The Egyptian Royals Collection

by Michelle Moran

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s the truth,” my brother warned. “You’re lucky Caesar didn’t hear you.”

  I glanced at the door. Soon Octavia would appear and order us to bed. “What do you think will happen to that prisoner?”

  “Exactly what my uncle said. His hand will be nailed to the Senate door.”

  “And Agrippa will do it?” Alexander asked quietly. He had removed his diadem, and his hair tumbled over his brow. He pushed it back with his palm.

  “Or someone else. But there is no one more loyal than Agrippa. He would strike down his own daughter if she threatened Rome. And they’ll catch this rebel eventually.”

  “But why does he use the image of a red eagle?” I asked.

  “Because the eagle is the symbol of Rome’s legions. He is trying to say that Rome is dripping with the blood of its slaves. The freedmen all think it’s very brave. But don’t ever use the name in front of my uncle. He thinks it glorifies the rebel’s cause.”

  “But if the senators haven’t rebelled,” I asked, “how has the Red Eagle gone against the law?”

  “By sneaking into the arenas and freeing gladiators. And by helping husbands and wives who’ve been separated by slavery escape.”

  “Escape where?” my brother exclaimed.

  “Possibly to their homelands. Gallic slaves were caught on the Flaminian Way a few months ago with enough stolen gold to return to Gaul.”

  I glanced at my brother, who must have known what I was thinking, because he shook his head sternly. But what else was there to hope for? If this Red Eagle was willing to help slaves return to Gaul, why wouldn’t he help us return to Egypt? Alexander had heard Octavian’s warning just as well as I had. The girl is pretty. In a few years, some senator will need to be silenced. She’ll be of marriageable age and will make him happy. And neither of the boys has reached fifteen years. Keeping them alive will seem merciful. And when it wasn’t merciful anymore? When Alexander came of age and posed a threat?

  Marcellus continued, “There is some honor in what the rebel does. It’s only an accident of Fortuna that we were born on the Palatine. We could just as easily be living in the Subura, sleeping with the rats and begging for our food. Or we might have been like Gallia, and sold into slavery.”

  Alexander sat forward. “She wasn’t born a slave?”

  “No. Her father was King Vercingetorix.”

  “She’s a Gallic princess?” I gasped.

  Marcellus nodded. “When she was a girl, she was brought to Rome in chains, and years later her father was paraded in Caesar’s Triumph and then executed.” He saw my look and added quickly, “That would never have happened to an Egyptian queen. Vercingetorix was the leader of the Gauls. A barbarian. My mother told me that when Gallia came here, she knew neither Latin nor Greek.”

  “Then she isn’t twenty.”

  “No. I should say more like thirty.”

  My brother hesitated. “So then why did your uncle spare us from slavery?”

  “Because your father was a Roman citizen, and you carry the blood of Alexander the Great.”

  “Juba’s father wasn’t a Roman,” I pointed out.

  “No. His ancestor was the warrior Massinissa. But my uncle must be thankful he didn’t make Juba a slave. Juba saved his life at Actium, and there were many days leading up to the battle when my uncle feared he would be defeated.”

  Just as there had been many days leading up to the battle when my mother had thought Egypt could still be saved.

  An uneasy silence settled over the room. Marcellus cleared his throat. “So I saw your sketch of Alexandria,” he said. “You are very talented.”

  “You should see her other drawings,” Alexander added. “Show him your book of sketches, Selene.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “She has a leather book,” Alexander explained. “It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen. Go ahead. Get it,” he coaxed.

  When Marcellus looked at me, I went to the chest in the corner of the room and took out my mother’s present. His eyes widened in the candlelight, and when he held the book in his hands, he asked in amazement, “What is this?”

  “Calfskin,” Alexander said.

  “All of it?” Marcellus turned the pages, and I don’t know what impressed him more, my sketches or what I had drawn them on. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he admitted. “Where did this come from?”

  “The library on the Acropolis in Pergamon,” my brother said.

  “The greatest library in the world!”

