Daughters of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  I wince at the way, in her wild, childlike enthusiasm, she reminds me of my daughter. “You won’t like the dye factory or the camels, Julia. They both stink.”

  “I don’t care. You must show me everything before Agrippa comes to fetch me and make us all miserable!”

  Five

  “THIS is morbid, Selene. Even for you.”

  As Julia and I settle ourselves under the shady entryway of my mausoleum, I say, “I cannot imagine what you have to complain about. Look at the lovely yellow flowers in these urns and the skillful stonework.”

  “It’s a tomb. Hardly the place for an idyllic picnic in the hills …”

  Though Julia is my favorite Roman, times like these remind me that she is Roman. “It’s a royal tomb and it’s the best place for an idyllic picnic in the hills. From here we can see the sea and the beauty of Mauretania. Why should I wait for the afterlife to enjoy it?”

  “Because there’s a sarcophagus inside!”

  Truly, she is ridiculous. “What of it? It’s Hybrida’s sarcophagus and Bast is beside her.”

  The emperor’s daughter makes a strange noise in her throat. “You mummified your cat?”

  “She was a good cat. Why shouldn’t she enjoy salvation?”

  “So we dine with the lemures.”

  When Julia says lemures, she means ghosts, spirits of the dead, restless and malevolent, so I’m determined to set the matter straight. “There is no reason to fear the shades, Julia. I’ve drawn my family’s kas to this very spot by erecting statues in their likenesses.”

  “All the more reason for me to fear. Your parents hated my father; I don’t suspect their shades will be fond of me. And what is a ka?”

  “It’s one of the nine bodies of the Egyptian soul. It’s the part of you that makes you live. A spark. It eats and drinks, which is why I bring meals for my dead. My family is lost to me in this River of Time, so if they can join me here in any way at all, I’m gladdened by it.”

  Julia sighs as if she must grant me that. “Still, I cannot approve dragging little girls to romp in the tombs of their dead mothers. Visiting one’s ancestors should be a somber endeavor. A thing done with all the solemnity of old men who lecture about gravitas and dignitas.”

  “Since when have you wanted anything to do with gravitas and dignitas?”

  Julia laughs, conceding the point, while under the supervision of my Berber woman, the children happily play hide-and-seek behind the pillars. As fair as she is, I should worry that my daughter will freckle in the sun, but I don’t want to see her covered up before her time …

  “One day this tomb may be the only place Isidora can be with me,” I say, as servants lay a bountiful feast upon our picnic table. “I want her to be happy here. I want to fill this place with warm memories, so that when she comes with offerings for me, the remembrance will be a comfort. She won’t fear it. It will already be a home to her.”

  “Your blood may be Macedonian Greek,” Julia murmurs, mirth in her eyes, “but you’re more Egyptian than anything else.”

  “I am Mauretanian,” I say, as much to convince myself as her. Then, as if to prove it, I lay aside my fears of the hot sun and remove the shawl of my embroidered blue himation to leave my shoulders bare.

  “You’re Mauretanian, then,” Julia agrees. “All the better, as far as I’m concerned. Your kingdom is just a few days’ sailing from Rome—”

  “Depending upon the weather and the direction,” I interrupt, which leads me to ask, “Just how did you convince the captain of Agrippa’s ship to carry you here against your husband’s wishes?”

  “Blackmail, of course.”

  It’s the last answer I expect. “The captain of that ship must have a dark and terrible secret for him to fear it more than he fears your husband.”

  “Perhaps he does,” Julia says, plucking a cluster of grapes from a silver platter. “Imagine that the captain became very drunk one night and put his hands on me. Imagine that I gave myself over to him. Now imagine that I threatened to tell my husband about it.”

  Her words are a cool cup of water thrown in my face. I am the last person to judge anyone for adultery, but I cannot imagine that even Julia would do such a thing. She loves to shock people, and I see that she’s enjoyed shocking me, but I cannot affect an air of sophisticated indifference. Remembering her father’s new law, the Lex Julia, which makes adultery punishable by banishment or even death, I shudder. “You take lovers so freely now?”

