Daughters of the Nile (12 page)

I do remember, though all such remembrances of Rome are tainted for me. “Did you tell them how you used to steal stewed plums from the pot of spiced wine?”

“Oh!” Julia says, rocking back on her knees. “You’ve given me a craving. Can we have spiced plums for the Saturnalia? Or don’t you think the plums will taste so sweet if we don’t have to steal them from Livia’s pot?”

“My plums will always be sweeter than hers,” I declare.

Julia wants plums, so I give them to her. Wearing a freedman’s conical red
pileus
cap, as is the tradition during the Saturnalia, I serve plums at
all
our holiday banquets, and they taste sweeter than ever before. The Romans shout,
“Io Saturnalia,” and I gather the children in my chambers, where I shower them with gifts, including masks of revelry. I give gifts to my courtiers too. A new set of alabaster lamps for my mage. A thick silver bracelet for Tala. A length of precious cloth for Chryssa. Gem-encrusted inkpots for my poet, Crinagoras, and a vial of perfume for Circe.

Such gifts as these would be too humble for Julia, so I commission a play in her honor. It is a new version of
The Trojan Women
that makes us all weep. It’s one of our playwright’s best; everyone agrees that Leonteus of Argos has outdone himself.

Later, still dabbing our eyes and weary with emotion, Julia and I huddle together on a couch by a burning brazier in my chambers, sipping warmed wine. Elsewhere in the palace, we hear revelry that will last late into the evening. I should be there with them in the banquet hall, celebrating with the king, but my quiet intimacy with Julia is a sweet respite. I give her a set of combs and ribbons in commemoration of the first gifts she ever gave to me, and she likes them very much.

“You think me vain!” she cries, but she sets about putting them in her hair straightaway. “And here all I have to give you is the rights to quarry stone in Numidia . . . They fell to me somehow as a gift from Marcellus. I suspect that given all the construction here in Iol-Caesaria, you can make better use of stone than I can!”

It is an astonishingly generous gift. “I’m so grateful. Truly, I cannot tell you how glad I am to have you here for the Saturnalia. I only wish it didn’t mean we’ll have to face your father’s wrath come springtime.”

“Oh, Selene, you need not worry about my father’s wrath. Did you really believe that I let a sailor of low birth bed me just so that I might blackmail him into sailing across the narrow strait?”

I know the look in her eye when she means to tell me something vital and the hairs rise on my nape. “How should I know what to believe when you play such games with me?”

Julia gives a rueful smile that fades into sadness. “I’m sorry I deceived you. It’s just that I wanted time with you that belonged only to me. Time I didn’t have to share with my father.”

Disentangling myself from her, I begin to sit up. “I need you to explain yourself . . .”

She sighs with regret. “I half convinced myself that I was acting upon my own desires instead of being pushed like a piece upon a game board between men vying for power. I hope you’ll forgive me . . .”

“How can I forgive what I don’t understand?”

“Fine. I’ll make it plain. I left Agrippa at my father’s command.”

“At your father’s command?” But that makes no sense at all, unless . . . “So the emperor means to break from his alliance with Agrippa. Has he grown so powerful in Rome that he no longer needs his best general?”

Julia gives a delicate shrug. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been in Rome since my marriage, and my husband censors my letters. But my father has ways of getting word to me through the soldiers. It was my father who gave me the means to leave Agrippa and come here.”

The grinding gears of imperial intrigue have grown rusty in my mind, but now they start to turn again. “
Sweet Isis.
Your father must be planning some move against Agrippa. Is there to be another civil war?”

Julia stares down, twisting her betrothal ring around and around the fourth finger of her hand. “I don’t know. I only know this is the only mission my father has ever set for me other than to marry the men he chooses and bear children for them. I couldn’t refuse him.”

It doesn’t surprise me that the emperor would use Julia’s desperate need for approval against her. But it
does
surprise me that she remains so stubbornly loyal to such a father. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me. It is, I begin to think, the Roman way. “Meanwhile, your husband returns to Rome, unaware of the trap . . .”

