Lily of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  Philadelphus fell back onto the bed and let the water slosh onto the floor. I took the basin from him and used the washrag to wipe down his body. “Have the visions passed?”

  He nodded weakly.

  “When the healer comes, you must be quiet, even if the visions come back. Can you be quiet?”

  Philadelphus pulled the bed linens up around him, but nodded. Still, his eyes were faraway. “The river bent and the silt churned, and now I can’t see what happens as clearly.”

  Thirty-one

  THE physician believed that the way to cure my little brother’s fever was to plunge him first in a hot bath, then in a cold one. So poor Philadelphus spent the mornings in the caldarium breathing in steam, and the afternoons in the frigidarium, soaking in cold water until his lips turned blue and his teeth chattered. But still, Philadelphus’s fever burned.

  For that matter, so did Rome.

  First, the armories were set ablaze. Siege engines and barracks went up in smoke on the Campus Martius before the fire brigade could battle the flames under control. Next came the warehouses, some of which still housed portions of my mother’s seized treasure.

  Finally, the villas burned. Most wealthy homes on the Palatine were abandoned in summer while nobles vacationed in their villas by the ocean. Thus did several homes perish in flame without anyone being home to stop it. No one wondered that they were the homes of the emperor’s most loyal senators. But they should have.

  When Agrippa’s own house burned down, there was no question in my mind that it was arson. That house had belonged to my father, and I didn’t even have to remember the way Helios set his toy ship aflame in Alexandria to know this was his doing. I remembered the birthmark on his arm. The uraeus, the spitter of fire.

  Yet the emperor never publicly accused Helios. In fact, deceptive official explanations for the fires were put out. An overturned lamp for the villas. A lightning strike at the docks. A careless soldier at the barracks.

  Even so, now that Marcella and Agrippa had been forced to live in the imperial compound with the rest of us, I waited for the day of reckoning. Since my visit to the Temple of Isis, I was no longer afraid for myself. But the emperor still held power over the people I loved, and for them, I was afraid.

  One day, when I was staring out the gate, no longer sure whether I should hope for Helios to return, the emperor emerged beneath an archway, scrolls tucked beneath one arm. I felt his eyes on me in a way that made my senses prickle with alarm. He said, “I could have soldiers go house to house, rooting out every Isiac in the city. I could have them rounded up and thrown into the arena with lions.”

  “But Caesar is more merciful than that,” I said, suddenly conscious of the thin garment I wore on this hot day, and the less-than-fatherly way he stared at me.

  “Yes, I’m merciful. Which is why I’m only sending Agrippa to close temples and prohibiting the worship of Isis within the inner sanctum of the city.”

  I started to object. I started to remind him that this was in violation of the bargain we’d struck, but he held up his hand. “It’s as much for their protection as for mine. The Senate blames the Isiacs for the fires.”

  “But closing the temples makes it look as if you blame them too,” I said, rising to my feet. “You’ll make them look guilty.”

  He brought his face near to mine. “Would you prefer that I told the people the truth?”

  No. Beneath us, the city of Rome fanned out and I knew that somewhere in that maze of dark passages and brick hovels, Helios hid, waiting to strike fear into the most powerful nation in the world. If the emperor told the Romans that it was Helios setting their city on fire, the mob would do worse than kill my twin. We both knew it, and all the fight went out of me. “What would you have me do?”

  “Write a letter asking the Isiacs to peaceably give up their temples and altars in the city. They all remember your dalliance with the crocodile. They’ll listen to you.”

  I reached up to pluck a branch of laurel knowing I’d always associate the scent of sweet bay with Rome—with the Palatine Hill and with the wreath Octavian wore when he, like some dark god, dragged me through the city streets in chains.

  Surely Isis wouldn’t want her followers to abandon her temples, but when Isis faced her own dark god, she fled to the marshes. So too would her followers have to flee now. “I’ll write your letter,” I said, knowing it might be the bitterest thing I’d ever done.

  THAT afternoon, Juba came to see me on the terrace where I was reading medical texts in the hopes that I might find some cure for Philadelphus. “How do you fare?” Juba asked me.