  She laughs, patting the gentle swell of her belly. “It can be done carefully, Selene. Agrippa’s children all look like him. After all, I never take on new passengers until the cargo is full.”

  With a gasp, I say, “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t risk it!”

  “Believe it. I do it to punish Agrippa. Even if he never knows about it, I do.”

  “You don’t want to punish Agrippa. You want to punish the man you love.”

  Julia had been ready to pop a grape into her mouth, but this stops her. “I don’t love any man.”

  Her vehement denial reveals the true depths of her heartbreak and I find myself saying, “Iullus Antonius did not betray you, Julia. It was your father who forced him to marry Marcella. Like you—like all of us—Iullus is at the mercy of the emperor.”

  Julia frowns. “Selene, we shall get on a great deal better during my visit if you don’t mention your half brother to me. He’s forgotten me, so I do my best to forget him.”

  I never thought to hear myself defend him, but I say, “Iullus has not forgotten you. When I saw him last, he was bereft.”

  “Not so bereft that he couldn’t perform his marital duty with Marcella,” Julia counters. “Iulla and Lucius Antonius, their children are called.”

  “You have children the same age.”

  “Iullus has a choice in such matters; I do not.”

  I know what it is to feel helpless. To feel seething hatred for the men who have lorded over me. So my heart fills with pity for her. “I feared it would be hard for you, married to Agrippa. Do you hate him, then?”

  “Of course I hate him,” she says, stuffing another grape into her mouth and swallowing it whole. “Big, bellowing Agrippa. I take satisfaction in irritating him to the point of rage. I must be wicked to enjoy his distress as much as I do. But doesn’t he deserve it? On the battlefield, they say he’s the incarnation of Mars. He’s wiped out entire tribes; these past years in Spain he’s had his legions hunt the Cantabri to the last man.”

  Yes, that sounds like Agrippa. “And now he has won …”

  “He’s Rome’s best general and has earned a Triumph, but my father will block it—”

  “I thought it was at your father’s command that the Senate voted Agrippa the honor.”

  Julia rolls her eyes at me. “You know very well that everything my father does in the Senate is for show! My father will insist that my husband refuse the honor. Perhaps he should. I’m told that Agrippa can’t count even a single ancestor amongst the first families of Rome. Not that I’ve bothered to confirm it, because that would only remind everyone that the emperor saw fit to marry his only daughter to a New Man. And even if I could forgive Agrippa all that, there remains the fact that he’s forced me to bear two—now three—children for him.”

  I wince, remembering a time when I was held down and forced. Remembering it as if it were yesterday. In the remembering, I restrain myself from glancing at my daughter. It was an ugly thing, that night, but I wouldn’t trade my beautiful girl, even if it meant I could swim in some other River of Time where that night never happened.

  Oblivious to my distress, Julia goes on to ask, “Do you want to know the thing I despise most about Agrippa? It’s that I cannot hate him as much as I should.”

  I too have reason to hate Admiral Agrippa, and yet I’ve never been able to do it. As much as I fear him, as much as he is my enemy, I’ve always known that what drives him is not malice—and yet, what solace would that be for all the men he’s killed? “Hat
red is a heavy burden to bear. Especially hatred for your own husband.”

  Julia lifts her face to the sun and closes her eyes. “I tell myself that I hate him. Then he comes to my bed with a diligence born of pure patriotism. I swear to myself that I won’t be roused by his touch, but I am.”

  I blink more than once. “Truly?”

  “There is something about Agrippa’s body,” Julia explains, quite unconcerned that she might be overheard by servants. “It’s scarred and weathered. It awakens hideously respectable urges in me to bear children and sit all day weaving at the loom.”

  None of this is what I expect to hear. “You can’t mean it …”

  “Well, not the part about the loom. But the rest of it, I mean every word. He undresses with military precision, lays me flat on the bed, then climbs atop me with a gravitas that would be laughable if he weren’t so appallingly good at it!”

