Hand of Isis (22 page)

They were in one of the little dining rooms, and the man who stood before them was dripping wet, having swum ashore under cover of night from a fishing boat that had passed out to sea, daring the defenses on Pharos Island as too small and insignificant.

“Imperator, Gracious Majesty,” he said to both in Hebrew, inclining his head. “I am Benjamin bar Micah, of the city of Ashkelon. I am sent to you by His Reverence Hyrcanius bar Alexander, Ethnarch of Jerusalem. At his request, and yours, we have assembled three thousand Jewish cavalry at Ashkelon, there to meet with the nearly six thousand infantry of the Twenty-seventh Legion that you sent marching from Greece. Mithridates has joined us with nearly a thousand Nabatean horsemen, and two thousand infantrymen.” He paused for a breath, while the Queen waited, impassive, until he continued.

“Together, under Mithridates and our commander Prince Antipater, we have crossed Gaza and taken the fortresses that guarded it. We have laid siege to Pelousion, where Antipater personally led the assault. I am pleased to report that the garrison of Pelousion has fallen, and our armies have advanced into the Delta as far as Memphis. At Memphis, the gates were thrown open in the name of Queen Cleopatra, and Antipater and Mithridates are the guests of Memnon, the Hierophant of Serapis.”

I bit my lip until I thought it would bleed, not to cry out in tears of thanksgiving.

“Prince Antipater and his son, Prince Herod, send you their most cordial greetings, and ask if you will sally forth immediately, that we may catch King Ptolemy’s army between us on the Saite branch of the Nile.”

Caesar smiled, and I thought it was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. “Good work,” he said. “And a brave man to carry the news! Bring wine for this soldier now!” He stood and poured a cup for the man himself, and laid his own cloak about the man’s dripping shoulders.

Then he turned. “Pollio,” he said, “get every man you’ve got still horsed mounted up. I need archers to the top of the Gate of the Moon now. Tell Arcavius to light the Greek fire for the ballistae. Send a tortoise from the Sixth straight through the gate, and if the resistance is light enough, I want you to charge through the resistance and get the city gates. Alexandria will be ours tomorrow.”

He bent over Cleopatra’s couch as men clattered about, running for orders and subordinates. I heard because I stood behind her.

“I told you to trust me,” he said.

“I didn’t,” she said. “But I will in the future.”

“The dice are thrown,” he said. “Now we will see if it is the Venus throw.”

I
had not realized before just how quickly they could move. They were gone before the hour was half done, in a clatter of steel and stamp of feet. Two hours before sunrise the palace was quiet. The fighting would be at the Gate of the Moon, not here.

The Queen paced back and forth, her arms crossed over her chest. At last she turned with a cry I had not heard from her before. “I can’t stand it! Charmian, go to the gate and see what has happened.”

I ran.

The tortoise had done its work, veterans of the Sixth Legion, their shields locked together, around them and over their heads like a great turtle bristling with spears, advancing through the besiegers, the entire scene lit by the sudden eerie bursts of light from the Greek fire, as at long last the pair of ballistae cut loose.

And then with horrible high shrieking calls, the gates burst open behind the tortoise and out swept the Gaulish cavalry, five hundred of them on their little horses, with Pollio in the front, long hair and cloaks flying behind them. With the thunder of two thousand hooves they resolved themselves into a flying wedge, a lance tip with a single point. I had read my long-ago ancestor Ptolemy describe it, but I had never thought to see it. I stood on the gate with my heart in my throat and it was beautiful.

Straight past the tortoise they went, splitting in two to pass around and reforming on the other side, the wedge unbroken, and overhead the ballistae gave one last volley to clear their way. Eldritch fire flashed over them. Emrys was in that charge, and I yearned with all my winged soul to join them.

For one moment it looked as if the defenders would hold, but then they broke, running for the safety of side streets and the courtyards of buildings. The cavalry went straight through, all the way to the Canopic Way, peeling off by turmae, some left and some right, to secure the main city gates of Alexandria.

Out of my sight. I could see no more because of intervening buildings. So I went back to the Queen, tears on my face.

The sun rose on a city that was ours.

A
ND THEN WE WAITED
. Caesar was gone. All of them were gone, save some men of the Twenty-eighth Legion that Caesar had left to hold Alexandria. We waited.

