I froze at the sound of rustling in the shrubbery and Helios had the presence of mind to crouch low. A small sword was in his hand as swiftly as if he’d conjured it, and the quick spark of heka snapped in the air to his command. Dear Isis, I didn’t know whether to hope our intruder was Memnon or not, given Helios’s deadly intent. To be caught here, even by my own guards, alone with a man . . . Just then, Helios loosened the grip on his weapon. “Is that Bast?” he asked, a small smile upon his lips as the cat pushed leaves aside to emerge with glowing eyes.
“Wretched cat!” I said, gasping for breath. I’d gone weak all over with relief.
Helios stooped to pick the cat up, and she knew him, purring in his hands. “Not such a sleek huntress anymore, are you?”
“She’s old and pampered and well fed,” I assured him, grateful that Bast was one courtier who could keep our secrets.
TWO pieces of news arrived almost simultaneously. The first was a missive from Rome stating that Lucius Cornelius Balbus would celebrate his Triumph. The second missive was from Armenia, stating that the Parthians had negotiated for their kidnapped prince. They agreed to return the lost battle standards and what captured Roman prisoners they still held.
Augustus had done it. Once again, he’d prevailed. And he’d done it without Agrippa. He’d done it without me. It must be some trick, some charade, some farce, I thought while the island celebrated around me. “Oh, Virgil, how I envy you.” Crinagoras laughed. “The poetry you’ll write in honor of this New Alexander who needs not even command his armies in battle to return with victory!”
Virgil smiled. “We’ll have to make much of this if we’re to compete with Agrippa’s bloody slaughter in Spain. He’s all but extincted the Cantabri tribes, something the citizens will admire. They aren’t accustomed to celebrating such an occasion as the emperor’s latest victory. Maecenas will want to mint coins, showing the king of the Parthians kneeling in supplication to Rome.”
I pressed my lips together. “Won’t that offend Phraates and start the war up again?”
“Augustus has been generous,” Lady Lasthenia replied. “He gave the Parths back their prince and made gifts to the king. An Italian girl he admired. An acknowledgment of his territorial boundaries and hegemony over Armenia. It’s a good bargain.”
A good bargain, indeed. What wouldn’t I give to have Isidora back in my arms if someone kidnapped her? The thought agitated me such that I needed to remind myself of my good fortune. I wouldn’t be needed to work magic for war. Augustus hadn’t won a military victory for himself, but in retaking those battle standards, he could claim to have restored Roman honor. Only one question plagued me. “When will he return?”
“There are still matters to resolve,” Lady Lasthenia said. “A few weeks? A month at the outside.”
Thirty-six
I prayed that my idyllic nights with Helios would stretch on forever. Let a storm delay Augustus’s triumphant return. Let him stop in some city to be feted and worshipped as a god. My distress about the emperor’s return must have been obvious, because even Circe felt the need to reassure me. “Majesty, you must have taken my advice to heart. No one will ever doubt your love for Augustus. Every day now, you’re flushed, like a lily about to bloom.”
Yes, I thought. But I blossomed only when the moon was high in the sky and my lover came to me. Afterward, I folded in upon myself as if to protect the sacred places where he’d explored me. Everything he touched became sacred. The oil lamp he’d snuffed out. The pillow upon which he’d rested his head. Even the ashes of the fires he lit on the beach to keep us warm. I was in love—yes, I was finally bold enough to name it to myself. This was nothing I could hide within the dark shadow of my soul with the rage and the hatred and the grief. It was an emotion stronger than all my artifice, and I laughed at the thought that even my own courtiers were convinced by it. They might tell Augustus how I asked after him every day, how I so carefully dressed as if to welcome him home. How I sat in dreamy contemplation, my cheeks pink with passion. And I didn’t care. I didn’t care! These days of happiness were mine to treasure, even if they must soon come to an end.
That night, Helios stroked the purple silk of my cloak, our makeshift bed on the sand. “Have you any idea how many ships I could buy with this?” he asked.