  “The second greatest,” Alexander corrected. “And when our family stopped exporting papyrus to them, they started using calfskin to make books like these.”

  “Books,” Marcellus said wonderingly.

  “There were two hundred thousand of them in Pergamon, and our father made a present of them all to our mother. She was reading them, one by one. A different book every night.” He looked at me, and I knew he was remembering our seventh birthday, when we had been allowed to choose anything we wanted from Pergamon’s library. My brother had chosen a book on horses, and I had chosen an empty book for sketches.

  When I looked away, Marcellus said quietly, “Queen Kleopatra was a remarkable woman.”

  “Yes,” Alexander said quietly.

  Footsteps echoed in the hall, and Marcellus stood. “My mother,” he said, returning my book of sketches to me. The door of our chamber opened, and Octavia’s face appeared next to an oil lamp.

  “Marcellus,” she said sharply. “What are you doing?”

  “Going to sleep.” He grinned back at us, then kissed his mother on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he promised us. When he was gone, Octavia set the oil lamp on a table.

  Alexander and I lay back on our couches and waited to see what she was going to do. Despite the heat, I covered myself with a thin linen blanket. She came and sat at the edge of my couch. When I inhaled, I could smell her light scent of lavender. My mother had always worn jasmine.

  “How was your day?” she asked kindly.

  I shot a questioning look at Alexander. “Tiring,” I admitted.

  “It will be even more tiring tomorrow,” she warned. “I would like to prepare you for my brother’s Triumph, though it will only be for one day.”

  “I thought it was three.”

  “Yes, but you will only be a part of it tomorrow. In the morning, clothes will be delivered to your chamber. You’ll be expected to put them on, then ride behind Caesar on a wooden float. There may be chains as well. But I will not allow them to cuff your necks. That is only for slaves.”

  “And then?” Alexander asked steadily.

  “You will return for the Feast of Triumph. It will be larger than what you have seen tonight. But you must be prepared to see things tomorrow. Things that will make you very upset.”

  “Will they spit at us in the streets?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know. The plebs are very angry. They believe what they’ve heard about your mother and father.”

  “Such as?” I asked urgently.

  Octavia’s shoulders tensed. “Such as your father wore a Greek chiton and put away his toga while in Egypt.”

  I raised my chin. “That’s true.”

  “What else do they believe?” Alexander asked.

  “That Antony instructed that he be worshipped as Dionysus. That he crowned his head in ivy and carried a thyrsus instead of a sword.”

  I could see my father in his robes of red and gold, holding Dionysus’s stalk of fennel just as Octavia had described. “All of that is true.”

  Octavia sat forward. “And did he really strike a Roman coin with your mother’s likeness?”

  “Yes. Three years ago,” my brother replied. “What’s so terrible about a coin?”

  When she didn’t answer, I asked sharply, “So is that all the Romans believe?”

  She hesitated. “There were rumors of dinners on the Nile.…”

  “Of course,”
Alexander said frankly. “Our mother and father had a club. The Society of Inimitable Livers.”

  “And what did this society do?” she asked breathlessly.

  “They had banquets on ships and discussed literature with philosophers from around the world.”

  “Then they changed it to the Order of the Inseparable in Death,” I added, “when our father lost the Battle of Actium. Now all of that is gone,” I said. “Just like our mother and father.”

  Octavia sat back and looked from my brother to me. She seemed to have trouble reconciling the Antony she had known as her husband with the Antony who had been our father. “So did … did your father spend a great deal of time with your mother?”

  I realized what was happening and felt my cheeks warm. She had loved him.

  Alexander answered quietly, “Yes.”

  “Then he didn’t spend all of his time with his men?” It was me she was asking.

  “No.” I was too ashamed to meet her gaze. “Are you glad that he’s gone now?”

  “I would never wish death on anyone,” she said. “When he left me,” she admitted, “it was a great embarrassment. All of Rome knew I had been rejected.”

  I tried to imagine how she must have felt, abandoned so publicly by my father. Antonia and Tonia, my half sisters, wouldn’t even have known him, since he had come to live with us permanently when they were just a few years old.

