Lily of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  Twenty-eight

  AS I walked up the road in my bloodstained white gown, passing citizens stared. Still, I was unafraid. For so long in Rome, I’d lived like a timid mouse, feeling myself unworthy of the power of my legacy. Now, with this heka from the temple coursing through me, I felt like a lioness. Hundreds of people had seen the divine power of Isis working through me—they would tell their friends. Soon thousands would know. There was no hiding these mystical powers now.

  “Just a little farther,” Juba said, but I didn’t need his reassurance. Isis was still with me.

  As we entered the house, Livia gasped at my bloodstained appearance and her slave nearly dropped the amphora she was carrying. “What have you done, you wicked girl?”

  I was a child of Isis. Livia was nothing to me. When I looked at her, zeal must have shone in my eyes, because she said nothing more and simply let me pass. The last time I’d served as a vessel for the goddess, I’d been a frightened child, and Juba had to carry me up the stairs. This time, gathering the white folds of my betrothal gown into my bleeding hands, I walked by myself.

  I didn’t knock but swung the doors of the emperor’s study wide, standing in the threshold where he could see me. He was already standing, in armor and cloak. Whether a runner had warned him, or he’d seen me from the windows, I couldn’t say, but now we stared at one another like two towering colossi on either side of a road.

  If I was some part Isis, then he was some part of the dark god Set. “Is the message for me?” the emperor finally asked with cold fury.

  I held my chin high. “Yes.”

  As the emperor circled me, I held up both bleeding hands to let him see the thousands of little cuts upon my skin. I didn’t wither under his scrutiny. “Translate,” he said.

  I was eager to.

  “As you refuse Isis her throne, be assured your descendants will never inherit yours. Deny me, and your ignoble name will fade to dust.”

  Before I could translate more, the emperor seized me roughly by both shoulders. “And where shall I have my retort, Cleopatra? Shall I point out that you descend from an inbred line of fat kin murderers, most of whom squandered Alexander’s legacy until Egypt was an indebted skeleton for you to inherit at Caesar’s sufferance?”

  He shook me until my teeth rattled. Still, I knew it wasn’t me he was screaming at. No, he was speaking to my mother. Perhaps he didn’t want to think that he defied a goddess, or perhaps some part of him needed to grapple with my mother still.

  We stared at one another, both of us aware of every sound in the room, of every breath. I’d brought this on myself to strike at him, and I felt both satisfied and unsettled by the effects. Though he’d held my life in his hands since before I’d even met him, he’d never laid hands on me like this. He was a cool-tempered man who rarely spoke an unintended word, but now his fingers dug into my shoulders like talons.

  “You’re hurting me,” I whispered.

  He looked right through me, trembling with rage. And his eyes—oh, his eyes. “Who are you?”

  “Selene,” I murmured.

  “No. You think like her. You talk like her,” he accused. Then his hand went to the nape of my neck, where he bunched my hair in his fist. My arms went limp at my sides, and droplets of blood splashed the woven carpet beneath us.

  I was perfectly still. I heard my own heartbeat in my ears; it beat only a pace slower than his. We were locked together now, almost like an embrace. “I’m Selene …”

  At last, he released me, returning to his chair with a great show of propriety, as if he hadn’t touched me at all. My blood was now smeared on his breastplate. He didn’t seem to notice. It took me a moment to find my voice. “There’s more.”

  “I’ve heard enough.” His voice was like a sword being slowly slid back into its scabbard for use another day. He stared out the window and my pain began to overshadow the euphoria.

  “The symbols aren’t healing as they usually do,” I told him. “Isis is still in me and my hands won’t stop bleeding until you’ve heard it all.”

  “Don’t say it as if it were my fault. She does this to you, not me.”

  Did he want me to feel angry with my goddess? With my mother? The days of that were long past. I’d shared the tears of Isis, praised her name, and she’d infused me with power that I hadn’t known I could draw upon. I stood there. Waiting. It felt as if hours passed before the emperor finally made a motion with his hand.

  “Read the rest.”

  “The spirit of Isis survives. I will lurk in depictions of mother and child. I will live in the shadows waiting for the Golden Age. Justum bellum, Octavian.”

