Lily of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  My twin’s hands tightened on the iron bars that separated the imperial compound from the rest of the world. “Do you want to stay here? Do you want to become some Roman girl and be married off like Marcella? It’s Juba’s influence on you,” Helios accused. “Ever since your talk with him, you’ve been different.”

  But he was wrong. It wasn’t Juba who had changed me—not just Juba anyway. It was our mother’s bracelet. It was that coiled serpent that slept beneath my bed, reminding me every night how I had killed my mother, and how she had known that I would. It was my burning resentment for her and my determination that we shouldn’t share her fate that made me hesitate. And what if Juba was right anyway? What if we could return to Egypt and rule it for Rome, just as my mother had ruled Egypt for Julius Caesar? “I’m going inside,” I announced and didn’t see Helios again until the next morning.

  We were sitting together eating porridge when Lady Octavia glanced at us, and seemed to know us at once for the guilty conspirators we were. I couldn’t guess if some spy had reported back our whisperings or if she simply had a preternatural sense for intrigue, but I’d barely finished eating when she informed us that we’d be leaving Rome at once.

  “Leaving?” Helios asked, the color draining from his face. “But why?”

  “Marcella needs time to adjust to being a married woman,” Octavia said. “I can’t have her running back to cling to me whenever Agrippa says a cross word. Besides, Augustus needs time to plan his new glorious conquest. While the men concentrate on military matters, they don’t need women and children about. We’ll spend some time at Livia’s country estate. It will be good for you children to be in fresher air.”

  I hadn’t liked Rome, and not only because I was being held there against my will. The dark alleyways, the teetering buildings, and the sour scent of the Tiber River hadn’t endeared the city to me. Moreover, I didn’t like to remember that my mother had been here, seen her fate, and carried on. But this new journey filled me with foreboding. In the country, we might be isolated. Easier to murder in our beds and make up a convenient excuse to tell anyone who might still care about what happened to the children of Antony.

  I fought back my fear long enough to ask, “But what about our studies?”

  “We’ll hire new tutors,” Octavia chirped, warming to the subject. “Think of the brilliant scholars who will all want to teach the emperor’s family. We’ll bring Julia too, and the younger boys. Now get to your rooms and help the slaves pack your things. I want to leave at once.”

  The color in Helios’s face now came rushing back again. We both knew that we couldn’t escape during the Navigium Isidis if we weren’t even in the city, and Octavia’s sudden announcement had given us no opportunity to formulate an alternate plan. I feared that Helios might sweep everything off the tables in a rage. Somehow, he steadied himself long enough to stand and storm away, and I chased after him down the corridor to our rooms.

  “It only means that we must wait a little longer to find Euphronius,” I told him.

  Helios didn’t even answer me. He brushed past Philadelphus and threw open the door to his room where Chryssa was already at work, collecting his things and putting them into a traveling chest.

  “Where is Livia’s villa?” Helios asked her. “How far is it?”

  “Six miles from Rome,” the slave girl answered. “No more than that.”

  It might as well have been across the sea.

  “Are there any temples near Livia’s villa?” Helios asked. “Any altars? Anywhere we could meet with Euphronius in safety?”

  “Euphronius?” Philadelphus asked, his eyes wide. “He’s here in Rome?”

  “Hush,” I told him, not wanting to explain, and not wanting to involve him in my twin’s scheme.

  “There’s nowhere to meet him there,” Chryssa said. “Nowhere to worship Isis either. Livia’s estate is well guarded and isolated.”

  At hearing this, Helios bunched his golden hair in his fist. I wanted to say something to him. I wanted to find the words to comfort him, but his mood was as dark as mine had been the day Virgil gave us our mother’s bracelet. There was nothing we could do, and even Helios knew it. Once we’d been packed off in the carriage with the rest of the children, his anger smoldered dark as soot. He couldn’t even be comforted by Bast, who kneaded gently upon his lap as we rolled along the Via Flaminia, away from Rome.

