Song of the Nile (27 page)

Agrippa had complained about Republican factions in Rome. Those were likely my father’s old partisans. The emperor liked to claim that Antony and Cleopatra would have destroyed the Republic to rule as monarchs, but during the civil war, half the Senate—including the staunchest Republicans—had fled to my father’s side. They’d feared the young Caesar was the greater threat and they’d been right. Maybe some of those same senators had survived the wars. Maybe one of them would come to power, someone who would favor my claim to rule my mother’s kingdom. But who? Pacing back and forth beneath the columns holding up the emperor’s house, I came full circle to the very same realization I’d made as a girl. Augustus was my enemy, but he was also my savior. He’d taken my birthright away from me and was the only one who could give it back. I
needed
him. I needed him to live. I needed him alive and indebted to me. For the love of Isis, I needed to find some way to forgive him, at least long enough to nurse him back to health!

Stiffening my resolve with a cup of unwatered wine, I called for a slave to find a
kithara
and climbed the stairs to the emperor’s rooms. Musa hovered by the door, tight-lipped and nervous. “I give him cold baths to keep his fever down. He has lucid moments, but he’s frail. Nothing else can be done.”

“I’ll try to soothe him.” I took the cushioned stool and positioned the
kithara
on my knees. Dampening the unwanted notes with the palm of my left hand, I used my other hand to pluck at the strings with a little wooden pick. I thought of Mauretania and the unusual melodies I heard in the streets there, until I found myself making music. Augustus opened his eyes, murmuring, “Now she comes to me as Sappho serenading Apollo in his darkened cave . . .”

“Is that what you want?” I smiled softly. “To see Sappho in the afterlife?”

“I won’t see anything,” he croaked. “I don’t hold with that mummery about the Elysian Fields. When I close my eyes the last time, there’ll be only blackness. Death is the end of all things.”

He said it boldly, but I could see that he was afraid. After all the lives he’d snuffed out, now he was afraid for his own. Somehow Isis allowed me to feel compassion. “My goddess promises salvation. To venerate her is to find our way to the afterlife, reunited with all those we’ve loved, reunited with the parts of ourselves that we’ve left behind. In the Nile of Eternity, we live forever. This is why it’s so wrong of you to deny the people Isis. Why it’s wrong to close her temples and deprive people of the faith that sustains them through this life and into the next.”

His dry lips cracked into a near smile. “I’m dying and you torment me like a harpy. You defy me as well. I told you that I want to see our daughter before I die.”

I stopped myself from shuddering. “And you
will
see her, for I believe you’ll live a long while yet.”

Lifting a trembling hand to point in my direction, he said, “More the fool, you. If you were wise, you’d give me your forgiveness and hurry back to Mauretania before the vultures pick over my corpse. Rome isn’t a safe place for royalty.”

As always, he tested me. “You’re not dying and I’m going to stay until you’re well.”

“If I weren’t dying, I wouldn’t feel so wretched.”

“To make the bread, the wheat must first suffer beneath the sickle. Maybe you feel so wretched because you’re becoming something new.”

He turned his head, gray eyes meeting mine. “What new thing would you have me become?”

Hope stirred in my breast that even someone like the emperor could change. “I’d have you become a more just and merciful ruler. A man who would rather be remembered for securing the peace than for triumphing over his enemies.”

“Ah, Selene,” he said. “You’re still so pitifully young.”

LEAVING the emperor’s sickroom, I came upon Philadelphus throwing dice in the courtyard so that Bast could scamper after them. “Oh, Bast!” I cried, stopping to stroke her and scratch behind her ears. It was the first time I’d seen our cat since my return and the first moment Philadelphus and I had been alone. It was an opportunity, at last, to speak without censure or spies. I went to my knees beside him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. “I’ve seen him,” I whispered. “He’s alive, Philadelphus.”

My little brother looked over his shoulder at the house, where I’d left the emperor wheezing upon his bed. “He’s sicker than before, but he’s always managed to claw his way back to health. If I see truly, I think he’ll do it again this time.”

“Not
him
,” I said, shocked both at my brother’s prediction and that he’d mistaken my words. “I speak of my twin.”

