by Jo Graham
“I’ve never thought about it,” he said. “Their own gods, I suppose. But their Gods can’t be very powerful or they wouldn’t have become slaves.”
“And if you were sick?” I asked. “Or if your mother were sick?”
“I’d make an offering to Asclepius and ask for His favor,” Marcus said. “But I don’t expect it would work.”
For a long moment he turned away from me, looking out over the river, at our spreading wake. When he spoke again his voice was different, as though he was thinking of something for the first time. “I don’t think I’ve ever needed compassion.”
“Then you have been very lucky,” I said.
“Perhaps I have,” he said, and his eyes were troubled.
IN THREE WEEKS we were back in Alexandria. Cleopatra wanted to sail as far south as Philae, or at least Thebes, but Caesar reminded her that he still had a civil war to conduct. Egypt might be won for him and stand at his side as an ally, but in Rome the Senate still named him rebel and organized armies. Not that he would leave Cleopatra undefended. He would leave three of his four legions with her, the Twenty-eighth that we had come to know and two others, their size cut in half by casualties, that had come with Mithridates. Caesar, his Germans, his Gauls, the veterans of the Sixth Legion, and the Fighting Jews would march eastward through Gaza and back through Jerusalem for Syria.
The Queen was eight months gone with child. It would have made more sense for him to stay, I thought. But the weather was against it. Soon the heat of summer would make the march more difficult. That was the official reason, of course. I remembered that his first wife had died in childbed, and also his beloved daughter. If something happened, Caesar would hear it far away, in a tent somewhere on campaign, when all this was as though it had happened to another man.
Marcus Agrippa, of course, would go with him. So would Emrys.
And so I stood with Dion atop the Gate of the Moon and watched them go, my gray cat Sheba perched on my shoulder. The Queen did not come. There would be no public good-byes. Whatever they had to say to one another, they had said in private, and if the Germans had heard they were conveniently deaf to Koine.
“Good-bye,” I whispered, and the sun glinted off Agrippa’s shining helmet, his white plume.
Dion put his arm about my waist. At least, I thought, I could publicly carry on. Dion could not without getting Emrys into a lot of trouble.
“Stupid Romans,” I said.
Dion laughed, and Sheba’s long tail whacked him in the face as she turned about. “We’ll manage, won’t we, my friend?”
“We will,” I said. And of course we did.
IT WAS THE QUEEN who noticed first, naturally. Being attuned to it herself, she stopped me in the bath as I held the towel for her, her body huge now with the child due any day. “Charmian.” She put her hand on my arm. “You too?”
I nodded. It was only a few weeks. It might be a mistake. It might just be the weather or something I had eaten. Though I knew it was not.
She put her hand to the side of my face, smiling. “They will be the same age, then. Perhaps your son will stand beside mine as you have always stood beside me. Anyway, who? Agrippa?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you want me to write to Caesar and ask him to send Agrippa back here? There are plenty of positions with the legions here for a tribune.”
I lifted my chin. I did at least have enough pride not to have my sister send for him. “He will not thank me for taking him from Caesar or from his chances of promotion to sit in a garrison in Alexandria. And it would hardly be fair for me to have what you and Dion cannot.”
“Oh, Dion,” she said, laughing again. “I had never thought to see him really in love. And who would have imagined a wild Kelt?”
“Who indeed?” I said. “Yet they seem to do well enough.” And turned the conversation neatly from her feelings and from mine, I thought. I stood as close to her as anyone, and yet I would never know what she felt for Caesar, or didn’t. My heart was always plain to the world.
“It is a good thing,” I said, “that you are the Queen.”
She put her arms around me, the hard mound of the baby tight between us. “You always have a place here with me,” she said. “You and any child of yours. You are mine.”
“Yes,” I said.
HER CHILD WAS BORN on the second day after midsummer, a week before the helical rising of Sothis should signal the beginning of the season of the Inundation. The child was born at high noon, after a night of labor, when the sun stood straight in the sky overhead. I stood at her head, a damp towel in my hands, and when the doctor drew it forth I saw as soon as anyone else.
