Daughters of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  *

  THAT day, all manner of games and entertainment are held, to the joy of the populace. Chariots run special circuits in the circus. Plays are performed in wooden theaters, and pantomimes erupt in the streets. I learn this from Tala, who takes the children to see all these marvels and brings them home excited, babbling about puppet shows. Then Juba returns early with an unwelcome guest.

  We receive King Herod with all due honors, of course. Nothing else can be done.

  I have refreshments served and make Crinagoras recite some verses for us as we sit down together with a few of our most entertaining courtiers. Still, to have the King of Judea here, in my home, discomforts me in every way and I’m relieved to hear him say that he cannot stay long.

  “Perhaps I ought to have sent an emissary,” Herod says, reaching for his wine with an aged hand. “But when in Rome, they say it is best to do as the Romans do. I thought we might get straightaway to our business without the usual formalities.”

  “By all means,” Juba says.

  Herod swirls the vintage in his cup, sniffing at it before he swallows. “My son Alexander will marry Glaphyra of Cappadocia, but I have other sons in need of brides. I’m told there is a Princess of Mauretania.”

  A sudden chill sweeps through the room as nearly every one of my Alexandrians turns hostile glances in the direction of our guest. No Eastern king can have designs on a Ptolemaic princess without turning greedy eyes to Egypt, and they all know it. Most of my retinue once graced my mother’s court; some of their families have served mine for hundreds of years. They are nearly as haughty and proud as I am—maybe more so. And they seem plainly horrified by the idea that the Ptolemaic dynasty has fallen so low that I might entertain a marriage proposal for my daughter from a foreign prince, much less the King of Judea.

  But where the direction of this conversation receives a cold reception from my courtiers, it sparks a flame of maternal protectiveness in me. “My daughter is only six years old.”

  Herod smiles, tipping his cup to recognize me, as if amused I should enter the conversation without invitation. “I was told she was nearly seven, but that is of no matter. Send her to Judea and the wedding could be postponed until she turns twelve.”

  “Twelve!” I cry indignantly.

  Juba puts a hand on my knee to still me.

  Herod tilts his head, as if bewildered by my reaction. “Is twelve not the legal age at which girls may marry by Roman law?” Indeed, he seems so puzzled that he may not even realize how distasteful his proposal truly is. Even the emperor insisted upon the age of fourteen for the girls in his household.

  “Twelve is the legal age,” Juba replies. “But my queen is very attached to our daughter. We would not part with Cleopatra Isidora so soon.”

  It is the politic answer, so I do not interrupt.

  Herod lifts his hands in a gesture meant to be conciliatory. “Normally, I’d want the girl to live in Judea until she’s of age, but we’re men of the world, Juba, and kings besides. We can indulge the sentimental urges of our women. Cleopatra Selene, content yourself to keep the girl until she’s twelve and then we can celebrate a wedding.”

  I am about to say something undiplomatic when Juba breaks in with, “I need time to consider this offer, and, in any case, we could not let her go until she was fourteen.”

  My husband says this as if he will be the one to make this decision. As if he is actually entertaining this preposterous idea, a thing that plainly discomfits our courtiers as much as it outrages me. From his dining couch, my poet’s eyes narrow to a squint. Even Memnon, standing at his post by the door, clears his throat.

  Still, Juba’s insistence that Isidora be fourteen before she marries should dissuade Herod. The King of Judea’s sons are grown. He would waste almost a decade before Dora comes of age, during which time his sons will weary of waiting.

  Strangely, Juba’s demand does not deter Herod. “Fourteen, then.”

  I can no longer keep my silence. “We have not agreed to this.” With Princess Glaphyra’s words still ringing in my ears from the night before, I say, “Surely there are more suitable brides for your son. Perhaps a Jewish girl?”

  King Herod gives a look that seems to indicate he expects my husband to keep me in better order, but Juba merely dips a bit of flatbread in spiced olive oil, which forces Herod to deal with me directly. “I am a Jew, Queen Selene, but my subjects dispute this. The more closely I keep Judaic tradition, the more they hold me in contempt. There is no pleasing them and it holds no benefit for Judea to please them anyway. Better that my people adopt Hellenistic culture and learn to comingle. It is for this reason I prefer to marry my sons to gentile princesses.”

