Hand of Isis (4 page)

Cleopatra looked at Dion seriously. “You did save my life, you know.”

He stopped in mid-gesture.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that you have the eternal gratitude of the House of Ptolemy. I shall never forget what you have done for me, and if ever I may repay you, I shall.”

It was well spoken, and what a prince should say, but even I could see that it was incongruous from a nine-year-old girl to a boy in a dirty chiton. Still, Dion knelt before her like her true companion.

“Gracious Lady,” he said, “I am at your service. Always.”

I
N AN HOUR OR SO
, Dion’s father came home. He was heavy-set and about fifty, with a gray beard and a very serious way about him. I should have been intimidated, had he not seemed to share his son’s good humor. By now we had learned that Dion was the youngest child of parents long married, and that he had three older sisters and an older brother who had long since had children of his own. Dion was the only one still a child, since his next oldest sister was fourteen and had recently moved to her betrothed’s house to live with him and his parents until the wedding was celebrated.

He glanced back and forth between me and Cleopatra. “So which of you is the princess?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t obvious; we were two girls the same age and same height, with the same look of the Ptolemies about us, and wearing equally disheveled clothes. My hair was lighter than hers, and my eyes were blue instead of brown, but unless one were looking carefully, one wouldn’t know if one had never met the princess before.

“I am,” Cleopatra said, getting to her feet.

“Apollodorus will be half-mad looking for you,” he said. “I’ll take you back myself. They’re bringing the litter now.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Do you teach at the Museum?” I asked.

He nodded. “Mathematics. I lecture in the applied sciences as well, mostly hydraulic engineering.” Used to Dion, he assumed we quite understood what hydraulic engineering was. Something to do with irrigation, I thought.

“Would you teach me?” Cleopatra asked.

He blinked. “Hydraulic engineering?”

“Hebrew,” she said. Cleopatra glanced at me, and I knew she was thinking of the princes of Judea we’d discussed on the roof. “After all, who knows whom I might marry, or where I might go?” It would be better for her if she spoke the language of her husband’s people. Better for us too, if we were to accompany her. It would be very hard to manage her household in a country where neither Iras nor I spoke the language.

Dion’s father blinked again. With his gray hair and beard, and white robe, he had the look of an overstuffed owl, I thought. A very nice overstuffed owl. “I’m not really a teacher of Hebrew,” he said. “Nor do I think you need a rabbi, just to learn to converse. You could learn as well from anyone. And you should learn Aramaic, the language as it is spoken, not the Hebrew of the Law.”

“I’ll teach you,” Dion volunteered, leaping off the couch.

Cleopatra gave him a measuring look. “You would do nicely.”

Dion stood straighter. “See, Papa? My first student!”

His father laughed. “If it is agreeable to Apollodorus, I see no reason why you can’t join the young ladies’ lessons occasionally and teach them conversational Aramaic.”

Dion’s mother made a noise in her throat.

His father turned to her. “Can’t do the boy any harm, can it, Mariamne, to have a taste of patronage at the palace?”

It certainly couldn’t. One thing I had amply learned from Apollodorus was that the Library and all of the lectures and schools surrounding it ran on money granted from wealthy patrons, and the wealthiest and most generous funder of research was the House of Ptolemy. Some Pharaohs gave to music and the arts, some to the sciences, some to literature and drama in greatest measure, but all of them gave to the great Library, and their patronage was by far the most stable. Grant money from a princess could make a young man’s career.

“Please?” Dion asked, appealing to his mother.

She shook her head. “I suppose.” She gave him a raking glance that took him in from his lost shoes to his wild hair. “You’re more trouble than the other four children put together.”

O
UR RETURN TO
the palace was anticlimactic. Apollodorus was still out looking for us, and nobody yet knew we were missing. We’d had our dinners before Dion’s family slave found him, and he came back gray with anxiety. If something had happened to Cleopatra, no doubt he would have been killed in a gruesome way.

We sat in the bath, Cleopatra and I, telling Iras all that had transpired. All that had happened to her was that she had been dragged around town by Apollodorus all afternoon, getting increasingly frantic. She had a few tart words to say about Dion taking us where nobody would know to look for us. And a few more when Cleopatra told her about the Aramaic lessons.