“Oh Gracious Isis!” I said, as the first sputtering wail shattered the air, and saw my sister turn her face to me, sweat rolling down her cheeks, even before the doctor spoke.
“Gracious Queen,” he said, “you have a perfect son.”
He lifted the child into the light from the window to see to tie and cut the cord, an ordinary enough baby with thin dark hair and the beginnings of the Ptolemy nose, kicking feet, and eyes shut to scream.
“Ptolemy Philometor Caesar,” she said. Cleopatra pushed up on her elbows, trying to see him better. “Horus, for Egypt.”
“Caesarion,” I said.
Isis Enthroned
I had not expected to fall in love. Perhaps it was because I was pregnant myself, or perhaps it was simply that I had never been around a young child before, since I was one, but I fell madly in love. I had thought of him before as an important playing piece, a necessity to the succession, or even a hindrance that would prove our downfall if Caesar failed.
Now he was a person. He was a warm and squirming baby that snuggled against my ear, twisting his tiny fingers in my hair and burrowing against my neck. His eyes, when he opened them, were a sea blue that would darken in time, and his thin hair was soft and fragrant, exactly the color of his mother’s. There was something in the set of his eyes that reminded me of Auletes, but the high handsome cheekbones beneath the baby flesh were pure Caesar. When he clung to his wet nurse’s breast I felt something stir within me, some primal craving soon to be satisfied.
My child would be born in the winter, Caesarion’s cousin. Holding him in my arms, I could imagine that other child there, and when it first moved within me it was in response to Caesarion’s mewing and trying to nurse from breasts that were not yet ready.
I cupped my hand around his soft head. “Not yet, little one,” I said. “I haven’t anything for you yet. But you can share when your cousin comes, if you want.” Since he was hungry, I handed him back to his wet nurse, and wondered if I had really felt it, a stirring beneath my breasts as though the child bumped against the wall above.
“When they are old enough,” Cleopatra said, “your son will join mine in the schoolroom the way you joined me. Apollodorus will find a tutor for them, and they will learn to write together, just as we did.”
My eyes pricked with tears. That was how it was supposed to be. They would sit at the table together in a white city by the sea, reading Ptolemy on the original scroll, two little boys who were his long-removed descendants, learning to love the city he had built. Caesarion would learn to rule fairly and well, and there would be an end to the fighting among heirs the House of Ptolemy had known. He would be loved, and hence moral. And when his mother at last passed the Gates of Amenti, he would rule as Horus, Ptolemy Caesarion, Pharaoh of Egypt. We would have peace, and the Black Land would endure. We would have peace, and the city would spread her wings wide to the world. These would be the days to come.
Of course, for Cleopatra, there was much more than the nursery. I might spend a great deal of time watching over this small life, but she had all of the lives of Egypt to attend to. She bound her breasts against her milk, and suffered through it while Caesarion took to his wet nurse. She could not nurse every few hours for months at a time, not when Egypt was finally hers to rule.
And there was so much to do
. The Inundation was scarcely over before she must make the trip upriver to Thebes and attend to the business of the kingdom there. Caesarion, hardly three months old, stayed in Alexandria with me while Iras accompanied the Queen. There was no question of taking him, not in the season after the Inundation when fevers multiplied and took the young and old. He must stay in Alexandria, in the fresh sea air, far from the swamps and quagmires of the Delta.
By the time the Queen returned to Alexandria, I was a month from my delivery and the stars of winter were rising.
Of course she had written to Caesar, and he had replied. Whatever he had said was for her eyes only, and the scroll had not been turned over to the Royal Archive. Subsequent letters were more public. Caesar congratulated the Queen. If he stopped short of calling Caesarion his son, he stopped little short, and he inquired constantly about the boy’s health, eating habits, and temperament. “Yes,” we replied, “Prince Caesarion enjoys perfect health, except for being fussy about teething as all babies are. He eats with great enjoyment, and has begun to take small meals of porridge mixed with milk, as well as the flesh of peaches well mashed to a pulp. He is in all ways a sunny child, sleeping well and laughing when tickled, responding to hiding behind the corner of a himation and popping out with hysterical giggles. He chews cloth, and burrows into the breasts of any woman who holds him, the bigger their breasts the better.”
