Disclaimer: These particular interpretations of historical characters and situations owned by Jo Graham, with a slice of Robert Graves.
Thanks to: Kathyh, wonderful beta-reader.
Last night I dreamt I was in Alexandria again. Waking up, I found that this was so, and the reality of it is worse than I had ever imagined.
"The dream again, Marcus?" asked my wife, who has never been to Alexandria before. It is all new to her, and while she knows the true purpose of this journey, she cannot help being seduced by the wonder of it all. But then, she is young.
As I once was.
I had not intended to return to Egypt, ever again. It is a tomb to me now, a mausoleum; I buried the callow boy I had once been there, along with her dead body, laid side by side with her royal sister. "Charmian, was this well done by your lady?" I had asked her, holding her dying body in my arms, and she told me it had been fitting for the last of so many noble kings. I had not hated the Queen of Egypt until that moment, when Charmian chose to follow her into death. Charmian could have lived, you see. She was nothing to Octavian. He never understood she had been more to Cleopatra than a slave, and at any rate he could not have denied me anything, or anyone, not then.
It wasn't that I still dreamt of a life to be shared. That well was truly poisoned by then. I would have let her go to wherever she chose to go. Egypt, or Syria, or Greece; it would not have have mattered to me as long as I knew she was alive and safe. But she chose death, because her sister and mistress had done, chose Cleopatra above any life I could have offered, for the second time.
My own guilt ate at me then, and has burdened me ever since. But woven in it are anger and spite, though I had to grow old myself to admit this. All of Rome blamed Cleopatra for unmanning Marcus Antonius in those years, for causing a war between Romans. I never did, even while fighting her and defeating her in that same war.
I blamed her for Charmian.
Charmian cursed me, that last day. "Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, your house will go down in blood, and you will never know peace on this earth," she said, words already slightly slurred from the poison in her veins.
For years, I never spoke of this to anyone. Octavian would have laughed, and told me it was the bitterness of a dying slave lashing out one more time; he had never known what she had been to me. None of my friends had, and my first wife, Caecilia, whom I had married after Charmian had spurned me to remind myself I was a Roman, and for the riches her father offered, was a friendly stranger. My second wife, Marcella, had been frightened of too many shadows as it was. Besides, I told myself it was my own burden to carry, and that the two daughters Caecilia and Marcella had given me were safe. They would marry, they would leave my house; surely any curse would not reach them.
But Julia, who became my third wife, has given me sons as well as daughters. And now I rise with blood in the morning and lie down with it at night, as Charmian has cursed me to do. I dream of Alexandria, of that last day, and it is Julia I hold in my arms. I dream of the two boys whose deaths I ordered because reason and Octavian demanded it, and no longer are they Caesarion and Antyllus; they are Gaius and Lucius, my sons. Julia's sons.
Octavian's sons, too, as well as his grandsons. He has adopted them now, for he never had any child but Julia, and means for one of the boys to succeed him.
"Too many Caesars is not good", he had said to me when he was young, and I was young, and thus Caesarion was condemned to death so that there should be no more civil wars. Now we are both in the autumn of our lives, and I look at my sons who carry that name now, too. Caesar. I look at them and hear Charmian's voice in my heart.
"I have never known you to be afraid of anything," Julia said, who has known me all her life. "But you are afraid now. Why, Marcus?"
And so I told her. They are her sons, too.
She was a child when Egypt fell and Charmian died, of course, but she has grown up with Cleopatra's daughter, Selene, who was raised in Rome by Julia's aunt Octavia. She remembers the triumph in which Cleopatra's children had to march. She knows the poems written in celebration, which poets recite to her often to flatter her father and myself. And so she knows some of the story already, contradictory fragments, stones from a mosaic that could never be whole.
People call Julia irreverent and flighty, because she takes few things seriously, not even her father, whom she teases all the time; she is the only one still alive who dares, now that Maecenas and Terentia are gone, and my own friendship with him has become frozen in formality and unspoken reproach. But she did take me seriously then, at once.
"Well, there's just one thing for it," she said. "We have to go to Egypt, you and I."
I stared at her in disbelief.
"To ask for the curse to be lifted, there, where it was made," she said.
"I have asked," I said. "With every temple I have built, I prayed to the Gods, all the Gods, to show mercy. Rome is full of them, but the shadow has not left my heart."
"You haven't asked Charmian, though," Julia said, looking at me with her father's grey eyes, that always appear to see more than any man can hide in himself. "You have not prayed at her tomb."
"She is dead," I said, and the guilt and bitterness were as acid in my heart, as if no intervening years had occurred to make it numb. "There is nothing left in Egypt but bones and embalmed flesh."
"Selene always claimed the Kings and Queens of Egypt were gods," Julia said. "If Cleopatra is Isis now, then that tomb is her shrine. And if Charmian was Cleopatra's sister as well as her servant, then surely she will be Isis now, too. I think there can be no more powerful place for us to pray, and ask that the curse be taken from our children."
