Lily of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  The two Antonias—my half sisters—watched everything I did. Marcella, Lady Octavia’s elder daughter, ignored me as if I were beneath her. None of the girls actually spoke to me except for Julia who complained a great deal of the time.

  For dinner we ate boiled fish and greens. Then it was time for the emperor’s nightly lecture. We all settled into low couches, chairs, and benches while the emperor stood at a lectern. “Here under my roof,” he began, then paused to cough. “I’ve gathered the children of my friends, my enemies, and fallen comrades. You’re the sons and daughters of the old Republic and I’m the last man standing. Now, together, we’ll make a new Rome.”

  My eyes drooped wearily, following the rows of tiny white and blue tiles across the floor to where my brothers yawned and swayed in their seats.

  “I’ve brought the civil wars to an end,” the emperor continued. “And now there are a thousand offices left vacant because of casualties or proscriptions. Rome will need moral wives and loyal public servants, and I’ll make you children into able candidates for those positions.”

  Honestly, I can’t remember the rest of what he said. By the time I climbed into bed that night, my entire body ached and I wondered if heartsickness could spread to the limbs like an illness. I held up my arms and stared at them in the flickering light. I had seen what Agrippa saw. I had not imagined it. I had seen a message carved into my skin.

  Now I was waiting for another.

  Eight

  “THE most insidious threat to any state is the immorality of its women,” the emperor was saying.

  I tried not to watch him when he lectured. His cold eyes still unsettled me. Besides, I was still trying to wear my mask of royalty. Livia could say that my titles were stripped from me and that I was little better than a slave, but I knew otherwise. I was a Ptolemy princess—a queen in exile who must bide her time until she could think of some plot, some plan to return her to her throne.

  “Egypt’s soft religions make women licentious and independent,” the emperor asserted. “Even before the war with Cleopatra, Roman women were corrupted by her example.”

  “He’s obsessed!” Helios whispered.

  I’d managed to sit beside my twin tonight, but now I regretted it. I pleaded with my eyes for Helios to be silent, for the emperor’s daughter was sitting with us. Still, Helios was right. The emperor was fixated on how women should behave, and more importantly, how women should not behave. He’d been rambling for what seemed like hours.

  In sheer boredom, I contemplated the bland red and green mural on the wall depicting a Roman matron returning at night, watched from the balconies by her neighbors—a reminder to me that my brothers and I were also being watched.

  At last, the emperor’s speech became more passionate. “Before Actium, women were voicing unsought opinions. They ignored their duty to produce children. Women were becoming stubborn and hard to live with.”

  The sickly ruler of the world had whipped himself into such a fury that he had to pause to blow his nose. Then he sipped at one of the tonics Livia gave him for his ailments and rearranged his notes. “It’s no wonder that noblemen preferred to marry their own emancipated slaves rather than marry a true-born Roman woman.”

  Helios leaned over to me and whispered, “Romans fear no army on earth, but they’re apparently terrified of nagging wives.”

  “Be quiet. You’ll get us in trouble,” I whispered back.

  Too late. The emperor heard us, and he glowered, waiting until all attention was back on him. Our whispering had annoyed him; perhaps that’s why his examples became more demeaning. “When women meddle in matters of the world, there’s disaster. Fulvia, of recent infamy, meddled in politics and raised an army, shaming her husband, and bringing about the needless deaths of many.”

  I glanced over at our half brother, Iullus, to see his reaction to this public rebuke of his late mother, but his face was like stone, betraying no emotion at all. How long had he endured lectures like this in the emperor’s home? Was he lonely here? At least I had the brothers I’d grown up with all my life. Who did Iullus have?

  The emperor sniffed. “This is why women must be kept in their place. A woman needs to value purity and chastity. Monogamy keeps the voracious female appetite in check. Left to her own devices, a woman will take many men to bed and to wed, and then divorce them just as easily. Just as Cleopatra did.”

  Helios could not sit still, moving his hands first to his lap, then to his sides. He made a sound like a growl and my stomach tightened. My mother had married four times, it was true, but she was only widowed, never divorced. Not like all these Romans.

