Daughters of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

I have never seen Augustus weep before, not even in the depths of his grief for Octavia. Now I watch him sob. I hear his laments. But they do not reach me. He says something to me. I don’t know what. I don’t care what he says. I don’t care at all. I have no pity for him. I do not bow to him. I do not even stand.

  Tearing at his tunic, he cries, “After all they have denied me, how can the gods be so cruel as to take my son?”

  My mind cannot turn away from the unspeakable pain my son must have suffered before he died, but Augustus only asks how the gods could take something from him. As always, he puts himself at the center of the tragedy. Perhaps that is where he belongs. My voice quavers. “You dare to blame the gods?”

  “Who else should I blame?”

  My whisper becomes an outraged shout. “It was no bolt of lightning that struck him dead! It wasn’t the gods that killed my son. It was you.”

  His bleak eyes meet mine and he staggers back. “What?”

  “My son was murdered,” I cry rashly. “He was taken from me by your enemies and mine. My son was murdered because of you and what you carved on that accursed altar.”

  In the face of my rage, Augustus actually softens. “No, Selene. I was told there was a fire. A stampede …”

  I will not believe it. I know better. I’ve always known better. “Who started that fire? Who opened the stalls? I saw those horses. Something—someone—spooked them.”

  “The flames could have been started by anything. An overturned lamp … the fire must have sent the animals into a panic.”

  “It was not the fire,” I insist. “Where is Memnon’s sword? He was never without it. My guards searched the ashes for that sword, but I know they’ll never find it. Because someone took it from him. That’s why Memnon died with a dagger in his hand. He didn’t die choking on smoke or dodging the deadly hooves of runaway stallions. He died fighting. He died fighting for Ptolemy.”

  “Selene—”

  “My son was a prince. He was always watched, never alone. They all knew it. All your enemies. All of mine. So they murdered my son’s faithful guard and they murdered my Berber woman before they murdered my child. Then they let horses trample the bodies to cover their crime.”

  Augustus takes my arms and shakes me. “Who would dare?”

  Livia. Livia would dare. I want to name her. But this act doesn’t bear her signature. Poison is her weapon. She doesn’t strike in the open. This act, so haphazard, with so much potential to go wrong, would be the crime of someone far less prudent. Someone who deals in brutality and mayhem. But who?

  Tiberius commands men to slaughter on his behalf, but he is painfully cautious and unimaginative. Drusus is bold enough, but would my sister’s honor-obsessed husband kill my son? Could Drusus have possibly convinced himself that the only way to restore the Republic was to murder my child?

  Surely not.

  Then there is Herod. By now he must have surmised that Crinagoras was my agent, my instrument in bringing him low. Herod would want vengeance and has agents in the city …

  As these thoughts consume me, I cannot make my lips name a culprit, for the moment I do, I will bind myself to fatal revenge. No bond of kinship, no debt of honor, no command of any deity above or below will keep me from dealing bloody justice to the person or persons who did this. It is only this knowledge and the swelling of my throat that keeps me silent.

  The emperor strokes my arms. “Oh, my poor Selene. You are searching for villainy …”

  I shake with denial, my heart filled with guilt and bitter bile. Someone is to blame for this. Someone must be to blame for this. It is too unnatural that a child should die before his mother. I can make no sense of it. I will not hear reason. I will not believe that my beloved boy could be taken from us in such an indifferent happenstance as an overturned lamp …

  Augustus tries to calm me, saying, “No one would dare kill my son.”

  And thus he repeats the lie, here in Juba’s house, once again. My head jerks up and I rake him with a vicious glare. I want to fly at him and tear his face open. I want to make him bleed the way I am bleeding inside, and I scream, “He was not your son!”

  The emperor’s eyes narrow into slits. I see the danger there, but I do not care. For once, I am reckless. Too consumed with pain to do anything but tell the truth. “He was not your son, you madman. You madman! He was mine and Juba’s. Now he’s dead because you’re too vain to admit that you cannot sire a son of your own.”

