Cleopatra’s Daughter

I was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps that will be enough for us both.”

We looked across the triclinium at Juba, who was being congratulated by Agrippa and Claudia. “As soon as you’re comfortable in your new palace,” Agrippa was promising him, “we plan on making the journey south for a visit.”

But Juba laughed. “I don’t expect I’ll be leaving anytime soon. There’s the matter of a war in Cantabria to finish. I’m not sure how Augustus would feel about returning home to discover that I’d left him.”

Julia and Marcellus were by themselves on the farthest couch in the triclinium, and I could see that she was weeping. He kissed the tears of happiness from her cheeks in a way that made my heart ache, and I reminded myself sternly, It’s about continuing to study with Vitruvius so that Augustus will let me return to Egypt; it’s not about falling in love with a Roman—however winsome he is.

But it was difficult to remember what I had left to hope for as Julia dragged me to every shop in the Forum in search of the perfect bridal clothes. There had been a message from Iberia that whatever Julia wished for her wedding should be ordered, and that every senator in Rome would be invited to the celebration.

“Look at all this cloth,” Julia complained in November, with only a month left before her marriage. “Wool, linen, heavy winter silks. How can any of these be used for a veil?” We had gone to shop after shop looking for something suitable, but she’d found nothing. She sat down on the shopkeeper’s chair while the old man scurried around us, presenting us with options.

“There has to be something,” Lucius protested. “What about that red stuff over there?”

“It’s too thick.”

My brother held up a swath of red silk.

“Too shiny,” she ruled.

“There are no more shops,” Gallia reminded her. “What about inviting the merchants from Ostia to the Palatine?”

“She’s already done that,” I said dryly.

“Then how about choosing something from the one hundred shops we’ve already been to?” Marcellus suggested.

Julia’s eyes filled with tears. “You don’t care what I wear.” She stood angrily. “I could show up in a peasant’s palla and it wouldn’t matter at all!”

Marcellus exchanged a wearied look with me. “You’re right. It wouldn’t.” He went to her. “Because what matters to me isn’t the veil.” He lifted her chin tenderly. “It’s you.”

Alexander whispered in Parthian, “You have to feel a little sorry for him. This is what the rest of his life is going to be like.”

Julia calmed a little, but the crisis of the veil wasn’t resolved until eight days before the wedding, as we were bidding Magister Verrius farewell. Our days in the ludus were finished. Beginning with the new year, Alexander and Lucius were going to join Marcellus and Tiberius in a separate school for rhetoric, where they would learn how to speak in public and argue law cases. Julia would be in charge of her own house, a magnificent villa near Agrippa’s on the Palatine, and instead of studying Homer or Vergil, she would be holding her own salutatio, doing charity work, and commissioning buildings in her own name. Because school was finished for me as well, Vitruvius paid me the honor of asking whether I wished to study with him in the daytime and oversee some of the work on the theater, Agrippa’s Pantheon, and the new basilica being built in honor of Julia’s marriage. Only this time, when he asked, it was not because Octavia pressured him to.

The six of us waved good-bye to Magister Verrius, and though Julia was the one who had enjoyed the ludus least, she blinked back tears as we crossed the courtyard toward Juba and Gallia for the very last time. Though Juba was king of a foreign land now and could have left our security to the Praetorian Guard, it was a mark of his loyalty to Augustus that he remained as Marcellus’s personal protector. Julia sniffed loudly, and when Marcellus gave her his linen square, she used it to dab at her eyes. “You know what this means, don’t you?” she wailed.

“Our childhood has passed,” Alexander said quietly.

“Who cares about our childhood?” she said heatedly. “There are only eight days to find cloth for a veil!”

Marcellus gave Julia a desperate look. “Why don’t you go shopping with Selene,” he suggested. “Juba can take us back—”

“We’ve been to every store,” I interrupted. “There’s nowhere in Rome we haven’t gone.”

Julia’s look was miserable. Everything was ready. Her handsomely embroidered cloak of red and gold. A tunic woven from the finest silk. Her pearl-encrusted sandals, her bangles, her underclothes. Only the veil remained. Marcellus looked as if he were about to weep himself. And then I remembered.

“I think I have something. In the chest I brought from Alexandria—some swaths of red silk.”

Julia gasped. “Can we see them?”

I glanced at Marcellus, who smiled at me with the deepest gratitude, and I was forced to admit to myself that my revelation was not entirely altruistic. “Of course.”

Marcellus exhaled audibly. “I’ll bet Selene has something that would be absolutely perfect.”

Julia shot him a look, but when we returned to the Palatine and I opened the chest that had been locked for more than four years, she reached forward for the first swath of silk and exclaimed, “This is it!” It was the material left over from a chiton I had worn to my mother’s last feast. It had been the Feast of the Inseparable in Death, when my parents had invited everyone who had been close to them to dine one last time. I hesitated, wondering whether or not I should tell her.

“You probably don’t want that one,” I said finally.

But she had already draped it over her head. “Why not?”

“Because it was the cloth I wore to my mother’s last dinner.”

“The feast of a queen,” Julia whispered, regarding herself in the mirror. The red contrasted beautifully with her mass of black hair, and she didn’t care what the material had been for.

“It might bring you bad luck.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “That’s only superstition.”

“Your father wouldn’t think so.”

“And do I look like him?”

No. She looked like the most beautiful bride who would ever be carried across the threshold of a villa. Pearls imported from the Indian Sea gleamed on her dark neck, and in eight days, when her hair was dressed in similar ornaments, Marcellus would be the envy of every man in Rome. I let her take the silk, but as she was folding it into a neat square for her seamstress, she sat down on my bathing room chair, and tears began to well in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” I exclaimed. “You have your veil. Everything is ready.”

She nodded, as if she knew it was foolish to cry. “I know.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

She looked up at me, and her dark eyes suddenly appeared enormous, as if they belonged to a child. “She won’t be there,” she whispered, and immediately I was ashamed of my resentment. No one in the world knew Julia better than Marcellus. Her father, her stepmother, even her stepbrother only cared what happened to her so long as it advanced their will. In a world of pretty silks and pearls where everything was theater, Marcellus was her only real happiness, and her mother wouldn’t even be able to meet him on the wedding day. I took a seat next to her and offered her my hand. There was nothing I could say, so instead we sat together in silence and I thought of how selfish a friend I had been.

The excitement of Julia’s wedding didn’t stop me from wallowing in my own misery in private. Though I put a smile on my face and helped Julia with everything a bride might need—packing her chests, choosing her perfume, finding the right silk tunic for her wedding night—I still felt an empty ache in my heart when Marcellus looked at me or I heard him laugh in his mother’s villa and knew it would be one of the last times I would ever have that sound wake me in the morning. Yet Marcellus was bursting with happiness. He was marrying a woman he loved, and who loved him back. There would be spectacles and entertainments to plan for an entire year, and before long Augustus would make him consul and officially name him the future emperor of Rome.

Two nights before the wedding, Marcellus crept into my chamber, where Alexander, Lucius, and I were whispering about the war in Cantabria and how it might be many years before we’d have to see Livia’s sour face again. Since the announcement of his wedding, he had stopped coming to us, and I presumed from the nightly