Cleopatra's Moon (20 page)

“The scholar Varro?”

“Yes, he is one of my patrons. We are celebrating the publication of my first book.”

“I did not know you were working on a book! What is it called?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Oh, I thought I had told you about it. It’s called
Roman Antiquities
.”

Again, I felt that strange surge of anger that I usually tried to suppress around Juba. “And yet you do not write about Numidian antiquities or the great battles of your grandfather, Hemipshall the Second?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows, staring at me.

“I am sorry,” I said, looking down. Why could I not keep my mouth shut? “Publishing a book is an impressive accomplishment. Please, tell me about it.”

He pulled up a wooden stool and talked excitedly about the project and the positive reviews it had garnered. His eyes lit up as he spoke, and I understood, more deeply, that Juba was a scholar at heart.
How he would have loved our Great Library
, I thought once again. How
I
would have loved to show it to him and introduce him to our famous philosophers!

But that life seemed like a dream now. So I focused on the present — the warmth of his smile, the light in his eyes. We discussed the long and expensive process of getting his scrolls copied for distribution and his plans for future books. Ptolly never awoke, despite our enthusiasm. And we both pretended my clumsy attempt at kissing him never happened.

“Do not give him that water!” commanded the doctor.

I jumped at his sharp tone. “But he is so thirsty!” I cried.

“Please,” Ptolly said, licking his cracked lips. “Just a little.”

The
iatros
scowled. “I have just given him a tincture of feverfew, and I do not want it diluted before it takes effect.”

“Just a little?” I repeated, hating to see Ptolly suffer.

The
iatros
sighed as if greatly put upon. “Fine, but not too much.”

I held the honeyed water to my brother’s lips, supporting his head as he closed his eyes. Ptolly had continued to deteriorate, his fever lingering, his strength gone. I tried not to notice how even the act of drinking exhausted him.

“That’s enough!” the doctor said.

Reluctantly, I pulled the cup away.

“More?” Ptolly whispered.

The doctor narrowed his eyes at me. But how could I not slake my little brother’s thirst? I could not bear the sight of the dry, sunken hollows of his eyes or the parched, peeling skin around his lips. For the thousandth time, I wished that Olympus, our royal physician in Alexandria, were here to help me.

When I let Ptolly drink his fill, the
iatros
turned on his heel and left, muttering in Greek, “How can I do my job if this meddlesome child is constantly interfering!”

He must have forgotten Greek was our first language. I knew he was going to complain to Livia, especially since I had refused to let him bleed Ptolly again. I could not bear to see my brother grow even weaker at the doctor’s ministrations.

“Thanks, sister,” Ptolly murmured as I put the cup down.

Zosima had made a salve of beeswax and chamomile oil. I dipped my finger into the small clay cup and spread the ointment on Ptolly’s
mouth, tracing the pale and peeling contours over and over again, as if by sheer repetition I could bring back the sweet pink plumpness of his little-boy lips.

“Tell me another story?” he mumbled.

The weaker Ptolly got, the more he wanted to hear about our lives in Alexandria. It was as if my stories of Egypt were calling to him, like snatches of a beautiful song he could almost, but not quite, remember.

“Which one?”

Ptolly shivered and turned on his side, bringing his knees up to his chest. “I am so cold,” he muttered.

I looked behind me at the doorway from which the doctor had just left. He would probably tell me not to add blankets to the thin wool covering already spread over him because his chill was likely the result of the tincture taking effect. Ptolly shivered again, and I felt a surge of defiance. How could he expect me to sit back and watch my baby brother suffer? After kicking off my sandals, I climbed onto his sleeping couch behind him, curling around his body and rubbing my hands over his goose-pimpled arms. I willed my body to heat him and, within a few minutes, his teeth stopped chattering.

I raked my fingers on the scratchy wool. Our cats, Sebi and Tanafriti, responded to my summons by jumping onto the couch, one curling into his chest, the other around his head. I could feel his muscles relax as our combined warmth entered his body.

“‘Nother story,” Ptolly prompted again, and my heart lurched at how young he sounded, younger than even his nine years.

I sighed. “Which one?” I repeated.

“When they tricked you.”

I chuckled. I knew which story he meant. It had become his favorite. “It all started because I hated you with all my heart when you were born. I wanted to send you back to wherever you came from!”

He made a gurgling, giggling sound in his throat.

“Alexandros and I were four. I had complained bitterly about hearing your wails echoing down the empty halls when I awoke in the
deep-dark,” I said. “Everybody tried to get me to like you, especially soft-hearted Katep. Do you remember him?”