  No one has insulted the emperor for a very long time. Certainly none who lived to tell the tale. And my words are more than insult. They are deadly missiles launched from a catapult and they crash into the fiction he has built around himself. He literally shakes from the impact. “Never say that again—”

  “Or what?” I fling his hands away from me, despising his touch. My hair, loosened from its adornments, flies wild in my face and I feel the storm inside me rise hot with fury. If I were in my right mind, I would remember how much I still have to lose, but I am broken free of my moorings. Now I am all avenging shadow. I know how to wound him. I know better than anyone. And I want to wound him. “What will you do? Will you rape me again? Will you raze my kingdom to the ground? Or will you kill my daughter too? You fiend! What will you do?”

  When he only blinks, I rave on, spittle flying from my lips. “The only thing you won’t do is kill me. No. You will shove me down just to see if I can stand up again. You will destroy the world and make me watch. That is what you have always enjoyed. From the day you captured me, you have gloried in tormenting me. You delight in forcing me to tears as you rob me of everything and everyone I have ever loved. That is your monstrous, sadistic thrill. So what will you do to me now? What will you take from me next? Make your threat plain.”

  My heart thunders in my chest and my fists clench at my sides, ready for anything. Yet I do not anticipate the softness of his hand on my cheek. “How wrong you are, my Cleopatra. What I wanted most was to give you everything …”

  He believes it. He believes it with all his twisted heart and soul. Everything he knows about himself and the legend he created depends upon this belief. And in this moment, I want nothing so much as to strip him of it. It is the lie of his lifetime … and mine. It is the lie that killed my son. And I will not have it.

  “I am not your Cleopatra,” I say, forcing the words out calm and clear. “Listen well, you petty, pathetic man. I am not your goddess. I am not your lover. I am not your bride. And I am not your Cleopatra.”

  His hand slips to my neck in warning, as if he would choke me. Perhaps I have goaded him to end my life and give me a merciful escape from this pain.

  Alas, his fingers do not squeeze. “You’ve lost your wits, my poor girl …”

  “I am not your poor girl. I have never been your anything.”

  “That’s a lie,” he says, forcing me to look into his eyes. “You bound yourself to me before I ever touched you. When I was dying, you nursed me back to health. Did you not offer yourself to me during the sacred Mysteries at Eleusis? Did you not call upon the gods to bring about a Golden Age in my name? You and I are two parts of a single story. Deny it.”

  My lips part to scream my denial. To swear that I have never felt anything but hatred for him. To vow that I am bound to him by nothing. But I catch a glimpse of my daughter in the doorway, pale with fright. By the gods, she looks like him. Small ears, a delicate little nose …

  If he is a part of her, is he not also a part of me? I have never loved him, but I have felt more for him than hatred. I have felt pity, gratitude, and even awe. I remember all the times I used his weakness. I have used him to gain power and wealth. I have used him to kill. And now it has come full circle. First, because of him, I brought death to my mother. Now, through him, I brought death to my son.

  All along, I’ve told myself that my hatred for the emperor was something I hid in my khaibit, my shadow. But he is my shadow. The emperor is a reflection of everything that is weak and wicked inside me. And
this is what we have wrought together. A dead boy, his little bones crushed under the weight of our ambitions. And a trembling girl in the doorway, her eyes wide with fright at our discord.

  “Deny it!” Augustus cries, clasping me hard.

  I cannot deny it. We are bound. We are a curse to each other and the world. Unless someone puts a stop to it we will both live on long after everyone else we love is destroyed. I must stop it. I must make an end to him, even if it means my own end …

  And in that moment, I decide that I must kill him.

  It is as if Isidora has already seen me do it, for she rushes to my side, trying to break us apart. “Please! Please, stop!”

  Then her pleas are cut off by another voice, low and menacing. “Get out.”

  It is Juba in the archway, his swollen eyes dark with fury. For a moment, no one moves. No one can believe that the king should speak to his emperor this way. And yet Juba lifts a hand and points one of those long elegant fingers directly at Augustus. “Get out!”

  The cold leaches into the emperor’s hands. “This is none of your concern, Juba.”

