Alexandria, Egypt—48 BCE
She should have known better than to trust a Roman. She should have never listened to his honeyed speech, or considered his strange ideas, or dared to search his onyx eyes. Seth’s teeth—she was a fool. ‘Beware the heirs of Romulus and Remus,’ the High Priestess had always cautioned her, but the words had been but a riddle in her young ears. By the time she finally understood their meaning, it was too late. She was already in love and doomed to die.
She remembered the day she started down that terrible path. She was working at her master’s brew house in Alexandria, Egypt’s capital city. She had lived through one and twenty inundations by then and had been bound in slavery since the age of twelve. She had never tasted meat, or seen her face in a mirror, or touched the waters of the Big Green Sea, though the harbour was only streets away.
What she had done was toil. She awoke each day at dawn and worked without rest—stirring mash, cleaning pots, pouring beer—until the last of the brew house’s clients stumbled out on to the moon-drenched streets. Then she would curl up on a floor mat outside the door of her master’s quarters and welcome the oblivion of sleep.
That was Wen’s life—day after day, month after month, from akhet to peret to shemu. It was a small, thankless existence, redeemed only by a secret.
The secret was this: she knew Latin. She knew other things, too, but Latin was all that mattered. Few people in Alexandria spoke Latin. The official language of Alexandria was Greek, the language of Egypt’s Greek Pharaohs, though Egyptian and Hebrew were also widely spoken. But even Queen Cleopatra herself had sworn never to learn Latin, for it was the language of Rome—Egypt’s enemy. The tongue of thieves, she had famously called it.
As it happened, the brew house in which Wen laboured was frequented by Roman soldiers who spoke only Latin. They were known as the Gabiniani—tolerated in Alexandria because they had once helped restore the late Pharaoh to his throne.
But the Gabiniani were villains—rough, odious men who belched loudly, drank thirstily and sought their advantage in all things.
She knew their depravity intimately, though she tried not to think of it. It was enough to admit that they were loathsome men and she was happy to keep her watchful eye upon them.
Thus she earned her bread as a kind of spy—an Egyptian slave serving Roman soldiers in the language of Plato. She pretended not to understand their Latin chatter and placidly filled their cups. But whenever one bragged about thieving beer or passing a false drachma for a real one, she would happily inform her master.
She had saved her master thousands of drachmae over the years in this manner and he was able to provide his family with a good life. It was for this reason, she believed, that he never used her body for pleasure, and always gave her milk with her grain. It was also why she knew he would never set her free. She began to see her life as a river, flowing slowly and inevitably towards the sea.
But the goddess who weaves the threads of fate had a different plan for Wen. One morning, a man entered the brew house wearing an unusual grin. He was as dark as a silty floodplain and handsome in an ageless way, as if he had been alive for a thousand years. She believed him to be Nubian, though his head was shaved like an Egyptian’s and he wore a long Greek chiton that whispered across the tiles as he walked. A bracelet of thick gold encircled his arm and a heavy coin purse hung from his waist belt.
A tax collector, she thought. She was certain the man had come to collect taxes on behalf of the young Pharaoh Ptolemy, who was seeking funds for his war against his sister-wife, Queen Cleopatra.
‘Please, sit,’ she invited the man. ‘Goblet or cup?’
He did not answer, but regarded her closely, first in the eyes, then quickly down the length of her body, lingering for a time on the scar that peeked out from beneath her tunic.
‘How long have you been enslaved?’ he asked.
‘Nine inundations, Master. Since the age of twelve.’
‘Then you are the same age as the exiled Queen.’ Wen glanced nervously around the empty brew house. It was dangerous to speak of Queen Cleopatra in Alexandria. Her husband-brother Ptolemy was currently preparing to attack her somewhere in the desert. ‘You have a regal air about you,’ the man continued jestingly. ‘Are you sure you are not a queen yourself?’
‘I am as far from a queen as a woman can get, Master.’
‘That is not true. The roles and riches of this life are but—oh, how does that old saying go?’
‘The roles and riches of this life are but illusions,’ Wen said. ‘They matter not.’ It was a saying the High Priestess of Hathor had often repeated to her, though Wen had not heard it since she was a child.
The man’s face split with a grin. ‘Will you take me to your master?’
‘My master is away,’ Wen lied, as he had instructed her to do on such occasions. He despised tax collectors and would surely beat Wen if she let this man through to him.
But in that instant, her master emerged from his quarters and heralded the stranger, and soon the two men had disappeared into his office. When they re-emerged, she noticed that the coin purse no longer dangled at the man’s waist.
‘Serve this honourable traveller what he requests,’ her master told her, a rare smile beguiling his face, ‘and do whatever he asks. He has paid in full.’
Do whatever he asks? She felt her ka—her sacred soul—begin to wither. Her master was not a kind man, but she had always believed him to be decent. It appeared that decency had been only in her mind, for he had apparently sold Wen’s body for his own profit.
I could just run, she thought. I could dash out the doorway and on to the streets.
But the streets were more dangerous than ever. A Roman general had lately landed in Alexandria—a man they called Caesar—and was conducting diplomatic meetings with Pharaoh Ptolemy in the Royal Quarter. The General travelled with a legion of soldiers fresh from battle. They wandered Alexandria’s streets in search of diversions. If Wen were not captured by slave catchers, then surely she would be captured by one of Caesar’s soldiers seeking female company.
‘What do you ask of me, then?’ Wen whispered, speaking her words to the floor. She studied its cracked tiles, as if she might somehow mend the rifts in them.
But the man said nothing, nor did he attempt to lead her away. Instead, his stretched out his arms and held his hands open. ‘You need not fear me,’ he said in Egyptian, her native tongue. ‘I am not here to take, but to give.’
Then, as if by magic, a large coin appeared between his fingers. He toyed with it for