Seeking to tamp down the fire in the boy’s words, Juba says, “I did not raise a legion to go to war, but to see that we don’t have to. Have our brothers not had enough fighting, Tacfarinas?”
“But this time, they will win. The Garamantes worship Egyptian gods. They have with them a warrior forged of fire. Horus the Avenger they call him, and he will burn all our enemies to dust.”
With my hand, I cover a gasp. Horus the Avenger. Still fighting Rome on the borders of Egypt. If it’s true—if it is not just a rumor, not just legend—then it is proof that Helios still lives. It has been years since I saw my twin with my own eyes, kissed him with my fevered lips, caressed his cheeks with my fingers. And this news awakens me as if from a long sleep. It puts a terror in me that my twin may yet be caught, captured, dragged before the emperor, and revealed by name. No, not Helios. He would die before giving Augustus that satisfaction. But oh, he is not dead. If it is true what the Berber boy has said, then Helios must be somewhere in this world, and the relief I feel is such that I am suddenly dizzied …
When I sway, Juba stares at me, and I am forced to look away. Heedless of how his words have affected me—indeed, how they have shocked the whole court—the boy goes on. “We should ally with the Garamantes, Majesty. Do that, and we will fight for you to the end.”
Juba should grab Tacfarinas by the tunic and shake him, threaten him, and make a great show of displeasure, but the king surprises me by laughing. “Well, if the Garamantes have a god such as Horus on their side, they hardly need our help, do they?”
The king’s jest cuts the tension. Laughter rings throughout our hall. Even the Romans laugh. Only Tacfarinas stands before his king red-faced, for he has been made to look like an inconsequential little boy. Sensing the boy’s shame, Juba says, “Come work in my stables, Tacfarinas. I will have you as my groom and give you a horse of your own.”
It is too generous a gift for even a resentful boy to turn aside, and Tacfarinas bobs his head in submission. I think Juba will regret this offer, for Tacfarinas will most likely take his horse and ride off into the hills where we found him, never to be seen again. But perhaps it would be better for us if he did.
That night, as the banquet draws to a close, leaving us to finish up the dregs of our wine with only a few intimates, talk turns to our new settlers. Some are Isis worshippers. Some are merchants and moneylenders. But most are discharged soldiers, fresh from the legions, who are to be settled in our lands in keeping with the promise that Augustus made to them. It is their payment for many years of service, but they come at the expense of our Berber tribes, who must make way for these settlers.
Berber grazing lands are being turned into farmland, and the arrival of settlers brings a flood of court proceedings surrounding property. The need for magistrates is so patently obvious that not even the Romans object to my presiding over disputes. “You are, perhaps, a better judge than I am,” Juba confesses.
“To the contrary,” I protest, glad of his return and hoping he can sense it. “You’ve memorized every point of Roman law and understand how to make them work with our own. It is only that I find out the liars more easily than you do.”
“You have help in that, do you not?” the king asks, gaze falling upon Chryssa. “Your freedwoman has made a terror of herself to every farmer, merchant, and shipowner who does business with the crown. I am told she makes them account for every copper.”
“Is that true?” I ask her.
Chryssa is unrepentant. “If the king and queen wish to forgive the thievery of their subjects, it is within their powers. Your Majesties, it is for you to be benevolent, but your council should be merciless with those who try to steal from you.”
Whatever happened to the sweet slave girl who first knelt to me in homage, so timid even in speaking the name of Isis? Her freedom in Mauretania has made her bold, but then, has it not done the same for me? I glance at the king to see what he thinks of Chryssa’s exacting standards.
“I cannot find it within myself to argue with your freedwoman,” he says. “So long as such officiousness does not end in her murder at the hands of an aggrieved banker.”
Maysar idly strokes the weapon at his hip. “Hopefully fear of her fierce Berber husband and his big shining sword should serve to protect her.”
We all laugh. Then, with eagerness in his eyes, Juba reaches across the couch to lace his fingers with mine. “Come, wife. We should leave our companions to their reunion and indulge in a happy reunion of our own.”
