Song of the Nile (36 page)

Chryssa’s smile fell away. “Majesty, happiness and sorrow change partners in the dance of life. On the same day you’ve wept with loss, someone else has wept with joy. It can’t be wrong to feel gladness. Isn’t it a gift of Isis?”

I eyed her suspiciously. “You sound like a philosopher. Have you been attending Lady Lasthenia’s lectures?”

“Bah, the wealth of this life is lost on the Pythagoreans. There has been much on my mind, though . . . The Berber chieftain desires to wed.” My eyes must have flown wide because she hurried to say, “It’s the custom of his people to ask the bride’s family, so he might ask you. I won’t consider his suit unless he learns Greek and unless you give your blessing, of course.”

“You’re a free woman, Chryssa. You don’t need my blessing, but you have it if you want it. I only ask you to consider how you’ll feel if Maysar takes a second wife, or a third.”

“Maysar swears he’ll only have one,” she said, pressing her lips together. “He says that while some of the tribesmen treat their women badly, his own reveres women. Do you think he can be trusted?”

I wasn’t optimistic when it came to the trustworthiness of men. “I suppose a good test is whether or not he learns Greek.”

“He’s taking lessons from Juba’s pretty
hetaera
. We’ll see if Circe turns his head as well as trains his tongue to a civilized language.” She threw her feet up onto the pillows. “If he disappoints me, well, there’s always the future, for it’s said you’ll bring about a Golden Age.”

“Is that what you believe?” I asked, watching a lizard sun itself beneath a potted citron tree. “That I can make everyone happy and end all suffering with a wave of my hand?”

“I used to believe it, but even Isis couldn’t deliver her son, Horus, into a world of complete happiness. The dark god Set was always there, lurking. If Isis cannot do it, how can you?”

I arched a brow. “Should I be pleased or disappointed that I’ve somehow broken your faith in me?”

“Oh, I still believe in you and the Golden Age. It’s too important an idea. Everyone believes in it. The Easterners, the Asiatics, the Jews, and even the Romans pine for a time that’s more just, more peaceful, and more enlightened.”

That’s because everyone is looking for a savior,
I thought.
Some extraordinary person who will rescue them from all their cares.
“No one person can be all things to all people.”

“That’s why the idea of twins is compelling,” Chryssa said. “It isn’t just
one
extraordinary person. It’s the idea of a partnership. Symbolic for the notion that a Golden Age can only be attained by combined effort.”

There was something vitally important in what Chryssa had said, but I was distracted by my child, who squealed when Euphronius showed her the trinkets in his magician’s box. Alabaster lamps and magic wands and little bowls for mixing potions. She was enraptured by all of it, a pampered princess who knew only the delights of the world, and while it could never be that way for me, I wanted it to always be that way for her. I marveled at the way sunlight made her hair a golden halo and couldn’t help but see Helios in her profile. My ache for him was only made worse every time I thought of him battling in the sands of Egypt, making war at the side of a mysterious queen. I imagined the Kandake as an ebony beauty with gleaming skin and a long neck that bent gracefully when Helios stooped to kiss her ear. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the image, for it wounded me. It wasn’t only a stab of jealousy but some deeper despair.

When my mother was my age, she’d only just met Caesar. Her love for him would be the beginning of her journey as a lover, not the end. My romantic future, by contrast, seemed bleak. Even if I could find it within myself to have feelings for Juba, he seemed to have abandoned our false marriage at long last.

That night, music awakened me, the soft strum of lute strings, the mournful longing of the double-reed pipe serenading me. I’d heard this song before, this Song of the Nile, and knew Egypt was calling me. Half asleep I sighed at the soft breath upon the nape of my neck. Strong wet hands caressing my shoulders, thumbs tracing down my spine. It was the god, come to me again, and need flowed hot through my body. I tasted the silted water of the Nile as it kissed my lips. And with damp bed linens clenched between my knees, I wanted . . . I wanted . . .

