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Elder

P
oseidon’s winds beat against her face, teasing strands from the golden clasps of her diadem and whipping them across her cheeks. Cold idled in the air despite the bright afternoon sun, and Berenice wrapped her woolen mantle more tightly around her shoulders. She stepped lightly over the thick grass. All around her, acacia trees sprang up, their stalks spindling into the blue until their branches burst forth in a spurt of olive. Here and there, Berenice caught sight of one of the menagerie’s lingering denizens: a giraffe stretching his neck to munch idly on the leaves, or a peacock dragging his luxurious tail through the high-grown lawn. Otherwise, she was alone. Or as alone as she could ever be. Two guards trailed some twenty paces back, silent yet obtrusive.

As a child, she’d loved this forgotten isle cast off the royal harbor. Her father’s hapless uncle, Ptolemy Alexander, had built a palace here during his first reign some fifty years ago, among the rocky crags of the northern beach, but it had long since fallen into ruin, its gold and marble pilfered by his more fortunate successors. In the years that followed, the island had given itself over to wilder passions. The glimmer of the past gleamed sharper along the southern shore: the limestone avenues cracked with stubborn grass, the Isis temple with its shrinking coterie of priests. The rest had been overtaken by the Piper’s ever-growing collection of exotic creatures. Amid the birds and beasts of far-flung lands, Berenice would lose herself in wonder. Here she could forget the tensions of the court, her mother’s scheming, and her father’s decadent feasts. And it was here that she’d first learned of love and death: the wolf who leapt to greet her each day until the day he rose on his paws no more. “Don’t weep for your foolish pets”—Tryphaena’s words. Those had been long and solitary years for her mother, years of welcoming and burying babes each spring as she tried and failed to bear a living son.

As Berenice left the acacia grove behind and crossed onto the limestone that snaked toward the Temple of Isis on the island’s southern end, the grounds grew more ordered. Between the granite statues of her forefathers in sphinx form, each cloaked face virtually indistinguishable from the next, stood the cages of her father’s more fearsome beasts. Most of the pens lay empty; the Piper had taken great joy in acquiring creatures but little interest in their care. The albino tiger of her childhood remained, lying listless on his belly. He raised his head and growled halfheartedly at her step. In his youth, he’d paced until his tread wore through the iron floor of his crate. Now he was still; only his tail flicked from time to time. Pieton would have her kill the creature. “A powerful example, the death of the most prized piece of your father’s collection,” the eunuch told her. Her mother urged the animal’s execution too. But Berenice needed him, this creature paled to an imitation of his former majesty. He reminded her of her father, of all she herself refused to become. The tiger’s claws, yellowing with years, relaxed; his growls calmed to a purr.

By the time she reached the Temple of Isis, its frieze of the bare-breasted goddess suckling her fatherless babe brilliant in the afternoon glow, the sundial’s shadow stretched long. She should return to the other shore, to her royal palace and all the irritations that waited there. What was she searching for here? Did she believe that she could sate the cold hole in her stomach? That was childish. Besides, her absence would have already turned the bureaucrats and petitioners restless. She had to tread with care to appease the people and their priests. Word of her antics in the Upper Lands had spread—and the Alexandrians were capricious characters. She couldn’t risk another such display. Not if she wanted to capture Cyprus. Not if she wanted to fend off her father’s armies.

A scuffle scattered her thoughts, and she turned toward the upset: her men grasped a breathless boy between them. The larger guard seized the child’s wrists in one hand; the other pointed his sword at the interloper’s neck.

“Caught a likely assassin, have you?” Berenice scoffed. It was their job, their duty—she understood that. But she wondered why they’d grabbed a child with such ferocity. Did they think her so weak and womanly as to be endangered by that wisp of a boy?

His knees buckled, collapsing him forward toward the limestone lane. She almost pitied this pathetic messenger. The broader soldier jerked him to stand. The smaller, the sword-wielder, spat in disgust at the child’s cowardice.

“Come, come. Let’s see what he has to say for himself before you bruise him too badly.” It was strange that he should come to the island at all. Who would know that she lingered here? “You ought to know better than to race through the royal menagerie,” she told the boy. “As you’ve now learned, there are those who might mistrust your motives. What brings you here at such reckless speed?”

