Yet the purity of our bond would be something Juba considers corrupted.
It does not matter, I tell myself. It was Juba that I married, but Helios was always the husband of my heart and now I am a guilty adulteress, no matter what I do. I cannot let myself love Juba without betraying my very soul, and I cannot love Helios and give myself wholly to the man in my arms … even though I want to.
I want to. I want to. But why should it matter? Where in all the royal marriages of the world would it matter?
My husband waits on my answer, but no good can come of telling him the truth. It will only wound him or enrage him or both. I resolve to lie to him as I have lied to him for years. But Juba’s hands are now so gentle as he strokes me, that in this moment of intimacy, skin to skin, I cannot force myself to speak words of deceit.
The king takes my silence for an answer. “Will he take you from me?”
“No,” I say, and it is true. My twin will fight for Egypt. He will fight the Romans to the end of his days. But he has left me to this life. He has left me to this man. He will not take me from Juba.
Juba has always believed that it is Augustus who stands between him and my heart. It is the farthest thing from the truth, but it is a lie that protects us all. If Juba knew my brother was alive, he would betray him to the emperor. And if he knew that Helios had been my lover, he would hold me in contempt for more than a betrayal of our marriage bed.
Once, I would not have cared whether Juba held me in contempt. He would not have been able to pierce my Ptolemaic armor with his disdain. But that is all changed now. And so I squeeze my eyes shut, praying that he does not ask me to explain myself. By the gods, let this be the end of it!
The king should close his eyes, sink into the cushions, and let Dionysus carry him off in drunken dreams, but he asks one last question. “Will you dishonor me with him?”
He does not ask if I have dishonored him, for he has always assumed as much. In this, he simply asks a promise. I don’t know if I can keep it but I make it anyway. “No. I won’t.”
My husband exhales and I know we will not speak of it again. We will both pretend he has never asked these questions and that I never answered them. We will forget these words like the nonsensical things uttered in the madness of ecstasy when a man and a woman come together in the night—words that cannot be examined in the light of day. Words that must not be examined in the light of day.
Twenty
“HORUS the Avenger,” Euphronius mutters.
He is almost always to be found in his rooms now. His eyes have become so cloudy that it is hard for him to see, making it too difficult for him to walk the grounds of the palace on his own. So isolated is he, here amidst his old magic wands, dried herbs, and caged birds, that I cannot imagine how he has come to hear the gossip.
“You have heard about the fighting near Egypt,” I say, irritated that his servants have not swept up the birdseeds from the tile. What if he should slip and fall? “Who told you?”
“The stable boy. Tacfarinas. He comes with Dora to read for me sometimes. I cannot read the recipes for my own potions anymore. I cannot sketch plants for the king’s books anymore either, but the boy can do it.”
Setting aside my surprise, I try to cheer him. “The king intends to name a plant after you. Euphorbian, it will be called.”
I think this will make him smile, but he glowers. “That is not my name.”
I had hoped that our trip to the Nile the previous year would have lifted his spirits, but he seems older, frailer, and more defeated than I have ever known him to be before. Pressing my lips together, I ask, “Do you want to go to Helios? To Horus the Avenger? I told you again and again that he lives and now I can even tell you where he will be found. Near Cyrenaica, on the border of Egypt, fighting with the Garamantes.”
The mage’s lips turn down at the corners, his whole face drooping, jowls and all. “Majesty, he will not be found there. He will not be found in this world.”
I groan in frustration, throwing myself down upon a dusty couch amidst dusty scrolls and stray feathers. “Even now you will persist in telling me that my twin is dead?”
“Do you know what made me a powerful seer, Majesty? It was not that I saw into the Rivers of Time. Many magicians can do that. Some of them—including your mother—could see all the possibilities. All the potential in the world. But I always saw things differently. When I scried, I saw only the directions my River of Time could still flow. I tell you now, when I left your twin brother in Thebes, I knew I would never see him alive again. All other possibilities flowed away. Helios disappeared from the Rivers of Time. He simply disappeared.”
