Cleopatra's Moon

by Vicky Alvear Shecter

  I smiled in relief. When I had asked Juba earlier to escort me to Capua, he had said he was not sure he could get away on such short notice.

  “Leaving? With him?” Marcellus turned to me. “What is he talking about? Where are you going?”

  I cleared my throat. “The Temple of Isis on the way to Capua,” I said.

  “But why is Juba escorting you? I’ll take you instead!”

  “I have already made arrangements,” Juba said. “And I think Caesar would not be too happy to hear that you had ducked away from your duties at the Rostra to attend the rites of the banned Goddess.”

  Marcellus looked at me, then back at Juba. “Can we have a moment alone, please?”

  Juba hesitated. “Fine.” He looked at me. “We leave at sunrise.” He turned and walked stiffly away.

  “Selene — Cleopatra Selene, why do you have to leave right away? Couldn’t you postpone it a bit? You can visit Ptolly’s tomb anytime, right?”

  I nodded. But this time I wasn’t just going to visit Ptolly. “Yes, but I want to go tomorrow.”

  A look of hurt flitted across his face, but he replaced it quickly with his typical charming smile. “Well, I shall wait for you then!”

  Looking up at Marcellus, another strange feeling of unreality seized me. Had I just been kissing Marcellus? Pretty Marcellus, the Golden Boy? My enemy’s favorite?

  “I … need to get back,” I said. “My nurse will be looking for me….”

  “Your nurse? You do not need to account to her. You are not a child!”

  I smiled up at him, pleased. “Nevertheless, she will be wondering.”

  “Come, I’ll walk you back,” he said.

  As we neared the girls’ wing, Marcellus whispered, “You know that we will have to act as if this never happened, yes?”

  Was he brushing me off? I flushed with shame.

  “That does not mean, however,” he said, “that you and I have to act that way when we are alone.” He touched my wrist.

  Marcellus, nearly twenty, never lacked for attention from fawning women — or from fawning men, for that matter. Everybody, it seemed, desired the beautiful, charismatic successor to the ruler of the world. But what if this was all a big joke to him — the seduction of the whore-queen’s daughter, as Octavianus would put it? What if Marcellus was dallying with both my brother and me in some kind of sick game? I shook my head slightly to clear my thinking.

  “Selene,” he said, bending to look into my eyes, which I had averted.

  “Cleopatra Selene,” I mumbled.

  He smiled. “Cleopatra Selene. You are not saying anything.”

  “I think,” I said, “considering that we have to act as if nothing happened between us, around others, perhaps it would be better if we acted that way when we are alone too.”

  “But —”

  “Thank you for walking me back,” I said stiffly. And then I turned and hurried toward my cubiculum, trying to hold on to as much of my tattered dignity as possible.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I met Juba before dawn in the torch-lit gloominess of the stables. Sleepy grooms walked our horses out to help us saddle them and tie up our belongings. I jumped when a nearby rooster shattered the purple-gray stillness with its shrill crowing. Juba laughed softly. I smiled back, a little embarrassed.

  “Selene! I’m glad I caught you before you left!”

  Marcellus approached us in the dark. Juba looked at me and then back at Marcellus, who hurried up the slope to us in his beautifully draped white toga and gleaming leather sandals.

  As Marcellus came near, Juba asked him, “Aren’t you worried about what everyone will say about you coming to say good-bye to Cleopatra Selene?”

  “Ah, but I have made it clear that I have come up here to say goodbye to my good friend Juba,” he said, winking at me. “And if Cleopatra Selene happened to be here too, well …”

  “Marcellus, this is a bad idea, and I do not wish to be used as your cover,” Juba said tightly.

  “I am not asking you to,” Marcellus said.

  Juba turned and walked back into the stables.

  “Here, let me help you with that,” Marcellus said, patting my horse’s rump as he came over to help me tighten the straps. My mouth went dry and I suddenly felt very small standing next to him. In my sleepiness of the morning, I had almost forgotten my strange evening with him. Almost. But when his forearm brushed against mine, everything came flooding back: the scent of him, the memory of his mouth on mine.

