Cleopatra's Moon

by Vicky Alvear Shecter

  “Dominus.” The man lowered his eyes and turned to go.

  “Wait! Do you know which boy I mean? Do you know where I might find him?”

  The gardener’s face closed in wariness. “I am sorry, young mistress. The boy I think you mean was flogged and sold days ago.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I do not know. I do not question Domina’s orders.” He turned and scuttled away.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you have a crush on a mere garden boy, Selene!” Marcellus said, smiling down at me. “You must set your sights higher! Although,” he laughed, “almost everybody falls for a slave at least once, even the best of us.”

  “I didn’t … I don’t have a crush …” I did not know what to say. Livia had the boy whipped and sold. What did this mean? Was it because I had talked to him about Isis? Because he made contact with the priestess for me? But how would she know? And how would I learn the priestess’s plans if my messenger was gone?

  “Gods, Selene, you look like you have seen a daemon! Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I … er,” I stammered.

  “Ah, poor thing. You really did fancy yourself in love with this boy, didn’t you?”

  “No, I …”

  “Come. I was about to visit your little brother. Would you like to escort me there?”

  I nodded dumbly. We turned toward Livia’s house, Marcellus’s warm hand on my back.

  The leeches, it appeared, did nothing to reduce Ptolly’s fever. “Little Bull, you have to hurry up and get well so we can leave this house and go back to Octavia’s!” I told him one morning.

  “I don’t wanna go back to Octavia’s house,” Ptolly whined. His words surprised me, but I shrugged it off to the peevishness that came with feeling miserable.

  Octavia’s gentle voice echoed down the hallway. “How is my sweet boy doing?” she asked, and then winced as she entered the room. “Oh, I didn’t realize he was asleep,” she added in a softer voice.

  I whipped my head around back to Ptolly, only to see him pretending slumber. But why would he do that?

  Octavia turned to me. “How is he today?” she asked in a whisper, coming to his side. She stroked his head and frowned. “He is still much too warm!”

  “He is,” I agreed.

  She adjusted a small pillow on a three-legged stool and sat. “Why don’t you go? I’ll sit with him now.”

  “I have nowhere else I want to be,” I said softly. “We can sit together, if you like.” In avoiding Livia, I had found I ended up avoiding Octavia too, which I did not like. Her presence calmed me, and I even hoped Livia would come by and see her with Ptolly and me as a reminder that she dared not hurt us while Octavia was nearby.

  “How is Tonia holding up without Ptolly to play with every day?” I asked in a low voice.

  Octavia smiled. “She is furious that I won’t allow her to visit him. But we cannot risk any of the other children getting sick. By the gods, but she does have a temper!”

  “Ptolly and Tonia are so much alike,” I agreed, smiling. “They are both just like their tata.”

  She stood up. “Yes, well. I just remembered that I need to talk to both Antonia and Tonia about their studies. I will come back to see my little Marcus later.”

  She left the room so quickly, I could only stare after her, wondering if I’d said something wrong.

  When we could no longer hear her footsteps, Ptolly opened his eyes. “You were faking!” I whispered. “Are you mad at Octavia?”

  Ptolly shrugged. “A little.”

  “Why?”

  “I told her she should call me by my real name. She keeps trying to treat me like a baby. But I am nine now, and I do not want to sleep in her room anymore or be called ‘little Marcus.’“

  Was that why Octavia seemed so sad and haunted that first day of his illness? His assertion of independence pleased me, but I guessed that it also hurt Octavia. I hated the idea of one of us hurting the person responsible for our safety, but there was nothing I could do. Ptolly was growing up.

  I spent most of my time with him reading his favorite battle scenes from The Iliad. His enthusiasm for the blood and gore of the poem never waned. “Read the part where Menelaos hits Peisandros so hard on the head with his sword, his eyeballs pop out!” Ptolly demanded.

  I smiled, as it always amazed me how — when it came to the violent scenes — Ptolly had impeccable recall. But then I grew concerned, noticing that he had closed his eyes with fatigue after making the request. Just then Juba walked in. “Good morning, young Achilles!” he said.