Nineteen
IOL-CAESARIA, THE KINGDOM OF MAURETANIA
SPRING 14 B.C.
MAKE the arrangements swiftly, Julia writes. And your niece can be a queen before the year’s end.
Apparently, King Polemon of Pontus is in dire need of a wife. Julia has secured Agrippa’s permission for him to marry Pythia, so we will not need to ask the emperor. Unfortunately, King Polemon has a different bride in mind. Throwing open a chest of exotic gifts, fragrant herbs and spices, shining silks, and golden leaves pounded thin as papyri, the king’s emissary says, “My king offers this and more for your daughter, Cleopatra Isidora, heir of the Ptolemies.”
Juba gives the answer we’ve been giving since Herod’s proposal. “Isidora is too young and my wife will not part with her yet.”
Wearing a cone-shaped hat and a robe of silver mesh, the emissary glances to where Pythia sits with the rest of my women. “Your princess looks ready for marriage. If a girl so beautiful has not already caught the attention of men twice her age, she soon will. Especially when you leave her free to be seen by all those who come to court.”
If he thinks to argue his way into a marriage agreement, he has miscalculated. I do not like his manner and my husband likes it even less. Juba snaps, “That is my wife’s niece you look upon so boldly and without my leave.”
Another girl might blush and let her pretty dark eyes fall to the mosaic floor, but fifteen-year-old Pythia lifts her chin. I’ve not raised her to hide in the women’s quarters or veil her face from the gaze of men and I feel strangely proud of her for this decided lack of modesty. So I say, “If your king is content to have my niece—as the emperor’s daughter assures me he is—we might consider it. But a marriage between the King of Pontus and my daughter is quite impossible.”
We should not have to say it. He should have known better than to ask, but Herod set the shameless example …
The emissary withdraws to consider. And that night, we bring out the maps. Pythia runs her fingers over the vellum, murmuring, “With the combined kingdoms of Pontus and the Bosporus, we would have dominion almost over the entirety of the Black Sea …”
It would be a marriage of great advantage to us, but I don’t think Pythia understands what it will entail. “King Polemon is not a young man. You would not be his first woman, nor his first bride.”
Fortunately, she is not naive, this girl that I have helped to raise. “I hope he is old. I hope he is very old, so that he will need my companionship, comfort, and care. I can give those things. They are a small price to pay for a throne.”
They are, to be sure, less than the price I paid for mine.
She understands the way of the world. She has no romantic notions. What a magnificent queen she will make! But it hurts my heart to think of parting with her. “You would be amongst strangers, Pythia. Do you understand how far away those kingdoms are?”
“I’ve been to Pontus. My father owned an estate there. I remember because when we went, my mother bought me a hat of pure snowy white rabbit fur to guard against the cold.”
The pining in her voice echoes deep within me. I have tried to make Mauretania her home, but always some part of her heart is in the East. “Pythia, you’ve no need to leave this court. There is always a place for you here. You are as a daughter to me.”
Her dark eyes soften. “But I do not have the blood of the Ptolemies. I cannot be a daughter to you.”
Taking her face in my hands, I say, “Isis brought us tog
ether and your mother gave you to me. Don’t you know that I love you?”
My heart breaks at the sudden tears that spill over her cheeks. Have I never said this to her before? Surely I have. But somehow I have never made her believe it. What a wretched woman I am. Wiping the tears from her cheeks, I say, “Pythia, know that I love you and that you don’t have to go.”
“But shouldn’t I? If I did have the blood of the Ptolemies, what would I do?”
I smile, bittersweet. “What would a princess do when a golden crown and glorious future is in her reach? She would snatch it up with the unrelenting grasp of a Ptolemy Eagle.”
She will have him, I decide. No Eastern king will refuse my niece, the granddaughter of Mark Antony. Pythia is a kinswoman to the imperial family through the Antonias. She is their niece as well as mine. And if she wants King Polemon for a groom, she will have him.