He shook his head and I swallowed, recalling Katep’s kindness, the pretty roundness of his face, the soothing scent of sandalwood and cinnamon of his skin.

“One night, I was especially ill-tempered about your loud screaming….”

“You? Ill-tempered?”

I smiled, pleased he could muster the energy to tease me.

“So Katep turned to me and said, ‘The baby misses his
mother.’
See, he knew I missed Mother terribly during the long period she traveled to help Tata recover from his war in Parthia. But I refused to have empathy for you….”

“Typical.”

“Shush. Anyway, one night, your cries seemed particularly loud and miserable. So Katep said, ‘Come, let us see if we can help the milk nurse.’“

“Nafre.”

I paused. Not since leaving Alexandria had he uttered the name of the nurse he had adored — the nurse who had left him on the dock because she could not bear to live among Romans. “Yes. Poor Nafre looked exhausted as she paced with you on her shoulder.

“‘I order you to make that baby stop crying!’ I told her. But Katep said, ‘She cannot, because he misses his
mother,’
trying yet again to get me to feel for you.”

“Could have told him … never work,” he whispered.

“I told her to feed you and she said she already had. See, you were a little pig even then! All of a sudden, you belched like one of the burly dockworkers from the Harbor of Good Return!”

I paused, thinking how happy I would be to hear him burp now, for that would mean he would have eaten something.

“Well, as soon as you burped, Nafre shoved you into my arms and scurried off, claiming she had to wipe off her shoulder. I looked into
your face, you looked up at me, and then … you smiled! I gasped. Your grin looked so much like Tata’s — though toothless. I turned to Katep in surprise.

“‘See,’ Katep said. ‘Ptolemy Philadelphos loves his sister — She Who Shines like the Moon, She Who Soothes like Hathor.’“

Ptolly made a noise in his throat. In previous tellings, he had giggled at Katep’s overly formal Egyptian words.

I continued. “When I looked down and saw that you were still smiling at me, I had a total change of heart.”

“And then?”

“And then you grew up to torture me.”

“No, Klee-Klee,” he muttered. “Tell it real.”

He was using his baby nickname for me, as if his soul — and his memories — were growing younger. Traveling backward. It terrified me. My throat tightened, and I had to take a deep breath before I could speak again. “Fine. Zosima later confessed that she, Katep, and Nafre had planned the whole thing. See, you always smiled after burping. So the three of them waited for just the right time to strike. By throwing me in your line of vision as soon as you burped, it looked like you reserved your most charming, most loving smile just for me.”

“G’ trick,” Ptolly said sleepily.

“It was a good trick.” And it had worked. From that moment on, I had loved my little brother with as much ferocity as I had once hated him for his loud crying.

Ptolly did not say anything else, and I thought him asleep. I pushed myself up to check. His eyes were closed. I could see the tiny blue veins in his eyelids.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, barely moving his pale lips.

I lay back down.

“Klee-Klee?”

“Hmm?”

“I miss Nafre.”

I closed my eyes, hearing the grief in his small voice. “I know.”

“Do not leave me,” he whispered. “Like … Mother and Nafre.”

My heart lurched. I cuddled up to him, surrounding him with my body, pouring my affection and love into him as if I could comfort him from the outside in. “I will never leave you, little brother,” I whispered into his ear. “
Never
.”

I must have fallen sleep. The light was strange, as if a spring storm had come and gone. I wondered if the rain had cooled the air. Is that why I was so cold? I cuddled closer to Ptolly.

My heart began to beat faster. Someone was watching me. I lifted my head toward the center of the room. The cats’ eyes — glittering, focused, intense — regarded me with a seriousness that stilled my breath. Sebi and Tanafriti, sitting like two statues in a tomb. Sentinels. Brother and sister cat, guardians to the realm of Osiris.

I sat up. My stomach tightened, pulling the air from my lungs. Our cats waited for me to realize what they already knew. But I refused to believe them.

I shook Ptolly, begged him to wake, tried to warm his cold skin with my hands, pretended that the blue around his mouth was a trick of the disappearing light. The silent cats stood as witnesses to my horror, as if guarding the portal for the
ka
that had already left my little brother’s body.

My sweet Ptolly, I promised never to leave
you
, but why, WHY, had I not made you promise never to leave
me
?

I stayed with Ptolly, refusing to remove my arms from around his cold body. Hands, voices tried to pry me from him, but I would not budge.