  “Not well,” I admitted. I was still angry with him, but I had no ire to spare. The weddings drew nearer and Philadelphus had told me that I almost always married Juba in the Rivers of Time, so I forced myself to be civil. “What if they catch Helios and blame him for the fires? What will happen to me and Philadelphus?”

  Juba sat beside me. “If that happens, the emperor will need you even more than he does now. Denounce Helios as a traitor and the emperor will be even happier to elevate you. Your mother declared her brother a traitor when he fought against Julius Caesar, after all.”

  Comparing Helios to my wicked uncle was an outrage. “I’ll never denounce Helios.”

  Juba sighed. “I wouldn’t be so sure, Selene. You and I must accept the fact that we’ll be forced to stand against your brother if he continues this course.”

  “I fear that as I fear little else in life, but I don’t accept it.”

  Juba took the scrolls from my hand and set them aside. “Let me distract you with talk of our future. We don’t have much time to gather everything that we’ll need for the voyage. Our kingdom is still wild—”

  “Is it?” I asked, for this wasn’t what I’d read. Mauretania might be unsettled, but as a Roman province, at least Numidia had cities.

  “Well, it’s wild in some parts, so we’ll have to bring everything.”

  I squinted at him. “Not everything, certainly.” There wasn’t any reason we couldn’t live in one of his ancestral palaces … unless the Romans didn’t intend to leave and Numidia was to be granted to him in name only.

  “I’ve already started to ready ships and sailors for the journey,” Juba continued. “Securing a stable food supply is our first priority. We’ll have to do all we can to send grain back to Rome.”

  Grain for Rome. Another price to be paid. Like my mother before me, my destiny would be to feed the ungrateful Roman masses. “Juba, have you only thought of the soldiers and the ships and the maps? We must also have musicians, poets, and people to travel with us and make our royal court their new home. We’ll need our own royal guard.”

  He tilted his head. “Royal guard?”

  “Will a Roman guard taste your food for poison?” I asked, taking perverse joy in deflating him. “King or no, the Romans look upon you as an equal at best, a barbarian at worst, certainly not someone to die for. Will you entrust your life to them?”

  Juba didn’t like hearing this, if the way he knit his brows was any indication. “A royal guard, then. Anything else that Your Royal Highness would like?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. We’ll need gifts for the important personages we’ll encounter. Perfumes, paintings, silk, incense, furniture, gold plate …”

  “How about statuary?” Juba asked, finally warming to the subject. “And tradesmen. If we build a new city, we can’t wait for native talent to present itself.”

  A new city. The idea called to my blood. A summer bee circled lazily in front of us, stopping on a nearby acanthus flower, and I was wary of its stinger. My Ptolemaic ambition was my strength and my weakness. Juba knew he could exploit it to draw me nearer to him because the founding of a city was a magnificent thing—even my mother hadn’t accomplished it in her lifetime. If I could do that, wouldn’t I prove myself worthy of the Ptolemy line? Would she be proud of me from beyond?

  “In whatever city we construct, there must be a Great L
ibrary,” I whispered before I could stop myself.

  Was it possible to rebuild everything that had been destroyed? Was it possible to steal back all that had been stolen from my family? I served Isis one way, and perhaps Helios served her another way. Which one of us was right, I couldn’t say.

  OCTAVIA sat dutifully beside my brother’s sickbed, smoothing back his hair while the physician attended him. Philadelphus’s chest rose and fell as he wheezed under the watchful gaze of Bast, who dozed on a ledge, her whiskers twitching every time my little brother coughed.

  It hurt to see that my little brother’s skin was pallid and untouched by the sun yet kissed with the dew of fever. He seemed smaller somehow, limp with exhaustion.

  In Egypt we’d have brought him to the shore to be cooled by the breeze and with ostrich-feather fans. Musicians would have played to soothe him, and the best physicians in the world would have attended him. But here in Rome, they kept him in this fetid room.

  Octavia looked relieved to see me. “Ah, Selene. Good. I can stretch my legs a little bit.”