“My master, Sophos, sent me.” His voice cracked and he took a moment to gather himself. “Sophos, who cares for your mother.”

This tired tale again—her mother feigning some sickness to gain her attention. “I know who he is. Why did he send you?”

“Her illness…” The boy’s tongue stuck in his throat.

“What now of her famed illness?”

“H-her illness,” he stuttered. “Her illness has taken a bad turn. Sophos bids you to come at once. She has little time, the doctor said.”

The renowned physician should know better than to send some slave every time her mother feigned worsening symptoms. But her men’s eyes lay accusations on her. Perhaps they had mothers they hadn’t yet learned to hate, and so, for their sakes—not for her own worries, no—she followed the boy back to her father’s palace.

The moment she entered her mother’s apartments, she was overwhelmed by the stench: dusty myrrh pricked with the treacly smell of honey. Another odor wafted, sick and sour, as though the dulled silver incense burners lining her mother’s ivory-embossed table were meant to cover up some far more frightful smell. Berenice resisted the urge to cover her nose with her hand. Instead, she stepped carefully across Medusa’s pebbled head and toward her mother’s bedchamber.

Within, the doctor bent over a withered crone. All bones, skin, and elbows, no flesh on her at all. That creature with paper skin and twisted veins could not be her mother. Berenice refused to believe it. Tryphaena could not have grown so small. And yet as she thought back on the past weeks…Her mother’s absences had stretched on from one week to the next. Berenice had scarcely laid eyes on Tryphaena since her return to Alexandria, and her mother had never been quick to remove herself from court. When Sophos looked up from his shriveled patient, Berenice shrank to a girl of six coming upon her mother’s bed of child death.

“My queen. I’m glad you have come.”

“Is she awake?” Berenice’s whisper caught in her throat. She hadn’t prepared herself for this scene. It was a scene, though, she reminded herself. Her mother’s curled form and the physician looming over her, the faience figure of bare-breasted Isis on the mantel and the half dozen incense burners scattered about the room—each detail had been chosen to craft a death tableau. Berenice could scarcely believe that her mother had turned religious in her final days. Tryphaena would no sooner take to lighting scented sticks to beg the goddess’s mercy than she would give up her dream of ruling.

“For the moment, she sleeps,” Sophos answered. “Only the gods may say whether she’ll wake again.”

“It can’t be as grave as that.”

“My queen, she’s suffered for months. This latest turn comes as no shock.”

Her mother didn’t suffer; she prevailed. She manipulated ailments the way lesser women manipulated costumes: with ease and calculated malice. She wouldn’t be felled by some plebeian illness—an infection of the throat and nasal passages.

“Shall I leave you two alone, my queen?”

Berenice nodded despite herself. She hadn’t expected to see Tryphaena so pale and feeble. Her mother was fading—but not dying, no. Berenice couldn’t believe that. Her mother thrived on attention—this, too, would be part of some ploy. She wouldn’t be taken in. The cloying stench of incense wouldn’t cloud her senses here.

“Call for me if her condition worsens,” Sophos told her gently.

The door thudded shut, and the two were alone, free of the eyes of physicians and servants. And now her mother should spring up at once, with renewed and fearsome vigor. Laughing at how she’d tricked her daughter—
soft.
But the body on the cedar bed didn’t so much as twitch.

Berenice cleared her throat, and kept her voice cold. “You may drop the theatrics, Mother. We’re alone now.”

Still, the body didn’t stir.

“Isn’t luring me here victory enough?”

Berenice approached the sleeping woman. Beneath her mother’s bracelets, chapped sores had cropped up on Tryphaena’s paper skin. Foolish, careless slaves. When her mother grew strong, her rage would mount and they’d come to regret their negligence. Berenice took the old woman’s hand in hers. Its palm was clammy; its fingers nearly slipped from her grasp.

“Berenice.” Tryphaena’s voice scratched in her throat. “You’ve come to me at last.”

“I weary of these antics, Mother. If you wanted an audience, you might have petitioned like anyone else.”

Tryphaena’s laughter choked into a cough. It wrenched her frame, ripping the hand from Berenice’s hold. An act, she reminded herself. A good one.

“Even now you deny me. What sort of unnatural daughter doesn’t mourn her mother’s death?”

