Children of Tiber and Nile Read online

  “You, a conduit for divine will. That will be the day.” That, as they clattered up the steps, and the servants at the door, recognizing them, opened the door.

  Alexander noted that the pair of servants were Roman and new, and bit his tongue on his reply, saying merely, “Now, now, best behavior, Tiberius. My mother is here, and requires us all to attend some sort of family meeting before dinner.”

  Marble tiles spun underfoot in their dizzying geometric forms, while Flora and Faunus danced on the walls in a fresco opposite the more sober pair of Venus Genetrix and Mars Pater. All the symbols of home, to Alexander, for the first eighteen years of his life. But as he spoke, Tiberius paused at the stairs leading up into the family quarters on the second floor. “Then I’ll see you at dinner, then,” he said, nodding and turning away.

  Alexander caught his friend’s arm. “No, come along. You’re practically family. They all know you’re my brother. I’ve adopted you. It’s settled!” Cheerful, breezy words.

  Tiberius sighed and pulled him up the stairs, away from the servants’ ears. Down the open-air balcony that overlooked the atrium, and which was lined with the doors that led into the various cubiculum that served as bedrooms and workrooms for the Julii family. Found the door to Alexander’s bedroom, and stepped inside, making sure the door was locked before speaking. “Alexander, this has to stop,” Tiberius said, his gray eyes serious. “We have to stop, soon. You’re marrying Octavia inside the next year, not that you’ll set a date—“

  Alexander swore and kissed Tiberius, stopping the flow of words. “Octavia is a feather-brain. A very attractive feather-brain, but a feather-brain nonetheless.” He swore again, irritated. “I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you. It was supposed to be fun.” I was just going to keep you compromised. Make sure that you couldn’t make any kind of a play for my brother’s offices. Look where that got me. Eurydice would laugh if she knew how much my protestations that I didn’t have time to be in love had turned out. Of course, damn her, she probably does know.

  Tiberius put his arms around his shoulders for a moment. “Yes, well. I wasn’t exactly expecting to fall in love with you, either.” He shrugged, as if this weren’t the first time they’d ever actually put it into words. “Everyone expects these things to pass. I’m supposed to marry Vipsania in four years or so. I expect I can endure loneliness and ardor until then.”

  “And I’m saying, you don’t have to.”

  “Octavia, feather-brain or no, deserves a husband who only looks for passion in her bed—“

  “And there’s at least nine or ten months before any vows are spoken, so take your honor and shove it, Ti.” Alexander turned away, fighting down any urge to beg Tiberius to understand. To reconsider. His friend had strong ideals in terms of duty, honor, and loyalty. He wouldn’t so much as look at a married woman—unless that woman had been beaten or abused in some fashion. And while Tiberius clearly enjoyed what they did in bed, and what they did in various brothels, Alexander knew that the instant Tiberius spoke his own wedding vows, the iron curtain of duty would come down, and divide them permanently. His own feelings on the subject were that the curtain needn’t be iron, but rather some form of silk. Preferably a diaphanous one. Easily raised and parted if all parties were amenable.

  He tossed his various collected notes from their afternoon’s outing on his desk, to be transcribed into Egyptian/Hellene demotic script for his own records, to make it more difficult for anyone who might gain access to his rooms to read. He’d burn the originals once he’d done that. Alexander exhaled, his back still to his friend. “In the meantime, you’ve lived in this house for three years.” Alexander paused. “You’re family, as far as everyone here is concerned. You and your brother. Certainly more so than Octavia.” He grimaced. “My brother values you as a tribune and as a friend. Eurydice calls you friend, too. Come with me to this damned family meeting. Your presence will probably be the only thing that will make it endurable.”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” Tiberius said quietly, “what choice do I have but to come along?”

  Chapter II: Duty

  Selene Julia Caesar knew quite well that of all her illustrious family she was the least significant. For a while, after her father’s death, she’d resented it, but she thought she’d outgrown that. Certainly, it embarrassed her now to look back on how spitefully she’d behaved towards Eurydice from time to time, when Eurydice had been dropped into the position of matron of the household at the age of fourteen, when their mother had married Antony and, perforce, had left the household. While learning to ride like a man and to use all that terrifying, wonderful magic.