  Juba advances upon us with clenched fists and murder in his stare. “I swear by Jupiter himself that if you don’t take your hands off my wife—”

  “You threaten me?” Augustus’s eyes dart to the door where his praetorians stand, ready to kill at his command.

  But Juba is beyond reason. He grabs the emperor by the tunic, tearing him off me, nearly lifting him from the floor. “Must I throw you out, damn you? Because I will, Caesar, by all the gods, I will. I will hurl you from my doorway into the street.”

  The praetorians rush in, swords drawn, ready to cut Juba limb from limb and I act by instinct to defend my husband. My hand flies up, fingers extending with heka as a torrent of wind races up my arm and blasts out of me. But it isn’t wind.

  It is a ball of fire …

  Strabo tries to duck out of the way but it catches the emperor’s chief praetorian by the shoulder, sending his cape into flames. Strabo screams as it catches fire to his hair. One of his comrades tries to beat down the flames while the others crouch down in loose battle formation and I send another stream of fire after them, an explosion of blinding flame.

  On my arm is a birthmark in the shape of a sail, a sign of the wind. Fire has never been my power. That is my twin’s magic, not mine. How has such a magic come to invest itself inside me and how long has it been there? There is little time to wonder. Wild-eyed and terrified of my powers, the men scramble to their feet and flee, abandoning their emperor in my clutches. And I am still determined to kill him. It is Helios’s rage that rises up inside me like the flames I have swallowed. My twin’s burning, murderous certainty. The same certainty that was in his eyes the night he came to kill the emperor in Greece. I stopped him then, but now I cannot remember why …

  The emperor doesn’t see the danger in my eyes. He does not see that the moment my husband releases him, I am going to wrap my arms around him and incinerate him with every last drop of heka in my blood. He does not see it, but Isidora does. She grabs my still flaming hands, shrieking, “Stop! Do you think Ptolemy can’t see us? He has yet to enter the afterworld and have his heart weighed against a feather. Would you make his heart heavier with sorrow to see us tear one another apart?”

  At her words, Juba releases the emperor—flings him away—but the damage has been done. Augustus eyes me and my husband as if we were hunting dogs gone rabid. We all stand there, heaving breaths, the air so charged that any spark may bring more violence.

  Isidora sinks to her knees before the emperor. “Forgive us, Caesar. We are mortals and we suffer as mortals, forgetting ourselves in our grief. We haven’t your strength to accept wounds with stoicism. Please come back another day when we can learn from your example how to mourn without causing distress, for we are all your children and we need our father’s guidance …”

  Our father’s guidance. I am struck dumb by her careful choice of words. She knows. She knows Augustus is the man who put her in my womb. He wants to be bound to me, and Dora now offers herself as the strongest tie. He is moved by her, I can tell. And how could he not be? She is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. He could never look into her tear-filled blue eyes and not want her for his own. My Isidora is not proud or guarded like Julia. She will not hold herself back from him. As always, she offers her whole heart. And I am afraid he will eat it raw.

  Thirty-eight

  I do not know what Augustus will do now. He leaves my house wide-eyed and shaken. Perhaps he realizes that he came as close to death at my hands as he has ever come. If he is finally afraid of me, it will go better for everyone. But he is not the only one left in fear. Our servants are too afraid to attend us. The world is upended and our place in it uncertain.

  Since the day I met Juba, I have goaded him to rebellion against the emperor. Now he has done it. We have all said things that cannot be unspoken and done things that cannot be undone. My husband has seen me use magic, but never has he seen me throw fire. And yet I think he is more shocked at his own behavior than mine. As he slumps against a marble pillar, I see the devastation written all over him.

  What have I done to him? I judged Herod a monster for tearing his family apart, but look what I have done to mine. When my husband rises again, he grips his tunic, snapping it straight. Then, with a look of grim purpose, he storms through the scorched archway toward our front gate.

  I follow, calling after him, “What do you mean to do?”

  “I am going after him,” Juba says.

  “To what purpose?” I demand to know. “To what possible end?”

  Juba grips the iron bars, his biceps tight and trembling, his breath puffing in the cold air under an overcast sky. “I don’t know.”

