Cleopatra's Moon (23 page)

“Selene,” he said, bending to look into my eyes, which I had averted.

“Cleopatra Selene,” I mumbled.

He smiled. “Cleopatra Selene. You are not saying anything.”

“I think,” I said, “considering that we have to act as if nothing happened between us, around others, perhaps it would be better if we acted that way when we are alone too.”

“But —”

“Thank you for walking me back,” I said stiffly. And then I turned and hurried toward my
cubiculum
, trying to hold on to as much of my tattered dignity as possible.

I met Juba before dawn in the torch-lit gloominess of the stables. Sleepy grooms walked our horses out to help us saddle them and tie up our belongings. I jumped when a nearby rooster shattered the purple-gray stillness with its shrill crowing. Juba laughed softly. I smiled back, a little embarrassed.

“Selene! I’m glad I caught you before you left!”

Marcellus approached us in the dark. Juba looked at me and then back at Marcellus, who hurried up the slope to us in his beautifully draped white toga and gleaming leather sandals.

As Marcellus came near, Juba asked him, “Aren’t you worried about what everyone will say about you coming to say goodbye to Cleopatra Selene?”

“Ah, but I have made it clear that I have come up here to say goodbye to my good friend Juba,” he said, winking at me. “And if Cleopatra Selene happened to be here too, well …”

“Marcellus, this is a bad idea, and I do not wish to be used as your cover,” Juba said tightly.

“I am not asking you to,” Marcellus said.

Juba turned and walked back into the stables.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Marcellus said, patting my horse’s rump as he came over to help me tighten the straps. My mouth went dry and I suddenly felt very small standing next to him. In my sleepiness of the morning, I had almost forgotten my strange evening with him. Almost. But when his forearm brushed against mine, everything came flooding back: the scent of him, the memory of his mouth on mine.

“I wanted to ask if you if I offended you last night,” he said softly, so no errant horse boy or stable slave could overhear. “I suspect I did, only I do not know how.”

When I did not respond, he added, “Will you at least tell me so that I can make amends? Perhaps I moved too fast? For that, I am sorry. Well, not sorry, but …” He smiled down at me, and my stomach contracted. I continued tying and retying the leather straps on my pannier. My silence seemed to agitate him, which only made me more self-conscious and unable to formulate a thought, let alone a sentence.

“I … I must return to the atrium to start greeting our early clients. Will you come see me when you return, Selene? I mean, Cleopatra Selene. Yes?”

“Well, that about does it!” said Juba in a loud voice, rejoining us. “Thanks for stopping by to wish me well on my journey, friend!” he said, clapping Marcellus on the back. And then to me: “It is time to go.”

Marcellus paused. “Yes, well. May Mercury protect you and keep you safe from danger and dark magic on your journey,” he said loudly, with a false cheerfulness. He smiled at me, and again I marveled that such a beautiful young man would take even the slightest interest in me. I tried to smile back but I felt frozen, like a rabbit under the shadow of a swooping hawk. He turned and walked back toward the house.

Juba and I mounted and rode our horses out of the stable yard. At the crest of the Palatine Hill, we paused to take in the stirrings of the beast that was Rome. Already the city teemed with people, slaves pouring out of homes like ants on the march. Citizens and freedmen flooded the streets too — seeking escape from their horrible
cubicula
, I surmised — in search of fresh bread and morning wine.

What did Juba see when he looked out over the city, I wondered. I suspected it was not what I saw, for when I gazed across Rome, I saw the fumes and vapors of Hades’ netherworld. Smoke curled from countless household kitchens, bakers’ ovens, hypocausts, blacksmiths’ furnaces, and funeral pyres, joining over the valleys to form a dark cloud of lung-searing ugliness below us. From this height, we could still breathe fresh air, but it wouldn’t be long before we would find ourselves coughing at the stink of black smoke, sweating bodies, illegally dumped
chamber pots, rotting refuse, gutted fish at fish stalls, and the sweet scent of blood from early morning sacrifices.

Once out the Porta Capena, the gate that led to the Appian Way, we rode past the parade of tombs. Burials and cremations were outlawed inside the city, so as wealth poured in from Egypt and other conquered lands, the rich of Rome built massive houses of the dead along this road. I sighed, noticing how many of the recently built tombs evoked the grandeur of Egypt in the form of obelisks and even pyramids. It was the Roman way — destroy the originating culture, then steal its art and beauty.