Zosima finally broke through the horror. Talking to me in a low, soft voice, as if I were a toddler on the edge of a cliff, she said, “Let us prepare him for the Priests of Anubis. We will dress your brother like a true prince of Egypt.”

She brought me water scented with lotus oil and I washed his body. I straightened his limbs, combed through his curls, and dressed him in Alexandros’s old Egyptian kilt, pectoral, and linen cloak. I cradled his small, cold head and set a coronet of rosemary and laurel in place of the golden diadem that Octavianus had long ago melted down to pay the soldiers he’d used to destroy my family.

Zosima and Alexandros helped me surround his funeral couch with fragrant blooms and small pots of burning incense. Someone hung pine and cypress branches around the door frame, a Roman tradition, I later learned, to signify that death had polluted the room.

Although I did not remember her entering, Octavia also refused to leave Ptolly’s side. Grief seemed to have torn her apart as well. She had crumpled at his feet, sobbing. I felt an even deeper kinship with her then. She had understood how special Ptolly was. She had loved him deeply too.

Ptolly’s
ka
, I sensed, hovered nearby. It would have no peace until we completed the full rites of Anubis as we had done for our parents and Caesarion. It was the only way Ptolly would be reunited with them in the afterworld.

“I will not fail you,” I promised. “I will find a way to entomb you in the sacred traditions.”

Octavianus had a different plan. He commanded that Ptolly’s body be burned in the Roman manner. He had banned the worship of
Isis and other Egyptian gods from inside the walls of Rome; he said he could hardly allow such practices in his own household. I overheard him arguing with Livia outside Ptolly’s death room while I pretended sleep.

“We are in Rome, and we do things our way,” Octavianus said in an angry whisper. “We burn him on the pyres outside the city walls on the fifth day and that is it!”

Livia, to my surprise, argued for my wishes. “Husband, if the boy’s body disappears, it could be made to look suspicious. But if we allow them to have their Egyptian rites, then you appear kind and magnanimous. You need people to see you that way right now.”

“I see no advantage in honoring their barbaric death rituals,” he said before stomping off. “The boy burns!”

After they left, I sat up and rearranged the flowers surrounding Ptolly’s body. Kissing his cold forehead, I vowed again to honor him in the ancient ways. Or die trying.

That afternoon, I asked for an audience with Octavianus and was refused. Thyrsus, Octavianus’s man, shook his head after blocking me from his
tablinum
door. “The
Princeps
is busy now.”

“But I must see him!”

Thyrsus took me by the elbow. “I am sorry about your brother,” he said in a low tone. “But Caesar is not to be disturbed.”

I snatched my arm out of his grip. “I MUST see him,” I cried loudly. “It will anger the Gods of Death if he ignores me!”

Thyrsus paused. Seeing the opening, I pressed on. “When a son of Egypt dies, all the gods of the underworld surround his body, demanding they be honored in the ancient ways,” I announced even louder as I saw wide-eyed servants, slaves, and associates drifting toward me. “Don’t you know they are gathering still? Don’t you
feel
them?”

Thyrsus grabbed me. “You must go!”

“No!” I screamed. “I must see him!”

The most powerful man in the world burst out of his room. “What is the meaning of this? Thyrsus, remove her!”

“I have been trying to!” Octavianus’s man said with exasperation as he grabbed my arms behind my back.

“I will speak with you!” I yelled as I writhed like a slippery octopus in Thyrsus’s grip. “You must honor the newly grieved!”

Octavianus turned to look at the growing crowd of witnesses to our exchange. He would not dare abuse me or banish me in the face of associates and clients who might spread gossip about his behavior. His image was too important. I had counted on that.

Octavianus glared at me. But then he smiled. “Of course, of course, my dear girl,” he said, playing to the crowd. “One must indeed always honor the newly grieved.”

He drew me in to his study, gripping my elbow with unnecessary firmness. When the door closed behind me, he sniffed and pushed me away from him.

“You smell like death,” he said. “I will have to purify this room after you leave.”

“You must allow us to perform the ancient rites for my brother,” I said.

He smirked. “You don’t seriously expect me to listen to the demands of a barbarian
girl
, bastard spawn of a witch, do you?”

“The gods punish those who act with hubris,” I said. “Would you risk having them turn on you?” I had prepared this argument, knowing that Octavianus was just as superstitious as most Romans, if not more so. He feared lightning, the dark, and angry gods. I prayed I could use that to turn him to my view.