  It is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Perhaps his sons only imagine that he seeks to eliminate them as legitimate rivals for his throne by marrying them to princesses who do not worship the god of the Jews. I too would find it hard to trust his motives were he my father, but Herod’s words have such a pragmatic ring of truth that they cannot be entirely discounted.

  “Nevertheless, my daughter cannot be part of your plans,” I say. There is no advantage in mingling my Ptolemaic blood with Herod’s; if anything, it is a distinct disadvantage, as can be read in the hostile expressions of my courtiers.

  Juba attempts to soften the blow of my refusal by saying, “Our daughter is so young that we’re forced to be cautious. I have only two children, after all.”

  King Herod’s response is a tapping foot upon my tile and a scowl that makes plain we have offended him. Then he forces a leering grin onto his face. “Come now, Juba. Surely not just the two children. You’re a young man, but not very young. Have you no natural children of concubines or harem girls?”

  My cupbearer actually gasps at this effrontery but I do not betray the slightest emotion. Such an impolitic question, put to my husband in the presence of his wife, is either meant to shame me or to insult Juba’s manhood. Nevertheless, I keep my chin high and my posture regal, coolly regarding Herod down the length of my half-Roman nose.

  “If there are any such children, I am unaware of them,” Juba says mildly, as if he had not noticed that everyone in the room has stopped talking, intent upon his answer. Fortunately, my husband’s infuriating mildness seems to be an asset in discussions such as these. It is a manner that I cannot adopt as my own, but I cannot deny its merits. Especially as it seems he has effectively ended the conversation.

  “Well, then,” Herod says before taking his leave. “We can address the subject again at a later date.”

  The moment Herod is gone, I dismiss my courtiers. Then I am on my feet, pacing back and forth upon the black and white tile. The vulgar mention of illegitimate children makes me wonder exactly what Herod knows or suspects about me or my daughter. Does he suspect that Augustus might be her father? Surely not. If he did, he would never allow one of his sons to marry her.

  He would want Dora for himself …

  No, Herod must be an arrow shot at me from someone else’s bow. Livia’s perhaps. She would delight in taking my daughter from me. Or perhaps it is Agrippa, knowing all that he does. Yes, it must be Agrippa, who wishes to diminish me and my line at all costs.

  And what shield do I have against him?

  Thirteen

  “I apologize,” Juba says, watching me pace. “I shouldn’t have invited Herod here. He is an obscene man … but you can expect more proposals like that one. Dora is a prize. Herod can’t resist the lure of that Ptolemaic prestige.”

  He is trying to ease my humiliation, but I fear it is more than prestige that Herod is after. Insofar as I still hold a claim to my mother’s Egypt, so does my daughter. She would help to legitimize any ambitions Herod might have for his dynasty to swallow up Egypt. Perhaps Herod thinks to become Pharaoh …

  Herod is as vindictive as he is hungry for power; the chance to seize even parts of my mother’s kingdom as she once seized parts of his must tempt him greatly. He has already risen far higher than anyone might ha
ve predicted, and such men do not perceive limits on their ambitions.

  And yet, Egypt now belongs to Rome and such an ambition is too great even for Herod to dream.

  Another reason to suspect he is merely Agrippa’s puppet.

  Later, while my servants dress me for the evening’s festivities, my niece hovers in the doorway. Then Pythia shuffles in, biting her lower lip. “Your Majesty … would you offer me in marriage to one of Herod’s sons?”

  Aghast, I wave away the servant who is trying to fasten my garment with a pin ornamented with pearls and emerald beads. “Pythia! Why would you even suggest such a thing?”

  My niece’s cheeks pinken. “I overheard King Herod’s offer. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but the doors were open and I heard what he said. And I—I need a husband.” She speaks very quietly, but very earnestly. “My mother told me that I would need a good husband to better my station. She hoped that you might find a husband for me. Girls can marry when they turn twelve and I am almost thirteen now.”

