Authors: Emily Holleman
“What’s he doing here?” her mother spat.
“Apologies, my queen,” Pieton replied coolly. “I didn’t intend to disturb a familial parley.”
A familial parley.
The thought that Pieton wouldn’t be included there was strange in and of itself. After all, he’d paid more heed to her than her mother ever had. It was Pieton—not Tryphaena—who’d taught her lessons and comforted her when she was sad. Wasn’t that what family was—what other people’s families were?
“That was precisely your intent,” Tryphaena barked. “The guards told you I was within.” She returned her fury to Berenice. “Watch your companions, my dear. This one’s every word stinks of deceit.”
“The two who stand watch told me they couldn’t speak of the queen’s business,” the eunuch answered. “I’d no idea who attended you here.”
Berenice ignored her mother’s glares. “What brings you to me, Pieton?”
“There are matters we must discuss involving Inundation in the Upper Lands.”
Berenice pursed her lips. Inundation and the Upper Lands—business that concerned her and the double kingdom both. She’d already wasted too much time, mired in this feud.
“Do his lies blind you?” Tryphaena hissed. Her mother hated nothing more than being ignored. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? How he begrudges you all private counsel?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Mother. You’re not my councilor—only a shrieking harpy upon whom I take pity in my weaker moments.”
She didn’t meet her mother’s eye; she looked to the door instead.
“Guards,” she cried out. “My mother requires an escort.”
Tryphaena flailed against callous hands that gripped her shoulders and dragged her across the floor.
“Don’t pretend I didn’t warn you. Remember this day, child. Remember it. Perhaps you were right: the nearest threat isn’t Arsinoe after all.”
Hacking blocked Tryphaena’s tongue as the guards pulled her away. Legs splayed before her, she looked not a hellhound but an aging mother, long past her prime, shielding her last living child. Her knees knocked; her flesh hung loose about her arms and throat. Berenice’s heart grew weak but she steeled herself with her mother’s words:
Never show them you are soft.
In the days that followed, Berenice avoided her mother—a task that proved easier than she had imagined. As queen, she needn’t answer to anyone, and perhaps her threats had frightened the old woman in the end. Rumors hummed that Tryphaena lay ill with coughs and quakes and shivers. The more dramatic among the slaves claimed that she was near death. Berenice didn’t care. She had finished with her mother’s games. Too many times throughout her childhood, Tryphaena would take to her bed—it was always a ruse, a desperate attempt to draw the Piper in. She would not fall for those same tired ploys.
Besides, she had more important matters to attend. To retake Cyprus, she would need knowledgeable advisers, ones who could muster troops and predict Rome’s movements. Pieton had winnowed out what few of her father’s men might be trusted—or at least kept in line—and so she called for them to be brought before the court. She wanted to see what she would make of these men herself.
“Is it necessary for you to leave Alexandria so soon?” Dio drummed his fingers against the cypress. Perhaps he worried that her support in the city would flag in her absence.
The eunuch glared at the question. “The local interloper,” Pieton called Dio behind closed doors, as though the Alexandrian had no business concerning himself with matters of the throne. The more the eunuch objected, though, the more Berenice’s fondness for the man grew.
“It’s time for me to sail up the Nile to distribute grain. First to Memphis, and then on to Thebes. The locals should be reminded that they have a new queen, one who embraces her duties as their shepherd.” The thought exhausted her; she’d never taken much joy in her journeys to Upper Egypt. But that was where too many of her armed men lay. Even reduced to an echo of its former self, Thebes remained a potent fantasy for the defiant masses: natives from the farthest reach of the Nile’s waters all the way to Alexandria could hardly speak the city’s name without a shiver of awe. Her presence, she hoped, would check any rebellious tendencies. She needed the town and its surrounding lands subdued if she was to recall the legions stationed there. “As queen, I will not let my people starve—any of my people.”
“The solstice has scarcely come and gone. Surely the people are not starving yet,” Dio argued with a light smile. “You shouldn’t forget your beloved subjects in Alexandria either.”