When I first came to Egypt, it was due to a woman of the Julii as well. My mother was friendly with Atia, Caesar's niece, as I was with Atia's son, and thus I ended up seconded to Caesar as a tribune despite being far too young for such a post. I could not believe my luck, for like many of the young men in my world, I worshipped Caesar. But I knew very well I hadn't yet done anything to justify such a place, and thus I tried not to get in any veteran's way, keep my mouth shut and learn. Charmian spotted me at a banquet where I tried to find a couch that was not already taken and took pity on me.
I was a boy then, but she was already a woman, radiant and beautiful, far more so, I always thought, than her royal mistress. She also was a stranger, and yet sometimes it felt as if I had known her since the beginning of the world. Then again, I often think I never knew her at all. Not really. I did not understand her position at the court, to start with the most basic of things. She had told me she was the Queen's handmaiden. I took this to mean she was responsible for Cleopatra's elaborate wardrobe, and perhaps also for the entertainment. It wasn't until considerable time had passed that I found out that she shared a father with the Queen, though her mother had been a Thracian slave. And the circumstances in which I found out ensured I would never forget.
We were at my villa in the country by then, and years had passed since that first encounter. Cleopatra had come to Rome to visit Caesar, and Charmian had come with her. It was obvious that the Queen could not stay in Italia forever, however, and my dread of losing Charmian again grew, until I understood there was one way I could prevent it. I had it all planned out. An honorable man who'd lost all his family in the civil wars, who owed me much, would adopt her, claim she was freeborn, the records lost, and who could gainsay him? Then we could marry. She would become Roman. No longer a slave, but a free Roman citizen. It did not even occur to me that she would refuse, for she had agreed to come with me as my mistress already, which I took to mean that she loved me, as I loved her. And I did not want her to be my mistress. I wanted her to be my wife.
Not only did she refuse, but she was insulted I had even dared to ask. "I am the descendant of kings, of eight generations of kings since Ptolemy son of Lagos wore Alexander's crown," she said, and every sentence cut deeper into me. "I speak five languages. I manage a budget of thousands of talents a year. If I say to the Queen this should be done, it is done because she trusts me. Do you understand that cities and provinces are taxed on my word? That levees are built and ships made and soldiers hired? Do you not understand that you are asking me to leave off the government of the wealthiest and oldest nation in the world, the governance of which is my birthright, to come and be your wife?"
The incredulity with which she pronounced "wife" made it sound like a dirty word. She had been the first woman I had ever loved. Now she became the first to reject me. Young as I was, I thought nothing worse could happen to me in my entire existence. I thought I would never love again, and what was more, that I had been a fool to deceive myself into believing that I had loved her to begin with. Who was she, after all? A slave, who preferred being a slave to being free. Never mind all that fine talk about being a descendant of kings; as far as I could see, her position was entirely dependent on the Queen's favour. If Cleopatra had decided tomorrow that Charmian's task should be to scrub the floors instead of managing "thousands of talents a year", could Charmian have refused? No. And if Cleopatra had decided to feed her to the crocodiles, would there have been any law gainsaying the Queen's right to do so? No. And that was the position she preferred to being free, and my wife.
The humiliation of it all burned nearly as badly as the loss, for this, of course, was the end of our affair. I never held her in my arms again, not until the day she died, though I saw her a few times more.
If I could go back now to the young man proposing marriage with such confidence in his heart, the young man who thought, just an hour later, that nothing worse than that refusal could ever happen to him, I would shake him until his teeth rattled. I would tell him to keep silent, to use those precious weeks with her to get to know her before offering or demanding any vows.
No, I did not know Charmian, except perhaps in my dreams. And she did not know me.
"He is not your Alexander," she once said, furious, about Octavian, and I agreed with her that he was not, but what she did not understand was that this did not matter. To Charmian, there was just one kind of loyalty; the absolute devotion she had for her sister and mistress, the boyish worship I used to feel for Caesar.
I never adored Octavian in this way. But he was my friend. It is easy to forget now, when there is an adult generation in Rome who has never known any rule but that of the First Citizen, who venerates and fears him as Augustus, pater patriae. But he was Gaius Octavius Thurinus once, a lonely boy made lonelier by the fact he was smarter than most people in any given room, and had not yet learned to disguise it. Nor did he have the charm most of the Julii are famous for, the charm that makes it easy to love them. Nor was he healthy or a good athlete; his enemies later mocked his propensity to fall sick just before crucial battles, and in truth there was some tactic to this, but he really did fall sick often as a boy, and the humiliation of doing not so well at games other than throwing dice often made him grit his teeth before he learned to disguise that, too.
