We didn’t climb to the snowy summits but hugged the edges of the mountains where fruit-laden trees and freshwater oases offered respite. It seemed hardly possible that the source of the Nile was to be found so far from Egypt, but I followed Juba’s maps and his exacting descriptions, relying upon my husband in absence as I’d never relied upon him when he was near.
The deeper into the wilds we traveled, the more familiar our surroundings became; I didn’t even have to close my eyes to imagine myself in Egypt. When at last we reached the banks of a river, I spied a hippo spouting a mist of water from its gaping nostrils! At the marshy scent of the river, Euphronius came awake. “Egyptian lotus,” he whispered, captivated by the floating water lilies.
“Look, Majesty, all the gods of Egypt have come to do you homage,” Crinagoras teased, pointing at the far bank where a crocodile sunned himself, vicious jaws cracked in a toothy smile. “First Anubis, then Hapi, now Sobek too.”
I ignored my poet’s irreverence. “What do you think, Euphorbus? Can the great god be found here? Is this the source of the Nile?” I urged my camel to kneel, unwrapping the shawl from my shoulders as my guards helped me down. I needed only a steadying hand from Memnon, but Euphronius had to be lifted from his mount. I didn’t like to see my mage so stiff and frail, as if his bones creaked when he moved, but his awed expression told me that his spirits had been lifted along with mine.
Holding his divination staff in one hand, and his rattle in the other, he stepped onto the low rocks on the shore and stooped to touch the water. His eyes were damp when he said, “Maybe it is the Nile . . .”
Inside my hastily erected tent, Chryssa undressed me and brushed my hair until it gleamed. “I never thought to prepare you for another wedding,” she said. “But if Osiris is here, you must come to him as a bride, divine wife to divine husband.”
Though she was Greek, she’d studied well under the priests and priestesses of Egypt. I closed my eyes, surrendering to her ministrations, listening to Euphronius chant prayers and hoping the river god awaited me. I’d come to him once as a lover in the arms of Helios, so I told myself that we weren’t strangers. For a thousand years, queens of Egypt had met him on the Isle of Philae, where Isis first wept for her murdered husband. Where she brought him back to life with her magic, where he waited for his love. I couldn’t go to him in Philae, where the warrior queen, the Kandake, now ruled. Was it foolish to think he’d come to me here?
I emerged from my tent accompanied by a chorus of frogs. Adorned in the pure white robe of an Isiac devotee, I carried a bouquet of wildflowers. My hair was loose about my shoulders and my amulet throbbed at my throat with a heartbeat of its own. I stepped into the shallows. Close behind me, Chryssa held my robe so that I slipped naked into the murky water without revealing myself to onlookers. The mud of the riverbed sucked at my feet and warm water caressed my skin. I remembered Helios as he’d been that night in the storm, when the god had first taken me. Now I felt certain he’d been waiting, pining for me all along. “I’m the queen of this land,” I said quietly. “I call upon you, Lord of the Rebirth, to bring us water for the crops. To bring us grain.”
Memnon shouted in alarm as the crocodile on the far shore roused from its stupor and slid into the river with me. I wasn’t afraid. Isis was in me; I had nothing to fear from crocodiles. Already, the green waves were lapping at my consciousness, drawing me into the marshy reeds of a waking dream where life teemed. And I realized that I’d seen this all before. The moment my mother put my amulet around my neck, I’d seen myself surrender to the river. Not in Egypt. Here.
It had always been here.
“She is the Resurrection,” Euphronius chanted. “She brings life from death. She gives to her kingdom an heir, she gives to her people their daily sustenance, and she gives Isis an embodiment on earth for Osiris to love.”
Closing my eyes, I drew the heka inside me, releasing it like a kiss. The wind was soft at my neck and I flushed hot all over. My nipples tightened and I felt the river swell for me. The god had come! The sweet rush of heat between my legs made me moan, a rapturous sound so foreign that I knew it belonged to the goddess. Not to me. My skin expanded to accommodate Isis. She smiled a seductive smile with my mouth. She opened her legs to the water and my thighs trembled. She panted, beckoning her paramour, and through her, I learned how it was that a woman might tease a man and make him want her.