  Each wound closed up as I finished translating, leaving my hands bloody but healed. Now my strength was failing me. I couldn’t stand any longer and took a seat unbidden.

  Octavian was quiet, letting his head tilt upward, to stare at the ceiling. “You sound very much like her.”

  Like a trainer with a dangerous asp, I knew not to make any sudden moves that might provoke him to strike again. “I’m sorry.”

  “I remember how your mother spoke about justice for Caesar’s murderers. We were allies then, your parents and I. Did you know that?”

  I did know it. “It’s sad that Julius Caesar’s legacy was fought over by those who loved him best.”

  “Did she love him?” the emperor asked. “I’ve always wondered. Oh, I know she bewitched and ruined him by parading their affair before all of Rome. She even let him put her statue in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. What humiliation for my family! But did she love him?”

  I could see that he genuinely wanted to know. Beneath his blood-smeared breastplate, his chest rose and fell with the effort to restrain his emotions, as if he still grieved for his uncle. His shoulders were knotted and tense. I could almost feel compassion for him until I remembered that he’d killed Julius Caesar’s only son—my brother Caesarion. And in truth, if he was Julius Caesar’s son, then Caesarion was the emperor’s brother too. And he’d killed him anyway. With that thought, what compassion I had for him drifted away. “Yes, she loved him. My mother loved Julius Caesar and she fought for him until her death.”

  “No, I think she still lives somehow,” he said, almost entirely to himself. His tone was flat, detached, as if he’d gone somewhere to erect his defenses. “And yet I’m strangely gratified.”

  He was as rattled as I’d ever seen him. By now, he would have normally ordered me away so that he might have time to think. But instead, he had me linger, that strange intensity still in his eyes.

  “Gratified?” I asked.

  “Did your mother tell you that I would have killed her? If she did, she was wrong. I know what they say—that I wanted her dead. That it was convenient for me. And it was. But in spite of the politics of the matter, I wanted her alive.”

  I balanced on the edge of my seat. “To torture her?”

  “To make her appreciate it!” he snapped.

  His calm was only armor of another kind and I’d dented it, badly. “Don’t you see, Selene? Your mother would have understood what I’ve accomplished. Even in defeat, she would have appreciated it as no one else can. Cleopatra dismissed me as a boy, but I wasn’t so different from her. She was a teenaged queen and I was the youngest consul in history. I was outmaneuvering Antony before I was twenty years of age!”

  He ran his fingers over the golden dolphins by his desk. My mother’s. The rug was hers too. The furnishings and even the agate cup he drank from once belonged to my mother. He’d surrounded himself with her things and her children.

  “Look now,” he continued. “I find myself alone in a world filled with such little people. The great ones are all dead. Marius. Sulla. Pompey. Cato. Cicero. Caesar. Brutus. Cassius. Antony. All gone now, but me. Yes, Octavian triumphed where they failed.”

  He’d used his real name; he might be telling the truth, but I was wary. Always at war in him were his cautious instincts and his desire for an audience. He needed not just those
watchers who fell under the spell of his performance but also the critics who grasped the cleverness of his play. “I’m sure my mother understood the enormity of what you’ve done.”

  “It’s dangerous to humor me right now,” the emperor said. “I know you. I know how you think. You may look like an innocent lily floating on the Nile, but you are like the blue ones that submerge at night. You show the world one face during the day, but like your namesake, the moon, you are changeable. Beneath the surface of you lurks a creature of ravenous appetite. I know you as I know your mother. Cleopatra and I understand one another. We know what we’re fighting for.”

  The emperor looked down at his breastplate, where my blood dried between the grooves of the carving that depicted his victory at Actium. Madness shone in his eyes. “We fight for the world. A war to determine all—which ideologies dominate and which gods survive.”

  “And you’ve won, Caesar,” I said, wading into the depths of the swamp, leaving only my eyes visible through the reeds of my intention. Like Isis, I must hide until I was stronger.

