Song of the Nile (11 page)

The whites of his eyes widened with defiance. “Well, I’ve challenged Egyptian gods before and won. I’ll put my faith in Roman gods, who are stronger.”

“And which Roman god countenances the violation of another man’s wife?”

He shook me by the arms. “Don’t you know that you’re mine to do with as I please? When I captured you in Egypt, I could’ve made a slave of you. I could’ve forced you into a brothel. Instead, I gave you a throne. I’m sending you to Africa with income from mines and deeds to plantations, with chests of gold and silver bars, with treasure enough to humble the proudest royalty in Asia, so don’t cry to me about your spoiled virtue. I’ve taken from you no more than I’ve fairly purchased.”

His words demeaned me, made me feel filthy, just as he’d intended them to, and I pressed my hands on his chest to push him away. He released me, staring down at the bloody handprints I’d left on the stark white folds of his toga. What guilt and remorse he was capable of feeling now welled up in his eyes. “I won’t see you again,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tomorrow, you and Juba will go to Africa without me. You’ll find a way to forget this. I vow by Apollo that I’ll
never
set foot in Mauretania.”

Good
, I thought, because I never wanted to see him again. I never wanted to smell him, or hear his voice, or have him breathe the air of any land I ruled. An ocean between us wouldn’t be far enough, but he was Augustus. He was Caesar. He
still
held in his hands everything I ever wanted and the lives of everyone I loved. “But what of our bargain?”

“This changes nothing, Selene. I’ll spare your brothers if you remain a loyal queen. But this will be the end of it.”

“No,” I said, a bitter taste in my mouth. “Now there will never be an end of it between us.”

STUMBLING out of his rooms, my arms covered in blood, half delirious with both the joy of my goddess championing me and the unbearable pain of her leaving again, I was certain that I’d spoken truly. He wouldn’t be rid of me with a royal dowry and a promise to stay away. I was a Ptolemy, the kin of Alexander. He thought that like a length of cloth dipped in royal purple dye, he could stain himself with the glory of my maiden’s blood. But I hoped my blood would be a toxin to him. A slow poison that would eat at him for all our days.

“Gods be good!” one of Maecenas’s slaves cried. “Where are you hurt, my lady? Have you been stabbed?”

“Hush!” Chryssa said, rushing to my side, breathless as if she’d been searching the villa for me. “Isis has been here. Now the
heka
sickness remains. We need to get her to her chambers before she falls.”

I let them put me to bed, drifting asleep to a familiar song. The melody was so far away that I couldn’t make out the words, but it was a man who sang to me, his voice like the rushing of water, strangely alluring over the notes of a plucked harp. He sang like a lover whose hands wouldn’t hurt me but would coax warmth from my skin. Of other, sweeter sensations that would make my heart pound not from fear but from the pleasure of skin against skin, breath upon breath, the tangle of my fingers in his hair. It was a promise from my goddess to me, that a lover would come to purify me, like the Nile washes over Egypt and makes it new again. A promise I’d find someone who would take the pain away.

I awakened to see Juba hovering over me. Was he the lover my goddess promised? I’d married him. It would be only right if he were the one to make me feel safe and whole. So why did I flinch when his hand touched my shoulder? “Selene . . .” Juba had once seen my blood blossom to flowers on the temple floor. He’d tried to stop me from running into a pit of crocodiles. It had frightened him. I could see he was frightened again now. “How is it that you’re working magic again?”

His gently spoken remonstration wasn’t meant to be a question, but I wondered myself. How
had
Isis come to me? Always before, she was moved to speak when I’d touched the blood of her worshippers. Only now did I remember how Chryssa had cut herself with the
strigil
, her blood in my bathwater. “My goddess is moved by suffering.”

“What torments you?” Juba asked, rubbing at the stubble of his beard. “Why does your goddess come to you like this?”

How could I tell him without confessing what the emperor had done? I wanted to trust him with the truth, but I remembered what Livia had said. Juba wouldn’t believe me. How much worse for him it might be if he did! What if my new husband took my part, raging like a lion, thundering down the hall to the emperor’s rooms, pounding upon his doors and demanding satisfaction? It would cost Juba his throne, if not his life.