  I’m scandalized and a bit disturbed. “I might have gone my whole life quite happily not knowing this about Agrippa. Have a care—”

  “Oh, our Marcella fooled us with her tears on her wedding day. Crying about Agrippa’s fumbling hands. She’s a liar. Agrippa masters everything he puts his hands to. Even me.” Julia sighs, then shivers. “It’s such an earnest business, the way he grinds me down into the bed. He tells me to close my eyes and think of the honor of my family and the good of Rome, and I do. I can see myself, a mother of the empire. He excites me. I don’t bother to hide it. I don’t care if Agrippa thinks I moan too loudly when I find my own pleasure. I don’t care at all. It’s freeing, not to care.”

  I speak slowly. “So, then … you’re not entirely unhappy with Agrippa?”

  “What purpose would it serve to be entirely unhappy? I’m the daughter of the emperor and the wife of the only man who can challenge him. There are worse fates that can befall a woman.”

  Perhaps she is thinking of her mother. Poor, ostracized Scribonia, who not only hailed from a family that advocated for the return of the Republic, but had the temerity to give the emperor a daughter instead of a son; he divorced her the very day that Julia was born. Or perhaps she is thinking of my mother, who challenged this world of men and came away from it with deadly venom in her blood. “You’re right, of course.”

  Julia likes to be told she’s right, so her dark mood vanishes in an instant. “Delightfully, there’s more to the world than bedmates and babies. There are advantages to being Agrippa’s wife. He took me to Spain and he’ll take me to Greece!” Her eyes cut at me, shrewdly. “Ah, but you’ve already been …”

  I don’t wish to speak of Greece, both because it shames me and because I still carry secrets from my time there with the emperor that are not safe to share. Not even with Julia. “Hurry and finish your lunch,” I say to distract her. “We still have an adventure ahead of us …”

  *

  “IT carries water all the way from those mountains,” I boast, sweeping a hand over the path our monstrous aqueduct cuts into the wide sun-drenched vista of Africa. “It stretches farther than your eye can see! We bridged rivers in five places and looped around the landscape where shale or other soft stones are prone to landslides.”

  Julia feigns a little yawn. “Wake me when you’ve finished marveling at standard engineering, will you? Honestly, you’re worse than Agrippa. We have aqueducts in Rome, you know. Soldiers too.”

  She’s speaking of the Legio III Augusta, which is overseeing the construction. Ordinarily, the officers show me only the barest modicum of respect, but now that I’m in the company of the emperor’s daughter, the highest-ranking officer makes haste to welcome us into their camp and boast of their aqueduct.

  It’s a rough place, here on the river. Alongside the surveyors and engineers, there are men at hard work with picks and shovels. Laborers run pipes, sweating under the sun, while stiff-necked soldiers guard the dusty camp from the raiders on the frontier.

  While we survey the marvel from the vantage point of a watch post, I hear Tala sharply scold the children in a Berber dialect I’ve learned. I turn to see Pythia and Tala’s son Ziri standing close together, innocent of any wrongdoing. But my daughter is kneeling in the dirt beside a cage of camp dogs, trying to give them a drink from a water skin.

  “What is she doing?” Julia asks.

  Groaning, I give a shake of my head. “My daughter can resist no creature under the sky …”

  My big Berber woman tries to haul my daughter away from the dogs, but Isidora is so intent on the animals in the cage that she actually struggles. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?” my daughter shouts, slapping at Tala’s tattooed hands.

  Never before has she treated her nursemaid in such a way and it shocks me. “Isidora! Shame on you. Tala is trying to protect you. You don’t know those dogs. Do you want them to bite you?”

  “But he’s not a dog,” Dora cries, sniffling. “He’s a boy!”

  I march to her side, frustrated by the increasing frequency with which my daughter says strange things to vex me. Peering into the cage, I’m brought up short. There, curled up on the straw amidst the caged hounds, is a little boy with cinnamon-kissed skin. A gash across his dirtied cheek is caked with dried blood and his filthy fingers splay over a festering wound in his side.

  I think the boy is dead, so I startle when his agonized eyes pop open and fasten on mine. “Sweet Isis!”

  Julia comes up behind me, demanding of the centurion, “Why is this boy in a cage?”

