Daughters of the Nile (59 page)

Staring, Juba breathes in. He breathes out. His voice is hoarse when he speaks. “If that is true, then lay aside your trembling, because it will never happen. Whatever Caesar has been telling you, whatever he has promised you, he will never do it. You think you know him. You think you know him better than anyone else. But I have known him longer, Selene. I’ve seen him toy with adversaries for years. For decades. He tells them what they want to believe—”

“He is the one who wants to believe Ptolemy is his son, not me.”

Juba lifts one hand as if to grant me that. “Perhaps the desire is all his. Still, you must understand that these fantasies are private indulgences. He has many. Things to help him find relief from the realities he cannot escape. In the end, he always does that which will assure his esteem in Rome.”

My husband is telling me that I am nothing to the emperor but a very expensive
hetaera
with whom he plays the most intricate bedroom games. Perhaps he is right. It would be better for us all if it were true. Unfortunately, I cannot believe it. “The
Ara Pacis
is not a private indulgence. It will be unveiled days from now before all of Rome.”

“Tell me, Selene. Which hero is depicted on that monument?”

“Aeneas.”

Juba nods as if I have proven his point. “Not Alexander. Not Julius Caesar. Not Mark Antony. None of the men who took an exotic or forbidden woman for a bride. He chose Aeneas. He chose the hero who abandoned his African queen. He will never jeopardize his legacy. Not for you or even for a son of his own. If you believe otherwise, if you
truly
believe otherwise, it is a vanity.”

He puts a terrible doubt in me. Can I have been so foolish? I think of all the promises the emperor has made to me. All the promises he has broken. Has my Ptolemaic pride blinded me to the truth that the only promises he has ever kept were the ones most convenient to him? I am shaken but not convinced. “It is not my vanity that carved me with the winds as a goddess. How will our enemies answer it?”

My husband adopts the tone he uses to lecture. “We do not have enemies, Selene. We have a rival in Herod, that much is true. But here in Rome? We have friends and allies. Julia adores you. Tiberius and Drusus were your childhood playmates, and I would happily serve either of them should they come to power. I understand that you do not care for Livia. She resents you because of the emperor’s fascination, and two strong-willed women will undoubtedly come to conflict.”

I shake my head violently. “No. You don’t understand at all if you think Livia and I loathe each other because we are strong-willed. There is a long trail of dead men and boys in her wake. I cannot prove it. I have never been able to prove it . . . but she is a poisoner more dangerous than the emperor himself.”

“That is a
vicious
rumor,” Juba says, as if he thought better of me than to spread it. “One that might well be hurled at Isidora one day for her love of plants and potions.”

My fists clench because in this one thing, I am utterly certain. “I know Livia works in poisons because she tried to give me one.” I remember what she said the morning after the emperor forced me to his bed.

I’ve provided you with an honorable exit. It won’t be as dramatic as your mother’s end, but unless you have the power to conjure up Egyptian cobras, a goblet of poisoned wine will suffice.

When I tell him, Juba narrows his eyes. “Did you drink it?”

“Is that what you think I should have done for your honor and mine?” I ask, fury rising inside me. “All this time, you have been wishing that I took my own life . . .”

“No,” he snaps, taking me hard by the arm. “No, Selene. I ask because I want to know how you are so certain the wine was poisoned.”

Damn him, examining my claim like a tutor before a classroom. Demanding proofs that I cannot give, but which I know in my heart, in the deepest part of my heart, are true. “You think I imagined the danger?”

He gives a long-suffering sigh. “I think you have seen so much death in your time that you are overvigilant against every possible threat. You have lost so much that it has made you paranoid, prone to hover over your children and live in constant terror for them. If everything you’ve said is true, people will gossip about your surrendered virtue and mock me, but they’ll assume Ptolemy is just one more of the many children on that monument and they will put it from their minds.”

I want it to be as simple as that. I desperately want it to be. “So we should do nothing. We should pretend as if it is nothing. Will you still see it the same way when Augustus insists on keeping me and Ptolemy here in Rome?”

The king grimaces. “I’ll speak to Caesar about this. It is a conversation long overdue.”

This answer, given so seriously, makes my stomach churn. “You don’t believe anything I’ve said, do you? Because if you did believe me, you would know to fear for your life in having such a conversation. I have told you everything and still you don’t believe me . . .”

“Have you told me
everything
? Tell me there are no more lies. No more secrets between us. No more fugitives hiding in my court. Tell me that I know everything now.”

I have told him everything that is mine to tell. I have told him every part of the story . . . except for those having to do with Helios. I cannot tell him that. If I tell him Helios is alive, he will reveal it to the emperor. And if he should try to persuade me that Helios is dead, another thing I have only
imagined
, it will break me.

At my hesitation, Juba takes me by the shoulders. “What else?”

My voice quavers. “You will not thank me for telling you . . .”

“Tell me, damn you!”

We are at the edge and neither of us can back away. If I tell him, we will fall. If I refuse to tell him, we will fall. We will fall and we will not survive it.

“Selene, you tell me or Augustus can keep you for all I care.”

This threat makes me want to shout at him that it can be over, then. That if he is willing to abandon me to the emperor, again, then I do not want him. But I would be lying. I do want him. I fear that I have fallen in love with him. I fear that I love him
desperately
and that he is breaking my heart. “Juba, can’t you see that for you, I am stripped bare of everything but this one secret? It is not a danger to you. It is not a danger to our children. It is not a danger to our kingdom.”

