Cleopatra's Moon

by Vicky Alvear Shecter

  Power. I had none. Not yet, anyway. And he was going to have it all. He would rule the empire one day. I remembered my initiation vision. Was he to play a role in helping me regain Egypt?

  I blinked, looking at Marcellus with new eyes. Perhaps marrying Gallus was only a small step. Perhaps I needed a powerful ally in Rome for protection once I was back in Egypt. Suddenly it seemed clear. I could do what Mother had done. I would ally myself with a leader of Rome.

  I smiled up at him. This time when he bent to kiss me, I arched up to kiss him back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  In What Would Have Been the Twenty-fifth Year of My Mother’s Reign

  Still in My Fifteenth Year (26 BCE)

  Although I had decided to ally myself with Marcellus, I had to be careful. If Juba was right, he would tire of me as soon as he “conquered” me. So I would not let him fully seduce me. My reluctance seemed to add to his fervor, which both excited and frightened me.

  I wondered about telling the Priestess of Isis about my connection with Marcellus. Would she approve? Or would she think I was taking an unnecessary risk? I could not ask her, because she had warned me not to discuss our plans, even when I visited Ptolly’s tomb. She would contact me, she had instructed, never the other way around. But the waiting for word from her was agonizing.

  Which is why, when I received a tiny note in demotic, a form of Egyptian writing, hidden in the folds of a freshly laundered tunica, I could barely keep my hands from shaking. The note was brief:

  IMPRINT OF CAESAR’S SEAL. NEED FOR GALLUS. STATIM.

  I groaned. The priestess wanted me to steal Octavianus’s seal? But that was impossible! Outrageous! Did she think I could just interrupt him at dinner and ask for his ring? Why did the Lady of Capua think I could do something like this?

  I paced inside my cubiculum, trying to regulate my breathing. After a time, I saw the sense of creating a counterfeit seal. Gallus — as well as our agents here in Rome — would likely need to forge documents to keep suspicion at bay as plans moved forward. But knowing that did little to reduce my sense of dread over the difficulty of the task.

  For several nights, before bed, I lit a small fire in a clay bowl in front of a statuette of Isis Pharia I’d taken from Egypt. I pinched a bit of incense and sprinkled it over the flames in an offering to the Goddess. I prayed for her help:

  You who showed us the path to the stars,

  You who nourish all the fruit of the world.

  I pray you, end my great travail and misery.

  Fill me with your Wisdom,

  Guide my hand in the Work I do for you and Egypt.

  On the third night, as I drifted off to sleep, the room still thick with smoke, I dreamt of the day I begged Octavianus to allow us to give Ptolly the Egyptian rites. Over and over again, I saw myself in his tablinum as he twisted my arm and pushed me into his desk. How the force made something clatter to the floor. How he swatted my hand away before I could touch it, slamming it back down on his desk. How he had grinned when he told me he’d had his signet ring made from Mother’s gold….

  I sat up. The Goddess had shown me. I understood. “Thank you, Great Lady of Light,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

  Days after receiving my instructions, I worked a small ball of wax in the palm of my hand as I sauntered toward Octavianus’s tablinum. I was in search of a scroll I could not find in Livia’s collection — that was my excuse for being there, if anyone asked.

  Octavianus often signed documents between the sixth and seventh horas, after the last of his clients completed their morning ritual of kissing his ring and asking for favors. He demanded silence then. So I had paid a young slave boy to release a large snake in Octavianus’s atrium just as a large group of female slaves came by. The uproar, I hoped, would draw the Princeps out of his study.

  The screams were louder and more frantic than I had imagined. I rushed into the house through the back servant’s entrance, peering around the hallway just in time to see Octavianus and Thyrsus stalk over to the screaming women. “By the gods, what is the matter?” shouted Octavianus in a fury.

  “It is an omen! A bad omen!” one of the women wailed.

  I massaged the wax ball more furiously, softening it with the heat of my fear. I snuck into his study. There. His heavy seal ring lay beside the red Samian inkwell, just as it had been in the memory-vision the Goddess had sent me. My heart beat in my ears so loudly, I was sure the sound would call him screaming back into the room.