  “I wanted to ask if you if I offended you last night,” he said softly, so no errant horse boy or stable slave could overhear. “I suspect I did, only I do not know how.”

  When I did not respond, he added, “Will you at least tell me so that I can make amends? Perhaps I moved too fast? For that, I am sorry. Well, not sorry, but …” He smiled down at me, and my stomach contracted. I continued tying and retying the leather straps on my pannier. My silence seemed to agitate him, which only made me more self-conscious and unable to formulate a thought, let alone a sentence.

  “I … I must return to the atrium to start greeting our early clients. Will you come see me when you return, Selene? I mean, Cleopatra Selene. Yes?”

  “Well, that about does it!” said Juba in a loud voice, rejoining us. “Thanks for stopping by to wish me well on my journey, friend!” he said, clapping Marcellus on the back. And then to me: “It is time to go.”

  Marcellus paused. “Yes, well. May Mercury protect you and keep you safe from danger and dark magic on your journey,” he said loudly, with a false cheerfulness. He smiled at me, and again I marveled that such a beautiful young man would take even the slightest interest in me. I tried to smile back but I felt frozen, like a rabbit under the shadow of a swooping hawk. He turned and walked back toward the house.

  Juba and I mounted and rode our horses out of the stable yard. At the crest of the Palatine Hill, we paused to take in the stirrings of the beast that was Rome. Already the city teemed with people, slaves pouring out of homes like ants on the march. Citizens and freedmen flooded the streets too — seeking escape from their horrible cubicula, I surmised — in search of fresh bread and morning wine.

  What did Juba see when he looked out over the city, I wondered. I suspected it was not what I saw, for when I gazed across Rome, I saw the fumes and vapors of Hades’ netherworld. Smoke curled from countless household kitchens, bakers’ ovens, hypocausts, blacksmiths’ furnaces, and funeral pyres, joining over the valleys to form a dark cloud of lung-searing ugliness below us. From this height, we could still breathe fresh air, but it wouldn’t be long before we would find ourselves coughing at the stink of black smoke, sweating bodies, illegally dumped chamber pots, rotting refuse, gutted fish at fish stalls, and the sweet scent of blood from early morning sacrifices.

  Once out the Porta Capena, the gate that led to the Appian Way, we rode past the parade of tombs. Burials and cremations were outlawed inside the city, so as wealth poured in from Egypt and other conquered lands, the rich of Rome built massive houses of the dead along this road. I sighed, noticing how many of the recently built tombs evoked the grandeur of Egypt in the form of obelisks and even pyramids. It was the Roman way — destroy the originating culture, then steal its art and beauty.

  After a time, I fell into a trance as I bobbed with the rhythm of the horse, closing my eyes to feel the morning sun. I jumped when Juba spoke.

  “The way you are handling Marcellus is really quite masterful,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “If you wanted to make him obsessed with you, ignoring him ensures it.”

  “I do not know what you mean,” I said, feeling criticized but not understanding how or why.

  “Marcellus has been blessed by the gods with many gifts. Everything comes to him easily, including women. As a result, he has grown only to be interested in those who show no interest in him. It becomes a challenge, you see.”

  “No, I don’t ‘see,’ Juba. What are yo
u trying to say?”

  “I am not trying to say anything. I am just admiring how you seem to know exactly how to manipulate Marcellus to your favor.”

  I flared with irritation. “Manipulate? But I am not doing anything!”

  “Precisely! Excellent work.”

  My mouth dropped open in surprise. He thought my tongue-tied confusion and reticence around Marcellus was an act?

  My expression gave Juba pause. “You have noticed how he has been slowly turning on the charm around you, yes? And that the more you ignore his attempts, the harder he tries?”

  “No, I had not. And I … I do not say anything to him because in truth, I do not know what to say,” I admitted.

  Juba looked at me and smiled. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”

  “By the gods, Juba!” I growled. “I am in my fifteenth year! Girls my age are getting married and having children all the time.”