  There was no attempt to be subtle on the emperor’s part. He obviously meant to use our dead parents as examples, openly and often. “An unnatural woman like Cleopatra ruins a man. Once, the Amazon Queen of the Lydians put the great hero Hercules into bondage and forced him to dress like a woman. Mark Antony claimed descent from Hercules and just like his forbearer, he allowed corrupt Cleopatra to emasculate him and make him weak.”

  At that, Helios was on his feet. “Endless lies!” I stiffened in my chair as Helios continued, “My mother wasn’t corrupt and my father wasn’t weak. His soldiers told a thousand tales of his valor.”

  Part of me was angry at Helios for risking the emperor’s wrath. Another part felt proud of him. Unfortunately, it made me feel like a coward for silently enduring insults against our family honor. The emperor lifted his cold eyes from his notes and stared at Helios dispassionately. “If your father wasn’t weak, he wouldn’t have lost the war.”

  I could see Helios wrestling with his anger, his hand twitching. “What would you know about it? You let Agrippa do all your fighting for you. At Philippi, it was my father who avenged Julius Caesar’s murder while you hid in a swamp.”

  The emperor’s daughter gasped beside me and a nervous rustle went through the room at what Helios had said. The master of the world tilted his head as if evaluating my brother anew. I expected the emperor to shout a denial, but he was often quieter when angry. “So he taught you about Philippi?”

  “My father taught us about all his battles,” Helios replied, and it was true. He would pull out maps and tell us about the people in each country, and show us where he’d marched.

  The emperor said, “Then he must have taught you that Philippi was a very unpleasant place. I don’t breathe easily in such climates.”

  “You breathed well enough to make a father and son draw lots to see which would be spared,” Helios argued. “My father’s soldiers told us how the conquered at Philippi were so disgusted with your ruthlessness that they cursed you even as they saluted my father as the merciful victor.”

  I closed my eyes, fearing to breathe. It couldn’t be wise to remind the emperor of all the people he’d so cruelly put to death. We could still be next!

  When I opened my eyes again, the emperor was staring hard at my brother, his gray eyes sharp and flinty, but he made no move to deny any of it. “Antony may have been a valorous warrior at one time,” he said. “But then he was enchanted by your mother and her orgies of wine and excess. She forced him to abandon Rome and every shred of honor he ever possessed.”

  I felt warm with embarrassment at the picture of my parents he painted. They had entertained the finest artists and scholars in the world, yet Octavian made the joy of our court sound perverse.

  “Your parents clearly didn’t make the time to school you in your manners,” the emperor said. “It’s time you were properly educated. Helios, you’ll be whipped three times for speaking out of turn.”

  My twin’s jaw set in the same way it had when he burned his model ship. “Is it three strokes per interruption? I have at least six strokes’ worth more to say.”

  A ripple of fear went through the room; I could feel it and the emperor seethed. “You can have fifteen.”

  Livia rose from her seat to fetch one of the disciplinary rods Juba kept in his classroom. Meanwhile, the emperor crooked a finger a
t my brother, summoning him to the front of the room.

  “Remove his tunic,” Octavian instructed a male slave. The slave rose, but my brother pulled off his tunic and threw it on the floor before anyone could undress him. Then Livia returned with the beating sticks and handed them to Juba, who regarded my twin with some disappointment before pulling out a bench for Helios to lean over.

  Juba readied the switch while I observed the faces of the children and slaves in the room. They were a study in marble. The children might giggle and bicker outside, but before the emperor, they showed nothing. Even Lady Octavia was subdued, her hands neatly folded in her lap. I couldn’t read her expression—whether it was stern approval or distaste—but she told Marcella to put Philadelphus and Minora to bed, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want Philadelphus to see Helios beaten, and I tried not to feel grateful to Octavia for sparing him.

  As soon as the younger children had gone, Helios lay face-down, his smooth royal back exposed. His hands gripped the wooden legs of the bench as Juba lifted the switch and brought it down. The whip whistled through the air, then cracked against my brother’s back.

