Daughters of the Nile (14 page)

A lump rises in my throat. “Oh, Julia . . .”

“In trying to please my father, I may have lost my little ones and caused a war besides! Who would win?
Tell me
, who would win?”

Her husband would win an armed conflict, but Agrippa isn’t at the helm of a ship preparing to meet an enemy fleet. He’s in Rome, a political arena where Augustus is the prizewinning gladiator. Still, I reassure her by saying, “You’re working yourself into a terror over shadows. We face only two strong-minded men in togas on the Palatine Hill.”

She calms, either because of my words, or because the caravan is ready to move again and there is no choice for any of us but to go forward.

* * *

WE
don’t reach Rome until evening. Because of the late hour, our Mauretanian retinue goes straightaway to my house on the Tiber River, two bridge spans apart from the city.

It’s the house I chose myself when last I lived here; Juba has never seen it. He says our ride from Ostia has left him too tired for a tour; however, I suspect it’s Julia’s company that has exhausted him. As for the emperor’s daughter, I see her swiftly to a guest room, saying, “Whatever we will find in Rome will wait until morning. We’ll face it better with a good night’s sleep.”

I convince myself of that too and retreat to my chambers. Sleep comes swiftly but I awaken when the moon is high, shrouded in gray clouds. I shift beneath the bedsheets, disoriented and confused in the stillness of the night. It is some instinct for danger that has awakened me and now it lifts my every hair on end.

I’ve long kept the unusual habit of sleeping alone, my attendants banished to a nearby chamber. I’m used to quiet nights. But it is
too
quiet, I think. I should be able to hear my guards posted at my door. Sometimes they lay their spears against the wall and I hear the scrape against the plaster. Sometimes they speak in hushed whispers. Even when they don’t speak, I can sometimes hear their heavy breathing if I listen for it.

But tonight I hear nothing.

Rising from bed and wrapping a shawl over nightclothes, I crack the door and find the corridor outside my chamber terrifyingly empty. My Macedonian guards have never deserted their posts. Their absence makes me instantly alert.

Something is terribly amiss. I’ve a keen sense for danger, nurtured from living so long at the mercy of those who would see me dead. One might think this would prevent me from rushing straight into peril. But my children are in this house, so I take an oil lamp from a nearby table and hurry down the shadowy hall, my steps soft but swift upon the tile.

As soon as I turn into the columned corridor and see men clustered outside the nursery, I know that I’ve been drawn here by something darker than mere danger.

The emperor is here
.

I can’t imagine how he came to be in my house, with all the torches dim or guttered out, in the dead of night. Yet I sense him. I know his presence deep down in my bones. I know that he’s stolen into my home even before I see two of the emperor’s praetorians facing my grim-faced Macedonian guards, swords drawn. I float into their midst, as if untouched by terror. “Is there to be bloodshed, gentlemen?”

“Not if your guards have any sense, Majesty,” Strabo says.

He is the commander of the emperor’s praetorian guard. If he’s here, so is Augustus. The nursery door is ajar and inside I see my son’s wet nurse all atremble, her hands winding one over the other as she frets. The fear on her face drives me to push past her into the room, my heart hammering.

I find Augustus hovering over my infant son, his face half-hidden by the dark. We have been too intimate together for me not to recognize him. In military sandals, embroidered tunic, and thick woolen cloak over his bunched shoulders, Augustus doesn’t look much like his majestic statues. Strangers are always surprised that he’s pale and slight of build. They take it for weakness until he captures them with his piercing gray eyes. Now he turns those eyes on me, the eyes of a predator in the dark, the glowing eyes of a wolf.

And I stop where I stand.

“Caesar,” I say, my voice carefully modulated as I lower in deference to him.

“Cleopatra,” he whispers, helping me to conjure the shades that haunt us both.