  “Not for much longer, if Caesar has his way,” he said. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Caesar wants to move up the minimum age of marriage for girls from twelve to eighteen and for boys from sixteen to twenty,” Juba said. “He believes we need to shore up Rome’s lax morality, to go back to the purer days of Roman pietas and virtus.”

  “How would that help restore this so-called Roman piety?”

  “Well, it’s not only that,” Juba continued. “He wants to change the laws to discourage cheating between spouses.”

  I stiffened. He would, I knew, find some way to insult my parents with this campaign.

  “If the husband catches the wife with a lover, he is allowed to murder the lover without question or consequence,” continued Juba. “And he is allowed to divorce the wife without having to return her dowry.”

  “And if the wife catches the husband with a lover?” I asked.

  He looked blankly at me.

  “There is no consequence for the husband cheating?”

  “Well, no,” Juba said, seeming nonplussed by the very question.

  I sighed. Of course not.

  “Caesar also wants to encourage the educated classes to have more children. Especially since the number of slaves — not to mention immigrants — already far outstrips the number of citizens.”

  I frowned, trying to remember how Mother had managed the prickly populations of Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, slaves, and immigrant traders in Alexandria. My heart sank as I realized I did not know, and I would never be able to ask. I made a mental note to ask Isetnofret if any of Mother’s ministers had left records I could study.

  “I think he may wait awhile to introduce the legislation,” Juba continued. “Still, he’s a genius. He has convinced Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy to write about Rome’s ‘pious’ history. That will soften the Senate in preparation for the morality laws to come. It’s a brilliant strategy, really,” he added with a sour face.

  I smiled. “Friend, I do believe I detect a note of cynicism about your hero!”

  “It is just that I am not so sure — as a writer — how I feel about him using poets and historians of their caliber to push —”

  “Lies?” I asked. Hadn’t Octavianus used a masterful campaign of besmirching my mother to turn all of Rome against my father?

  “Public policy,” he said flatly.

  “Aren’t you doing the same thing, though?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, indignation sparking in his eyes.

  I paused as my horse shook his head. Was that a warning to keep my tongue? We’d had this argument so many times before…. “Well,” I said slowly, overriding the warning. “You only write about Roman history, Roman geography, Roman language, Roman painting — all to the glory of Octavianus’s idealized Roman world.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I write about what I’m interested in. And he is not commissioning the works from me as he does with Virgil. I write what I want.”

  I laughed. “You are like Odysseus, only you don’t know you are lost at sea.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, tightening his grip on his reins.

  “Why don’t you write about Numidian heroes like your ancestor Massinissa or your great-great-uncle Jugurtha? What about the bravery of your own father? You have forgotten your homeland, your destiny, and even the kingship that Rome stole from you,” I said. “You’ve even lost your name! And you use your scholarship to stay distracted from what the gods originally planned for you.”

  His face darkened. “How would you know what the gods planned for me? Perhaps they planned that I should die in Numidia, but by the grace of Julius Caesar, I was spared. Have you ever thought of that? I am a scholar because those are the gifts the gods endowed me with, and living in Rome as a Roman citizen is how that destiny is fulfilled….”

  “But you were a prince of your people! Julius Caesar stole your future as king as surely as Octavianus stole mine. Shouldn’t you fight to reclaim your —”

  Juba’s jaw worked. “No!”

  I persisted. “I think you get angry because you know I am right.”

  He looked at me with a fierceness that made me break eye contact. “You, right?” he said with more malice than I had ever heard from him. “Every time I talk to you, it reinforces for me that I have made the right decision, not you. I do not want to spend my life bemoaning my fate or wondering what could have been!”

  Now it was my turn to tighten my hold on the reins. “Yes, of course,” I said, my voice dripping ice. “I can see how much better — excuse me, safer— it is to lose yourself in intellectual pursuits rather than fight to claim what is rightfully yours.”

  Juba set his mouth. “I do not fight battles I know I can never win.”

