Song of the Nile (54 page)

A breeze caressed my neck, then all the torches guttered out, plunging us into blackness until everything flared bright again. A figure appeared in the doorway, all aglow in an aura of
heka
.

It was Helios.

AUGUSTUS was helpless, unarmored, unarmed, unclothed, and intoxicated on the sacred
kykeon
. The emperor was seldom unguarded, but we’d come to this chamber alone, for who would dare harm him during the most holy ceremony of the civilized world? Slow to respond to the bronze-clad warrior whose beloved hand drew a sword from its sheath, Augustus rose to a seated position to protect me, as if I were the one in danger. “It’s only a vision of the underworld,” he said. “You’re safe, Selene.”

“But you aren’t, Octavian,” Helios said, fingers gripping the pommel of his sword.

At last, the emperor’s face showed some sign of recognition. “It can’t be . . .”

Helios squared his shoulders, his voice low, filled with a pious resolution. “I come to avenge Egypt. To avenge my father, my mother, my brothers . . . and most of all, to avenge Selene.”

“Don’t,” I said to Helios, finally finding my voice. “For the love of Isis, don’t kill him!”

My twin’s glance flickered my way and seeing me undressed seemed only to make his rage burn hotter. His blade glinted in the light, the tendons of his thick forearm twitching. “I’ll kill him swiftly, which is more than he deserves.”

“No!” I cried, clambering over the emperor’s body, shielding him with my own.

Augustus was filled with
kykeon
and hubris. He shoved himself up to his feet, knocking me to the ground. My hands hit the stone floor, the resounding impact rattling my bones. “We’re here to be shown the secrets of the afterlife, Selene. The goddess challenges me to grapple with him, like Hector and Achilles!”

The
kykeon
was in me too, and I was disoriented, wondering if I wasn’t imagining all of this. But not even in a vision would I allow any man to be slain in a temple. The emperor staggered toward Helios as my twin’s muscular arm arced back for the killing blow. The deadly point would strike true, at the vulnerable place between the emperor’s ribs where his heart would beat its last. In desperation, I threw out my arm, and the sirocco woke to my call, rushing down my elbow and exploding from my fingertips. It was a wild, uncontrolled blast that caught both men and lifted them from the ground. My wind wrenched the sword from Helios’s hand, sent it tumbling end over end into the wall where it shattered like glass.

It wasn’t the only thing to break.

As if wings flapped behind me, my winds howled through the room, knocking over sconces and ripping tapestries from the wall. Pomegranates rolled upon the floor beside my mother’s scepter. Baskets of grain tipped over, spilling their contents, which then flew up into the air, pelting us. As I struggled to my feet, my mother’s sparkling diadem tumbled from my hair, which now whipped wild round my head.

The emperor lay on the bed, eyes closed, unmoving, breathing shallowly.

“I don’t need a sword to kill him, Selene,” my twin said, rage in his eyes. “No one else in the world may dare, but I
can
kill him with my bare hands.”

“I can’t let you,” I shouted over the howling wind. “I
won’t
let you.”

“I promised that I’d always defend you, Selene, and it’s the only promise I can keep. He violated you once and lived. He won’t live to do it a second time.” Helios pointed at the bed and I felt the spark of fire even before it left the tip of his finger, the flames blazing. The silk upon which the emperor lay ignited around him. Sweet Isis, Helios was going to burn him alive!

I pushed another funnel of air toward the flames, trying to extinguish Helios’s fire. Our magic met in burning bed linens and seeds of grain, force against force, Helios and I drawing
heka
from the temple floor to counter each other. Smoke and flame billowed with ribbons of purple silk, soot rising to stain the cult statue of the goddess. “How can you do this?” I cried. “You defile her temple.”

“I’m stopping a defilement,” Helios replied. “You should ask yourself how
you
can do this. How you can mate with a monster and give him a son.”

“Because I must!” I shouted, sending charred bits of silk into the swirling maelstrom. “Do you think I want this? ‘Remember Egypt,’ our mother said. I’m walking in her footsteps now.”

Helios lifted a second hand, orange and yellow fire billowing from both palms, and I stretched my hands to meet them, wondering how long I could hold him back. Which one of us was stronger? “She would have never done this, Selene. What she did, she did for love. Can you say the same?”