It is a crushing thing to hear, a thing I refuse to hear. “For you, perhaps. Perhaps you will never see him alive again. But I have seen him with my own eyes.”
“Maybe you are the only one who can.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask shrilly. “What can you mean?”
Pressing his cheek against his staff, he says, “You were born sacred twins, two halves of one soul. Perhaps you can see him because you are now joined together.”
The word joined makes me blush. I have never spoken to my mage of how I took Helios for a lover, though it is unlikely to shock him. Perhaps I have not spoken of it because the Romans have taught me to be ashamed. Or perhaps it is because what passed between Helios and me was never tradition, or legacy, or politics. Our stolen nights on the Isle of Samos are the only memories of true love that I will ever have. Our lovemaking was lovemaking, secret and sacred. Ours alone.
I will not share those nights with anyone else, even by speaking of them.
“Majesty, if Helios lives in this world, he does so inside of you.”
“Then where is he?” I demand. “I do not see him now. And I long for him. You have no idea how I long for him.” He must think me a madwoman, and maybe I am. I have lost too many people not to be a little mad, I think. But I will go completely mad if I allow this talk to continue. “Helios fought the Romans with the Kandake of Meroë in Egypt. Now he is fighting with the Garamantes. You heard the boy say it. Tacfarinas said the people whispered of a mage called Horus the Avenger. That is where you can find him, Euphronius. With the Garamantes. Not here. Not in me.”
“There are always rumors in Africa of Horus the Avenger. It is a story as old as the world, and people tell it because they want to believe in it. They want to hope when hope is lost.”
“I have not lost hope,” I say. “And you are wrong to let yourself lose faith in it.”
The old man’s head bows at my chastisement. He is silent for many moments. When he speaks, it is with grave resignation. “I have been wrong about a good many things, Majesty. So let me help you in the one way I might still be useful. Let us take no chances with your new Iseum. Let me help you consecrate the spot for Isis before Amphio’s workers break ground.”
Can this mean that he has given himself over to my vision of how our goddess must be saved, not in Egypt, but here in Mauretania? This does lift my spirits. And because I do not wish to argue with him anymore, I am swift to agree.
The mage insists on being shaved bald for the ritual, and dresses in linen as a priest of Isis must. We go alone when the sun has set, because my goddess is the mistress over the moon that is my namesake. It is slow going, every part of it difficult for him, even though he leans upon his staff on one side and my arm on the other. My poor mage is so much older now than when we started this journey. He is brittle only in bone and near-broken in spirit. I hope this rite will inspire and rejuvenate him.
Beneath the silver glow of the moon, he encourages me to go barefoot onto the soil, walking patterns the mage taught me long ago, searching with my feet for any evil spells. My toes curl into the earth, searching for the heka of pain or suffering, the lingering laments of the dying. Sensing no tales of woe, I go to my knees. Pressing my hands to the ground I push a tiny bit of my magic into the soil and draw it back in again, communing with the island, l
etting it speak to me, delighted when it tells me only the stories of sailors and fishes.
“It is a good place for an Iseum,” I declare, holding a lantern high.
“Are you certain, Majesty?”
For a moment, I think I have missed some trace of dark magic. Then I realize he is not asking me if this site is fit for a temple. He is asking me if I am certain of the course I have chosen. There was a time when I was uncertain—a time, even, when I doubted my faith. A time when I turned from Isis, her worshippers, and all their hopes for me. But I am on the right path now. Even if Helios is alive, fighting a world away, I was born for a different battle. “Before she died, my mother said that rulers choose what ink to write in. Blood, sweat, or tears. Well, I have written in all three.”