  I’m determined that the children in my household will be children as I never was and it vexes me that a girl of Pythia’s age should worry to better her station. “You do not need a husband. Not yet. You’re the granddaughter of one of Rome’s finest generals, the niece of a queen, and the heiress to a great fortune in Tralles. You want for nothing.”

  “I do need a husband. I need a husband if I mean to write my name in the scrolls of history. If I mean to avenge all the wrongs done to our family.”

  Tilting my head, I stare down into her unreadable dark eyes and ask, “What wrongs do you imagine you must avenge?”

  “They call my grandfather a traitor to Rome. They call my father a filthy foreign merchant, though the Romans funded their wars on his treasury. They all but banished my mother for the sin of having married him. I must become something to show that everything they said about our family is a lie.”

  That is when I realize that I have shielded her from nothing. She has only let me see what I wanted to see. Little Pythia. Always well behaved. Agreeable to her tutors and obedient to all who have authority over her. She is an orphaned girl who seems at ease in my court, living amongst strangers, but mourns for her dead mother and perhaps secretly pines for her lost home.

  Sweet Isis, am I looking down into the face of the little girl I used to be?

  She is not like Dora. My daughter has no shadow self. No khaibit. No dark soul. But I see now that Pythia is like me. Even at her young age, she burns with a dark ambition. And I am rocked by the strange sensation that I am staring at my very self. Taking her hands in mine, I make a solemn vow. “I am not going to give a twelve-year-old girl to any man. But I promise you, as I promised your mother, that I will make a fine future for you whether it be in Mauretania or Rome or somewhere else altogether.”

  But it is a promise too easily given, for we learn before the night is through that the show of unity between the emperor and Agrippa is only pretense and that we are, indeed, on the verge of war.

  *

  TWO of Agrippa’s most trusted men have been found dead, apparently drowned in the Tiber River. Before the evening’s religious rites, there is apparent retaliation. Two senators—lackeys of the emperor—are found dead in their homes. One of them had his head bashed in by tiles and debris from a suspicious roof collapse. The other seems to have slit his wrists open in a bath, but there is no explanation for the curious stab wound betwixt his ribs.

  It is happening again, the people whisper. The purges. The civil war. It is coming. If Augustus and Agrippa can pretend to be at peace while killing each other’s men, they will surely lay waste to all of Rome before it is over.

  Augustus has pretended friendship with Agrippa in daylight, but excluded him from the evening sacrifices. In reply, Agrippa’s soldiers have been spreading word that these rites will not carry the religious authority of the Pontifex Maximus.

  Agrippa knows Lepidus is a thorn in the emperor’s side. He reminds the emperor that there is still some power in the Roman world that he does not possess. And Augustus always wants most what he cannot have …

  That is why the Secular Games and all the attendant festivities are to continue and almost certainly why the emperor sends his praetorians to fetch me. Juba stops me in the hall as I am leaving the house. “You will keep your own guards near you, yes?”

  My eyes narrow. “Am I in danger?”

  It is a foolish question. I have always been in danger. But with the power of Isis that is mine to command, I do not fear the ordinary. If a man should come at me with a weapon, my winds would take him down. It is only the threats I do not see coming that I fear.

  “Agrippa believes that you are an obstacle,” Juba says quietly. “He believes you are the reason the emperor will not agree to his terms for peace.”

  “The emperor does not like terms being dictated to him by an underling—that is why he will not agree,” I say, though we both know it is only a small part of the truth. Another small part is that I am to blame. At least, the emperor’s obsession with making me his very own Cleopatra is to blame. And have I not always used it to my own ends?

  “Nevertheless, Selene, be mindful tonight of how vulnerable you are.”

  Vulnerable. I am that. Everything in this city is a reminder to me of my past and the future I could have had. Could still have, if I walk another path. I am again tangled in the web I worked so hard to escape from and I do not know which move to make to keep from being devoured.

  “I will be mindful,” I say, turning to go.