The nights were warmer now, and I liked the smell of his sweat on me. “Take it. Sell it. Do with it as you will. I deny you nothing.”
He tugged me closer and the waves tickled our bare toes. “Even a talented pirate would have to explain how he acquired a cloak like that one, Selene, and I’m not a talented pirate.”
“Good,” I said burrowing my nose beneath his chin. “Because I’m training a fleet to capture pirates off the coast of Mauretania. At least, I ordered such a thing be done.” Juba’s new authority in Spain may well have been part of that effort, but it was now all very far away across the sea.
Helios nuzzled against my hair. “You must be something to see. Commanding that this or that be done. Hearing petitioners. Presiding over a council. It’s a proud thing to be a queen’s lover.”
I’d always wondered what my mother must have felt like to carry on an affair with men even before she’d taken them to wed. I wished it was in me not to care what anyone might think, but I couldn’t stop fretting. “What must your sailors think of your latenight liaisons?”
“They think it’s none of their concern,” Helios said. “They also know that I’d cut the tongue out of any man foolish enough to speak about my doings. I love you, Selene. I would die for you. Or kill for you. For you or for Isidora. You must know it.”
“Let there be no talk of dying,” I whispered. “Or killing.”
Helios paused. “You say this, but what if you’re with child? I must kill Augustus before he—”
“I’m not with child,” I said, suddenly guilty for the way I’d used my heka to close my womb to him. “The goddess must be inside me for that to happen now, but here, with you, I wanted to be mortal.”
Helios sat up, drawing me with him. “She was inside you the night I came to you in the storm . . .”
“Yes. I think Isidora is yours. I wanted her to be yours. To keep some part of you with me always.”
“When I kill Augustus, Isidora can know of me. It’ll be safe to tell her, then.”
“What she’ll know,” I said, blinking back sudden tears, “is the world that we make for her. Which is why you can’t kill the emperor.”
Helios growled his frustration. “How can you still defend him?”
“I’m not defending him. I only ask you to consider what you hope to accomplish. Do you think killing him will free Egypt?”
“It will free you.”
I reached out and touched his face. “Do you think I haven’t wished him dead a thousand times? Do you think I’ve never been tempted to poison his food or slip a dagger between his ribs or use my winds to blow him into the sea? Helios, when he lay dying of fever in Rome, it would’ve been so easy to smother him while he slept.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because Rome isn’t one man. Because we didn’t lose Egypt in one battle. Because when we were born, people looked to us to bring them a Golden Age and I don’t want to bring them war and chaos and pain! Especially not when I can get back everything we’ve lost by giving Augustus what he wants.”
Helios’s gaze snapped to me and the fire crackled. “What have you promised him?”
This moment was infinitely worse than I had imagined it would be. “A son.”
Those eyes of his were as eternal as the Nile and now they narrowed with anger. I thought he’d rage at me, but he didn’t. He didn’t reel back in fury or call me a harlot or accuse me of treachery or infidelity or otherwise decry my lack of morals. Instead, Helios took me by the arms and steadied me as if forbidding a small child from dangerous play. “You can’t do that.”
“I have to.”
“No,” he said.
“You didn’t for
bid me from Juba’s bed.”
He looked away, as if slapped. “But you didn’t go, did you?”
“I might have, were the circumstances different.” What was one more ugly confession now, added to all the rest? I’d tell him that Juba was a decent man. A man who wanted to be a good husband. A good father to a child he knew wasn’t his own. A man who had begged me, pleaded with me, not to go. And that I felt something stir inside me at Juba’s kiss.
Before I could tell him any of this, Helios said, “I’d rather you did go to Juba. If he gives you some small happiness, then return to him. Become his wife in truth if you must. If it will keep you from this folly with the emperor.”
I cried out, my nails digging into his arms. “If you loved me, you’d never say such a thing.”
“I say it because I love you. I could haul you over my shoulder and carry you away, right now. I could take you. Were it not for Isidora I would take you but she deserves more. If you came with me, it would be an end to everything our parents wanted for us and perhaps an end to Isis too.”
