“My place is with him, in Mauretania, and I am going home …”
He shakes his head with furious denial. “This does not end it, Selene.”
“It ended the moment my son took his last breath.”
“We have a daughter together too.”
“No. We have nothing together. Let there be an end of it between us, you once said to me. I obey that command.”
“Now I command you to stay. Obey me or—”
“Do you remember you once wanted to bring me with you to Parthia?” I show him the palm of my hands, which have so often told our future. “You asked me to bury the armies of your enemies in sand. I said I could not do it and you called me a liar. Perhaps you were right. Think what you have seen me do with these hands. Think of the winds I have commanded. Think of the fire. Think for one moment of whose armies I might bury if provoked. I am taking my family to Mauretania and you will leave us in peace. If you do not, if you send ships after us, I’ll send your navy to the bottom of the sea.”
I hear the catch in his breath, see the whites of his eyes as fury overtakes him. But he is considering my words. He is wondering what I would dare and how he might stop me. “You cannot do it, Selene. No more than your mother could. If your mother had that power, she would have won the war. If you had that power, you would be in your mother’s place now, the Queen of Kings, the Empress of the World …”
“Are you so sure that I’m not?”
His brow furrows in confusion.
I don’t wait for him to figure it out on his own. “You have turned to me, again and again, to help you in your quest for power. I have nursed you. I have nurtured you. I have helped guide you and curbed your worst instincts. I have invoked gods on your behalf. You have prospered through me and through everything you have taken from me. Like Isis, I am your throne. It has been thus since the moment I discovered I had the power to destroy you … and chose not to. I was born to bring about a Golden Age, and through you, I may still do it. So has it never occurred to you that I am the ruler and you are the vassal?”
He startles visibly, a hand lifting shakily as if to slap me. We are face-to-face, here in this room where I once cowered at his feet. Where he once grabbed me and shook me until I was weak with fear. He doesn’t grab me this time. He does not dare. Once, I imagined we were two towering colossi on either side of a road, but we are both cracked and crumbling now. He is old and tired and broken. And I—I am divided against myself. Some part of me is determined to kill him, here and now. But the other side knows it is enough to ensure that he will never harm me or my loved ones again.
“You started a war with my mother,” I remind him. “But not only her. You made war on Isis too and called it a just war. Justum bellum, you said. She told you the war was not over and so it is not. She will win. Isis always wins. That is why I am leaving and I am never coming back. I will never again answer your summons. Not for any threat. Not for any promises of riches or glory. This is the end.”
He stares, but nothing changes behind his gray eyes. He doesn’t accept what I’m saying. “You have run from me before, Selene. You’ll come back.”
“No. You will never see me again.”
The flat finality of my words, spoken like an oracle, finally reaches him. He stares, rattled as I have never seen him. He looks as if he is shrinking into himself, falling into a pit of inner blackness, and though I should let him, I offer him one last chance at grace. “Caesar, if you ever cared for me, if there was ever a moment of genuine feeling in your heart, if I have ever pleased you, if you ever pitied me or admired me or wished to give me or my children anything, give me this: Let me go.”
When I say it, he nearly crumbles before me. His face screws up and then the words burst out of him like a plea. “I can’t! You are my Cleopatra and I am your Caesar.”
Perhaps I should remind him that Julius Caesar was parted from Cleopatra, that Aeneas was cleaved from Dido, that Cyrene lived apart from Apollo … but these are all dangerous pretensions. Bitter loss has taught me that there is peril behind wearing masks.
In the oldest Egyptian stories, Ra was the king of all gods and creation, but Isis held power over him because she learned his secret name. The name the emperor was born with is no secret, but it holds just as much power. He is not wily Julius Caesar. He is not pious Aeneas. He is not sun-drenched Apollo. He is not Set, the evil god of the desert. He is not Jason … and I am not Medea.
