Children of Tiber and Nile Read online

  Children of Tiber and Nile

  Book II of

  The Rise of Caesarion’s Rome

  by

  Deborah L. Davitt

  Copyright 2017, Deborah L. Davitt

  Cover art by Jason Nguyen, 2017

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  For more information on this book and others in the Edda-Earth universe, please see www.edda-earth.com.

  ISBN-10: 0-9860916-4-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9860916-4-3

  Library of Congress Control Number:2017915246

  Foreword

  No book, as I’ve said before, is written in a vacuum. The Caesarion books are the ones I wanted to write for ages, but didn’t think I had enough background in Roman history to write, without, well, obtaining for myself that level of education. Fortunately, a long-time reader of mine, Alexander Thomas, has his master’s degree in Classical Studies, with a focus on Roman military equipment and strategy. I’d like to thank him for being a good guide as I’ve done my research, and always being available to tell me when the source I’m reading (Suetonius, for example), might just be the tabloid journalist of ancient Rome. I’d also like to thank Anastasia Ivanova, the Russian super-fan who translated part of the first chapter of The Valkyrie, and Laura Ballegeer, my Canadian super-fan, for their help and support. Without the enthusiasm and encouragement of people like this, I’m not sure you’d be holding this book today; it helps to be reassured that the work is solid on days in which you feel as if you’ve left your talent in your other set of pants.

  I started writing Book IV of the Edda Prime series, and got to a certain point with it where I wasn’t sure what the characters would do next; there were new ones in the mix, and they changed many things. I started writing Caesarion as a break from that, and writing the history of the early empire has vastly clarified for me where Edda Prime will go as Sigrun allows things to unfold that will repair the damage done in the War of the Gods. Yes, that’s . . . vague. I’m sorry. Wait and see how it unfolds.

  As you read these books, you may be struck by how similar Roman life is to modern western life. Some of their holidays—such as Mother’s Day (Matronalia), or Compitalia (Halloween)—might bear some haunting similarities to how you celebrate such, yourself. Other customs, traditions, values, and attitudes may offend you. Please understand that the characters’ attitudes and beliefs reflect those of their time, place, society, and position within that society. Those attitudes do not necessarily reflect mine. Thus, if you encounter two male characters having sex, but both of them view themselves as male, comport themselves as vigorously male, and they do not consider their sexuality to be their identity? Then it’s not identity for them, and has very little to do with life in the 21st century of Real-Earth.

  Likewise, women married early in Roman times—plebeians, strikingly, less so than noblewomen—and in this highly-stratified and traditional society, everyone had a place. Caesarion breaks several cardinal rules of Roman behavior throughout these books. However, he’s god-born, and half-Egyptian. He has to change the rules.

  If you’ve read much on the time-period, I hope you can accept that my perspective on alternate-timeline characters in history—from a Cleopatra who’s outlived her Real-Earth lifespan, to an Octavian Thurinus who was never called Augustus or adopted into the Julii clan, to an older, more weary and cynical Marcus Antonius, or a younger, untried Tiberius—might not be how you’ve seen them when you’ve read them in the annals of history.

  If you can’t suspend your disbelief, or are easily offended by characters who may not share your particular modern attitudes and sensibilities, this book might not be for you. I hope, however, that you’ll give it a try anyway. Sometimes delight comes in the most unexpected of places.

  Chapter I: Plots

  We denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

  —Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Ends of Good and Evil)

  Ianuarius 2, 20 AC

  The vast temple complexes baked under the noonday sun, crowds of people lining up outside the steps of each, waiting to be permitted inside to kneel before statues of the gods and make their offerings. Wooden scaffolds leaned here and there against the ancient red-brown buildings, and workers dozed gently in their shadow, waiting for the sun to sink past zenith before returning to the labor of painting the turquoise, white, and yellow patterns on the this wall or that set of columns. Egypt’s sun leeched the color from even the brightest pigments, given just a few years’ time, and a recent sandstorm had left the great temples of Thebes looking a little more pock-marked than usual.

