Tala tests the consistency of the henna paste between her fingers. “He is also a man preparing himself for you as a bridegroom. After his morning ride on his new stallion, he washed, sat in the steam room, and had himself rubbed down by a Nubian slave before calling for a barber. He’s demanded a special dinner in your rooms and hasn’t let a drop of wine touch his lips.”
Warily, I ask, “How do you know this? Do you have spies in his chambers?”
Tala shrugs with insolent mirth. “If I reveal my sources, you’ll think I’m easily replaced.”
“What if I paid you extra to tell me?”
She grins. “Never haggle with a Berber, Queen Selene. You cannot win.”
Tala is typical of my adopted people. Proud and resilient with a fierce sense of self. I’ve chosen to live amongst the Berbers and rule as their queen. I’ve chosen, I remind myself, to forsake my mother’s throne in Egypt and make my life here with a man who is my husband but is also, in many ways, still a stranger to me.
In making myself ready for him, I allow the servants to pluck every hair on my body below my eyebrows. I linger in a bath of honey and almond milk. Then the slaves dry me with warm towels. They massage lavender oil into the muscles of my arms and legs until I’m so limp and lethargic that I quietly acquiesce to the painting of Berber patterns on my nude flesh.
I try to adopt the native customs of my kingdom whenever practicable. In this case the custom suits me, because Berber brides go to their husbands tattooed. As my husband is a Berber by blood, I hope it will please him.
While the henna sets, Tala urges me to play a game of Senet with her. I race my ivory cones against her ebony wheels until I emerge victorious, a thing from which I take great satisfaction because it’s not in Tala’s character to let me win. When it’s finally time to scrape the dried henna from my body, she reassures me, “The color will change in time. The tattoo will deepen, just like the love between a husband and wife.”
At this, I scowl. For though I’m the daughter of two famous lovers, I didn’t marry for love. By the traditions of my family, I would have married my oldest brother, Caesarion, the King of Egypt. When the Romans murdered him and conquered Egypt, I should have wed my twin brother, Alexander Helios.
But when I came of age, the emperor wanted me for himself.
In Juba, the emperor found a man who was willing to pose as my husband. It was only as the spoils of war, as a reward for his loyalty, that I was given to this Berber king. In truth, I have many reasons to despise him—and not only because of our chaste wedding night and his willingness to surrender me into the emperor’s bed. I am acutely aware that my husband has, in his own way, been partly responsible for every tragedy that has befallen my family and me.
And yet my resentment is tempered by the knowledge that I have betrayed him too. Tonight we must forget these betrayals, so I want to be done with these endless preparations for an act that has been more than five years in the waiting. “Let us not speak of the love between a husband and a wife, Tala. There’s no need to fill my head with romantic notions. I’m no fearful virgin.”
Never cowed by my imperious nature, she asks, “Then why are you sweating like one?”
She’s right. In spite of the coolness of the autumnal evening, my nape is damp. Fortunately, I’m not compelled to answer her question because we’re interrupted by the king’s slaves, who beg admittance to deliver platters of food for our supper.
Tala makes them wait as she finishes dressing me. A touch of red ochre to my lips and I am left to recline upon cushions on the floor, where I will receive the king. Meanwhile, my husband stands awkwardly in the doorway with his slaves and our dinner.
King Juba is ten years my senior, and the years sit well on him. He’s a man with a head of thick dark hair and high cheekbones. I’ve always liked the look of him, and I see that tonight he’s resplendent in a purple tunic embroidered with pearls.
He is a handsome man; perhaps my duty will not be so unpleasant.
When we’re alone, the king takes his place on cushions beside the low table. A flicker of lamplight shadows his eyes, so I cannot read his expression. I offer him first choice from the plate of lamb shank braised with quince and cinnamon, saying, “I hope I didn’t make you wait so long that it’s turned cold.”
Juba cocks an eyebrow. “Do you refer to our meal or to your bed?”
