The Egyptian Royals Collection

by Michelle Moran

  “Because your mother forbids it?” Julia guessed.

  Marcellus shook his head. “So long as I’m with them, they’re welcome to come. But they’re afraid. They’d rather be playing their lyres or planting boxwood in the garden.”

  Julia wrinkled her nose. “How boring.”

  “They’re like my mother,” Marcellus observed. “They enjoy the simple, quiet pleasures.”

  And there was something very endearing about their simplicity that evening while everyone played dice in the summer triclinium. Neither Antonia nor Tonia gambled, and Vipsania and Drusus were deemed too young to play. So the four of them sat together on a couch, quietly watching the roll of the dice. Only Alexander, Lucius, and Julia remained in the game. Marcellus whispered eager tips to Julia, and once in a while Juba or Agrippa would look up from their reading to see who was winning.

  Julia rolled, and Lucius exclaimed, “Four Vultures!”

  She groaned. “I’m finished.”

  “But no one’s thrown a Venus,” Lucius protested. “The next roll could be yours.”

  “It’s always the next roll with you two. You can keep my denarii in the pot.”

  “Your loss,” my brother said temptingly, but she didn’t care. He and Lucius battled it out, and by the time Lucius won, I realized that Marcellus and Julia had disappeared.

  I looked around the triclinium. “Where did Marcellus go?”

  “With Julia,” Tonia said. “Out to the gardens. I think they’re sitting in the gazebo.”

  “Which one?”

  “Near the statue of Fortuna. Would you like me to show it to you?”

  “Leave them alone,” Juba said, looking up from his reading. “They’ve gone there for a reason.”

  “And how do you know?”

  “I have eyes.”

  I rose swiftly from my chair, and Tonia asked eagerly, “Would you like me to show you?”

  “Yes,” I said stubbornly.

  “You’re wasting your time.” Juba’s voice grew irritable. “If you think you’re in love with him, you’re no different from any of the girls at the roadside inns. Besides, it’s Julia he’s meant for.”

  “So everyone says.”

  “So Augustus says.” When Juba saw me pause, he added, “The letter came today. Octavia will probably announce it tomorrow.”

  Tonia was still looking up at me; her small hand reached out toward mine. “Shall we go?”

  For a moment, I didn’t answer. Then, when the mist finally cleared from my mind, I told her, “Just take me to the baths.”

  Tonia chatted about silly things along the way—what color the flowers should be on her balcony and which food I liked better, thrush or quail. She wanted to know if I had ever seen the animal called a giraffe, and told me that I should visit her uncle’s zoo in Rome as soon as we returned. Nothing she talked about was of any importance. She spoke only about simple, insignificant things, and for that I couldn’t have been more thankful.

  But when Octavia gathered us all in the triclinium the next morning and announced that she had wonderful news from Iberia, my heart sank in my chest, and I wished I could have as simple a life as Tonia. Instead, I had spent the night hoping that Juba had been wrong, that he had only told me such things to try and torment me. But now, Marcellus’s long-awaited marriage to Julia was going to be made a reality, and Augustus wanted Agrippa to take his place in the ceremony on the auspicious day of December twenty-fourth.

  As soon as Octavia spoke the words, my brother looked at me, and Lucius patted my arm in an understanding gesture. For the next four months I would have to be cheerful and happy for Julia, and there would be a dozen things she would want me to help her with: tunics and cloaks, new sandals and bridal jewels. There was more news as well, but I hardly heard it. Marcellus was to be honored by being made an aedile, in charge of Rome’s public entertainments for an entire year, which would mean access to nearly unlimited funds in order to impress the plebs. When Tiberius heard this, he sat back in his seat and groaned. “I hope Augustus knows what he’s doing.”

  But the final news made time stop entirely. In honor of his service to Rome, Juba, Prince of Numidia and unswerving friend of Augustus, was being made King of Mauretania. It would be a client kingship in which he served the purposes of Rome, but even so, Mauretania adjoined his ancestral land of Numidia, where his father and grandfather had ruled before him. I met my brother’s gaze across the table, and while everyone celebrated the happy news, Alexander seated himself next to me.

