Song Of The Nile Part 7

"Don't," I whispered quickly. "Don't promise violence in a temple. Not even if you aren't real."

"I'm real enough . . ."

"You can't be. They told me that you were dead!"

He lowered his head. "Better that I were."

"If you're better off dead, then I am too," I told him, hot tears scalding my cheeks. "We've always been together and I can't be alive without you. I can't do anything without you. I can't even get clean . . ."

"You are clean," Helios said, pale eyes squinting.

"No." I shook with each sob, my shoulders heaving. "Since that night, I've scrubbed my skin raw, but I can't wash him away."

Helios looked stricken, his throat working as he fought back tears of his own. He pressed his forehead to mine and we stood like that, breathing each other's breath, until he said, "I'll wash him away for you." Making a cup of his hands he scooped up water from the pool, then let it trickle down my neck. He did it again. Then he poured water over each shoulder, as if in sacred ritual. It must have been, for I felt the magic wash over us. Here in this temple, I heard the chants of the priests and the sounds of rattles from eras gone by. Here a thousand women had brought their sacrifices and a thousand candles had been lit. I didn't recognize the chants or understand their words, but like me, they'd all come here in human frailty and need.

Pain was a universal language.

Together we knelt and my gown floated on the water ghostly white. Helios washed my shoulders, my arms, and my trembling belly. He bathed me. He went on and on, slowly and methodically. He ran his hands through my hair, combing his fingers through it, thumbs ma.s.saging my scalp. And stroke by stroke, drop by drop, the salt water of my tears mingled with the sacred water until I was wrung out, rinsed away of pain. I hadn't been able to do it alone, but with Helios all things were possible. In the water, the flow of heka rushed up from the floor, spreading like warm honey in my veins. With my fingers still tangled with his, I pressed them against a supporting pillar. The paint in this temple had faded but the magic inside it hadn't. Heka flowed through our fingers so strongly, I could taste the green malachite on my tongue. "Can't you feel that?" I asked. "Years of sorrows and worship, magic stored here for us to use. It was here waiting to bring us together."

This sharing of heka was intimate and Helios seemed surprised by the intensity of it, dipping his head. "Selene . . ." His voice was tortured. "You're too close to me."

"How can I be too close?" I asked, tasting the tears of generations. "Like the sun and the moon, we were always meant to be in the same sky."

"Selene," he said again, as if it hurt him to speak my name. That's when I realized that he wanted me. Perhaps he'd always wanted me. Not abstractly, as a king who wants a queen, but with burgeoning, potent s.e.xual desire. He shied away, as if ashamed. He shouldn't have been. For hundreds of years my family had practiced brother-sister marriage like the Egyptian pharaohs before us. The Romans judged it a wicked thing for a man to take his sister as a wife, but Helios wasn't a man and I didn't come to him as a woman or as a sister.

I'd said the calling prayer. I'd drawn him back from the underworld just as Isis had called back her brother-husband. In this sacred s.p.a.ce, he was a youthful G.o.d and I was a maiden G.o.ddess. He was the husband that had been promised me in my dreams. The one who would take the hurts and soothe them, the one who would take what was broken in me and make me whole. It wasn't Juba. Helios was the lover who sang to me. It was his face I dared not name, even to myself. My skin glowed like the pale moon and reflected silvery off the face of the G.o.ddess above us. I was the G.o.ddess and he was the golden G.o.d that overflows the Nile's banks, cleansing the earth, filling the cracks in the soil with the seed of life.

I kissed him and he startled when our lips sealed together in soft reverence. I wrapped my arms around his neck and tasted the salt on his skin. I ran my fingers through his leonine hair and realized he was vulnerable to me. His body fell easy prey to my touch. I could take him as my lover or cast him away. It was my choice. Mine. And I chose him.

Ten.

I was clean.

He'd made love to me upon a flower-strewn altar. He'd stroked me softly, worshipfully, as if only my skin could offer him salvation. He didn't curse me or demand that I love him. He didn't have to. Every tremulous touch had brought me closer to wholeness. Trembling hands washed away cruel ones. Sweet, tentative kisses drowned unrelenting dark memories.

After, I awakened to a crash in the outer chamber-maybe an urn or potted plant that couldn't withstand the storm. The winds were still blowing. I squinted into the dimness, coughing in the dusty air. Someone had wrapped me in a blanket and I clutched it. Helios was here. More worldly, less perfect. Still here. With a tunic wrapped around his waist and a cloth over his mouth, he crouched over an oil lamp, using his fingers to give rise to a flame. My eyes widened in amazement when I felt a strange pull in the heka and realized that he was using it to make fire. "How are you doing that?" I asked.

He glanced up, then held his arm out to show me his birthmark, the one shaped like a cobra, the ureas, the spitter of fire. "I can take flames into me or let them out. You can do the same with wind."