I smile at his cutting joke, for it reminds me that the king can be witty. Tearing a piece of warm bread from the loaf, I use it to scoop up a little of the meat. The aromatic dish is delicious and I’m grateful that he’s arranged for this private meal, as I’m uncertain I could bear with any dignity the ribald jests of our courtiers, who take an interest in our long-awaited reunion. It is already difficult enough to woo and be wooed without the eyes of others upon us.
“Will you have wine?” I ask.
The king shakes his head. “I had enough when we were apart.”
It is, I think, his apology for the way I found him when I returned to Mauretania. He was abed in daylight, drunk to the point of illness. Nevertheless, I now fill his goblet near to overflowing, saying, “It’s my opinion that tonight we should drink to excess. My parents formed the Society of Inimitable Livers … We should see whether it’s possible to imitate them after all.”
“As I remember it, the girl I married wasn’t overly fond of wine or frivolity.”
The girl he married was a fourteen-year-old captive too consumed with the fear of death to take pleasure in life. He has only known me as the emperor’s caged bird, a prisoner of Rome and of my own ambition. All that has changed. It must change. I gulp from my own cup, then say, “I’m a woman of twenty years now—almost twenty-one. The girl you married is no more.”
He leans back, eyeing me carefully. “So I’m married to a stranger.”
“Aren’t we all?”
Juba gestures like an athlete in the arena who has been felled by a well-dealt blow. Then he lifts his goblet. We toast in honor of something we do not name. We drink to fill the silence. My husband is a learned man who knows well how to pass the time in banter, but the weight of what we’re about to do consumes our feeble attempts at lighthearted conversation. “Will you tell me what happened?” he finally asks when the wine has loosened his tongue. “Tell me why the emperor has sent you back to me.”
Since I was a little girl, marched through the streets of Rome in chains behind a statue of my dead mother, Cleopatra, I have been the emperor’s possession and obsession. Juba has always known it. What my husband wants to know now is why the emperor has finally released me. And I don’t want to tell him. There are things that I cannot tell him. Things too painful to remember. Things he would never understand or believe. “Let it be enough to know that I’m done with Rome, and Augustus too.”
Juba snorts. “Augustus could turn our kingdom into a Roman province with a snap of his fingers. He’s our patron, Selene.”
I do not need reminding. Everything my husband has ever done has been precisely calculated to please the emperor, and I hate this about him. It’s also what I hate about myself, for I have done the same. The memory makes me drain my cup, then fill it again. Wine will make this night easier.
Come, Dionysus, and dull my senses.
“We owe Caesar our fealty,” Juba continues, as if trying to talk himself out of touching me.
Perhaps he feels as if he needs his master’s permission, which makes me insist, “We owe him nothing more than fealty. If he wishes, let him declare an end to the Roman Republic. Let him call himself King of Rome, the King of Kings. Let him rule the world from the Palatine Hill and settle the squabbles of all his client kingdoms. We can keep ourselves apart, here in Mauretania, and reign in peace.”
Juba considers my words, staring at the rim of his cup. “It will be no simple thing. You’re a Ptolemy, born to intrigue, drawn to the center of political power like a moth to flame …”
It irritates me that he uses my legacy as an accusation, when i
t’s my prestigious bloodline that helped secure his throne. “You’re the one who longs to return to Rome, not me.”
I think he might deny it, but he wipes the corners of his mouth with a napkin and says, “I dreamed all my life of returning to Africa as a king, never realizing that it would be an honorable sort of exile. I pine for Rome because that is the only home I’ve ever known. But Mauretania is our kingdom now and it must become a home for us both.”
His stark honesty softens me. He must sense it, for he offers me a hand and helps me to rise. My sweat-slicked palm slides through his grip and my cheeks flush. I’ve spent a lifetime masking my emotions, mastering my body down to the slightest tremble so as not to quail from the emperor’s touch. But I cannot seem to cool my blood, which now runs hot with anticipation.
There can be no going back from this.
Juba seems as anxious as I am about the long-overdue consummation of our marriage, and when our eyes meet his voice becomes a hoarse whisper. “It doesn’t have to be tonight.”