Philadelphus slowly lifted his eyes to mine, his slim shoulders tensing, his mouth forming words of grief and denial that his voice wouldn’t sound. Then he leaned closer, as if afraid to even whisper my twin’s name. “You’ve seen Helios? Alive?”

I smiled over the sob in my throat. “Yes. Oh, yes. I thought you’d know it because of your sight. I wanted to tell you before now, but I couldn’t think of a way.”

Bewilderment clouded his eyes. “But I thought . . . in the Rivers of Time, I so often saw him dead . . .”

I gave him a little shake. If he denied it the way Euphronius denied it, I’d go mad. “Helios came to me in Mauretania in an ancient temple. I felt his touch as real as you feel mine now.”

“He came to you. He found you . . .” Philadelphus’s eyes glistened, and then he smiled as if it suddenly made sense. “I suppose that he would.”

I didn’t have to tell him that no one else must know. He’d lived too long in this Roman court of intrigue not to know how to keep secrets. “Now he calls himself Horus the Avenger.”

Philadelphus smiled wider, as if overawed. “Just as they named him at our mother’s funeral.” His smile turned to that characteristic roguish grin. “If he’s become Horus, and you’re the New Isis, what does that leave for me? Surely, I must be a god too.”

It made me laugh. “We Ptolemies are never humble, are we?”

I played the
kithara
again for Augustus the next day. Musa had propped him up in a chair so that his feet could soak in a wooden tub of seawater. Beneath the cold poultice on his forehead, the emperor’s complexion was ashen, as if his illness were burning some part of him away; I hoped it was the cruelest part. “I’m so weary of baths,” Augustus said irascibly, pointing an accusing finger at Musa. “He made me soak in cold waters at Baiae until I couldn’t bear it. ‘Just let me die in Rome,’ I told him. Still he leaves me wet and shivering.”

“We’ll have the slaves carry you back to your warm bed soon enough,” the long-suffering physician replied, leaning over the emperor to put an ear to his chest. “Or would you be more comfortable at the home of Maecenas?”

“It’s too late for comfort,” the emperor wheezed, and then his eyes fell on me. “Physicians are torturers, you know. I’m told you have one at your court in Mauretania. This Euphorbus, who hails from Alexandria. What are his credentials, Selene?”

My fingers stilled on the harp, the music dying away. The emperor’s question seemed casually posed, but his gaze was intent. It was a potent reminder that even now, even so near to death, he was a danger. He’d been spying on me and I didn’t know how much he’d learned; I had to spin a convincing lie without falling into a trap. My hesitation went on too long, and not wanting the emperor to see my rising panic, I averted my eyes.

It was Musa whose voice pierced the uncomfortable silence. “Euphorbus is my brother, Augustus. We parted when Lord Antony gave us our freedom, but everything he knows, he learned from me.”

I stared at Musa in surprise, as the emperor was wracked with an interminable cough. He convulsed, one of his feet sloshing water on the floor, and Musa called for slaves to carry the emperor to his bed. They hurried in, taking the emperor by his pale arms and lifting him from the chair. “Come,” Musa said to me. “He asked me not to let you see him like this.”

I followed the physician on unsteady legs. We stopped in the corridor beneath the painted garlands, vibrant green on the wall, and I leaned back against the plaster. The question that burned in my throat went unspoken, but Musa must have seen it in my eyes. “I hope I didn’t just make a terrible mistake, Majesty, but you seemed in need of my help.”

My wariness still made me choose my words carefully. “Euphorbus is your brother?”

“No,” Musa admitted. “But when I was in Alexandria with your father, I knew a Euphronius. He was a priest. A good man. Your tutor if I’m not mistaken . . .”

A hand to my cheek, I gaped at him. “Why would you take such a risk for me?”

“I’ve told you before that your father was a good master to me and that I was grateful to him for giving me my freedom. I’m a friend to you and your brothers, Majesty. You have many friends, though you may not know it. If ever I can help you, I will. As for risk, well, whatever we say in front of Augustus now may be denied and blamed upon the fever if he lives.”

“If he lives,” I whispered. “And he must live. He
must
live.”