*
EVERYONE wants Isidora. Julia’s inquiries on behalf of my niece have touched off a flurry of betrothal offers for my daughter that I suspect would never have taken place if we had sent Herod away in utter disgrace. The offers become a topic of discussion in the council chambers with our advisers. Resting comfortably on his ivory throne, my husband observes, “The Emesans do not even ask a dowry.”
“Princess Isidora’s bloodline is a dowry richer than the Emesans deserve,” Lady Lasthenia says crossly. “What foreign prince is worthy of a Ptolemaic princess?”
“None of us are,” my husband says, sighing with amusement.
He seems not to realize that a good number of our advisers are not at all amused. Many of them are status-conscious Alexandrians who are indignant at these proposals of marriage from lesser kings. “We are not entertaining the offers,” I say, hoping to forestall criticism.
“Not now anyway,” Juba adds. “But one day Isidora must leave us for some foreign prince.”
This gives me a start. “Why must she?”
Juba tilts his head to slant me a glance. “Who else is she going to marry? Her brother?”
The king asks this with a contemptuous laugh and several Romans laugh with him as if none of them realize the insult. For nearly three hundred years my family practiced brother-sister marriage, a tradition all-but-abandoned by my mother with the gravest consequences. When Juba and his men laugh, they are laughing at my family. Humiliation scorches my cheeks, and our Alexandrians stiffen in their seats, a schism in our court widening before my very eyes. Lady Lasthenia reddens, arguing, “King Juba, this is the way of royal dynasties in the East.”
“Not all of them, surely,” Juba says with a tight smile. “Or we wouldn’t be receiving all these offers.”
My poet takes up the argument, going on to list all the kingdoms that follow the practice of brother-sister marriage, finishing with, “Why, at present, there is only one sister left for the King of Commagene to marry off because he married the other.”
At last, Juba seems to sense that our courtiers do not see the world with Roman eyes, but he is not chastened. “Well, they may do as they like in the East, but it will not happen here.”
My nostrils flare at the autocracy of his words, but I keep my silence.
Crinagoras rises to his feet to address the king again. “Having served in many royal courts I would remind you that there are good reasons—good political reasons—not to give hope to foreign kings that they may lay claim to your throne or to the bloodline of the Ptolemies.”
At this, Juba turns to face me. “Is that what you want, Selene? Our nine-year-old daughter and our four-year-old son to cease being innocent siblings, everything corrupted between them by a betrothal?”
The pain this question causes me is acute—a band of agony squeezing tightly at my throat, suffocating any reply I might make. He asks this of me as if the notion were absurd. A disgrace. So distasteful an idea that I should be ashamed. And I am ashamed, for his words are not only a slap to the traditions of Egypt, but a condemnation of the love I found with my twin—a love I have hidden and denied, a love I have sacrificed at an inestimable price to my soul.
Of course I don’t want our children to marry. I cannot even imagine it. Ptolemy runs after Isidora when she is at play and she is patient with his boyish ways. She holds his hand when he goes up and down the stairs and coddles him when he falls and cries. Everything they do, they do in innocence. They are a sister and a brother, nothing more. They are not like Helios and me.
No. I absolutely do not want them to marry. And yet, the king has called me out in front of our entire court. “What I want is to make a wise and considered choice for Princess Isidora. One that is in keeping with my duty to our kingdom and the distinguished lineage of my ancestors …”
It is as tempered a reply as anyone could possibly expect from me under the circumstances, but it seems to anger the king. Or perhaps Juba is smarting from having been lectured to by the Easterners in our court who will always see me as my mother’s heir and him as the husband who was forced upon me by the emperor.
In a rare fit of temper, my husband dismisses our council, retreating with his Roman companions, leaving me behind with only a few of my intimates.
“That was a most unfortunate dispute,” my poet says.
“Do not make much of it,” I warn. “Do not make record of it in your poems. It was only a disagreement and it is years before a decision must be made about Isidora’s future.”
