Lily of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  Juba nodded. “But I haven’t. Helios is still missing. This is bad news, as you know.”

  “I’m beside myself,” I admitted.

  “I know. You don’t eat, you sleep little, and you don’t speak in class. You don’t even speak to me, though we’re to be wed.”

  I took a deep breath, worried that I had offended. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to apologize. Your brother is lucky to have your love.” Here Juba paused. “I hope to inspire such loyalty from you one day.”

  “And I want to be a loyal wife.” I meant it earnestly. Oh, Isis, how innocent I was. I didn’t know anything of marriage, but I wanted to please him, and it made him smile.

  Quietly, we strolled through the gardens where Livia’s slaves had trimmed box trees in the shape of animals. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Juba asked, draping his arms over a marble railing. “We can build gardens like this in our own home if all goes according to plan.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself. “I’d rather that whatever we build be more like Alexandria than Rome.”

  “Do you even remember Alexandria after these years? Are you sure it was really so much preferable?”

  Did he even have to ask? “Have you been to Alexandria?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure,” he said.

  I sighed. “Then you couldn’t understand.”

  Juba plucked a blossom from a hedge and handed it to me, a most romantic gesture. “If you explain, I’ll try to understand. You can be the teacher today and I the pupil.”

  He was trying hard to win my affections, as if he didn’t realize that he already had them. I wasn’t distant from Juba because I didn’t care for him, but because I could think of little else than my missing twin. I took the flower and inhaled its scent while gathering my thoughts. “First, consider Rome,” I began. “She crows with worry about the loss of old Roman values, and everywhere you turn, the emperor tries to reverse time. Everything new is suspect. Everything that’s practical utility is not immediately evident is worthless. Beauty is frivolity, and books are stowed away in temples reserved for only a few. Rome is always looking over her shoulder and wishing for what once was.”

  Juba’s brows knit in concentration. “Go on.”

  “But Alexandria isn’t just a city,” I said. “She’s an idea. She isn’t about what came before but about what can be. She has the best university, inviting the greatest thinkers of our time to collaborate and discover. The Great Library pools human genius from all over the world, or at least it did before the Romans came. Above all, Alexandria embraces the free mind.”

  Juba walked with me a few steps and then said, “How free can a mind be under a monarchy? It’s not as if you Ptolemies adopted Athenian democracy. But even granting that, some say that a free mind is an undisciplined mind. The Alexandrians are the most rebellious and immoral people in the world.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sometimes I think immoral is just a word Romans use for things they fear. Why must passion be immoral? Why must pleasure be sin? Why should it matter which woman sleeps with which man?”

  “Selene!” he said, scandalized. “You know why it matters.”

  And I did know. Yet, I could see that he was enraptured by what I was saying and I let myself fall under the same sway. For that moment, I imagined myself in his arms. Juba moved closer to me and I wondered if he’d embrace me. I wondered too what it would be like if he kissed me the way Iullus kissed Julia that night in the garden. I could feel his breath on my cheeks. He smelled like cinnamon and sand and incense. Like the upturned petals of a flower, I lifted my face to him in offering.

  But Juba only kissed my forehead.

  “When you care about something, you care about it fiercely,” he said. “If your brother feels as strongly as you do, it’s no wonder that he’d try to escape to go back home. But if he’s gone much longer—”

  “Perhaps he hasn’t gone home,” I said, a little dizzied by Juba’s proximity, and remembering the words Euphronius spoke to me in the grasses outside Livia’s villa. “Perhaps Helios has only gone east. Maybe to India.”

  The spell between us was slowly subsiding, as Juba said, “Even if Helios isn’t in Egypt, the Egyptians may take up his banner in the hopes that he’ll soon arrive. If they declare him king, then the emperor will send me back to Africa again to help put an end to it.”

  “Again?” I asked, taken aback. “When were you last in Africa?”

  He straightened as if steadying himself for a blow. “During the war.”

  Something warned me in advance that I shouldn’t ask the next question, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. “Which war?”