“You have had little choice in the matter, Majesty …”
“Perhaps the gods will remember it that way. But in my hour of judgment, when my heart is weighed for sin, I would have Isis know that I used the hands she wrote upon to do work that glorified her and lifted up others in her name. People have looked to me and called me savior. They ask me for salvation and they will find it in this temple. It does not matter that it is here and not in Egypt. Even if my name is never whispered after I am gone, even if this temple crumbles to dust, they will still speak of Isis. And I will have saved her …”
Tears glisten in his rheumy eyes. “But I will still have failed. I was to see you restored to Egypt. But I have failed in everything. I failed your mother. I failed Isis. I failed you.”
I put down the lamp, take his wrinkled face in my hands, and make him look at me. “You never failed my mother. You never failed Isis. And no matter what I have said in the past, you never failed me. You have given your whole life to us. Your queens do not forget. Not Isis, not my mother, and not me. Tonight we begin something new. Something pure. Something that will live on long before we pass into the Rivers of Time.”
There is no question in my voice. No sadness or doubt. Only faith. He hears it too. He withdraws from my touch, taking up a censer of burning incense. “Then I will help you. In this and in everything.”
Lighting candles in a circle on the soon-to-be sacred spot, I pour Nile water into a lotus cup. Facing Egypt, I lift the bowl and let moonlight touch its surface with silver before calling upon the blood, the power, and the purifying winds. My gown billows into the sky as the forces of Isis cleanse us of all that has come before. And in a cloud of fragrant smoke, my mage calls upon the eternal flame of our goddess to make this place her own.
Bathed in pale moonlight, he walks in the circle we’ve made and hums a song I have never before heard. Like a murmur of butterfly wings, like the music of flowers when they spray pollen into the sky, like the first ripple on a calm pool of water. I do as he has taught me, making the bones of my feet hollow things through which my heka may flow, and I feel my lightest magic mix beneath me with the tinier but more potent tendrils that belong to the mage.
The world spins beneath me as he makes himself a part of this place, boldly venturing forth like a lion, noble as an elephant who never forgets. He gives all his magic to this ground, like marrow squeezed from bone. He gives himself to my land of salty ocean spray, hot winds, and desert grasses. He gives himself to my kingdom, to Isis, to me. He plants himself here, in this soil, like the seeds of what will become an endless sea of grain.
And then I know he is dying.
He taught me once that it costs nothing to take magic into your body, but it will carve its way out of you. It is carving its way out of the mage now, leaching from his bones, ravaging his body. I try to stop him. I reach for him, trying to push the life force into him. But what I give of myself he will not take. How desperately I cling to him, trying to keep him here in this world with me. But always I have been his student, and even now he has more to teach me.
He is no longer a man of failing sight, sagging skin, and bent back. He is a child of Isis and made of more than these bits of flesh and bone. He is, on this night, a breathtaking mirror of the gods. He is not weary and old. He is a young man again, towering in determination and joy. How happily he shows me the essence of him. How lightly he lets go of all that has ever held him here as he consecrates this sacred ground. He makes himself as peaceful as a silver thread, glimmering in moonlight, as light as a feather, as free as a floating drape of silk.
And then he falls.
I cradle him in my lap, my tears falling upon his cheeks. Why, why did he insist we come here this night, keeping from me his true purpose? He knew. He knew what he would do. But never would I have let him do this, if I had known. “That is why,” he says, with a peaceful smile. “Do not mourn. Princess Isidora saw it truly. I have become a great wizard again. I have lived long and I am not gone.”
The curve of his smile becomes the waves in my ocean. His breath becomes the night mist. His open palms become the petals of lilies floating on the Nile. The spark in his eyes becomes the fire in my lighthouse. And I know now that I must never, ever let it burn out …
*
I pack his magic wands carefully in fine-spun silk cloth and set them into a chest with the divination cups and alabaster lamps and magic amulets. His books and sketches I will give to the king, but I do not know what to do with the bundles of herbs and incense.
The birds I set free.
I am still standing there by the window with an empty cage when I hear someone knock at my mage’s door. Let them knock. I will not answer. I made plain to the servants that I do not want to be disturbed. But whoever it is braves my wrath by coming into the room without my leave.