As Juba searched my eyes for an explanation, I said nothing. He couldn’t know. I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want
anyone
to know. That the emperor had forced himself upon me was a wound so deep it might be fatal to expose. For now, I must give this pain to my dark shadow self, with all my unworthy thoughts, all the wrath that Isis warned against. I let my
khaibit
hold my atrocities—the ones done to me, and the ones I wished to do—knowing they’d be there for me another day.

AS the skipper led our small armada out of port, I stood at the rail, refusing to look away. From the shore, Augustus watched me go. I’ve always said that his power was in the cold treachery of his gray eyes, with which he could hold me perfectly still. Now, after four long years, his eyes were fading into the distance, his figure getting smaller on the horizon. His grip was loosening and I wanted him to remember me like this. Let him look at my cloak billowing behind me like the aura of a goddess. Let him wonder about the curse Isis had laid upon him in my name.

The sailors busied themselves with ship’s tasks and my attendants saw to my berth. I thought I was quite alone at the rail, watching the milky green waves pass beneath us until Juba murmured, “Is it done between you?”

My breath caught in my throat. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

The sea breeze whipped his dark hair against the grim set of his jaw, and there was a shadow in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “The night it rained, Selene, I came to your room. You weren’t there. Where were you?”

I turned away. I’d already resolved not to speak about that night. Not to Juba. Not to anyone.

He put his hand on my arm, a harmless gesture, but I was still too raw to be touched. When I yanked away, Juba winced as if I’d slipped a dagger past his defenses to wound him. “Am I really such anathema to you, Selene?”

“Juba, you misunderstand—”

“Where were you that night?” he demanded, eyes narrowed.

I shook my head. I wouldn’t tell him. Perhaps I
couldn’t
tell him. My throat closed with emotion and Juba’s expression turned to stone. Snapping his gaze away from me, he stared out to the sea as if it might swallow us both up. The harbor of Ostia was receding now, all its warehouses getting tinier with every stroke of the rower’s oars.

“I’ll find a way to forgive you,” Juba said at length, his voice cold. “Just tell me that it’s done.”

He shocked me into saying, “You think I went willingly?” I turned to stare at him.

“Don’t!”
His grip on the rail tightened until his knuckles went white. “Don’t pretend you didn’t seduce him, Selene. You used the occasion of our wedding to make a whore of yourself, and I endured it, so don’t lie. If not your loyalty, you at least owe me the truth.”

Each word drove into me like a dagger. I’d known he wouldn’t believe me, so why did it hurt so much? And I remembered that Juba had asked for my love, but he’d never promised his. “What of
your
loyalty?”

“First and always to the emperor,” he said, without any hesitation at all.

Looking deep into Juba’s troubled amber eyes, for one horrifying moment, I wondered if he’d somehow been complicit. “You left me a virgin. Were you saving my virtue for your master?”

He snorted. “It was
you
who went rigid on our wedding night.”

“What about the night after?” I asked only to lash out at him, to cause him as much pain as he was causing me, but a flicker of guilt passed over his features and what he said next stole my breath away.

“One doesn’t take from Augustus what he wants for himself.”

Though wind filled the billowing sails overhead, I couldn’t seem to get enough air. Until this moment, I hadn’t known what kind of man Juba was. Not truly. Both hands went to my cheeks, fingers over my ears, as if I could
unhear
his words. “You knew . . .”

“I’m not blind,” Juba said. “Of course I knew what he wanted from you.”

Then Juba had betrayed me.
Again
. “Why didn’t you defend me? Why didn’t you protect me?”

“Protect you?” Juba asked, eyes ablaze. “It’s what you wanted, Selene. Now you’ve had your way.”

“It’s not what I wanted. Shall I show you the bruises?” I reached for my skirts to yank them up.

Juba caught my wrist, stopping me. He wouldn’t look. He wouldn’t
see
. And whatever might have been salvaged between us was now shattered. Blinking back stunned tears, I wrenched my arm from Juba’s grasp, hating the white indentations his fingers left in my skin. I didn’t want him to touch me. I didn’t want any man to touch me ever again. There wasn’t a man in the world I could rely upon. No one but Helios had ever protected me, and now no one else ever would. I must always and only rely upon myself. The realization left me frightened, furious, and torn asunder. When I found my breath, I spat, “You’re a coward, Juba.”