Then with a jerk of his hand, he snaps at the wet nurse, “Leave us!” She looks first to me for permission, but when I nod, she flees, closing the door behind her. Then the emperor and I are alone, and a heavy silence descends. I cannot think why he’s come unless it is to punish me . . . or my son. The thought makes me draw closer, wedging my body between the emperor and my sleeping baby. “Why are you here at this hour, Caesar?”

His hand tightens on the edge of the cradle as if he might overturn it with a sharp jerk and spill my baby onto the floor. “I used to love being hailed,” he says. “Coming into a city and having every man, woman, and child stream into the streets to greet me. But now I hate such a display. All the petitioners and hangers-on who push and shove to greet me so that I might look favorably upon their cause. Always with their hands out like beggars. Always asking things of me. It’s become tiresome. Loathsome. And so what I once desired most has been turned into a poison for me; are not the gods cruel?”

I don’t answer; I know that he doesn’t want me to.

“Now I must travel in the stillness of night,” he continues. “When all the city is sleeping, I steal into Rome like a thief. That’s why I’m here at this hour.”

“What I meant to ask . . . is why are you here, now,
in my home
?”

“Where else could I see you without the whole world looking on?” He stares with such intensity that I become aware of my loose hair and flimsy nightclothes. It is a stark reminder of the night he took me, when I was still a naive girl. I’m chilled by the memory but not conquered by it. He will never touch me again without my leave. “Why should you want to see me without the world looking on?”

His voice cracks in reply. “Because you’ve been unjustly torn from me . . .”

So it’s to be maudlin self-pity, then. That’s better than fury. So I speak to soothe. “It was the will of the gods that you sent me away, Caesar. Remember? I was there in Eleusis when the gods warned you that to become the father of Rome, you must abandon me.”

He leans close, his breath a strangely cool caress on my cheek. “I’ve defied gods before. I would keep every promise I made to you, to make you queen, wife, empress, were it not for the good of Rome.”

It’s an old dance between us and I know all the steps, but I remain unmoved. I won’t allow him to taunt me by dangling the world over my head as he did before. “I don’t begrudge you your grand destiny, Caesar. You’re a new Aeneas come to found Rome again. Am I not called to stand witness as you herald a Golden Age?”

“You cannot even say the words without seething, Selene.”

With a mirthless chuckle, he reaches around me, scooping up my son for closer inspection. I want to lunge at him and snatch my baby away, but I dare not do so while the emperor holds him aloft, staring at my little boy, whose face is wan in the moonlight.

My son. The Prince of Mauretania. A child I named
Ptolemy
. It must have been a fit of madness that drove me to give my son a name that would remind the world that he holds a claim to Egypt. A male child who is kin to Alexander the Great. A boy who can be thought of as a rival to Augustus in a way that I never was . . .

Yet my son looks so fragile, his little head a tender melon that might crack open if dashed against the stone. I’m struck by a sudden rage that the emperor should hold him; that my children should be threatened. The scent of hot metal in the forge rises in my nostrils along with the iron tang of dark magic in my blood. My fingers tighten round the handle of my lamp, which seems to flare with my rage. And I imagine swinging it with all my strength so that the clay pot will shatter against the emperor’s skull.

If he moves to harm my baby, I’ll do it. I’ll beat him down. I’ll batter him bloody before the powers of my winds even reach my fingertips. If he tries to harm my son, I’ll kill him before his guards even throw open the door to stop me . . .

To my surprise, the emperor merely presses a gentle kiss to Ptolemy’s forehead. “Does he know?”

I exhale, still hammering down the molten iron anger inside me. “
What?
Who?”

“Juba,” the emperor says. “Does he know about the boy?”

“What should Juba know?”

The emperor speaks the next words slowly and through his teeth. “Does he know that Ptolemy is my son?”

Nine

IN
all the years since Augustus took me prisoner, I cannot count the times that he has shocked me. Stunned me. Rendered me speechless with his cunning, his ruthlessness, his unexpected generosity, his boundless ambition, and his madness. Always, his madness. Yet I am utterly unprepared for this.