  “You see,” I whispered in Parthian. “If it can happen for Juba, it can happen for us.”

  “Yes, but he’s twenty-two and he’s spent his life being useful to Augustus, serving him, protecting him, fighting alongside him. What have I done?”

  “Nothing. But you haven’t been given the chance!”

  “At least you have your work with Vitruvius.”

  I was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps that will be enough for us both.”

  We looked across the triclinium at Juba, who was being congratulated by Agrippa and Claudia. “As soon as you’re comfortable in your new palace,” Agrippa was promising him, “we plan on making the journey south for a visit.”

  But Juba laughed. “I don’t expect I’ll be leaving anytime soon. There’s the matter of a war in Cantabria to finish. I’m not sure how Augustus would feel about returning home to discover that I’d left him.”

  Julia and Marcellus were by themselves on the farthest couch in the triclinium, and I could see that she was weeping. He kissed the tears of happiness from her cheeks in a way that made my heart ache, and I reminded myself sternly, It’s about continuing to study with Vitruvius so that Augustus will let me return to Egypt; it’s not about falling in love with a Roman—however winsome he is.

  But it was difficult to remember what I had left to hope for as Julia dragged me to every shop in the Forum in search of the perfect bridal clothes. There had been a message from Iberia that whatever Julia wished for her wedding should be ordered, and that every senator in Rome would be invited to the celebration.

  “Look at all this cloth,” Julia complained in November, with only a month left before her marriage. “Wool, linen, heavy winter silks. How can any of these be used for a veil?” We had gone to shop after shop looking for something suitable, but she’d found nothing. She sat down on the shopkeeper’s chair while the old man scurried around us, presenting us with options.

  “There has to be something,” Lucius protested. “What about that red stuff over there?”

  “It’s too thick.”

  My brother held up a swath of red silk.

  “Too shiny,” she ruled.

  “There are no more shops,” Gallia reminded her. “What about inviting the merchants from Ostia to the Palatine?”

  “She’s already done that,” I said dryly.

  “Then how about choosing something from the one hundred shops we’ve already been to?” Marcellus suggested.

  Julia’s eyes filled with tears. “You don’t care what I wear.” She stood angrily. “I could show up in a peasant’s palla and it wouldn’t matter at all!”

  Marcellus exchanged a wearied look with me. “You’re right. It wouldn’t.” He went to her. “Because what matters to me isn’t the veil.” He lifted her chin tenderly. “It’s you.”

  Alexander whispered in Parthian, “You have to feel a little sorry for him. This is what the rest of his life is going to be like.”

  Julia calmed a little, but the crisis of the veil wasn’t resolved until eight days before the wedding, as we were bidding Magister Verrius farewell. Our days in the ludus were finished. Beginning with the new year, Alexander and Lucius were going to join Marcellus and Tiberius in a separate school for rhetoric, where they would learn how to speak in public and argue law cases. Julia would be in charge of her own house, a magnificent villa near Agrippa’s on the Palatine, and instead of studying Homer or Vergil, she would be holding her own salutatio, doing charity
work, and commissioning buildings in her own name. Because school was finished for me as well, Vitruvius paid me the honor of asking whether I wished to study with him in the daytime and oversee some of the work on the theater, Agrippa’s Pantheon, and the new basilica being built in honor of Julia’s marriage. Only this time, when he asked, it was not because Octavia pressured him to.

  The six of us waved good-bye to Magister Verrius, and though Julia was the one who had enjoyed the ludus least, she blinked back tears as we crossed the courtyard toward Juba and Gallia for the very last time. Though Juba was king of a foreign land now and could have left our security to the Praetorian Guard, it was a mark of his loyalty to Augustus that he remained as Marcellus’s personal protector. Julia sniffed loudly, and when Marcellus gave her his linen square, she used it to dab at her eyes. “You know what this means, don’t you?” she wailed.

  “Our childhood has passed,” Alexander said quietly.

