Daughters of the Nile (31 page)

“I’ve been to Pontus. My father owned an estate there. I remember because when we went, my mother bought me a hat of pure snowy white rabbit fur to guard against the cold.”

The pining in her voice echoes deep within me. I have tried to make Mauretania her home, but always some part of her heart is in the East. “Pythia, you’ve no need to leave this court. There is always a place for you here. You are as a daughter to me.”

Her dark eyes soften. “But I do not have the blood of the Ptolemies. I cannot be a daughter to you.”

Taking her face in my hands, I say, “Isis brought us together and your mother gave you to me. Don’t you know that I love you?”

My heart breaks at the sudden tears that spill over her cheeks. Have I never said this to her before? Surely I have. But somehow I have never made her believe it. What a wretched woman I am. Wiping the tears from her cheeks, I say, “Pythia, know that I love you and that you don’t have to go.”

“But shouldn’t I? If I
did
have the blood of the Ptolemies, what would I do?”

I smile, bittersweet. “What would a princess do when a golden crown and glorious future is in her reach? She would snatch it up with the unrelenting grasp of a Ptolemy Eagle.”

She will have him, I decide. No Eastern king will refuse my niece, the granddaughter of Mark Antony. Pythia is a kinswoman to the imperial family through the Antonias. She is their niece as well as mine. And if she wants King Polemon for a groom, she will have him.

* * *

EVERYONE
wants Isidora. Julia’s inquiries on behalf of my niece have touched off a flurry of betrothal offers for my daughter that I suspect would never have taken place if we had sent Herod away in utter disgrace. The offers become a topic of discussion in the council chambers with our advisers. Resting comfortably on his ivory throne, my husband observes, “The Emesans do not even ask a dowry.”

“Princess Isidora’s bloodline is a dowry richer than the Emesans deserve,” Lady Lasthenia says crossly. “What foreign prince is worthy of a Ptolemaic princess?”

“None of us are,” my husband says, sighing with amusement.

He seems not to realize that a good number of our advisers are not at all amused. Many of them are status-conscious Alexandrians who are indignant at these proposals of marriage from lesser kings. “We are not entertaining the offers,” I say, hoping to forestall criticism.

“Not now anyway,” Juba adds. “But one day Isidora must leave us for some foreign prince.”

This gives me a start. “Why must she?”

Juba tilts his head to slant me a glance. “Who else is she going to marry? Her brother?”

The king asks this with a contemptuous laugh and several Romans laugh with him as if none of them realize the insult. For nearly three hundred years my family practiced brother-sister marriage, a tradition all-but-abandoned by my mother with the gravest consequences. When Juba and his men laugh, they are laughing at my family. Humiliation scorches my cheeks, and our Alexandrians stiffen in their seats, a schism in our court widening before my very eyes. Lady Lasthenia reddens, arguing, “King Juba, this is the way of royal dynasties in the East.”

“Not all of them, surely,” Juba says with a tight smile. “Or we wouldn’t be receiving all these offers.”

My poet takes up the argument, going on to list all the kingdoms that follow the practice of brother-sister marriage, finishing with, “Why, at present, there is only one sister left for the King of Commagene to marry off because he married the other.”

At last, Juba seems to sense that our courtiers do not see the world with Roman eyes, but he is not chastened. “Well, they may do as they like in the East, but it will not happen here.”

My nostrils flare at the autocracy of his words, but I keep my silence.

Crinagoras rises to his feet to address the king again. “Having served in many royal courts I would remind you that there are good reasons—good political reasons—not to give hope to foreign kings that they may lay claim to your throne or to the bloodline of the Ptolemies.”

At this, Juba turns to face me. “Is that what you want, Selene? Our nine-year-old daughter and our four-year-old son to cease being innocent siblings, everything corrupted between them by a betrothal?”

The pain this question causes me is acute—a band of agony squeezing tightly at my throat, suffocating any reply I might make. He asks this of me as if the notion were absurd. A disgrace. So distasteful an idea that I should be ashamed. And I am ashamed, for his words are not only a slap to the traditions of Egypt, but a condemnation of the love I found with my twin—a love I have hidden and denied, a love I have sacrificed at an inestimable price to my soul.

Of course I don’t want our children to marry. I cannot even imagine it. Ptolemy runs after Isidora when she is at play and she is patient with his boyish ways. She holds his hand when he goes up and down the stairs and coddles him when he falls and cries. Everything they do, they do in innocence. They are a sister and a brother, nothing more. They are not like Helios and me.

No. I absolutely do not want them to marry. And yet, the king has called me out in front of our entire court. “What I want is to make a wise and considered choice for Princess Isidora. One that is in keeping with my duty to our kingdom and the distinguished lineage of my ancestors . . .”

It is as tempered a reply as anyone could possibly expect from me under the circumstances, but it seems to anger the king. Or perhaps Juba is smarting from having been lectured to by the Easterners in our court who will always see me as my mother’s heir and him as the husband who was forced upon me by the emperor.

In a rare fit of temper, my husband dismisses our council, retreating with his Roman companions, leaving me behind with only a few of my intimates.

“That was a most unfortunate dispute,” my poet says.

“Do not make much of it,” I warn. “Do not make record of it in your poems. It was only a disagreement and it is years before a decision must be made about Isidora’s future.”

“Nevertheless, the king seems unprepared for it. He is too much Roman . . .”

In spite of the fact that Juba has wounded me, I argue in his defense. “Maybe we are too much Greek or Egyptian. Our Berbers have their own royal traditions. Why, they even divide their kingdoms between all their sons.”