In my surprise, I must tip the oil lamp, for the wick pops and sparks in bright flame. Still reeling, I murmur, “
Your
son?”

“
Our
son, if you insist upon precision,” the emperor says. “You must know how it pains me. To see that you kept your promise to me, though I broke mine. You promised me a son and I promised you so much more, Cleopatra Selene. Now I’m here to confront you in the night, like Aeneas confronted Dido in the underworld after she killed herself of a broken heart. Do not take her example and rebuff me. In sending you away, I only did my duty, but that’s cold comfort when I must visit in secret my only son . . .”

Though I am astonished, my voice comes firm. “He is
not
your son.”

“Don’t deny it, Selene. You played the same game with Isidora when she was born. You’ve given me a daughter and a son. It’s a proud thing. Admit it.”

I shake my head, refusing to toy with him, as I would have done before, when I was younger and desperate. “No. I’m sorry . . . Ptolemy is not your son.”

The emperor’s bony fingers stroke the soft skin beneath my baby’s chin. “I counted the months since you left me in Greece, Selene. Surely Juba has too.”

This makes me gasp with offense. “My son was born early. He almost died of it. Can’t you see how tiny he is for his age, even now?”

“That’s because he’s of the
Julii
. We’re not birthed easily. There is a famous story that one of the Caesars needed to be cut from the womb.”

I cannot bear any more of this. I reach for my son, prying the warm little bundle out of the emperor’s arms. “Don’t even think it. He
cannot
be your son, Caesar. We didn’t come together in Greece as a man and woman must to make a child.”

“You deny that which was witnessed by the gods themselves?” he asks with an indignant huff. “I took you during the Mysteries at Eleusis. I laid you down on a bed covered in silk to break the curse your goddess laid upon me and to defy the soothsayers who told me I’d never have a son of my own. But your goddess is cruel; she gives me the son I want and denies me a way to make him my heir. Men plan and gods laugh, they say. How Isis must be laughing now.”

It’s true that I went to his bed in Eleusis, the place where the goddess Demeter searched for her lost child. It’s true that together we drank of the sacred
kykeon
and were taken by visions of the world beyond this one. I was prepared to bind myself to him, to give myself to him in exchange for the throne of Egypt. It is
not
true, however, that we made a child. “The deed was never done. You spilled your seed before you could plant it.”

“Never in my life have I been unmanned.” All at once, he turns on me in such fury I think he might strike me. “Do you expect me to believe that you’d bear the child of any other man? You, my proud Ptolemaic queen? No. You would not. You
could
not. The gods may not let me have you, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t mine.”

I bite back the poisoned words on my tongue at the implication that I should be always waiting for him, like a special couch sent to a faraway palace, reserved only for him when he visits. “You are not my husband.”

Augustus seems to take what I’ve said for a shrewish reproach—the kind of thing a scorned woman says to the lover who abandoned her. He must think he sees in me a broken heart that I’m desperate to hide, and he reaches for my cheek. “Your denials only prove that Ptolemy is my son. Another woman would try to pass off a child on me to see what advantage it held. Another woman, with such a royal lineage, might beg and plead a kingdom as reward. Another princess of Egypt might even use this child to win back her mother’s throne. But you’re too proud, too filled with venom. You’re a reflection of me so I know you better than you know yourself. The only thing stronger in you than your relentless ambition is your cruel spite!”

I shake my head. He doesn’t know me. He only knows my shadow self. My
khaibit
. The part of me that is dangerous and destructive. The part of me I’ve fought down. I’ve lied before. I’ve kept secrets, betrayed vows, and broken faith even with the goddess whose words sometimes carve themselves in my flesh. I’ve driven men to acts of madness and murder to reclaim what should have been mine. And in the confines of the emperor’s household, where my heritage was reviled and my faith suspect, I learned that to survive was to deceive. Indeed, my enemies say that by sparing my life, Augustus allowed a viper into the very heart of Rome. What they don’t know is that it was the emperor himself who molded me into the kind of venomous creature that strikes when provoked.