Daughters of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  Seventeen

  IOL-CAESARIA, THE KINGDOM OF MAURETANIA

  SUMMER 16 B.C.

  CHRYSSA gives birth to a healthy boy, dark like his father. “Your Berber chieftain will burst with pride when he returns with the king,” I promise her, but I do not know when that will be.

  Juba has settled his court in Volubilis, where he says the buildings are holdovers from the Carthaginians, so old that they boast the Punic style. The people of Volubilis are not hungry or lacking for useful employment, but their city is in need of defensible walls and public baths, new marketplaces and a basilica too.

  The expense for these projects makes me dizzy to comprehend, but I think we were wrong to pour all our wealth into Iol-Caesaria. It has created resentments elsewhere in the kingdom that now need a remedy. As a gesture of goodwill, the king gifts the city of Volubilis with his prized bronze bust of Cato the Younger. I match his gift by sending overland a statue of the goddess Kore that was given to me during my sojourn with the emperor on the Isle of Samos.

  I have just made the arrangements for the statue’s transport when my niece comes rushing into my chambers, her black hair damp with sweat, her cheeks scarlet, as if she has run the whole way.

  “We were nearly eaten by a lion!” Pythia cries, breathlessly telling the tale. “Tala took us to the market to choose new sandals. We were only halfway there when we heard shrieks. Then people ran in every direction at the sight of an escaped lion from the amphitheater.”

  That accursed amphitheater! It has only just been finished and already the gladiatorial arena is a danger. “Well, what happened then?”

  “Everyone ran from the wounded lion but Dora rushed to it and began to speak to it!”

  I gasp, covering my cheeks with both hands. “Where is she now?”

  “With the physician, but she isn’t hurt. Tacfarinas pulled Dora out of the way while Tala distracted the lion, but Tala was slashed and Euphorbus is tending her wounds now. Tala would have been eaten too if Dora hadn’t told her to plead with the lion in your name.”

  “What?” I ask, still weak with fear.

  “Dora told her to talk to the lion and he might let her go. So Tala shouted that she served a great Ptolemaic queen. And when the lion cornered Tala against a market stall, she begged him to spare her in your name, for she was the caretaker of royal children. You should have seen the lion stare, listening to each word as he limped back and forth, pacing in front of her. Tala told the lion that the Queen of Mauretania would be very displeased with him if he should make a meal of her and pleaded with him to leave her in peace. So he did.”

  “What?” I say again, unable to comprehend it.

  “Like a king, he listened to her petition, then set her free. He limped off into the street and left us alone, though I don’t know where the lion is now.”

  “Sweet Isis!” Standing on wobbly knees, I rush to the chambers of my mage, where I find my daughter helping to bandage three claw marks on my Berber woman’s big thigh. “Is it true, Tala? You were slashed by a lion?”

  My Berber woman tells the story just as Pythia told it, and I turn to my daughter, not knowing whether to clutch her against my breast or thrash her or both. “Why did you run toward the lion? What could you have been thinking?”

  “He had a spear in his flank,” my daughter says. “He was badly wounded from the gladiator arena and needed help.”

  Yes, I will thrash her, I think. For the first time in her little life, I will thrash her until she is howling. It is only that I am still so weak with fear that I cannot make myself do it. “You could have been killed. You could have all been mauled to death in my market, far from me where I could do nothing to stop it.” The thought that I could have lost her—that I could have lost any of them—has me shaking all over. My emotions are so volcanic, I do not trust myself to touch her. “You are not a physician, Dora! You cannot heal every creature that crosses your path. Surely you understand danger. You will have no dinner tonight and you are never to be out of my sight again, do you hear me?”

  Fear has made me a shrieking harpy and my daughter begins to cry, turning to Pythia to hold her and wipe away her tears. How galling that she is not afraid of a lion, but now she is afraid of me.

  My mage rests his comforting palm upon my shoulder. “Majesty, it all ended well. Tala’s wounds are shallow. No lasting harm has come to any of them.”

