Daughters of the Nile (77 page)

He puts the sparkling royal diadem upon my brow and the golden scepter in my hands—and I hold it fast. We journey up the Nile, all the way to Aswan, on our luxurious river barge. We see the fields golden with grain and watch fat little children running on the towpaths beside the oxen. We see the pyramids on the purple horizon and our shining city of Thebes, rebuilt. We sleep upon a perfumed bed draped in netting with silver stars. And I wear emeralds that match my eyes.

We swim together in the green Nile, my gown floating ghostly white. Helios washes my shoulders, my arms, my trembling belly. He
bathes
me. He runs his hands through my hair, combing his fingers through it, thumbs massaging my scalp. And stroke by stroke, drop by drop, the salt water of my tears mingle with the sacred Nile water until I am wrung out, rinsed away of life’s pains. In this sacred space, he is the youthful god and I am a maiden goddess. My skin glows like the pale moon and he is the golden god.

Just as Osiris then rose from the dead, so too shall the deceased Cleopatra walk in the great company of the gods.

There, in the temples, we find our mother in a pure white robe, her complexion a sun-kissed copper as I remember it, her bare arms outstretched like Isis to welcome us home. Our father stands within the sphere of her ethereal glow—having set aside his warrior’s helmet in favor of a simple tunic and a reveler’s wreath of grape leaves—raises his glass, and makes a toast, merriment in his eyes. I feel as a girl again, as if I would rush to him and find myself staring up at him like the giant he once seemed to me. Our brothers are here too. Caesarion, Antyllus, and Philadelphus. And we fall into one another’s arms and weep for joy.

It is all as Helios once vowed to me it would be.

But just as the Rivers of Time flows before us with slippery possibility, so too does the life after. There is no choice to be made between Egypt and Mauretania.

No choice to be made between the men I have loved.

It is Mauretania where I have left the essence of myself. There that I am buried. There that my beloved husband leaves honey cakes and pours libations for me. There that I will be reunited with Juba. And there that I find Ptolemy, my beautiful boy, riding his prize stallion outside our tomb. He rides in the sunshine under the flinty gaze of Memnon, who is young again and holds a sword in one hand and a round shield painted red with my initials in the other. Tala is there too, mixing her henna, shaking her head at me as if to scold me for being away for so long. My sister Hybrida lifts a hand to wave to me, Bast weaving around her ankles, tail twitching in excitement.

Grabbing hold of my skirt, I run through the golden grain fields to reach them. Ptolemy cries out, leaping off his horse to welcome me. How proud he is! He wants to show me the tall spires of antelope horns he has taken as his prize, and we embrace, my happy tears wetting his straight hair.

We will have roasted antelope for our feast when the king and Isidora and little T’amT’am return home. Our hearts are filled with so much love that we cannot want them to hurry, but we will welcome them with the grandest celebration when they come.

For I know. Now I know the truth of it.

I may crumble away to dust, but my spirit remains. I journey home now, and though my lands fall fallow and my palaces turn to sand, my kingdom lives a million years in me. I do not fear, for death is not the end of all things. I shall again warm myself by a fire, loved by a man, children upon my knee. And in the Nile of Eternity, I shall live forever.

Epilogue

ISIDORA

The moon herself grew dark, rising at sunset,

Covering her suffering in the night,

Because she saw her beautiful namesake, Selene,

Breathless, descending to Hades,

With her she had had the beauty of her light in common,

And mingled her own darkness with her death.

—CRINAGORAS OF MYTILENE

MY
mother died with the moon. Her poet wrote it down for the ages. We buried my mother in the Royal Mausoleum on the hill with its
ankh
on the door, in all the traditions she held most sacred. We visit her there often, making offerings and telling her news of her beloved Mauretania.

Did she know she had triumphed and that her death would be followed by the most bountiful harvests we had ever known? I think she did.

My mother’s last act was to smile at the shadowed moon. But the men who dominated her life did not meet their fate with such grace. King Herod’s last acts included the execution of another son, and an order to murder all little boys in Judea under the age of two so that in them would arise no new savior . . .

As for Augustus, his empire is too small for him without my mother in it. Without her to match him, to test him, to keep him from his most despicable impulses, it all unravels. My mother once warned the emperor that if he did not repent, he would suffer the curse Isis put upon him.

You’ll live long enough to watch your heirs fall, one after the other, until your empire rests in the hands of those who despise you.

It is already coming to pass, just that way . . .

I have seen how it will be for him at the end. How, whenever his daughter is mentioned to him, he will call her a cancer and cry, “Would that I were wifeless or had childless died!”

His last words will be spoken beneath paintings of theater masks on his wall and he will say, “If I have played my part well, clap your hands, and dismiss me with applause from the stage.”

The lasting legacy of Augustus will be the Golden Age my mother spent her life working to achieve. She is there, in the grain fields that feed the empire. She is there, when just laws are administered and the empire goes on without threat of civil war. She is there on his monument, the
Ara Pacis
, though even now they debate which of the goddesses gave Rome her glory.

It was my mother.

She gave them Isis too. The mother goddess with her virgin-born son in her lap will go and on, and in that way, so does Isis, and Cleopatra Selene. I feel her with me, even now. When Tacfarinas whispers love to me and begs me to run off with him. Go anywhere, be anyone, he says . . . but I think of how she would want me to stay and watch over my baby brother.

I remember too that my mother wanted me to be the Queen of Mauretania. She would have gifted me her crown, if she could have, yet she gave me much greater power and dominion. She loved me and wanted love for me. She forgave me for not being
her
and asked only that I be my best self. She freed me to follow my own river, wherever it might lead.