  Juba let go of my hand. “Selene, what’s past is past.”

  My blood seemed to turn to water. I needed to hear him say it. “Which war?”

  Juba didn’t look at me. “The war with your parents.”

  “You were in Egypt?”

  “And surrounds,” Juba said. “It was my job to help keep other Africans from rushing to your father’s legions. It was my job to help convince those who served your father to abandon him.”

  “You helped spread the tale that my father fled Actium after my mother like a coward …”

  “Yes.”

  Just moments before, I’d wondered what it might be like to have Juba kiss me. I’d let down my walls, let myself feel close to him, and this was my reward. This was the man that I was to marry? This was that man?

  “And what was your payment for these services, Juba?” I knew the answer to that too. It was me. “The emperor promised me to you, all that time ago. I’m your wages for your part in Egypt’s defeat.”

  “Please try not to think of it that way,” Juba pleaded.

  Were it not beneath my dignity, I would have spit at him. “What other way is there to think of it? You always knew the emperor wouldn’t harm me, because he’d already promised me as your slave girl prize. Did you think marrying me would help you regain your Numidian throne? Or did the glamour of marrying a Ptolemy entice you, Juba?”

  “It doesn’t matter why I wanted you,” he said. “The point is that if it would help bring peace to the empire, I’d do everything again a thousand times.”

  I laughed bitterly. “I think you would.”

  I started to walk away from him, then changed my mind after a few paces. I spun on my heel to say, “If my brother finds his way to Egypt and is declared king, they’ll send you to work against him. They’ll have you use my name, as my husband, to what? To fight Helios? To kill him?”

  “Yes,” Juba said.

  Of course. Just as Romans had pitted my mother against her siblings, this is what they would try to do to us. This is why the emperor had wanted my assent. He wanted to divide Helios and me through this marriage and weaken our claim to Egypt. But I wasn’t some simpering Roman woman who would take her husband’s part over all else, and the emperor, of all people, should have known it. I’d never take up against Helios. Not for Juba or anyone else.

  My fingers curled into fists at my side, one hand crushing the blossom Juba had given me. How I wanted to hit him. How I wanted to scream. But someone was calling my name.

  It was Julia and she was waving both her hands. “Selene! Virgil is here and he’s telling everyone that he’s seen Helios.”

  Twenty-five

  TURNING away from Juba, I raced up the garden path and burst into the tabulinum where the emperor was supervising slaves in arranging chairs and benches for the night’s lecture. Virgil stood by, sweating.

  “Is it true?” I demanded. “Have you seen Helios?”

  The emperor snapped at my intrusion. “Selene!”

  “He’s my brother. I have to know.”

  Juba and Julia arrived on my heels and the emperor fanned himself with his hat, waving us all into the room. “Well, Virgil,” he said, “it appears I have a new interrogator in my employ and she may be more effective than Agrippa. Go ahead. Answer her.”

  “I’m
afraid it’s a very confusing tale,” Virgil began, glancing at my arm, perhaps expecting to find my mother’s snake bracelet wrapped around it, but it’d been secreted away since the day he gave it to me.

  “I’ll simplify this confusing tale,” the emperor broke in, his expression somewhere between outrage and amusement. “Helios tried to burn down Virgil’s house.”

  I was sure I’d misheard.

  Virgil shifted from foot to foot nervously. “I own a country estate near Cumae. It’s easier to work there, away from the crowds and the heat of Rome. One evening, I returned to find my slaves shouting and throwing buckets of water into my study, which was on fire.”

  I was astonished. “Why would you think Helios had anything to do with it?”

  “Because my slaves managed to capture the arsonist and they brought him before me. Imagine my surprise to see it was your brother. But punishing the guilty party was hardly my concern. Saving my house was my priority and in the chaos of the moment your brother escaped with an old man in priestly garments that none of my servants could identify.”

  “An Isiac, no doubt!” The emperor snorted.

  He was more right than he knew. It could only be Euphronius with Helios, but the Romans had long forgotten our old tutor, and I wouldn’t remind them.