I thought the latter would make Caesar smile.
Truly, there was little enough to. After he had left Egypt he had marched straight to Syria where he defeated King Pharnaces of Pontus, who had crossed into lands the Romans claimed now that he need not fear Pompeius. Now he might fear Caesar instead. However, while all this occurred, Gnaeus Pompeius and his brother Sextus had raised an army backed by many prominent men in Rome. Caesar had crossed again to Africa, near what had once been Carthage, and tried to come to grips.
It was from there that the first letter came for Dion, which he shared with me as with a sister.
Hail my friend,
I am learning to write. We are in Africa. Many thanks to your Queen whose generosity has sent ships with grain for us. We like the grain, but better still the fruits and other good things. I have your letter. You say it is the fourth, but the first I have. The horses like it better here.
The battle at Zela was not easy. I have hurt in my leg, but it is healing and I do not think I will limp when it is done. Now we have these sons of Pompeius to defeat, though I do not think much of them, having seen how Gnaeus ran at Pharsala when we charged him.
You ask me how I am, and what I am thinking. I am thinking that now it is cold at home, and that the sun grows small in the southern sky, the nights long and endless long. Yet I am here, where there is no difference and the sun is as hot as ever. The trees are green where there is water, and the dates are fat. Are the waters that wash these shores the same as the ones that come to the cliffs where I grew? Are the winds the same that blow over you, where you are in Alexandria? The world is very big. And also very small when it can be reached across by the heart.
We will beat the sons of Pompeius. Then I do not know where we will go. Back to Rome, I expect. Caesar must. And some men are tired and their discharges overdue. I wish we might come back to Alexandria. But one thing I have learned is that the Black Land is not going anywhere.
Farewell,
Emrys Aurelianus, Decurio
I had no letters from Marcus. At first I worried that he did not write, but after he was mentioned four or five times in the official dispatches, I knew that he was well. I would not allow myself to be angry. After all, I had not really expected that he should remember me. What is a slave woman, the lover of a little less than three months, that one should remember? An episode in the life of a young Roman gentleman, a pretty face to figure in some future story when he was old and gray. “Once I knew this girl in Alexandria . . .”
Still, I needed nothing from him. I lacked for nothing. I had my sisters, the Queen’s own doctor, and I had my small nephew. I should not want for money or food or care because Marcus forgot me. It was best that I should forget him too.
I stopped writing to him after five letters. There was no point, if he would not reply. It only made me pathetic, a woman who continued to pursue a man who has long since moved on. There was no need to tell him about the baby or how it grew. Why should I share any of that with him, pour my heart out in letters that he would toss aside? Better instead to give my time and attention to those who loved me, to Caesarion and Dion, to my sisters and my friends. Marcus Agrippa should be no more to me than I to him, a story of a handsome young soldier I had once desired.
MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN at dawn, seven days after the winter solstice, at the end of two days of difficult labor. Iras held my hand as she had held the Queen’s, and I looked into her eyes in those last long moments, seeing her will holding me up, inflexible and sure as the pillars of the universe.
“A perfect daughter,” the doctor said with satisfaction, and turning her about laid her in my arms. The slither of the cord pulsed a few times more, and then he cut it and she lay against me crying, her small fists pounding.
Pounding fists were good, I thought. She will never stop fighting. And I closed my eyes and slept exhausted against her hair.
THE NEXT WEEKS PASSED in a haze of nursing and sleeping a few hours at a time, but as she grew and slept more I could find myself again. Demetria looked less like me than Caesarion, I thought. Her hair was darker than mine, more like Agrippa’s, and instead of the Ptolemy nose she had the look of him in the square forehead, the wide-set eyes. Only they were not brown like his but sea blue, like mine and my mother’s. She would not, I thought, be a great beauty, but her features were regular and pleasing. Perhaps she would not need to be a great beauty.