I lean forward, and speak the truth. “Hear me because I am going to tell you who I am and who you are. You are Gaius Octavius Thurinus and I am Cleopatra Selene of House Ptolemy. You built an empire, and I fed it. This is our story. The whole of our story. And this is how it ends.”
PART FOUR
THE BREAD
Thirty-nine
I do not stay to watch Augustus suffer or to see him draw himself back together. I stay only long enough to meet his eyes one final time. Mine, green as the Nile. His, a stormy gray. I will not forget his eyes and he will not forget mine. But we understand each other now as we have never done before.
He sees in me not only the cowering girl who has always made common cause with him, but also her fiery twin—the one who would burn everything he has built to ash. I am dangerous to him, and for the first time, he knows it.
While I draw breath, he will never again threaten Juba’s life with impunity. Nor will he take my daughter from me unless she wishes to go. That much we understand. And so I leave him.
I leave him atop the Palatine Hill and cross the bridge to Tiber Island. I cross again to my home with the black and white tiles where my children threw stones from the balcony, and I do not look back.
We hoist black sails in Ostia and carry our son’s sarcophagus to Mauretania. We make harbor in the shadow of our lighthouse and my unfinished Iseum. We are met by our royal guard, mounted on horseback. Beneath helmets adorned with smart plumes that bob up and down as they ride, the riders break into two ranks, forming an honor guard for our sad procession.
King Juba is grim-faced, his back stiff, his gaze so faraway that I’m unsure if he even cares that we have at last returned to our own kingdom. But I am comforted. My son died in Rome, but he was born here in Mauretania. He played here on these shores, collecting rounded pebbles from the beach. There, in the market, where Tala took him to taste honey and laugh with merriment at the actors in the streets. This city, Iol-Caesaria, is another child that Juba and I birthed together.
For that alone, I would hold it always close to my heart.
Our court is in mourning. We give Tala’s embalmed body over to her son so that he may bury her in the traditions of the Berbers. Ziri—or Mazippa as he is now called—and his people will paint her in red ochre and make a tomb for her in the side of a mountain. I take upon myself the expense for it. In honor of Tala, I also give her son a royal grant to vast plantations, making him the greatest Berber landholder in Mauretania. He will always have a place in our court, I assure him. Always a seat in our council chambers or at our table. Where he has no mother now, I bid Mazippa to consider me in her place, if he should feel I am worthy, but I know I am not.
In memory of Memnon, our Macedonian guards cut their hair in solidarity and sorrow. I commission for Memnon’s tomb a new sword, for he should never be without one, in life or death. Then I begin to make arrangements to return him to Egypt, from whence he came.
It is then that Lady Circe tells me that Memnon once asked her to put his last wishes in ink, for he himself could neither read nor write. She shows me the parchment, where he made his mark, a crude blot of ink. And there I see written that Memnon wished to be buried wherever I am buried, in Mauretania or Egypt, for he would never willingly leave his post.
These words would break me if I were not already broken.
On the day of our son’s funeral, our people line the streets from dusk to dawn to pay tribute to their lost prince. For Ptolemy, they give coins and silver jewelry, fine woven carpets and polished furniture, lit
tle ivory toys and silken clothes to carry with him into the afterlife. They loved their prince. Truly, they loved him.
We carve his name where the gods may see it. We perform all the sacred rites. And we seal him in his tomb with half the wealth of our kingdom. I do not count it much of a sacrifice, for we have already lost our greatest treasure …
At every step of the funeral and the feast that follows, Juba is at my side, stoic and silent. When we return to the palace, he takes my dazed daughter to her chambers, brushes her tears away with his thumbs, and tucks her into her bed as if she were still a small girl. He does all that is expected of him as a father. All that could be desired from a king. But there is nothing of a husband in him.
He does not seek comfort in my company. He does not speak to me. He cannot even look at me, and I fear whatever was between us died with our son. When I wake in the morning, Juba is already holding court. When I go to meet him in the stables before his daily rides, he is already gone. When I offer to dine with him, his slaves tell me he has retired to bed. We live in the same palace, but slip past each other like dim spirits in the necropolis.
