Cleopatra’s Daughter: A Novel (48 page)

“Who cares about our childhood?” she said heatedly. “There are only eight days to find cloth for a veil!”

Marcellus gave Julia a desperate look. “Why don’t you go shopping with Selene,” he suggested. “Juba can take us back—”

“We’ve been to every store,” I interrupted. “There’s nowhere in Rome we haven’t gone.”

Julia’s look was miserable. Everything was ready. Her handsomely embroidered cloak of red and gold. A tunic woven from the finest silk. Her pearl-encrusted sandals, her bangles, her underclothes. Only the veil remained. Marcellus looked as if he were about to weep himself. And then I remembered.

“I think I have something. In the chest I brought from Alexandria—some swaths of red silk.”

Julia gasped. “Can we see them?”

I glanced at Marcellus, who smiled at me with the deepest gratitude, and I was forced to admit to myself that my revelation was not entirely altruistic. “Of course.”

Marcellus exhaled audibly. “I’ll bet Selene has something that would be absolutely perfect.”

Julia shot him a look, but when we returned to the Palatine and I opened the chest that had been locked for more than four years, she reached forward for the first swath of silk and exclaimed, “This is it!” It was the material left over from a chiton I had worn to my mother’s last feast. It had been the Feast of the Inseparable in Death, when my parents had invited everyone who had been close to them to dine one last time. I hesitated, wondering whether or not I should tell her.

“You probably don’t want that one,” I said finally.

But she had already draped it over her head. “Why not?”

“Because it was the cloth I wore to my mother’s last dinner.”

“The feast of a queen,” Julia whispered, regarding herself in the
mirror. The red contrasted beautifully with her mass of black hair, and she didn’t care what the material had been for.

“It might bring you bad luck.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “That’s only superstition.”

“Your father wouldn’t think so.”

“And do I look like him?”

No. She looked like the most beautiful bride who would ever be carried across the threshold of a villa. Pearls imported from the Indian Sea gleamed on her dark neck, and in eight days, when her hair was dressed in similar ornaments, Marcellus would be the envy of every man in Rome. I let her take the silk, but as she was folding it into a neat square for her seamstress, she sat down on my bathing room chair, and tears began to well in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” I exclaimed. “You have your veil. Everything is ready.”

She nodded, as if she knew it was foolish to cry. “I know.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

She looked up at me, and her dark eyes suddenly appeared enormous, as if they belonged to a child.
“She
won’t be there,” she whispered, and immediately I was ashamed of my resentment. No one in the world knew Julia better than Marcellus. Her father, her stepmother, even her stepbrother only cared what happened to her so long as it advanced their will. In a world of pretty silks and pearls where everything was theater, Marcellus was her only real happiness, and her mother wouldn’t even be able to meet him on the wedding day. I took a seat next to her and offered her my hand. There was nothing I could say, so instead we sat together in silence and I thought of how selfish a friend I had been.

The excitement of Julia’s wedding didn’t stop me from wallowing in my own misery in private. Though I put a smile on my face and helped Julia with everything a bride might need—packing her chests, choosing her perfume, finding the right silk tunic for her wedding night—I still felt an empty ache in my heart when Marcellus looked at me or I heard him laugh in his mother’s villa and knew it would be one of the last times I would ever have that sound wake me in the morning. Yet Marcellus was bursting with happiness. He was marrying a woman he loved, and who loved him back. There would be spectacles and entertainments to plan for an entire year, and before long Augustus would make him consul and officially name him the future emperor of Rome.

Two nights before the wedding, Marcellus crept into my chamber, where Alexander, Lucius, and I were whispering about the war in Cantabria and how it might be many years before we’d have to see Livia’s sour face again. Since the announcement of his wedding, he had stopped coming to us, and I presumed from the nightly creaking of his window that he was visiting Julia instead. But he took up his old position on the third couch, and my brother asked eagerly, “Well, what’s it like to be getting married?”

Marcellus smiled. “Wonderful. Frightening.”

“How can it be frightening?” I teased.

“Well, think of the responsibility,” he said. “Now, there will be a house to maintain, and slaves to buy, and—”

“You’re not really going to buy slaves?” I exclaimed.

“Of course he is,” Lucius said. “How else is his house going to run?”

I stared at Marcellus.

“I will treat them properly,” he promised swiftly. “I would never send them away for getting pregnant.”

“Or push them into an eel pool,” I added, “or whip them for broken dishes.”

“Certainly not!”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Will you pay them?”

He hesitated. “I … well … sure. Why not? Every Saturnalia, they can all receive presents. Julia can take care of that.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I’ll be too busy planning the Games.” He grinned widely. “There’s the Ludi Plebei, the Ludi Apollinares, the Ludi Megalenses, and the Ludi Ceriales.” He looked at my brother. “And you’ll help me, won’t you?”