What he did have was boundless will power, patience, and that mind whose intricate working I still, years after any warmth between us has become a matter of nostalgia only, can marvel at. He was often bullied by other boys before I made myself his protector, nicknamed "the sly one" and ridiculed for his lack of physical prowess, but he managed to get even without me quite easily, as I found out. If anyone had a secret, he learned it, and usually waited until the worst possible moment to use it against whoever had been casually cruel to him before. What I did not notice until years later was that he also took the trouble of learning the secrets of people who had never harmed him in any way, and that if it benefited him, he used these as well.
He has always had courage, which most people did not notice during our boyhood, because it was not physical in nature. His courage was not of the type that would drive a man on the battlefield. But it was the type that drives a boy whose body keeps failing him forward regardless. And when Caesar had been murdered, everyone around Gaius Octavius told him not to accept the posthumous adoption, and the heritage that came with it. His mother and stepfather were afraid he'd make an enemy of the murderers and Marcus Antonius both, and that either of them would crush him. After all, who was he? An eighteen-years-old nobody.
He never wavered and became Octavianus Caesar. He also had a plan, not just for the immediate future and his own survival, but for Rome.
"No more civil wars," he told me, "no more families dividing Rome between them. We will achieve it, Marcus, you'll see. We'll change Rome forever. It will be ruled by law again. And lawful Rome will rule the world. The golden age. We'll get there, you'll see. If you help me."
Charmian saw Octavian as the destroyer of all she held dear, and could not understand why I chose him. What she did not, could not, would not see was that to choose him, to me, was also to choose Rome.
As far as I know, she had grown up in a palace. There had been strife and fighting between various members of the House of Ptolemy, true, but I doubt Charmian had ever experienced what civil war meant the way we did in Italia. The Republic had not been at peace within itself for not just my lifetime, but that of my father, and of his father. Every single family which had more than one son would go through the experience of finding their sons in service of generals turned against each other, sooner or later. My own older brother, Lucius, fought for Pompeii and Cato even while I fought for Caesar. It had to stop. And if there is one justification for my life, and for the decisions that I have made, it is this: it has stopped. Oh, there are still wars, but not on Italian soil. There is peace now, and has been for almost two generations. Pax Romana. And I have used that time of peace. None of my military victories makes me feel as proud as the fact I have restored all the aquaducts, that water and enough grain is something even the poorest citizens of Rome will never lack, that public baths are available for everyone, rich and poor alike. We have libraries now that are open to all citizens, and poets proving that there is literature worthy of the Greek epics of old that is written in Latin now.
Charmian, were she alive, would tell me that we would have had all of this in a world where the rule of Cleopatra was followed by the rule of Caesarion. And she would be wrong.
For many reasons, not least because Rome would never have accepted Caesarion. Yes, Caesar had been loved by many, but hated by many as well, or else he would never have been killed. And the people had known him. Caesarion would have been a stranger. He would have been a name, a stranger raised in a strange, foreign land. For anyone following him out of love for dead Caesar and Marcus Antonius, there would have been two rejecting him as a Greek and Egyptian tyrant lacking any Republican virtue. And thus the civil wars would have continued. Egypt may have been at peace under the rule of Caesarion in that future that never was, but not Rome. Never Rome. And I would always choose Rome.
"Too many Caesars," Octavian said to me when we talked of what had to follow Cleopatra's defeat. "It's no good. There must be an end, once and for all. We're in agreement there, aren't we, Marcus?"
I had never seen the boy, or at least if I had, I did not remember. He was with the Queen when she visited Caesar during the last year of Caesar's life, when I asked Charmian to marry me, but my memories of that year are limited to a journey to the country and back, and to a death later. At any rate, if he had been a boy then, a child, he was not a child any more. He was seventeen years old. Octavian, who had been eighteen when accepting Caesar's heritage, certainly did not have any illusions about what a young man could and could not do.
"Yes," I said, and told myself that even dead Caesar would have understood. Would, of course, not have approved, but would have understood.
I had no sons of my own then. Nor had I raised any.
"You killed my baby," Charmian screamed at me, that last day, and all my justifications fell apart in front of this one fact: she had held Caesarion in her arms after the boy had been born. She had raised him. And I had killed him.
"Selene thought that she would be killed," Julia said, "when she first came to Rome. She thought my father was just biding his time, and that Octavia was pretending. I told her that of course she was safe, and she said "Safe as my brothers?"
Julia coming with me as I took command of the Eastern Provinces again has caused a minor scandal in Rome. A good noble wife, it was said, remained at home, not just to deal with the administration of her husband's considerable estates but also to avoid a situation where she could end up in the dubious company of camp followers; of prostitutes. There are also rumors that I am only taking her with me because I do not trust her to remain faithful to me. I know there are because Livia, Julia's stepmother and Octavian's wife, has made it her business to tell me.
