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When Octavian is a boy, and no one of any particular importance, he meets a girl. That is not significant in and of itself; even here, amidst the sleepy outskirts of Rome, girls are always underfoot and acting like such children, the silly things. His sister is the worst of them - only six and always in the way. Why, only today, when he was practicing his oration to make sure every word and every tone was just right, Octavia took it into her head to stand in the doorway, with her sticky fingers and stifled giggles, and goggle at him until he could bear it no longer.
“Enough!” he shouted, throwing his arms into the air as dramatically as Great-Uncle, and flung himself out into the market. Clearly there is no peace to be found at home. He stalks along, propelled by his rage and still so preoccupied that he hardly notices her in his way.
He ought to have. Her eyes and teeth shine uncannily light against swarthy skin, and her hair hangs down in thick unmatronly coils. Also she is standing in the midst of the road where any innocent bystander, such as himself, could have easily knocked her down.
(Not that he does. Er. It appears she is built far more substantially than his lanky twelve-year-old frame, but still, but still, it’s the principle of thing. Octavian is very fond of principles, particularly when he can set them to work for him.)
“I beg your pardon, Lady,” Octavian says begrudgingly, and adds, “I do hope you weren’t hurt,” even though, all things considered, it’s his shins that hurt more from the abrupt collision than any part of her.
She takes no notice of this, naturally, only smiles brightly at him. “Not at all.” And before he can glower more: “You seem to be in quite the hurry, young master. What’s the fuss?”
It is rude to tell women they were unbearably nosy, isn’t it? Most likely so. Octavian forces a smile and mutters, “Forgive me my distraction, Lady. I was only preparing my oration,”—then, because this outrageous female opens her mouth to say something else, of all things, he quickly blurts out, “for my grandmother’s funeral. I must speak on her behalf.”
Silly of him to care so much, he thinks she might say. Most likely no one will pay any heed to what he says about the one person who had cared if he lived or died. But he owes Grandmother this much, if not more. He might not have money, or power, or even the power of family behind him, but he has his words. He can give her that.
“Ah,” she said, considering. “Well. For your politeness, young master, I offer you this: make sure your voice carries.”
With that, she is gone.
She finds him in Phillipus’s house, newly returned from donning the toga virilis. The folds of the garment still swaddle him, making it almost impossible to breathe in the heat. He can’t imagine why he ever looked forward to wearing the ridiculous thing.
“I’ve wondered the same thing, watching you men,” a voice says from the doorway, and there she is.
With the consciousness of manhood, he notices that she is beautiful. He wonders that he had not seen it before. The corners of her eye crinkle as she tries not to laugh.
He has no time to waste on thoughts of her attractiveness, however. “You knew,” he accuses. “You knew before it happened, that Mother and Phillipus would hear me speak. That they would take me home with them.”
She settles on the corner of his bed as calmly as though she belongs there. “I did,” she agrees.
Well. That was unexpected. He had expected a bit more arguing. He sits down, a respectable distance away from her (is there such a thing, when it comes to a woman so beautiful? A stupid thought, and so to be ruthlessly ignored.) and demands: “Are you a sibyl?” He likes the thought of that, a previously unknown sibyl, come to him, Octavian, to tell him only he could save the Republic from certain doom….
She snorts. “Those smoke-befuddled fools? No. I am….a spirit, I suppose you could call me. Yes.”
A spirit come to pronounce that only he could save the Republic from certain doom will read just as well in his memoirs. He nods in satisfaction. But for that, he’ll need: “Have you a name that I can call you?”
Her lips flatten into a feral grin. “Elissa.”
“Very well. Now, tell me, what is it I must do?”
She smiles back at him, the barest upturn of her lips that mocks him and mollifies him, all at once. “I should think that’s a question that you answer, not I. What is it that you want?”
This is a moment for honesty. Everything hinges on what he says now. Words, his own strength, desert him. He stands—well, sits, really—helpless before her.
Octavian licks his lips. “I want—I want power. I want fame. I want never to be forgotten and sent away again, for everyone to know my name.”
Her smile is well and truly satisfied now. “Is that so? Woo your uncle—great-uncle in your case—then. It certainly worked well enough for me.”
Great-Uncle, is it? Well, then. Octavian smiles grimly and begins plotting out his campaign. Come next spring, the old man will be eating out of his hand.
First, though: he may be only just a man, but he knows nothing comes so easily without a price. “Why are you helping me?”
She smiles. “Because you were born at Ox Head,” she says, taking the name of his family’s old estate on the Palatine Hill, “and I have always had a soft spot for oxen.”
It’s not much of an answer, but it’s the only one he’ll get: in the space it takes him to blink, she has disappeared.