  His eyes, however, betrayed him. They were the eyes of the hunted and haunted. “In declaring war upon Egypt, I said we must allow no woman to make herself equal to a man. The Egyptian queen, Cleopatra of House Ptolemy, the Egyptian whore who worships reptiles and beasts, must be vanquished. We declare a just and righteous war. Justum bellum.”

  Remembering it seemed to bring back fire from a lost time, and his fist tensed. He was slowly coming into possession of himself again. “I wished for peace, yet it seems Cleopatra is still alive and wishes to keep fighting. Where, I wonder, will she find another Roman warrior to champion her cause?”

  “I don’t know.” I wrapped my arms around myself. I didn’t like to see how his memories renewed his strength. I didn’t like to see how his obsession with my mother blinded him.

  “Not your brother,” he mused. “He’s just a boy. Not Agrippa; he’s too loyal. No doubt Plancus and Sosius and all your father’s old partisans who now pretend to be mine would entertain her cause, but none are great enough to face me now. As I said, the world is filled with little people.”

  “I am just the messenger,” I whispered.

  I wasn’t just the messenger. I was the Resurrection, and he seemed to know it. He stood, placing both palms on the desk and leaning toward me in a stance of threat. “You’re more than that. Perhaps your mother plans to find her new warrior amongst the Isiacs you inflamed with your demonstration today?”

  My heart beat erratically. He’d taken a gamble in sending me to the temple; it wasn’t too late for him to bury his mistakes. “Caesar, I won’t go to the temple again. What happened there today can be denied.”

  “Oh no, Selene. The stage has been set and we’re now both trapped upon it. Your fortune and mine are entwined. So you may go to the temple. Bleed. Cavort with crocodiles. Weave your Ptolemy spell over the masses. Play at divinity. And be in love with Juba, the blush of it on your cheeks. The more potent symbol you are, the more powerful tool you make for me. Make them bow, make them weep. Let them think you’re their savior, for I am yours. Your mother may be emboldened by your brother’s escape—Helios may be with her, wherever she is, even now. But she forgets one crucial thing. You belong to me.”

  Twenty-nine

  OUTSIDE the emperor’s study, my insides quaked and my knees shook beneath my gown, but I forced myself to stand tall. The magic had taken a deep toll on me. I ached deep in my bones. My stomach felt cramped and sick. The black pillars holding up the roof seemed to weave before my eyes.

  “Let me walk you back to Octavia’s house so you can be cleaned up,” Juba said, tentatively extending a hand to me.

  “Just leave me alone, Gaius Julius Juba.”

  “Selene, be reasonable. You can barely stand, much less walk back on your own.”

  He wasn’t wrong. When I looked down at the ground, it seemed to fall away from me. The breeze in the trees sounded rhythmic and harsh, impossibly loud. My arms were stiff with drying blood, uncomfortable, and tight. I must have fallen because Juba steadied me and I was startled by his touch. I hadn’t realized he was so close to me, because I seemed so far from myself. Even though he had likely rescued me from cracking my head open on the stairs, I glared at him. But I was too weak to pull away from his grasp.

  Juba shook his head. “Today … Selene, how did you know the crocodiles wouldn’t harm you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  This answer plunged Juba into a temporary but welcome silence. When he spoke again, he was hoarse. “Did you make that woman fertile? The woman in the temple whom you laid hands upon. Do you have that power?”

  I looked him in the eye. “What do you believe?”

  He studied me. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “I’m trying to save my brother’s life. I’m trying to spare Egypt. I’m trying to spread my faith and honor my goddess. If that frightens you, I don’t care.”

  Juba sighed. “I’m to be your husband …”

  “But you’re not my husband yet, are you?” I asked, pulling away and walking on my own.

  He fell into stride beside me. “In a few weeks, I will be your husband. Everyone is anticipating it.”

  I was so weary, I couldn’t even be bothered to brush away the flies. “Don’t fret, Juba. I’m willing to make the sacrifice of marrying you, but until that day, don’t touch me.”

  “Sacrifice?” he asked stooping down to one knee so that he could look at my face. “Will marriage to me be so terrible? We belong together. Imagine what we’ll do. You can’t tell me that you aren’t eager to return to Africa.”