All this was true. I couldn’t go with him. As long as Augustus breathed, as long as Rome stood, we couldn’t be together. Still, his heartbeat had been next to mine in the womb, and I would listen for it my whole life. “But I love you.”
Love. We’d both spoken of it now. We both felt it. We both knew how real and dangerous it was. We knew better than anyone. Our mother and father had loved one another so desperately that they set the world aflame and let it burn. Their love, timeless and enduring as it was, had known no reason. No caution. No limits. Their love had eventually defied political sense and self-preservation. Their love had killed them and set in motion all the things that had led to the abuse and torment that shattered me and destroyed Helios. All the things that had twisted us inside so that we could never love anyone the way we loved each other.
“Would you have us be just like them?” Helios asked, reading my thoughts. “Gamble everything, bold and reckless and defiant? Shall we risk your daughter? Egypt? Isis? The world? You cannot be mine.” His lips pressed to my cheek, the stubble of his beard scratching my chin. “So let it be Juba. Let it be any man but Octavian. You cannot give yourself to your own rapist. To do so would be to spit in the face of our goddess.”
I shuddered, then shook my head in denial. “Isis will forgive me. You must let Augustus live and this is how this game must play out. If I cannot have you, then I will have the world, and this is the only way to get it.”
“Isis will forgive you,” Helios agreed. “But will you forgive yourself ?”
For months now, I’d lived with the self-loathing of knowing I was making true everything my enemies said about me. That I’d set myself upon a course of action in which my ambitions ruled me. In which I’d even pit the interests of my child against Julia’s infant son. I’d convinced myself that I must push aside that guilt. “I’m a queen. What does it matter how I regard myself?”
“You’re not a crown,” Helios said, kissing my brow. “You’re not a scepter. You’re a queen but a woman too. Haven’t I proved that to you again and again?”
My cheeks heated at the reminder, but I had to make him understand. “When we were young, I was afraid of everything but you were always brave. Well, I’m not that frightened girl anymore. I’m Cleopatra’s daughter. I’ve clawed my way to the pinnacle of power. How can you ask me to back away?”
“I’ve lost everything for my recklessness. Why would you follow my example?”
Because I’ll triumph where you failed, I thought, the blood of my ancestors singing proud in my veins. My mother and father had made battle plans upon this very island and now I would triumph where they had failed too. I would even triumph over the emperor and Alexander too, for I, Cleopatra Selene, will have won the world without ever having wielded a sword. And the only blood I’d spilled was my own. Down my arms in the holy words of Isis and between my legs on the emperor’s sheets.
“I won’t let you do it,” Helios said.
“This is what our mother would have done. What she did do. She offered herself to Caesar, even though she didn’t know what manner of man he might be—”
“She knew he wasn’t a perverse fiend!”
I winced, silent tears now flowing down my cheeks. “Helios, when she died, our mother gave Philadelphus her sight. She gave you her strength. But she gave me her spirit. She told me not to forget, and I never have. When I’m unquestioned ruler of Egypt and all North Africa, when my daughter has her birthright, when the emperor is burned to ash, you’ll see it’s all been worth it.”
“I won’t let you do it,” he said, again, his fingers digging into my arms.
I put my palms flat on his chest. “It’s my choice. Should I let anyone take that from me again?”
He released me, then fell silent, staring into the black ocean. “If it’s your choice, then change your mind.”
“There are people who depend on me. Given the way I feel about you, it doesn’t seem possible, but I don’t belong only to you—or even only to myself.”
“You don’t belong to Octavian either. You owe him nothing more.”
How like Helios to know what no one else did. That in spite of my hatred for the emperor, I’d always felt grateful for his mercy. In his debt. When he made me a queen, I felt that was part of his largesse too. When he told me that he had every right to take my body—that it was no more than he had paid for, hadn’t some part of me believed it? “If I have his son, Helios, he’ll belong to me.”
“This conversation isn’t done,” he said, but dawn, accursed dawn, was here, and I had to let him go.