The next time he sees her he is on his deathbed, and unlikely to live through the night. True, the doctor who’d come and gone said it was only a mild case of indigestion, but Octavian knows better. This is the tragedy that cuts short a promising career, that robs Rome of her most devoted son, that thousands in the years to come will mourn—
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elissa says from his bedside. “You’ll be well within a day and a night, and you know it.” Sweat-soaked, he lunges closes to her. “I know who you are,” he says, eyes wide. “I know. Elissa’s not the most common name, is it, Your Majesty? You’re the Queen of Carthage and you’ve come to laugh as Rome’s future dies here in this bed.”
Elissa appears remarkably unimpressed. “It was hardly meant to be a secret. And as for my feelings about Rome, when I ruled over my city, it was a wonder while your ancestors were digging in the mud, trying to find enough to eat. These days, I’m more drawn to power and those with the potential for it.”
Octavian collapses back onto his pillows, his strength spent. “I did what you suggested,” he says, absolutely, certainly, not sulking. “Great-Uncle thinks I’m the cleverest, most respectful young man he’s ever seen. If only Mother hadn’t made such a fuss about me joining him on his campaign that first time, I’d be there instead of here, in such a state.”
“Your mother knows her poisons,” Elissa says practically. “She didn’t dose you enough to kill you, just enough to make sure you stayed safe at home with her. And don’t look like that,” her voice cuts sharp, “it might be the first time you’ve been poisoned but it won’t be the last. Certainly you can hardly afford to lie in bed in this disgraceful fashion.”
“What do you propose I do, then?” he—and even Octavian can’t deny it this time—whines. “I’m sick and tired and every part of my body aches.”
Elissa leans in close. Her eyes are pitiless. Despite himself, Octavian leans closer.
“Go to your uncle. Follow him, come what may, storm or sea or sore buttocks from riding all day, and you will be his heir.”
With that promise, she disappears. Octavian swallows and begins the laborious process of getting to his feet.
”’Mint condition,’” Elissa quotes scathingly, and Octavian raises his hands in defeat.
“It was the truth,” he reminds her. “What did you want me to say?”
“That you never made poor Clodia Pulchra happy for a day in your marriage. And you won’t make Scribonia any happier either.”
He closes his eyes and stretches out on his couch, too exhausted to raise argument. Weddings are terrible things, and wedding nights even more tedious. He is not looking forward to the one to follow; at least this respite he can afford himself before he must think of Rome and do his duty.
“What do you want me to say?” he repeats, not opening your eyes. “That if you—“
Elissa laughs. “Oh, Octavian. Don’t fool me or yourself into thinking you are in love with me. It hardly becomes you. Besides,” she puts a placating hand on his shoulder, “we know the truth, don’t we, you and I?”
He does open his eyes at that, raises an eyebrow at her. “We do?”
“That no woman, living or dead, could ever rival Rome in your heart. You love power, and the pursuit of it, as much as any Cupid-struck shepherd does a nymph, as much as any actor the theatre.”
Octavian scoffs. “Should I be flattered that you compare me to any two-bit comedian prancing about the stage?”
She laughs at him. “The resemblance is uncanny, particularly when you sit in conference with Lepidus and Antony.”
He watches her. He wonders. He opens his mouth and asks: “Did you love him?”
“Acerbus?” As he nods, she continues: “Yes. I did. Very much. I loved my city so much because I thought of it as the child we might have had together.” She shakes her head and and pats him on the head, as though he were a child himself, not a bridegroom twice over. “So you see? We’re not so different, you and I. You love your city because it’s the mother you might have had, the one who never abandoned you for death or a new husband.”
He has no answer to that, nothing he’s willing to give.
Her voice softens: “So do the right thing, Octavian. Release Scribonia. Don’t leave her longing and unloved. Don’t make her endure what is to come.”
She leaves before he can tell her that he will not.
He sees Elissa, briefly, in the wedding procession by Livia’s side, an apparition that most overlook in favor of the heavily pregnant bride. She is bright with happiness, he thinks, and—
(“A wonderful choice,” she told him the night before, “Livia’s so cold-blooded, she won’t take your slights to what little heart she has. I couldn’t have chosen better for you myself.”)
—and the satisfaction of knowing that he heeded her words.
She holds power over him. How powerful is a man ruled by a woman who, by rights, shouldn’t even exist?
When Octavia comes to him weeping, Octavian knows there is no choice but war.
Not because of his sister’s tears, of course; Octavia might have grown in years but he finds her no less exasperating. What had possessed her to fall in love with her own husband, particularly such a noted philanderer as Mark Antony? If he’d known she would be this silly, he would have only given her to the crudest fool he could find, to ensure she would keep her wits about her.
