Daughters of the Nile (48 page)

And so I am irritated with everything, my plans frustrated at every turn. Why, it doesn’t even look as if any progress has been made on the Iseum, so I call Amphio to account, forcing him to come before my throne in his formal toga. “I hoped to see more done,” I complain. “I was gone in Rome nearly two years. Perhaps if you spent less time with women of questionable virtue—”

“Patience, Majesty,” Amphio says, with an infuriating smirk. “The amphitheater took twelve years to complete and that was done with an army of slaves. Since you’ve been gone your tribesmen have not once, but twice stopped work, demanding higher wages. Even still, in that time, we have built the base, fashioned the drainage for your pools, and framed—”

“You must work faster.”

“I cannot, Majesty. We have only a thousand workers. I would like it better if we had three thousand. That is to say nothing of the stonecutters, carpenters, masons, and artists—we will need more money to lure the best. If I’m to build faster, I’ll need more men, more wagons, more everything. With the resources you have given me, no temple builder in the world could do better. It may be ten years more before it is done.”

A decade more! I’ve already reigned as queen over Mauretania for thirteen years. In ten more years, my daughter will be twenty-two years old; she will be married with children of her own by then. And my son? Why, he will be old enough to ride with the legions. Where will I be in ten years? Where will I be in two . . . ?

* * *

THE
king calls me to join him in the royal library adjacent to the palace. Once I have gone up the stairs between the watchful gold lions, he meets me in the central court, then leads me into one of the storage rooms where thousands of scrolls crowd the little cubbies on the wall. On a wide table of fragrant citrus wood, he spreads open a manuscript, his hands weighing down the ends. “I need you to verify the authenticity of this scroll, Selene. We can’t have our librarians filling this place with forgeries.”

He is right. To pass off a forgery as an original manuscript is a serious crime and we cannot have our reputation tarnished with a library full of ignorance and fakery. Still, there are librarians better equipped than me to detect such fraud . . .

Nevertheless, I glance down and the familiar writing makes me gasp. “Oh, Juba. These are my mother’s words, written in her own hand.”

He smiles with great satisfaction, edging from the table so I may take a closer look. “You recognize this manuscript?”

Here my mother turned her scholarship to medicine. Cures for fox mange. Treatments for scalp and skin diseases. A complicated list of weights and measurements. How Isidora will love this book, written by her own grandmother . . .

“This is the original, Juba. How did you get it?”

My husband looks abashed, clearing his throat nervously. “At rather great expense and with devious skullduggery engineered by your Lady Lasthenia. I suppose you will not approve of my raiding the Great Library of Alexandria, but who has a better right to the works of Cleopatra than you? I meant it as a gift, and I hoped it would please you.”

The blush upon his cheek banishes all my reservations about raiding the Great Library. “You can hardly have pleased me more . . .”

I want to tell Juba the truth.
Sweet Isis
, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him that the emperor intends to steal us away from him. I want to tell him that if Ptolemy goes to Rome, I must go too. I even want to tell him about Helios, though I know he will never understand . . .

No, I cannot. If I tell him these things, it will ruin what time we have left together. There is nothing my husband can do to change any of it. Telling him may ease my burdens, but it will only add to his. Perhaps I will tell him later, when I have a plan. When I have thought of a way out. Until then, I have two years. Two years to be the best mother, the best queen, and even the best wife I can be. And so I kiss my husband and keep my secrets.

* * *

“HOW
can he afford it?” I demand of my advisers. “Tell me how Herod can sponsor the Olympic Games, give spectacles for his people, fund cities and expeditions, and still afford to build his temple in Jerusalem?”

I would put these questions to Crinagoras if I had any way of contacting him. Instead, I must wait for the next dancing girl he sends my way. I am forced to rely upon Lady Lasthenia. “Augustus gives him money,” she says, absently tugging on a strand of her hair that looks to have been chewed on the end. Her fingertips are stained with ink, but we do not keep the Pythagorean scholar at court for her noble appearance. “Herod also taxes his citizens heavily.”