I think we will live like this the rest of our lives, for it is all smashed.
All ruined.
Everything destroyed.
*
I must know how I swallowed a fire and why sparks now snap to my fingertips whenever I desire them to. If I can throw fire now, what can that mean? I think it means I imagined Helios always in my darkest moments, always coming to my rescue when no one else would. But perhaps I was always my own rescuer and I have survived everything on my own.
Who, then, is Horus the Avenger? A legend or lemur?
I will never know the truth of it. But if I have conjured up Helios in my sorrow, then why isn’t he here now? I have never suffered more than with the loss of my son. So if Helios is only a comfort that I give to myself, then why isn’t he here?
Perhaps, he is here. My mage once said that if he was alive anywhere in the world, Helios was alive in me. I feel him inside me even now. Perhaps when the Romans said he died in Thebes all those years ago, he did. If that is true, Augustus has nearly died more than once at my hands. If it was not Helios who nearly assassinated the emperor during the Eleusinian Mysteries … then it was me.
I remember the night of Agrippa’s funeral, I watched the crows fight over a scrap of meat and felt anger flare up inside me. The hut of Romulus burned before dawn. I think it was my doing. I think there has been a war inside my soul between an avenging sun god who wants nothing more than destruction and the moon goddess who pines to bathe the world in peaceful splendor.
If my wizard were alive, I would put these questions to him. I would demand that he answer them. I would demand that he tell me the truth, and I would stay with him until I could understand and believe it. But the wizard is long dead. So when the moon has risen, I go to the island upon which my Iseum is being built, and I reach for his essence, for the wisdom he gifted me here.
Thinking I am alone, I light candles in the nearly finished inner chamber and leave my tears where masons will build the altar.
How it enrages me when my search for spiritual guidance is interrupted by Publius Antius Amphio.
“I beg your pardon, Majesty,” he says, from the dim recess of an archway. “I was only just told that you had come to inspect the Iseum. I had hoped you would come in the daylight.”
He looks as if he had been abed and roused by panicked workmen before rushing here with his toga askew. The end of it trails on the ground when he bows. Since, in all the time I have known him, he has never made any real pretense of respect, I worry what bad news he might have for me.
Gathering up my candles, I take in the work he has completed. The piers of the Iseum look to be tall and strong. The stone walls look to be solid, tightly constructed, perfectly in order. Above us, the impressive dome has been laid over a temporary olive-wood frame. But Amphio’s mood is so subdued that I ask, “Won’t the dome hold on its own?”
Amphio, who has grown balder since we met last, stiffens. “It will hold, Majesty. Once it is set, we’ll remove the frame. The concrete layer, being one piece, will exert pressure downward rather than out. It will hold.”
“You’re sure?”
He nods gravely. “I swear it to you upon my life. What’s more, I won’t wait for you to execute me if it fails. I’ll stand beneath the dome when the centerings are removed as proof that I’m a genius or a fool.”
He is many things, but not a fool. “Tell me, then, why it is that you seem so sad when you should be boasting. What can have gone wrong now?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the Iseum, Majesty, save that I have not finished it sooner. I don’t believe that Isis exists, but you do. It would have pleased me for you to have found comfort here in your grief.”
If he is mocking me again, I will have his head. But one glance at his stern face with its hawkish Roman nose and I know he’s sincere. “Prince Ptolemy would have made a very great king,” he says.
Though he is a stiff-necked Roman, he does understand compassion. He does understand suffering. In spite of the fact that he claims no gods for his own, he somehow understands our need for them. His humanity is evident in the beauty of this temple he is building. And for the first time, I am sure that even Amphio has a soul. He may not know it, but Isis and I do.