“Which has proved a disaster for them!” Crinagoras has had an unusually long career, serving as an ambassador for his home of Mytilene long before I was born. He politicked with my mother, my father, Julius Caesar, and Pompey the Great, and has made the acquaintance of nearly every king in the empire. I am fortunate to have him at my side, even if he is vain, boastful, and dismissive of my Berbers. “King Juba has no standing upon which to show you such disrespect.”

“Juba didn’t grow up in a royal court. He doesn’t understand.”

“That much is plain. If King Juba gives the impression that he will happily accept a foreign prince for his daughter, what will happen to your reputation? Your bloodline is your claim to Egypt. Your claim to the legacy of Alexander the Great. It is bad enough, they say, that your mother let two Romans sire her children, but at least those Romans were the most powerful men in the world. Now
your
children’s blood has been diluted with that of a jumped-up barbarian—”

“You speak of your king!” I hiss, whirling upon him.

“He is not my king,” Crinagoras reminds me, unrepentant. “I am a free citizen of Mytilene. I serve Cleopatra’s daughter . . .”

“You do not serve me when you speak of my husband with scorn. There are limits to my tolerance and I will send you back to Mytilene within the hour on the leakiest ship I can find if you do not recant.”

“Your Majesty,” he begins, only a touch more conciliatory, “I am merely repeating what is said of your husband. These are not my words. I know that King Juba is a civilized king. Perhaps the most civilized king. But he does not behave in keeping with the expectations for a
Hellenistic
king. He has not paid visit to Greece. He’s sponsored no monuments in Athens. He shows no interest in sponsoring the Olympic Games and allowed your contributions to be dwarfed by King Herod. Already you find it difficult to lure artists and engineers and scholars to Mauretania—and those that
do
come, come because of the prestige of being able to say they served in a Ptolemaic court. Without that, what do you have?”

* * *

LATE
that night, Juba comes to me, stumbling, drunk, and angry. We are, neither of us, in any good temper. But I do not want to quarrel. I missed him too much when he was gone, so when he puts his hands on me, I let them roam and pretend that wine has not made him clumsy. As the servants melt away, snuffing out candles and lamps as they go, I let the king pull me down onto a bed piled high with embroidered pillows. Encircled by a canopy of gauzy linen that sways in the sea-scented breeze, I let him strip me of my clothes. I remember how it was when I went to meet the god in the river, where my womb opened like the blossoming of a lily. When my body became an instrument of life. I want another child, so, like the goddess opened herself to the god, I try to open myself for my husband.

But I cannot do it.

You would never allow such a thing to happen unless your husband has become so inconvenient that you desire to be made a widow.

The emperor’s threat echoes in my mind. I do not want to be a widow and now I can think of nothing but how I gamble with my husband’s life. When it is finished, I know that I am not with child. I think Juba knows it too. Years now, he has kept to the terms of our bargain. When we come together, he doesn’t speak of it. He doesn’t ask me questions or force me to examine my desires. He doesn’t press me to name my feelings or even to acknowledge what we do together when we are alone. He doesn’t try to unmask me or to delve beneath the surface of what I am willing to show him. And because he has not demanded that I give him my whole self, I have been able to give him a small part. If he sees that the seeds of my fondness for him might blossom into something more—he has been wise enough not to say so.

At least until now.

In the dark, his words are whispers against the pillow. “Do you love another man, Selene?”

The question catches me by the throat.
Do I love another man?
I am only half of one soul—I came into this world with another—and to be without him is a wound that never heals. It is a wound I bandage over with the fabric of my life in Mauretania. It is a wound so deep and hidden that it is not safe to touch.
Helios
. Horus the Avenger. Whatever name they call him now, he is my twin, my other half, and the strength of everything I do.

Yet the purity of our bond would be something Juba considers
corrupted
.

It does not matter, I tell myself. It was Juba that I married, but Helios was always the husband of my heart and now I am a guilty adulteress, no matter what I do. I cannot let myself love Juba without betraying my very soul, and I cannot love Helios and give myself wholly to the man in my arms . . . even though I want to.

I want to. I
want
to. But why should it matter? Where in all the royal marriages of the world would it matter?

My husband waits on my answer, but no good can come of telling him the truth. It will only wound him or enrage him or both. I resolve to lie to him as I have lied to him for years. But Juba’s hands are now so gentle as he strokes me, that in this moment of intimacy, skin to skin, I cannot force myself to speak words of deceit.

The king takes my silence for an answer. “Will he take you from me?”

“No,” I say, and it is true. My twin will fight for Egypt. He will fight the Romans to the end of his days. But he has left me to this life. He has left me to this man. He will not take me from Juba.

Juba has always believed that it is Augustus who stands between him and my heart. It is the farthest thing from the truth, but it is a lie that protects us all. If Juba knew my brother was alive, he would betray him to the emperor. And if he knew that Helios had been my lover, he would hold me in contempt for more than a betrayal of our marriage bed.

Once, I would not have cared whether Juba held me in contempt. He would not have been able to pierce my Ptolemaic armor with his disdain. But that is all changed now. And so I squeeze my eyes shut, praying that he does not ask me to explain myself. By the gods, let this be the end of it!

The king should close his eyes, sink into the cushions, and let Dionysus carry him off in drunken dreams, but he asks one last question. “Will you dishonor me with him?”

He does not ask if I
have
dishonored him, for he has always assumed as much. In this, he simply asks a promise. I don’t know if I can keep it but I make it anyway. “No. I won’t.”

My husband exhales and I know we will not speak of it again. We will both pretend he has never asked these questions and that I never answered them. We will forget these words like the nonsensical things uttered in the madness of ecstasy when a man and a woman come together in the night—words that cannot be examined in the light of day. Words that
must
not be examined in the light of day.

Twenty