Which suggests we had nothing to do. Rather, it was the opposite. Alexandria had been without its Queen these many months, and now at last Cleopatra could return to the job of ruling. There were the drydocks to be rebuilt, the streets around the Palace Quarter mended from the damage of the siege, the streets near the harbor cleared of rubble and rebuilt. The people who had lost their homes must be tended, and while many now lived with kin, the Queen offered compensation for those who had lost their homes in the fire, the money to come from that which the Queen owed Caesar.

At last the barges moved again, and by day and night they made their way down the canal from Lake Mareotis to the sea, grain by the measure and the barge load. The harvest in Upper Egypt had been good this year.

We ate new cucumbers pickled in rough vinegar from the south, because Cleopatra craved it, and those cucumbers were like the breath of life, tart and fresh, the gift of the Nile from Philae and Elephantine and Thebes. Mornings dawned cool and clear, and Pharos glimmered against the dawn before the great lamp was doused for the day.

We went among the people. We went to the great Temple of Serapis and Isis. The markets opened, and a Tyrian ship loaded with cloth came into the kind of exotic profits that a merchant might dream of once in a lifetime. Whether or not they had loved us before, they did so now. The beautiful young Queen walked in procession beneath an ivory shade, her saffron gown pleated like Isis on a temple wall, her swollen belly an ornament of her beauty, the land giving forth fruit. The braids of her wig swung back, and could not hide her smile.

What is there not to love, among people such as us, when youth and beauty and charm combine to make her all at once everyone’s daughter, everyone’s granddaughter and wife, everyone’s honeyed dream of remotest childhood? Crowds screamed her name as though they had never loved anyone else.

“Isis! Isis!” And at last it was not her name they called at all, but Isis. She was a goddess on earth.

I would have thought there was no art in it, were I not the one responsible for the saffron gown, for the wig with its malachite and gold beads, for the cloak she wore of cloth of gold, pleated and with sticks in the seams so that it moved like the wings of Isis when she knelt, not crumpling, but folding like a bird. I would have thought there was no art in it, except that I had seen Auletes school her. I would have thought there was no art in it, except that the flutists who suddenly burst into joyful music had been hired by Iras.

And yet it actually was magic. When I saw her turn, pushing past the careful cordon of guards, to lay her hand in blessing and healing on the brow of a pretty girl child who lay in her mother’s arms, her eyes smiling into the mother’s with sudden understanding—then, oh then it was really magic.

I
T WAS A MONTH
before the news came, and by then we had expected it. Caesar had met Theo and the Royal Army on the banks of the Nile. Caesar and his men had routed the king completely, and in their retreat the galley carrying Ptolemy Theodorus had capsized. Pharaoh had drowned.

Caesar and his column approached the city by the main Canopic Gate, which was thrown wide before him, flowers raining down upon the bemused heads of the German bodyguards. Cleopatra met him on the steps of the Soma, six months filled and smiling. He went down before her on one knee, his head bent before Queen and goddess.

For a moment I thought the Romans would protest, but the Germans followed Caesar, dropping to their knees behind him, and in the next breath Pollio knelt, his scarlet cloak swirling around him, one hand tugging at Tiberius Nero. The Gauls went down like a wave of grain, and for a moment I could at last pick out Emrys, standing beside his horse with his hand on the bridle, and then he knelt, one of the first, with the quick glitter of tears on his face.

And then the Romans knelt, though they cried “Ave Caesar!” not “Ave Isis!”

Toward the back some one of them shouted loudly enough to be heard over the general din: “Ave Caesarion! Hail, Little Caesar!”

Caesar turned sharply, as though to see who said it, but then the whole crowd of Romans took it up. “Hail, Little Caesar!”

“Sweet Isis,” I whispered, “please do not let the baby be a girl.” But I knew it was not even as I prayed it.

Cleopatra bent over Caesar and said something too low for me to hear, taking him by the hand and raising him so that he stood beside her, one step lower on the steps of the Soma. She raised their joined hands in the air. I doubt anyone other than he could have heard what she shouted above the noise of the crowd, but the gesture was enough. Straight off a temple wall, Isis crowned the victor with Her love.

T
WO HOURS LATER
, flushed and hot, trying to make sure there was cool watered wine for everyone in the largest hall of the palace, I found myself beside Dion.

He put his head to the side. “The art of magic,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“It was so in Abydos,” he said. “It was art, rehearsed and planned. And yet . . .”

I looked to see why he trailed off. Emrys was coming through the crowd toward him, excusing himself to people who stood in the way.

“I’m back,” he said, and his eyes lingered on Dion’s face.