  “Selene,” the emperor said quietly, swatting at a mosquito that plagued him. “Your brother has done more than run away from me; now he’s betrayed me.”

  “By offending Virgil?” I asked, as if I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Helios is trying to destroy the epic work I commissioned to glorify Rome.”

  My future groom was agape. “You think he was trying to destroy Virgil’s Aeneid?” Juba asked.

  I gripped the back of a chair and lied without reservation or hesitation. “My brother pays no attention to Roman poets. He couldn’t care less about Virgil’s work.”

  “Really?” the emperor asked. “Of all the country estates on the Italian peninsula, he manages to find Virgil’s and set it aflame? It’s a symbolic gesture. A way of striking back at me. Unusually subtle for your brother, I must add.”

  It was entirely too subtle for Helios, but it wasn’t beyond our old wizard. If Virgil was writing a treatise that would glorify Rome and degrade my mother, they’d want to destroy it. But didn’t Euphronius know what danger he was putting my brother in, and didn’t he care?

  When he’d urged me to escape with my brothers, Euphronius had said nothing about starting fires. He talked only of escaping Rome. So why hadn’t they left yet? Were they waiting for Philadelphus and me? Were they coming for us?

  “The fire was put out, I trust,” Juba wondered.

  “Yes,” Virgil replied. “Thankfully nothing of import was destroyed. A couch, some draperies, and a scorched door were the worst of it. It all happened rather quickly and I was able to save my writings.”

  The emperor pinched the bridge of his nose. I could almost hear him counting in his head the thousands of man-hours he’d wasted hunting for my brother at Ostia. But who could’ve predicted Helios would go to Cumae? “Selene, while I’ve often decried your mother’s morals, I never denied that she was shrewd. And yet they say her brothers were drooling idiots. Is this is a hereditary problem in your family?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “It was a rhetorical question!”

  I looked at Virgil. “Are you sure it was Helios?”

  It was the emperor who answered. “Of course he’s sure. Do you think there are many other startlingly blond boys of royal breeding running around trying to ruin my legacy?”

  It had been a string of bad days and the emperor’s eyes were sunken and his skin more afflicted than usual with splotches. “Leave me. All of you. Julia, go to your room!”

  Julia’s eyes widened at the injustice of it. What had she done, after all? “But—”

  “Julia, go. Juba, send for Agrippa. Selene, serve Virgil some refreshments while we await Agrippa. He might have more questions for him. Now get out. Go!”

  I led Virgil to another room where I knew I could find him some honeyed wine. As we walked through silk curtains, I noticed that Virgil was still sweating and fretting.

  As soon as he was sure we were alone, he said, “Selene, I didn’t tell the emperor quite everything. There’s a message.”

  I remembered the last time Virgil had delivered a message to me, so I was wary. “What message?”

  “It’s from your brother. He asked me to give it to you before he ran off.”

  Virgil pressed a small scrap of paper into my hand, and I realized it was Helios’s writing.

  I was afraid the emperor would realize that you’re dearer to me than a slave girl, dearer to me than my name, and dearer to me than Egypt. Now that I’m free, I’ll learn for the both of us. The sun lets the moon rest, and the moon shines when the sun is tired.

  When I finished reading, my eyes filled with tears. I memorized the words and, with great reluctance, tore up the note into small pieces lest the emperor see it. “Ah, my dear, it seems I always deliver news that upsets you,” Virgil said. “I confess that I tried not too hard to capture Helios. But he’ll not get so lucky with Agrippa’s men.”

  As if summoned by his name, Agrippa burst into Livia’s dining room and nearly tripped over a low table. A fruit platter clattered to the floor. “Virgil!” the admiral bellowed. “How in Jupiter’s name could you let the boy get away?”

  “His villa was on fire,” I interjected.

  “Selene, go back to Octavia’s house!” Agrippa barked.

  “Helios is my brother, I—”

  “Now!”

  In his own way, Agrippa was less reasonable than the emperor sometimes. This was one of them. I trudged toward my room, my emotions a jumble.