  “My brother wanted him dead,” she confessed. “But I.…” She hesitated, saying at last, “There wasn’t a woman in Rome who didn’t love your father.”

  “They don’t love him now,” I remarked.

  She stood up from my couch, then touched my cheek with the back of her palm. “Because they think he abandoned his people to become a Greek. But all of that is past,” she said tenderly. “What matters is tomorrow. Be brave,” she said, “and it will all end well.”

  When she closed the door, leaving the oil lamp near Alexander’s couch, I turned to him and we watched each other in the flickering light.

  “Our mother never came to us at night,” he remarked.

  “Because our mother was a ruler, not the sister of one.”

  “Do you think Father really loved Octavia?”

  It seemed cruel to say no, but Octavia was nothing like our mother, and I couldn’t imagine my father ever racing chariots with her on the Canopic Way, or spinning her in his arms whenever she won. “Perhaps he loved her kindness,” I offered, and Alexander nodded.

  “Marcellus has the same compassion, doesn’t he? And I doubt there’s anyone in Rome more beautiful.”

  I stared at him. “You’re not a Ganymede, are you?”

  “Of course not!” He blushed furiously.

  I kept staring at him, but he blew out the light, and in the darkness, I was too tired to argue.

  The clothes that were brought to our chamber the next morning were insulting. Alexander held up his linen kilt, and I crumpled the beaded dress in my hands.

  “Is this what Romans think Egyptians wear?” I asked angrily. The hills were still pink with the blush of dawn, but I could hear that the villa was already awake.

  “Of course,” Gallia said, and I could see that she wasn’t mocking me.

  “A thousand years ago queens wore beaded dresses,” I told her. “Now they wear silk chitons!”

  “That is not what I have seen in the paintings or statues.”

  “Because they’re stylized,” Alexander explained patiently. “I have never worn a kilt in my life.”

  “I am sorry,” she said, and I could see that she was. As a child, she must have suffered the same humiliation when she was paraded through the streets of Rome. “But this is what Caesar has instructed.”

  I did not fight her when she took me to the bathing room. I could see that Gallia was unhappy, but when she helped me to put on the beaded dress and I looked in the mirror, my cheeks grew hot. The beads covered only the most important places; otherwise I might as well have been naked.

  But when Octavia arrived, her hand flew to her mouth. “What is she wearing?”

  “What Caesar ordered,” Gallia said indignantly.

  “She will not be paraded through the streets like a whore!” She turned to me. “Have you brought other clothes?”

  “Silk tunics and wigs,” I answered swiftly.

  “And that’s what you wore in Alexandria?”

  “With paints.”

  “Then fetch them.” She closed her eyes briefly. “Better paint than this.”

  Octavia watched while Gallia fit the wig over my hair, and she frowned a little when I showed Gallia how to extend the dark lines of antimony outward from the corners of my eyes. Gallia wanted to know about everything I unpacked. The henna for my hands, the moringa oil for my face, the pumice stone for removing extra hair around my brows.

  “You are too young for that!” Gallia said sternly. “You will rub your face raw.”

  “That’s what this is for.” I showed her the cream Charmion had used on my face every morning. She held it to her nose, then passed it to Octavia.

  “And all women wear these things?” Octavia asked quietly. “Henna and wigs?”

  “On special occasions,” I told her.

  She glanced at Gallia, who said, “It’s not much different from the malachite that Romans use for eye shadow, Domina. The Egyptians just prefer more of it.”

  When we left the bathing room and returned to the chamber, I suppressed a laugh. My brother was dressed in a long linen kilt. A golden pectoral shone from his chest, and a pharaoh’s blue and gold nemes headdress had replaced his diadem. When he turned, he crossed his arms angrily. “How come you get to wear your tunic, and I have to wear this?”

  “Because Caesar wanted me to wear a beaded dress.”

  He gasped. “Like a dancer?”

  “Or a whore,” I said in Parthian.

  Octavia cleared her throat. “We are going to the atrium now.” She smoothed her stola nervously. “My brother is coming here to make an offering. Then the procession will begin at the Senate. Nothing will happen to you,” she promised.