My own birthmark was shaped like a sail, and I stroked it now, fascinated by each freckle. "Does that mean . . . Is this storm my doing?"

"I don't know. Fire seeks me out. It may be the same for you with wind." He came to my side with a skein of water and brought it to my dry lips. I drank eagerly, realizing only now that my throat was parched. I should have used the oil the way Tala told me to, but from the moment I'd entered this temple, nothing had seemed real. That was all changing now.

During our lovemaking, I hadn't noticed the bandage wrapped round his ribs. But then spirits and G.o.ds couldn't be wounded. So he was no shadow or double. "You didn't die at Thebes . . ."

"I should have," he said, bracing his back against the stone wall. "There weren't many survivors, but what few there were, my men and I evacuated to Hermonthis." It was strange to hear him talk of his men, as if he were a military commander like Agrippa. As much as I'd changed in the time since we'd been apart, Helios had changed even more. He looked like a young fighter, one of the boys they enrolled in the legions. "Magic and faith can't win wars, you said, Selene. Only soldiers can. You were right and I was wrong about everything . . ."

After the Battle of Actium, in defeat, my father had brooded in a cabin by the water and when he finally emerged there was a hollowness to him. Some kind of death before death. I'd never thought to see such a thing again, but when I looked at my twin now, I glimpsed that same abyss and knew I wasn't the only one who'd come to this temple all broken inside. "What happened to you, Helios?"

I reached to inspect his wound and he pulled away. "It's nothing. A glancing blow." He unstopped an amphora of olives and the two of us ate in silence. When he finally spoke again, he said, "I learned of your marriage . . ."

I flinched, staring down at my betrothal ring. "I didn't want to marry Juba. It's no true marriage."

"You don't have to justify yourself to me, Selene. I didn't come here to accuse you."

"Then why did you come?" I asked, still half certain that I'd conjured him.

"I had to see you one last time."

I hated the sound of that. "How would you know to find me in this temple? How could you know that I'd come?"

"When I heard of your marriage to Juba, I knew you'd make landfall in Mauretania. Once I arrived, I pa.s.sed this crumbling little temple and knew you'd find it too . . ."

It still seemed too dreamlike. I had to lean against his shoulder to rea.s.sure myself of the warmth and substance of him. "Who knows that you're here?"

"No one," he said with a shake of that golden head. The heat of the storm had dried his curls and mine. "There's a back entrance to the bas.e.m.e.nt where they store old offerings. I broke the chain . . . Selene, I meant to come back for you at the head of an army, to liberate you and Philadelphus the way we used to dream Caesarion would. I knew you were clever enough to stay alive until I returned." Well, I'd done that. I'd survived. I was good at that. Helios bowed his head. "I failed. In this River of Time, I failed. I know you can't forgive me, but I am sorry."

Sheltered beneath the statue of the G.o.ddess and all the magic her worshippers had left here, I tangled my fingers in his hair. "Of course I forgive you."

"If you saw Thebes, you wouldn't-you couldn't. This Prefect of Egypt, this Cornelius Gallus, wasn't content to win his victory and loot. He dismantled the temples. He burned the houses. He took women and children and . . ." He broke off, seeing it all again.

"Hush, it's all done now." I stroked his hair as if he were a child. "Surrender to Juba and it can all be over. The emperor said you might be allowed to live here, in Mauretania, with me."

At that, his chin jerked up and he met my eyes. "You know better, Selene. Augustus won't spare me. He'll kill me. You know that." How could I argue when the emperor had broken almost every promise he'd ever made to me, not least of which was the unspoken promise of any civilized man that he wouldn't force himself upon a woman? "He thinks he must kill me, Selene. The Sibylline Books say a woman shall rule and subdue Rome. A woman like our mother. Then Rome would be purged by fire with a coming savior, a sun G.o.d like Helios-Horus, a child of Isis. So I burned Rome."

"Did you really set fire to Virgil's house too?"

He swallowed. "Virgil made an accidental arsonist of me. I only meant to burn his poem. But fire leapt from the hearth into my hands and my command over it faltered. I learned my magic in those mistakes, and those fires in Rome, at least the first ones, they were my doing. I thought I was fulfilling the prophecy."

Rome scourged by fire . . . and then a savior comes.

Of the Sibylline Books, those oracular writings that the Romans feared and revered, I knew only that which had been taught to me by Virgil, who busily refashioned those prophecies to cast Augustus as Rome's savior. It was no accident the emperor had chosen Apollo the Sun G.o.d as his patron deity. He'd tolerate no rivals and Juba's words came back to me. Oh, my poor Selene, you actually thought you could save him . . . Juba knew what I hadn't: Augustus would never allow Cleopatra's son, a boy named Helios, to come of age. "Then you have no choice but to raise an army to fight and make you King of Egypt."

