The rage wasn’t self-sustaining, not as it once had been; it appeared a glimmer of its former self. That frightened her. Once it had been all she needed to raze Alexandria and take the throne. “About how eunuchs’ tongues wag where their balls can’t.”
Old Nereus let out a hearty laugh, as did Thais. But their amusement irked her too, almost as much as her own forced lightness did. Her mother was dead. Dio was dead. Even in Rome her father stretched his hand to steal back his crown, to erase the hard work she’d done governing the lands he’d failed. She’d put Alexandria’s granaries to good use, distributing wheat to the starving Upper Kingdom and putting aside the rest rather than selling it to Rome for more gold. She’d raised the levies on the farmers and ensured a surplus of food for this year as well. And now that the Nile had risen high this season, she could promise that there would be grain enough to save and sell. With that certainty, she’d been sure that she could buy enough mercenaries to reclaim Cyprus and begin to seize her dynasty’s lost lands.
Unmoved, Pieton remarked, “I believe the saying goes, ‘A eunuch’s tongue is endowed where his cock is not.’ But in this particular instance I feel a different reference might be more apt: ‘A eunuch hears when other men merely listen.’”
“You aren’t wrong there,” she told Pieton, searching for an answer. Despite herself, her heart ached for Dio, for the one man who’d sought her out, and never bent to the Piper’s will. She couldn’t trust her rage, or her levity either. It was too polluted by her grief. She’d cast about for distraction—and instead, she’d found this. It was Cyprus she should be planning for, not her father’s return. Why did it all fall to dust, all at once? “And you, you wise men before me, had no idea of the goings-on in Rome. We must send another delegation.”
“We send more men to the slaughter, then?” Dryton said. Her minister of war didn’t often speak, but when he did, he silenced the room. “What we should be doing is finding allies, not sending more men to die at your father’s hands.”
The quiet ached against her ears, but not as it must have ached against Dryton’s. As she glared at him, his pretty face twisted with regret, and his mouth contorted to justify himself.
Dio—foolish, foolish Dio. What had he been thinking, staying at an unprotected inn? Surely he could have taken more precautions while in Rome. And without anyone to plead Berenice’s case, her father would certainly bring the Senate to heel. Strong though her Alexandrian support was, she could imagine how easily Rome’s citizens might be swayed by her father’s tale. And these daft men, her pathetic excuses for councilors, had no advice to offer at all. What she needed was to be alone.
“Get out,” she ordered. “Get out, all of you. I’ll think over what you’ve said. And whether I can wrest some fresh allies from the stones.”
It calmed her to watch the effects of her words. Thais was the first to flee, wrenching his reedy body from his chair and rushing toward the door. And pretty, flustered Dryton hurried out as well. He liked to give the impression that he was both wiser and busier than any of her other advisers. It was how he justified his insolence. Perhaps he believed in all honesty that the kingdom couldn’t run without his caustic advice and sticky fingers.
Pieton and Nereus stayed seated, settling into a stubborn war for her attention. The eunuch drummed his fingers on the table, his impatience palpable in every tap. But the old man paid him no mind. A word from her would resolve the matter, but she could take some pleasure in watching these petty power struggles play out.
Pieton cleared his throat. Scarcely two feet to his right, Nereus made no answer. Berenice suspected that the old man feigned deafness to suit his purposes. She would have to recall that skill when she grew old and faint of mind. If she should live that long.
The eunuch cleared his throat. “Nereus, my friend, the queen requested your absence.”
“And yours as well, eunuch.”
Pieton didn’t look at her; he knew better than to appeal for her favors. But Nereus had no such cautions. “My queen, I beg a word with you in private.”
Why not? The old man was easy; she could handle whatever he tossed her way. With her former tutor, though, her emotions might boil to the surface. He knew her too well, read her too well. She didn’t dare speak to him alone. Not now, when more than ever she needed to be strong. “Go on, Pieton. Leave us awhile.”
The eunuch cocked his head in surprise. He wasn’t accustomed to dismissals. He looked very nearly wounded, his eyes shrunk and twitching. But then he shrugged and bowed, and did as he was bid without objection.
“Very well, Nereus. Now that you have bested Pieton”—she smiled; if she didn’t smile, she was afraid that she’d rage into madness, or tears—“tell me what bothers you.”
“It pains me, my queen—” Nereus’s voice caught. He cleared his throat loudly to continue. “I, too, worry for the future of our lands. And though my nephew sounds like a firebrand at times, he does, I am afraid, address an important point.”
Dryton was his nephew, then. She’d make a note of that. It helped to focus on the minutiae of these lesser men’s lives. How they built one upon the other to claw closer to the crown.
Nereus spoke quietly. “We don’t have the swords to defeat Rome. But there is another path to victory.”
Berenice knew what he would propose before he spoke the words. But she wouldn’t heed them. Pieton, too, would urge a similar course if she gave him half a chance, the course that confounded every woman at one point or another: marriage. Not even for Cyprus would she sink to that. She’d witnessed the consequences of wedding, how it had destroyed her mother.
“Long before you were born—nay, even long before I was born; yes, even as long ago as that—your ancestors kept the Romans at bay by wedding allies, uniting the descendants of Alexander against the Republic,” the old man continued.