The eunuch eyed the man’s broad belly with contempt. “Well, you’re not starving, Dio. That much is evident.”
Berenice smiled. Pieton’s touchiness amused her. His loathing for Dio sprang from his affection for her, she realized, which she found comforting. It was a relief that someone loved her, her to the exclusion of all others.
“No, thank the good gods, I am not. I am merely jealous to be deprived the pleasure of the queen’s company.” He raised his goblet in her direction. “To Queen Berenice the Shining One.”
Pieton raised his cup in return, grudgingly. That boded well; they’d need to find some way to work together. As she drained her glass, a knock sounded against the door.
“I present Nereus, son of Sostias; Dryton, son of Mentes; and Thais, son of Harmon,” the herald proclaimed in his thunderous voice.
The first to enter was the last announced, a twitchy, beardless man whose balding pate was ringed by a dusting of chestnut curls. Unlike Dio, he did look nearly starved. This Thais was so skinny that his elbows stuck out at angles, as though a stiff breeze might knock him off his feet. He’d directed the farming of the southernmost lands under her father’s rule. He was noted for neither loyalty nor bravery, but, she heard, he had a way of loading up the granaries with wheat.
“My—my queen,” he stammered. “May the gods’ blessings be upon you.”
“There’s no need for that, Thais,” her eunuch sneered. “The priests have already said their words.”
“It would be—it would be an honor to serve you, in whatever capacity you see fit. A—a great honor.”
The man was terrified—that much was clear. Berenice had already begun to tire of his shaking voice, and she turned her attention to his fellows behind: old Nereus leaning on a young man’s—Dryton’s—shoulder. Unlike Thais, neither appeared especially anxious.
“Or not to serve, if the queen prefers,” Thais nattered on. “There can be honor in that as well. What—whatever the queen sees fit—”
“The queen would prefer your silence, Thais. She is likely too distracted by your stammering to see anything at all.”
The reedy minister shrunk at the eunuch’s words. He was a tall man but his shoulders hunched and his whole body looked as though it might collapse in on itself. Berenice smiled at Pieton. Snappish and ornery was how she liked him best. He served her well as a guard dog, her very own Cerberus.
Her gaze turned to Nereus. Among the oldest of the old guard, he’d gone almost completely bald. The hairs that once covered his head seemed to have migrated to his face, sprouting up in tufted eyebrows and bursting in thick clots from his nose. She’d never liked Nereus—she’d no reason to. After all, he’d advised her father to renounce her mother. He’d whispered poison in the Piper’s ear: “Sons are what you need. And your wife only whelps dead ones.” Or so Pieton had told her.
“Tell me, Nereus: why do you stand before me now?” This old man, despite his fickleness, required her courtesies. No one knew the inner workings of the army and the kingdom as well as he—and no one had more experience staving off the Romans. He still saw her as a girl, as helpless as on the day her father set aside her mother. But she’d show him otherwise. Spineless or not, he had his uses. As long as he learned his place.
His gray brow furrowed. He tried to read the wishes on her face. “Because, my queen, I have a reputation for serving the realm. I’ve served Alexandria since thirty years before your birth. I serve whoever rules. And you are the queen.”
“While that’s all very admirable, Nereus, we’ll need more proof of loyalty than that,” Pieton answered. “How are we to know that you won’t send letters to the Piper? Even now, you might be telling him the inner workings of the palace.”
“Very well, eunuch.” The old man pinched at the sagging skin along his throat. He’d had a beard when Berenice was young—she couldn’t fathom what foolishness had driven him to shave it off. “What would you ask of me to prove my loyalty?”
“The confidences between you and the Piper.”
“You may have every letter that has passed between us two,” Nereus rejoined solemnly. “I’ll have my servant fetch them from my chambers at once.”
“I knew you’d be cooperative.” Berenice smiled, savoring each word. She’d let him squirm a while longer. “So I took the liberty of having my guards sort through your things.”
Nereus’s enormous eyebrows descended like great gray clouds over the sun, threatening to block his eyes entirely; perhaps he had more to hide than she had imagined. She would have her soldiers do a second sweep.