With heka swirling warm in my womb, I opened like the petals of a flower. I hadn’t known before that I could use magic upon my own body, to make myself ready for a child. Tentatively, I pulled at the heka inside me so that my womb closed again, then allowed all the wonderful sensations to come rushing back. With a wild toss of my head, I laughed. All my life, my body had been at the mercy of others. The flesh of my arms had been a canvas for my goddess to paint with blood. My breasts and the tender flesh between my legs had been in the emperor’s possession, to give away to Juba or plunder for himself. Mastery over myself, over my body, over my fertility itself, was a triumphant thrill.
“Now,” Euphronius said, somewhere in the distance. “Work your magic now! ”
Controlling heka the way he’d taught me, I found the core, the hopes and fears and dreams, and I let it flow out of my fingertips into the river. I let it go. Sweet release! I saw the frog and the minnows, the life-giving silt settling onto the fields beyond and everywhere I turned in the water, the birds flocked and water lilies blossomed. I traced lazy circles into the river, bringing fish leaping to the surface. I passed dried brown foliage as I made my way to shore, and it sprouted green with life again. I gazed upon the washed-up carcass of a viper and it arose, swollen and shimmering like the phallus of a lover. My mother had surrendered to his venomous love bite, but I wasn’t ready to pass into the afterlife.
I rose up, gloriously naked, glistening rivulets of river water flowing over my bare belly, hips, and thighs. With the flush of divine lovemaking on my body, I knew that I radiated beauty. I was beautiful at last. Filled with promise. An overflowing cornucopia.
None dared to look upon my nudity. Chryssa seemed lost in reverie as she enveloped me in my white robe. Poor Memnon trembled. Crinagoras stood speechless, the papyrus he’d been writing upon lost to the breeze. Others joined Euphronius in prayer, and he led them, though his voice was hoarse.
And then it rained.
RETURNING to Iol-Caesaria, I spread my arms and lifted my face to welcome each raindrop. I was no longer a stranger here. I felt connected to the camel, to every brown rock and green blade of grass. These were my juniper bushes that hugged the mountainside, my antelopes that danced across the steppes of the Maghreb, and my people who waved to us from passing caravans. This was my Mauretania and love swelled in my breast as if I were seeing it for the first time.
When we reached the palace, riding through the gates and giving our weary animals over to the stable, Isidora ran out to welcome me home. I swung my daughter up into my arms and spun her in the rain.
Twenty-six
MY servants prepared a bath of milk and honey to treat my sunburned skin. Once I was bathed, and perfumed with rose water, and wearing clean clothes again, I took supper in my rooms. Eggs and olives. Grilled flat bread and seasoned lamb. A creamy pudding made of goat’s milk, dotted with raisins and dates. All to be washed down with a pot of hot mint tisane. I enjoyed it as I’d never enjoyed food and drink before, certain that a bountiful harvest was to come.
As I made to sink down with Bast into my indulgently soft mattress for a well-deserved rest, Memnon knocked at the door. “The king has returned,” he said.
Stroking my cat’s fur, I didn’t even stir. “It’s just another caravan with all his scrolls and hunting trophies, and possibly some other woman he’s discarded.”
Memnon gave a quick shake of his head. “Majesty, Tala saw King Juba dismount from his horse and says he’s now coming in from the rain.”
TOO late, the trumpeters rushed to announce the king’s arrival. He waved
them away. I wasn’t sure I’d have heard them anyway, over the thunder of my heartbeat. Juba stood under an awning that shielded him from the downpour and nodded to me in stiff, formal greeting. A circlet of gold made him appear to be the king that he was, and such adornments finally seemed to rest easy upon his brow. It’d been almost two years since I’d seen him and I’d forgotten his good looks. I was momentarily captivated.
Whether it was the stuporous rain or the late hour, we were quite alone in the cavernous throne room and Juba said, “Salve, Selene.” He often retreated to Latin when distressed, and truly, Juba did look pained.
“Are you ill?” I asked.
He laughed, sweeping his hand through his wet hair. “It’s just that nothing here looks quite like I left it. Even you are changed. A woman now.”