  LIVIA’S country estate overlooked the Tiber valley and had a magnificent view of the sloping Italian hills. She called it Ad Gallinas Albas, after the white hens that populated the place. She told us that on the day of her marriage to the emperor, an eagle dropped a white hen into her lap with a sprig of laurel. As a young wife, she then planted the laurel and used branches of its leaves for the emperor’s wreath during his Triumph.

  Even if I’d believed her story, I couldn’t hate the magnificent laurel groves that encircled the villa and lent it a sweet bay perfume. I was unexpectedly charmed by the place. I’d been a city dweller, first in Alexandria and then in Rome. Here we seemed entirely apart from the rest of the world. The gardens featured fruit trees, every hedge thrived with herbs. Even though imperious columns hovered over the pool like hulking guards and everything was designed with the exacting lines the Romans preferred, Livia’s villa still felt less like a prison than did the houses on the Palatine, and my fears about it being an out-of-the-way place in which to murder us began to subside—especially when I learned I was to share a room with Julia.

  Our beds were inlaid with shells, and Julia and I each had our own elaborate dressing tables. Gilded braziers heated the room, each of them shaped like a sheaf of wheat. The mosaic floor was covered in a thick woven carpet of crimson and gold, and it was more luxurious than anything I’d seen in Rome. “If you like this, you will love the palace in Capri,” Julia said. “It’s only in Rome that everyone watches and wants us to be humble.”

  Before we unpacked, Julia and I explored every nook and cranny of our new apartment, including the ivory-trimmed wardrobe filled with old-fashioned garments handed down by Julii women, which we took turns trying on. I was grateful that the emperor’s daughter was so absorbed with her image in the mirror that she didn’t notice me slip my mother’s serpent bracelet—wrapped carefully in my old bloody dress—under the mattress. I buried it, like I buried my own discontent. I’d been angry since my mother’s death, but I’d blamed all my troubles on the Romans. Now I blamed my mother too.

  I wondered which of the things the emperor said about my parents might be true. Sometimes, in the darkness, I even wondered how Isis could have loved us and let all this come to pass.

  When the weather warmed, our days were spent chasing after Bast to keep her from hunting the white hens. Since Livia wouldn’t join the emperor in Spain until much later, she made sure we were also given chores to do. It didn’t matter that our childish efforts were often more of a hindrance to the slaves than a help—Octavia’s girls were put to work in the gardens tending the fruit trees, the boys collected eggs and tended the barn animals, and perversely, it was Julia’s task to milk the goats. Meanwhile, I was to spend most of the day in the house helping the kitchen slaves.

  Since the night of the Saturnalia, when I discovered Livia caressing the cheek of the senator’s daughter, she seemed to single me out for unpleasant tasks. But if Livia thought to exile me to a life of kitchen drudgery, she misunderstood my nature. For me, the scents of the kitchen were like magic—a safe kind of magic, which I could enjoy without reproach. Over the smoke of the hearth, as the slaves brewed up porridge, I cherished the earthy scent. In the mornings, I loved to make rose-honey, squeezing petals in a press and extracting the sweet perfume. At dinnertime, I loved to grind tart sumac for the stew. Try as I might to forget Egypt, my fingers always formed our olive oil cakes into the shape of pyramids. Sometimes I packed these cakes into leather satchels so that we could take our lunch in the hills.

  While the emperor planned his campaign and the rest of us live
d in exile, the mirror showed changes. Green eyes still dominated my face, but my lips were fuller and more distinct. I wished that I was as adorable as Julia with her dimples and upturned nose, but my face had the grave look of a temple statue, long and regal. I worried too that Julia’s form was still boyish, while my hips were curving and my breasts growing round.

  It was at Livia’s country villa that I first began to bleed—not in carved messages from Isis, but with the blood of womanhood. I knew it meant that I would now be able to bear children. What frightened me was the thought that the emperor would marry me off to make babies for some dour old senator. So I told no one of my monthly flow and buried the bloody rags behind the house before my morning chores. I also bound my breasts so that the Romans might not yet know me for a woman.