  With shaking hands, I pressed the seal cleanly into the warmed wax. The ring clattered as I put it down, and I winced at the noise. But nobody came. As I rushed to the doorway, I placed the imprinted wax into a small box to protect its design.

  Peeking out, I saw that one of the guards was trying to cut off the snake’s head. I bolted out the back of the house, listening to Octavianus call for an Etruscan haruspex to divine the meaning of the snake that appeared below the death masks of his ancestors.

  When I finally looked at the wax imprint of the seal, I had to fight the temptation to smash it against the wall. A sphinx. Octavianus had adopted the Egyptian sphinx as his symbol. My stomach roiled with disgust. He had found yet another way to gloat over the destruction of my beloved Egypt. But I did not destroy the mold. I replaced the lid and planned my next excursion to the Temple of Isis in Capua.

  Weeks after delivering the wax base of my enemy’s seal, I received another message from the priestess. I was to meet her agents by the central fountain in the heart of the Subura. come in disguise, the note instructed, and wait, our agents will approach you.

  On the assigned morning, I shrugged into a slave’s cheap brown wool tunic that Zosima had filched for me and slipped my feet into rough rope sandals. I grabbed a dark mantle to put over my head. Just before I stepped out of my cubiculum, Zosima hissed, “Wait!” She handed me a small bronze plaque hanging from a rope chain. “You must wear this.”

  I groaned. The plaque read property of caesar. I shook my head, handing it back to her.

  Zosima was adamant. “Girl slaves are preyed upon,” she said, the furrow between her eyebrows deepening. “But nobody dares hurt any of Octavianus’s slaves. Even criminals are afraid of him.”

  She slipped the rope over my head. Zosima had seemed hurt that I had not confided the reason for my subterfuge, but I had to keep her safe too. I made my way out of the compound through a little-used path by the stable.

  As I passed, a horse reared and whinnied. “Whoa, boy, whoa,” said a familiar voice trying to calm the beast down. Octavianus. I stiffened into stone as if I had looked into the face of Medusa herself.

  Footsteps. I moved the mantle to cover my entire face. “You, girl!” he called. “Run back and tell my man to bring me the scrolls I left in my tablinum. Now!”

  My stomach contracted. What would he do to me if he found me out? I kept my eyes down as I turned in the pretense of obeying.

  “Did I not tell you to run, stupid girl? Or do I need to take a whip to you?” he roared, incensed at my hesitation.

  Footsteps. An intake of breath. “Caesar,” another familiar voice said — Juba? “This is one of your wife’s slaves. Her loyalty is commendable — she defies even you to serve Livia.”

  Octavianus growled. “She had better be thankful you recognized her, for I would have beaten her within an inch of her life for not obeying me. Be gone, miserable girl!”

  I scurried away as he repeated the order to one of the stable boys, holding the mantle tightly under my chin. I stopped at the far side of the stable and leaned against the wood, shaking with fear. Romans regularly beat their slaves, sometimes even killing them, which was their legal right. Discovering my ruse would have given Octavianus just the excuse he wanted to beat the daughter of the queen of Egypt.

  Running footsteps. “Princeps! The co-consul just sent a messenger. He wishes to speak with you immediately.”

  “Gods!” Octavianus groused. “I leave for Spain in a matter of days! Can
I have no peace even for a short ride?”

  “His messenger said it was critical, sire.”

  The sound of a whip petulantly thrown on the ground. “Fine! Tell my boy to unsaddle my horse,” he commanded as he stomped off.

  I closed my eyes in relief. When I opened them again, I cried out in surprise. Juba was standing before me with a thunderous look on his face.

  “What in the name of Jupiter do you think you are doing, Cleopatra Selene?” he demanded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked. I had been so proud of my slave-girl disguise!

  “I need to know why you would do something so dangerous,” Juba said between clenched teeth.

  I shrugged, not answering. He stepped closer. “Do you not have any idea the risks you take leaving the Palatine? A young girl on her own, without a male escort?”