Why should I want for him to look at me and find me beautiful? What I wanted—what I truly wanted, I reminded myself—was to ensure that all my hard-won gains wouldn’t be spoiled by Juba’s return. “Perhaps you’re just looking at it all with new eyes . . .”
Juba shook the rain off and looked abashed when it puddled on our mosaic floors. “I wanted to see you, Selene.”
“That’s why you’ve come home?” I asked, not ready to believe it.
“Perhaps it was the rain.” It was autumn. A year since Philadelphus’s death. I wasn’t the only one counting months. Juba’s gaze traveled down to the flat expanse of my belly. He didn’t allow his eyes to linger on my empty womb, but Juba wasn’t a practiced liar. That single glance told me his fears. That glance told me that he still thought of me as a wicked seductress and feared that I’d brought home another bastard child. If I told him, This time I ran from him. He told me what he wanted from me, and I ran, Juba wouldn’t believe me. Perhaps he’d even tell me that I shouldn’t have run.
With that horrible thought, I said, “I’ll summon Lady Circe for you.”
JUBA’S arrival wasn’t the only thing to ruin the evening. While we were gone to the river, war in Egypt raged on. News arrived that the latest Roman prefect had launched a counterattack, destroying the Meroite city of Napata. I held my breath, terrified that I should read that the so-called Horus the Avenger had been captured or killed in the fighting. Instead of total Roman victory, however, I read of Rome’s failure to make substantial gains against the formidable Kandake of Meroë and her war elephants.
Still, this news shattered me. In searching for the Nile, I told myself that if I could make the land fertile again, a burden would be lifted from Egypt. Now I worried that I’d simply fallen too much in love with Mauretania and the comforts it afforded me. No one else might ever know it, but I knew Helios was fighting the Romans. I should be with him, helping to free Egypt from Roman tyranny, trying to win back my mother’s throne. She’d entrusted to me her legacy, but I let the Queen of Meroë fight my battles. And she was losing them.
JU BA had returned from his expedition with a caravan of precious salt from the marshes, spectacular hunting trophies, and a variety of exotic animals, including a Barbary macaque. The king came to my apartments with the furry monkey on his arm. “I’ve heard tell that the Princess Isidora likes animals,” Juba said. “I brought this little creature back for her as an early Saturnalia gift.”
Juba was a stranger to my daughter, but far from being afraid of him, she was delighted. She lowered to him in deference, a baby’s imitation of the other ladies in the palace, and her bright eyes glittered as she reached out for her new pet. I was wary of the monkey’s mischievous little hands. My Berber woman nodded a warning to me when the creature yawned, pointing out the sharp teeth. What kind of gift was this for a young child? I wanted to refuse it but didn’t like to refuse my daughter anything. Moreover, I regretted the churlish way I’d left Juba the night before. “You’re not to play with the monkey unless Tala is watching,” I said to my daughter, then thanked Juba politely.
He was also polite, commenting approvingly on the artwork I’d chosen for this part of the palace and admiring the carved gemstones I’d brought back from Rome, for he collected them, and was a great connoisseur of beautiful things.
Then we had nothing to say.
The next day, letters arrived from Rome. Two were from my half sisters, the Antonias, telling me that the tomb for Philadelphus was now complete. Minora’s letter was dreamy and idealistic, and she confessed to me an abiding affection for young Drusus, whom I remembered fondly even if he was Livia’s son. By contrast, the elder Antonia’s letter was stiff and stilted, expressing a deep sadness that she’d yet to give her husband a child.
While I was occupied with these letters, Isidora disappeared from under Tala’s watchful eye and sent the palace into an uproar. After hunting for her behind statuary and potted palms, we found her in Juba’s study, sitting on his lap. “North African elephants assist one another when they’re hunted,” he said, reading to her from his latest treatise, “and will defend one that is exhausted. And if they can remove him out of danger, they anoint his wounds with the tears of the aloe tree, standing round him like physicians.”
I was in no mood for fanciful talk of elephants. “Isidora, you’re not to run off from Tala!”
“It’s all right,” Juba said, cradling her. “Every writer needs an appreciative audience once in a while.” Nevertheless, I pried her out of his arms and sent her off. As I turned to follow, Juba stopped me. “Stay awhile, Selene . . .” He motioned me into a seat that had ornate, talon-shaped feet that reminded me of a Ptolemy Eagle. When I was seated, Juba said, “I should have said this before now. I was saddened to hear the news from Rome. Marcellus and Philadelphus were fine young men. I can’t imagine how you must have grieved for them.”