  Inside one of the temples, a man knelt before an altar, whispering prayers to Isis. “My lady, let the pharaoh return to his land soon. The Nile’s floods were late this past year, and we can scarcely feed ourselves, let alone send the grain that Rome demands of us.” He sighed, lowering his head. “The pharaoh is Emperor of Rome, too. He must surely see our need. He and his queen must come, and renew the land.”

  Hearing no reply, and expecting none, he stood, and gave way to the teeming crowds behind him. Hundreds of people, each with their own request for the goddess. Let my pregnancy come to term easily and with a healthy child to show for it. Bring plenty to my fields. Please heal my child’s sickness. Please, when the gods weigh my husband’s soul against the feather, find that it is light, and grant him safe passage through the underworld. Thousands of voices, a susurration of whispers, continually crawling along the stone walls, like the flickering light of the lamps and torches. So many appeals—little wonder that the goddess did not see fit to answer each one.

  In another temple, that of Thoth, whispers of a different sort. The highest-ranked of the mage-priests gathered, under the auspices of their high priest, Padubast, and knelt in a circle in the inner sanctum on reed mats on the cool stone floor. Eleven men in total. Bare-chested, each man wore a kilt of bleached white linen, contrasting starkly with the deep tans of their desert-touched skin. All shaven-pated with kohl-ringed eyes; most wore a bracelet or two in heavy gold to denote their rank. The high priest himself wore a heavy necklace in turquoise and lapis, with an image of Thoth cast in gold at the center. An elderly man, his hand trembled as he raised a reed he’d normally have used as a pen to call for order. “We have met to discuss this subject before,” he rasped. “Tahut-Nefer, you spent over six months in the barbarian lands of Rome, attempting to instruct Princess Eurydice in the use of magic—before her marriage to our pharaoh, Ptolemy, whom Romans call Caesarion.” He coughed into his hand.

  Tahut-Nefer was a stout man in his late forties, with a cold set to his dark eyes. “I did,” he said, taking the cough as enough of a pause to speak. “I found them both to be arrogant—“

  “Pharaohs are always prideful,” Padubast interrupted weakly. “They are the living embodiment of the gods. I have never met one who wasn’t arrogant.”

  “The princess scorned all lessons in the use of her powers,” Tahut snapped. “She refused to heed my words, and experimented freely, not conforming to the set use of spells handed down to us by the ancients. We all know what can happen when someone deviates from known uses of power. They can annihilate themselves—or worse, those around them. She has no respect for power, or the consequences of its use. They cannot be allowed to rule Egypt.”

  M
urmurs through the room. Even meeting in such secrecy, such words were dangerous.

  “And yet,” Padubast whispered, “they have respected our ancient ways. The Pharaoh has taken his sister, the lady Eurydice, as his wife. Word has come even so far as this, that the gods of Rome themselves blessed the union—against the customs of their people—“

  “The gods of Rome have blessed them,” Tahut sneered. “The gods of Egypt have remained silent. And the Nile has not brought forth its floods. Our people starve. Surely, this is a sign that our gods, the most ancient and powerful in the world, do not favor these barbarians who claim the names of the royal line—“

  “They are the children of Cleopatra and Caesar,” another priest cut in sharply. “They have the blood. They have the name. They are god-born—she of Isis, Horus, and Venus, he of Mars, Venus, Isis, and Osiris. They have the right to rule—“

  “And yet they do not,” another priest argued, his eyes glittering with fervor. “Who remains prefect here but Gaius Cornelius Gallus, the same man who has held that post for ten long years? Governing in the name of Queen Cleopatra and Pharaoh Ptolemy. But he is nothing but a Roman administrator. He has no more power than the armies at his back—“

  Padubast coughed into his hand. “Those have always been a convincing argument before. Most of you are too young to remember the last great uprising, almost sixty years ago. When the priests of Thebes joined together to rebel against the Ptolemy of the time. It was our second rebellion inside thirty years, and the pharaoh reduced much of this great city to ash and rubble. We have rebuilt. But we have only been able to do so because Queen Cleopatra has permitted it.”