  Ptolly opened his eyes and smiled at him. This was the first time I had crossed paths with Juba since I tried to kiss him. Distracted as I was by my fears for Ptolly, I had almost forgotten the entire humiliating event. Almost.

  “Good morning to you too, Cleopatra Selene,” Juba said, smiling.

  “Good morning,” I mumbled, pretending that I had lost my place in the scroll and I was trying to find it.

  “Juba, you usually come when Alexandros is here,” Ptolly said. “You are early.”

  Shame swelled in my chest at this confirmation that Juba had indeed been trying to avoid me. I continued searching the scroll so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “Read!” Ptolly commanded me, closing his eyes again.

  I read aloud until he slept, which wasn’t long, all the time aware that Juba was watching me. When I stopped reading, the only sound in the room was Ptolly’s breathing.

  “Cleopatra Selene,” Juba said quietly, “I wanted to apologize …”

  “No,” I said. “Please don’t. It is forgotten.” I smiled brightly at him. “Truly, that was ages ago. We need not revisit it.”

  Juba looked down. “It is just that …”

  Gods, I could not bear to rehash it! “So, why have you come in the morning when you usually visit later?” I interrupted, desperate to change the subject.

  He stopped and took a breath. “I am going to a banquet at Varro’s tonight.”

  “The scholar Varro?”

  “Yes, he is one of my patrons. We are celebrating the publication of my first book.”

  “I did not know you were working on a book! What is it called?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Oh, I thought I had told you about it. It’s called Roman Antiquities.”

  Again, I felt that strange surge of anger that I usually tried to suppress around Juba. “And yet you do not write about Numidian antiquities or the great battles of your grandfather, Hemipshall the Second?” I asked.

  He raised his eyebrows, staring at me.

  “I am sorry,” I said, looking down. Why could I not keep my mouth shut? “Publishing a book is an impressive accomplishment. Please, tell me about it.”

  He pulled up a wooden stool and talked excitedly about the project and the positive reviews it had garnered. His eyes lit up as he spoke, and I understood, more deeply, that Juba was a scholar at heart. How he would have loved our Great Library, I thought once again. How I would have loved to show it to him and introduce him to our famous philosophers!

  But that life seemed like a dream now. So I focused on the present — the warmth of his smile, the light in his eyes. We discussed the long and expensive process of getting his scrolls copied for distribution and his plans for future books. Ptolly never awoke, despite our enthusiasm. And we both pretended my clumsy attempt at kissing him never happened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Do not give him that water!” commanded the doctor.

  I jumped at his sharp tone. “But he is so thirsty!” I cried.

  “Please,” Ptolly said, licking his cracked lips. “Just a little.”

  The iatros scowled. “I have just given him a tincture of feverfew, and I do not want it diluted before it takes effect.”

  “Just a little?” I repeated, hating to see Ptolly suffer.

  The iatros sighed as if greatly put upon. “Fine, but not too much.”

  I held the honeyed water to my brother’s
lips, supporting his head as he closed his eyes. Ptolly had continued to deteriorate, his fever lingering, his strength gone. I tried not to notice how even the act of drinking exhausted him.

  “That’s enough!” the doctor said.

  Reluctantly, I pulled the cup away.

  “More?” Ptolly whispered.

  The doctor narrowed his eyes at me. But how could I not slake my little brother’s thirst? I could not bear the sight of the dry, sunken hollows of his eyes or the parched, peeling skin around his lips. For the thousandth time, I wished that Olympus, our royal physician in Alexandria, were here to help me.

  When I let Ptolly drink his fill, the iatros turned on his heel and left, muttering in Greek, “How can I do my job if this meddlesome child is constantly interfering!”

  He must have forgotten Greek was our first language. I knew he was going to complain to Livia, especially since I had refused to let him bleed Ptolly again. I could not bear to see my brother grow even weaker at the doctor’s ministrations.

  “Thanks, sister,” Ptolly murmured as I put the cup down.