“Nevertheless, the king seems unprepared for it. He is too much Roman …”
In spite of the fact that Juba has wounded me, I argue in his defense. “Maybe we are too much Greek or Egyptian. Our Berbers have their own royal traditions. Why, they even divide their kingdoms between all their sons.”
“Which has proved a disaster for them!” Crinagoras has had an unusually long career, serving as an ambassador for his home of Mytilene long before I was born. He politicked with my mother, my father, Julius Caesar, and Pompey the Great, and has made the acquaintance of nearly every king in the empire. I am fortunate to have him at my side, even if he is vain, boastful, and dismissive of my Berbers. “King Juba has no standing upon which to show you such disrespect.”
“Juba didn’t grow up in a royal court. He doesn’t understand.”
“That much is plain. If King Juba gives the impression that he will happily accept a foreign prince for his daughter, what will happen to your reputation? Your bloodline is your claim to Egypt. Your claim to the legacy of Alexander the Great. It is bad enough, they say, that your mother let two Romans sire her children, but at least those Romans were the most powerful men in the world. Now your children’s blood has been diluted with that of a jumped-up barbarian—”
“You speak of your king!” I hiss, whirling upon him.
“He is not my king,” Crinagoras reminds me, unrepentant. “I am a free citizen of Mytilene. I serve Cleopatra’s daughter …”
“You do not serve me when you speak of my husband with scorn. There are limits to my tolerance and I will send you back to Mytilene within the hour on the leakiest ship I can find if you do not recant.”
“Your Majesty,” he begins, only a touch more conciliatory, “I am merely repeating what is said of your husband. These are not my words. I know that King Juba is a civilized king. Perhaps the most civilized king. But he does not behave in keeping with the expectations for a Hellenistic king. He has not paid visit to Greece. He’s sponsored no monuments in Athens. He shows no interest in sponsoring the Olympic Games and allowed your contributions to be dwarfed by King Herod. Already you find it difficult to lure artists and engineers and scholars to Mauretania—and those that do come, come because of the prestige of being able to say they served in a Ptolemaic court. Without that, what do you have?”
*
LATE that night, Juba comes to me, stumbling, drunk, and angry. We are, neither of us, in any good temper. But I do not want to quarrel. I missed him too much when he was gone, so when he puts his hands on me, I let them roam and pretend that wine has not made him clumsy.
As the servants melt away, snuffing out candles and lamps as they go, I let the king pull me down onto a bed piled high with embroidered pillows. Encircled by a canopy of gauzy linen that sways in the sea-scented breeze, I let him strip me of my clothes. I remember how it was when I went to meet the god in the river, where my womb opened like the blossoming of a lily. When my body became an instrument of life. I want another child, so, like the goddess opened herself to the god, I try to open myself for my husband.
But I cannot do it.
You would never allow such a thing to happen unless your husband has become so inconvenient that you desire to be made a widow.
The emperor’s threat echoes in my mind. I do not want to be a widow and now I can think of nothing but how I gamble with my husband’s life. When it is finished, I know that I am not with child. I think Juba knows it too. Years now, he has kept to the terms of our bargain. When we come together, he doesn’t speak of it. He doesn’t ask me questions or force me to examine my desires. He doesn’t press me to name my feelings or even to acknowledge what we do together when we are alone. He doesn’t try to unmask me or to delve beneath the surface of what I am willing to show him. And because he has not demanded that I give him my whole self, I have been able to give him a small part. If he sees that the seeds of my fondness for him might blossom into something more—he has been wise enough not to say so.
At least until now.
In the dark, his words are whispers against the pillow. “Do you love another man, Selene?”
The question catches me by the throat. Do I love another man? I am only half of one soul—I came into this world with another—and to be without him is a wound that never heals. It is a wound I bandage over with the fabric of my life in Mauretania. It is a wound so deep and hidden that it is not safe to touch. Helios. Horus the Avenger. Whatever name they call him now, he is my twin, my other half, and the strength of everything I do.
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