Song of the Nile (30 page)

Augustus pronounced that he’d finish the theater of Marcellus. Whether this was because the emperor genuinely mourned or because it was the politic thing to do, I’d never know. Those Republicans who’d seen Marcellus as a champion of their cause wondered whether the emperor had poisoned his son-in-law to keep his own power secure. Those who’d seen Marcellus as a threat to Republicanism insisted Livia must have poisoned him to make room for her own sons. Still others gossiped about the conspicuous absence of Admiral Agrippa. The celebrated military commander didn’t return for the funeral of his brother-in-law. Not even for the sake of his wife, Marcella, a grieving sister. Not even, I thought, for Octavia, a grieving mother, the woman he loved.

This wasn’t because Agrippa was a cruel man but because all his fundamental beliefs, all the ropes that tied him so tight inside, had begun to fray the moment he heard the emperor say that he’d fathered my child. It was somehow my fault, I thought. All my fault. And in all this sorrow of great personages, all this speculation and jockeying for position in the new political landscape, the death of Antony’s boy—young Ptolemy Philadelphus—was entirely overshadowed. It was only the smaller people who seemed to remember him. The slaves, the priests, the Alexandrians, and the friends of my parents who’d long since been driven out of public life.

And the Antonias, of course. Both my half sisters came to help me prepare his body, but I’d let no one else touch him. I brushed a ringlet of auburn hair back from my little brother’s dead face, knowing that I’d never see a flush upon those once-rosy cheeks again. He was in danger from the moment he was born, a living token of my father’s break from Rome. He’d been born a prince of Egypt and made a crowned king, but he’d never dwelled upon that. He’d been a thirteenyear-old boy whose greatest joy had been betting on chariots and throwing dice. Philadelphus found pleasure in simple things, like eating and playing with our cat, as if he’d known all along that his time in this world would be brief. Why hadn’t I listened? Why hadn’t I understood when he told me that we didn’t have long together . . .

He wouldn’t be burned like Marcellus but embalmed according to Egyptian custom, let no one try to stop me! I’d have his organs preserved in canopic jars, his body mummified, protective amulets wrapped in the bandages to ward off dark magic. It would take seventy days to do it properly, which meant I’d have to stay in Rome until the seas opened again in the spring. I didn’t care. Time had lost all meaning. I’d lost my mother, my father, my older brothers—all cut down violently or forced to suicide. Only Philadelphus had been taken from me for no reason I could discern, and I desperately wanted someone to blame.

IT was the saddest Saturnalia. The grimmest holiday in memory. Like mimes, we went through the motions of the festivities but took no joy. Octavia didn’t want music, poetry, or games. She purged the household of everything that reminded her of Marcellus and took personal affront to any show of merriment. But with the death of Marcellus, Octavia’s influence was waning and the emperor’s wife was once again the most powerful woman in Rome.

Livia made no secret of the fact that she thought our grief was excessive. Un-Roman. Since Virgil couldn’t be persuaded to celebrate, she hired minstrels and invited King Herod’s young sons, who had lately come to the city, as honored royal guests. When Terentilla, the beautiful wife of Maecenas, fawned over Augustus so scandalously that guests openly acknowledged her as the emperor’s mistress, Livia revealed not the slightest tremor of jealousy.

Livia’s game was transparent to me. She was making new allies in the emperor’s circle who could be counted upon to support her. She was recruiting royals to lessen my prestige and encouraging promiscuous women to turn the emperor’s eye away from me. For all that she was my enemy, I didn’t care. I only knew that if I found any evidence that she’d poisoned my brother, I’d have vengeance.

Beneath the frescoes in the dining hall, Terentilla’s high-pitched laughter echoed and I sat staring into my goblet of wine. It was a sweet Falernian that had gone dark with age, so strong that it bit the tip of my tongue. I wondered how many cups I’d have to drain before I no longer felt the bite. The Herodian princes presented Livia with a pair of emerald earrings as a Saturnalia gift and she made much of them, even as she demurred, “Perhaps you’d better give these gems to my stepdaughter, as Julia so loves to ornament herself. As for me, my children are my jewels.”