“I don’t see any need for it,” Iras sniffed. “Not with that impossible boy. He’s not a proper teacher. I’m going to find something else to study when he comes.”

“What if I marry one of the Jewish princes?” Cleopatra asked. “And we all go to Jerusalem together?”

“There are plenty of people who speak Greek in Jerusalem,” Iras said. “It’s a perfectly civilized place.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Cleopatra said, taking the sponge and running it over her legs. The three of us fit the bath perfectly, and never minded sharing. “The thing that’s awful is that Apollodorus says I can’t go out of the palace on foot ever again. He says that I can’t go without a litter and guardsmen now, because something might happen to me.”

“Ouch,” I said, examining one of the alabaster jars of hair treatments on the ledge beside the bath. It smelled wonderfully of roses. I poured some into my palm. “No more plays? No more markets? No more just going about with Apollodorus and seeing interesting things?”

“I’ll never see anything interesting again with a dozen guards hovering around me,” Cleopatra said.

I scooped the roses into my hair and started scrubbing. “That’s true,” I said. Our legs looked alike in the water. Iras’ were longer and her skin darker, but then she had brown eyes like Cleopatra.

An idea struck. I ducked my head to wash out the suds, then dashed the water out of my eyes. “What about me and Iras?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter about you and Iras,” Cleopatra said despondently. “You can go and do whatever you like. It’s only me that’s stuck.”

Iras caught my eye. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. Sometimes we were so alike it was uncanny. “So as long as you stay here, we can go out.”

“That’s what I just said,” Cleopatra said.

“Then as long as one of us stays here, the other two can go,” Iras said. She leaned back against the tile wall of the bath. “Most of the guards don’t know us well enough to tell us apart, especially if we wear our himations modestly over our heads.”

“If you wear my clothes, and pretend to be me . . .”

“Or me,” Iras said.

“. . . then you can go out,” I finished triumphantly.

“We can take turns,” Iras said.

“It will never work,” she said. But it would. Oh, it would.

“We could try it,” Iras said.

And that is how The Game was born.

A
setnefer had kept us close when we were children, but as we grew older, Iras and I had more freedom to come and go. Oh, the whole of the city was not ours, and we dared not run from Apollodorus and roam as Dion did, but when our studies were done we could go about the palace and the grounds, the park and the Royal Cemetery. We could even go down to the palace docks, where merchants with special licenses were allowed to bring goods for sale to the inhabitants of the Palace Quarter.

The palace was not the only thing in the Palace Quarter, not by far. Many nobles maintained houses there, some grand enough to have their own walls and gardens, their own orchards of sweet fruit, and little pavilions hidden among the trees where dinners and revels might be held. And of course there was the park and the tombs.

When the city was built, two hundred years ago, the cemetery had been outside of town, but the city had grown up around it. It was parkland, now, with trees and pleasant walks, fountains playing in the sun. White mausoleums and the entrances to tombs were scattered about, some with plain markers, and some with more grand ones. Beneath it all was the city of the dead. The catacombs stretched beneath the entire park, connecting some tombs and not others in a vast unmappable net.

Since the incident of the riot, Cleopatra had to stay in the palace unless escorted. Apollodorus was inflexible on this. No doubt he was simply green with fear at what might have happened, but we thought it wildly unfair.

Our world was remarkably safe. Yes, of course there was Pharaoh Ptolemy Auletes, our father and our master, but we saw him once every six months, and he did not enter our world. Our world, the world of the palace, was the world of women. Pharaoh might speak to his Major Domo about something, who would in turn speak to a eunuch, who might speak to the chief housekeeper, or to Asetnefer. They would then assign tasks, rewards, and blame. The authorities of our life were women, with the exception of put-upon Apollodorus. We did not know, yet, that there were sterner masters. Our greatest challenge lay in The Game.

The Game was this: The three of us should go together into Cleopatra’s rooms, talking loudly and being seen, our himations about our shoulders. Then once we were alone, Cleopatra would change clothes with either Iras or me. We took turns. Dressed anew, two of us would take our leave of “Cleopatra,” the same himations draped about our heads. The one who waited would settle down in Cleopatra’s rooms to read. The other would explore the palace with her sister.