“Selene?” It is the king. I know his voice. But it seems so far away. “What are you doing here?”
“I am mourning.”
Juba comes to my side, taking the cage from my hands, his eyebrows furrowed. “I know it took you some time to warm to my physician and I am glad he won you over, but I’m sorry to see you so very sad at his passing …”
He does not know what Euphronius was to me.
He has never known.
And that is my fault.
“He was a priest of Isis,” I say, tilting my head back to swallow my emotions down. “A great wise man of Egypt. He was my mother’s wizard—a man feared by even the Romans, in his time.”
Juba shakes his head in confusion. “Are we speaking of Euphorbus Musa? Brother of the emperor’s physician?”
I turn to face him, wondering what difference it makes now. This is one lie amongst so many. Why is it that now, after so many years, I feel the need to tell him so many painful truths? “We misled you. He called himself Euphorbus at my command. His name was Euphronius and he was my mother’s wizard. He was the mage who helped Helios escape from the emperor all those years ago.”
My husband’s eyes fly wide as if he cannot decide to be furious or appalled. “Do you mean to say that for years now, you have let me shelter one of the emperor’s enemies, here in my court?”
Nodding, I say, “I was afraid that if you knew who he really was, you would tell the emperor. I was afraid you would have given the old man over to the Romans to be tortured or killed.”
Juba’s jaw snaps shut and he stares hard, clenching a fist. But he does not say that I was wrong to fear it. That is what he would have done and we both know it. I was right to keep it from him. I was right to do it.
Suddenly, the king throws down the cage with a clatter. “Who else knew? Half our court hails from Cleopatra’s Alexandria. They knew him, did they not? Memnon, Lasthenia, Crinagoras, and the others … all this time, they said nothing!”
“Many of my mother’s intimates took new names after the war,” I explain, quick to defend my favorites. “They keep one another’s secrets as a matter of survival.”
Juba stares at me as if he cannot quite fathom that I could have deceived him about such a thing and for so very long. “What of Musa? Did you never worry the emperor’s physician might deny having a brother?” His eyes go wider at my silence. “By the god
s, Selene! Just how intricate a conspiracy did you weave?”
“Musa knows. And I think Dora knows. When I took the girls to the river, I think she saw him true. She has the gift of sight—a gift he had too.”
It is too much for the king to hear. He shoves his fingers through his hair, squeezing his eyes shut. “This is madness.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I say, blinking back tears. “Euphronius is dead. The emperor cannot hurt him now. Augustus need never know the truth unless you tell him.”
“Tell him?” The king laughs with bitter indignation. “What purpose would it serve to tell the emperor what a gullible fool I have been? Better for him to question my loyalty than to know I have been a blind half-wit. A mockery in my own palace!”
“You are not a mockery.”
“Oh, no? Then why tell me this now … unless it is to laugh at me? I would never have known the truth. Why tell me now, after all these years?”
I meet his eyes in plaintive desperation. “Because there is no one else I can tell but you. Because I am filled with sorrow and there is nowhere else I can turn but to you.”
Why do I give him power over me? I have made myself so vulnerable! He can betray me to the emperor. He can punish my loved ones. He can purge our court of my favorites. He can walk away from me in my grief. Then who would be the mockery? All our marriage, I have shielded myself from him, guarded my heart, determined never to allow the mask to slip. Now I stand before my husband more naked than I have ever been. And he is so angry, I am afraid of what he will do.
What he does is open his arms.
“Then turn to me,” Juba says hoarsely. “If there is nowhere else you can turn but to me, then turn to me.”
With a small sob of surprise, I step into his embrace. He tugs me close and I bury my face in the folds of his tunic. He strokes my hair and urges me to lean on his chest, to let him cradle me in my sadness. I am afraid to lean upon him, but when I finally do, I am surprised by his strength. He does not have the wide shoulders of a sailor or the bulging sword arm of a soldier, and yet maybe there is some manner of iron inside him after all.
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