Song of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  “You’ve cheated death before.”

  He swallowed, his eyes closing. “I’ve never been so ill before. I haven’t slept well since we parted. Until you give me your forgiveness, I shall not even sleep well in my tomb.”

  My forgiveness. Surely it must come with a price. “Then put me on the throne of Egypt and my daughter after me.”

  “My daughter,” the emperor said. “I got a child on you and I’d like to see her before I die.”

  At this very moment, a shadow passed in the doorway and we both looked up to see Agrippa. I choked on air, the emperor stiffened, and Agrippa looked like a gladiator who had just apprehended a fatal wound—as if someone had plunged a dagger into his chest. I knew, without question, that he’d overheard the last few words, and my blood went to water. Agrippa’s gaze slid over me, then back to the emperor, then back to me again. My hair was loose over one shoulder, my hand still in the emperor’s grasp, and I couldn’t seem to pull away. Agrippa cleared his throat. More than once. Then, slowly, he seemed to come into possession of himself. “Piso is here. I thought you’d want to know.”

  THE emperor loved theater and he was the world’s greatest actor. I might have known that he wouldn’t permit himself to die without an audience. We all crowded into his sickroom. Livia took a place beside the emperor’s bed, her expression haunted. Julia was there too, clutching Marcellus’s hand, though it broke all rules of propriety for a Roman husband and wife to cleave to one another. Then there was Agrippa, ramrod straight, his eyes cutting me with every glance.

  None of us spoke, and in the tension it was difficult not to jump every time the fire sparked in the brazier. “Piso,” the emperor said, breaking the silence. “You’ll find my papers in order on my desk. They detail the finances of Rome and our military situation. I entrust them into your care and commend them to the Senate.” Piso stammered, as if he’d never expected to have any official duties, and the emperor wheezed. “Contrary to the slander hurled against me, I don’t fancy myself King of Rome, nor will I name a successor to the honors I’ve earned under Roman law.”

  Then Augustus held out his shaking hand where we could all see it and worked at pulling the golden signet ring from his finger. “This is the seal I’ve taken as my own. It stands as testimony to my authority.”

  We all stared at the glittering ring in his palm, the one etched with a sphinx, an apt symbol for the man who even now, in his last acts, was a riddle. Lady Octavia nudged her son forward to take the ring, but the emperor motioned to his most trusted soldier. “Agrippa. I’m leaving my seal to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. I want everyone here to witness that until I recover, or until the Senate chooses someone to replace me, Agrippa shall have my authority. Even my bitterest enemies must admit that he’s qualified, experienced, and competent. I recommend that when I am dead, Rome choose him to rule in my stead.”

  We dared not speak, and yet the room seemed to erupt. There were sighs, sharp intakes of breath, and a hostile sound came from the emperor’s sister. Marcellus shot his mother a warning look. Octavia’s son wasn’t such a crassly ambitious young man that he’d have demanded to know why he’d been passed over, yet the question still floated in the air. Agrippa took the ring, his expression unreadable, well-practiced stoicism.

  The emperor glanced to his daughter. “I’m leaving my personal property to my son-in-law Marcellus and my daughter Julia. Let there be no more talk about how I mean to make a dynasty.”

  Oh, it was a masterful performance! If he died, he didn’t want to be remembered for having tried and failed to make himself absolute ruler. Better that he pretend it was never his aim at all. Piso was entirely taken in. He clutched the papers against his chest and breathed with heavy emotion. “They’re jackals who say you mean to make yourself King of Rome. They don’t know what a great man you really are, Augustus. You’ve given us back the Republic. You’ve ended the civil wars. That’s what you’ll be remembered for.”

  My fingernails dug into my palms as I awaited the next pronouncement. My throat swelled with emotion as I willed him to speak of my fate. But though he’d summoned me from across the sea to attend this grand deathbed drama, he made no reference to me at all. “I’m tired,” the emperor said. “I bid you all farewell.”

