Cleopatra’s Daughter: A Novel (43 page)

“It’s true,” he admitted. “You may not like him, but the women of Rome obviously do.”

I supposed that Juba was somewhat attractive. His hair was thick and long, a rich color as dark as his eyes. His muscled thighs were exposed on the horse, and I imagined that his chest was just as handsomely sculpted. But he would never have the same easy laugh as Marcellus. There was no one like Marcellus, and as I blinked back my tears, my brother patted my shoulder.

“Augustus doesn’t want anything to happen to him. Marcellus won’t see any of the dangerous fighting. But it’ll be lonely in the ludus,” he said understandingly.

“And the Circus. And the triclinium.”

“At least you have Julia.”

She was my only consolation as the long months passed and Saturnalia approached without any hint that the soldiers would be returning home. We wandered the holiday markets together with Gallia and seven of the Praetorian Guards, but it was strange without Marcellus’s constant chatter and with no one to look pretty for.

“When Marcellus returns home,” Julia said, pausing above a wide selection of wigs, “perhaps I’ll be blond.”

I laughed. “What? Like a
lupa?”

“No, like Gallia! Look how beautiful she is.”

“Because I am light,” she told Julia. “With blue eyes and pale skin. You are a Roman. Dark is your color.”

Julia pouted. “Then how will I surprise him?”

I glanced in the mirror above the shopkeeper’s head, wondering whether I would look good with golden hair. But the thought of wearing a slave girl’s shorn-off tresses turned my stomach.
Marcellus is not for me
, I thought firmly.
If he comes home safe, it will be to Julia
. But I couldn’t help feeling just a little triumphant that I would have something more than a new wig to show him when he returned. The construction of the theater had already begun near Octavia’s portico, and when given a choice of designs, I had asked Vitruvius to build something like the Circus, with three stories of arches veneered in white travertine and topped by Corinthian columns. He was allowing me to sketch every mosaic and all of the important friezes inside. I picked up one of the shopkeeper’s statuettes and smiled to myself.

“What? Are you thinking of worshipping Roman gods now?”

I looked down and realized that I was holding a statuette of Mars. “Of course not!” I put down the statue at once.

Julia laughed. “He looks like Agrippa, doesn’t he?”

The round marble face and short, cropped hair did look a little like him. “He must be a very loyal man,” I remarked. “All of this time your father has been gone, and he’s never once betrayed him in the Senate.”

“Agrippa would lay down his life for my father. His eldest brother chose the wrong side in the war against Julius Caesar. He fought alongside Cato, if you can imagine, and when Cato was defeated, Julius Caesar took Agrippa’s brother as a prisoner. It was my father who intervened and saved his life, so Agrippa feels as though he owes him,” Julia said. “Sometimes, he comes to our villa just to check
on Drusus and me. Of course, there’s the Praetorian Guard to watch over us, but he comes anyway.” She lowered her voice. “And he never betrayed me that night in the Circus.”

I paused. “What night?”

“When my father went searching through Marcellus’s room thinking he was the Red Eagle! Agrippa found us renting a room near the
fornices
and never told my father that I was there as well.”

There was a sudden pressure on my chest so hard that it hurt to breathe.
“You’re
the one Marcellus was sneaking out to meet?”

Julia giggled. “Didn’t your brother tell you?”

“No!”

“Well, you should talk to him more often.”

When we returned to the Palatine, I stormed into my chamber, startling Lucius and Alexander at their work.

“What’s the matter?” my brother asked. “Shopping didn’t go well?”

“You lied to me!”

He scrambled to a seated position on the couch, scattering his scrolls from the ludus. “About what?”

“You never told me Marcellus was meeting with Julia in the
fornices!”

“I just found out! Julia only told me a few weeks ago.”

“Weeks?” I cried. “And were you ever going to tell me?”

“He was waiting for the right time.”

I glared at Lucius. “So you know about this as well? My brother tells
you
everything, but keeps his own twin in the dark?”

“It wasn’t meant to be that way,” Alexander argued.

“Then how was it meant to be?”

Alexander moved across the room and shut the door. “He was meeting with her. I knew it would hurt you and I didn’t want to see you upset.”

“So better to see me embarrassed,” I said heatedly. “Better that I learn about it while shopping in the Forum!” Then another thought occurred to me. “So Marcellus isn’t the Red Eagle.”

“It’s still possible,” my brother said. “Haven’t you noticed that since he’s been gone, not a single actum has been put up?”

“It could also mean the rebel is smart enough to make it look like him.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“I’m sorry, Selene,” my brother said quietly.

“I wonder how long they’ve been—”

“Only a few months before he left,” he assured me. “Before then, he was seeing a
lupa.”

I gasped.

“Everyone’s done it.”

“Have you?” I challenged.

“Of course not me!” He glanced at Lucius. “I mean everyone else.”

I seated myself and closed my eyes, wishing that if I kept them shut, I would never have to see Alexander, or Lucius, or Marcellus’s bright face when he returned and whispered into Julia’s ear.

