Hand of Isis (2 page)

M
y mother was a Thracian slave girl who died when I was born, so I do not remember her. Doubtless I would have died too, as unwanted children will, had Iras’ mother not intervened. Asetnefer was from Elephantine, where the Nile comes out of Nubia at the great gorges, and enters Egypt. Her own daughter was five months old when I was born, and she took me to her breast beside Iras, a pale scrap of a newborn beside my foster sister. She had attended at the birth, and took it hard when my mother died.

I do not know if they were exactly friends. I heard it said later that Pharaoh had often called for them together, liking the contrast between them, the beauty of my mother’s golden hair against Asetnefer’s ebony skin. Perhaps it was true, and perhaps not. Not every story told at court is true.

Whatever her reasons, Asetnefer nursed me as though I were a second child of her own, and she is the mother I remember, and Iras my twin. She had borne a son some years before Iras, but he had drowned when he was three years old, before my sister and I were born. It is this tragedy that colored our young lives more than anything else, I believe, though we did not mourn for him, having never known him. Asetnefer was careful with us. We should not play out of sight of people; we should not stray from her while she worked. She carried us both, one on each hip in a sling of cloth, Iras to the left and me to the right, until we grew too heavy and had to go on our feet like big children. She was freeborn, and there was doubtless some story of how she had come to be a slave in Alexandria by the sea, but I in my innocence never asked what it was.

And so the first thing I remember is this, the courtyards of the great palace at Alexandria, the slave quarters and the kitchens, the harbor and the market, and the Court of Birds where I was born. In the palace, as in all civilized places, the language of choice was Koine Greek, which educated people speak from one end of the world to the other, but in the slave quarters they spoke Egyptian. My eyes were the color of lapis, and my hair might glow bronze in the sun, but the amulet I wore about my neck was not that of Artemis, but a blue faience cat of Bastet.

In truth, that was not odd. There were golden-haired slaves from Epirus and the Black Sea, sharp Numidians and Sardinians, men from Greece fallen on hard times, mercenaries from Parthia and Italy. All the world met in Alexandria, and every language that is spoken was heard in her streets and in her slave quarters. A quarter of the people of the city were Jews, and it was said that there were more Jews in Alexandria than in Jerusalem. They had their own neighborhood, with shops and theaters and their own temples, but one could not even count the Jews who studied at the Museum and Library, or who taught there. A man might have a Greek name and blond hair, and yet keep the Jewish sabbath if it suited him. So it was of little importance that I looked Greek and acted Egyptian.

Iras, on the other hand, looked as Egyptian as possible and had the mind of a skeptic philosopher. From her earliest days she never ceased asking why. Why does the sea pile against the harbor mole? Why do the stars shine? What keeps us from flying off the ground? Her black hair lay smooth in the heavy braids that mine always escaped, and her skin was honey to my milk. We were as alike as night and day, parts of one thing, sides of the same coin.

The seas pile against the harbor mole because Isis set them to, and the stars are the distant fires of people camping in the sky. We could not fly because like young birds we had not learned yet, and when we did we should put off our bodies and our winged souls should cavort through the air, chasing and playing like swifts. The world was enchantment, and there should be no end to its magic, just as there was no end to the things that might hold Iras’ curiosity. And that is who we were when we first met the Princess Cleopatra.

Knowing all that she became, it is often assumed that at that age she must have been willful and imperious. Nothing is further from the truth. To begin with, she was the fifth child and third daughter, and not reckoned of much account. Her mother was dead as well, and the new queen had already produced a fourth princess. There was little reason for anyone to take note of her, another Cleopatra in a dynasty full of them. I only noticed her because she was my age.

In fact, she was exactly between me and Iras in age, born under the stars of winter in the same year, and when I met her I did not know who she was.

I
RAS AND
I were five years old, and enjoying a rare moment of freedom. Someone had called Asetnefer away with some question or another, and Iras and I were left to play under the eyes of half the other slave women of the household in the Court of Birds. There was a fountain there, with worn mosaics of birds around the base, and we were playing a splashing game, in which one of us would leap in to throw water on the other, who would try to avoid being soaked, waiting her turn to splash the other. Running from a handful of cold water, I noticed a girl watching us with something of a wistful expression on her face. She had soft brown hair falling down her back, wide brown eyes that seemed almost round, smudged with sooty lashes. She was wearing a plain white chiton and girdle, and she was my height precisely. I smiled at her.

At that she came out from the shadow of the balcony above and asked if she could play.

“If you can run fast enough,” Iras said.

“I can run,” she said, her chin coming up. Faster than a snake, she dipped in a full handful of water and dashed it on Iras.

Iras squealed, and the game was off again, a three-way game of soaking with no rules.

It lasted until Asetnefer returned. She called us to task immediately, upbraiding us for having our clothes wet, and then she saw the other girl and her face changed.

“Princess,” she said gravely, “you should not be here rather than in the Royal Nursery. They will be searching for you and worrying if you have come to harm.”

Cleopatra shrugged. “They never notice if I’m gone,” she said. “There is Arsinoe and the new baby, and no one cares what becomes of me.” She met Asetnefer’s eyes squarely, like a grown-up, and there was no self-pity in her voice. “Why can’t I stay here and play? Nothing bad will happen to me here.”

“Pharaoh your father will care if something happens to you,” Asetnefer said. “Though it’s true you are safe enough here.” A frown came between her eyes, and she glanced from the princess to Iras, who stood taller by half a head, then to me with my head to the side.