“I see that,” Dion said. He had forgotten all else with his forgotten thought.

“I hope you’ve been well,” Emrys said.

“Yes. Fine. And you?”

But that was not what their eyes said.

I went to check on the platters of olives and almonds that were going around, with neither actually noticing me. How good it would be, I thought, for someone to come home to me. For someone to have missed me. To be greeted by someone who had yearned for me, who would murmur my name with his hot breath, say that he had dreamed of me on some awful field somewhere. I was meant for such.

Instead, the party went late, though Cleopatra and Caesar did not wait it out, but went to her rooms with the Germans at the door and Iras to sleep in the antechamber. The dawn star was rising when the last guests were chivvied out the doors, drunk and sleepy. I went back and forth, entrusting a valuable krater to a trustworthy man to wash, getting the slaves about sweeping up the crumbs and scrubbing the tiles, taking the linens to wash later in the day, scouring the corners for stray cups.

The rooms were baking hot from the press of bodies, and I threw open the terrace doors to let the night breeze in. I walked outside, breathing in the cool air.

The stars were beginning to pale on the far horizon.

“What is that star?” he asked, and I turned to see Agrippa standing beside one of the tall painted pillars.

“We call it the Daystar,” I said. “But it’s not really a star. It’s a planet.”

“Venus,” he said. The dawn breeze stirred his fair hair. “I suppose Aphrodite to you.”

“Yes,” I said, and stepped closer. His face had the kind of pure, austere beauty that the Greeks loved to carve in ancient days, not pretty but strong. He was young still, and not quite entirely grown into his bones. In a few years he would be a handsome man, with the rugged looks that would last until he was older than Caesar.

“I dreamed about you,” he blurted out, and the color rose in his face. “I dreamed that you told me you had loved me since the beginning of the world.”

It wasn’t polished, but I did not smile. “Perhaps I did,” I said. “Who can remember the beginning of the world?”

“A poet,” he said. “There’s a poet I met in Neapolis when I was there with my mother who said that he could remember the first men in the world, in Arcadia. He said that he had met me beside the River of Memory, and knew that I had been a wanderer and an exile and a king. He wasn’t any older than you, and he said that he remembered me.”

“I think perhaps he was coming on to you,” I said gently.

“Not Publius Vergilius Maro,” Agrippa said. “It wasn’t like that. He was very serious.”

“I see,” I said, and smiled.

“Are you laughing at me?” He put his head to the side, and I thought he might blush.

“Never,” I said. “There is nothing in you to laugh at. Even Achilles was young once.”

“More Patroclus than Achilles,” he said. “I’ve never wanted to be Achilles.”

“Or Alexander,” I said.

“I don’t want to be a king,” he said. “I mean, it’s not easy, is it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not easy at all.”

Agrippa took a breath. “Better to be a loyal man, and to be true as best one can. As you do.”

“I try to,” I said. No one had ever said as much to me, named me for what I was, that way.

“I mean, you’re a Companion, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, and knew exactly what he meant, as though he had seen my heart and put a name to what was there, surely as though he had known me most of my life.

Agrippa leaned back against the column, the wind lifting the hair from his forehead like a mother’s touch. “So am I,” he said. “I live to serve.”

I believed him. And whatever dreams he might conjure, right now he was no dream of starlight, but a flesh-and-blood young man.

“Do you think there can be happiness in that?” he asked. “Do you think if one is true, one will be happy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I took a step closer, my himation almost brushing his arm. He was taller than I, and he still had a lot of growing to do. “If you steal your fire where you find it.”

“Oh,” he said, and bent his head to me, too shy to quite kiss me.

I leaned up into his mouth, warm and soft with the faint stale taste of wine on his tongue, a slow, sensual kiss, showing him all it could be.

Our lips parted, and his brow furrowed as he gazed into my face. “What did that mean?” he asked.

“Come with me,” I said.

I
DREW HIM DOWN
beside me in my room, and he kissed me with raw passion I had not expected. There was no art in this, only desire and need, fire leaping to kindle fire. His touch was rough and reverent all at once.

“I’ve never done this before,” he whispered.

“I know,” I said, straddling him, my skirts lifted. “Don’t think so much,” I said, my belly pressed against him, feeling his hard body against mine. “Just remember.” I took the pins out of my hair, watching his face while I did so, watching his lips part as the cascade of my hair fell around my shoulders. I unpinned the clasps at my shoulders, baring breasts pale as shells in the moonlight, my nipples dark with my arousal.