Lucius perched himself on the arm of my chair, and I opened my eyes. “Come with us to the odeum today,” he said.

“Yes,” Alexander replied. “You never come. And you’re the one who professes to like poetry.” Since Lucius had moved into Octavia’s villa, my brother had begun going with him to the local odea. The little covered theaters hosted musical competitions and poetry readings. And since Marcellus had left, my brother was visiting the odea even more frequently than the Circus. “Come on,” Alexander pleaded. “The one on the Campus is the prettiest little theater you’ve ever seen.”

“It might even give you some ideas,” Lucius prompted.

“Ovid is going to be there,” my brother said temptingly.

“And who is Ovid?”

Alexander and Lucius looked at each other. “Just the greatest young poet in Rome!” Lucius cried. “Come with us!” He took my arm, and I allowed myself to be led to the Campus Martius, where a small stone building welcomed visitors with a handsome mosaic and an ivy-covered arch. Because it was nearly Saturnalia, a green and saffron canopy fluttered over the crossbeams, invoking the colors of fertility and protecting the patrons from the December drizzle. Two men of the Praetorian Guard took seats behind us, and Alexander explained what was about to happen.

“Today is for poetry,” he said. “You see the young man with the red cheeks waiting to go on stage? That’s Ovid.”

“How old is he?” I exclaimed.

“Sixteen.”

“And his family lets him perform?”

“Not everyone’s father refuses to acknowledge the value of literature,” Lucius said.

“What about Horace and Vergil?” I asked.

Alexander wrinkled his nose. “Augustus owns them. All they write is politics now. Ovid writes about what’s real.”

When I frowned, Lucius said, “Love,” then added quickly, “and love’s pain.”

I crossed my arms. “And you think I want to hear about love’s pain?”

“Shh,” Alexander said. “Just listen.”

Ovid took the stage, and immediately the patrons of the Odeum hushed. This was not like Octavian’s theater performances, where men stood from their seats and threw dates at the actors and chanted, “Bring on the bear.” The audience was composed mostly of young men. A few women sat with their friends, giggling and pointing,
but everyone grew silent when Ovid declared, “I call this ‘Disappointment.’”

Several men chuckled.

“Why is that funny?” I whispered.

“Because he’s always talking about his triumphs,” my brother said.

Then Ovid began:

The audience laughed uproariously, and Ovid continued:

He went on to describe the shame of not performing, and I stared at my brother in disbelief. When Ovid was finished, the entire audience was on its feet.

Alexander turned to me. “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s disgusting and crass. Is this all that he does?”

“You didn’t like it?” Lucius exclaimed, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. “He has other material, too,” he promised. “Entire odes to his mistress Corinna.”

“The one he took nine times?” I asked dryly.

“It’s meant to be satire,” my brother said. “I thought you’d find it funny.”

“Perhaps I’m not in the mood.”

“But the theater is handsome, isn’t it?” he asked.

Grudgingly, I admitted that it was. For a little stone building crushed between two shops in the Campus Martius, it had a certain charm. It wasn’t anything our mother would have frequented in Alexandria, and she would never have condoned our enjoying coarse Latin poetry in a Roman theater with golden
bullae
around our necks. But then, our mother was gone, and Egypt had been swept up in Augustus’s new empire. Marcellus had been all that made my exile bearable.
When I listened to him laughing in the halls of the villa or shouting at the teams in the Circus Maximus, I could forget for a while that Charmion and Ptolemy were dead, that I would never return to the Egypt of my childhood, and that my father’s memory had been expunged from Rome.

Alexander and Lucius tried their best to cheer me, and for a while there was news from Egypt that seemed hopeful. Cornelius Gallus, the poet and politician whom Augustus had set up as prefect over my mother’s kingdom, had fallen from favor and committed suicide. What better time to turn to me and Alexander than now, when Egypt was without a leader? But news arrived just as swiftly from Gaul that a new prefect had been found. So even as Saturnalia came and went, I found little to be happy about.

When my brother and I had our fourteenth birthday on the first of January, Julia presented me with a beautiful pair of gold-and-emerald earrings, but her generosity did nothing but irk me.

“We should go to the Forum,” she said eagerly, “and pick out a silk tunic to match them.”

“And who would I wear it for?” I demanded, ruining the light mood in the triclinium, where Octavia had hung Saturn’s sacred holly branches from the ceiling, and their waxy leaves reflected the lamplight.

Julia frowned. “What do you mean? For yourself. For Lucius.”

“All Lucius does is stare at my brother.”

Julia looked at the pair of them rolling dice in the corner of the triclinium. “So do you think they’re more than friends?” she asked.

I looked at her aghast. “Of course not!”

“They spend all their time together,” she pointed out.

“So do we,” I whispered. “And I’m not your lover. Marcellus is.”

She glanced swiftly at Octavia. “Please don’t tell her, Selene. She would never forgive me if she knew. Please.”

I wanted to reply with something cutting, to tell her that Octavia knew already, but the need in her eyes was too urgent. And why was it her fault that she was the one destined for Marcellus, and not I?