He’s wrong. It must be tonight, before the emperor thinks better of having let me go. It must be tonight, before I am again summoned to Rome to play another deadly political game. It must be tonight, before either of us loses our courage. So I tilt my face to him in invitation, sweeping my eyelashes low in the way I have learned excites a man. It has the desired effect. As if resolving an argument inside himself, Juba says, “Cleopatra’s daughter, you are lovely.” Then he catches sight of the pale henna designs on my skin and frowns. “But why must you come to me painted?”
Because I can never let you see me unmasked.
The henna is set. He cannot wipe the intricate designs away like he wiped my face clean of paint the night we were wed. These tattoos are, for a time, an indelible part of me. A barrier that he cannot breach. The only defense I have. “Tala said this is ornamentation for Berber brides.”
“But you are no maiden bride,” he replies, as if to shame me for having attracted the emperor’s lust. “These patterns only remind me I’m not your first lover.”
It would be easy to let my temper boil with offense, but I am guiltier than he knows. I carry a secret love for a man whose name I cannot say, so my tart reply is without real venom. “Yet I need no henna to remind me that your bejeweled hetaera still graces our court, well rewarded for having prostituted herself to you. She cannot be the only one …”
My husband takes in a breath as if in preparation for a bitter rejoinder, but then chuckles. “Only you would think that a relevant comparison. A wife has a duty of marital fidelity; a man may take pleasure where he likes.”
It’s pointless to argue, for in truth, I don’t much care where my husband takes pleasure. I know what it is to feel the true stab of jealousy, one that bleeds your soul. I’ve drowned in misery and longing for the man I love. Juba is not that man. Nor is the emperor that man. That man, my true king, the other half of my soul, may be forever lost to me. And because I must swallow that bitter draught down with all the rest of it, I ask, “Must we speak of duty and dishonor?”
My husband brushes an errant strand of dark hair from my eyes. “I would have this night be about neither.”
This night is about freedom. Perhaps, if I am honest with myself, curiosity too. I enjoy the way my husband looks at me now, heavy-lidded with years of unfulfilled desire. He’s well in his cups and I must be too, for I speak with brazenness. “Do the tattoos trouble you so much, or will we make a son tonight?”
Experience has taught me that the desire for a son, an heir, and a legacy that reaches beyond the tomb can be a potent aphrodisiac. My husband is not immune. His pupils widen, the flickering lamplight reflected in their dark depths, and he draws me closer, burying his nose in my hair, inhaling the lavender perfume with pleasure. With vague amusement he murmurs, “It may take more than just one night …”
But that is more than I am willing to promise. “No. We will need only one night to make our son. I need only open myself and invite my goddess into my body to make it come to pass. For I am a vessel of Isis and these things are in my gift.”
Then I kiss him, lest he say anything to change my mind.
Two
THE KINGDOM OF MAURETANIA
SPRING 18 B.C.
IT is a month too early for my baby to be born. We hope my cramps are phantom pains that will subside, but they do not. Panting on my bed as we await the midwife, I wave Tala away. “I don’t want to be painted again.”
My Berber woman purses her lips. “Henna tattoos fight the evil that is drawn to childbirth.”
She nearly died birthing her son, years ago, but surely I don’t face such danger. I’ve inherited my notoriously fertile mother’s wide birthing hips. My daughter was born healthy, and Isis has always watched over me. But the pain that pierces me now is so sharp it steals my breath.
At last, the midwife marches into my chambers with a contingent of slaves and servants who busy themselves in preparation, like an army on the eve of battle. At the head of their formation is Chryssa, my Greek freedwoman, fair hair piled atop her head in glistening ringlets, secured with expensive hairpins made of gold and sapphires. Though once she was a cowering slave, few hints of her former servitude remain, and she isn’t hesitant to give orders in my presence. “Put the birthing chair by the window so she catches a breeze, and open the drapes. The queen likes to see the ocean.”