“Do you know where my father sails, Nereus?” she asked lightly.
“I know he is now in Rhodes,” the old man replied with care. “But I don’t know where he plans to go from there.”
“I do,” his young friend—Dryton—interjected. He had broad shoulders and a soldier’s build. He wore his hair long as was the fashion among men her age, and he tossed an errant lock from his eyes before he continued. “I know your father, the Piper, sails to Rome. He told me so himself. He’ll seek a favor from Pompey, a longtime friend of his. But he’ll still have to beg his case before the Senate.”
“Everyone knows that the Piper is in Rhodes, and any fool might surmise that he means to sail to Rome.” Pieton yawned. “He entrusted his will to the Vestal Virgins of that city for safekeeping. And many a greater Ptolemy than he has asked for aid from the Republic.” The eunuch toyed with him as a cat might with a mouse.
But Dryton was no mouse.
“I know more than that, my queen.” His bright eyes fixed on hers, and he addressed his words to her alone. “I know the suit he’ll make in front of Rome’s senators. He discussed his arguments with me. I might sail to Rome myself, and make the counterplea.”
Berenice kept her face blank. This man’s offers were too shiny to be true, and though he could have some knowledge of her father’s plans, she doubted that he had as much as he claimed. If he did, he might be a great deal more dangerous than she imagined. She wondered how one so young—he could not be more than twenty-five, perhaps not even that—had gained her father’s confidence so easily. One way came to mind, but she pushed it from her thoughts. Her father was gone, and she wished to wash the city of his twisted proclivities, not dwell on them.
“You?” Pieton scoffed. “Sail to Rome? I wouldn’t trust you as far as Memphis. Trust must be earned. A few choice phrases won’t buy it.”
Dryton started to object but thought better of it. “Of course, if that is—if that is what the queen desires.”
“I’d prefer that you stay in Alexandria,” Berenice said gently. Dryton knew her little; she’d let Pieton play the crueler part. “But you’ve been wise to tell us all you know. You’ll relate my father’s claims to Pieton and work to craft our argument.”
Nereus spoke up. “But someone must go to Rome.” He’d regained his footing, and he stood taller, as though a few years had slipped away. “A delegation must sail at once. Or perhaps one has already sailed. Pieton? Didn’t you say that any fool might surmise that the Piper sails to Rome? Or are you not as clever as any fool?”
“Watch your step, old man,” Pieton snapped. “I’m the only reason you are not already—”
“Silence. All of you.” Berenice’s voice brought quiet among these men who once had spoken over her without a second thought. This was what it was to have power. She savored it. This, she thought, would save her from emptiness; it would blossom in the place where all her hatreds lived.
“Dio shall lead the delegation to Rome,” she announced with certainty.
Pieton tried to catch her eye; she ignored his efforts. She could hear his chiding voice inside her head:
Why reveal so much before these men you do not trust?
But now the eunuch wouldn’t dare talk her out of her choice, not when she had marked it as her first command before her council.
Later, after that night’s feasting had drawn to a close, Berenice eased back onto her dining couch. Weighed down with minted veal and honeyed duck, she felt as though her stomach might burst through her gown. Throughout the evening, the banqueting room had remained oddly bare. Too many of Alexandria’s high nobles had vanished, either to their country villas or on her guards’ spears. The rest were by and large too terrified to set foot in the palace. It didn’t bother her; she liked the solitude. Great feasts marked her father’s manner of conducting business, not her own. But she was still pleased when Dio slid onto the divan beside hers.
“I’m honored, my queen, that you’d send me to make your case in Rome.” He grinned. His smile was the only handsome part of him: it revealed a dazzling set of teeth.
“I can’t imagine a better emissary to represent my cause. There’s no man in all of Alexandria who knows me as you do.” Her voice grew flirtatious, despite herself. Dio brought out this side of her; he was too old, too plump, too lowborn, but it was his very homeliness that stoked her confidence. With pretty men, like Dryton, some part of her felt all knees and elbows, as though at nineteen she still hadn’t grown into a woman.