  Even Tala—who should be angrier than I am—seeks to pacify me. “If it scars, I’ll be glad of a keepsake. I’ll be the woman who spoke to a lion in your name. Maybe your poet will even write of me.”

  There are not enough thanks in the world for my Berber woman. She saved my children at the risk of her own life and I will never be able to repay her. I will gift her with a poem or with whatever else she likes. She may behave in any way she pleases in my court, I decide. I do not care how insolent she is.

  And the Berber boy, Tacfarinas. He must be rewarded too for pulling Dora from the lion. Only I cannot think on it now, for I am too shaken.

  Later that night, Dora crawls into my bed and I curl around her, cuddling her close. I cannot get enough of her. “If you had been there, Mama, you would have helped the lion. That is why I wanted to help him. And it is why he didn’t eat us. He knew it too.”

  She is wrong about me, but I do not correct her, because I am too touched by her innocence. She is nothing like me. I was never so pure of heart. Never so filled with empathy. She cannot have learned this from pragmatic Juba. Nor can she have inherited it from the emperor, for he has a heart of stone. This quality in her can only have come from Helios, the boy who gave every last coin he owned to beggars. In this, she must be his daughter. And for that, I am grateful.

  To My Friend, the Most Royal Queen of Mauretania,

  How I love the East! On our progress, we’ve been to Taenarum, Gythium, Sparta, Corinth, and Athens. Never—not even when you’ve described it—have I imagined to be honored and feted this way. The moment we set foot in a place, they call for the stonemasons to dedicate an inscription to us. We give them money and they erect buildings to us. Why, Agrippa even has a college named after him in Sparta now, which, given that he is as grouchy as a Spartan, seems entirely appropriate!

  We attended the Festival of the Muses at Thespiae and I persuaded my husband to stop at a shrine to Asclepius for treatment of his feet. Agrippa apparently thinks he is still a young man who can march with his legions without consequence, but I know better. The physicians at the shrine insist that he must soak his feet at night in hot baths of vinegar. This helped ease his pain, so I intend to make a large donation to the next temple of Asclepius that I come across.

  Who knows? Perhaps they will carve my name in the stone if I do.

  One of my favorite cities so far is Mytilene. Isn’t your poet from there? It has a beautiful harbor and all the people are clever and hospitable. They call me the new Aphrodite, for she is my ancestress, but I’m not sure I like seeing myself carved as the goddess herself. Unlike you, I am content to be a mortal woman.

  A very rich, pampered, well-traveled mortal woman.

  At any rate, as part of his bargain with my father, Agrippa owns mansions wherever we go, each more exotic than the one before. My husband insists on buying priceless artwork rather than seizing it, but the citizens have little choice but to sell us whatever we want at whatever price we say. Because of this, I am now the guilt-ridden owner of a lion sculpture and a painting of Ajax and Venus.

  If you want them, let me know and I will send them to you.

  It will sweeten your disposition for what I have not yet told you. Namely, that King Herod has traveled to meet us. He is still no admirer of yours. He bristles at the mention of your name and complains that you think your blood too good to give your daughter over in marriage to his sons.

  He went on this way so tiresomely that I felt the need to tweak him. I asked if he would erect a statue of me as a naked nymph in the middle of Jerusalem, and he was so terrified of A
grippa’s reaction, he could not look at me for the rest of the day.

  It is not all fawners and festivals and flowers, though. People come to me to appeal to Agrippa on their behalf. Sometimes I even do it! I have no explanation for this. Perhaps when I visited you in Mauretania, I was too much taken by your example. I’ve begun to write letters to my husband about political matters, practicing clever turns of phrase. More distressing, the other day, when I should have been shopping for jeweled lamps, I caught myself spying a good place for an aqueduct!

  I fear you have ruined me.

  You may have heard about Queen Dynamis of the Bosporus, who has now had three husbands in one year, leaving me little room to complain about the frequency with which my father weds me to men I don’t love. I begin to suspect, however, that Agrippa loves me.