“That can’t be it,” I say with a shake of my head, remembering how our Berbers resented the tax. “Not all of it anyway. If his subjects are poor, they cannot pay. What do they grow? What do they make? What do they sell? Dates and wine. They have no metals to speak of. They are a small kingdom; their farms produce far less grain than ours. Yet Herod can afford these great building projects and completes them with great speed and finesse. How is he doing it?”

Chryssa offers her theory. “Spice traders cannot reach imperial markets without going through Judea. He profiteers on access to Rome.”

“Then of course, there is the tomb raiding,” Lady Lasthenia adds, almost absently.

We all stare at her, for it is an outrageous accusation, even against Herod. Truthfully, the way she keeps her gaze low tells me that she is hesitant to level the charge. “It’s rumored that he raided the tombs of his predecessors. King David and King Solomon. Jews in our city say that it was such an abomination against their god that the bodyguards who helped haul the loot away perished in a burst of spontaneous flame.”

“Or Herod killed them to keep them quiet,” I say, though I can never hear about spontaneous flame without remembering my twin’s gift with fire.
Sweet Isis
, the thought of Helios still wounds me. How I sent him away as if he were only a brother now and not my lover, my love. But this temple will be for him as much as it is for me and for Isis. It will be the way I honor him and what he has given up.

“I might ask what kind of king desecrates the tombs of other kings,” I say, “But then, we are speaking of Herod, a villain such as I have never before imagined.” I will not emulate him. To honor my goddess, I cannot ask the emperor’s help. I will not tax my subjects into impoverishment, I will not extort and bully our traders, and I will not raid the treasure of dead kings. But I will raid the ocean. “We will need more factories to turn the sea snails into purple dye. We’ll make ten times the amount of dye.”

Chryssa considers. “Majesty, if we make ten times the dye, you’ll flood the market and send the price so low that every beggar on the street will be wearing royal colors.”

“Then let it be said that Cleopatra Selene clothed the whole world in purple majesty. I won’t mind as long as we have the money for the Iseum.”

* * *

I
have come to rely upon Juba to poke apart my arguments and reveal their weaknesses, so when I tell him about my intentions for the dye works, I am ready for him to find some flaw in my plan.

Seated amongst inkpots and maps and the pieces of that damned broken water clock that litter his writing table, Juba only waves away my idea and thumbs through sketches of plants that I recognize as having belonged to my mage. “Do you remember the plant I named after my physician?”

“Euphorbian. It can be used as some manner of purgative, as I recall.”

He taps at the sketch of a cactuslike specimen. “It might be a topical cure for snakebite.”

Can he know how such a revelation fills me with bittersweet pain? It was my mage who made me carry a basket of figs to my mother—the basket in which an asp waited to strike her dead. Though I was just a girl, the wizard made a killer of me, and for many years, I resented him. I forgave him long ago. Still, he spent his final days searching out a cure for snakebite . . .

“Does it work?” I ask.

“We should test it on a condemned prisoner. I might have one in mind.” Then, without warning, Juba roars, “And in the future, you would do well to discourage Isidora from keeping company with the Berber boy!”

I take two steps back, without the faintest idea why he is shouting at me. “What has Ziri done?”

“Not Tala’s boy. The stable boy.
Tacfarinas
.” Juba growls, snapping the scroll noisily in his lap, urging me to examine the sketch more closely. “Isidora told me that he drew many of these plant sketches. He still draws them for her in your garden where she has a little plot of dirt. I came upon them together and they were holding hands.”

A thousand times have I seen the children together in the gardens, grabbing each other round the waist, clasping hands as they run, for Isidora is much younger, in her way, than I was at the same age. “They are happy to be reunited after our trip to Rome. I am sure it was done in innocence.”

The king does not look at me. “No boy his age takes any girl’s hand in innocence. He is no fit companion for a princess. He is a Numidian barbarian.”

“As are you by blood.”

That finally provokes him to look at me. “And you have made clear for the entirety of our marriage that I am not worthy to touch the hand of a Ptolemaic princess. Consider me convinced. Isidora needs more supervision. She should be accompanied everywhere, and if Tala cannot do it, then you must see it done by . . . by
eunuchs
.”

“Shall we import some from the East? I’m sure our stiff-necked Romans would take delight in the sight of perfumed eunuchs whispering in the ear of their princess.” When I see that he is not amused, I sigh. “Dora takes pity on Tacfarinas, nothing more. Whatever you imagine you saw in the garden was kindness to a boy with a wretched past.”