No
. I was grateful to Augustus. I’d learned to admire him. I’d even forced myself to share in his triumphs and be glad for them. But I loved only Helios. The antechamber became a furnace, an intolerable forging oven in which my inner resolve was melting away. “Our mother took two Romans for politics too. For Egypt . . . she’d have done anything for Egypt.”

“Perhaps,” my twin said, his eyes squeezing shut. “It was her kingdom. It isn’t ours.”

Not ours?
My winds faltered and his fire seared my fingertips. What could he mean? Some dark voice inside me knew, and I redoubled my efforts, blowing the flames back at him until they shot toward the ceiling, a pillar of fire between us. “Don’t say that to me, Helios. Not to me. Not after all the blood. After all the struggle. After all the battles you’ve fought and the cities that have been destroyed—”

“Do you even remember Alexandria?” Helios asked. “Do you still count it your home?”

“Yes!” I screamed, angrier than I’d ever been. Angrier still to know it was a lie. Oh, I remembered Alexandria, and the faith I had as a child that the lighthouse would guide me home. That Helios should know my heart and name my guilt made me furious. Egypt lived in me . . . but I’d taken her elsewhere. I’d taken the spirit of Alexandria and transplanted her to foreign shores. I’d built her image in Mauretania, where my palace waited for me by the sea.
Mauretania
, where my child had been born. Where the people loved me and where the god of the land had come to me as Osiris comes to Isis.

“You can’t unburn Caesarion,” Helios said. “You can’t make our mother and father sit up in their tombs and join the living again. But if you do this, it may send you to your tomb.”

Above the roar, the emperor groaned but didn’t open his eyes. The air whirled dangerously through the heated chamber, the candle wax melting on the altars and bits of glass and pottery clattering against the walls. And the breath went out of me, my lungs singed by thoughts I didn’t want to acknowledge. I glanced up at the statue of the goddess, willing her to speak to me. Willing her to cut into my hands and tell me what she would have of me. But this was a silent Greek version of my goddess. It was only the words of Helios that cut me. “You don’t have to do this, Selene. You don’t have to be his mistress, his goddess, or the mother of his child.”

I’d spent my life scheming, spinning such a web of deceit that even I no longer knew what I actually felt or only pretended to feel. I wondered what it would be like to be free of all this. To be myself and not a new incarnation of my mother. What might it be like to let it all go . . .

At that moment, Augustus roused himself, his eyes opening, his hands raised against the storm of debris. My brother’s determination was renewed at the sight of the emperor’s struggle and Helios launched a ball of fire from his hands, sending it spiraling toward the emperor, rolling like one of those pomegranates upon the floor.

I leapt in front of it. It struck me in the shoulder and my gown burst into flame.

“No!” Helios roared, tackling me to smother the fire.

What hair remained on my forearms burned away, and as Helios dragged me to the floor I screamed at the emperor, “Run!”

Naked, Augustus managed to stagger past us, stumbling into the dark corridor beyond while Helios beat the flames from my body. My arm was red in patches where I’d been burned, and I’d skinned my hands in my fall. Helios held them now, staring as my blood pooled up in the wounds. “Forgive me, forgive me, Selene.”

“Just go, Helios. Go now, before the emperor summons his guards. There are only precious moments. Or will you spill more blood in a temple?”

“I would have only the blood of Octavian on my hands here, not yours! Never yours!”

There was no time to argue. The room was burning and I imagined that I heard the stomping feet of the emperor’s praetorians. I took my twin’s soot-covered face in my hands and made him look at me. “Will you go or force me to watch you be cut down?”

“Come with me,” Helios said. This room would burn. The world might think I’d burned with it. I could die as Helios had died in Thebes and be free. Free as my father had been when he fell upon his sword. Free as my mother had been when she put her hand in that basket of figs . . .

We both knew it wasn’t possible. “I can’t leave Isidora.”

Helios gulped in smoke. “Then you must get free of him. You must swear to me that you’ll get free of Augustus or I’ll stand here and meet whatever fate.”

“We’ll speak of it later. You’ll find me again and—”

“Selene, before the goddess, vow that you’ll get free of him. Find a way,
any way
, to get free of him!”