  Oh, how she’d envied Eurydice those privileges and gifts. How she’d envied her older sister the beauty of Venus that radiated out of her, not that Eurydice ever seemed to notice it—though these days, Eurydice seemed graceful, powerful, and controlled in every movement. No longer gawky, she moved like one of her birds, always light, alert, and ready to take action.

  The only way to deal with Eurydice, Selene had decided early on, was to make her happy. And the best way to do that was to take some of the work of the household off her sister’s shoulders. Oh, Selene still had lessons of her own—Egyptian and Hellene, poetry and mathematics and music. But she’d made a point of visiting the kitchen every day and asking the chief cook there to teach her what each of the herbs and spices actually were. Learned how to bake bread that didn’t have lumps in it. So that when Matronalia and Saturnalia came around, and the masters of the house had to serve the servants, Selene handled the bulk of the cooking, earning a grateful smile from Eurydice.

  She’d always been a much better weaver than her sister, and now that Eurydice was Caesarion’s declared Empress, she needed better and more elegant clothing than she had the time or inclination to make for herself. Selene therefore gave her little gifts silently through the year of silk, wool, and linen, the best products of her loom. And the sisters had fallen into a very comfortable pattern. Eurydice looked over the household account books, but Selene now kept them—Eurydice called this good practice for when Selene had a house of her own. Eurydice selected the guests for their meals, but Selene directed the menus. Eurydice handled their many visitors, including ambassadors from countries so far away that no one in Rome knew their names, and Selene might be called on to play her lyre or kithara at dinner . . . but Eurydice didn’t push her to converse with the guests.

  Which was entirely to Selene’s liking.

  The most Eurydice had pushed in the past three years was when she’d handed Selene dozens of scrolls on medicine, and told her to study them. Herbs. Poisons. Treatments. Surgical techniques. Selene had gaped at them, and floundered for a moment. “But why do I need to read any of this?”

  “Because if someone’s poisoned at a banquet, it might be helpful if someone besides me knows what the symptoms are, and which herbs in milk will help purge it,” Eurydice had replied with a faint grimace. “And your stitchery is very good.”

  “Gods keep me from every needing to use it on human flesh,” Selene had replied faintly. But she’d read the scrolls, as requested. And then had sat at her open window, playing her kithara, hoping she’d be able to forget some of what she’d just read.

  And her other siblings? Caesarion had always been eight full years her elder. She’d hardly seen him at all growing up—a kind enough stranger when Father had brought him back from whichever military camps they’d been visiting, but they hadn’t shared the same pedagogues, or even the same meals. Eurydice might smile and say she remembered being picked up and twirled in the garden by their eldest brother. Selene had no such recollections. Already a frightening being—a person both older than she, and an occupant of the largely alien and mostly male world that existed outside the villa, when the illusions over him to conceal his strength and full power had been broken, he’d seemed like Mars Pater’s personal vessel. As if the god had stepped out of the fresco on the villa’s wall and stridden off for battle,
with hardly a look behind.

  If Selene wanted to make Eurydice happy, she wanted to make Caesarion forget she that even existed. The last thing she wanted was for those red eyes to fall on her, or a frown to cross his face. She couldn’t even comprehend how Eurydice and he could love each other. Couldn’t fathom the way they kissed in private, or the sounds that drifted down the corridor from their rooms at night. So she tried for invisibility around Caesarion. And most days, she succeeded in that.

  Alexander? Not as terrifying as Caesarion or as frightening as Eurydice could be, when she chose. But Selene spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen around the servants. Most of whom were so accustomed to her being around—and her general invisibility—that they spoke quite freely in front of her. Whispering about Alexander. He’d acquired a cognomen of his own in the last few years, though it was one no one used to his face: Cerastes. The horned snake. The servants whispered that here was the true heir of Cleopatra. In charge of a shadowy network of men with long knives. A thousand eyes in the city were said to belong to him. And, every now and again, the laundry slaves would complain that they’d had to wash blood out of Master Alexander’s tunics again. Another long night questioning some Gaul. They say he keeps all the teeth he pulls out of their lying mouths, you know. In a little jar in his room.