  The owlish physician squinted at me, then put his things away in a satchel. I noticed he was short, squat, and had difficulty meeting my eyes, and I feared what Philadelphus may have revealed in his feverish rantings. “You must be Musa,” I said with an imperious air. “I’m Cleopatra Selene and I’d like to hear your report on my brother’s health.”

  “It’s malaria,” the physician said. “I’ve seen this fever many times. Bad air rises from the swamps and sickens people. We should expect nausea and vomiting. There may be a yellowing of the skin and eyes if it progresses.”

  He related these things to me in a very factual way, as if he were insensible to the distress it would cause. I had trouble keeping my composure. “Th-then what?”

  “Then we must continue his hot and cold baths and hope it runs its course,” Musa replied. He made ready to leave with Octavia but then stopped in the doorway. “He says things that make me wonder—”

  I stopped him before he said another word. “Certainly a physician of your reputation has seen delirium before.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “I just want you to know that your father was a very good master. He granted me my freedom and I feel as if I owe a debt to his children. If there is anything you should ever need of me, you need not hesitate to ask.”

  Then he let Octavia lead him away.

  I took her place beside Philadelphus’s bed and whispered, “You have to get better. Please, you have to get better.” I didn’t know if he heard me, but that’s when I felt a shadow behind me, in the doorway.

  I was surprised to see that it belonged to Agrippa. He seldom ventured into the privacy of Octavia’s villa, but with his own house—my father’s house—burned down, he was restless. I watched him shift awkwardly from foot to foot.

  “Lady Octavia just left,” I told him. “You can find her in the gardens.”

  Agrippa cleared his throat, as if embarrassed at my suggestion. “I came to see the boy. Is there any change?”

  I shook my head and Agrippa wiped sweat off his brow with the back of one forearm, then unclasped the right side of his breastplate. “Selene, I know of a folk remedy. It might break the boy’s fever.”

  I quickly fastened onto any scrap of hope. “What is it?”

  Agrippa rubbed the back of his neck and rolled one massive shoulder. “A weed of some sort. Sweet wormwood, they call it. I don’t know if it works or if the physician will let him have it, but I’ll have it sent for anyway … if you think I should.”

  It was strange to have him defer to me in this way. “Is there anyone to vouch for this remedy?”

  Agrippa grimaced, leaning against the door. “Your father did. A long time ago.”

  I failed to smother my surprise. “My father?”

  “You know we served together before he … went Egyptian. There were swamps at Philippi. Men fell sick. This plant, well, Antony gave it to some of the men. It helped.”

  “Then please, yes, send for some.” Agrippa nodded, but just stood there in silence. I knew it made him uncomfortable to discuss my family, but he’d brought it up in the first place, so I pressed the matter. “Did you always hate my father?”

  “No.” Agrippa let his eyes trail over Philadelphus. “Antony was once a soldier’s soldier.”

  Coming from Agrippa, that was the highest compliment, and yet the defeats that he’d perpetrated upon my father were the kind that denied him any honor. It hadn’t been enough, after all, to crush the Egyptian fleet at Actium; it’d also been necessary to slur my father’s manhood with the lie that he’d run away to chase after his Egyptian whore. “My parents broke your blockade to save their ships to fight another day. My father didn’t run away from you like a coward, but you had Juba say that he did. You must have hated him.”

  “Aye, by that time, I did.”

  “Why? What made you hate him so much?”

  Agrippa hadn’t shaved yet that day. He looked as if he hadn’t slept much either. Now he looked over his shoulder as if for an avenue of escape, then back at me. At length, he said two words: “Lady Octavia.” Then a lifetime of jealousy bubbled up from within him and spilled over for me to see. “I wanted her, but she wanted Antony.”

  I stared, wondering how I’d ever been so stupid. The emperor had ensured with a single divorce that my father would not only enrage Rome but set Agrippa against him too. It was brilliant and diabolical. My mother had used her personal relationships to shape the world. Now I realized that the emperor used people’s relationships to each other to do the same.

  “You still love her,” I said. “Even though you’re married to her daughter.”