And she taught me that I am a Daughter of the Nile, as are we all . . .

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Ancient sources mention Cleopatra Selene only in relation to others. She was Cleopatra’s daughter, Octavian’s hostage, Juba’s wife, and Ptolemy’s mother. But the archaeological and numismatic evidence of her reign tells a tale of a self-possessed and powerful queen who wished to leave behind a legacy of her very own. In light of that desire, it has been my honor and privilege to write about her extraordinary life.

The historical evidence suggests that Cleopatra Selene was a religious symbol for Isis worshippers and a champion of the cult. Though Isis worship was banned in Rome during her lifetime, adherents of the goddess found sanctuary in Mauretania, where Selene and Juba built an Iseum complete with a sacred crocodile. Both Augustus and his successor were notoriously hostile to the worship of Isis, but thanks in part to Selene’s efforts, Isis worship would go on to become the dominant religion of the empire until the rise of Christianity.

That is no small accomplishment.

It is, of course, impossible to discuss Cleopatra Selene as a religious icon without comparing her to Jesus of Nazareth, who was born shortly after her death. As a biblical and historical figure, King Herod intersected both their lives, which is why he is featured prominently in this story. More importantly, the history of Herod’s reign as told by Josephus is the only detailed chronicle of a client king in the Augustan Age that survives.

Thus, to understand monarchy as it was experienced by Cleopatra Selene and Juba II, we must look to the reign of Herod. To measure the success of their court, we must compare it to the dysfunction of the Herodian court. And if we want to learn how the Iseum was built in Mauretania, we must look to Herod’s Temple of Jerusalem. (The time, resources, and labor required for Herod’s project served as a measuring stick for me in writing about Cleopatra Selene’s undertaking.)

Though war and rebellion would savage her kingdom after her death, Selene’s reign was one of relative peace and prosperity. She and Juba spent their treasure building up two capital cities and providing a plentiful grain tribute to Rome. This is especially significant in light of the way slavery seems to have tapered off in Mauretania. There is little evidence of mass importation of slave labor after the initial establishment of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene’s reign, as might be expected in a grain-producing client kingdom, so I portrayed my heroine as ambivalent about the role of slavery. And yet, even without mass importation of slave labor after the initial establishment of their reign, Selene managed to transform the coastal city of Iol-Caesaria into a veritable reproduction of her native Alexandria—one of the many clues we have about both her ambitions and her poignant quest to memorialize everything she’d loved and lost.

Selene and Juba were bound in service to Rome, but it would be wrong to dismiss them as puppet monarchs. Selene was no more deferential to Rome than her colleagues and, in some instances, much less deferential. For example, in sharp contrast to other client monarchs of her day—including her husband, whose coins always featured Latin—Selene’s numismatic iconography is decidedly provocative. Selene’s coins are always in Greek, often flouting the emperor’s official narrative. Her coins sometimes celebrate her dead mother. Her coins also elevate the goddess Isis. Moreover, Selene’s coins imply that Egypt would break free of its bonds and that Selene represented the throne of Egypt in exile. In short, Selene’s coins are so brazen, so nearly belligerent, that one would expect her to have paid some political price for them.

Instead, Selene appears never to have fallen afoul of Rome. This and her formidable influence as Queen of Mauretania is evidence of an extraordinary relationship with Augustus. Perhaps the emperor indulged Selene because she was no threat or because she was a nominal member of his family and he was fond of her.

In this series of novels, of course, I have imagined a much darker reason: a twisted romantic obsession.

That Augustus was an adulterer is attested to by several sources, and my portrayal of him as a despoiler of virgins comes from Suetonius, who also mentions Livia as a possible partner in her husband’s proclivities. With this in mind, I invented the sexual relationship between Augustus and Selene as a consistent rationale for the unexplained turns in her life, and imagined that it stemmed from Augustus’s preoccupation with Cleopatra VII as explored by Diana E. E. Kleiner in
Cleopatra and Rome
.

However, it was a footnote about the
Ara Pacis
that is to blame for the liberties I have taken. The footnote in question identified the mysterious prince on the
Ara Pacis
as Juba and Selene’s son, Ptolemy. (The most prominent alternative theory is that the mysterious prince is the son of Queen Dynamis of the Bosporus and that she is standing behind him, but she appears to have died the year before the processional depicted.) Assuming the prince on the
Ara Pacis
is Ptolemy, I had to know how such a thing came to pass. That led to my study of the famed Tellus panel with its fertile earth goddess and her accompanying winds . . . and my story was born.

The ancients believed deeply in magic. This view was part of their everyday experience. And given that Cleopatra Selene was a religious figure during her own lifetime, it seemed natural to give her miraculous powers.

* * *

IN
the end, however, the creative liberties taken in this novel are not half as outrageous as the events based on actual history. The wife-swapping, melodramatic Julia-Claudian family soap opera that dominated imperial politics is well documented. Julia’s relationship with Iullus is attested to by the historical record. And in truth, I might have included many more details about the deterioration of Julia and Tiberius’s marriage if this were not, at heart, Selene’s story.

Still, I included as many too-strange-not-to-be-true elements as I could. It really
was
the emperor’s habit to slip into Rome under the cover of darkness. Cleopatra Selene really
is
believed to have died during a lunar eclipse. Juba truly
was
a renowned scholar with a fascination for exploration who claimed he had discovered the source of the Nile in Mauretania. (As a matter of geography he was wrong, but if it was political poetry to woo Cleopatra Selene by tying her new kingdom to Egypt, it must have been very well received. In any case, his theory about the Nile was not definitively disproved for almost two thousand years!)