  “Please don’t chase Augustus. If anything, we should lock the gates against him and his men.”

  “Lock the gates against me, if you like, but I’m leaving.”

  I hold the shattered remains of myself lest I fly apart. “And where would you go?”

  “To hunt down that horse,” he says with clenched jaw. “When I find that stallion, I’ll sacrifice him and bury him with the boy.”

  My husband wants vengeance too, and if he cannot have it against Augustus, he’ll have it from the stallion. I know what Juba is thinking. He is thinking that this animal threw our son. That the majestic horse trampled our little Ptolemy beneath his hooves. So eager to find blame, I should think the same. But I remember, “Ptolemy loved him, Juba. He loved that horse. Let Sirocco go. I beg of you.”

  The king turns to me, his eyes bleak as the winter sky. I think he will strike me. I think he will rage as I have never seen him rage. Instead, he shrugs his assent. “As you wish, Selene. Who am I to deny you?”

  With that, he storms away into some dark recess of our house.

  I cannot go after him. I have no right.

  Instead, I go back inside and place my cloak over my son. Ptolemy does not feel the cold anymore, but I tuck it under his chin as if he were merely asleep. Then a whimper and a howl cuts through the winter air. It is Ptolemy’s dog keeping vigil by his bier, licking bloodied blistered paws that I realize only now were burned in the fire at the stables. The creature is skittish, shying away. She was faithful to my son. She was there with him at the end. My son loved this dog and everything he loved is now precious to me, so I stroke the animal’s neck to soothe it while the hound blows air through its nostrils in distress.

  Dora stoops beside me and tears the hem off her garment to make a bandage. I help her wind the cloth round the dog’s paws and tie it tight. Then Dora clutches at the collar of gold amulet round her neck and declares, “Augustus will forgive you. I have seen it. He will forgive you anything.”

  “I don’t care if he does,” I say.

  It is Juba’s forgiveness I want and I do not deserve it, so I will have to content myself with vengeance. “You saw it happen in your divination bowl, didn’t you? You saw your brother’s death.”
>
  Dora nods once, sadly. Perhaps if I had allowed her to work her magic, she may have seen it long before it happened. When there might have been time to save him. The thought hammers another nail of guilt into me. “Did you see who started the fire, Isidora?”

  Tears spill over her lashes. “No. I only saw the flames and the stampede …”

  “Fetch your divination bowl. I’ll give you my heka. I’ll hold your hand and pull you back if the currents of the magic carry you too far. I want you to look into the Rivers of Time and tell me who did this to Ptolemy.”

  She rests her hand atop mine. “The Rivers of Time flow into the future. They have never shown me the past.” It is another crushing disappointment. She must see it on my face. “Could the wizard see the past? Could my uncle Philadelphus? If they did, maybe I can too. I’ll try.”

  “No.” I remember with bitter certainty. “They did not see the past. Forget I ever asked such a thing. And when we go back home, things will be different between us, that much I vow.”

  “But I’m not going back,” she reminds me gently, as if I’m addled. “Don’t you remember that I’m to marry King Archelaus and be Queen of Cappadocia?”

  “That’s all done now, Isidora. You will never live anywhere but where you wish to live. You will never marry unless you wish to. And if you become a queen, you will be queen in your own right, for you are now the sole heir to Mauretania.”

  *

  IN the seventy days it takes for my son to be properly embalmed, my Roman sisters flock to me. First the Antonias, then Julia and Marcella too. For my sake, they do not quarrel. They come carrying garlands and elaborate candelabra and vases of oils and ointments for my dead son. They whisper words of sympathy, their faces grave. Minora tells me that I am still young enough to have another child, and I forgive her, because I know she only says such a thing in a spirit of compassion.

  The truth is that I am barren and, even if I were not, my husband recoils anytime I come near him, a thing that makes my pain deeper and more desolate by far. My husband loved Ptolemy as much as I did. He is the only one who can possibly know the loss I feel. He is the only person who could possibly understand there is an emptiness in me where Ptolemy used to be and it can never be filled. If there were any comfort to be had, I would find it in Juba’s arms. But I know we will never be happy again.