No, he couldn’t imagine it, and I could barely speak of it. “I still grieve for them.”
“As do I,” Juba said, then paused a moment before adding, “You were gone a long time in Rome.”
“You were gone longer, Juba. Our advisers despaired of your return.”
“My absence didn’t grieve you, though,” he said, amber eyes alight. “Did it?”
I flushed. “It gave me a chance to prove myself. To prove that I can rule—”
“Without me,” Juba interrupted, shaking his head, though he didn’t seem angry. In truth, his journey seemed to have rejuvenated him. He seemed somehow more at ease with himself and with me. “You’re almost eighteen years old now and just look at you.” I was wearing nothing scandalous—a white Grecian dress with a thick collar of aquamarine gemstones around my neck. My hair fell in a single braid down my back and I wasn’t even wearing cosmetics. Nonetheless, Juba said, “You’re tall as a goddess and just as assured. I suppose Augustus can’t be blamed for keeping you in Rome so long.”
Not this conversation again. I rose to my feet. “He didn’t keep me and I’m sorry that Isidora disturbed you. She’s normally a wellbehaved child. I’ll make sure she doesn’t bother you again.”
Juba lifted a hand, a gesture of apology. “She’s not a bother. She’s my daughter.”
Because we were alone, I dared to say, “We both know she’s not.”
“Has Augustus claimed her?” With silence as my answer, Juba leaned back. “Then I’m her father in every way that matters and I’d like to know her.” It gave me pause. I had loving memories of my father whereas Juba had none. Perhaps he took pity on Isidora. “Selene, I promised that no one would ever have cause to believe that she’s not mine.”
That statement forced two years of pent-up fury out of me. “A promise you broke! You wrote to Augustus about her.”
“Gods!” Juba slammed his palm on the desk. “Do you think I wanted to tell him? Do you think I enjoyed the humiliation?”
To see Juba behave as if this tortured him was too much. “Then why didn’t you lie? Why confess to him that you’d never laid a hand on me as a husband?”
His lips tightened. “Because I’m not a Ptolemy, Selene. Intrigue isn’t bred into my bones.”
I clasped my hands beneat
h my chin in a gesture of mockery. “How could I forget? You’re the noble savage. The scholarly king. Rex Literatissimus. Too busy with your studies to worry about keeping your word.”
“I thought you wanted Augustus to know,” he said, rising to face me.
“Why would you think such a thing?” Had he believed I’d force the emperor to acknowledge my child and willingly make myself the most notorious woman in the empire? It’s what my mother would have done. What she did do. But Isidora was a girl. There could be nothing gained from using her in such a way. “What gives you the impression that I wanted to reveal my humiliations?”
Juba came closer, as if to unsettle me. “Am I to believe, in the years we’ve been apart, that you’ve stopped scheming to reclaim what your mother lost?”
“Oh, Juba.” I made a sound of disgust. “Have you returned only to rejoin our tedious circle of recriminations?”
“No.” He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how I envisioned our reunion.”
“Then just how did you envision it?”
“Like this,” he said, darting forward to fasten his lips upon mine. It was a sudden, unexpected kiss, and my hands flailed behind me, finding purchase on the edge of his writing table. He’d taken me entirely by surprise, but he didn’t force his kiss upon me beyond that first shocking sensation. It was my own nature—awakened by the god in the river—that allowed me to give myself over to him, like some common doxy.
In Juba’s kiss, I detected the hint of sandalwood and cinnamon, the scents of the desert that always seemed to cling to him. A scent I’d mistaken for heka, and perhaps Juba did work some small magic on me, because I didn’t pull away even when I felt his hand press at the small of my back. Instead, I wrapped my arms about his shoulders and he rained kisses down the column of my neck, until I realized how very much I wanted him to kiss my mouth again. When he did, the brush of his lips against mine was electric. I kissed him back. I kissed him again and again, until my bosom rose and fell with desperate little breaths.
Song of the Nile Page 28