He blanched, his throat bobbing. “I ask you again, is it done between the two of you?”

For him to ask such a question, he mustn’t have known me either. “No. It isn’t done. I’ll never let it be done.”

Another man might have struck me or demanded a different answer from his wife, but as I turned to go Juba merely followed me to the tiny cabin on the deck that had been specially prepared for us. Inside, Chryssa vomited into a brass pot. Juba hovered in the entryway. “If she’s going to be seasick the whole journey, I might as well find another berth.”

I didn’t even glance at him. “You might as well.”

Seven

THEREAFTER I shut myself up with my slave girl in a cabin that smelled of vomit. I’d taken to scratching at my arms with my fingernails, as if I could scrape off the emperor’s filth. That Juba had known, and let it happen, defiled me twice over, and I feared that all the water in the sea couldn’t wash the shame away. So while Chryssa retched, I wished I could heave up the poison of humiliation in my own belly. All that comforted me was the memory of my goddess and her words.

Child of Isis, you are more than flesh.

“I’m going to die,” Chryssa whispered late on the third night of our voyage, her eyes bloodshot, hair clinging in tendrils to the back of her sweating neck. She groaned as the waves tossed our ship like a gambler tosses knucklebones. “Promise that when I die, you’ll commend my spirit to Isis.”

“I promise no such thing as seasickness isn’t fatal,” I said, though her waxy complexion did nothing to convince me. Still, my tone was sharp and I hated the way my own despair made me mean-spirited and selfish. At the thought of her death, all I could think was that everyone else had left me. My parents. My brothers. Even my new husband had abandoned me to the clutches of a depraved fiend. I couldn’t lose Chryssa too. “You’re not allowed to die, Chryssa. I can’t be burdened with the guilt of having dragged you across the sea to meet your end.”

The next day, convinced that Juba was engaged elsewhere on the ship with his new advisers, I finally coaxed Chryssa out of her sickbed to take lunch on the stern deck. We enjoyed a pleasant meal of dried dates and savory cheese wrapped in bay leaves, and Crinagoras sidled over to amuse us. Wary of male company, I remarked, “King Juba fears that you don’t share Virgil’s vision, court poet.”

Crinagoras smirked, making a gift to me of an ingenious little feather fan. “It’s true that my vision is clouded with the perfume and glitter of royalty. Remember, madam, Virgil is Augustus’s poet, whereas I am yours. Augustus uses his poets to shape his reputation; I intend to help shape yours.”

My twin had loved all things nautical, the transport ships and their banks of oars, the ports and the sea itself. He’d spent the better part of his youth sketching war galleys and river barges; but when the skipper offered to give me a tour of the ship I declined in favor of a nap. Arranging myself beneath the billowing square sail of our big-bellied craft as it rode the waves to Mauretania, I dozed. Hence, it was with my eyes half closed that I first spotted land, and when my eyes fluttered back open I gaped in astonishment, letting the fan fall from my hand.

What I saw was no strange Berber land at the west end of the sea. This was
Alexandria
. Her towering lighthouse rose up from Pharos Island, winking fire to greet me, and I saw the Heptastadion too—that jetty connecting the island to the mainland and sheltering the harbor, where dock workers unloaded cargo. Beyond that, broad avenues lined with swaying palm trees and the Great Library where scholars strolled, debating the questions of the day.
Alexandria
. My birthplace, home of Isis, whose temple shone brightly in the sun. I jolted up, the words exploding from my chest. “How have we come to Egypt?”

“This is Mauretania, Majesty.” The skipper must have thought I’d lost my wits.

I blinked once and Alexandria was gone. A small untamed island off the coast led into the neglected harbor of a colorful village. Mountains broke through the clouds to loom over the blue sea and I was so disoriented that I forgot everything. “What is this town?”

“It was the capital city before old King Bocchus died,” Crinagoras replied.

“It looks barbarous,” Chryssa said, surveying the rocky coastline with a wary eye. “Is it just the first stop on our journey or are we meant to make it our home?”

“Not our home,” I said to reassure us both. “It’s only a
mansio
. A place to stay until I return to Egypt.”