"It is only to be expected," she said, "dearest Marcus. After all, you could be her father."
Livia wanted Julia to marry her son Tiberius, and she has yet to forgive her husband, Julia or myself for foiling this particular plan.
"I doubt Scribonia would have as much as looked at me back then," I said, referring to Julia's mother and deliberately misunderstanding Livia. "She wasn't the type of wife to start an affair with a married man."
When I repeated this remark to Julia later, she hooted. Livia herself, of course, had been married when Octavian, equally married, to Scribonia, had decided he wanted her for a wife. Or rather: it must have been a mutual decision. In all the years since, Livia has not given me the impression that she bowed to anyone's command.
At any rate, neither Livia nor Octavian nor anyone else seemed to have an inkling as to why I would choose to go to Egypt again after avoiding it for so many years, and that was for the best.
Julia had suggested visiting Mauretania first, where Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius, is Queen, but I had declined. Now that I had made my mind up, I needed to go to Alexandria as soon as possible. I did feel my age in my bones; and the dreams where Gaius and Lucius took Caesarion's place were growing more vivid.
"What did you reply to her?" I asked when Julia told me about her first encounter with Selene, a girl her own age, and remembered Julia as a child, curious, bold, and utterly without the tact both Livia and Octavian's sister Octavia tried to instill in her.
I also remembered Selene, and her brothers - her younger brothers, Helios and Philadelphos. I had sworn to Charmian that they would survive, but I don't think she had believed me, either.
Caesarion wasn't the only brother of Selene's to be dead at this point. So was Antyllus, the oldest son of Marcus Antonius, who had been seventeen, just like Caesarion, and thus had been deemed capable of raising another army in his dead father's name, just like him.
Julia said: "I said that Father had promised Octavia he would spare Antonius' remaining children, all of them. That did not impress her, and so I added he had promised you as well."
"How did you know that?" I asked, surprised. Octavia had asked for the lives of the children in public, but I had not.
"Because they were still alive," Julia said, and I drew a breath. Sometimes she can shock me, and it has nothing to do with what Livia deems to be her frivolity.
Julia watched me with those Julian eyes again. "Even a child had heard about the proscriptions back then, Marcus," she said. "I know today you're telling everyone that it was all Antonius and Lepidus, but I knew then there were three hundred senators and two thousand knights dead at my father's orders. We were living in the house of a dead senator, Marcus, with his slaves serving us! Did you think they never told us children where they had come from?"
It was true. They had drawn up lists, all three of them, Octavian, Antonius and Lepidus, after they had become allies. Most of the men on these lists had been political opponents, but not all. Some had simply been chosen for their wealth.
"I love my father," Julia said. "I honor him. But I have always known that he is the most dangerous man who ever lived. Why do you think my mother agreed to a divorce as soon as I was born and wasn't a boy? Why she allowed herself to be sent back to her family like damaged goods, when he was the adulterer? Why did she never try to use her position as the mother of his only child to gain money or lands, or at least some social standing in Rome? As a child, I thought at first she didn't want me and hated her for giving me to Livia, but then Octavia arranged a meeting because she was sorry for my mother. And then I understood my mother had been afraid that if she refused any of my father's demands, made any difficulties whatsoever, he would have had her killed."
But he had not killed the younger children, I thought, and there was desperate need in my declaration. Selene lived, and reigned, happily, one heard. The younger boys had eventually died, true, but years later, as young men, and of natural causes; that same fever that had taken Julia's first husband, Marcellus, had also taken Helios and Philadelphus, and nearly took Octavian himself.
"Your sister will raise these children as loyal Roman allies," I had said, in Alexandria, with Charmian's curse still in my ear.
"Yes," he had replied, "she will. Do you think I'm foolish enough to miss out on this opportunity? They're children. They can learn. It will be far more effective to send them back after they've become Romans than to do anything else. Stability, Marcus. It can't be carried out by a few men alone, not with an empire."
This had assured me of his good faith more than if he'd declared that he did not make war on children.
"You're the one man he can't do without," Julia said, as the famous lighthouse of Alexandria became visible on the horizon. "Never could. So you must have asked him for the lives of the children. That's what I thought, that's what I told Selene, and that's why she started to believe me that she wasn't about to die in Rome."
I remember when I stopped thinking of my friendship with Octavian as a thing of the present, and started to think of it as a thing of the past. I remember the very night. It was not in Alexandria. It was in Rome, many years later, when young Marcellus, his nephew, Octavia's son, yawned during one of Horace's poems and said: "I don't see why we have to celebrate Actium every year. What's there to celebrate? A victory over a drunkard and his whore with her minions of shrieking eunuchs and handmaidens. Some victory."