  The officials hurried for the door and his wife went with them. Livia wasn’t one of the Julii and she’d given him no children. He’d made no provision for her or her sons, Tiberius and Drusus. He hadn’t even encouraged that honors be voted for her after his death. In humiliation, she couldn’t retreat swiftly enough. Only the emperor’s sister and I were bold enough to stay.

  “I don’t understand,” Octavia said to the emperor. “I thought we agreed that Marcellus—”

  “I saved your son’s life just now,” Augustus said. “Do you think I got where I am because Julius Caesar announced I was the successor to his reign as dictator? No! He gave me all his money and I inherited the loyalty of his soldiers. I made myself the ruler of Rome, and so shall Marcellus.”

  That was all very fine and well for Marcellus, but what of me and my daughter? My mind reeled with a thousand schemes. It wasn’t in me to give up. When Octavia stormed out of the room, I said, “Call them back. Call them back and ask them to witness that you’re naming me Queen of Egypt!”

  Augustus sighed. “Selene, didn’t you hear what I just said about Marcellus? If I named you Queen of Egypt now, I might as well order your execution. If I were alive to support your bid, you might reclaim your throne. But without me? Egypt is too wealthy a province to surrender without a fight. If I cede it to you on my deathbed, the Senate would deny it or try to make war on you. You’re not strong enough to hold Egypt. Not by yourself and not with Juba. Especially not when you’ve given me only a girl child.”

  Curse him. I wanted to shriek and throw things. With his final breaths, he was content to betray those he loved and those from whom he’d asked forgiveness. When I whirled for the door, he called after me. “Be content! You have Mauretania. I’ve done right by you, and you’ll realize that one day. But if I ever wake up again, I want to see our daughter.”

  UPON leaving the emperor’s chambers, I was overtaken on the stairs by the enormous shadow of Agrippa. As he stepped toward me, his eyes burned with dark emotion. “I’ve defended you,” he said, voice low and filled with pain, as if he’d been the victim of treachery. “I sat idly by while Octavia took you to her breast as a daughter. I let you be a sister to my own wife. Even though I knew you for a witch, Marcella and I were happy when you became Queen of Mauretania. Now I see how blind I’ve been. You’re a poison, like your mother. No, you’re far worse! At least your mother never made any pretense about being a virtuous girl.”

  It’d been a long time since anyone had spoken to me this way and I bristled. “Just what have I done to deserve your insults? When I lived in this house, I offered only love and companionship to Octavia and Marcella.”

  “You offered a great deal more to the emperor, didn’t you?” Agrippa’s expression was all fury. “How could you have done it to him?” That’s how it was with the men who loved Augustus. First Juba, now Agrippa. Neither of them would see that Augustus was a lecherous tyrant who abused all those in his care with neglect, casual cruelty, or betrayal. They refused to see the master they served as he was, so they saw him as a victim. My victim. “To take him to your bed,” Agrippa growled low with disgust. “To seduce him while betrothed to Juba . . .”

  “I didn’t seduce him. Why don’t you go back into his room and ask him? Be a man and not a loyal dog!”

  The grizzled soldier’s mouth fell open. “You want me to think that he attacked you?”

  Why was it so hard to believe? “That’s just what he did, but you won’t ask him, will you?”

  Agrippa looked back up the stairs as if considering it. Then the moment passed. “We all saw you at your wedding, Selene. If he—if he did such a thing—it would only be because you bewitched him. Just like your mother bewitched Caesar a
nd then Antony. It had to have happened more than once for him to get a bastard whelp on you.”

  I hadn’t hated Agrippa for a long time, not even though he’d made possible every bad thing that had ever happened to me. This, however, was a step too far. “Never call my daughter that again.” As if seeing a vengeful flash of heka in my eyes, Agrippa actually took a step back. Still, I was keenly aware of the emperor’s signet ring on Agrippa’s finger and knew this balance of power wouldn’t last. By morning, Agrippa would be the most powerful man in Rome. Then who would challenge him? Oh, the patricians would back Marcellus against a new man like Agrippa, but I couldn’t know who would win that power struggle or what it would mean for my future. Agrippa wasn’t the kind of man I wanted for an enemy, so I moderated my tone. “Agrippa, I know disillusionment, so I won’t hold your words against you. But whatever you heard, whatever you think you know about my daughter, you must never repeat.”