  I yelped, but Helios didn’t make a sound.

  “Where was I?” the emperor asked. “Oh yes. The immorality of women is dangerous to the state. One day, I’ll pass new laws that will bring us back to the older, more correct, Roman values.”

  The second strike of the rod was just as vicious. The third welted Helios’s skin. My twin twitched, then lowered his face so that we couldn’t see his expression.

  The emperor continued his lecture throughout it all. “The new laws will require a man to immediately divorce an adulterous wife and report her if he knows her to be unfaithful, or else be convicted for pimping.”

  The sixth stroke broke Helios’s skin and my twin brother’s knuckles whitened around the legs of the bench. I tried to look away but couldn’t. He was my other half and I felt the echoes of his pain upon my own skin. It seemed to me almost as if the legs of the bench were straining under my brother’s grip. Still, he made no sound.

  As I writhed in my seat in empathetic agony, comfort came from a most unexpected source. Julia touched my fingertips. She was the emperor’s own daughter, but I squeezed her fingers in return.

  The tenth stroke sent a slow trickle of red blood over Helios’s ribs. He let out a smothered groan. The eleventh stroke brought more blood with it and my eyes flooded with tears. It was the fourteenth stroke that finally broke Helios. He cried out.

  But Juba would never reach fifteen.

  Like a crack of lightning, the legs of the bench snapped under my brother’s iron grip. Wood splintered, the bench crashed to the floor, and Helios tumbled forward, stupefied as he held broken wood in each hand.

  The marble facade of all the faces in the room finally shattered—Julia squealed and one of Livia’s sons laughed nervously. Disgusted, the emperor stormed out of the room.

  Once the emperor was gone, I ran to Helios’s side, helping him up from where he lay amongst splinters. How could a bench break in such a way? It seemed impossible that it should’ve fractured to pieces.

  “Selene,” Juba began, reaching for me as if to apologize.

  “Barbarian,” I said, jerking away.

  The crisscross pattern of welts and blood on my twin’s back was truly horrible to behold, and Juba had done that. Was this the happiness that he told me we’d eventually find here? Had Juba endured his family being insulted day after day? He’d whipped my twin and I wasn’t sure I could forgive him no matter how sorry he was.

  I wrapped my arms around Helios even though his blood smeared on my hands. It was warm like the Prince of Emesa’s blood had been when they chopped his chest with an ax. And that memory sickened me and made me sway on my feet.

  As for Helios, he was angry and embarrassed. That much I could tell. He wiped his teary eyes with the back of his hands. Then he turned on the women and children in the room. “Only three of Cleopatra’s children were here to defend her,” Helios said. “But if everything we’re told is true, six of Mark Antony’s children sat here. Lady Octavia even claims she was his true wife. Yet I’m the only one who defended him.”

  Our half brother, Iullus, flashed his eyes at Helios with barely disguised fury. “Why should I defend him? How can one defend the indefensible?”

  Helios all but spat at Iullus. “He was your father.”

  “A regrettable fact of my life,” Iullus replied.

  Iullus was three years older than Helios, bigger and with a longer reach. Even so, the two of them looked ready to come to blows.

  “That’s enough, boys,” Lady Octavia said. There was an edge to her voice and she looked away. “It’s time for bed … We’re all very tired.”

  “SELENE!” The whisper cut through the darkness and startled me awake. I rolled over on the thin mattress, squinting in the dim light.

  “Helios? Where are you?”

  “Look for me under your dressing table,” he said.

  I climbed out of bed and crept across the floor. Ducking under the table, I found a hole in the wall and saw my twin’s face on the other side, illuminated by his oil lamp.

  “The slave girl told me that there was a loose brick between our rooms,” he whispered through the hole. “I waited for Philadelphus to fall asleep and pulled it out.”

  “Which slave girl?”

  “Chryssa. The Greek.”