Marcellus had been married to Julia as soon as he'd been old enough to wear a toga. As Octavia's only son, he was Octavian's chosen heir, for Octavian had no son of his own, and he never had much sympathy for Livia's son Tiberius. Tiberius had been married to my own oldest daughter, Vipsania, who seemed happy enough with him, but I was conscious this had been intended less as a gesture to honor my daughter and more as one to dash any hopes Tiberius may have had, or rather, that his mother definitely had regarding Julia.
I had not minded Marcellus, who was a cocky young man but not cruel, not until that night. What changed everything weren't Marcellus's attempts at youthful bravado, but the fact his uncle did not reprimand him, and simply chuckled indulgently. I stared at him. I thought of the blood on my hands, I thought of Charmian dying, and bile rose in me. He noticed; of course he did. He notices everything, still. And silently, he stared back at me. I understood, then, what the game was. He was trying to tell me I wasn't irreplaceable; that there was a new generation now, that I would have to strive for his favor if I wished to keep my position as the second man of Rome.
It was Octavia, not Octavian, who spoke to chide Marcellus. Octavia, who of everyone present had the most reason to denigrate Antonius and Cleopatra, said, with steel in her voice: "You will not speak ill of the Queen of Egypt, nor of my husband, who was your stepfather. Nor of any of our dead who fought and died at Actium so you can sit in a peaceful Rome here, my son. Apologize."
He flinched, and apologized. I rose to leave, regardless. It wasn't Marcellus I was truly angry with, after all. And again, it was Octavia, not her brother, who followed me and drew me aside.
"You have to understand," she said. "That bile was not for you. Marcellus has never forgiven Antonius for leaving us, nor the Queen for taking him away. His own father died so soon that Marcellus cannot remember him, you see. And Antonius, while he was there, played with the boy and - Antonius," she ended, her voice heavy even after all those years, "had a gift for making people love him."
He did. Octavia had been the seal to a pact between her brother and Marcus Antonius; it had been a sensible political arrangement, no more than that. But two daughters had come out of it, whom she had raised with all of her and his other children, and half of Rome had always suspected she had committed the terrible mistake of actually falling in love with him.
"I bear no grudge against your son, Octavia," I said. "He is young."
But I did bear a grudge, though not against Marcellus. And by the time he died, carried away by that same fever that took so many young lives, that fever that also weakened the ever sickness prone Octavian, I had made a decision. He was recuperating when I went to him.
"Marcus," he said, "I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't shouldered so many of the burdens of state during this latest calamity. Thank you."
I said nothing. His gaze sharpened.
"What's done is done, Marcus. If I erred in an uncle's fondness for a young man for whom we all mourn..."
I shook my head. "He did you proud," I said, and from his watchful look, I could tell Octavian knew I did not mean it as a compliment.
"Gaius," I continued, as I had not addressed him for many years, "we're too old for these games. You will not play me out against another of the young ones again. Stability, remember?"
"Always," he returned wrily. He does have a sense of irony, something Charmian would never have believed, who thought him humorless. "So..." he probed, slowly.
"You will give me Julia," I said. And at once, any sign of weakness was gone. He sat up, all coiled steel. Whoever married Julia would be regarded as his chosen successor by the people.
"You're too old," he said. "Older than I am. You may not even survive me. Be sensible, Marcus. The whole point of having a successor at hand is to secure the future."
But I was sensible. I was also a man who had helped to rule an empire for decades. The poets whom Maecenas favored praise me as the epitome of selflessness for this. I have not the heart to tell them that no one governs that long without losing his life if he has not ambitions of his own. The young man I had been did not wish to rule, it is true. He wished to serve Rome. I still do. But I have learned the ways of service, and of power, and I am no longer young.
"It is the future I am thinking about," I told the First Citizen, who, once upon a time, had been Gaius Octavius, my friend, and then Octavian Caesar, and now was Augustus, the most lauded Roman who ever lived. "The future of my line, as well as yours. If we both died tomorrow, and Tiberius by some miracle would be capable of uniting the senate behind him, then the point of our existence would have been to make the Claudians the rulers of Rome. The Claudians, Gaius. Not the Julii. Give me Julia, and I will have sons by her. Whether I will rule, or they will, that will be as the Gods decree it. But no more of this ridiculous favoritism. You will not pretend anymore that anyone but myself or my sons will be your heir. And thus Rome will remain stable."
"And I don't?" he asked, softly. He hadn't been told by anyone what to do or not to do since Marcus Antonius had tried it, in the years after Caesar's death, and failed.
"Then you will have to kill me," I said flatly. "And hope that Tiberius and Drusus are good enough as generals to deal with the resulting uprisings, young as they are. Because we both know you are no military commander, brilliant as you are in all other ways."
There was a long silence between us.
"I will never forgive you for this," he said. "But I will give you Julia."