But I was alone. Rising from my bed, I went to the terrace where the full moon lit the sky and glinted silver off the sea. The roar of the ocean, waves folding over waves, didn’t drown the music out. At my throat, my frog amulet seemed to vibrate with
heka
, as if it had leeched from my body.
I am the Resurrection
, the engraved stone said, and I ran my fingers over the etching as if to remind myself. Was I meant to be the resurrection of my mother’s spirit or was I meant to resurrect the goddess in a hostile Roman world? By dawn, having dressed and wandered into my gardens on the far side of the palace, I realized that the melody echoed from the sunlit mountains of the Atlas to the south. And why not? If Juba was right, then that was the source of the Nile, the sacred river.

I couldn’t go to Egypt. I couldn’t fight with Helios. But perhaps I could go to Osiris; I must find the source of the Nile.

Twenty-five

IVORY wands from Egypt adorned my wizard’s lair, but new instruments found their place here too. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the walls, mortars and pestles littered a workbench, and baskets spilled forth green plants of every variety. Like me, Euphronius had learned to keep himself busy in exile, but when I told him my plans he forgot about all else. “Majesty, no one knows the source of the Nile. It’s a question that has plagued geographers for centuries. Your husband the king is an eager theorist; you ought not take everything he says as fact!”

I was nearly eighteen years old now and disliked it immensely when people lectured me. “What am I to make of you, old man? You always caution me not to forget Egypt. Now I want to journey to the highlands of Mauretania to find the very source of Egypt’s Nile and you discourage me.”

He furrowed his bushy white eyebrows. “I’m only concerned at the way you busy yourself. Since your return from Rome, you sleep very little and you eat even less. Except for Isidora’s birthday, I don’t think I’ve seen you take your leisure for a moment.”

“I feel too guilty to eat much,” I confessed. “There wasn’t enough food in Rome. I saw people starving. We must have early rains here in Mauretania to prepare the soil for the winter sowing if we’re to have more grain in the next harvest.”

And I must have grain. What Augustus needed from me—what he had always needed from me—was grain. If Helios should fail in Egypt, grain would be my last political leverage. “Euphronius, when I was a little girl, my mother brought me to the Isle of Philae, where she gave herself to the Nile. It was the first time I watched her work
heka
. The first time I ever knew that there were things queens could do that kings couldn’t. The Nile rose. The crops were bountiful. Now she’s gone and famine stalks the lands. She gave me this amulet and said that I was the Resurrection. Why can’t I make the land fertile the way she did?”

“Majesty, as Queen of Egypt, you’d have already made that journey down the Nile. Should I live long enough to see you on your rightful throne, I predict the most bountiful harvest that Egypt has ever known.”

But that wouldn’t come soon enough. “You taught us that Isis is a goddess of a thousand names,” I argued. “I found Isis in the temple of Carthaginian Tanit. Crinagoras compares her to Kore. Are we to believe that her story is only an Egyptian story? That the great god who is her lover can find her
only in Egypt
? The Nile sings to me, as Osiris sings to Isis. I must go to him.”

Even after I’d convinced the mage, my plans met with almost universal opposition. The Berbers argued that in my absence Juba’s Roman advisers would wrest away control of the country. The Romans didn’t want me to go either. Without Balbus, no clear leader stood out amongst them. They disliked taking orders from a female monarch, but there was something in the Roman psyche that preferred
order
above all else and my presence provided a reassuring hierarchy. They feared that my journey would plunge the government into chaos. I assured them that given the new roads and an accompaniment of soldiers, I’d be gone no more than a few weeks. A month at most.

I had no idea how arduous the journey was going to be.

Camels travel swiftly over great distances without food or water, but that doesn’t mean that their riders don’t fatigue. The scorching sun forced us to slow our pace and there were days, thirsty and dispirited, the stink of camel in my nostrils, that I considered turning back. Yet the parched land still called to me.

I’ll never be able to capture the beauty of that journey the way Crinagoras did in the poems he later read at court; I am, nonetheless, compelled to try. As our expedition rode southwest, expanses of shimmering fields gave way to the vast steppes upon which the Berber tribes grazed their animals. I gasped with delight when our camels carried us past a family of African wildcats playing in the brittle grasses and thought how Isidora would have clapped her little hands to see them. Many days later, ascending from the steppes into the cedar-forested mountains where wild boars rustled in the green foliage, we looked down upon a rippling sea of sand. I knew the stark desert and its deadly beauty. Still, the cold mountains seemed even more intimidating.