"I'm already King of Egypt," Helios said, and it was true. He didn't wear a diadem, but he didn't need to. His face, so beloved to me, carried echoes of our parents, of my brothers, and of all our ancestors. Traces, even of Alexander, I thought. Royalty and responsibility were written in his every gesture. "But I don't deserve to be king."

I reeled back. "Of course you deserve to be king! No one in this world loves Egypt more than we do. Egypt needs a pharaoh. Egypt needs you."

"No," he said, taking a long drink of water. "Enough people have died for me. I'll never ask anyone to fight in my name again. The Romans think I'm dead. Some part of me is. Let them believe it."

Then what would he do? Live in obscurity? I was a Ptolemy. I couldn't conceive of it. "There has to be another way. A place for you here, until we can go home. Maybe you can hide yourself among the Isiac brotherhood and become an even more powerful magician."

Helios scowled. "I'm done learning magic. Whatever star I was born under, whatever destiny our parents saw, whatever Golden Age the Isiacs hope to have of me, it's not in this River of Time."

It was like blasphemy. "How can you say that?"

Holding both his hands up in the candlelight, he said, "Our mage taught me to throw fire, to send pillars of flame rolling down a hill at the enemy, but still the Romans came in formation, with their shields held high. I knew then that the prophecies about me must be a lie."

The mention of our mage, my mother's court wizard, captured my attention. "Where is he?"

"Safe, I think," Helios replied. "When defeat was certain, I sent Euphronius to find you. Perhaps he can teach you what you need to know. He served me to the best of his ability, Selene. Now you must care for him as you care for me . . . and I need you to carve my name in stone so that the G.o.ds know me, here in the West, where Egyptian kings go when they die."

My mouth worked but it took a moment before I found my voice. "I don't understand. What's to become of you?"

"Do you remember our mother's funeral?" Helios asked, turning to me. "When I performed the Opening of the Mouth, the crowd chanted. 'He is Horus-he is Horus the Avenger,' they said. That's what Egypt needs from me. I'm a son who couldn't save his parents and a brother who couldn't protect his siblings. I can't also be a king who fails his country."

"But you just said that you wouldn't ask anyone to fight-"

"I said that I'll never ask anyone to fight in my name," he interrupted. "Egypt needs someone to fight for her, not for a throne. The Romans steal grain and tax the people besides. Raping the countryside-" I winced at the word and he noticed, his rage fueling the torchlight in the hot, cavernous temple. "By Isis, I'll make them pay for all our family's spilled blood, for every offense against our faith, and for everything they've done to you!"

It wasn't just idle talk of a traumatized boy king. He meant it. He'd come here only to say good-bye, and it sent a jolt of anger through me. "You can't leave me again. I won't let you go. I'll scream for the Romans, and they'll capture you."

He leaned forward. "You'd never betray me, Selene."

"But I did," I said, tears welling in my eyes. "I kept secrets from you. I made you run away."

"I only ran because I thought they'd use you against me. And they would have."

I was blind with need. "Then we'll go, together, both of us. Let the Romans think I was swallowed in a storm. Take me with you!"

Helios cupped my chin. "Trust me, I want to, Selene. But that isn't what's best for Egypt."

I knew then, that he was a better king than I was a queen. "I don't care."

"Yes, you do. We can't forsake Philadelphus. We must think of him too. Make it easier for me, Selene. The Romans think I'm dead. Make them believe it. Build a tomb. Mourn for me. I've lost my name, but the House of Ptolemy lives on in you."

He wanted me to agree, to give him up for dead. How could I? I put my face in my hands, trying to think of some other way. Some escape from this labyrinth. "Where will you go? Am I never to see you again?"

Helios laced his fingers with mine. "We're one akh, Selene. We'll always find one another."

He meant that we'd be reunited in the afterworld. That in every realm of the soul, we'd been together before and would be again. "But I need you in this lifetime, Helios."

He smiled softly. "No, you don't. Look what you've done all by yourself. You were a prisoner and now you're a queen. You made that happen, not me. It all rests on you now, Selene. I know that if there will ever again be a pharaoh of Egypt, it'll be you."

The admiration I saw in his eyes broke my heart. "You don't know the lies I've told. All the unforgivable things I've done-"

"Don't you know that there's nothing I wouldn't forgive you for? None of it matters. You kept Philadelphus safe, didn't you? And Chryssa?"

"She's here with me," I admitted.

At that, he smiled again. "I knew you'd take care of her."

"Well, you gambled there," I said, guilt-ridden and bitter. "I resented her because you trusted her . . . loved her . . ."

His cheeks flamed. "There's no one I love the way I love you."