  Zosima had made a salve of beeswax and chamomile oil. I dipped my finger into the small clay cup and spread the ointment on Ptolly’s mouth, tracing the pale and peeling contours over and over again, as if by sheer repetition I could bring back the sweet pink plumpness of his little-boy lips.

  “Tell me another story?” he mumbled.

  The weaker Ptolly got, the more he wanted to hear about our lives in Alexandria. It was as if my stories of Egypt were calling to him, like snatches of a beautiful song he could almost, but not quite, remember.

  “Which one?”

  Ptolly shivered and turned on his side, bringing his knees up to his chest. “I am so cold,” he muttered.

  I looked behind me at the doorway from which the doctor had just left. He would probably tell me not to add blankets to the thin wool covering already spread over him because his chill was likely the result of the tincture taking effect. Ptolly shivered again, and I felt a surge of defiance. How could he expect me to sit back and watch my baby brother suffer? After kicking off my sandals, I climbed onto his sleeping couch behind him, curling around his body and rubbing my hands over his goose-pimpled arms. I willed my body to heat him and, within a few minutes, his teeth stopped chattering.

  I raked my fingers on the scratchy wool. Our cats, Sebi and Tanafriti, responded to my summons by jumping onto the couch, one curling into his chest, the other around his head. I could feel his muscles relax as our combined warmth entered his body.

  “‘Nother story,” Ptolly prompted again, and my heart lurched at how young he sounded, younger than even his nine years.

  I sighed. “Which one?” I repeated.

  “When they tricked you.”

  I chuckled. I knew which story he meant. It had become his favorite. “It all started because I hated you with all my heart when you were born. I wanted to send you back to wherever you came from!”

  He made a gurgling, giggling sound in his throat.

  “Alexandros and I were four. I had complained bitterly about hearing your wails echoing down the empty halls when I awoke in the deep-dark,” I said. “Everybody tried to get me to like you, especially soft-hearted Katep. Do you remember him?”

  He shook his head and I swallowed, recalling Katep’s kindness, the pretty roundness of his face, the soothing scent of sandalwood and cinnamon of his skin.

  “One night, I was especially ill-tempered about your loud screaming….”

  “You? Ill-tempered?”

  I smiled, pleased he could muster the energy to tease me.

  “So Katep turned to me and said, ‘The baby misses his mother.’ See, he knew I missed Mother terribly during the long period she traveled to help Tata recover from his war in Parthia. But I refused to have empathy for you….”

  “Typical.”

  “Shush. Anyway, one night, your cries seemed particularly loud and miserable. So Katep said, ‘Come, let us see if we can help the milk nurse.’“

  “Nafre.”

  I paused. Not since leaving Alexandria had he uttered the name of the nurse he had adored — the nurse who had left him on the dock because she could not bear to live among Romans. “Yes. Poor Nafre looked exhausted as she paced with you on her shoulder.

  “‘I order you to make that baby stop crying!’ I told her. But Katep said, ‘She cannot, because he misses his mother,’ trying yet again to get me to feel for you.”

  “Could have told him … never work,” he whispered.

  “I told her to feed you and she said she already had. See, you were a little pig even then! All of a sudden, you belched like one of the burly dockworkers from the Harbor of Good Return!”

  I paused, thinking how happy I would be to hear him burp now, for that would mean he would have eaten something.

  “Well, as soon as you burped, Nafre shoved you into my arms and scurried off, claiming she had to wipe off her shoulder. I looked into your face, you looked up at me, and then … you smiled! I gasped. Your grin looked so much like Tata’s — though toothless. I turned to Katep in surprise.

  “‘See,’ Katep said. ‘Ptolemy Philadelphos loves his sister — She Who Shines like the Moon, She Who Soothes like Hathor.’“

  Ptolly made a noise in his throat. In previous tellings, he had giggled at Katep’s overly formal Egyptian words.

  I continued. “When I looked down and saw that you were still smiling at me, I had a total change of heart.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you grew up to torture me.”

  “No, Klee-Klee,” he muttered. “Tell it real.”