In recent months, others have viewed my return to Mauretania with bewilderment. I am a Ptolemy, after all. The blood in my veins is the same Macedonian blood that thrummed through the veins of Alexander the Great. I am heir to the throne of Egypt. They wonder why I am here birthing a child for my Berber husband when I could be in Rome at the emperor’s side, scheming to reclaim my mother’s lost throne.
But Chryssa never wonders. Beneath her blousy peplos pinned with little gold brooches at each shoulder, she hides a tangle of pale, knotted scars—her keepsake from a flogging she received at the emperor’s command. Chryssa knows better than anyone what manner of man the emperor is and why I fled from him to bear a son for my husband. She will never wonder. We need not even speak of it. And that it is why it is a comfort to have her near.
“Has anyone told the king?” she asks, critically inspecting the midwife’s tools, linens, sea sponges, and pots of goose fat, olive oil, and sweet-smelling herbs.
“The king has yet to return from Spain,” Tala replies.
“He should be here,” my freedwoman snaps. “He is not the King of Spain!”
In this, she echoes my petty complaints. Here in Mauretania my husband is king. But in cities across the narrow strait in Spain, he has no royal authority. There he serves as a Roman magistrate, setting aside his crown to drape himself in a toga as the emperor’s legate, sitting not upon a throne but upon a low folding curule chair—that strange little stool with curved legs that the Romans use as a sign of office.
My husband doesn’t see this as an insult to his royal dignity nor does he resent it as yet another way in which Rome exploits his loyalty. To the contrary, my husband sees these unusual responsibilities as evidence of the emperor’s faith in him. And so I find myself defending my husband in his absence. “It makes no difference if King Juba is here or away, and in any case, he had no cause to know the child would come so soon …”
Before I can say more, pain rips through me. I clutch my belly, groaning. The midwife examines me, her face grim. “It’s too soon for the child.”
Chryssa all but hisses. “We know it. Tell us what to do, woman. Or must I send for a civilized Greek physician?”
“He’ll tell you the same thing,” the midwife replies. “There’s nothing to do but wait.”
And so we wait. In the grips of agony, I feel sweat soak my hair and run down my back. Chryssa mops my brow with a cold cloth, murmuring a prayer to our goddess Isis that she may deliver me safely of a healthy child. Meanwhile, Tala again insists that I let her paint me, and I’m too pained to argue. She uses her henna paste to draw int
ricate symbols on my feet and ankles. When she reaches for my hands, however, I stop her, for they have been a canvas for symbols before.
I am Cleopatra’s daughter. I am a sorceress. I have carried the words of my goddess on my outstretched palms, in vivid hieroglyphics that ran red with my own blood. I worry to submit my palms now to sacrilege. “What do the symbols mean?”
Tala looks up with impatience, using the same tone she uses to scold my little daughter. “On your feet, the symbols are protective talismans to keep evil from seeping up from the earth as you walk. Over your womb, a symbol of fertility. On your hands I would paint the stylized sun, to purify and protect you against your enemies. You know Egyptian magic, Majesty. But we Berbers have magic of our own.”
When the first gushes of bloody water pool beneath me, I will gladly accept any magic to help my child. There shouldn’t be so much pain. Surely there wasn’t this much when my daughter was born. I would have remembered!
Tala wraps me in linens and I stifle the cries that threaten to tear from my throat. At length, an arrow of excruciating pain shoots through me. I scream and the voices of my attendants mingle into a dull, faraway roar.
I’m hoisted up onto the squat wooden birthing chair with its open bottom. Then the midwife waves a small clay pot of mint under my nose, and the bracing scent helps me make ready. Since the night I shared with the king, I’ve curled round my womb, cooing softly to the baby inside. I’ve dreamed of holding him safe and warm in my arms. To know my baby is struggling for life even now, before he has taken his first breath, fills me with a fierce determination.
This child will mark me as my own woman, no longer the emperor’s plaything. This child will be the beginning of a new life that I’ve chosen in defiance of every expectation of me as Cleopatra’s daughter. Even if my baby is tiny, I will see that he grows strong. I will safeguard him as Isis nursed her secret child in the marshy reeds of Egypt.
Daughters of the Nile Page 2