My brother couldn’t have been more pleased with any request. They spoke at length about horses, and floats for parades, and which animals from Augustus’s zoo would be the most likely to awe the plebs if they were used as part of the opening processions. Marcellus didn’t speak again about marriage, but before he left, he paused at the door one last time and looked back. “Lucius and the twins,” he said, his voice filled with regret, “I’ll miss our nights together.”

When he shut the door and Lucius left, I turned on my side and faced the wall. Alexander knew enough to simply blow out the oil lamp. Then he kissed my hair and whispered that it would be better in the morning.

But it wasn’t. It was the last day of Saturnalia, with all of the shops in the Forum closed, and a hundred different things still to be arranged. There was the matter of the food, and reminders had to be sent across Rome to the homes of butchers and bakers to ensure that the proper amounts would be delivered the next morning. Wine, honey, vinegar, and garum had to be available in considerable quantities, and despite the fact that it was a holiday, merchants arrived throughout
the day with heavy chests and barrels. Nothing more important than this wedding would ever happen beneath Octavia’s roof, so the slaves rushed from room to room with wash-buckets and brooms, using feather dusters on the most delicate statues and ladders to reach the highest mosaics. Marcellus went to spend the day with Julia, and when Alexander asked whether I’d like to join him and Lucius at the odeum, I shook my head.

“What will you do, then? Sit out here on the portico and feel sorry for yourself? It’s cold,” he protested. “Come to the odeum. There’ll be warm beer and
ofellae.”

“I’m fine. Besides, there’s work to be done in the theater.”

“Over Saturnalia? Even Vitruvius isn’t working.”

“There’s just a few things I’d like to see to,” I lied. “It’s important.”

But my brother knew me better. “Selene, you care more about that theater than Marcellus does. He’ll probably step inside it once.”

“That doesn’t matter!” I said angrily. “It’s my project. Vitruvius gave it to me, and I’ll see that it’s done right. Work doesn’t stop just because it’s a silly Roman festival.”

I convinced Octavia to let me go, and two Praetorians were sent with me to Marcellus’s theater. I took my book of sketches, although truthfully there was nothing I planned to sketch. I simply wanted a place away from the madness of preparations; a place where I could sit one last time to remember how simple life had been before engagements and weddings and bitter envy.

We crossed through the Forum Holitorium, where the vegetable stalls were shut for Saturnalia, and though the guards wanted to take the shortcut, I refused, thereby avoiding the Columna Lactaria, where Horatia’s daughter had been abandoned. This winter hadn’t brought any snow, but gray clouds curtained the sun, casting a pall over the city and darkening the streets. When we arrived, I could see that the guards were worried about rain. There was only one
umbraculum
between us, so they gave it to me and waited beneath the arches while I inspected the empty theater.

A great deal of work had been completed since the building’s conception: the
cavea
, where more than ten thousand spectators could sit; the stage, which would soon be covered in mosaic; and the three tiers of arches supported by columns in each of the Greek architectural styles, first Doric, then Ionic, and finally Corinthian. Every day for nearly a year I had come here, with either Vitruvius or the guards, and watched the men build. I had been allowed to choose the artwork and mosaics, and the workers knew better than to slight me, since Vitruvius had made it clear that I was as important to this theater as Marcellus himself.

I walked to the stage and ran my hand along its edge. The wood had been smoothed to perfection, and when I was sure that there were no splinters, I seated myself so that I looked out on the
cavea
. Years of hard labor would be required to complete the rest of the theater. Builders would grow from boys to men here, as I had grown from a girl to a woman in the time since it had started. I thought of my excitement when Marcellus first asked Augustus whether I could help in its creation. I’d believed it was Marcellus’s way of showing special favor to me, and it had been, only not the kind I’d imagined. He didn’t really care about this theater, and tomorrow he would take Julia as his bride. She would press her soft cheek against his chest as he carried her into their villa, and once he untied her girdle their new life would begin. I could feel the sting of tears beginning in my eyes. Then a figure appeared at the back of the theater, and I stood swiftly.

“What are you doing here?” I exclaimed.

Juba smiled as he advanced. “I saw the guards and thought there might be trouble inside. I didn’t realize you had come here to cry out your sorrows. But I suppose that every tragedy deserves a stage.”

“I’m not crying,” I said sternly.

Juba raised his brows. “My mistake.”

“I came here to make some final plans. This area,” I said unconvincingly “still needs a mosaic.” I stepped down and strode purposefully past him. And then it occurred to me. “I know why you’re here,” I gasped. “Augustus wants you to spy on me!”

Juba laughed at my foolishness. “Do you really imagine that I have so little to do with my time?”

“Then why aren’t you packing? Leaving for Mauretania on the next ship?”

Immediately, I regretted my words. He stepped back and said quietly, “Perhaps I still have business in Rome, like making sure my slaves have a place to go when I’m gone.” He moved to join the guards, and the three of them talked about the war in Cantabria, completely ignoring me. When I finally asked to be taken back to the Palatine, the four of us walked the short distance in silence.