  He was using his baby nickname for me, as if his soul — and his memories — were growing younger. Traveling backward. It terrified me. My throat tightened, and I had to take a deep breath before I could speak again. “Fine. Zosima later confessed that she, Katep, and Nafre had planned the whole thing. See, you always smiled after burping. So the three of them waited for just the right time to strike. By throwing me in your line of vision as soon as you burped, it looked like you reserved your most charming, most loving smile just for me.”

  “G’ trick,” Ptolly said sleepily.

  “It was a good trick.” And it had worked. From that moment on, I had loved my little brother with as much ferocity as I had once hated him for his loud crying.

  Ptolly did not say anything else, and I thought him asleep. I pushed myself up to check. His eyes were closed. I could see the tiny blue veins in his eyelids.

  “Don’t go,” he whispered, barely moving his pale lips.

  I lay back down.

  “Klee-Klee?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I miss Nafre.”

  I closed my eyes, hearing the grief in his small voice. “I know.”

  “Do not leave me,” he whispered. “Like … Mother and Nafre.”

  My heart lurched. I cuddled up to him, surrounding him with my body, pouring my affection and love into him as if I could comfort him from the outside in. “I will never leave you, little brother,” I whispered into his ear. “Never.”

  I must have fallen sleep. The light was strange, as if a spring storm had come and gone. I wondered if the rain had cooled the air. Is that why I was so cold? I cuddled closer to Ptolly.

  My heart began to beat faster. Someone was watching me. I lifted my head toward the center of the room. The cats’ eyes — glittering, focused, intense — regarded me with a seriousness that stilled my breath. Sebi and Tanafriti, sitting like two statues in a tomb. Sentinels. Brother and sister cat, guardians to the realm of Osiris.

  I sat up. My stomach tightened, pulling the air from my lungs. Our cats waited for me to realize what they already knew. But I refused to believe them.

  I shook Ptolly, begged him to wake, tried to warm his cold skin with my hands, pretended that the blue around his mouth was a trick of the disappearing light. The silent cats stood as witnesses to my horror, as if guarding the portal for the ka t
hat had already left my little brother’s body.

  My sweet Ptolly, I promised never to leave you, but why, WHY, had I not made you promise never to leave me?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I stayed with Ptolly, refusing to remove my arms from around his cold body. Hands, voices tried to pry me from him, but I would not budge.

  Zosima finally broke through the horror. Talking to me in a low, soft voice, as if I were a toddler on the edge of a cliff, she said, “Let us prepare him for the Priests of Anubis. We will dress your brother like a true prince of Egypt.”

  She brought me water scented with lotus oil and I washed his body. I straightened his limbs, combed through his curls, and dressed him in Alexandros’s old Egyptian kilt, pectoral, and linen cloak. I cradled his small, cold head and set a coronet of rosemary and laurel in place of the golden diadem that Octavianus had long ago melted down to pay the soldiers he’d used to destroy my family.

  Zosima and Alexandros helped me surround his funeral couch with fragrant blooms and small pots of burning incense. Someone hung pine and cypress branches around the door frame, a Roman tradition, I later learned, to signify that death had polluted the room.

  Although I did not remember her entering, Octavia also refused to leave Ptolly’s side. Grief seemed to have torn her apart as well. She had crumpled at his feet, sobbing. I felt an even deeper kinship with her then. She had understood how special Ptolly was. She had loved him deeply too.

  Ptolly’s ka, I sensed, hovered nearby. It would have no peace until we completed the full rites of Anubis as we had done for our parents and Caesarion. It was the only way Ptolly would be reunited with them in the afterworld.

  “I will not fail you,” I promised. “I will find a way to entomb you in the sacred traditions.”

  Octavianus had a different plan. He commanded that Ptolly’s body be burned in the Roman manner. He had banned the worship of Isis and other Egyptian gods from inside the walls of Rome; he said he could hardly allow such practices in his own household. I overheard him arguing with Livia outside Ptolly’s death room while I pretended sleep.