  Here in the country, I wasn’t the only one to get lost in the chores of daily life. Philadelphus enjoyed feeding the birds in the poultry yard—especially the peacocks with the iridescent feathers that reminded me so much of home. With his auburn hair and apple cheeks, Philadelphus fit in with the imperial family more easily than Helios or I did, for he had an easygoing nature. When I watched him playing with the Antonias, I wondered if my littlest brother would forget that we were once Egyptian royalty. I envied him and wondered if I too could forget.

  But Helios didn’t forget. He busied himself sketching ships—his mind always on the sea that separated us from Egypt.

  WHEN at last the emperor and his entourage left for Spain, I began to wonder if my brothers and I were being kept in the countryside precisely because he suspected we might run. Helios must have realized it too, because I often found him pacing in front of the marbled balustrade of the terrace like a caged animal paces behind bars. His eyes were often in the direction of Rome, where he imagined Euphronius might be, waiting to liberate us.

  For my part, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Why don’t you come inside,” Octavia said to us one afternoon. “It smells like rain. Besides, Virgil is visiting. He’s grown quite fond of Marcellus and knows how much I worry for my boy, so he’s come to entertain us. Isn’t that kind of him? You know the story of Rome’s founding, don’t you?”

  “Romulus and Remus,” I said as we followed her inside. “Two wolf-nursed brothers who fought to the death to see which would rule Rome.”

  “That’s right!” she said proudly, and I could do nothing but shake my head at her. Egypt too had her story of fratricide, when Set murdered Osiris—but in Egypt, Set was loathed as the dark god of chaos. In Rome, the murderer was revered.

  With the older boys gone, the good-natured, clownish behavior of Livia’s youngest son, Drusus, came to the fore. He was throwing dice with Philadelphus when we came into the library. “Ah, the children are here,” he said in the exact tone the emperor always used, mimicking his stepfather. Helios rolled his eyes, and I stifled a laugh just as Octavia sailed into the room with our poet in tow.

  A slave started a fire in the brazier, for it had, indeed, begun to storm outside, and Virgil began to speak.

  Virgil called his new work the Aeneid. It was not about Romulus and Remus, after all, and it began:“Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by fate,

  And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,

  Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.

  Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,

  And in the doubtful war, before he won

  The Latian realm, and built the destined town

  From whence the race of Alban fathers come,

  And the long glories of majestic Rome.”

  Perhaps no one in the room was more enthralled than Philadelphus, who sat forward on his couch, straining for every word. But as the poet read, I didn’t like what I heard. Virgil’s Aeneas was an upright warrior who was tempted from his true Roman destiny by a seductive queen; I couldn’t help but think Virgil was commenting upon my parents. Worse—much worse by far—was the denigration of our beliefs, all the passages mocking Anubis and setting the gods of Egypt against the gods of Rome. Then his poem went on to glorify the emperor, implying that Octavian would bring about a Golden Age!

  I tried not to show my open displeasure, but on the couch next to me, Helios folded his arms and stared into the crackling fire. I heard my twin grumble, close to my ear, and the flames seemed to rise and fall with his breath, flashing brighter the angrier my twin became.

  Afterward, when all the others had gone to supper, I lingered, helping Virgil roll up his scrolls. “Ah, Selene, you didn’t like my poem?”

  “I prefer your other works—at least, the ones the emperor gave me. I’d like to read your missing Fourth Eclogue, though.”

  “You have quite a memory,” Virgil said, his thick fingers pushing through his dark hair. “Won’t you let this matter go? The Fourth Eclogue has been banned by orders of Augustus.”

  I was astonished, for Virgil was the emperor’s favorite. “Why would he ban your poetry?”

  Virgil watched me carefully, as if to test me for what I knew. “The Fourth Eclogue is just a flight of fancy I once had, brought on by too much wine. Those were strange days, when prophecies ran rampant. Even before your mother’s influence was at its zenith, the world was on the cusp of transformation.”

  “What kind of transformation?”