I knew that if I didn’t swear, my twin would stand here and die like the proud fool he was, so the words fell easily from my lips. “I swear to you by Isis, I will get free of Augustus.”

Helios pulled me into a desperate kiss. One that tasted of life and death. I scented the smoke and the grain and the incense. And beyond that, in the revelry outside, the scent of grilling meats and celebration. The scents and sounds that we’d been born to. He kissed me, and kissed me, and our fingers twined together before I felt the tug of
heka
as he drew the remaining flames back inside him. The fire went out. The room went still. We broke apart, one last look into one another’s eyes before he turned and fled.

In the scorched but silent chamber, I stood coughing uncontrollably. I fastened my gown, pulling my hair behind my shoulders, trying to think of what lie I’d have to spin to absolve me of guilt when the guards rushed into this sacred room. The silence stretched on until I thought I’d go insane waiting for the inevitable clatter of Roman armor. It never came. Instead, the emperor staggered back in the door, bony fingers clutching at me as if to prove I was real. “The goddess has given me a vision!”

My senses failed me, one at a time. My vision narrowed. My lips numbed. After that, I remember nothing more.

Thirty-eight

NOT knowing where I was, my eyes fluttered open to find the emperor’s physician hovering over me. I sprawled upon a well-appointed bed, my arm bandaged where it had been burned. With
heka
sickness ravaging my bones, I also became aware of the burning pain in my arm. Both were agony.
Isidora
. I moaned her name. Given what had happened in the temple, Augustus would be consumed with rage, bent on vengeance. I didn’t fear for myself but for my daughter. I should have sent her back to Mauretania. Back to Juba. A certain softness stole over me at the realization that he’d protect her. Whatever troubles had ever been between us, I could trust Juba with my daughter; I despaired of having never appreciated this about him before.

As regret consumed me, the emperor’s grim face appeared over my sickbed, his eyes troubled. “She wakes. Kore rises from the underworld yet again.”

He would have more questions than I could safely answer. He would know me for the scheming liar I’d always been . . .

“You must’ve overturned a brazier in the night,” Musa said as I groaned in pain again. “The initiates claim there was a storm and fire swirled around the temple, but men see such terrors when they indulge in the
kykeon
. It’s a miracle you weren’t both burned alive.”

“Yes, a miracle,” the emperor agreed quietly. “Can you give her something for the pain?”

“No,” I whispered, refusing with a shaky hand the concoction that Musa tried to force to my lips. I couldn’t afford dull senses now.

“She doesn’t want it,” the emperor said, pulling a chair close to my bedside. “Leave us.”

Once Musa was gone, I thought it strange to see Augustus sitting vigil beside me as I’d once done beside him. “I hadn’t believed there was a world beyond this one, Selene. Not when words carved in blood and flesh upon your arms, not even when I first saw you raise your hands and call the winds did I believe . . . but now I’ve seen the power of your goddess and the terrors of the underworld.”

The terrors of the underworld were nothing compared to my fears of what Augustus might do if he thought himself betrayed. But I saw neither rage in his eyes nor wrath in his posture as he sat beside me, his gaze far away and haunted, one hand slowly stroking his chin as if to relearn the contours of his own face. “Do you know what happened upon our return to Athens?”

I didn’t remember. I hadn’t been conscious. I shook my head.

“Zarmanochegas, the holy man in the Indian delegation, burned himself alive. He was inspired by the flames and the storm. Just as my litter bore you into Athens, this man stood before me and immolated himself.”

Augustus was shaken as I hadn’t seen him shaken in a very long time. Not since he believed that my mother was still alive. Not since he first saw the messages of Isis on my arms. “It must have been a terrible thing to see a man burn alive.”

“No,” he said, turning to me with naked zeal in his eyes. “It was a thing of wonder. A sacrifice worthy of
me
, a man to whom goddesses send visions.”

He hadn’t mentioned Helios, so I nodded, wary as if I faced a cobra, ready to dodge its strike. “What did you see?”

“Did we not journey into the underworld together?”

“Yes, but—I want to know if we were sent the same vision.”

He moved from the chair to the bed, not seeming to notice when I hissed in pain, cradling my burned arm against me. “I saw ecstasy, terrors, and salvation. I saw the assassins. Brutus. Cassius too. And the boy. Caesarion. Did you see him?”