After a time, I fell into a trance as I bobbed with the rhythm of the horse, closing my eyes to feel the morning sun. I jumped when Juba spoke.

“The way you are handling Marcellus is really quite masterful,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“If you wanted to make him obsessed with you, ignoring him ensures it.”

“I do not know what you mean,” I said, feeling criticized but not understanding how or why.

“Marcellus has been blessed by the gods with many gifts. Everything comes to him easily, including women. As a result, he has grown only to be interested in those who show no interest in
him
. It becomes a challenge, you see.”

“No, I don’t ‘see,’ Juba. What are you trying to say?”

“I am not trying to say anything. I am just admiring how you seem to know exactly how to manipulate Marcellus to your favor.”

I flared with irritation. “Manipulate? But I am not doing anything!”

“Precisely! Excellent work.”

My mouth dropped open in surprise. He thought my tongue-tied confusion and reticence around Marcellus was an act?

My expression gave Juba pause. “You have noticed how he has been
slowly turning on the charm around you, yes? And that the more you ignore his attempts, the harder he tries?”

“No, I had not. And I … I do not say anything to him because in truth, I do not know what to say,” I admitted.

Juba looked at me and smiled. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”

“By the gods, Juba!” I growled. “I am in my fifteenth year! Girls my age are getting married and having children
all the time
.”

“Not for much longer, if Caesar has his way,” he said. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Caesar wants to move up the minimum age of marriage for girls from twelve to eighteen and for boys from sixteen to twenty,” Juba said. “He believes we need to shore up Rome’s lax morality, to go back to the purer days of Roman
pietas
and
virtus
.”

“How would that help restore this so-called Roman piety?”

“Well, it’s not only that,” Juba continued. “He wants to change the laws to discourage cheating between spouses.”

I stiffened. He would, I knew, find some way to insult my parents with this campaign.

“If the husband catches the wife with a lover, he is allowed to murder the lover without question or consequence,” continued Juba. “And he is allowed to divorce the wife without having to return her dowry.”

“And if the wife catches the husband with a lover?” I asked.

He looked blankly at me.

“There is no consequence for the husband cheating?”

“Well, no,” Juba said, seeming nonplussed by the very question.

I sighed. Of course not.

“Caesar also wants to encourage the educated classes to have more children. Especially since the number of slaves — not to mention immigrants — already far outstrips the number of citizens.”

I frowned, trying to remember how Mother had managed the prickly populations of Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, slaves, and immigrant traders in Alexandria. My heart sank as I realized I did not know, and I
would never be able to ask. I made a mental note to ask Isetnofret if any of Mother’s ministers had left records I could study.

“I think he may wait awhile to introduce the legislation,” Juba continued. “Still, he’s a genius. He has convinced Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy to write about Rome’s ‘pious’ history. That will soften the Senate in preparation for the morality laws to come. It’s a brilliant strategy, really,” he added with a sour face.

I smiled. “Friend, I do believe I detect a note of cynicism about your hero!”

“It is just that I am not so sure — as a writer — how I feel about him using poets and historians of their caliber to push —”

“Lies?” I asked. Hadn’t Octavianus used a masterful campaign of besmirching my mother to turn all of Rome against my father?

“Public policy,” he said flatly.

“Aren’t you doing the same thing, though?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, indignation sparking in his eyes.

I paused as my horse shook his head. Was that a warning to keep my tongue? We’d had this argument so many times before…. “Well,” I said slowly, overriding the warning. “
You
only write about Roman history, Roman geography, Roman language, Roman painting — all to the glory of Octavianus’s idealized Roman world.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I write about what I’m
interested
in. And he is not commissioning the works from me as he does with Virgil. I write what I want.”

I laughed. “You are like Odysseus, only you don’t know you are lost at sea.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, tightening his grip on his reins.

“Why don’t you write about Numidian heroes like your ancestor Massinissa or your great-great-uncle Jugurtha? What about the bravery of your own father? You have forgotten your homeland, your destiny, and even the kingship that Rome stole from you,” I said. “You’ve even
lost your name! And you use your scholarship to stay distracted from what the gods originally planned for you.”

His face darkened. “How would you know what the gods planned for me? Perhaps they planned that I should die in Numidia, but by the grace of Julius Caesar, I was spared. Have you ever thought of that? I am a scholar because those are the gifts the gods endowed me with, and living in Rome as a
Roman
citizen is how
that
destiny is fulfilled….”

“But you were a prince of your people! Julius Caesar stole your future as king as surely as Octavianus stole mine. Shouldn’t you fight to reclaim your —”

Juba’s jaw worked. “No!”