  “Ah, but that is the difference between you and me. I carry the blood of Alexander the Great. And he never fought a battle he ever considered he might lose!”

  “And how do you propose you could win any kind of battle against the most powerful man in the world, eh? You are like an ant throwing crumbs at the giant Cyclops!”

  “Just because I do not have a plan formulated yet doesn’t mean I will never have one.”

  Juba made a scoffing sound in his throat, and I urged my horse to trot ahead of his. Which one of us was right? Was it better to stoically accept what the Fates handed you? Or to push back, to use the emotional energy that the Stoics strived so hard to control, to shape your own fate, like Alexander? When did acceptance become acquiescence to an intolerable situation? Should I follow Mother’s lead and fight until the end, controlling even my own death? Or should I be more like Juba, creating a safe little life in the shadow of that which ultimately sought to oppress or destroy me?

  A surge of defiance straightened my back. I was the daughter of the greatest queen of Egypt who ever lived. Even if it meant my death, I would fight to reclaim what had been stolen from me. It would be a dishonor to her memory to do anything else.

  Juba and I did not speak again until we arrived in Capua.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  As they did every full moon, devotees of Isis had gathered to sing her praises and honor her beauty. The air nearly vibrated with anticipation as her followers gathered to take her Great Journey. By sunrise, the induction into the Mysteries would be over. Some, it was whispered, never made it back from the Goddess’s side. Others, touched by the Goddess, spoke of prophetic visions. My heart raced with excitement. What would it be for me?

  At dusk, two young priests — heads shaven and eyes rimmed in kohl — escorted me into the courtyard. I walked out barefoot, clean from my purification bath and wearing a pure white shift of tightly woven linen, taking careful steps over the uneven grassy grounds of the clearing beside the Temple.

  Prayers and chants vibrated through the evening air. Bursts of scent from the early blooming roses wafted in the balmy breeze. Two other initiates joined me in the center of the small circle: a woman bent like a grandmother, her long gray hair unwound, and a young man whose newly shaved head gleamed in the darkening light.r />
  After what seemed like hours of chanting and prayer, someone put small clay bowls in our hands. “Drink,” one of my priestly escorts ordered. “For your journey begins now.”

  I drank. Wine with something else, something unfamiliar, bitter yet not unpleasant. I tilted my head back and took the liquid into me as if the Goddess herself poured it into my mouth. More chanting. Shadows flickered as priests and priestesses held torches for us in the night air.

  The strange drink filled me with warmth, bringing a tingle into my toes and out my palms. I wanted to dance, to weave myself in and around the hypnotic chants. I put my hands over my head and swayed. Suddenly, an image of Ptolly flitted past me — of his little body dancing to the pan flutes at Caesarion’s manhood ceremony. My eyes filled. Ptolly’s ba-soul was here, watching, grinning, blessing me, I was sure.

  I could hear my heart beating in my chest. A feeling of great love swelled inside me for all of us — all those who hurt and yet so earnestly and purely loved the Goddess. Everything vibrated and pulsed with light and power. The world shimmered, and I gasped at its beauty.

  A woman’s voice — the priestess’s? — urged me to lean on her as she guided me inside the Temple. A dark room. Small bronze lamps on tripods in the corners. Priests and priestesses chanting, the smoke from pungent incense weaving in and around their swaying faces. “Lie down,” someone ordered.

  I did. I lay in the sun under a blooming sweet citron tree. The sky a brilliant blue. Juba smiled at me and leaned over to kiss me. I closed my eyes. His skin was so warm. So smooth. I pressed myself against his bare chest, shocked to discover that my chest was bare too. I surrendered to the sensations — the feel of his warm lips, the pounding of his heart as I caressed his skin, his soft kisses along my neck. How much I had longed for this!

  “My queen,” he murmured, and I froze. Despite how much I desired him, I did not want to be “his” queen. I wanted my rightful legacy in Egypt.

  The Goddess laughed, a light, breathy laugh. I pushed Juba away. He looked surprised and hurt. “I am sorry,” I said. “My destiny has always been to be the queen of Egypt.”