Daughters of the Nile (55 page)

They told the world that they were gods.

I have merely tried to honor mine.

And now I must return to Rome, to the emperor, with everything unfinished. I am so very miserable at the thought I could sob. Why haven’t I thought of a way to keep the emperor from destroying our life here? Wasn’t I smarter than this, once? Has motherhood made me irrational and featherbrained, or am I just tired of fighting?

Glancing at my daughter, I know she struggles with her own disappointments. But she has gotten ahold of herself and I must do the same. Fine, then. Maybe it is all unfinished. Isn’t it for everyone, in the end? Not even Alexander accomplished everything he set out to do before he died, and I am not dead yet, though being at the emperor’s side will make me wish I were.

I must bear up under this and find a way to turn it all to my advantage as I have always done. Just as my daughter is now learning to do. With a stiffened spine, I take Isidora’s hand and we return for what I hope will be a peaceful evening.

Instead, we find my palace in chaos. It seems as if every courtier in the city is crowded in the throne room, where there is also a horse standing on my marble floors. Yes, a horse. A hobbled mare, burrs in her coat, ribs protruding at each side.

Chryssa is there too, and my freedwoman tries to warn me away from the unusual scene with a frantic motion of her hand. Soon I see why. With the mangy horse is the boy. That
wretched
boy, wilder than when we first found him, teeth bared in a snarl at his Roman captors.

I suppose Tacfarinas is no longer a boy. A hint of a beard gives a rough quality to his square jaw as it juts out over a thick neck and well-muscled shoulders. He is filthy beneath the ropes in which he is bound, as if his accusers dragged him in the dirt to bring him to trial, but there is a potent masculinity about him now that he has become a young man.

At the sight of Tacfarinas, my daughter stifles a cry with her palm. I wish she had not seen him. Would that Isidora had never laid eyes upon him in that cage all those years ago!

Chryssa whispers to us that Tacfarinas has been captured in the hills by Roman settlers and stands accused of banditry. Of horse theft. Dora shakes her head in disbelief and tries to go to him. Catching her by the back of the gown, I give her a firm tug to remind her where we are and who is watching.

She squeezes my hand as the Romans make their case before the king. Seated on his throne, Juba hears the complaints with an air of placid attention, but his fingers flex in agitation at his side. I doubt the Romans would have bothered to bring Tacfarinas to trial if they didn’t know he had been in the service of the king.

Indeed, Juba makes no pretense of not knowing him. “Tacfarinas of the Musulamii, you stand accused of stealing this mare from a veteran farmer, under the cover of night. What will you say to these charges?”

Tacfarinas swallows, his dark eyes flashing with resentment. “I would say that there is nothing here in Africa that has not been stolen first by Romans.”

It startles me that several Berbers in the audience shout their agreement. While waiting for the cheers to die down, Tacfarinas turns and his eyes fall upon Dora. They soften when he sees her; I will give him that. But when she mouths his name, trying to warn him against further rebellion, he looks away.

The king sits taller. “Did you steal this mare?”

Tacfarinas jerks his head up as if he would deny it. Then, as he takes in the array of powerful men in togas situated around him, his shoulders droop and the spirit seems to go out of him. “Yes, I took the mare.”

“Guilty! Guilty!” These cries go up from the Romans.

Dora gives a slight, desperate shake of her head and I tug her hand to keep her still. The king’s expression is grim, for we all know the penalty for such a crime. The boy does not have Roman citizenship, which means the punishment will be worse. He will be flogged—there is no question about that—but his freedom and his very survival are in question too.

The Romans call for Tacfarinas to be cast from a cliff or made into a slave while some of our Berbers shout for mercy. At the calls for death, my poor daughter’s breathing begins to stutter. Her wild little pants make me fear she will swoon. I decide to spirit her away, but she will not be moved. Terror has turned her into deadweight. The king sees Dora’s distress but he has no choice in what he must do. I know it. He knows it too.

“Nothing else to say?” the king asks Tacfarinas.

The Berber boy remains mute.

The king tries to goad him into speech. “I would have you answer this. You were not watched closely in the royal stables, where the finest steeds are bred. Any horse was yours for the taking if you wanted to steal. Why steal this broken horse and not one of mine?”

Tacfarinas’s insolent stare cuts up to Juba. “You’re not starving your horses, Majesty. You didn’t tie them to a fence and leave them in the sun with no water. That’s how I found this mare. When I tried to give her a drink from my water skin, this farmer hurled abuse at me and drove me off. So I came back for her at night.”

The settler doesn’t deny the accusation, but makes a threatening gesture with his fist. “What cause did you have to be on my land in the first place, you young pirate?”

The boy answers, “I need no cause to sleep on the lands of my ancestors.”

None of this will help him. It is no crime to starve a horse. We have little authority to tell our settlers how to treat their slaves; we cannot tell them how to care for animals. That Tacfarinas tried to free the sickly mare can be no defense and I suspect he is guilty of far greater crimes. I do not think it an accident that the Roman veteran called him a pirate . . .

Juba asks, “How old are you now, Tacfarinas of the Musulamii?”

Tacfarinas falls silent again. Perhaps he does not know how old he is; the Berbers do not count their years in the way we do, so the king answers for him. “You are sixteen. Maybe seventeen. Old enough to serve in my legions. Our kingdom needs soldiers and I know you have fight. I sentence you to be flogged . . . and then conscripted into service for a minimum of twenty-five years. Let it be done as I command.”

Chryssa blanches at the sentence and I remember her screams when the emperor had her flogged. My daughter has never seen such a thing, but she is unable to restrain herself for even another moment. “No!” Dora cries, trying to break away from me; she tries to run to her Berber boy, but I have too strong a hold on her. My guards hurry to surround us, helping me to usher the princess away.