But Antony has begun to overstep his bounds, and with that grasping Egyptian at his side, threatens to shatter the fragile balance in which he has kept the Republic. So war it shall be.
Before he leaves, though, Elissa comes to him. Her eyes are sad—they have never been sad before. “Don’t go,” she says, “for my sake.”
“Is it my death, then, that I’ll find on this campaign?” He tries to keep his voice casual, unconcerned. He is not entirely convinced that he succeeds.
She shakes her head. “She is dear to me,” and her face softens like he’s never seen it before. “Little Cleopatra, so lonely and clever and eaten up with ambition….How could I resist?”
He thinks of Elissa smiling at the Egyptian queen he met at Great-Uncle’s side as she smiled at him, and his insides burn. He supposed he was the only one whose superlatives drew her, who she came to visit. It seems he had been incorrect.
Octavian forces a smile. “But without it, I’ll never overcome Antony,” he reminds her. “Is that what you want?”
She shakes her head. “There is another way. Cleopatra’s interest lie away from Rome,” she tells him, and for the first time, his instincts scream with mistrust. What stops her from furthering the Egyptian whore’s interests rather than his own? “She will keep Antony’s attention away from you, and you will rise nonetheless, my Octavian.
“Please,” she says, “I ask nothing more of you. Spare her.”
Octavian hates Egypt. Rows and rows of statues, all with Elissa’s shadow-smile. He wants to burn them all to the ground, destroy them as he has Antony’s whore’s legacy, but he can’t. He means to be seen as benevolent, not a tyrant. It’s too bad Cleopatra interfered with that by killing herself instead of accepting his mercy.
Mercy it would have been, though there would have been no little amount of satisfaction, too: knowing that Elissa, somewhere, looked on her two chosen; demonstrating, forcefully, for all too see, which one of them was superior.
He takes an unfamiliar corridor of the Egyptian palace, and there Elissa is, face white. At first, all unthinking, he holds his hand up in greeting, but then he recognizes the expression on her face: clear, unforgiving anger.
She turns away from him. She does not look back.
“Forgive me,” he falters. “I had no choice—there was no other way—“
She does not.
Years later, the poet sings of her. Livia smiles politely and Octavia, unsurprisingly, weeps. She weeps at almost anything, fool of a woman that she is. And Augustus, Octavian no longer, shifts uncomfortably in his seat as the man tells of Dido’s hopeless passion.
The Elissa he had known had not seemed helpless about anything, much less a fair-featured, landless Trojan with no head for directions. Less so had she seemed inclined to throw herself to the flames for anything less than avoiding the fate of relinquishing her power. He needs no further proof that this Virgil, talented though he is, had never warranted a visit from Elissa in person.
That said, one episode finishes, and the next begins. While Livia perks up at the description of the ghoulish delights of the underworld, Octavia, her first set of tears barely having dried, cries again at a mention of her long-dead son. Augustus shifts uncomfortably in his seat at the description of Dido’s rage in the Underworld, of how she turned her head and walked away, not heeding the hero’s perfectly rational and articulate explanations.
There is no way the man could know, except if—
For an instant, he sees her appear, still pale with rage, directly behind Virgil. To his side, his women sit oblivious, and the poet declaims on and on.
She’s not above a bit of torment, his Elissa.
He thinks of her when he dies. He thinks of many things, to be fair: poor, doggedly loyal Octavia; Livia, as inscrutable and unscrupulous as ever; his lack of a son; his disappointing stepson; his idiot of a heir, who had to go and get himself killed; his Julia, who he still can’t bear to see due to the anger he bears her.
But mostly he thinks of her.
Now, of all times, he yearns for her presence. She would know what it is like, being a spirit. Will he join her, in finding new spirits with a craving for the crown to raise up? Or will he linger lonely in the underworld that the poet described? He must know, before he dies.
He might be a priest by title, but he has no spells to conjure her. He has only this: years of regret at having been separated from her, the barest twinge of remorse for his jealousy, the craving to see her one last time to prove to himself that he can.
Slowly, ignoring the burning of his lungs, he remarks, to no one in particular, thinking of a time when he had scorned to be called an actor, ignorant that the seat he had sought had required nothing else from him than to be that: “”Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.”
Around him the whispers begin. How modest the he is, how noble in spirit even as his spirit fades! For once, though, the only reaction he wishes to see is hers.
Slowly he makes through blurry eyes: lips that twist in a mocking smile, light eyes that crinkle at the corners, coils of dark hair that spill over his chest.
“You have, my Octavian,” she tells him. Enough. It is enough.
He passes in peace.