  “Who cares about our childhood?” she said heatedly. “There are only eight days to find cloth for a veil!”

  Marcellus gave Julia a desperate look. “Why don’t you go shopping with Selene,” he suggested. “Juba can take us back—”

  “We’ve been to every store,” I interrupted. “There’s nowhere in Rome we haven’t gone.”

  Julia’s look was miserable. Everything was ready. Her handsomely embroidered cloak of red and gold. A tunic woven from the finest silk. Her pearl-encrusted sandals, her bangles, her underclothes. Only the veil remained. Marcellus looked as if he were about to weep himself. And then I remembered.

  “I think I have something. In the chest I brought from Alexandria—some swaths of red silk.”

  Julia gasped. “Can we see them?”

  I glanced at Marcellus, who smiled at me with the deepest gratitude, and I was forced to admit to myself that my revelation was not entirely altruistic. “Of course.”

  Marcellus exhaled audibly. “I’ll bet Selene has something that would be absolutely perfect.”

  Julia shot him a look, but when we returned to the Palatine and I opened the chest that had been locked for more than four years, she reached forward for the first swath of silk and exclaimed, “This is it!” It was the material left over from a chiton I had worn to my mother’s last feast. It had been the Feast of the Inseparable in Death, when my parents had invited everyone who had been close to them to dine one last time. I hesitated, wondering whether or not I should tell her.

  “You probably don’t want that one,” I said finally.

  But she had already draped it over her head. “Why not?”

  “Because it was the cloth I wore to my mother’s last dinner.”

  “The feast of a queen,” Julia whispered, regarding herself in the mirror. The red contrasted beautifully with her mass of black hair, and she didn’t care what the material had been for.

  “It might bring you bad luck.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “That’s only superstition.”

  “Your father wouldn’t think so.”

  “And do I look like him?”

  No. She looked like the most beautiful bride who would ever be carried across the threshold of a villa. Pearls imported from the Indian Sea gleamed on her dark neck, and in eight days, when her hair was dressed in similar ornaments, Marcellus would be the envy of every man in Rome. I let her take the silk, but as she was folding it into a neat square for her seamstress, she sat down on my bathing room chair, and tears began to well in her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I exclaimed. “You have your veil. Everything is ready.”

  She nodded, as if she knew it was foolish to cry. “I know.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  She looked up at me, and her dark eyes suddenly appeared enormous, as if they belonged to a child. “She won’t be there,” she whispered, and immediately I was ashamed of my resentment. No one in the world knew Julia better than Marcellus. Her father, her stepmother, even her stepbrother only cared what happened to her so long as it advanced their will. In a world of pretty silks and pearls where everything was theater, Marcellus was her only real happiness, and her mother wouldn’t even be able to meet him on the wedding day. I took a seat next to her and offered her my hand. There was nothing I could say, so instead we sat together in silence and I thought of how selfish a friend I had been.

  The excitement of Julia’s wedding didn’t stop me from wallowing in my own misery in private. Though I put a smile on my face and helped Julia with everything a bride might need—packing her chests, choosing her perfume, finding the right silk tunic for her wedding night—I still felt an empty ache in my heart when Marcellus looked at me or I heard him laugh in his mother’s villa and knew it would be one of the last times I would ever have that sound wake me in the morning. Yet Marcellus was bursting with happiness. He was marrying a woman he loved, and who loved him back. There would be spectacles and entertainments to plan for an entire year, and before long Augustus would make him consul and officially name him the future emperor of Rome.

  Two nights before the wedding, Marcellus crept into my chamber, where Alexander, Lucius, and I were whispering about the war in Cantabria and how it might be many years before we’d have to see Livia’s sour face again. Since the announcement of his wedding, he had stopped coming to us, and I presumed from the nightly creaking of his window that he was visiting Julia instead. But he took up his old position on the third couch, and my brother asked eagerly, “Well, what’s it like to be getting married?”

  Marcellus smiled. “Wonderful. Frightening.”

  “How can it be frightening?” I teased.