It was a wonder to us how easy it was. People see what they expect to see. We were three little girls of the same age, and there was a resemblance between us. Iras was taller, and we had to be careful lest that be marked, and my eyes were the wrong shade, but that should pass except for close inspection. Differences in skin color are difficult to see in semidarkness, and could to some extent be remedied with the cosmetics we experimented with lavishly.

Language was more difficult. The palace, like the city, relied upon Koine Greek for most public business, but outside of the corridors of power native Egyptian was still the language of the people. Proclamations and such were generally done in both languages.

Iras and I had learned both together from babyhood, as both were spoken in the slave quarters. At first it drove Cleopatra wild that Iras and I could converse in front of her in a tongue unintelligible to her, but that didn’t last long. With the facility of a child, it was not long before she spoke the native language too, and could sound like me if she wished.

Thus the three of us had many innocent adventures, and thought ourselves daring as any hero of old.

I
HAVE HEARD IT SAID
that everyone longs for some lost paradise, some golden age, which is really no more than the state of things in infancy, a half-forgotten nursery where nothing ill ever happened. I have had that. My golden age was in the palace by the sea, with Asetnefer and Apollodorus and my sisters. But of course that ended. We do not stay children forever.

I expect that in due course of time Cleopatra would have married. Perhaps it would have been one of the Jewish princes, as we had discussed, or perhaps some scion of the royal families of Numidia or Pontus. It would not have been one of her brothers, not with two sisters her elder. While the Ptolemies marry their kin in the Egyptian fashion, it’s only Pharaoh who does so. The third daughter is for making alliances with, not for making queen. Even when the eldest of her brothers died, it was of little account in these plans. Her second brother should follow Ptolemy Auletes on the throne, matched with her eldest sister, Tryphaena, or with the second, Berenice.

If I have said little of these other sisters, it is because I knew them very little. Both had their own households before I joined Cleopatra’s. Tryphaena was eleven years Cleopatra’s senior, and Berenice eight, so they were great ladies of the court while we were in the schoolroom.

Arsinoe was the sister we knew. Three years younger than we were, she was the daughter of Ptolemy by his second queen, and had two little full brothers. The three of them had a separate nursery to themselves, with an extensive household staff, five tutors, a physician, a teacher of rhetoric from Athens, and a great deal else. But Ptolemy’s second queen cared little enough for the children of his first, and least of all for a third daughter who was the heir to nothing. It was quite enough to allow Cleopatra to amuse herself with her studies until she could be married off to the advantage of the dynasty.

It had never occurred to us that if she were to marry elsewhere in the great wide world, she might go to a husband who did not think that wives should enjoy the freedom of women in Alexandria. We should have been shocked had we known that in Athens respectable women did not go about unveiled in public, and that in most places in the world there were no women who pled cases in courts of law, or who studied medicine in the Temple of Asclepius. Only in the Hellenized east were these things true, in the kingdoms of the Successors that followed after Alexander, of which Egypt was chief. We lived in the freest place the world had ever known, and we did not understand at all but took it entirely for granted.

All of that changed when we were eleven.

For more than a hundred years, the Ptolemies had held the island of Cyprus as part of the empire. Now it was lost to the Romans.

I understood little of the politics at the time, but we all understood the mobs in the streets, tearing their hair and casting their cloaks over their heads, wailing, “Cyprus is lost! We have lost Cyprus!” Worse was what they did not cry, but muttered together on corners. “Cyprus is lost, and Ptolemy Auletes did not lift a finger to save that land which belongs to us. See how our fleet sits in the harbor still? He would not send a single ship to defend Cyprus against the Romans!”

It angered me, for I had always thought of my father as a good ruler. Perhaps he looked nothing like the fine carvings of kings on the walls of the Serapeum, being instead fifty and somewhat stout, with round smooth-shaven baby cheeks and rather less hair than desirable, but looks are not the measure of a man. They are absolutely not the measure of a king. Ptolemy Auletes was no Alexander, but I had taken a certain pride that he was a good king, and a tolerably fair man, at least as fair as a ruler may be.

I decided to ask Asetnefer. It was true that she was not a scholar, but she heard a great deal as she went about her work, and knew everything worth knowing in the royal household. Moreover, she was not the least afraid of Pharaoh.