As we go, I hear the tearing of the boy’s tunic as he is stripped for his flogging, and I shudder to think of what a bloody mess the scourge will leave him . . . if he lives through it.

Hiccuping and near hysterical, my daughter cannot be calmed. “It’s my fault,” she wails in the privacy of her chambers. “When I told him I was to marry, it hurt him so badly.”

Arranging the coverlet on her bed, I insist, “We all face disappointments—we don’t all behave so recklessly as that boy always behaves. You’re not to blame.”

“I
am
to blame. If I didn’t tell him I was to marry, he wouldn’t have run away. He tried to save the mare because he saw another creature in as much pain as he was. And if I wasn’t so fond of Tacfarinas, Papa would have never sentenced him so harshly.”

I stroke her cheek. “How wrong you are. Were you not so fond of that Berber boy, he’d be dead now. Or a slave.”

“He’ll think conscription worse than slavery. He’d rather die than fight for Rome.”

“He’ll serve in
our
legions, not Rome’s. It may do him good, Isidora. One cannot commit a crime and escape without consequence. It was for
your
sake that the king gave him a place in the army where he may yet bring honor to his people.”

She groans in misery. “Twenty-five years he must serve, and I’ll never see him again. The last memory he’ll have of me is that I stood by my father’s throne and did nothing to help him.”

I know well the guilt in staying silent. Of walking away from the one you love. “There is nothing you could have done to help him. If you had said anything, it would have gone worse. The king would have been forced to punish him more severely so as not to appear as if he were disregarding the law just to please his daughter.”

But Isidora will not hear me. She does not shout or fling hateful words. She does not have to. It is all in her eyes. Her eyes see a world filled with injustice and that I am part of that world. She does not want my comfort. I am forced to leave her curled upon her bed, tears falling on her pillow.

Leaving her, I go straightaway to the king but he has gone to supervise the conscription himself.

I do not see him again until the next afternoon.

I catch him at his meal and ask, “Is it done?”

The king takes a roasted quail egg from the platter and stabs it open with his knife. “Tacfarinas is bloody but alive. He is now in the custody of the
decurio
for our cavalry. The boy is a skilled rider; he may have a career ahead of him when he heals.” Then Juba heaves a sigh. “I went to see Isidora late last night . . . She will not speak to me.”

“Well, she cannot bear the sight of me either.”

“You aren’t the one who sent her Berber boy away,” my husband says with a rueful shake of his head. “I did that and I fear she will never forgive me.”

“She’ll forgive you and she’ll forget Tacfarinas.”

At this, my husband gives a bitter laugh. “Not if any harm should come to him. Boys who die young live forever in the tender hearts of the girls who loved them.”

* * *

TO
cheer my daughter, we host a farewell banquet, and during the festivities, our courtiers all speculate on what fine royal groom will win her hand. Several young girls volunteer to serve her, wherever her new home might be, so that she will have her own ladies at court.

Before the banquet is over, Tala points to two young handmaidens, one from the kitchens and the other the daughter of my washerwoman. “Not those two,” Tala says, bracelets jingling on her blue-tinted arm. “They’re fawners and flatterers and frivolous girls. They’ll tell Princess Isidora whatever she wishes to hear, but they won’t keep her secrets or help her to guard herself or her reputation at court.”

When my niece married the King of Pontus, I did not worry about court intrigues, for there has seldom been a girl as guarded as Pythia. But my daughter guards herself against nothing. Isidora will be very fortunate to have Tala with her to speak hard truths and bolster her strength, just as I have been fortunate to have my Berber woman with me all these years.

“You choose her attendants,” I say, comforted to realize that in this, and in so many other things, Tala knows best. What kind of queen would I have become without her Berber wisdom? I will miss her frankness. I will even miss hearing her bicker with Chryssa, the two of them exchanging barbs that are no less sharp for their mutual respect and affection.

I will lose both of them now. The two women who have served as my closest companions since I first became queen. For Tala will go with Isidora, and I will leave Chryssa here in Mauretania, where she has her own children to look after . . .

I cannot count the number of times I have said good-bye to Chryssa. I have given her up a little bit at a time. First to her freedom. Then to her happy marriage. Then to her beloved children and the house she bought in the hills—the one she thinks I do not know about. She has feared my reaction to the idea that she has a life of her own that has nothing to do with me or my treasury. Truthfully, she has been right to fear it.

I do not let go easily of the things I love.

But she doesn’t need me anymore, I think, and so our farewell is especially bittersweet. All the more, because I think she knows, I think she senses, that I will not return from Rome this time.

In the privacy of my chambers, she says, “Don’t go.”

Sitting at my dressing table, I nearly upend a number of little green glass perfume bottles and amber kohl pots. “When the emperor summons me, I always go.” I must go. It is too late for schemes or plots or plans, since Juba and the emperor both insist my son must be educated in Rome.

“This time feels different,” she says, eyeing me carefully as she unfastens my pearl earrings, falling back into our old intimacy.

I stop her, catching her hands and forcing them against the folds of my royal purple cloak. “You’re not in servitude any longer, but I am. I haven’t freed myself from Augustus; but I’ve freed
you
from him. And I am glad.”

These are not mere words. It is the truth. Striding confidently through the palace, giving orders to servants and subordinates, calling officials to account and harrying them until they will agree to nearly anything to escape her, Chryssa is no longer a beaten slave. She is an impressive woman and part of the legacy I leave behind. I will not leave behind a finished temple to my goddess, but there are people I have helped, people I have loved, people who love me. Can there be better work than that?

Thirty-four