She has too long been the daughter of Augustus for my implication to startle her. “I cannot believe that Agrippa is in any danger. My father cannot mean to make a widow of me a second time. He simply intends for a new ordering of their partnership. A new understanding. A negotiation . . .”

The emperor once described Julia as a kind of hostage that his powerful and increasingly independent general held against him; now, with Agrippa returning to Rome with his legions, the emperor has sent Julia to me for safekeeping, and I wonder at the significance of that. “Why here? Why did he make you flee to Mauretania?”

“It was the nearest client kingdom, though I’m sure there are other, more personal reasons.” She doesn’t say what those reasons are and I don’t ask. We’re both too shrewd for that.

“But, Julia, Agrippa has your children . . .”

“They’re his children, or so he insists. My loyalties aren’t torn, Selene. I am of the
Julii
. I must do as my father commands. As must we all.” Her eyes are strangely intent on me now, all the gaiety gone from them. Then she says quietly, very quietly, “I have never understood what passes between you and my father.”

If I have my way, she never will, for it is something too wicked to name. Something I have banished to the past, buried in my dark shadow self, my
khaibit
, which, Isis willing, will not rise again. “There is nothing to understand, Julia. Your father has done me great honor by making me queen and entrusting unto me some part of the grain supply for the empire. He’s commanded from me shipments of grain, and I have obeyed.”

“That is not all he commands of you now, Selene.”

What can she mean by that? I scarcely breathe, so anxious am I. Will the emperor admonish me for having borne the son of another man? In his rage, would he dare to entrust such a missive with his own daughter? Julia meets my eyes and speaks carefully. “My father and my husband need a man to mediate between them.”

“Maecenas?” I suggest, for that has long been the role of the emperor’s old friend.

But Julia shakes her head. “Agrippa doesn’t trust him. He’s heard that Maecenas once advised the emperor either to offer me to Agrippa as a bride or to kill him.”

That’s true. I was there. But I do not confirm it.

Julia continues, “So there is only one man upon which both Augustus and Agrippa agree might make peace between them. That is Juba.”

My mouth goes dry as it all falls into place. “Yet you said nothing, all this time?”

“The seas don’t open until the month sacred to Mars, so what would be the point of upsetting you when there is nothing to be done about it until springtime?”

I want to shake her. Not only for keeping this news from Juba, but for the news I am afraid she is still keeping from me. In my mind’s eye, I see the cobras rise from a basket of figs, but I force myself to ask, “What aren’t you saying? What is to be done, Julia?”

“I carry a summons, Selene. My father commands you and Juba to return to Rome.”

* * *

I
won’t go
, I tell myself. When the sea opens and the ships make ready to sail for Rome, I’ll delay. I’ll plead illness. I’ll plead madness if I must. But I won’t return to Rome. I won’t return to the emperor’s side. I will not be his mistress. I will not play that game again. Never again.

So I say nothing. I don’t tell my husband of the message that Julia carries from the emperor. Not when the nights are cold and the sea is rough and we are cut off from the rest of the world. Not when I can lose myself in the daily rhythm of our lives and believe the world we’re building here for ourselves can remain untouched.

There will be time enough to tell my husband before the sailing season, so we go on with the Saturnalia. In token of the holiday, I give Juba a bust in the likeness of his father, the Numidian king—something rare that I acquired at great expense. I take pride in this gift, because I don’t think my husband has ever even seen a portrait of his father before.

But I worry when Juba unveils it and stares so long at the marbled face. My husband swallows, as if searching the stone replica of his father’s image for some reflection of himself. “Now I see why, when I was a child in Rome, I was mocked as the son of a hirsute barbarian. Quite a beard . . .”

“I think he was handsome. Don’t you like it?”

Juba clears his throat. “Thank you for such a thoughtful gift, Selene. It’s only that I don’t know where I can keep it.”

I think I understand. We’re both the children of Rome’s enemies. Like my mother, his father battled Rome and lost. All our lives, we’ve been forced to renounce our parents. To dishonor their memories with silence, if not denunciation. If my husband should give a place of distinction in our palace to this bust of his father, the infamous Berber rebel, it might be taken amiss by his master in Rome. It might be taken as a symbol that we sympathize with our subjects who would drive the Romans out. But I didn’t make this gift with any political purpose in mind . . . or so I told myself at the time. “Keep it in your bedchamber, where only you can see it. No one can fault you for a private sentimentality.”