*
IN the first days of summer, there comes for us a letter from King Archelaus. This letter catches us unawares because we thought nothing of the King of Cappadocia when we sailed away from Rome with the girl he meant to wed. In our grief, we broke the betrothal without offering recompense and I cannot imagine that a king of his stature would easily forgive such an insult. Yet he sends heartfelt condolences for our loss.
Perhaps our long-standing friendship accounts for his willingness to overlook this slight to his royal dignity. Or perhaps this letter has less to do with friendship than with the plea of the emissary he has sent with it. “King Archelaus asks your intercession in a matter most dire,” the ambassador explains when we receive him in our mostly empty throne room, where potted palms droop wearily in the corners. “The King of the Jews has again taken it in his mind that his sons are plotting against his life and has again put them both in chains. Princess Glaphyra too is being held against her will.”
The king and I are so numb with our own loss that I only murmur, “Again?”
“Herod sees enemies round every pillar. He’s expelled friends and ambassadors from Judea. The country is in disarray. We fear that our Princess Glaphyra may be put to torture or executed.”
I glance at Juba for his reaction, to see if he has anything to say. He is silent on his throne, distracted, his eyes on the colorful paintings that line our walls. I force myself to be the queen I still am and clear my throat. “We are grieved to hear this news. How can we be of assistance?”
The emissary steps closer, his sandals sweeping softly on the marble floor. “The emperor hesitates to act against Herod on King Archelaus’s word alone. But if the emperor were to hear censure of Herod from voices he trusts and esteems, we believe he will strip Herod of his throne.”
Juba’s head snaps up as if he finds it surprising that news of our fall from favor has not spread to all corners of the empire. “Caesar is not interested in anything we might have to say about this matter. Your king would have a better chance of success if he were to sail to Judea himself and steal his daughter away in the dead of night. We can offer no help to you whatsoever.”
It is a flat and impolitic dismissal; there is nothing I can do to take the sting out of it for the Cappadocian emissary, who stiffly backs out of the room with a frosty farewell. If we had not already made an enemy of Archelaus by breaking the betrothal, we will surely have made one of him when he hears how his emissary was treated in our court. And yet my concern is for Juba. I reach for his hand, but my husband flinches away and I am reminded of how much he hates me.
*
I make a gift of ivory to the Cappadocian emissary to make amends for my husband’s harsh refusal, but I cannot think of what else I might do. That night, turning the problem over in my mind, I cannot sleep. In my aimlessness, I drift to the empty room where my son once slept. I touch the wooden chest at the foot of his bed. I sigh softly as my fingers find the indentation left by the hair-curling iron I once flung away because my son was so excited to run to his father’s arms.
The memory rips through me, bittersweet. I light the tiny lamp beside his empty bed. Then I climb in and press my cheek to his pillow, hoping to catch a scent of my boy and remember how preciously he tucked his little fists beneath his chin. By day he was as fierce as a Berber warrior, but at night, what a sweet babe he was …
Thinking I am alone, I am startled by something cold and wet against my hand and look down to see the nose of my son’s dog. How soft her ears are, I think as I stroke her big ugly head. Luna climbs up into the bed next to me and I stroke her, wondering if she too is searching for my son. She was there with him at the end, barking and barking. She might have abandoned him to the fire, running away in fear as the horses did. But she stayed with him, a loyal hound indeed.
Luna’s silver paws have healed up nicely, but she is shy of flame now, her eyes wary when I lift the lamp to get a closer look at Isidora’s handiwork. “Poor dog. You will never forget and neither will I.”
My son did not die in a bed, in the arms of his mother. He died near this dog, and I want to be near him. I whisper my son’s name and offer the bewildered animal the comfort that I cannot give to Ptolemy. I stroke her, searching the warmth of her coat, reaching for any tendril of connection to my son’s spirit.
All at once, the hound lifts her head in alertness at a noise at the door and I glance up to see Juba there. We have startled the king as much as he has startled us, and he gruffly asks, “What are you doing here with Ptolemy’s dog?”
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