  “Queen Cleopatra has spent most of her reign in Rome.” Rumbles of dissent.

  Padubast shrugged. “They will pay heed when their neglect causes Rome to starve.”

  “But our people will starve before theirs do!”

  Mutters of discontent rang back from the walls.

  Tahut raised a hand imperatively. “Gaius Cornelius Gallus has been sent into the countryside to collect the shortfall in grain levies,” he told them all, his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “Perhaps this is an opportunity that we should exploit to . . . garner the attention of our pharaoh, his wife, and his mother. We can defy this Roman bureaucrat, thus forcing our wandering pharaoh to turn his eyes towards us. And once he is here, you may judge his fitness to rule us for yourselves.”

  “What alternative do we have?” Padubast asked, his reedy voice stern. “All the descendants of the pharaohs have been extinguished besides the line of Cleopatra.”

  Tahut shrugged. “She has other children. Alexander. Selene. A babe in arms with the uncouth Roman name of Gaius. With proper education, these younger children might be properly instilled with Egyptian values.” He eyed the others in the room, clearly gauging their mood. “Of course,” he added smoothly, “removing the pharaoh is always a . . . tricky business. Perhaps it will not prove necessary. Perhaps once this particular descendant of the line of the Ptolemies sees Egypt for himself, he will find a proper love for the land in which he was born to burn within his breast. A proper respect for its culture and institutions.” He nodded.

  “Would not sending a letter be safer than staging some sort of uprising?” another priest asked timidly. “The Roman garrison in Alexandria is well-armed. Hundreds, even thousands of our people, could be slaughtered needlessly—“

  “Have any of our letters been heeded yet?” Tahut spat.

  “A vote,” Padubast said wearily. “All in favor of provoking the Roman garrison, please raise your hands. Only four? Motion denied.”

  The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter, and Tahut-Nefer met with like-minded priests in secret, in a separate chamber. “Fools,” he muttered, glaring over his shoulder towards the inner sanctum. “They don’t understand. If we do not remove the yoke of Rome from our necks, Egypt will die.”

  “So we provoke the garrison anyway?” one of his fellows murmured. “Without the sanction of the high priest?”

  Tahut’s expression turned grim. “He will be called to the afterlife soon, I think. His health daily grows worse.” He met their eyes. “And when the pharaoh and his bride arrive, as we know they will. . . .”

  “It cannot be traced to us,” his fellow conspirators muttered.

  A smirk. “Of course not. I would never use the magic of Thoth to kill them. I have . . . something quite else in mind.”

  ______________

  The Library of Alexandria was part of a larger complex of structures known as the Musaeum of Alexandria—dozens of beautiful Hellenistic buildings, constructed in the port city since the time of the first Ptolemy. Dedicated to the nine Muses, the grounds were dotted with statues of those daughters of Mnemosyne, dancing, laughing, weeping, singing, or reading from scrolls, and towering palms cast their shadows along the many wandering paths between the structures. Philosophers sat in shady gardens, amiably arguing with their students over tiny glasses of passum, Carthaginian raisin wine, or heartier cups of Egyptian grain beer. In one area, musicians tuned their lyres and began to play, attracting the attention of dozens of students and researchers, who approached to listen with every evidence of enjoyment.