The first Roman prefect of Egypt had been Cornelius Gallus, who had, as Maecenas once quipped, proved there must be something in the water there to help anyone in a ruling position confuse themselves with a god. When Gallus had become too blatant about this, Octavian had officially distanced himself, which immediately triggered a flood of lawsuits against him by just about everyone in Rome and Egypt. Faced with financial ruin, Gallus committed suicide. After that, the riches of Egypt notwithstanding, no one in Rome had been eager to follow in Gallus' footsteps, which was one reason why I ended up governing the Eastern provinces again.
Sometimes, in the gap between sleep and awakening, I wonder about another life. One in which I persuaded Charmian to become my wife, one in which she now helps me govern Egypt, as her ancestors have done. One in which I have made her see Rome as I do, so that she understands why it had to come first for me, why I could never have done what Antonius did. And even Antonius, after giving himself to Egypt, died as a Roman.
Foolishness, of course. And not even wished for when I am truly awake, for that would mean giving up what I have, all my children, alive and in my arms, for might have beens. The very reason why I understand Charmian better now is why I would not choose that other life, even if I could. I now know what is to raise a child, to feel every breath it takes exhaled from my own lungs.
And there is Julia. I did not marry Julia because I was in love with her. Only once did I wish to marry for love, and that led to no marriage at all. But I have always been fond of Julia, of her fearlessness, her wit that made her retort to her father when he chided her for being in such young company, unlike Livia, "don't worry, father, my companions will be old when I am", of her cleverness and her bracing honesty.
"Yes," she said when I came to her after my conversation with her father; that was how she greeted me.
"I haven't even asked the question yet," I said, smiling.
"You don't have to," she declared. "I told my dwarf to hide in the heating system so she could listen to you and Father. After all, I had to know whether Livia has finally worn him down enough so he'll hand me over to Tiberius, so I could prepare myself. If it had been Tiberius, I would fling myself in the arms of the next gladiator, though, I can tell you that. He was awful to grow up with already, and I bet he still stinks of compost between his toes."
"You're outrageous," I said, and felt younger than I had in years, before recalling that amusement at the expense of young Tiberius, who was, after all, my son-in-law, was uncalled for.
"Well," Julia said, "Father calls my his little Rome, and says he has two daughters, her and myself. That obliges me to be at least extraordinary, wouldn't you say?" Then she abruptly grew serious. "Don't tell anyone," she said, "or it would ruin my flighty reputation, but I do care what becomes of Rome, Marcus. If you die now, I don't see how it could survive without falling apart."
"I have no intention of..." I began, then stopped, abruptly recalling what I had said to her father.
"You told him he'd have to kill you otherwise," she said. "Do you think my girl left that part out when she reported to me?"
It was on the tip of my tongue to protest, to tell her I had not meant it, but that would have been a lie. It would also have been a lie to pretend I would not insist on her marrying me. But I did not wish for a wife who felt that I was her obligation, and nothing but that. That had been the state of affairs between Marcella and myself for the last years, which had been my fault as much as anyone's, and I decided to put more effort into this new marriage.
"What do you wish from a marriage?" I asked her. I had no idea what she and young Marcellus had made of each other. There were no children, but then they hadn't been married for long.
"To get out of this household," she said promptly. "To see as much of the world as I can. I can come with you on all your journeys, can't I? I won't pretend to be a perfect Roman matron, not the way Livia is, but I think I could be a good companion."
The pain was unexpected, like a stab in the dark. "You are a Companion, aren't you?" I had asked her, Charmian, when explaining, in all my youthful earnestness, why I thought it was better to be loyal and serve than to rule, and she had said "yes". Caesar had been alive then, Gaius Octavius was my friend who hoped and dreamed but was of no account to anyone but Maecenas and myself. I thought I knew all about loyalty. And I was so glad that she seemed to understand, this extraordinary, beautiful woman who for some reason was choosing to spend time with me when she was not serving her Queen.
Was I ever that young?
"Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa," Julia said, mistaking the reason for my sudden silence, "I think you want me to propose to you. Very well, I shall. It will make a change from just being handed over while trying to look as shy as a Vestal! Will you share my bed and company, oh most renowned admiral, son of Neptune, best of generals, greatest of builders, worthiest of all the Romans?"
She had done it again, jested her way into my dark mood and turned it around. I was not in love with her, but I realized then and there I soon would be.
"Yes," I said, and took her in my arms.
Not all of my children had come with me and Julia to the East this time. My oldest daughter Vipsania was with Tiberius, of course. My daughter Marcia was with her mother, Marcella. And Octavian had refused to let the boys come with us, citing the ever present plagues that swept the Eastern cities as a reason.
"They are, after all, my sons now," he said, "and the future of the state. Stability, Marcus," he added, unsmilingly. "You understand."
No, he had not forgiven me. That the boys were raised in my household at all, and not in his, was for Julia, not for me. But it was what I had demanded, after all, and so I said nothing.