After Cleopatra had gone to bed, I waited until Iras was also asleep in the small chamber off the Court of Birds that we shared. Then I went in search of Asetnefer.

She was sitting with some other women around the fountain, enjoying the cool of the evening, and the end of the day’s work. I came and stood beside her.

“Still awake, little cat?” she asked me, the pet name of my childhood. “Can’t you sleep?”

“No,” I said. “Will you talk to me?”

She came with me and we sat under the stars, listening to all of the insects of the night. “What’s the matter?”

I lowered my voice. “Why did Pharaoh lose Cyprus?”

Perhaps she had expected some trouble of the heart, not politics, or the news that I had begun my woman’s blood. I was eleven, after all, and Iras had bled first of us the month before.

“I know it’s difficult,” I said. “But I truly want to know.”

“Mind you, I am no diplomat or soldier.”

“I know,” I said.

She lowered her voice. “We lost Cyprus because we could not keep it. If we had sent ships, they would have been defeated. The Romans had too many ships, and all we should have done was to provoke war with them.” Asetnefer leaned back, and I could see her profile against the stars, elegant and fine. “These are not the ancient days, when the Black Land could stand against all of the kingdoms of the earth, or even the days of the first Ptolemies. No kingdom can stand against Rome, so Ptolemy Auletes tries to walk a careful course, being the friend and ally of Rome while maintaining our independence. If he had gone to war with Rome over Cyprus, we should lose, and Egypt would become one more province.”

Her words were bitter in my ears. “Can it be that there is no way to win?”

Asetnefer shrugged. “Not without some second Alexander. And how often is one such born?”

“If he were born,” I heard myself say, “why should he be born to the House of the Ptolemies? There is all the world to stretch beneath his feet, and there are more lands than this, which do not await him like a bride the bridegroom.” The stars were very bright, Sothis rising in the darkness. “The Black Land knows her lover, and will welcome him as she did at Siwah.”

“Sometimes you say the oddest things,” Asetnefer said.

“I do,” I said, but I was learning not to.

A
POLLODORUS WAS VERY STERN
about this—the mark of an educated person was a rational mind. In ages past, people believed that the Nile rose and fell by the will of the gods, that sickness came because of evil spirits, that everything that happened was blessing or curse. Now we knew better. The Nile rises and falls because of the rains in Africa, far to the south. Sickness comes because of filth or bad water, and things happen because science provides explanations. To believe in prophecy or the intervention of the divine was no more than sloppy thinking.

Once, when I told the other girls of some dream I had that came true, Apollodorus frowned. “If you say things like that, people will think you are no more than another silly superstitious woman. I am training you to be rulers, the three of you, royal Ptolemies conversant with philosophy and able to hold your own with any man in the world. If you believe in prophetic dreams and other nonsense, you are no better than the most ignorant old woman in the market.”

I turned deep red, and felt a shame so acute that I shook. I had not told him the half of what I dreamed.

It was Cleopatra who came to my rescue. “But Apollodorus, why is it wrong to tell of dreams if they do come true? Charmian dreams true all the time, about small things. What harm can it do?”

Apollodorus was grave, and his eyes strayed to Iras. “There are many in the world who do not think that women or people who are not born Greek are capable of learning, who will look down on you because you are female, or because Iras’ skin is too dark and Charmian’s too fair, who will say that they are both barbarians. If you descend to silliness and womanly superstition, you lower the regard of all women and all people of your bloods. You merely confirm the worst prejudices—that women are stupider than men and more prone to error, and that barbarians cannot learn science and rational thought.” His eyes fell on me again, concerned. “Do you not understand that when you talk of these things, Charmian, you harm all women?”

“No,” I said very softly. I felt the tears starting behind my eyes. “I didn’t know that.”

“You would not want to do so, I know,” he said kindly. “You are young, and some of these superstitions are entertaining. But you are an example. If, with your education, you are frivolous, you provide men with reasons why women should not attend lectures at the Museum, or should not publish books. You must do twice as well as a boy so that opportunities will not be denied to other girls because of your behavior.”

“I will not speak of it again, Master Apollodorus,” I promised, blinking back tears. I could not cry without piling further disgrace on my sex. So I did not.

Yet it did not escape me that Cleopatra still looked rebellious, though she said nothing.