  “Repeat it?” He looked at me as if beholding a lunatic. “To my dying breath, I’d deny that I heard Augustus claim your child! Thank Jupiter it’s a girl, or we’d have another Caesarion to deal with all over again. Whatever he promised you about Egypt, I’ll use this signet ring to make sure it doesn’t happen. If you expect him to play Caesar to your Cleopatra, put it out of your mind, because tomorrow he’ll be dead.”

  Eighteen

  BUT the emperor didn’t die. Not the next day or the day after that. Augustus lingered in some place between life and death, neither fully awake nor fully asleep, gasping so shallowly that it seemed as if all Rome held its breath to listen. Beneath the window to his sickroom, Livia sat in the courtyard, her eyes vacant, like a hunted animal unsure of what move to make next. I felt the same way. With the emperor would perish my hopes of winning back Egypt, unless Rome fell into complete chaos—which even I couldn’t hope for. My mind spun wildly as I tried to fasten upon a plan . . .

  I wanted to side with Marcellus, but there wasn’t a ruthless bone in his body. Octavia’s good-natured son couldn’t stand against Agrippa without that signet ring. Even if he did, it would mean another civil war. Perhaps with Rome at war with itself again, the Parthians would seize the opportunity to expand their empire at Egypt’s expense. I couldn’t let that happen.

  Agrippa had complained about Republican factions in Rome. Those were likely my father’s old partisans. The emperor liked to claim that Antony and Cleopatra would have destroyed the Republic to rule as monarchs, but during the civil war, half the Senate—including the staunchest Republicans—had fled to my father’s side. They’d feared the young Caesar was the greater threat and they’d been right. Maybe some of those same senators had survived the wars. Maybe one of them would come to power, someone who would favor my claim to rule my mother’s kingdom. But who? Pacing back and forth beneath the columns holding up the emperor’s house, I came full circle to the very same realization I’d made as a girl. Augustus was my enemy, but he was also my savior. He’d taken my birthright away from me and was the only one who could give it back. I needed him. I needed him to live. I needed him alive and indebted to me. For the love of Isis, I needed to find some way to forgive him, at least long enough to nurse him back to health!

  Stiffening my resolve with a cup of unwatered wine, I called for a slave to find a kithara and climbed the stairs to the emperor’s rooms. Musa hovered by the door, tight-lipped and nervous. “I give him cold baths to keep his fever down. He has lucid moments, but he’s frail. Nothing else can be done.”

  “I’ll try to soothe him.” I took the cushioned stool and positioned the kithara on my knees. Dampening the unwanted notes with the palm of my left hand, I used my other hand to pluck at the strings with a little wooden pick. I thought of Mauretania and the unusual melodies I heard in the streets there, until I found myself making music. Augustus opened his eyes, murmuring, “Now she comes to me as Sappho serenading Apollo in his darkened cave . . .”

  “Is that what you want?” I smiled softly. “To see Sappho in the afterlife?”

  “I won’t see anything,” he croaked. “I don’t hold with that mummery about the Elysian Fields. When I close my eyes the last time, there’ll be only blackness. Death is the end of all things.”

  He said it boldly, but I could see that he was afraid. After all the lives he’d snuffed out, now he was afraid for his own. Somehow Isis allowed me to feel compassion. “My goddess promises salvation. To venerate her is to find our way to the afterlife, reunited with all those we’ve loved, reunited with the parts of ourselves that we’ve left behind. In the Nile of Eternity, we live forever. This is why it’s so wrong of you to deny the people Isis. Why it’s wrong to close her temples and deprive people of the faith that sustains them through this life and into the next.”

  His dry lips cracked into a near smile. “I’m dying and you torment me like a harpy. You defy me as well. I told you that I want to see our daughter before I die.”

  I stopped myself from shuddering. “And you will see her, for I believe you’ll live a long while yet.”

  Lifting a trembling hand to point in my direction, he said, “More the fool, you. If you were wise, you’d give me your forgiveness and hurry back to Mauretania before the vultures pick over my corpse. Rome isn’t a safe place for royalty.”