  “You will be on the float behind Caesar,” Gallia explained. “And the plebs will never risk hurling stones if they think they might hit him.”

  “But they might hurl other things,” my brother ventured.

  Gallia looked to Octavia, who shook her head firmly. “No. You will be close to Octavian. I will see to that.”

  I took my brother’s arm. In the atrium, Octavian and Livia had already arrived. They were instructing Marcellus and Tiberius on where they would ride during the Triumph, though Marcellus seemed to be more intent on smiling at Julia. As soon as we appeared, the conversation faltered. Agrippa and Juba stopped polishing their swords.

  “By the Furies!” Marcellus exclaimed, and moved toward me. “Look at this wig.” While everyone turned to look, Julia watched me with unveiled disgust. There will be trouble with her, I thought.

  “Where is the beaded dress?” Livia demanded, and I realized it wasn’t Caesar who had ordered the dress for me, but Livia. She wanted to see me humiliated. But when no one answered her, she repeated, “Where is the dress?” She advanced, but Gallia stepped in front of me.

  “There was an unfortunate accident with the dress this morning. It appears that Domina’s cat mistook it for a plaything.”

  “You arrogant little lupa. Move!”

  Gallia stepped aside, but Octavia took her place. “The dress is gone, Livia.”

  “Liar! I know you took—”

  “You are speaking to the sister of Caesar, who does not lie,” Octavian said angrily.

  Livia lowered her eyes in shame. “Forgive me, Octavian.”

  “It is my sister you have offended, not me.”

  Everyone watched while Livia turned to Octavia. “I am sorry,” she said, though her words sounded more bitter than contrite.

  Octavia merely nodded. She hadn’t lied. The dress was gone, given to one of the slaves to sell in the mar
ketplace. It was Gallia who had twisted the truth, and I wished my wig could make me disappear when Livia’s eyes settled on me. She will never forget this humiliation. She will blame me for this. Me and Gallia.

  “Where is my speech?” Octavian demanded.

  Livia produced it slowly from her sleeve. He took the scroll from her, and when he unrolled it, he nodded approvingly. “This is good.” I noticed he was wearing a steel corselet beneath his toga, and he shifted uncomfortably under the weight. “Agrippa, Juba, you understand not to move during the speech?”

  “I will be on your left,” Agrippa promised. “Juba will be on your right. If a senator moves toward you—”

  “Then you have my permission to draw your sword. We are a family,” he said sternly, looking from Octavia to Livia to Marcellus. “Family members protect one another, and the people of Rome must see this. The plebs look to the Julio-Claudii to understand tradition, unity, morality. And if we cannot be happy, what chance is there for a brick-maker to be happy? So there will be smiles, even from Tiberius.”

  Tiberius made a purposely ugly grin, and Marcellus snickered. “How handsome!”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be as beautiful as you,” Tiberius snapped at Marcellus.

  But Octavian was not in the mood for banter. “Enough! Octavia, the Lares.”

  Octavia reached into a small cabinet and took out a vessel of wine. She poured a cup’s worth into a shallow bowl beneath the bust of Julius Caesar, and, together, everyone in the room intoned “Do ut des”: I give so you will give.

  There was a short silence. Then Octavian straightened his shoulders and announced, “Let the Triumph begin.”

  I expected the Senate to be the grandest building in all of Rome, a place so enormous that every senator who had ever served could have sat within its marbled chambers. So when I saw that it had been made of concrete and brick, the lower half faced with marble slabs, the upper half with imitation white blocks, I asked Marcellus, “Is this it?”

  “The Curia Julia,” he said reverently. “Romans call it the Senate.” Graffiti covered the steps, and some of the images were undoubtedly of Caesar. If my mother had ever found graffiti of herself, the men responsible would have been hunted down and sentenced to death. Yet Octavian hadn’t even bothered to order it removed for his Triumph. A single flight of stairs led to a pair of bronze doors, and Marcellus lamented, “We’re not normally allowed inside.”