I persisted. “I think you get angry because you know I am right.”

He looked at me with a fierceness that made me break eye contact. “You, right?” he said with more malice than I had ever heard from him. “Every time I talk to you, it reinforces for me that
I
have made the right decision, not you. I do not want to spend my life bemoaning my fate or wondering what could have been!”

Now it was my turn to tighten my hold on the reins. “Yes, of course,” I said, my voice dripping ice. “I can see how much better — excuse me,
safer—
it is to lose yourself in intellectual pursuits rather than fight to claim what is rightfully yours.”

Juba set his mouth. “I do not fight battles I know I can never win.”

“Ah, but that is the difference between you and me. I carry the blood of Alexander the Great. And he never fought a battle he ever considered he might
lose!”

“And how do you propose you could win any kind of battle against the most powerful man in the world, eh? You are like an ant throwing crumbs at the giant Cyclops!”

“Just because I do not have a plan formulated
yet
doesn’t mean I will never have one.”

Juba made a scoffing sound in his throat, and I urged my horse to trot ahead of his. Which one of us was right? Was it better to stoically
accept what the Fates handed you? Or to push back, to use the emotional energy that the Stoics strived so hard to control, to
shape
your own fate, like Alexander? When did acceptance become acquiescence to an intolerable situation? Should I follow Mother’s lead and fight until the end, controlling even my own death? Or should I be more like Juba, creating a safe little life in the shadow of that which ultimately sought to oppress or destroy me?

A surge of defiance straightened my back. I was the daughter of the greatest queen of Egypt who ever lived. Even if it meant my death, I would fight to reclaim what had been stolen from me. It would be a dishonor to her memory to do anything else.

Juba and I did not speak again until we arrived in Capua.

As they did every full moon, devotees of Isis had gathered to sing her praises and honor her beauty. The air nearly vibrated with anticipation as her followers gathered to take her Great Journey. By sunrise, the induction into the Mysteries would be over. Some, it was whispered, never made it back from the Goddess’s side. Others, touched by the Goddess, spoke of prophetic visions. My heart raced with excitement. What would it be for me?

At dusk, two young priests — heads shaven and eyes rimmed in kohl — escorted me into the courtyard. I walked out barefoot, clean from my purification bath and wearing a pure white shift of tightly woven linen, taking careful steps over the uneven grassy grounds of the clearing beside the Temple.

Prayers and chants vibrated through the evening air. Bursts of scent from the early blooming roses wafted in the balmy breeze. Two other initiates joined me in the center of the small circle: a woman bent like a grandmother, her long gray hair unwound, and a young man whose newly shaved head gleamed in the darkening light.

After what seemed like hours of chanting and prayer, someone put small clay bowls in our hands. “Drink,” one of my priestly escorts ordered. “For your journey begins now.”

I drank. Wine with something else, something unfamiliar, bitter yet not unpleasant. I tilted my head back and took the liquid into me as if the Goddess herself poured it into my mouth. More chanting. Shadows flickered as priests and priestesses held torches for us in the night air.

The strange drink filled me with warmth, bringing a tingle into my toes and out my palms. I wanted to dance, to weave myself in and around the hypnotic chants. I put my hands over my head and swayed. Suddenly, an image of Ptolly flitted past me — of his little body dancing
to the pan flutes at Caesarion’s manhood ceremony. My eyes filled. Ptolly’s
ba-soul
was here, watching, grinning, blessing me, I was sure.

I could hear my heart beating in my chest. A feeling of great love swelled inside me for all of us — all those who hurt and yet so earnestly and purely loved the Goddess. Everything vibrated and pulsed with light and power. The world shimmered, and I gasped at its beauty.

A woman’s voice — the priestess’s? — urged me to lean on her as she guided me inside the Temple. A dark room. Small bronze lamps on tripods in the corners. Priests and priestesses chanting, the smoke from pungent incense weaving in and around their swaying faces. “Lie down,” someone ordered.

I did. I lay in the sun under a blooming sweet citron tree. The sky a brilliant blue. Juba smiled at me and leaned over to kiss me. I closed my eyes. His skin was so warm. So smooth. I pressed myself against his bare chest, shocked to discover that my chest was bare too. I surrendered to the sensations — the feel of his warm lips, the pounding of his heart as I caressed his skin, his soft kisses along my neck. How much I had longed for this!