  Don’t be ridiculous. I’d have seen that in there when I go in to clean.

  That’s not all you’d see, if you looked. A sly insinuation to the voice. You’d find Master Tiberius’ boots under the sleeping couch, too.

  And, of course, there was that.

  Four years ago, in a command tent outside Brundisium, there had been a fleeting mention of how perhaps there could be a marriage tie between the Julii and the Claudii—that Tiberius could be betrothed to Eurydice, or to Selene. Selene had peeked out cautiously around her sister, caught sight of Tiberius and his brother Drusus, and had rapidly tried to hide once more. Fortunately, no one had noticed that. Tiberius had been uninterested, since he’d already been betrothed to the far-younger daughter of Agrippa for several years. His gray eyes had seemed like a day in winter, cold and cheerless.

  Several months later, with the brothers and Octavia Thurina, daughter of Octavian, living in the Julii villa, Selene had discovered that Tiberius knew how to smile. And that had largely been the end of it for her. The smile lightened his eyes—leaving them still melancholy, but with the precious possibility of hope amid all that sorrow. He remained older—a grown man, wearing a toga in the city, and armor when off at war. And thus, he, too, occupied that alien world outside the villa. In all honesty, in the past four years, Selene couldn’t say that she’d said more than ten words to him. But whenever he and Drusus came back from their mother’s villa, both with that peculiar mixture of anger, sorrow, and regret that visiting Livia seemed to provoke in them, she had made it a habit to sit near them at dinner, and to play music for them quietly. Matching their mood with her music, until she gradually lifted from elegiac Hellene melodies into spritelier, happier songs. She had no idea if it helped them, but they’d never told her to leave off, either.

  Selene knew it was foolish. Not only was Tiberius betrothed to Vipsania Agrippina, but . . . the Egyptian servants talked among themselves, in their native tongue, quite freely. She therefore had a fairly good idea of why Alexander and Tiberius disappeared into Alexander’s rooms at night, and it didn’t have much to do with drinking and dice games. Stupid heart, she told herself on the rare occasions when she inadvertently made eye-contact with Tiberius, or actually caught him smiling about something. Stupid and pointless.

  And so, she made sure that she was even more invisible when Alexander and Tiberius were home from the campaigning season

  Her friendship with Octavia had bloomed—and then withered. While Octavia still lived in the Julii house, waiting for her marriage to Alexander, Selene found that while she had dozens of responsibilities and tasks, Octavia never seemed to volunteer to do anything but go to the baths. And while it had been delicious, early on, to have someone normal to talk with—someone who wasn’t god-born or brilliant or beautiful beyond compare—Selene had realized in the past two years that Octavia was flighty. While betrothed to Alexander, she’d had crushes on a half-dozen young men—most notably Jullus, Antony’s second son. Which had been more than a little awkward while living in Antony and Cleopatra’s house during the campaign season. Selene had watched all of Octavia’s sighing and mooning over the young man, winced internally, and had carefully regulated her own behavior even more rigorously. No one was going to catch her sighing over Tiberius. The embarrassing condition of her foolish heart was her business. No one else’s.

  Of course, in and around all of that, Octavia had also come back from one of the Bona Dea rites a few years ago with giddy ideas. “We should practice kissing each other,” Octavia had told Selene, her eyes sparkling. “So that when we finally have husbands, we’ll know what we’re doing!”

  Selene had rather emphatically refused to participate. She had her mother’s love-spell—not that the damned thing worked—and that was quite enough practice for her. That hadn’t, however, kept Octavia from practicing with some of the maids. Selene hadn’t mentioned that to Eurydice. But she didn’t doubt that her elder sister knew, anyway. She took it on faith that sooner or later, Eurydice saw and heard everything.

  Except, perhaps, what Selene thought or felt about anything. Silence, however, went well with invisibility.