The king’s frown deepens. “Selene, I
imagined
nothing. Isidora is thirteen years old; it is long past time you speak to her about what will be expected of her.”

This sobers me. Two years I bought for her. Time is racing by and I am no closer to a solution. Always I have imagined that I would have my daughter with me; that when I am gone, she will wear my crown and carry on my legacy as another Ptolemaic queen in a long, proud line of them. I have taught her to love Mauretania as I love it. But the emperor seems intent on marrying her to a foreign king.

In his way, I think Augustus is trying to do well by her, but he has given us precious few names of potential suitors, and I will not accept Herod or his sons. Taking a deep breath, I say, “If I plead with him, Augustus would approve Ptolemy for her.”

Juba tilts his head back with an air of frustration. “Not this again.”

“I don’t like the idea either, but between us we are both orphans without relation. They call me the last of the Ptolemies and we have only two children by blood; we cannot afford to send either of them away.”

The king stands abruptly. “My son will never marry his sister, Selene. Such an abomination will never happen, here.”

Abomination
. Again, he wounds me. “My ancestors are not the only royals to marry brother to sister. The Seleucids—”

“Stop,” Juba says, one finger pointed at me.

“In Pontus and Commagene and—”

“I have heard it all before in our council chamber. Our advisers say no man becomes Pharaoh but through Pharaoh’s daughter. They say royalty must imitate the gods. They say it is done for the sake of stability. They say that a pure bloodline frustrates the ambitions of rapacious men. I don’t care. I know that our Easterners expect us to marry our son and daughter to each other, but this is not Egypt, and our courtiers will have to learn to live with disappointment just as I have learned to live with their resentment.”

“Have you considered what it means to marry a Ptolemaic princess to a foreign king? Any man my daughter marries can lay claim to Egypt and Cyrenaica and Numidia and Mauretania. All North Africa. You do not realize it, because you do not aspire to be a ruthless conqueror, but Augustus realizes it and that is why he has approved so few names. He knows, as I know, that any child Isidora bears may serve as an excuse for war—as an excuse to take or destroy everything we have built.”

“That is not the way of the world anymore, Selene,” my husband says, with wide-eyed optimism. “No kingdom dares to move against another in violation of Rome’s will. That is why we serve Augustus, is it not? He forces the peace.”

“It is better to guard against disaster instead of hoping it never comes to pass.”

Juba rubs at his face. “Selene. Enough. Not long after our wedding night, you held me at knifepoint and vowed that you would see me dead if I forced you to bed. I believed you as you must believe me now. You will need to see me dead before I allow our son and daughter to marry. It will not happen while I draw breath. So make your choice. Pick up a knife or surrender this perverse idea.”

It is, I suppose, a testament to how things have improved between us that taking up a knife is never a serious consideration. “Must you be
quite
so dramatic? I only want my daughter to wear my crown here in Mauretania, where she is beloved. I am grasping for something that will allow me to keep my daughter and prevent her from being ripped from her home, the way I was ripped from mine.”

“Now we come to the truth,” he says, softening a bit, reaching to stroke my arm. “Isidora will never be taken from our home as a prisoner, Selene. She will never walk in chains. She will merely marry beneath her, and it has not turned out so badly for you, has it?”

He’s trying to charm me and it is working. “That’s not the point.”

“I know. You want to maintain your dynasty in the way it was—so that your children can return to
Egypt
. But Isidora cannot marry Ptolemy and there is no one else of suitable rank. Isidora will wear a crown, Selene, but it cannot be yours. The sooner you prepare her for it, the better.”

* * *

I
tell her in the early summer, on the day of her first moon’s blood. My daughter is not shocked or frightened by her menstrual bleeding. She understands the breeding of animals and knows she can now bear a child. Nevertheless, we take Isidora to my chambers and my ladies make much of the occasion. Tala and I teach her to use rags to soak the blood. We tell her to give no credence to the superstitions that in a bleeding woman’s presence, bees will die, dogs will go rabid, seeds become sterile, plants will dry up, and fruit will rot on any tree she sits under.