Crinagoras had always indulged me with flattering verse, but I knew he took me for an eccentric queen and this trip a bizarre divergence. Swatting a fly that plagued him, he called to me, “We’re on a fool’s errand, Majesty. My hands are almost as blistered as yours and you’d cry if you could see how the sun has ruined your skin.” Then he leaned forward on his mount. “Besides, I think you’re killing your mage.”

At the sight of Euphronius slumped on his camel, huddled beneath his white robes as if in a trance, I wondered what price we all might pay for my folly. I pressed my chapped lips together, considering a retreat. But no sooner had my confidence wavered than a lone jackal appeared atop a rock outcropping.
Anubis,
I thought, as the jackal howled, and my resolve was renewed.

We didn’t climb to the snowy summits but hugged the edges of the mountains where fruit-laden trees and freshwater oases offered respite. It seemed hardly possible that the source of the Nile was to be found so far from Egypt, but I followed Juba’s maps and his exacting descriptions, relying upon my husband in absence as I’d never relied upon him when he was near.

The deeper into the wilds we traveled, the more familiar our surroundings became; I didn’t even have to close my eyes to imagine myself in Egypt. When at last we reached the banks of a river, I spied a hippo spouting a mist of water from its gaping nostrils! At the marshy scent of the river, Euphronius came awake. “Egyptian lotus,” he whispered, captivated by the floating water lilies.

“Look, Majesty, all the gods of Egypt have come to do you homage,” Crinagoras teased, pointing at the far bank where a crocodile sunned himself, vicious jaws cracked in a toothy smile. “First Anubis, then Hapi, now Sobek too.”

I ignored my poet’s irreverence. “What do you think, Euphorbus? Can the great god be found here? Is this the source of the Nile?” I urged my camel to kneel, unwrapping the shawl from my shoulders as my guards helped me down. I needed only a steadying hand from Memnon, but Euphronius had to be lifted from his mount. I didn’t like to see my mage so stiff and frail, as if his bones creaked when he moved, but his awed expression told me that his spirits had been lifted along with mine.

Holding his divination staff in one hand, and his rattle in the other, he stepped onto the low rocks on the shore and stooped to touch the water. His eyes were damp when he said, “Maybe it
is
the Nile . . .”

Inside my hastily erected tent, Chryssa undressed me and brushed my hair until it gleamed. “I never thought to prepare you for another wedding,” she said. “But if Osiris is here, you must come to him as a bride, divine wife to divine husband.”

Though she was Greek, she’d studied well under the priests and priestesses of Egypt. I closed my eyes, surrendering to her ministrations, listening to Euphronius chant prayers and hoping the river god awaited me. I’d come to him once as a lover in the arms of Helios, so I told myself that we weren’t strangers. For a thousand years, queens of Egypt had met him on the Isle of Philae, where Isis first wept for her murdered husband. Where she brought him back to life with her magic, where he waited for his love. I couldn’t go to him in Philae, where the warrior queen, the Kandake, now ruled. Was it foolish to think he’d come to me here?

I emerged from my tent accompanied by a chorus of frogs. Adorned in the pure white robe of an Isiac devotee, I carried a bouquet of wildflowers. My hair was loose about my shoulders and my amulet throbbed at my throat with a heartbeat of its own. I stepped into the shallows. Close behind me, Chryssa held my robe so that I slipped naked into the murky water without revealing myself to onlookers. The mud of the riverbed sucked at my feet and warm water caressed my skin. I remembered Helios as he’d been that night in the storm, when the god had first taken me. Now I felt certain he’d been waiting, pining for me all along. “I’m the queen of this land,” I said quietly. “I call upon you, Lord of the Rebirth, to bring us water for the crops. To bring us grain.”

Memnon shouted in alarm as the crocodile on the far shore roused from its stupor and slid into the river with me. I wasn’t afraid. Isis was in me; I had nothing to fear from crocodiles. Already, the green waves were lapping at my consciousness, drawing me into the marshy reeds of a waking dream where life teemed. And I realized that I’d seen this all before. The moment my mother put my amulet around my neck, I’d seen myself surrender to the river. Not in Egypt. Here.

It had always been
here
.

“She is the Resurrection,”
Euphronius chanted.
“She brings life from death. She gives to her kingdom an heir, she gives to her people their daily sustenance, and she gives Isis an embodiment on earth for Osiris to love.”