Julia took no notice of this. “Marcellus and Philadelphus both loved the Saturnalia,” she murmured, and I remembered the long ago Saturnalia, when Philadelphus chose the pastry with the bean and was proclaimed the Lord of Misrule. I remembered too how delighted he’d been when we were given a gray kitten . . . and now Bast curled up in my lap, her chin low and ears back as if she also mourned for him.

“The pine wreaths,” Julia continued, stammering and sniffling. “The r-red berries, the gilded candles and spiced w-w-ine . . . Marcellus loved it all.” She dissolved into a gale of sobs. Iullus rose to comfort her and she buried her face in his toga while he stroked her hair. He risked much by revealing his tender feelings, and for the first time, I thought to myself,
He truly loves her
.

The same thought must have occurred to the emperor because he disentangled himself from Terentilla and called Julia to him. Then he dismissed the rest of the family and our guests to exchange gifts elsewhere. I stayed behind with Julia, hoping to defend her. Or perhaps I was simply too drunk to stand. Facing the emperor, Julia whispered, “I want my mother.”

At this, Augustus rocked back in his seat. “Your
mother!
You dare mention her to me?” Whatever Julia’s mother had done to merit her virtual exile from Rome I’d never learned, but we all knew better than to mention Scribonia. With bleary eyes, I watched the emperor lean forward and say, “You’re an embarrassment, Julia.”

Julia dabbed at her eyes, losing a battle to still her trembling lips. “I’m a
widow
.”

“What do you have to show for it?” Augustus snapped. “Are you with child?” Julia shook her head, crossing her arms over her empty womb. Then the emperor turned on me. “Her moods are your bad influence, Selene. When are you going to give your brother a funeral? You can’t keep his sarcophagus in your house forever.”

What a silly thing to say. Nothing was forever. Not Philadelphus. Not my house on the other side of the Tiber. Not even Rome itself. In this life, everything would someday turn to ash. Bereft, I took another fortifying swallow and let the wine burn all the way down. “Let me see him safely to Egypt and put him in my mother’s crypt.”

Augustus rubbed his face, eyes upon the ceiling as if begging Jupiter’s indulgence. “Don’t try my patience, Selene.”

Perhaps he thought it was a ploy, a desperate gambit. This time he was wrong. I set down my goblet to plead with him. “Caesar, I’ll go secretly to Egypt and I won’t stay. I’ll perform the proper ceremonies. No more than that. Just let me see to it that Philadelphus rests with our mother and father. That’s all I ask.”

“
All you ask?
You’re a Ptolemy, Selene. You can’t step foot in Alexandria without being proclaimed Queen of Egypt.”

“Why would that be so terrible?” Laid bare, I pressed with both palms to my cheeks to hold back the grief. “I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked of me. Let us go home. Can’t you, for the sake of mercy, at long last,
just let us go home
?”

He just stared at me, then stood up and walked out of the room, his toga trailing after him. Even after he was gone, his footsteps still echoed in my mind, and I drank deeply, chasing after the drunken state of oblivion my father had so often sought for himself.

“How do you do it?” Julia asked. “How can you not weep?”

Because I’d spent my youth swallowing my grief like it was mother’s milk. Because I’d learned to mask my pain. Because I was bleeding inside and dared not pull away the bandage to inspect the wound and because—

“If she starts weeping, she’ll never stop,” Octavia said from the doorway. Though some Roman women wore white in mourning, she wore a
stola pulla
, all in black. Sadness had etched itself into the very lines of her face and I wondered at my own reflection on the surface of the wine. How was there color on my lips? How had that comb come to be in my hair? Tala must have dressed me, but I could scarcely remember.

Slaves had been dismissed from work on account of the Saturnalia, so Octavia took it upon herself to start cleaning up the meal. I should rise to help her, but I glanced over to see Julia fiddling with something in her lap. When she saw me looking, she held up little vials. “Perfumed oils. A gift from Tiberius. I fear he means to begin a courtship.”

Perhaps if I’d been sober, I wouldn’t have said, “Anything Tiberius gives you comes straight from his mother, and Livia is nothing but poison to you.”

I’d only meant to point out Livia’s all-too-obvious campaign to marry one of her sons to the emperor’s now-widowed daughter. Octavia fastened on a different meaning to my words. She never looked up, never changed expression as she gathered up plates from the feast. She only asked, “Do you think Livia works in poisons?”