  I went without him to see Ilium, where the Greeks conquered the Trojans, because it thrilled me to think that I might walk in the footsteps of my ancestor, Aeneas. (Certainly it will make my father green with envy.) I sent word ahead of my impending arrival, hoping for an escort in light of the winter rains. Alas, when my entourage reached the banks of the Scamander River, only a few villagers greeted me and I was obliged to set forth in a fishing boat, which overturned halfway.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever plunged headfirst into swollen floodwaters, but I cannot recommend it. The shock of the frigid water was like needles into my spine and when I gasped for air, I breathed water instead. The praetorians were so terrified to see me disappear in the black water that they splashed in after me, but my mind went black before they reached me. I thought—for just a moment—that this might be the way the gods wished to reunite me with Marcellus, for I still remember that dark night in Lake Avernus before he died …

  Next I knew, I was vomiting water onto the muddy bank. The shivering did not stop even after they wrapped me in furs and put me before a fire. I must have looked like a bedraggled lemur, because when Agrippa and I were reunited, he exploded with thunderous rage, threatening to burn down the whole city of Ilium and throw children from the towers as Greeks did so long ago.

  In terror, the citizens of Ilium claimed that I sent no word ahead of my arrival or they would have sent a proper escort or guided me to a bridge that would afford me safe passage.

  But Agrippa would hear none of their excuses. He accused them of having tried to kill me, and fined the city so heavily I can’t imagine how they will ever repay it. I think for men such as him, this is love. And I think for women such as you and me, it must be enough.

  *

  I am still thinking about her letter, days later, when Pythia asks me if I have given any more thought to a marriage for her. “I am thirteen now. Crinagoras says that when you were my age, you married King Juba and became a queen and a mother too. I am not too young.”

  I was nearly fifteen when I married, and even then I did not want to be a wife or mother, as my poet has good reason to know. The politician-poet is meddling again, and it vexes me, but I do not say this to Pythia because I know what it is to be an orphan, desperate for a family to carry on a lost legacy. “Do you have a husband in mind?”

  “I will be content in your choice for me,” my niece replies. “But I should like for him to be an important man. A senator. Or a prince. Perhaps a king, if one can be found.”

  She aims high, but shouldn’t she? Pythia is a wealthy heiress and I have given her the finest education possible. She has studied in my throne room too. There is no man in Mauretania worthy of her and because I do not know the first thing about matchmaking, I reply to Julia’s letter and ask her advice.

  I must grudgingly admit that my girls are not little children anymore. There are things I must teach them. Things my mother taught me. It is time to take them to the source of the Nile.

  *

  HOW excited the girls are to learn we will go by camel, wrapped in Berber shawls against the heat of the sun with turbans upon our heads like desert nomads. They run to the library to peek at maps purporting to prove that Egypt’s Nile finds its source here in Mauretania. They bicker over what to take in their satchels. And they pester my poor mage with questions when they learn that he is coming too.

  They know the old man as the king’s physician, wise in the ways of potions and rituals. They know he is a worshipper of Isis, yes, and that he may know a magic spell or two. But they do not know that he was once Cleopatra’s most trusted wizard and I worry for his true identity to be revealed. I worry more that he is not healthy enough to make the trip, for the journey nearly killed him last time.

  Alas, he will not hear of being left behind. “Where Isis is summoned,” he tells me solemnly, “that is where I belong. If we want autumn rains, we must go now to meet the god of the river.”

  Chryssa will stay behind to look after the city in my place. With Tala, I leave something more precious to me than the city or the whole kingdom—my baby boy. Ptolemy is two years old now. Old enough to climb stairs and jump into my arms with boisterous enthusiasm, but I cannot take him on a journey into the wilderness. This is a duty for queens.

  So I kiss my son’s pale cheeks and surrender him into Tala’s arms before mounting the camel that will take me into the desert once again. Atop their camels, the girls delight in this grand adventure and their excitement becomes my own.