“My queen,” he murmured, and I froze. Despite how much I desired him, I did not want to be “his” queen. I wanted my rightful legacy in Egypt.

The Goddess laughed, a light, breathy laugh. I pushed Juba away. He looked surprised and hurt. “I am sorry,” I said. “My destiny has always been to be the queen of Egypt.”

I wore a gown of gold as I glided away from him. “A queen must sacrifice her personal desires for the good of her people,” I said to no one in particular. I had heard Mother say so many times.

I was in the woods. Marcellus called to me. He was sitting on a tree stump, wearing the bright white toga I had seen him in the morning I’d left for the Temple. “Come here,” he called. I looked down and found a shining bronze mirror in my hand. I held it out to his face. His reflection blinded us both. I dropped the mirror, though I never heard it hit the ground.

“I desire you,” he said, standing so close I could feel his breath on my hair. “What do you desire?”

“Sovereignty,” I murmured.

“No,” he said, surprised. “You must desire me!”

I looked up at him. “I desire power over the house of Octavianus.”

“I will give you anything you want,” Marcellus said. “Beginning with me.”

“I want Egypt,” I said.

The Goddess’s laughter wound around me like a gentle breeze, low and knowing. I turned around, confused. Where was the Goddess? I could hear her, but I could not see her.

“I want what my mother wanted!” I announced to her, to Marcellus, to the air. Mother wanted independence for Egypt. She knew we could not fight Rome — who could? — and sought to ally herself instead. Why couldn’t I do the same?

“You must choose,” the Goddess whispered.

Choose what
?

“Selene!” Marcellus whispered, smiling. I had forgotten he was there. “Come with me.”

“Cleopatra Selene,” someone else whispered — Juba. “You must make a choice,” the Goddess said.

“Is that my only choice — to choose between men?” I asked. “I want what Mother had!”

“Your mother chose two men,” she said with light laughter.

“No! She chose independence for her country. She chose power and freedom,” I yelled.

Almost as if in response, a pulsating energy moved up from the ground into my bare feet. It thrummed up my body and radiated out in a bright light, first from my toes, then my fingertips, then the top of my head.

“I choose power,” I said. “I choose freedom.”

“Yesssssss,” the Goddess answered in the breeze. “That is all one can ever choose.”

My eyes snapped open. A cold floor. A blurry vision of swaying chanters. Flickering flames. The smell of sharp, cloying incense and human sweat. A priest stood over me and read from the Book of the Dead, beseeching the gods on my behalf:

“Anubis calls,” someone whispered. Arms grabbed me. Others wrapped me in thick red cloth, blinding me, binding me. I could not breathe. Bodies held me down.

“You must die before you can be reborn,” the priestess breathed into my ear. Someone covered my nose and mouth. Were the embalmers, the Priests of Anubis, mummifying me alive? I bucked and arched. Rage, terror, as my body fought.
Air, give me air
! Why were they killing me? I thrashed, every inch of my being screaming for air. Whirring spots of light exploded behind my eyes.

I floated. Stillness, in between Time. No breath, no life, no sound. A sea of nothing.

“Welcome, Little Moon,” a woman said.

“Mother!” I rejoiced, trying to turn toward her but moving as if trapped in liquid amber. Mother!

She was in the golden dress of Isis, the one she wore on the day of her death. “I am the Mother of All,” she said, and she transformed into the True Goddess, Isis, with her raiment of glittering stars and a golden disk on her head. I threw myself at her feet, a movement that took a lifetime.

“Let me stay with you, please,” I begged. “Do not send me back.”

“But I am with you always,” the Goddess of All said.

“No, you left me!” I cried.

“Stand, child!”

I stood, quivering with fear. Had I angered her? I could feel her moving away from me like a toy boat on the Nile floating out of my reach. “Wait! I will do whatever you want. Just stay with me,” I begged.

“I am always with you,” she whispered into the nothingness. “You chose power. Where does it live?”

Was she testing me? I wanted to get my answer right. I thought back to my choice in the earlier vision. Marcellus and Juba were there. Was I supposed to choose the power represented by either of them? Was I supposed to do what Mother did and align with Rome through its leaders?

“Where, child, does your power reside?” the Great Mother prompted again.

“With Marcellus?” I asked. Is that why she put him in my vision?

“Where …,” she whispered again.

And then I understood. “In you!” I cried, desperate to give her the answer she sought. “The power is in you! In my True Mother. In the Goddess. I surrender it all to you!”

But she was already gone, the echo of her sigh falling around me like mist.