  “I am not so young,” I shot back. “Besides, I have this.” I released the mantle to show him the bronze placard announcing me as a slave in Caesar’s house.

  Juba rubbed his left ear. “I am glad to see you taking some precautions, but Cleopatra Selene! You must trust me on this. It is not safe for you.”

  When I did not respond, he asked, “Where are you going in this ridiculous disguise?”

  “To the Subura.”

  “What? This cannot be so! Why would you go to the dirtiest, poorest, most dangerous district in all Rome?”

  “Are you done now?” I asked. “I wish to go on.”

  Juba sighed. “I am going with you, then.”

  “No, you are not! I do not need your so-called protection!”

  He chuckled while shaking his head, as if trying to cover his anger. “Nonetheless, I cannot in good conscience let you roam by yourself.”

  “You may do whatever you wish,” I replied, starting to walk. It would likely be easy enough to lose him in the crowds.

  I walked behind him through the tree-filled valley between the Palatine and Caelian Hills, on our way to the teeming center of the city. I watched as people nodded to Juba or greeted him, and I bristled at my invisibility. It was one thing to be invisible by choice; it was quite another to be invisible because people thought I was his slave.

  The streets of Rome were busier than ever. Thanks to the flood of wealth from Rome’s conquered lands, the city roared with the sounds of new construction and foreign slaves. Scaffolds teetered precariously along half-built walls as workmen scurried up and down the wooden beams like ants on a feeding frenzy. Carpenters banged, sawed, and called out to one another in hoarse voices. Loose tiles, hammers, and crumbling bricks rained down on hapless crowds, so those who dared step outside rushed past building sites with arms overhead for protection. The air was thick with wood and plaster dust. A tumult of voices — in Latin, Greek, Celt, Iberian, Persian, and others — clamored to be heard over the din.

  “Why don’t we cut through the Argiletum?” Juba asked, turning and bending to speak into my ear so that I could hear him. I willed myself not to shiver at the feel of his warm breath. I had thought that my dalliance with Marcellus would have burned away the attraction I felt for him. It had not.

  I nodded, though I thought I should still go straight to the Subura. I did not want to be late for the priestess’s agents. But, if I were honest, I did not want to leave Juba’s company either. We turned toward the street of booksellers and cobblers. I would just accompany him for a few minutes.

  Juba smiled sheepishly as he pointed to a small, dusty bookshop at the end of the crowded lane. “Let us stop in there. Just for a minute. I want to see if they have my new book.”

  “You wrote another one?”

  He nodded. “It is called Omoioteles.”

  “Equivalences? Equivalences of what?” I asked, puzzled by the book’s Greek title.

  “Language,” he replied. “In it I prove the Greek origin of the Latin language.”

  Again I thought how much Juba would have loved our Library in Alexandria. Even in the Argiletum — which was less hectic than the main throughways — the noise discouraged conversation. People called out greetings, sellers hawked cheaply copied scrolls, cobblers banged mallets on leather.

  Like most Roman shops, the dusty bookshop had little light, so it took a moment for our eyes to adjust. He sought out the bookseller, a portly man in a threadbare toga, while I wound my way around the pigeonhole stacks of scrolls, breathing in the familiar, reedy scent of old papyrus.

  A flash of sunlight from the front, and then a voice. “Juba, darling, I thought I saw you come in here!”

  “Vistillia,” he said, smiling. “How nice to see you.”

  Curious, I inspected the woman, whose richly dressed attendant followed meekly behind. The woman was draped in an elegant tunica and stola of the finest, thinnest aquamarine linen, a new favorite import from my beloved, ransacked Egypt. She wore pearls in her ears and on her wrists. Even though she was clearly not a young woman, the force of her beauty, confidence, and sensuality was undeniable. I felt a surge of jealousy. Was this one of the older married women Juba dallied with?

  “How silly to look for your own book in a store such as this when it is well known that the best houses in Rome already have a copy,” she said, smiling up at him. “I myself have three!”