  I scowled into the darkness. “You can’t trust her. I fought with her after my bath when she tried to take my dress from me.” That bloody garment, trophy of Octavian’s Triumph, was now hidden under my mattress, which was the only safe place I could find for it. “She’s just trying to get us in trouble.”

  “No,” Helios said. “I don’t think Chryssa means us harm. She said she wanted to help us.”

  He reminded me very much of my father then, with that firm and misguided belief in the honor of others. “Why would she want to help us?”

  Helios wet his lower lip as if he were afraid to tell me. “She saw what Agrippa saw. She saw hieroglyphics on your arms, but she was afraid to say anything. Now she’s in awe of you.”

  So the slave girl had seen it too. Still, I was guarded. “We just can’t trust anyone here. Not even Iullus.”

  Helios nodded. “Should I put the brick back, then?”

  “No.” Since we’d come to Rome, we’d had only a few moments alone and I missed him terribly. I put my fingers through the opening and touched Helios’s on the other side. “Does your back hurt from the whipping?”

  He looked as if he might deny it, then nodded instead. “It was worth it, though. I didn’t think I could break the bench just by gripping it like that.” Then he stared down at the spread of his hands with troubled eyes. “In the courtyard, when they told us they killed Caesarion, Octavia shook me, and I grabbed her arms, hard. I hurt her. I didn’t mean to grip that tight, but then tonight …”

  “You were angry,” I said, tracing the jagged plaster where the missing brick had once fit into the wall. “But Helios, you mustn’t provoke them even if it’s the least they deserve.”

  Shadows passed over Helios’s expression. “How can you ask me not to provoke them?”

  I felt weak, and childish. “Because I’m scared,” I admitted, though it wasn’t queenly to do so. “I hate the Romans. I swear it. I hate them as much as you do. But I’m scared to do anything that might make them change their minds about letting us live.”

  Helios sighed. “Your fingers are shaking, Selene. You should go back to bed.”

  The cool of the floor was now cutting through my sleeping gown, but I shook my head. “I don’t want to. I’ll only dream of Caesarion.”

  “Me too,” he said, for we often shared the same dreams, in every particular, down to the detail.

  “He’s gone. He’s really gone. And he’s not coming to rescue us. No one is.”

  “Then maybe we have to rescue ourselves,” Helios said. It seemed to me quite suddenly
that my brother was much older than I was, even though we were twins. In a day’s time he’d changed in a way that I wasn’t able to quantify. “Selene, when Euphronius had me perform the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, do you think he knew that Caesarion was dead?”

  Growing up, it had always seemed to us that our old wizard knew everything, but the idea that he’d known Caesarion was dead and let us believe otherwise was too horrible to contemplate. “No, he can’t have.”

  Helios’s voice was strained. “But don’t you remember how the crowd kept calling to me? They called me Horus the Avenger.”

  I could feel how badly my twin wished to avenge our father, but we shared more important burdens now. I leaned close and whispered, “What I remember is that with Caesarion gone, you’re now King of Egypt.”

  “And you’re Egypt’s queen,” Helios said.

  We were also two children huddled in a corner, reaching through a crack in the wall to comfort one another. That was the legacy of Octavian’s Triumph.

  Nine

  ISIS came to me.

  I woke in terrible pain. Stinging fire ran up and down my arms and I wondered if I were still dreaming. As I sat up, the glow of the oil lamp fell across me and I saw bloody handprints on the coarse linens. I lifted my hands before my face and they cast wavering shadows on the walls. Blood dripped down my arms.

  I screamed.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny cuts etched symbols into the palms of my hands and down my arms with precision. The pain was like the sting of many insects. Tiny birds, waves, and symbols danced in my blood. Trembling, I used the bed linen to wipe off my right hand so that I could read the hieroglyphics. I had trouble translating. The more commonly used demotic Egyptian was easy, but hieroglyphs used only pictorial clues for context.

  I heard footsteps down the hall. My scream had awakened the household, so I tried to read quickly. As I translated, I could almost hear words spoken in a beautiful voice—an echo of my mother’s.