A princess, I thought with some surprise. She doesn’t seem like a goddess on earth. At least not like what I think a goddess should be.

“Has he not arranged for tutors for you?” Asetnefer asked. “You are too old for the nursery.”

She shrugged again. “I guess he forgot,” she said.

“Perhaps he will remember,” Asetnefer said. “I will take you back to the nursery now, before anyone worries. Girls! Iras! Charmian! Put dry clothes on and behave until I get back.”

S
HE DID NOT RETURN
until the afternoon had changed into the cool shades of evening, and the birds sang in the lemon trees. Night came by the time Iras and I curled up in our cubicle in one bed, the sharp smell of meat roasted with coriander drifting in through the curtain door. Iras went straight to sleep, as she often did, but I was restless. I untangled myself from Iras’ sleepy weight, and went outside to sit with the women in the cool night air. Asetnefer sat alone by the fountain, her lovely head bent to the water as though something troubled her.

I came and stood beside her, saying nothing.

“You were born here,” she said quietly, “on a night like this. A spring night, with the harvest coming in and all the land green, which is the gift of the Nile, the gift of Isis.”

“I know,” I said, having heard this story before, but not impatient with it.

“He is your father too,” she said, and for a moment I did not know who she meant. “Ptolemy Auletes. Pharaoh. Just as he is Iras’ father. You are sisters in blood and bone as well as milk sisters.”

“I knew that too,” I said, though I hadn’t given much thought to my father. I had always known Iras was my real sister. To be told it as a great truth was no surprise.

“That makes her your sister too. Cleopatra. Born under the same stars, the scholars would say.”

I digested this a minute. I supposed I didn’t mind another sister. She had seemed like she could be as much fun as Iras, and if she was a goddess on earth, she was really a very small goddess.

“You will start lessons with her tomorrow,” Asetnefer said. “You and Iras both. You will go to the palace library after breakfast.” She looked at me sideways now, and I wondered what she saw. “Cleopatra is to have a tutor, and it is better if she has companions in her studies. She is too much alone, and her half-sister Arsinoe is barely two and much too young to begin reading and learning mathematics. You and Iras have been given to her to be her companions, to belong to her.”

“Given by whom?” I asked.

“By your father,” she said, “Pharaoh Ptolemy Auletes.”

I
F BEFORE I HAD LEARNED
what it was to be Egyptian, now I learned what it was to be a Ptolemy.

To be a Ptolemy was to be part of the longest and most successful ruling dynasty in the world. More than two hundred and fifty years before, Alexander the Great had died in Babylon, leaving the ashes of his empire to his generals and his unborn son. In the chaos that ensued, one Ptolemy son of Lagos had seized Egypt and held off all comers, crowned as Pharaoh by the old rites. Ruling from ancient Memphis and new Alexandria, queen of the seas, he built the greatest city in the world. It is true that Alexander himself set out the place for the city that bears his name, but he did not build it. Ptolemy did, and the men and women who came with him there from all over the world. It was he who set his stamp upon it, theaters and palaces, harbor and canals and sewers and docks and freshwater cisterns deep as three houses set into the earth, Egyptians and Macedonians and Jews and Nubians and all of the other peoples of the world in prosperity together under one king. Ptolemy son of Lagos was my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather.

We learned that the first day, my sisters and I. We sat at the scrolls in the palace library around one table. Only Iras’ feet touched the floor. On our three stools, our shoulders touched, Iras, Cleopatra, and me.

Apollodorus was a young man, with small children of his own, and came highly recommended from the Museum. He was also a well-rounded student of many arts in need of supplemental salary. The first scroll he laid before us was written by that same Ptolemy.

“This is his hand,” Apollodorus said, unrolling it carefully. “Later we will work from a transcription, but you should see the original. This is what he wrote, and the paper he set his thoughts upon.”

I looked at the writing, rendered spidery by two hundred years of fading. Or was his writing like that when he wrote it? He was an old man, eighty years old at the end of his life, when he wrote his memoirs.

Apollodorus took the ivory pointer, and showed us the words as he read. “?‘And it came to pass that Alexander saw a piece of fair land, between the sea and Lake Mareotis, where there was a village called Rhakotis. He turned to his architect, Dinocrates, and he said, “I shall build a city here and give it my name, for this harbor is unsurpassed and could hold a great many ships.” And so it was done as Alexander decreed. But when the men came to lay the boundaries in chalk, there was no chalk remaining and none to be had, so they marked the boundaries out on the earth in grain. When this happened, a great flock of seabirds descended and the men hurried to lay out stakes and rope before the markings were obliterated. At this Callisthenes scowled, and said that it was an omen that the city would come to nothing. Alexander laughed, and said that rather it was an omen that men should flock here from all quarters of the earth. I leave it to my reader to determine whose prophecy was more accurate.’?”

At this Cleopatra and Iras smiled and wanted words pointed out in the story. I was lost in the vision. I could see how it must have been, thousands of gulls descending and fighting, turning in the air, their wings beating together, and Alexander with his hat gone and his face red with sunburn, laughing. And Ptolemy impatient, ready to be gone, not knowing that this city would be his someday, that when Alexander was forty years in his grave he should write these spidery words on paper and remember.

Apollodorus looked at me. “Charmian? Can you point out words for me too?”