But Octavianus shook off my words. “I honor
my
gods. I am under no obligation to honor yours. And I will not have this conversation again. The boy burns. And when you leave this room, you will leave calmly. Do you understand?”

“You would dare anger Anubis?”

To my surprise, he threw his head back and laughed. “A dog god? You and your beasts. They have no power in Rome.”

“If the gods of Egypt have no power here, then why did you ban the Goddess from Rome? Anubis is a true son of Isis. He is not a god who angers easily, but when he does —”

Octavianus put his hand up in my face. “Stop! Your little attempt to frighten me won’t work. My patron god is Apollo, the God of Light and Wisdom. He banishes the evil surrounding your dark gods. He —”

I grinned at him. Something in my expression gave him pause. Like a sorceress speaking an incantation, with my wild and unkempt hair covering most of my face, I muttered, “‘O God of the Silver Bow, who protectest Chryse and holy Cilla and rulest Tenedos with thy might, hear me, O thou of Sminthe….’“

Octavianus looked confused, as if the words sounded familiar but he could not place where he had heard them.

“‘Hear me, ? thou of Sminthe,’“ I repeated. “‘I am calling Apollo your god, he of Sminthe, the
mouse
god himself.’“

I could see fear mingling with his confusion. “Before you insult my so-called beast gods,” I said, “remember that it is Apollo’s priest, Chryse, who calls him ‘mouse god’ in
The Iliad
. The mouse cowers in fear of the jackal. The jackal
devours
the mouse whole.”

His palm slapped my face so hard, I reeled backward. I put my hand to my stinging cheek.

“You dare insult Apollo in my own home?” he hissed.

“I do not insult. I merely speak the truth.”

He grabbed my wrist and twisted it hard. I gasped. “Do not say another word, or I swear by Apollo’s chariot that I will burn you
alive
alongside your brother,” Octavianus said in a low, dangerous tone. “Do not ever dishonor me or my patron god again, do you understand?”

He brought me closer, twisting harder. I tried to breathe normally, but with the pain and the rank smell of
garum
on his breath, I could not. I nodded.

He let me go with a push, and I skidded into his desk. Something rolled off it. Without thinking, I reached for it, but his hand slapped me away. He swept up what clattered to the ground and slammed it back down on his desk.

He saw me staring. “My signet ring,” he gloated. “Made from your mother’s golden armbands. I do take such pleasure knowing that what once graced her body now touches mine.”

He grinned at my look of disgust. “Now. Get out.”

I rushed out of his
tablinum
and back to Ptolly’s body. “Help me, O Goddess,” I begged as I curled into myself at his feet. “Help me save my brother.”

Exhausted from weeping, I dozed as images floated in and out of my awareness. Ptolly called for me: “Klee-Klee, where are you?”

Amunet emerged from smoky shadows. “Isis is your savior!” the priestess said.

“Well, who was Ptolly’s savior?” I cried.

“You are,” Amunet whispered. “Anubis demands it.”

I woke with a start. The room was dark. Someone had put a blanket over me. I looked around. Alexandros slept on a pallet on the other side of Ptolly. I heard a slight snore and saw Juba behind me on a low stool, his back against the wall, chin on chest.

I swallowed as my dream came back to me. “Anubis demands it,” Amunet had said. I lay down on the hard floor, remembering the strange day she taught me to Call Forth Anubis. The day she told me I would need that power to curse my enemies and protect the sons of Egypt.

I gasped, sitting up to stare into the closed, waxy eyelids of my baby brother. My heart raced with a new understanding and hope.

Juba stirred and sat up, rubbing the back of his neck. “Cleopatra Selene? Are you all right?” he whispered. “Do you want me to pull a pallet for you too? That floor cannot be comfortable.”

I shook my head, rubbing my cheek where the stone floor had left little marks. I moved closer to Juba. “Will you help me?”

“Of course,” he said. “Anything.”

I looked at him in the flickering glow from the almost spent torch in the hallway. Exhaustion and pain were etched on his face — a reminder that other people grieved for my baby brother too. “I cannot let them burn him,” I said. “We must perform the sacred rites.”

“I agree. But nobody has been able to convince Caesar of that.”

“You have tried?” I asked, surprised.

He nodded. How loyal Juba was to my brothers and me! It took me a moment before I could speak again.

“I need your help in getting …” I paused, wondering how I could make this request without shocking or disgusting him. “Would you help me get …”

Juba leaned forward. “Whatever you need, Cleopatra Selene. Just tell me.”

I took a breath.

“I need the blood of a black dog.”