  The centurion, who has, thus far, forced himself to politeness for our inspection, clears phlegm from his throat. “He’s a raider.”

  A raider, he says! The boy can be no more than eight or nine years old. He’s a scrawny, pathetic thing, mangier than the dogs that sniff around him. He is a bag of bones I could rattle to death with one hand, so my lips curl with contempt when I say, “A fearsome warrior, I’m sure. No doubt it took the whole legion to subdue him.”

  “Just about,” the centurion replies. “Little bastard bit half the ear off the soldier who captured him. He was riding with Berber raiders from Numidia. Garamantes, maybe.”

  The condition of the boy gives rise to my anger. Straightening to my full height, I look the centurion in the eye. “I was told Lucius Cornelius Balbus rid us of the Garamantes. Isn’t that why he was granted a Triumph in Rome?”

  The centurion shrugs. “We caught the raiders trying to steal the livestock from a farm after they’d set fire to the granary. We spared this one on account of his age. If he lives, maybe he’ll fetch a price.”

  They’re going to make a slave of the boy. It’s not the worst thing they could do to him, by far. So near to the frontier, it would be risky to try to find the boy’s tribe, not to mention more trouble than any legionary soldier would bother with. No Roman magistrate would have any interest in the matter either. What are the soldiers to do? They can’t let the boy wander off into the wilderness on his own; given the harsh terrain, he’d be dead in a day. Slavery is the kindest fate for this boy, should he live …

  “He’s hurt, Mama,” my daughter sobs. “He’s thirsty and hungry too.”

  “Let Tala give him water. You stay away,” I command before turning to the boy in the cage and addressing him in the Berber dialect I’ve learned. “What is your name? What tribe do you hail from?”

  The boy jerks upright, as if not having expected to hear his own language from my lips, but he doesn’t answer.

  Keeping hold of my weeping princess, Tala says, “He’s dull. He has no wits.”

  Something in the brooding stare of the boy behind the wooden slats of the cage makes me think otherwise. As a child hostage in Rome, I practiced making a mask of my face. When I was older, I learned to slow the beat of my own heart, so that I wouldn’t betray myself to the emperor’s touch. Having mastered the art of deception, I’m not fooled by the boy’s bravado. The spark in his eyes is one that I recognize; it’s the enraged and contempt-filled stare of a child who has been taken prisoner.

  His defiance is such a
sharp reminder of my proud twin brother that I’m nearly undone. “He is one of my subjects,” I say to the centurion, though it is almost certainly a lie. “He needs care if he’s to survive; does your camp physician believe the best medicine is to lock a wounded boy in a cage?”

  The centurion looks not even slightly abashed. “There’s a physician back at the fort, not here.”

  I opt for a conciliatory tone. “Of course. I imagine conditions are very difficult for your men here. Perhaps it would be best to release the boy to us.”

  Julia raises an eyebrow. “Just what are we going to do with him?”

  It’s a very good question. I cannot venture into the hills looking for his people. Nor can I find him a competent healer unless I take him all the way back to the city with us. While I consider my options, Dora wrenches free of her nursemaid to offer the boy her water skin. He goes for it with such savagery that I think he’ll snatch it from my daughter’s hands. But, like a wounded creature brought low by the mercy of a goddess, he only presses his mouth to the skin and lets her hold it for him while he drinks.

  She’s disobeyed me and behaved very poorly, but the sight of my daughter tending to this poor Berber boy moves me. “Please release him, Centurion. Or must I pay you to do so?”

  The veteran soldier kicks a stone in the dusty earth. “He’s not worth a bronze coin to you, Majesty. What will you do when he lunges for your face and tries to tear at you with his teeth?”

  “My guards can handle a boy.”

  At my side, Memnon nods, one leathery hand upon the pommel of his sword.

  The centurion lifts a hand in surrender, then barks out an order to one of his underlings who returns with the keys to the cage. After a bit of rattling, the boy is dragged out amidst barking dogs. Smeared in blood and dirt, the boy tries to make himself tall. Tries to hide that he’s in pain. Again, I ask his name. This time he answers, but puts such animus behind the word it sounds like an obscenity.