  Juba smiled back, looking slightly embarrassed.

  “I heard that you visited Cecelia Metella’s villa recently,” she said with an exaggerated pout. “And yet you have not visited me in some time! You will have to make this up to me!”

  Juba murmured an answer that I could not hear. The woman moved closer and placed her hand on his arm in a very intimate way. The sight of her pressing her breasts “innocently” against him incensed me.

  Without thinking, I blurted, “Oh, master,” in a singsong voice. “I believe I have found the other scroll you were looking for.”

  Juba looked at me, confused. The woman turned her painted face in my direction. “Master?” she cried. “You did not tell me you purchased your own slave girl!”

  “I … I …,” Juba stammered.

  “Yes, here it is,” I interrupted, grabbing the nearest scroll. “Cato the Elder’s speech on Roman piety. You know the one — where he rails against unfaithful wives, blaming them for the undoing of Roman morality.”

  The woman stared at me, then laughed. “Oh, how funny. But Cato wrote no such thing! That sour old coot just wrote about farming, didn’t he?” she said, turning to Juba.

  Juba glared at me. “Cleopatra Sel —”

  “Cleopatra!” the woman squealed. “You named your slave girl Cleopatra? In Caesar’s own compound! That is just hysterical, darling. But what a fitting name for your little pleasure slave.”

  My mouth dropped open in dismay. She thought I was … that I was his … ?

  The woman came over to me and removed the covering from my head. “Ah. Now I understand why you named her thus. She really does look like the statue of that wicked queen.”

  She must have been referring to the statue of Mother that Julius Caesar had erected in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar. Octavianus, mysteriously, had not seen fit to topple it, perhaps because he dared not destroy anything related to his adopted father. Whenever I was able to slip away to the small temple, I spent many hours staring into the marble face that Caesar and my father loved and all Rome feared.

  “Tell me,” she continued. “Does she perform as well as one might think with a whore’s name like that?”

  I felt my cheeks grow red. Glancing at Juba, I saw that he was trying to suppress a smile. He was enjoying my humiliation! How dare he? The woman turned her back to me and faced Juba again. But I could not let the insult pass.

  I tapped the woman on the shoulder. “I should clarify, Domina,” I said with exaggerated innocence and respect. “I am not his ‘little pleasure slave,’ as you so eloquently put it.” I leaned forward as if we were exchanging important secret information. “For that kind of work, my master prefers the
boys in the baths.”

  With one final smirk in Juba’s direction, I tossed the scroll back into a basket and stomped out of the little bookshop.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I watched my rope-sandaled feet as I hopped from raised stone to raised stone so that I could cross the road without sinking into the nauseating stew that sluiced down the lane. A man yelled, “Move it! Move it!” forcing us to make way for a mule team hauling a massive slab of marble on a metal sledge.

  The crowd grumbled and cursed. According to Roman law, no delivery carts were allowed within the city during daylight hours because of the way they tied up the already overcrowded roads. But if you were rich enough, you could get away with anything. My stomach dropped when I saw the hieroglyphs running alongside the top of the marble as it passed me. I wondered which sacred temple in Egypt the Romans had ransacked so that a rich senator on the Esquiline could redecorate his mansion.

  Once in the Subura, I headed for the central courtyard fountain across from the clothes cleaners, where I had been instructed to wait for the priestess’s agents. I sat on the rim of the fountain while women and slaves of all ages and nationalities gathered water from the fountain’s greenish spouts. The smell of urine was so overpowering, I wondered for a moment whether the fountain spewed waste instead of water.

  Then I remembered how the cleaners bleached their fabric. A pair of Roman men reached under their tunics and relieved themselves into the oversized terra-cotta pythoi right outside the cleaners’ stall. Two slaves dragged one of the urine-filled vessels inside. I shivered with distaste, knowing what was next. They would pour the fresh urine into a low vat, where they stomped and worked the fabric with their feet, using the liquid to bleach the cloth a pristine white. I looked at the weeping, ulcerated sores on the slaves’ feet and ankles and shuddered.