Julia the younger was with us, though, and Agrippina, my two younger daughters, as curious as their mother as they admired the white city. They wanted to explore the famous lighthouse, the Pharos. I listened while their teacher told them how it had been constructed by Ptolemy, first of his line, who had made Alexandria great and had given it what had not existed in the world before then, a soaring tower with a beacon at its summit to guide ships past the shallows and reefs. If you approached Alexandria from the sea, you could see it from as far as thirty Roman miles, and while there were other lighthouses built in the two hundred years since, there was still nothing like it. I had begged Charmian to tell me how it worked when I had seen it the first time, and she, not knowing, had asked her friend Dion to.
"How can a light shine so far and be seen during the day? Is it the fire of the gods?" Agrippina asked, and I repeated what Dion told me all those years ago. To my surprise, the words flowed out of me without hesitation or pain.
"The beam is created using mirrors - enormous reflectors made of hammered bronze and silver that can be tilted in various ways as to reflect the light of the sun. At night, a bonfire is kept burning in the tower, and the mirrors magnify its light. It must never go out."
It had not, not even when the city had been entered by our forces. Truly, it was a wonder of the world.
I had not thought of Dion for many years. He had been scholar and actor both, a favourite of the Queen and her sisters, and when I first fell in love with Charmian, I experienced some jealousy, until I realized that Dion did not long for the love of women and had, in fact, formed a liaison with Aurelianus, one of Caesar's soldiers from Gaul. Now that I am older, I wonder whether my original jealousy had been less foolish than I had assumed upon realizing this. I may have lain with Charmian, but I did not understand her, and she did not understand me. Dion, as far as I recall, did both.
The Pharos was a gigantic building; it housed a garrison, kitchens, workshops for the repairs and storage for both fuel and food. I could not let the girls go there alone with their tutor, and so we all went, postponing the visit I had truly come to make. I stood there and looked, not at the sea, but back to the white city in all its splendour. You could make out the Soma, the magnificent mausoleum where the first Ptolemy had buried Alexander. And taking it as my point of reference, I found it again, not seen these many years: Cleopatra's tomb.
I am not a man given to public gestures of affection. It is not our way. And yet I took Julia's hand then, and was glad not to be alone.
It was Julia who found a priestess of Isis willing to come with us in the end. My own first enquiries to the temple had been rebuffed politely, but unmistakably. I could, of course, offer my prayers whenever and wherever I wanted, I was told, but as the laying of curses on Romans was strictly forbidden, and they were obedient to our law in all things, they did not know who could lift such a thing, either. Then Julia went to the temple without me, but with our daughters, and when she returned, there was a priestess with her. She wore veils, so I could not see her face, but there was something familiar in the way she moved. Her voice, as she spoke my name, was not one I had ever heard before, though.
"Your wife tells me that you seek compassion from Mother Isis, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa," she said. "Does a victor need compassion?"
"Everyone does," I replied. "But I do not wish it for myself. I wish it for my children."
The priestess stood very still. Her first few sentences had been spoken in Latin, and her Latin had been good, while accented. But now she switched to Koine, the Greek they speak in Alexandria, and while her voice remained that of a stranger, the familiarity of the way she pronounced "goddess" was like a strand in a complicated fabric which I could not have pulled out without unravelling it all. "Why do you think your children need mercy from the goddess?" she asked.
"Because," I said, "I once had no mercy on her own child."
It was said. It was spoken. Even when recounting the story to Julia, I had not put it this way before. I had said that my soldiers had been under orders, I had said that I had agreed with her father on the necessity of it. But that had been hiding under phrases of passivity still. A man must own his deeds. I had done this.
The priestess took a step back. "You," she said. "You yourself? You gave the order? Not Octavian?"
"I gave the order," I said. "And for this, Isis cursed me through her servant."
"Oh, Mother," the priestess said, and there was grief and anger in her voice, and condemnation as she took a step closer to me.
"And was this not well done by our lady?" she demanded. The hairs on my arm rose.
"Who are you?" I whispered, and for a moment, I believed the impossible: that she was Charmian, who had never died, who had only pretended to because she had not believed any Roman promises, and certainly not mine.
But that was madness. I knew death, better than most, and I had held her corpse in my arms. And besides, there was this: if Charmian had lived, she would have followed her sister's remaining children to Rome. No power on earth could have kept her away.
"I am Isis," the priestess said. "As all her servants are."
"My children have done nothing," I told her. "The guilt is mine, and so should be the punishment. That is what I want to pray for, at the place where the curse was spoken. That the curse be on my head only, and be lifted from my house."
The priestess regarded me in silence for a while. "Any man can pray," she said, and turning to Julia, she added: "And any woman. I make no promises that the prayers will be heard. But I will come with you, to hear what you ask for your children."