We shouldn’t have this conversation. Not here in the emperor’s household where Livia’s spies lurked behind every pillar. Certainly not with Octavia half mad from grief. Even though my lips had gone numb, I was still wary enough to say, “I don’t know.”

“My son was healthy,” Octavia said, her lips pinched tight. “His brilliant future was cut short at the moment,
the very moment
, Livia saw her fortunes dwindling. Do you think it’s coincidence?”

Livia was known to prepare tonics for the emperor. Only
I
knew that she’d dosed him with something the night he took me to his bed. Only I knew that she’d offered me poisoned wine the next morning. And that was nothing I could share. I wanted to blame Livia for Philadelphus’s death; I wanted to punish her for it, but what proof did I have? Surely if Livia had hated anyone enough to poison them, it would have been
me
. Yet here I was, alive.

Octavia grabbed up a napkin and shook it free of crumbs. “There is one thing that’s certain. I’ll never let Livia benefit from the death of my son, even if that means Julia never remarries.”

At this, Julia flinched. She’d done her duty to her family; she deserved some reward, some hope . . . “Julia will
have
to remarry,” I said. “She’s sixteen and hasn’t any children yet. Marcellus wouldn’t have wanted her to live as a widow forever, and the emperor will insist that she take another husband. So why not Iullus? He’s twenty-one, another son of your household, and a
quaestor
with great potential—”

“He’s Antony’s son.” Octavia shook her head. “For the emperor to give Julia to Iullus would be like allowing Antony to bed his daughter. It would humiliate him. Don’t you know that Augustus would see them both dead before he allowed such a match?” I’d warned Julia that a future with Iullus was impossible, but Octavia’s words rang down like unshakable prophecy and there was nothing I could say to lessen the blow.

Julia’s expression fractured. “But Iullus is loyal to us,” she cried. “He isn’t Antony.”

As if she hadn’t heard Julia, Octavia reached for my goblet. I held it fast. I thought she’d lecture me on the disgrace of inebriation and almost welcomed the argument that would follow, but she only said, “I’d like you to lay Philadelphus beside Marcellus in the family mausoleum.”

In the tomb of Augustus, she meant. She’d loved Philadelphus and wanted to honor my brother as if he were her son, but how could I allow Philadelphus to rest eternally beside the emperor?

WITH a jar of wine and a basket of barley cakes, I went to the old Temple of Isis. With Saturnalia celebrants still stumbling drunk about the city, there was no one to stop me. The temple was dark and the gate was closed, but Memnon broke the chains and pulled the overgrown vines away so that I could slip inside. The potted trees were now nothing but desiccated stalks, dead and brown. This place had once been a sunlit sanctuary for me, where my blood blossomed into flowers. Where magic flowed and crocodiles defended me. Now the inner sanctum was shadowy and filled with a vile stench. The pools were clogged with muck. Following a chain on the ground, I found the rotted skeleton of a crocodile with spears in its remains. I couldn’t say if the magnificent beast had been killed for sport or mercy, but I grieved for him too. Everything I touched, everything I loved, I seemed destined to lose. Perhaps it was my punishment for allowing this to happen to the temple. Philadelphus once told me that I’d save the goddess, but I looked up at her statue to see the damage I’d wrought. Though moss had grown in the folds of her stone garments and all her finery had been stripped away, that perfect compassionate expression hadn’t lost its power. This was Isis in her own guise. A sistrum rattle in one hand and the sacred knot between her breasts.

“Oh,” someone whispered. “Isis is beautiful.”

I turned to see Julia standing with the Antonias amidst the debris. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We followed you,” Minora said.

“You shouldn’t risk yourselves! Augustus has ordered this temple closed . . .”

Julia held up the hem of her expensive silk gown, stepping over a fallen chunk of marble. “Yet here you are, Selene, in defiance.”

I didn’t want them here. I wanted to fling stones at them and drive them away. “Will you just go? Leave me!”

As a queen, I was becoming accustomed to obedience, but Antonia put a stubborn hand on her hip. “No.” With that firm-set jaw, she was her mother in miniature. She adjusted her
stola
as if afraid to touch anything. “We want to know where you’re going to entomb Philadelphus.”

“In Mauretania.” I’d built a tomb there for one brother; it would have to shelter another.

“Please don’t take him,” Minora said. “Philadelphus would be a stranger in Mauretania. Leave him with us.”