Juba strokes his chin. “If that’s true, it strikes me as odd, for it’s our private sentimentalities that pose the most danger, don’t you think?” I have the strangest sense that this is a veiled barb aimed at me. And when I meet his gaze, I realize that he already knows what I’ve been keeping from him. He points to a roll of vellum lying half-opened on his writing table. “Julia delivered the official summons this morning. Sealed with the emperor’s signet ring.”

At a loss for what else I might say or do, I drift to the table, examining the sphinx, the emperor’s personal symbol, pressed deeply into the red wax. Written in the most formal language, the summons gives no hint of the emperor’s state of mind. Whether he is furious or indifferent to us, we might never know from reading this. It says only that the
Ludi Seculares
will be held in July. It’s to be a grand ceremony to announce a new age. And we’re required to return to Rome to reaffirm our loyalty along with the other client kings and queens.

“Go without me,” I say, my voice hoarse with distress.

“You know that is not possible, Selene.”

“There’s no reason for me to be there except that he commands it.”

“That is reason enough.” He rummages on his writing table for a coin that he holds out on his palm. In the world of sovereigns, coins are the surest messengers, and there, engraved on the metal, is the true reason the emperor wants me in Rome. The front of the coin reflects the face of Augustus in profile, but it’s the back that is of most interest to me. A star. A comet. Just like the one that was said to mark Julius Caesar’s ascension to godhood and the one that was said to herald my birth.

Juba holds it up in the light. “He has minted this coin to commemorate the forthcoming
Ludi Seculares
, in which he will proclaim himself the promised savior. And he cannot be believed by the people unless his claim is acknowledged by Cleopatra’s daughter.”

The inelegant sound I make is a ghastly mixture of shock, disgust, and outrage. Why, this revelation is only further reason for me to stay away. “Let them believe what they will!”

“Selene—”

“Do you remember that once, the emperor summoned me, and you pleaded with me not to go? You told me to delay. You told me to lie and say the message didn’t reach me, or that it reached me too late to brave the journey over the winter sea. You said I should defy him. That I, alone, could defy him.”

“Did I?” he asks, careful not to meet my gaze. “I must have been quite drunk.”

“It was not wine that made you say it. You offered to help me then, so why not now?”

“Because there is no point.” My husband’s eyes settle again upon the bust of his father, still half in its wrappings, and he whispers, “Do you see this man, Selene? King Juba, the First of his name. I never knew him. He’s only stone to me. Only dust. He’s dead. He died while I was still an infant. He wasn’t the man who hired my tutors and made certain of my education. He wasn’t the man who defended me in my youth. He didn’t teach me political strategy or take me with him on military campaigns. The man who did all that was Augustus Caesar. Always Caesar. The only thing I have from the man in this bust is my name. If this is the man you want me to be . . . I fear I will always disappoint you.”

I flinch, for I know well what it is to be held up to the example of a parent and be found wanting. “Never would I put such a burden on you—”

“Then don’t hold him out as an example to me! Don’t ask me to put a statue of him in my bedchambers, where I must see his face every morning upon waking. Put out of your mind that I’m a notorious rebel, ready to throw off the yoke of Roman power.”

Heat comes to my cheeks as I realize he suspects me of trying to undermine his Roman sensibilities and I cannot say he’s wrong.

“I will not defy Caesar,” Juba continues. “The idea that I should prove disloyal to him in any way is a horror to me. I will not send him a refusal or seek to humiliate him or assert our independence. We must go to Rome and you know this.”

What I know is that my husband will always choose the emperor over me. The reminder of it stings like a lash across my cheek, and I begin to regret all those kisses that tasted like hope and happiness. My voice trembles with anger when I say, “Go to Augustus in Rome, then. Run to your master when he whistles. But I won’t go with you, and you know better than to think you can drag me there.”