  We leave in the heat of summer, the cracked earth an oven beneath us, baking what once was grass into straw. The tribesmen hail us when they see our caravan leave the city. Women hauling bundles of twigs to burn in the hearths of their mud-brick houses stop to wave. Children drop their buckets of water and run to us for little trinkets and coins. Indigo-clad shepherds driving their flocks of woolly sheep stop to salute us with their crooks.

  When we reach the wilds, the girls are delighted by the macaque monkeys who call to us from the forested hills, where pine and cedar and oak offer us cool shade beneath their green finery. We are charmed by the colorful bee-eater birds with their bright plumage in green and blue and yellow. By the ripening pears on the fruit trees. By the scent of wood smoke when we make our fires at night and sleep in tents beneath the brilliant stars. And by the far-off roar of a lion, warning that there is more than one king in these lands …

  For the sake of my mage, we travel slowly and stop often. Thirsty, sweaty, and stinking of camels, I worry that the girls will tire and want to go home. But they seem to treasure my undivided attention now that they have me to themselves, away from court. When at last the marshy scent of the river reaches our noses, I know we are near to the place Juba discovered. The place he says is the source of the Nile. The place I first became Isis and learned the true nature of my power.

  The girls sense it too. I have taught them Egyptian gods and they see Hapi in the hippos, glistening pink and gray in the water. They see Sobek in the yellow-eyed crocodiles sunning on the far shore. I tell them that we are soon to meet Osiris. I tell them how, when I was a young girl, my mother took me on her barge to Aswan so that I could see her become a vessel for Isis.

  We stop where the green river is widest. With the blistering sun this high, I wear the thin white linen that Romans find so scandalous. Even so, perspiration pools between my shoulder blades. The girls sit together under a cypress tree, fanning each other with ostrich feathers, watching me prepare on the riverbank.

  “If we were in Egypt, white-robed priests would gather here on the banks of the Nile,” I say. “Musicians would play double-reeded clarinets, serving girls would throw pink flower petals into the water, and worshippers would kneel in homage to me, their queen, the New Isis. If we were in Egypt, I would give them the blessings of our goddess. Then I would visit the Nilometer to see how high the river has risen, which would tell me if this will be a fat year or a lean one. Here in Mauretania, though, it is not the flooding river that brings the grain. Here, we need rain. To get it, I must go into the river as a bride. A queen must be divine wife to divine husband.”

  Pythia narrows her eyes. I think she may have some no
tion of what I am saying. But Dora, my exuberant seven-year-old, pulls the ribbons from her hair, asking, “Can we swim now? We should have brought Ptolemy with us. He loves to splash in shallow water!”

  “We did not bring your brother because there are some things only queens can do … and I mean for you both to be queens one day.”

  This awakens Pythia’s ambition, and her curiosity too. “There are things kings can’t do?”

  “Can a man suckle an infant?” I ask, unbinding my hair. “He cannot. Neither can a king nourish his kingdom. He can protect and defend it. He can rule his people justly. But a king cannot feed his people except through Isis. This is why, in Egypt, no man comes to be Pharaoh without wedding Pharaoh’s daughter.”

  My daughter nods absently, distracted by a lazy bee and I hope I was right to take her on this journey at so young an age. “I need you to listen, Dora. Every year in Egypt the river rises to wash away all the dead vegetation from the dry, cracked land. Then it leaves black fertile soil in its place. Every year in Mauretania, the rains must soak the earth to make it easier to plow. Then the farmers grow their wheat, and the laborers cut the wheat with their scythes, and the bakers make it into bread.”

  “I know that,” Dora says.

  “Then tell me why the Nile rises. Tell me why the rains fall,” I command.

  “Is it part of the Mysteries?” Pythia asks, glancing at the mage.

  Euphronius sits quietly by the river, soaking his feet, a little smile of reverie upon his face. This is as close to home as he can be—and as close to home as I will ever be again. But one day, my daughter may rule all these lands. Egypt, Mauretania, all of Africa. Isidora has the claim. I must now teach her the power inside herself. “It is love that makes the river rise and the rain fall. No man can rise to create life without a lover, and neither can the god in the river.”