  I found Chryssa skulking by my bedroom door. She was hugging her knees, careful not to press against the wall. The lacerations from her recent flogging still wept blood into the bandages beneath her tunica, and she winced as she stood to greet me. “Lady, I’ve come to ask your intercession.”

  I opened the door to my room and motioned her to follow me inside. “I’m sorry that you’re being whipped for my brother’s misdeeds, and I’m sorry I struck you. You deserve none of it.”

  “You have no need to apologize,” she said. “I’m just a slave and you are a vessel of Isis.”

  “But Isis teaches compassion,” I said ruefully. “I should follow her example. I’m trying, but it’s difficult to be as I’d like to be.” And with that, I started to cry. Deeply humiliated that I let a slave see my tears, I tried to wipe them away with the backs of my hands. “I’ll try to help you,” I sniffled. “But I already walk a very narrow ledge with the emperor.”

  “It’s an intercession of another kind I wish to ask.”

  Trying to get myself under control, I sat down at my dressing table and began to unwind the plaits in my hair. My lower lip was still trembling, and I bit it to keep it still. “I’ll help you if I can.”

  Chryssa took a deep breath before saying, “I vowed to save my virginity for Isis. My vow has been broken.” I was still young enough to be scandalized. I turned to look at her as she stammered, “S-s-someone found out that I was still a virgin. I was br-brought …”

  “Brought where?” I gently prompted. I was painfully curious.

  “To the emperor’s chambers,” she said, and my eyes must have flown wide in surprise because she added, “It was foolish of me to make a vow over that which I have no control. Now I fear that Isis won’t forgive me. If you were to pray for me, surely she’d listen.”

  I noted Chryssa’s bruised lips, her red-rimmed eyes, and the way her hands shook. I tried valiantly not to envision the perverse horror of her beneath the sickly ruler of the world. No. I couldn’t imagine it—and my pity turned to suspicion. “Did you fight him?”

  “I wasn’t so foolish, nor so faithful. Will you ask Isis to forgive me?”

  She lowered her head, awaiting my absolution, but
I’d noticed evasions. Someone had discovered she was a virgin? Someone led her to the emperor’s chambers? Who?

  What could she hope to gain by telling these lies? Perhaps she’d resorted to this to win back my favor, but I already felt guilty for the way I’d treated her. “I’m sure Isis will forgive you. If you tell it true, it wasn’t your fault. If it happened as you say, the emperor did it out of petty vengeance against Helios, and against Isis to be sure.”

  “Will you pray for me?” she asked again.

  “I will,” I said. After all, Isis offered forgiveness and compassion to all. “But when you pray to her yourself, you must tell her only the truth of what happened, and all of it.”

  I knew Chryssa was one of the few people who would take solace in the news that Helios was alive, so I tried to cheer her. “I have some tidings that might be welcome. They’ve seen Helios. He’s somewhere near Rome.”

  She gasped. “Have they caught him?”

  “Not yet. He’s with Euphronius. Doing what I’m not sure, but I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Thank you, my lady,” she said, and I could see she was sincere. She didn’t even eye my jewelry with her usual covetousness, so I motioned for her to rise and make herself comfortable on my bed. She winced when she took a seat, her flesh still tender from the lashing.

  “I hope they don’t catch him,” she said. “He’s too strong and brave.”

  “How can you praise him after he left you to take his punishments?”

  “I don’t mind,” the slave girl replied. “I told him not to worry about that when he left. It was a sacrifice I was glad to make for him.”

  Chryssa realized her error just as I did and dropped her eyes. My nostrils flared. I slammed down my comb and turned on her like a lion in the arena. “You said you had no idea he was going to run away. You lied to me!”

  “My lady, please forgive me, but we didn’t know what you’d do if you thought I had any part in him leaving.”

  I wanted to slap her again and so much harder than before. But if I did, I thought I might never stop. “Helios told you not to trust me?”

  She held up her hands in supplication. “He said that when Juba carried you out of the arena, he worried that you might say the wrong thing to the wrong person.”