  Juba stops me again. “Selene? Your father’s soldiers. The ones who still serve in the legions. If Augustus and Agrippa go to war … whom will they choose?”

  My breath catches. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I want to know if they will protect you. And if I am to force these men to bargain with one another, I need to know to whom your father’s men will pledge their swords.”

  “I try never to rely upon Roman soldiers to protect me,” I say. For what good were my father’s men in Egypt? They abandoned my father and they abandoned us too. “As for the rest of it, they will choose Agrippa. Unless I pleaded with them, and maybe even if I do, my father’s men will choose Agrippa.”

  “You sound so certain … but it was Agrippa who sent their comrades to a watery grave at the Battle of Actium. The emperor did not fight them himself …”

  “That’s why they will choose Agrippa. There will be less shame in it for them.”

  But there will be nothing but shame for me, because I must side with the emperor. If Agrippa sees my children as a threat now, he will always see them as a threat. The admiral is a danger to my children and me. The emperor is a danger too but he would defend my children because he believes that they are his. So I will side with the emperor as I have always done. There is no escaping it. There is no escape from him, after all.

  *

  THAT night the emperor invokes the primordial goddess of childbirth and the Vestal Virgins bring forth the sacred cakes. Augustus wishes for me to be seen with him during these rites, but I stand stiffly, aloof, resisting the emotions that had so shaken me the night before.

  I hate every moment of these rituals. I hate this farce. I hate more that I am any part of it. And at the late-night banquet that follows, I am, again, dispirited.

  Julia, by contrast, is infused with energy. In spite of the advanced state of her pregnancy and the tensions swirling in Rome, she is somehow radiant and wide-awake, dragging me from couch to couch to meet her friends and the artists she patronizes. One of them is Ovid, who shows a dangerous contempt for the proceedings, one that goes well beyond even mine. When Horace taunts him with reports that Ovid doesn’t even believe in the gods, the younger poet merely replies, “It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are.”

  “Why associate with such an irreverent poet?” I whisper to Julia.

  “Oh, spare me, Selene,” she says with a roll of her eyes.
“Your poet is more irreverent than any other … Besides, if you read Ovid’s love poetry, you’ll know perfectly well why I prefer him. But mainly I advance Ovid to frustrate Horace, who wants to take Virgil’s place as Rome’s foremost poet.”

  Julia is a stubbornly loyal creature, in her way. As a young wife, she was as unfaithful to Marcellus as he was to her. But as his widow, she has defended everything and everyone he ever loved. Even Virgil. “Stay close to me,” Julia whispers, yanking on my wrist. “Marcella is here and if I see her, I cannot think what I will do or say.”

  “Adopt a pleasant tone. You have a stepdaughter in common—”

  “Marcella and I have entirely too many people in common. That is the problem. How many different ways are we related? She is my cousin, my sister-in-law, my husband’s former wife, and now she has married …”

  She trails off, but she doesn’t need to say it. Marcella has married Iullus Antonius—the man Julia loves. With all his machinations, the emperor has managed to turn his family into one of those vulgar comedies in which every woman pines for the wrong man, every man ends up in bed with the wrong woman, and every child is without a father.

  “What a miserable state of affairs …”

  “With one entirely unexpected exception,” Julia replies. “I don’t know if you’ve seen him yet, but our sour, dour Tiberius positively dotes on Vipsania. He’s still boring and brittle as a stick, but he’s sweet to his wife, Selene. Truly. Without any regard for his own interests. It’s as if he’s forgotten he’s Livia’s son long enough to actually love someone.”

  I wonder if, finally free from his mother’s absurd quest that he should marry Julia and become the emperor’s heir, Tiberius may have finally found a measure of contentment. One glance at Vipsania across the banquet tells me that she is happy too. Dipping her head to whisper to my giggling half sister, Vipsania is the picture of a joyful wife.

  “Minora doesn’t seem displeased with her betrothal either,” I say.

  Julia pops a little ball of cheese into her mouth. “Minora and Drusus will find themselves well matched when they wed. She always knew it would be Drusus for her. Who else was left in the nursery once you went off to Mauretania?”