  As always, he tested me. “You’re not dying and I’m going to stay until you’re well.”

  “If I weren’t dying, I wouldn’t feel so wretched.”

  “To make the bread, the wheat must first suffer beneath the sickle. Maybe you feel so wretched because you’re becoming something new.”

  He turned his head, gray eyes meeting mine. “What new thing would you have me become?”

  Hope stirred in my breast that even someone like the emperor could change. “I’d have you become a more just and merciful ruler. A man who would rather be remembered for securing the peace than for triumphing over his enemies.”

  “Ah, Selene,” he said. “You’re still so pitifully young.”

  LEAVING the emperor’s sickroom, I came upon Philadelphus throwing dice in the courtyard so that Bast could scamper after them. “Oh, Bast!” I cried, stopping to stroke her and scratch behind her ears. It was the first time I’d seen our cat since my return and the first moment Philadelphus and I had been alone. It was an opportunity, at last, to speak without censure or spies. I went to my knees beside him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. “I’ve seen him,” I whispered. “He’s alive, Philadelphus.”

  My little brother looked over his shoulder at the house, where I’d left the emperor wheezing upon his bed. “He’s sicker than before, but he’s always managed to claw his way back to health. If I see truly, I think he’ll do it again this time.”

  “Not him,” I said, shocked both at my brother’s prediction and that he’d mistaken my words. “I speak of my twin.”

  Philadelphus slowly lifted his eyes to mine, his slim shoulders tensing, his mouth forming words of grief and denial that his voice wouldn’t sound. Then he leaned closer, as if afraid to even whisper my twin’s name. “You’ve seen Helios? Alive?”

  I smiled over the sob in my throat. “Yes. Oh, yes. I thought you’d know it because of your sight. I wanted to tell you before now, but I couldn’t think of a way.”

  Bewilderment clouded his eyes. “But I thought . . . in the Rivers of Time, I so often saw him dead . . .”

  I gave him a little shake. If he denied it the way Euphronius denied it, I’d go mad. “Helios came to me in Mauretania in an ancient temple. I felt his touch as real as you feel mine now.”

  “He came to you. He found you . . .” Philadelphus’s eyes glistened, and then he smiled as if it suddenly made sense. “I suppose that he would.”

  I didn’t have to tell him that no one else must know. He’d lived too long in this Roman court of intrigue not to know how to keep secrets. “Now he calls himself Horus the Avenger.”

  Philadelphus smiled wider, as if overawed. “Just as they named him at our mother’s funeral.” H
is smile turned to that characteristic roguish grin. “If he’s become Horus, and you’re the New Isis, what does that leave for me? Surely, I must be a god too.”

  It made me laugh. “We Ptolemies are never humble, are we?”

  I played the kithara again for Augustus the next day. Musa had propped him up in a chair so that his feet could soak in a wooden tub of seawater. Beneath the cold poultice on his forehead, the emperor’s complexion was ashen, as if his illness were burning some part of him away; I hoped it was the cruelest part. “I’m so weary of baths,” Augustus said irascibly, pointing an accusing finger at Musa. “He made me soak in cold waters at Baiae until I couldn’t bear it. ‘Just let me die in Rome,’ I told him. Still he leaves me wet and shivering.”

  “We’ll have the slaves carry you back to your warm bed soon enough,” the long-suffering physician replied, leaning over the emperor to put an ear to his chest. “Or would you be more comfortable at the home of Maecenas?”

  “It’s too late for comfort,” the emperor wheezed, and then his eyes fell on me. “Physicians are torturers, you know. I’m told you have one at your court in Mauretania. This Euphorbus, who hails from Alexandria. What are his credentials, Selene?”

  My fingers stilled on the harp, the music dying away. The emperor’s question seemed casually posed, but his gaze was intent. It was a potent reminder that even now, even so near to death, he was a danger. He’d been spying on me and I didn’t know how much he’d learned; I had to spin a convincing lie without falling into a trap. My hesitation went on too long, and not wanting the emperor to see my rising panic, I averted my eyes.