I didn't want to be like Juba, pressing him to feel something he didn't, but oh, greedy heart, I wanted more. For Helios, maybe what we'd done here in this temple had been a thing apart. Maybe he wouldn't have done it except as a farewell, dreamlike, the G.o.d in him and the G.o.ddess in me, and now we were merely mortals again. I had to know. "How do you love me?"

He took my hand and pressed it to his chest, on his breastbone, so I could feel his pulse. "You're my queen." He started to say something else, but his words were cut off by the crackle of thunder. "The storm is getting worse. I don't know if the temple can withstand it."

"It can," I whispered. "This place does more than shelter us. Heka is in the floor, in the stones, in everything. Teach me to use it."

Gathering my clothes, which had baked dry in the hot air, I fastened the clasps, laced my sandals, and pulled my veil in place. We pushed aside a curtain that must have once been vibrant red but was now filth-splotched, insect eaten, and reddish brown. I followed Helios down a narrow staircase, descending into a darker part of the temple where I felt the crackle of some energy force. Helios felt it too. "The heka is deep in this temple," he said. "I think we've been drunk on it . . ."

Is that how he'd explain the kisses we'd shared and the way our bodies had merged?

At the end of the pa.s.sageway, the wind howled. Sand leaked around the old bronze-studded door. Helios kicked aside the broken chain then pushed the door open and we were struck, both at once, by a swell of sand that whipped into our faces. We stepped outside and my gown billowed around me. I shielded my eyes with one hand. A smashed fruit wagon had overturned on the street, dates and pomegranates spilled, rolling all over the ground. Shards of pottery clacked against the buildings and shattered things in the distance. Palm fronds lashed overhead like a cruel slaver's whip.

This land was hurting. Mauretania suffered my pains. "Can I make it stop?"

Helios came up behind me, his chest tight against my back. His hands, always larger than mine, lifted my wrists. "You have to find the heka. Sift through the scents and sounds and tastes until you find it and draw it in. You have to swallow the wind, without being swallowed."

"How is there room for it inside me?" I wondered.

"Under your skin, between your bones, there's s.p.a.ce for other, more fluid things. Like blood. Like heka. Like fire and wind . . ."

I closed my eyes and breathed in the desert, along with the loam of Africa, groping for its magical core. My lungs swelled. I tasted Helios's breath in that wind and heard the creaking ships as they rolled in the harbor. Layer upon layer. Sounds, scents, and smells battered at me as I ventured into the storm. I reached for the heka, but it was just outside my grasp. I waded further into the sea of noise. Soon, I was inside myself, drawing the wind in.

Very distantly, I heard Helios call my name, but I couldn't see him. The wind was inside me and I was inside it, the thread of it slipping through my hand. I grabbed hold tighter. I caught the core of the storm, and it lashed angrily. I heard the snap of branches as it leveled trees but the sounds were dim and faint, a world away. As I swallowed the storm, I delighted in the rush of voices. Laughter of a tribal marketplace. The clink of coins. Clacking carts, horses neighing, a thousand different languages. The taste of plums soaked in wine, like the ones Julia used to steal from the pot during Saturnalia.

But as the sounds and scents and tastes came faster, my delight turned to fear. I heard the women of Thebes screaming. The taste of their blood was in this storm too. Slaves crying and men dying on battlefields. Elephants stampeding. All this horror was being pulled into me with this storm and I was whisked away. Swirling, down, down, down into myself. I tried to exhale but no longer knew how. Frantic, I flailed for some familiar sound or scent. I lost my hold. If I had a body anymore, I did not know. I drifted. I drowned.

I call you to me.

These words I knew and reached for the sound.

I call you by the breath of your body.

Was the voice my own, echoed back to me? No, it was Helios. I swam to him, toward his prayer.

I call you by the truth of your soul.

I call you by the spark of your mind.

Yes, there it was. His voice. I grabbed on to it like a drowning swimmer, in desperation. He'd found me, somehow, in this ocean of heka, and now he drew me back to myself.

I call you by the light of your spirit.

Helios was kissing me, drawing me back from the void. Giving me back my breath. I came back to myself, finding my arms, one outstretched toward the sky and the other rigid at my side. I gulped at windless air. My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and slowly, I realized it was the only sound. The only sound. Thump thump. Thump thump.

My eyes fluttered open, and I saw that I'd somehow made my way to the heart of Iol. Sand settled in a thin blanket across the land, and the sun warmed the cloudless sky. The air was still. At length, a dog barked somewhere in the distance. The next sound was a murmur as people opened their windows and doors. My veil had blown away and my cheeks were red and stinging, the tendrils of my hair still lifted on the storm I'd taken into myself. I blinked over and over again, afraid to move, for fear I'd collapse.