I hear him swallow. Then he asks, “Are you my wife or no?”

I don’t understand what he means by this question. I answer it with the truth as I know it. “I have been your wife since the night we conceived our son. Not before then. Not the day you married me. Not the years after. You were no husband to me then either, but I swear to you by Isis and everything I hold sacred that when I returned to you from the Isle of Samos, I became your wife. We made a family and a marriage beyond what was written in the contract.”

“Has that marriage no value to you?”

“You know it does. Let me have this one mystery. Don’t make me tell you. I ask for nothing else. Because if I tell you, you will betray me and none of it will have any value at all . . .”

He snorts. “So I am to trust in you while you put no trust in me.”

I lay my palms flat to his chest, beseechingly. “I am no good at trust. Or honesty. Or laying myself bare. But I am trying, Juba. I am trusting you with my son’s life. With my life. With all my secrets save one. I have put myself in your hands. Can it be enough?”

“I don’t know,” he says harshly.

It is not the answer I hoped for. “You don’t
know
?”

“That is what I said. I don’t know. You’ve had two years to consider, Selene; I will need more than just one night.”

Thirty-six

ROME

JANUARY 30, 9
B.C.

IN
the wee hours of the morning on the day the
Ara Pacis
is to be unveiled, I dream of mobs swarming my house, intent upon tearing me and my children from our beds and dragging us through the street. I do not want to go. While Tala natters on with the mistress of my wardrobe about what I should wear for such an occasion, I lie back down again in my bed, grateful for the Roman design of the house that keeps away sunlight. My daughter peeks into my chambers to ask, “Aren’t you feeling well, Mother? I can make you a tincture before we go . . .”

Though my head is pounding, I say, “I just need a moment to myself.”

She squints. “Perhaps your humors are imbalanced.”

“Perhaps I like them that way.”

She laughs and I am glad, because I regret my sniping tone. My daughter is only trying to tend to me. It may be the last time she ever does. Soon she will be the Queen of Cappadocia. And before that, she will see me carved on the emperor’s altar. Others may not see, but my daughter always sees. So I force myself to get up.

My hair is styled in the knotted coiffure made popular by Octavia and I don only small pearl earrings for adornment. For garments, I wear a modest blue
tunica
with yellow fringe, covered by a matching shawl and my fur cloak.

I will need the fur-lined cloak, for it shall be a very cold January day. It is made all the colder by my husband, whose crisp civility belies the storm inside him. The slaves must sense it, because they jump to his commands, preparing him for the day as if he were about to ride into battle. The king has not a spare word for me and I do not press him.

And as we go out into the winter afternoon, I stare out over the other side of the river, where the crowds assemble for the dedication. I know the difference between the normal clamor of the city and voices that are gathered together in anger, echoing off wood and brick and marble. I listen closely, my ears searching out for the slightest sound of jeering or discontent, but I hear none.

When we reach the site of the dedication, the crowds part for our royal entourage, but we do not hurry to take our customary place closest to the imperial family. Juba and I hold back and linger with the other notables in Rome, many of whom blow warm air into their hands and eye the sky for bad bird omens that may send us all home.

We endure speeches, rituals, gift giving, and pomp. Augustus is both solemn and proud to show off his new gift to Rome, and the people murmur and point at this symbol or that while I hold my breath.

They are most interested in the red granite obelisk that he stole from my mother’s Egypt and the bronze lines in the travertine pavement that mark the degrees of the solar year. Henceforth, on the emperor’s birthday in September, the shadow of the obelisk will fall upon the center of the altar of peace. He has made of it the gnomon of a sundial. With this bit of artistry, he is saying he was born to bring peace. He is saying that he is the savior. Augustus has made himself a sun god at last and obliterated the memory of Alexander Helios . . .

Clutching my son against me, I take great pains not to look in the emperor’s direction when he is hailed again and again. It is Livia I watch. I watch for every false smile and every twitch of her predatory eyes. Perhaps she has prepared herself. She is surrounded by her kinsmen. One can’t turn a full circle in the crowds today without seeing a Claudian of one stripe or another. Every man, woman, and child with a claim to the Claudian name has crawled up out of their holes to find favor in Augustus’s regime.

Livia has accomplished for her family what I could not accomplish for my own—a feat that deserves my grudging admiration. The emperor’s wife seems untroubled by my presence and, in fact, utterly unaware of me. It is a pretense, I know, but is it because she is afraid of her husband’s plans or because I am now so beneath her?

Who does the emperor lie to, I wonder? Livia or me? Who sees the true face of Augustus?

Maybe none of us do.

My husband and I stand side by side, keeping our children close. Juba performs the role that is required of him, but has no talent for this sort of playacting. His laugh is bitter and his only words to me a sharp rebuke. “Stop holding the boy round the neck or you’ll suffocate him.”

Ptolemy, who is keen for his independence when other boys are watching, is grateful when I loosen my hold on him at the king’s command. And my son’s eagerness to squirm away makes me feel even more of a fool. I don’t know what it is that I was expecting under the bright sun on this crisp afternoon. Did I think people would gasp at the scandal? Did I think senators would come rushing at us with daggers? From the street in front of the altar, a few women impolitely point at me and whisper behind their hands. Perhaps they have always done it, but today I notice, and it is very hard to pretend that I do not. But I am jumping at shadows, I think. All along I have condemned the emperor and Herod as paranoid and mad, but now I wonder if that is what I have become. What they have turned me into. It is a humiliating thought . . .

We stay only as long as propriety requires.