  “Slave revolts. Land ownership reforms. The start of giving citizenship to people outside Rome. Ptolemy women vying for power and wielding it without reserve. Roman women led by Hortensia protested in the Forum, agitating for justice. Your father put Fulvia’s face on coins and though she was just a woman, she led a military revolt without him. And then came your mother … The Sibylline Books warned against a woman like her. Do you know of Rome’s most ancient books of prophecy?”

  “I only know that they warned if an Egyptian king came to Rome in need, you should turn him away, but when my grandfather came begging for help, he received it. No one seemed too scared of the prophecies then.”

  “People have a way of interpreting the prophecies the way they want,” Virgil allowed. “The Sibylline Books said that a woman would rule and there would be fiery destruction in Rome, but then there’d be a time of reconciliation and harmony. A Golden Age.”

  I drew my feet up under me on the couch since Octavia wasn’t here to scold me for it. “And that’s what you wrote about in your poems? You foresaw the same?”

  “I saw an eclipse that heralded a new age. I foresaw that Antony’s progeny would bring about a Golden Age. That’s not something the emperor wants known, so the poetry has been banned.”

  I was mesmerized. “There was an eclipse near my birth …”

  “Yes, but you weren’t the child of Antony I was thinking of. I thought it’d be Lady Octavia’s son—that child combining the blood of Antony and Octavian, ending our civil wars at last.”

  I frowned. “But my father had no sons with Lady Octavia.”

  “Alas,” Virgil said quietly, “had she given Antony a son, he might not have gone back to your mother and there’d have been

  no war.”

  This I refused to believe, for my father was a different kind of Roman. “He didn’t need more sons. He had two Roman sons already—Antyllus and Iullus. And he had Helios! Your prophecy was wrong.”

  “I’ve told you it was wrong,” Virgil said gently. “You see?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “But if your prophecy was so wrong, then why should the emperor want to ban it?”

  “He’s banned everything that might encourage the people to latch on to you or Helios as a savior. Not just my poem. He intends to seize the Sibylline Books themselves and safeguard them in his new Temple of Apollo.”

  How curious I suddenly was to know what else the Sibylline Books said. “Then what’s all this talk about a golden child in the Aeneid? Are you talking about the emperor? Are you predicting Marcellus will be his heir?”

  “Selene, I’m the closest thing that the Romans have to a mystic, and prophecy is tricky business. It is like scrying the—�
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  “Rivers of Time?” I asked, remembering it the way Euphronius taught us.

  “Yes, exactly like that. You can see streams of all possible futures, but it’s hard to predict which one this world will follow. When your mother asked me to give you that bracelet, I think she was seeing one of all her possible futures. She was better at it than I, and when I tried, I upset the emperor. That’s also why you and your brother must put it out of your minds.”

  “What about the poem you’re writing now? In this Aeneid, you make it seem as if you’re seeing into the future and that the emperor is a savior and Rome’s way is the only way. Were my parents really the bad people you portray? Is the emperor right?”

  “My dear,” Virgil said ruefully. “A poet has to eat.”

  SUMMER swept over the peninsula fetid and hot. Even the laurel trees around the villa wilted beneath the sun. To escape the heat, we normally studied in an underground room which boasted bright garden frescoes on the wall, but since Juba was away on campaign with the emperor and the older boys, we spent the day at play.

  Drusus and Philadelphus threw a ball on the marbled terrace while Julia and I splashed them with the crystalline waters of the pool. “Do it again and I’ll drown you,” my little brother threatened. He was teasing, of course. Even so, it was a challenge we couldn’t resist. We continued to douse him, flinging white ribbons of water through the air until he came running toward us, arms outstretched, knocking us both into the pool with him.

  Julia and I came up out of the water shrieking, our careful hairstyles utterly ruined; our sopping clothes clung to us like fur on wet hounds. Then all the children were in the pool as Helios tried to dunk us. Minora squealed with delight, climbing on Philadelphus’s back and all of us—even Helios and dour Antonia—swam and splashed and laughed until our sides hurt.

  It was during this rare moment of levity that Livia came sweeping in, her eyes red, her hair wild, and her palla trailing the ground behind her like a funeral shroud. “Gods of Olympus, what is there to laugh about on a day like this? You little ingrates!”