NOT since old King Aegeus saw the black sails of his son Theseus’s ships and threw himself into the sea has anyone reacted to the sight of sails with such despair as I did now. The vision of the emperor’s flagship, emblazoned in red and gold, made my hands tighten on the terrace rail for balance. The whole world had tilted, realigned itself, and put me at its middle.
I wouldn’t have been the only one to have realized it. Out there, somewhere on that sea, with all the other merchant ships, was Helios. Squinting into the sun, I surveyed the horizon for a glimpse of his ship, but in the bustle of the harbor only the Roman flotilla announced itself like the trumpet of a new god. Then the whole island erupted at once, word passed from merchant to servant, from slave to master, from soldier to commander, “Augustus has returned! Make ready!”
I hurried back to my chambers to check my hair, my face, my jewelry. How had my mother rushed to greet her Romans? I wondered. Or had she tarried, waiting in the palace, forcing them to come to her . . . but this wasn’t Egypt. This wasn’t even Mauretania. The gown I chose was a bright saffron that set off my features dramatically. I opted for a bun at the nape of my neck, studded with pearls, and just over the white peak of my diadem, the front of my coiffure raised like the uraeus of Egypt. Finally, I grabbed up Isidora and was borne to the docks, where the gathering crowd chanted, “Triumphator! Io Triumphe!”
This was entirely inappropriate. Augustus hadn’t defeated any new foe in battle. The Senate hadn’t voted a Triumph for him, and this was certainly not its appointed day. Moreover, we weren’t in Rome, and oh, the calamity my father had suffered when he dared to celebrate his victories in Egypt instead of Rome!
From between the parted curtains of my litter, I glimpsed Augustus on the deck of his ship. He was in his military cuirass, one arm upraised in a pose that has now become famous in so many of his statues, all of which depict a more flattering, never-aging version of the man. He looks as satisfied as Apollo, I thought, giving Isidora’s little hand a squeeze. Then we stepped out of the litter to greet him.
But he didn’t come ashore; his ship remained far out in the sparkling sea. A small group of his soldiers rowed in. Iullus was with them, and when my Roman half brother approached me, his prominent chin jutted proudly beneath his helmet as if he’d conquered Parthia himself. He snapped his feet together and executed a curt bow. “Q
ueen Cleopatra Selene, Augustus requires your presence aboard his flagship.”
A trill of fear echoed in my ears. “For what purpose?”
“I didn’t question him, Majesty,” he said, offering his arm with great formality.
Myriad possibilities swarmed my mind, stinging flies all. The emperor would have some dramatic gesture planned. He might make me Queen of Egypt here and now. It had all been settled aboard ships at Actium, so perhaps it was only right to do it this way. Why couldn’t I be glad of it? Why should I dread the very thing I’d struggled all my life to reclaim? Why should I, on the brink of victory, turn away my prize? Perhaps it was some wary instinct that warned me of the emperor’s treachery. Perhaps, just as he’d made an end to my father’s forces in Actium, he would now make an end to me.
No. I could defend myself and Isidora with my magic. And even if I couldn’t, some deeper part of me understood that he would never kill me. The emperor might torment me every day for the rest of my life, but he would want me alive.
I fixed my most gracious smile upon my face and allowed myself to be brought aboard the emperor’s craft. He greeted us with all the correct and public decorum one might expect. He looked unchanged by battle, for there had been none. Still, I couldn’t help but be affected by the stance he took, the hard, shrewd aura of command that surrounded him now. He drew me aside into the awning erected to protect him from the heat. “Queen Cleopatra Selene, I return to you triumphant. The whole world has surrendered to me.”
I lowered my lashes. “As do my daughter and I, Caesar.”
A degenerate expression of pleasure spread over his features such that I wished Isidora weren’t staring up at him with her steady gaze. Augustus tilted his head back and made a sound not unlike carnal release, and for a moment I wondered if the force of his obsession shook the ship. The deck lurched beneath my feet, and I heard the commands below to the rowers.
Song of the Nile Page 39