  Agrippa stiffened, his arms crossing over his chest. “We all have our duties, Selene. We make sacrifices for honor, and we take our happiness where we may.”

  “I stay in Rome,” Philadelphus murmured feverishly.

  “I’d better go before I wake him,” Agrippa said, turning on his heel. I watched him retreat, wondering what it would take to win the loyalty of men like Agrippa.

  Thirty-two

  THE most famous story about Rome’s founding is about Romulus and Remus, the wolf-nursed brothers who fought for supremacy. But there was another story about the early men of Rome. They had no wives of their own, so they invited a neighboring tribe, the Sabines, to a feast. Once the Sabines were drunk with wine and filled with food, the Romans kidnapped the women and chased off their men.

  When the Sabine warriors returned with allies to liberate their wives and sisters, the women had already been raped by the Romans and borne Roman sons; by now, the Sabine women had lived amongst the Romans and shared their triumphs and their pains. New loyalties had been forged. And so, as the two armies were about to come to blows, the Sabine women rushed onto the battlefield to intervene. The women forgave the Roman men and convinced their fathers and their brothers to lay down their arms and let the tribes join as one.

  Thus was Rome born.

  It was a story that resonated with me in every way. Day by day, it became more difficult for me to tell my enemies from my allies. I’d lived for years now as the emperor’s hostage, his ward, and his favorite. I’d seen the Romans in all their shades of gray. Somewhere out there in the world, my twin was setting Rome ablaze, but it was Romans who tried to heal Philadelphus. And I couldn’t forget that.

  Agrippa sent his fastest messengers to fetch the folk remedy, and no one could fault Octavia’s devotion. She sat hour after hour, tending to my youngest brother. The emperor too, for all in him that I loathed, was ensuring a prosperous marriage for me. He insisted that my wedding was an important event to the world, for the territory that Juba would rule was the largest of any client kingdom in the empire, and the only one in the West. We represented the emperor’s new dynastic order, and everything had to be just right.

  The wedding day drew closer and client kings began to arrive, bearing gifts. The emperor gave generously too. Pearls, gold, jewelry boxe
s, and silk. Like Octavia, perhaps he felt he owed my parents some debt or form of penance. And now I felt myself confused.

  Had my mother wrestled with her loyalties the way I wrestled with mine? As much as I loved Helios, as much as I loved Egypt, I now had loved ones in Rome as well. So it was that when Octavia told me that Julia was also ill with fever, I ran to her as if she were my own blood sister.

  I found Julia in bed, on her side, her back to the door, with the linens tangled about her knees. She turned over to look at me, then reached out a trembling hand for the cup of water by her bed. I gave it to her and she drank greedily, her fingers shaking as she did so. It frightened me to see her like this.

  “Close the door,” she whispered.

  “Julia, you’ll get a breeze if you leave it open.”

  “Close it.” She lay back as if drinking had taken all her strength. I closed the door, half-terrified she’d slip away from life while my back was turned. But no sooner was the door closed than Julia sat upright. “Thank the gods! I was getting so bored. I thought you’d never come.”

  I stared, dumbfounded. “I came as soon as they’d let me.”

  Julia threw the covers off to reveal some poetry she’d hidden. “I’m reading Catullus and it’s perfectly filthy. You must read it. He’s so passionate. Catullus loves her. He hates her. He calls her a prostitute. He’s tormented, all because of a woman!”

  I took the seat with the tasseled cushion beside her bed. “Julia, aren’t you ill?”

  “Of course I am,” she replied, sobering. “I’m sick to death of weddings. Aren’t you?”

  Anger washed over me. “Julia, the whole household is terrified for you. Your father is beside himself with worry.”

  Her countenance turned soft and wistful—an expression she rarely employed and probably wasn’t conscious of. “He did seem worried when he came to see me. Of course, he wouldn’t step all the way into the room. My father’s health is delicate, you know. He can’t risk it. Besides, he’s been having nightmares.”

  My own nightmares usually came in the form of a basket of figs. But what disturbed the emperor’s sleep? This I had to know. “Does he say anything to you about what upsets him?”