“I’ve witnessed this particular ruse too many times. If you brought me here only to berate me, I’ll go at once.” Berenice straightened in anger. She’d grown weak; she’d nearly been blinded by her mother’s theatrics the way she’d been as a girl. But now she was a grown woman—a queen, not a fool.

“No, no, my child,” Tryphaena whispered, her voice weak. “I bid you to sit. I didn’t mean to lose my temper. There are—there are things I must say to you before my soul abandons this world for the next. You must accept the truth, child. I am dying.”

Something in her tone made Berenice pause. Her mother sounded meek, her voice shorn of conniving undertones. Had she herself been so unbending as to miss the truth? That Tryphaena, the impenetrable woman who’d borne her and raised her and plotted for her and connived for her, was dying? Her stomach twisted at the thought. For all her bitterness, Berenice had never imagined what life would be without her mother. Without Tryphaena as her spine. The hardness her mother had clung to had shielded her. Permitted her foibles. Her knees wobbled—traitors. And so, no matter what her mother had done, Berenice couldn’t abandon her, not at the end. Not the way her father had when he sent Tryphaena from the palace, and crowned that concubine his queen. The shrunken woman reached out to her. Berenice took the proffered hand and squeezed it.

“My child, tell me: what will you do when your father returns at the head of a Roman army?”

Even now, even in her final breaths, her mother worried after her rule. There was a sort of caring in that. Maybe it wasn’t the caring that she’d wanted. But it was the sort that her mother had to give. She’d take it now.

“He won’t gain an army,” Berenice told Tryphaena softly, in a tone she might use with a child. “We have our own men in Rome. They tell us he hasn’t swayed the Senate. Pieton says—”

“‘Pieton says,’ ‘Pieton says.’ What do I care about his words?” Tryphaena spoke so quietly that Berenice could scarcely hear the venom. “May the gods damn the day I sent him to tutor you. You trust too easily.”

“That’s neither fair nor true, Mother.”

“But this eunuch.” Her mother’s voice shook. Berenice bent close to make out the words. They were important, or at least her mother thought they were. She should listen. “Do not…do not trust the eunuch. He’s no Ptolemy. He will…”

Her lips twitched but no other sound escaped. And then the twitching stopped too. No. Her mother wouldn’t fade from her this way, leaving her to grasp at a new mystery. Berenice cleared her throat to cry for Sophos, to bring him running to revive the woman who’d given her life. But as she watched Tryphaena’s uneven inhales, she knew it was too late. Berenice’s fingers tightened on the woman’s fingers as though her grip might bind her mother to this life.
Please.

The rasping stopped. Her mother’s form collapsed, empty, and no air came to fill it whole. She squeezed her mother’s hand tighter, until she feared that she’d crush Tryphaena’s fingers with her clutch. It wasn’t possible—not now, not yet. Berenice counted the pacing of her own lungs:
seven…eight…nine…
But still, still her mother’s chest didn’t rise.

“Mother?” she pleaded, her voice edged with a child’s belief in magic. Again, she tried. “Mother?”

The old woman didn’t answer. Berenice slipped her fingers to her mother’s wrist to check the beat of blood. But as she ran her hand up Tryphaena’s veins, there was only stillness. Desperate, Berenice put her fingers to her mother’s temple, her throat, and finally her chest, but no heartbeat matched her own.

“Sophos!” she called out, and then again: “Sophos!”

The long moments stretched on as she listened to his steps, his prying open of the door. Her mother’s skin felt clammy and cool. She pulled her hands away.

“She has passed, then,” the doctor said softly from the threshold.

Berenice didn’t shout at him, nor at the servants who flooded in, the very ones who’d ignored her mother’s peeling skin. Instead, she stared at the empty face before her. Tryphaena looked at peace; death had stolen the mad vigor that had defined her life. As Berenice stared at that face, the quiet face of an old woman—lips chapped, eyelids wrinkled—she knew that her mother would not return. Yet something anchored her to the spot as maids bustled in and out, as the breathless boy whispered in his master’s ear. She paid their murmurings no mind, and she didn’t object when the ebony-clad priestesses came to remove the body. To bathe and dress and care for it as she, the daughter, was supposed to do. The servants dispersed, and the sun sank into the sea.