In the spring Caesar crushed the sons of Pompeius, and by summer he returned to Rome. Cleopatra had a letter every week, witty and clear, Caesar’s personality stamped on each line. Dion had a letter too, sent from Ostia to a merchant who did business for me at the palace.
Hail my friend,
I am in Rome now to ride in Caesar’s Triumph. Nobody before has had four in a row. It is truly something to see. But I do not think you would have liked the Egyptian Triumph much, with a statue of your Nile god enslaved, though the model of Pharos with flames shooting out the top was good. Your Princess Arsinoe walked in chains and I would not have known her if it weren’t for the placard saying who she was, so changed she was. I did not like it. I did not like it when it was Vercingetorix, who my tribe hated, when he walked with his head up through the excrement they threw at him, and at the end walked into the cellar where they killed him. They did not kill your Princess. I think she is in prison. It would not look good to behead a young woman. No one minded when they beheaded the rest of the prisoners.
You say that I am Roman, but I am not. We kill or do not kill, but we do not make a spectacle of it. We do not watch suffering and call it entertainment.
You will no doubt say something full of sophistry about how we can know what is right. I don’t understand, and won’t.
I can kill, Dion. I’m good at it. Unlike you, it’s not a matter of rhetoric. There is no library like the sword. But I have never hurt a human being for the pleasure of it, or enjoyed watching anyone raped or killed or cut to pieces. I cannot cheer. Let my enemies die if they must die, but let it be properly and swiftly, by the garrote of a priest in some private place.
I do not know when I will return to Alexandria. It all depends on Caesar. I have eleven more years of my enlistment, so I am almost half done. When I am done, I think I am done with killing. I will be thirty-seven then, and have, if the gods wish it, many good years ahead of me yet. I would like to do something else.
Sigismund, my friend the bodyguard who you may remember, says that he could make a lot of money in a short time as a gladiator, and then retire to live rich. I think that is not a good plan. But then he is bigger than me.
I am glad to h
ear that Charmian has a daughter. Should I congratulate you?
Farewell,
Emrys Aurelianus, Decurio
Dion showed me the last, laughing.
I put my head on his shoulder. “I don’t know, Dion. Should he?”
“Don’t you dare!” Dion grinned. “I’ve never done anything of the kind!”
“Not for want of admirers,” I said. Dion was both handsome and educated. Lately, his parents had been trying to arrange a marriage with every pretty young Jewish girl in town. I could have told them that it was hopeless. “You could tell your mother Demetria is yours,” I suggested. “That you had a torrid affair with a Gentile slave, and that you couldn’t dream of being unfaithful to your true love.”
“That might work,” Dion said thoughtfully, scratching his beard. “Better than to say I’m true to a Keltic cavalryman I haven’t seen in a year.”
“You can’t really be faithful.” I snorted.
Dion gave me an injured look. “I’m faithful in my heart!”
I laughed and hugged him. “I’m sure you are.”
He bent his head against mine. “And what about Agrippa?”
“What about him?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I don’t expect anything, Dion, not really. It was one of those things that blooms and dies swiftly. I don’t imagine he will forget his first woman, but it will be enough if he thinks of me fondly. I don’t need anything from him.”
Yes, there had been that lightning sense of connection, that spark. But I did not really know him, not enough to miss him. And if sometimes at night I wished he were there, or wondered who he would be if I actually knew him, I did not cry for him. I had my friends and my sisters, Caesarion and Demetria. I had charge of the Royal Nursery and the Queen’s wardrobe and personal plans, while Iras had the Royal Household and Apollodorus the Ministry of State. There were not enough hours in the day for all that needed to be done. I had no time for a love affair, and no particular inclination to look for one. A few hours now and again with a handsome man would be pleasant, but not worth the risk to my heart.