Free Daughters of the Nile by Stephanie Dray

fact that he’s forced me to bear two—now three—children for him.”
    I wince, remembering a time when I was held down and forced. Remembering it as if it were yesterday. In the remembering, I restrain myself from glancing at my daughter. It was an ugly thing, that night, but I wouldn’t trade my beautiful girl, even if it meant I could swim in some other River of Time where that night never happened.
    Oblivious to my distress, Julia goes on to ask, “Do you want to know the thing I despise most about Agrippa? It’s that I cannot hate him as much as I should.”
    I too have reason to hate Admiral Agrippa, and yet I’ve never been able to do it. As much as I fear him, as much as he is my enemy, I’ve always known that what drives him is not malice—and yet, what solace would that be for all the men he’s killed? “Hatred is a heavy burden to bear. Especially hatred for your own husband.”
    Julia lifts her face to the sun and closes her eyes. “I tell myself that I hate him. Then he comes to my bed with a diligence born of pure patriotism. I swear to myself that I won’t be roused by his touch, but I am.”
    I blink more than once. “Truly?”
    “There is something about Agrippa’s body,” Julia explains, quite unconcerned that she might be overheard by servants. “It’s scarred and weathered. It awakens hideously respectable urges in me to bear children and sit all day weaving at the loom.”
    None of this is what I expect to hear. “You can’t mean it . . .”
    “Well, not the part about the loom. But the rest of it, I mean every word. He undresses with military precision, lays me flat on the bed, then climbs atop me with a gravitas that would be laughable if he weren’t so appallingly good at it!”
    I’m scandalized and a bit disturbed. “I might have gone my whole life quite happily not knowing this about Agrippa. Have a care—”
    “Oh, our Marcella fooled us with her tears on her wedding day. Crying about Agrippa’s fumbling hands. She’s a liar. Agrippa masters everything he puts his hands to. Even me.” Julia sighs, then shivers. “It’s such an earnest business, the way he grinds me down into the bed. He tells me to close my eyes and think of the honor of my family and the good of Rome, and I do. I can see myself, a mother of the empire. He excites me. I don’t bother to hide it. I don’t care if Agrippa thinks I moan too loudly when I find my own pleasure. I don’t care at all. It’s freeing, not to care.”
    I speak slowly. “So, then . . . you’re not entirely unhappy with Agrippa?”
    “What purpose would it serve to be entirely unhappy? I’m the daughter of the emperor and the wife of the only man who can challenge him. There are worse fates that can befall a woman.”
    Perhaps she is thinking of her mother. Poor, ostracized Scribonia, who not only hailed from a family that advocated for the return of the Republic, but had the temerity to give the emperor a daughter instead of a son; he divorced her the very day that Julia was born. Or perhaps she is thinking of my mother, who challenged this world of men and came away from it with deadly venom in her blood. “You’re right, of course.”
    Julia likes to be told she’s right, so her dark mood vanishes in an instant. “Delightfully, there’s more to the world than bedmates and babies. There are advantages to being Agrippa’s wife. He took me to Spain and he’ll take me to Greece!” Her eyes cut at me, shrewdly. “Ah, but you’ve already been . . .”
    I don’t wish to speak of Greece, both because it shames me and because I still carry secrets from my time there with the emperor that are not safe to share. Not even with Julia. “Hurry and finish your lunch,” I say to distract her. “We still have an adventure ahead of us . . .”
    * * *
    “IT carries water all the way from those mountains,” I boast, sweeping a hand over the path our monstrous aqueduct cuts into the wide sun-drenched vista of