ONCE Augustus was abed, I returned to the sickroom, taking up my harp again. I thought the emperor had drifted to sleep, but he turned rheumy eyes my way and murmured, “The divine Julius had the falling sickness. He was afraid that anyone should know. Once, I saw him froth at the mouth like a dog, and I drew the curtains and let no one see.”

Plucking a soft melody, I said, “He must have been grateful to you.”

“I thought I was the only one who knew of his illness, Selene.” He winced with pain. “But
Cleopatra
knew too. It was hinted at in your mother’s letters, the personal ones that she kept and showed to me to soften my heart toward her. She tended Caesar whenever he fell, just as you’re tending me now.”

He was still trying to live another man’s story, and here I was to complete the illusion. To see the hunger for me in his eyes was no less disturbing than it had ever been, but would my mother have flinched from it? She’d always done everything for Egypt and would expect the same from me. I gritted my teeth beneath a serene smile, knowing that I must stay by him and stoke this fantasy.

THE surest way to re-create the emperor’s fantasy would have been to stay in my mother’s old residence, the one she lived in as a guest of Julius Caesar. But if I were to relive my mother’s life—if I were to succeed where she’d failed—my story must not end with
my
little girl delivering to me a deadly basket of figs. So I bought a house across the river with ample room for my courtiers and an excellent view of the boat-shaped Tiber Island, the center of which was adorned by an obelisk resembling a ship’s mast. It was in my new house that my daughter first learned to walk, falling to her knees countless times upon the black and white tiled floor. When she cried, I’d take her to the terrace to watch young waterfowl test their wings while fishermen pulled in their nets.

My days were devoted to nursing the emperor, but entertaining consumed my evenings. My royal retinue was delighted to receive important guests and I was grateful for the tasteful entertainments of my poet and pretty Ecloga, my young mime. My house was a veritable embassy of Mauretania where Roman luminaries and foreign ambassadors came to call.

This house was, I realized, the first place in which I’d ever been my own mistress. It wasn’t my mother’s home, nor the emperor’s, and though it paled beside my beautiful palace in Mauretania, I didn’t even have to share this house with Juba. Not yet. I did write him a letter, apprising him of the emperor’s health and beseeching him to empty our storehouses and send more grain as proof against the coming famine.

Juba didn’t reply. I received word only from Euphronius:
The king cares nothing for matters of state. He ignores dispatches, doesn’t meet with his council, and spends his time in the stables. Several Berber girls have been offered as concubines to comfort the king, but you’ve no cause to worry on that account as he refuses them, saying that he doesn’t want to favor one tribe over the other. We should, however, fear the influence of a Greek
hetaera
who has come to court as a gift from Herod.

Juba’s disinterest in the coming famine disturbed me even more than the fact that my enemy was providing my husband with female companions. To my immense irritation, I could do nothing about
either
as long as I was obliged to stay at the emperor’s side. One morning, as I prepared to make my daily pilgrimage up the Palatine, Tala said, “It’s shameful that you tend Augustus like a humble nursemaid. He doesn’t need you there
every day
.”

She made a good point and not just because the emperor’s health was improving. In spite of his drama with the signet ring, almost everyone still believed that he intended to rule Rome as a monarch. I feared they would blame his ambitions upon me and didn’t wish to give rise to gossip that I hosted lavish feasts while the Romans went hungry. Nor did I want to be seen as closeting myself away from Rome’s plainer citizens. I had my own reputation to protect, so I decided to take Philadelphus for a day at the races.

THE Circus Maximus was politically neutral. Patricians, plebeians, equites, freedmen, and slaves were all equally passionate about the races, and the enormous stadium was an excellent place to be seen.
How Roman he’s become
, I thought as Philadelphus excitedly rattled off the names of the best charioteers. I couldn’t help but be a little excited too.

Julia and Marcellus joined us at the arena, which turned my royal processional into an even grander thing, prompting trumpeters to announce our presence to the crowd. As we took our seats in the imperial box, the Romans cheered for the beautiful young married couple, and Marcellus glanced at the chair usually reserved for the emperor, laughing. “I could get used to this!” I must have looked appalled because Marcellus turned to Julia and said, “I see the sunny shores of Mauretania have done nothing to improve Selene’s sense of humor.”