Daughters of the Nile (16 page)

It’s such a pure, simple request that one would have to be a monster to deny her. In this one thing, Agrippa is the only man in the world who can give Julia what she wants. She’s gauged him; she’s chosen the precise moment when he wants to irritate the emperor without damaging the relationship beyond repair. She’s made a careful calculation, and I’m reminded that she is, after all, the daughter of the world’s foremost manipulator.

I am not the only one who learned at the emperor’s knee . . .

Agrippa rubs at the back of his neck. “Your mother has a reputation as a respectable woman. I can’t see the harm in it. I would permit you to see Scribonia today. Will that suffice?”

Julia’s breath catches in scarcely contained joy. Then Agrippa thrusts his big hand out to her. Julia stares at it, this beckoning hand with its scars and calluses ruddy in the morning sunlight. She’s making a choice, I realize, and there have been few enough of those in her lifetime. Perhaps she savors it. Julia gives me a brave smile. Then she steps forward and slips her delicate hand into his. Moments later, the two of them go out my front gate, the distance between them closing with each step.

* * *

NOT
long after, Iullus Antonius arrives at my door fitted out like a military staff officer, in a cuirass and military skirt, the flaps of which slap against his thighs as he marches into my house. My Roman half brother is some manner of tribune but I don’t know which kind. It doesn’t matter, really. He has whatever authority Augustus gives him, and since he married the emperor’s niece, he’s benefited greatly.

“You’re too late,” I say, leading him into my
triclinium
, where the morning meal has gone cold. “Julia already left this morning.”

Iullus scowls at me with as much resentment as the day he met me. “I only
just
heard she was in the city. You might have sent word to me.”

“If Julia had asked me to, I would have.”

His hands flex on the back of my couch—a blue one from Mauretania, with a carved citrus-wood edge. “To whom did she go? Augustus or Agrippa?”

When I tell him, he looks stricken. It takes him more than a few moments to compose himself. “As it happens, I didn’t come here for Julia.”

Lies do not come as easily to him as to me, but it is a brave attempt, so I pretend to believe him. “Oh?”

“I came to speak to your husband about what the emperor expects from him in the coming days.” Iullus is puffed up with importance as one of the emperor’s closest companions—as if the emperor had not already been here, in the night, desperate to rekindle
our
old intimacy. But if it pleases Iullus to think that he’s now the favorite, I’ll let him think it. After all, the emperor threatened to make me a widow, a fear made all the more potent when Iullus says, “The emperor will meet with Juba tonight on the Palatine Hill, and he wants to see him alone.”

Ten

I
don’t know how it will go between my husband and the emperor. I’m afraid. If after ten years of separation, the two men meet in violence, I’ll be to blame. If they embrace as brothers, I might also be to blame, for we’re all bound together by a singular crime.

In any case, I don’t want to bear witness to their reunion, but when my husband leaves, I find myself uttering prayers to Isis for his safety. And when Juba returns home that night quite unharmed, I’m relieved beyond measure.

I press him for details in the privacy of our
triclinium
, where we take our ease upon dining couches strewn with pillows dyed in saffron and blue. The king sends his cupbearer from the room, then pours himself some wine, but he cannot hide his conflicted emotions behind the rim of a cup. “I gave the emperor an ivory fibula pin for his cloak, carved like the sphinx on his signet ring.”
An odd token
, I think. A reminder that the emperor is every bit as unknowable as the desert riddler and just as deadly. Juba adds, “He received it gladly and threw his arm around my shoulder as if I were his long-lost son.”

But the way Juba’s fist suddenly clenches at his side, I worry there has been some confrontation. “And then?”

Juba takes a gulp of his wine. “He said nothing of his late-night visit to our nursery. Instead, he spoke of old times, when we would drink wine together by a warm fire, talking about the tragedy of Ajax. He said that he’d suffered without me at his side all these years, but that it was a sacrifice he needed to make for Rome. He said I was a good king and better than my father before me . . .” The throaty emotion in Juba’s voice tells me that he still falls easy prey to the emperor’s praise. “He greeted me very warmly, Selene.”

Personal warmth has never been one of the weapons in the emperor’s arsenal. Indeed, I doubt Augustus can even feel love. At least not the way other people do. He does form attachments, however, so perhaps his regard for my husband is genuine. Unfortunately, those the emperor keeps closest to what passes for his heart are often those to whom he is most cruel.

One glance at Juba as he averts his gaze tells me that he has, indeed, endured some manner of torture. “What did he say to you, Juba?”

Twice Juba starts to speak before he finally swallows whatever is choking him. “He said that every man is, alone, barbarous and pathetic, capable of any dishonor, and that he is no different. The emperor told me that he has committed great wrongs for which he seeks redemption. That it is only the fellowship of a man’s friends that keeps him from wandering off civilized roads. He says that he needs me now, as he has never needed me. That I’ve been called to keep men from drawing their swords; to keep friends marching together on a road to glory.”

I am rendered quite speechless by this secondhand account of the emperor’s expert manipulation; apologizing for his crimes without admitting fault, blaming Juba’s absence for his poor decisions, all while begging for help. The brazenness of it stuns me almost as much as the way it has affected my husband. As I stare at him, Juba drains his cup, swallowing the wine down in several gulps. When he is finished, he leans back against the pillows and I see what wars inside him.

He is a father who wants to protect his child. A son who wants acceptance from the only father he’s ever known. Perhaps even a husband who would defend his wife. Certainly a newly made king who wants to be of some consequence . . .

“You think me quite a self-important fool, don’t you, Selene? To think I may play some instrumental role in the age to come.”