  And so, in silence, she found a wall in Caesarion’s study as the rest of her family filtered in. Caesarion and Eurydice arrived together, hand-in-hand, earnestly discussing policy decisions. Caesarion took a seat behind his desk, burdened as it was with dozens of rolled-up parchment scrolls. Eurydice, as always, took a chair just to his left. Selene got a little smile of acknowledgement from her sister, and held her breath as Caesarion’s eyes passed over her, exhaling once his gaze moved on. Alexander and Tiberius, never far apart, joined them moments later, taking backless chairs in front of the desk, all restless, young male energy. Unable to sit still for more than a few moments at a time, constantly shifting their legs or moving their hands.

  And then Cleopatra swept into the room, bundled into a heavy cloak against the moderate Ianuarius chill. Toddling along at her side was little Gaius, now just turned three, her son with Antony. Cleopatra’s hair had turned almost entirely iron-gray in the last year, but her motions still held vigor, and her dark eyes still sparked with energy. “I ask for a family meeting, and I find Tiberius here,” she said with a shake of her head, as the door clicked shut behind her. “And yet, somehow, I’m not surprised.”

  Tiberius looked uncomfortable. “I told you I shouldn’t be here,” he muttered to Alexander. Looking at Caesarion, he said, “By your leave?”

  “Is this just for Julii ears?” Caesarion asked wearily. “I have at least fifteen other things I need to be attending to—“

  Selene dropped to a soft crouch, and held out her arms. Gaius caught sight of her, and immediately trundled over to accept a hug from her. She settled in at one of the tables behind the others now, finding a piece of parchment and a lump of charcoal with which to keep her little brother quiet and occupied. Secure in her invisibility and her general lack of importance, Selene listened to the conversation as it went on, but without paying much heed.

  “These are the things that you need to be attending to,” Cleopatra said sharply. “:Are you aware that the Nile’s floods came so late this year that there was almost no grain crop at all?”

  “I’ve read the reports,” Caesarion replied. “The price of grain is fixed in Rome, so that the plebeians can afford to eat. Unfortunately, that means that the state has to pay the farmers in some other way, and prices went up. Drastically. There’s a budget shortfall at the moment that you wouldn’t believe.”

  “How bad?” Alexander asked urgently.

  “Over a million solidi,” Caesarion admitted tightly. “All our legionnaires, when they retire, have been promi
sed either a piece of land, or a retirement bonus in gold. I have several thousand men asking to retire this year, and I’m going to have to ask them, if not outright beg them, to either stay in harness, or take the land and sell it on the market. Or, for the gods’ sakes, farm it themselves, so we get more grain coming in.” He rubbed at his eyes, and Selene rapidly sketched a sheaf of grain for little Gaius.

  “The legions have mutinied before over lack of pay, or the perception that they are about to lose their retirement bonuses,” Tiberius muttered. “I can vouch for the Fifth. You’ve had me with them all campaign season . . . before putting me on sewage issues here in Rome for the winter—“ a dark look at Caesarion, who shrugged. “And the rest of the core legions love you. But the ones in the east—you’ve been having to recruit from the provinces where they mostly speak Hellene, not Latin. You could be looking at revolts among the troops.”

  “Tell me something of which I am not aware,” Caesarion said, rubbing at his eyes.

  Alexander shrugged. “The populace here in Rome has been sheltered from the worst of it,” he put in now. “We have about a year’s supply of grain in the silos. No one’s going hungry at the moment. No graffiti calling for an increase in the bread dole. No mobs gathering to protest the price of food. Not yet, anyway.”

  Eurydice’s head turned towards Cleopatra. “You’re going to tell us that this is our fault, aren’t you, Mother?” she asked, her voice tight, and Selene looked up at that. “We’ve done what the gods required of us. We married. The compact is secure—“

  “You married here in Rome,” Cleopatra interrupted. “You need to go to Egypt. Both of you. As quickly as you may. Seal yourselves to the gods there, renew the old spells. And someone needs to rule there. Not just some Roman military prefect, commanding from a castra. Someone needs to be in the palace of the Ptolemies.” Her eyes narrowed, and her gaze met Eurydice’s like a clash of blades.