As was the custom in Egypt, Cleopatra had had her tomb build through the years of her reign. That was where she had sought refuge when our forces had entered the city. That was where we had found her, her servants, and the dead body of Marcus Antonius. And that was where she died, days later, with Iras and Charmian at her side.
They do not burn their dead in Egypt, as we do. They embalm them, and preserve the bodies through the centuries, as I had witnessed myself when visiting Alexander's tomb. Octavian had given permission for the Queen and her handmaidens to be buried according to their ways. He had no wish to take their bodies with him, after all. Besides, he wanted to avoid later impostors who could claim to be Cleopatra, returned. Everyone should be able to see where Cleopatra was: in Alexandria, dead.
I had been afraid Charmian's corpse would be on display in the same way, but it was not. Instead, she and Iras lay in smaller sarcophagi at her Queen's feet. But they were painted portraits of them on the coffins, for this, too, is the custom in Egypt, and the sight of them cut me to the quick, for whoever had painted Charmian's face had truly known her: the coppery gold of her hair that had made me believe, for a moment, she had to be a stranger in Egypt like myself when I first spotted her standing behind her mistress, the full, generous mouth, and the eyes the colour of lapis. Looking up, I saw that Julia was startled. She had encountered Egyptians before coming here, in Rome, in Jerusalem, in Damascus, and while she knew, of course, that the Ptolemies had been not Egyptians but Macedonians, she still must have imagined Charmian to have looked like the dark haired, bronze-skinned people she had met.
The priestess sighed, and repeated, as she had said before: "Oh, Mother."
It was a portrait, though. A painting, colours on wood, nothing more. There was no life here, and suddenly I felt sure that my quest was in vain. She was dead, as she had been these many years, her words had been spoken, and she could never take them back, even if, by some miracle, she would have wanted to.
Suddenly, Julia knelt down in front of the sarcophagi, and raised her hands, in the way we seek favour of the gods in Rome.
"Charmian," she said, "daughter of Ptolemy, sister of Cleopatra, hear me. My husband is a good man. If he has taken lives, he has saved many more. He has tried to make amends these many years. Forgive him, and end your curse."
The priestess said nothing. I knelt beside Julia. "I understand now," I said, "as I did not then. Spare my children. Do not make them pay for what I have done."
I did not add anything, for this was the heart of it, and I have never been a man who excelled at words.
"Your children," the Priestess said abruptly. "Would you give them to Isis?"
I looked at her. There was no breeze in the mausoleum; of course there wasn't. But she had lifted her veil, and it was then that I finally understood. No, she did not look like Charmian. She looked like my mother, dead these many years, as I remember her from my childhood, and no one else alive still can. A woman in her thirties, as old as Caesarion would have been, if he had lived. Born in that same year. She must have been.
Julia, who had not known my mother, and to whom the face of the priestess was simply the face of a stranger, bristled at the question.
"They are my children, too," she said. "They belong to me. They have done nothing. I will not give them to any goddess or god."
"And yet they say your father made your sons his sons and heirs, daughter of Augustus," the priestess returned sharply. "So you must have given them to him."
Julia rose. There was pride in her face. "To Rome," she said. "They are Rome's future, and Rome is theirs. That does not make them less mine."
"Then let Rome have them," the priestess said coldly. "I can think of no worse curse than that, and no harsher judgment."
I found I could breathe again, though every breath still stung. Charmian, I thought, Charmian, why did you never tell me?
It was too late now, of course. There she was, standing in front of me, child of the Ptolemies, child of my house, and yet not my child at all. A stranger. A servant of Isis.
But safe. Had I not come to ask for this? Safe from Romans and Egyptian gods alike, for the former knew nothing of her, and the later saw her as their own. The irony would have made me laugh, if it would not have made me weep. In the end, I did neither.
"Then Isis will forgive my husband?" Julia insisted, though her expression showed that she resented the insult to Rome.
"Do you feel forgiven?" the priestess asked me.
"I feel," I said, carefully, "that I need more than one lifetime to make amends. But I also feel that Isis will judge my children on their own merits, not mine. And that if they will pray, she will listen."
For the first time since lifting her veil, she looked surprised. That had been my mother's expression when I had told her that I thought her friend Atia's sickly son would become a great man one day, and the first man of Rome.
"You have as much faith as that?" the priestess asked, and her voice was her own, not carrying memories of anyone, either dead or alive.
"In my children, I do," I replied, and as I spoke, I realised that it was true.
"Then peace be with you, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa," she said, and put down her veil again. "However much of it you will let yourself find."
I have never dreamt of Alexandria again. Nor will I, I believe; not in this life, at any rate. Julia is pregnant once more, and we have taken it as a sign. Son or daughter, the child will be a blessing by the gods, and no harm of the past will affect it. As for the future - who can say? I never wished to know. I can only hope, and work towards it, as befits a Roman, the first of a new line.