  “Well, think of the responsibility,” he said. “Now, there will be a house to maintain, and slaves to buy, and—”

  “You’re not really going to buy slaves?” I exclaimed.

  “Of course he is,” Lucius said. “How else is his house going to run?”

  I stared at Marcellus.

  “I will treat them properly,” he promised swiftly. “I would never send them away for getting pregnant.”

  “Or push them into an eel pool,” I added, “or whip them for broken dishes.”

  “Certainly not!”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Will you pay them?”

  He hesitated. “I … well … sure. Why not? Every Saturnalia, they can all receive presents. Julia can take care of that.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I’ll be too busy planning the Games.” He grinned widely. “There’s the Ludi Plebei, the Ludi Apollinares, the Ludi Megalenses, and the Ludi Ceriales.” He looked at my brother. “And you’ll help me, won’t you?”

  My brother couldn’t have been more pleased with any request. They spoke at length about horses, and floats for parades, and which animals from Augustus’s zoo would be the most likely to awe the plebs if they were used as part of the opening processions. Marcellus didn’t speak again about marriage, but before he left, he paused at the door one last time and looked back. “Lucius and the twins,” he said, his voice filled with regret, “I’ll miss our nights together.”

  When he shut the door and Lucius left, I turned on my side and faced the wall. Alexander knew enough to simply blow out the oil lamp. Then he kissed my hair and whispered that it would be better in the morning.

  But it wasn’t. It was the last day of Saturnalia, with all of the shops in the Forum closed, and a hundred different things still to be arranged. There was the matter of the food, and reminders had to be sent across Rome to the homes of butchers and bakers to ensure that the proper amounts would be delivered the next morning. Wine, honey, vinegar, and garum had to be available in considerable quantities, and despite the fact that it was a holiday, merchants arrived throughout the day with heavy chests and barrels. Nothing more important than this wedding would ever happen beneath Octavia’s roof, so the slaves rushed from room to room with wash-buckets and brooms, using feather dusters on the most delicate statues and ladders to reach the highest mosaics. M
arcellus went to spend the day with Julia, and when Alexander asked whether I’d like to join him and Lucius at the odeum, I shook my head.

  “What will you do, then? Sit out here on the portico and feel sorry for yourself? It’s cold,” he protested. “Come to the odeum. There’ll be warm beer and ofellae.”

  “I’m fine. Besides, there’s work to be done in the theater.”

  “Over Saturnalia? Even Vitruvius isn’t working.”

  “There’s just a few things I’d like to see to,” I lied. “It’s important.”

  But my brother knew me better. “Selene, you care more about that theater than Marcellus does. He’ll probably step inside it once.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” I said angrily. “It’s my project. Vitruvius gave it to me, and I’ll see that it’s done right. Work doesn’t stop just because it’s a silly Roman festival.”

  I convinced Octavia to let me go, and two Praetorians were sent with me to Marcellus’s theater. I took my book of sketches, although truthfully there was nothing I planned to sketch. I simply wanted a place away from the madness of preparations; a place where I could sit one last time to remember how simple life had been before engagements and weddings and bitter envy.

  We crossed through the Forum Holitorium, where the vegetable stalls were shut for Saturnalia, and though the guards wanted to take the shortcut, I refused, thereby avoiding the Columna Lactaria, where Horatia’s daughter had been abandoned. This winter hadn’t brought any snow, but gray clouds curtained the sun, casting a pall over the city and darkening the streets. When we arrived, I could see that the guards were worried about rain. There was only one umbraculum between us, so they gave it to me and waited beneath the arches while I inspected the empty theater.

  A great deal of work had been completed since the building’s conception: the cavea, where more than ten thousand spectators could sit; the stage, which would soon be covered in mosaic; and the three tiers of arches supported by columns in each of the Greek architectural styles, first Doric, then Ionic, and finally Corinthian. Every day for nearly a year I had come here, with either Vitruvius or the guards, and watched the men build. I had been allowed to choose the artwork and mosaics, and the workers knew better than to slight me, since Vitruvius had made it clear that I was as important to this theater as Marcellus himself.