“No, I don’t.” My husband wasn’t born under a prophecy; no one expected anything from Juba except that he would eventually betray barbarian leanings—an expectation he has frustrated his entire life by becoming the most learned and civilized of kings. And yet, from the first day I met him, empire building was on his mind. When I was still too much of a child to understand the ways in which the world had changed, my husband explained them to me with a determination to help Augustus make the world a better place.

However misguided my husband’s loyalties have been, whatever his role in my family’s downfall, Juba has never wavered in that ambition. And now, even I must bow to it. “I think you neither self-important, nor a fool. You’ve steered a difficult course between Augustus and Agrippa so that they both might rely upon you. It positions our kingdom very well. It’s excellent statesmanship.”

Hope shines in his eyes. “I don’t think it will be so very difficult to reconcile them, do you?”

I’m not so certain. Six years ago, Agrippa broke with the emperor and left Rome. The falsehood that he was driven away by a jealousy for the emperor’s nephew has become accepted as truth. But now Marcellus is dead and Agrippa is not the same man who fled Rome in a pique of temper. Agrippa has been tested. He’s more confident. He’s more ambitious. And I tell Juba as much.

“But I suspect Agrippa does not desire more power for himself,” Juba muses. “All Agrippa wants is for the emperor to adopt his son.”

I make an indelicate snort. “What Agrippa wants is to stop the emperor from claiming
Ptolemy
.”

Juba stiffens, his eyes meeting mine. “Then it is in my interest to help him, is it not?”

There is a part of me—a dark shadowy part—that rises up unbidden, with ugly ambition. I surprise myself with thoughts that our son’s future could be greater than Juba and I have ever dreamed. If Juba could set aside his paternal pride, we could have more power over the emperor than ever before. The night Augustus hovered in our nursery he all but
begged
me to reach for the world. I could take it. I could rule it or destroy it . . . and if Juba were to conspire
with
me . . .

But he will not and I would never ask him to. I will not abuse his loyalty as the emperor does. And though I was born to intrigue, I will not exploit my innocent child. Not for Egypt, not for the world. I
will not
trade the world for my soul, I remind myself. I have not come to Rome to campaign for power. So, should I feel threatened or flattered that Agrippa finds himself struggling against me in a war I’m not even fighting?

* * *

ACCORDING
to my husband, the emperor and his son-in-law are taking pains to avoid each other, relying upon Juba as their intermediary. It is, perhaps, the wisest course of action. Once, they hammered out a peace treaty with my father in the full view of their legions—whose unwillingness to bear arms against Mark Antony forced the bargain. They both learned from that mistake. They are now clever enough to keep their quarrel as shrouded in secrecy as their reconciliation must be. Only a few of us are aware that while the whole city prepares to celebrate, this fragile truce might fall apart at any moment.

Meanwhile, the children make nuisances of themselves on our terrace balcony, where they throw little pebbles toward the river. “Are you trying to hit the Tiber?” I demand, smoothing back my daughter’s golden curls into the ribbons meant to remind her that she’s a princess.

“We’re trying for the island,” Dora says.

“You’ll need a much stronger arm for that. Aren’t they clever, the Romans? To shape Tiber Island to look like a boat. Do you see the obelisk that makes the mast? That came from Egypt.”

My niece bobs her head with interest, but my daughter’s somberness makes me fear she remembers her time here as a child. Isidora was only a babe in my arms during the famine, when the sick and starving thronged the island, seeking help from the Temple of Asclepius. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the cries of the dying floating up to me from the river, and I fear my daughter remembers it too.

“Mama, will you take us to visit the island?” she asks.

“We’ll pass over it every time we go into Rome, where there are far more important things to see. I’ll take you myself to the Temple of Venus Genetrix, where you can visit a golden sculpture of your grandmother.”

Pythia’s eyes light up, but Dora only gives me an indulgent smile. “There’s a snake on that island and he calls to me.”

She’s always been a peculiar child. Helios once said that looking into her eyes was like seeing into the Rivers of Time, and it is true. Is it so wrong of me to wish that she could be just a normal girl, at least for a little while longer?

“Don’t be foolish,” I say, dismissing what she’s said as the fancy of a child’s imagination. But her words linger. It was a snake that took my mother to the afterworld. Snakes are guides for the dead and if one calls to Isidora, I will keep her from it. And so I do not bring the girls to visit Tiber Island.

Instead, we cross swiftly into the city, then take a litter up the Palatine Hill. Fierce-looking praetorians greet us before the laurel-decked entrance of the emperor’s residence. The modest front of the household in which I was once kept prisoner does not fool me. I know that the gates will open upon a collection of buildings and sprawling gardens, ornamented with priceless artwork, all joined together with the majestic Temple of Apollo.

I find it no small irony that once inside the sacred walls of Rome, I’m obliged to leave off my symbols of royalty, removing my crown and setting aside my purple cloak lest I offend the Romans who claim to tolerate no monarchs. And yet here upon this hill, in the heart of their city, is the seat of the true king who rules over them all.

The emperor calls himself only the
Princeps
, the First Citizen amongst equals. But here stands the evidence to the contrary: an imperial compound that has steadily grown into a palace, garden by garden, monument by monument, year by year. Like a slow and steady bricklayer, he’s accomplished this, like everything else, one plodding step at a time, so that it is now too late for anyone to complain.

Anyone, of course, except Agrippa.

I find Octavia in the sewing room amidst looms, spindles, and baskets of shining white sheep’s wool. To the fascination of my girls, I explain that in my youth, all the women of the emperor’s household toiled here, so that the emperor could claim he kept his women to the old Republican traditions.