  Inside one of the white-pillared buildings, a woman looked up from her studies, listening to the music wafting in through one of the small windows for a moment. She stood out among all the other scholars crouching over their small desks in between the racks and racks of papyrus scrolls that ran the length of this huge, dimly-lit room. All the others were male, for starters. All the rest wore Hellene chitons, Roman tunics and togas, or white Carthaginian robes. Among all those men in their simple clothing, she sparkled like a jewel in a long silk robe dyed in vivid shades of vermillion, violet, and blue, with a long vest over the top of it in a darker shade of carmine embroidered in a dusky bronze. A kind of round cap perched atop her head, in that same carmine, and translucent red veils, also of silk, cascaded from it down the back of her neck. Another veil, this one black, concealed the lower half of her face, but above it, her dark eyes were a strange shade that mixed brown and green, like a bronze statue that had just begun to verdigris.

  And yet, in spite of her obvious femininity in this otherwise exclusively male enclave, not one of the other scholars came near her. Spoke to her. Or even looked at her for more than a moment. Some of that may have had to do with the man who towered over her, her perpetual shadow and guard. Tongueless, scarred, and—rumor had it—castrated, he stared at everyone around her impassively. Never seeming bored or lacking in vigilance, no matter how many hours she spent in the humid, musty confines of a nearly windowless library in a muggy port city, surrounded by sweating men.

  Somehow, she never seemed to sweat, either. In spite of the heavy layers of clothing she wore, or the long hair that was—probably—concealed by the veils and the cap.

  Now, she finished with the scroll she’d been copying, and took it back to the librarians, one of whom accepted it from her as if it were made of pure gold—which, in a way, it was, being so fragile and ancient. “I wonder if you might have copies of the Ephesia Grammata here?”

  The librarian blinked rapidly. “My lady? Those are . . . nonsense words, are they not? Said to have been developed by the . . . ah. . . Magi . . .“ he looked at her uneasily, “to protect those who can pronounce them correctly from demonic possession?”

  “Correct.” She regarded him steadily from behind her veils, and raised one hand to adjust the bracelets that jingled on her wrist.

  “My lady. . .” the unfortunate librarian leaned forward to whisper, his breath carrying with it a strong smell of the anise seeds that he clearly chewed with his brown and aging teeth, “shouldn’t you know those already? You are, after all . . . one of them. . . .”

  She leaned forward, and her ever-present bodyguard made a noise deep in his throat, and the librarian’s eyes flicked nervously upwards towards the brute, and then, with even more agitation, back down towards her. “I do not feel
the need to explain myself,” she murmured softly. “Simply bring the texts to my desk. I would like to review them.” She paused. “And, seeing as you know my affiliations . . . then you should know that lady is not my proper mode of address. You will refer to me as Magus. Magus Banit, if there is any reason for you to address me at all in the future.”

  Damkina Banit returned to her seat, pretending not to notice all the other scholars watching her out of the corners of their eyes. The pock and scritch of many pens, moving across papyrus or parchment, rustled like the voices of many insects. She sighed as the librarian finally found the relevant scrolls for her, and began to copy these, too, laboriously. Yes, the Magi and the priests of Artemis of Ephesus developed these centuries ago, but scribes make mistakes all the time. Some of the rituals have been copied and miscopied so often, that they have almost no efficacy at all anymore. Thus, we compare. And, if possible, I can inlay these words, with a charge of power, into a charm that will help protect me if and when I summon spirits that are maleficent to help me hunt down those whom I have pledged to kill.

  A grunt from her guard drew her attention, as did a cooling breeze generated by one of her attendant spirits as a warning. Damkina looked up just as a hand placed a note on her desk, and then the scholar who’d set it there scuttled by, as if nothing had happened at all. She waited for a moment, then opened the note, her eyes skimming across the words there. Ah. A very boring request for an item that will restore lost potency. Who wants this one . . . ah. A Hellene philosopher in his sixties. Must have just purchased himself a new slave-boy. Ah, well, he’s well-connected. Eats dinner with the Roman prefect once or twice a month. I wonder if he’ll come to regret the fact that my price is information, not gold? She shrugged mentally. And of course, the item I’ll provide him will indeed renew his flagging vigor. And I’ll need to charge it every few weeks. Just to ensure that he keeps providing information.