  A part of me was eager. I couldn’t have Egypt without Africa, and I couldn’t have Africa without Juba. But the fact that he could kneel before me and try to speak of our life together while my blood dried on my arms made me laugh.

  There was nothing else to do.

  CHRYSSA undressed me with great care. Then she helped me step into the bath because I was too weak to do it on my own. I lolled there, in the water, half-asleep. Meanwhile, Bast circled the room, puffed up and tail twitching as if she sensed the heka that’d worked itself through me this day. Her fur formed a ridge along the top of her back, and she wouldn’t be settled.

  “Is it true?” Chryssa asked. “What they say about the temple today … my sister Phoebe heard that you experienced the ecstasy of Isis, then confronted the emperor.”

  I’d resented her for such a long time, but now I understood that we were bound, she and I. I didn’t know that I could ever forgive Chryssa for helping Helios escape or for lying to me, but Julia had confirmed Chryssa’s story about the emperor having taken her virginity and I felt sorry for her. I couldn’t stay angry. “It’s true. I felt the power of Isis and even the crocodiles could see it upon me.”

  “I can feel the magic around you even now,” Chryssa explained, then quietly sponged me with perfumed oil—the kind that Octavia disapproved as a foreign extravagance, but which Julia and I both preferred to olive oil and a scraper. “The temple replenishes your power. Euphronius told me it’s stored in you and will dwindle slowly with every spell you cast.”

  “I don’t know how to cast spells,” I said, mindful of the doorway. Speaking of magic in Octavia’s household was never to be taken lightly. “Chryssa, I know you’ve lied to me before, and I know I’ve been unfair to you, but this is the most vital time for you to be truthful because Isis spoke through me today. You must tell me if you know where Helios is.”

  Chryssa lifted wet hands from the water. “I swear to you that I don’t know.”

  This time, I believed her.

  “Are you still in pain?” Chryssa asked as she returned to scrubbing the blood off my skin.

  “Yes.” I’d successfully fought the battle to remain conscious, but my body was limp, my head ached, and I fought nausea. “But I think I came to understand something in the temple today about suffering and the sharing in it. It is an important step to … to somet
hing else.”

  “To rebirth,” Chryssa said.

  I nodded my head slowly, closing my eyes.

  I can’t have been asleep for very long when I was rudely awakened by the emperor’s wife. Wet tendrils of my hair were cool against my forehead and I tried to focus my eyes. “You stupid girl!” Livia screamed.

  Bast hissed, Chryssa skittered to a corner, and I blinked several times in confusion. This was Octavia’s villa, and Livia seldom ventured here uninvited. But here she was, her face twisted with anger. “Selene, this household has been turned upside down to marry you and Julia off properly. I even purchased your wedding attire myself! I spent all day making arrangements, only for you to embarrass our family, whipping up the masses against us with your blood and ravings.”

  Normally I’d have been frightened of Livia, but something had changed inside me at the Temple of Isis. I didn’t even sink down into the pool to hide my nakedness. “You’ve been misinformed. I said nothing against you or this family.”

  “You didn’t have to. You just had to put on your Ptolemaic charm and the slaves bowed down before you like slobbering idiots.” Livia looked at Chryssa pointedly before her gaze returned to me. “Did you use chicken blood or some tawdry little tricks to put on that show?”

  “Isis came to me,” I said. “Perhaps you should visit her temple for guidance.”

  Livia reeled. “You’re an impudent wretch. Won’t this episode just wipe that self-contented look right off Octavia’s face? Maybe the shame of having a witch in her household will make her think twice about taking up for the likes of you.”

  I lifted my chin, pride overcoming wisdom. “Why should there be shame in my following the emperor’s dictates? I went to the temple today and did exactly as instructed. I just came from his study and he gave his approval, so perhaps you aren’t as privy to his wishes as you think you are.”

  Livia’s eyes narrowed and her fists clenched. I’d known exactly where to strike her vanity. While all of Rome might think of her as eternal serenity, this was the side of Livia that I knew best. Petty and mean, red-faced and furious. “Who are you to question my marriage?” she asked.