Hand of Isis (42 page)

“I know.”

“He’s very good to me too,” I said.

“And you are good to both of us,” Emrys said, his arm tightening around my waist. “Do you know Dion’s never been with a woman?”

“I didn’t know it for certain, but I’m not surprised,” I said. “He used to run like a startled hare whenever one got too interested. And they did, of course, when he was younger and his tastes less obvious.”

“You’ve known him forever, haven’t you?”

I shrugged. “Long enough. Let’s see. Twenty-one years? And you and Dion have been on and off for ten years, almost eleven.”

He laid his cheek against my hair. “It’s a long time, isn’t it? I only have two years left to go until my discharge.”

“And then will you come home to Alexandria?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and there was a smile in his voice. “I’ll come home.”

“You could raise cats like Ptolemy Soter,” I said. “Or sell brass cooking pots. Or buy a share in some business belonging to some friend of Dion’s who’s going to make a fortune selling automatic wine coolers.”

“I’ll try to stay clear of the wine cooler business,” he said. “And I know what happens with most of Dion’s inventions.” It was certainly true that some of Dion’s inventions had turned out to be disastrous.

“He’s a good astronomer,” I said.

“He’d be one of the greatest if he weren’t so easily distracted,” Emrys said.

“There are so many interesting things in the world,” I said. “How can he ignore any of them? Even if that means running about like an unschooled hound, barking at every scent?”

“While you are all practical concentration,” Emrys said.

“I need to be,” I said, my fingers closing around his wrist at my waist, feeling the pulse there. “I was fourteen when I knew what I would be—the Hand of Isis, and the Queen’s hands. That’s what I am.”

“You are more than that,” he said, and kissed me slowly and lingeringly, his hand cupping my chin sensually. I leaned back into him, reveling in the sweetness of it, the rightness, sinking into Emrys.

Dion cleared his throat. He had come back in, and sat down on the end of the couch. “Don’t mind me,” he said airily. “Just watching.”

“Do you like that?” I said, propping up on one elbow on the yellow and blue pillows. “Do you like watching Emrys kiss someone else?”

I saw the answer quite clearly in his face, the leap of pulse at his throat.

“You do,” I said, leaning forward and running my hand up Emrys’ thigh, lifting his red tunic to caress corded muscle. “It’s pretty, isn’t it, Dion?” I lifted the tunic higher, parting his thighs and showing his manhood, which rose at my touch, smooth beneath his foreskin. “I imagine you like this very much.”

Emrys made some incomprehensible noise, clutching at the pillow beside him.

“Shhh,” I said. “You like to show off. Why don’t you show Dion how it’s done?” I took him in my hands, pleased at how quickly he responded. He did like Dion watching. Oh yes. I kept my eyes on Dion’s face as I worked him with my hands.

“It would be educational,” Dion said breathlessly.

“You could show him where everything goes.” I lifted my skirts to my waist, one hand on Emrys, the other seeking my own center, parting the tender lips. I was slickening already. I turned the lips out, like petals, rubbing at my center. “I’m sure he’d learn something.”

“No field of study too obscure,” Dion said, and I could see his arousal clearly at the front of his amber-colored chiton, and I wondered how he looked different. I had never had the opportunity to closely study a circumcised man. “Never let it be said that I’ve neglected any concern of mankind.”

“No, never,” I said, slicking Emrys with my own juices, feeling the jolt of arousal in the pit of my stomach. “Come and see, Dion.”

“Right here,” he said, and as I lowered myself onto Emrys, Dion’s arms went around me from behind. He knelt against me, his manhood hard against my back and one hand splayed across the soft flesh of my belly.

Emrys groaned.

“That’s right,” I said, moving on him with excruciating slowness. “Put your hand there, Dion, and feel where we’re joined.”

“I’m going to die,” Emrys whispered. “Right this very moment.”

“Just there?” Dion slid his hand between my legs, first probing at my anus, and then slipping his hand forward. “Oh, there.”

I tried to rub myself against his wrist, but now the angle was all wrong and I couldn’t move on Emrys at all.

Emrys swore.

“This way,” I said, and pulled off, turning around to lie beside Emrys, my head against his shoulder and my skirts around my waist. “That’s easier.”

Which left Dion kneeling where I had been.

Emrys grinned, and reached up for him, taking him by the hand. “Come on, dearest. See what it’s like.” He reached down, lifting Dion’s chiton and taking him in hand, shorter and thicker than Emrys, rearing more sharply upward against his belly. With his hands on Dion, he guided him into me. “Like that.”

I closed my eyes, feeling Emrys’ familiar hands on us both. I reached up to caress Dion’s sharp hipbones, reveling in the difference, how much unlike Emrys.

“It’s so big!” Dion moaned.

Emrys sounded amused. “Women are, Dion. They’re made for it.”

I snorted. “If you’d gotten Demetria’s head out, you’d be bigger than Emrys’ ass too!”

Emrys started laughing, and Dion lost the rhythm entirely.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate here?” he asked plaintively. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

Then I started laughing, and the three of us collapsed in a heap with Emrys on the bottom. He shrugged his way out, laughing and embracing us both. I kissed Dion, and after an instant he leaned into it. He felt different from Emrys, and it wasn’t just his neatly trimmed beard. He tasted different. Fascinating. We parted and lay side-by-side, my arm beneath his shoulder on the pillows.

“You taste different,” Dion said.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, and we grinned at each other.

“Don’t you ever stop?” Emrys asked.

“Science,” Dion said, and winked at me.

“How about this, then?” Emrys said, and bent his head to take Dion in his mouth. I watched them, the practiced shallow thrust as Emrys’ eyes closed, his hands on Dion’s hips. My own hand between my legs, I gasped out my climax before Dion did, one leg wrapped around his bare buttocks, my eyes on Emrys’ face.

When he lifted his head he was smiling, but I could see the strain of arousal there too. “Now for you,” I said, and drew him up to me.

I
T WAS RAINING
. I could hear the storm coming off the sea, the winds flapping the awnings and the curtains drawn across the balcony, blowing cool through the gaps. Someone laid a blanket over us, and I curled closer. To Dion.

I opened my eyes. Dion’s arm was beneath me, and I lay against his chest, cuddled under the red and brown blanket from his bed.

“It’s raining,” I said sleepily.

“I know. Emrys went to get the blanket.”

“Oh,” I said, and settled back against him on the yellow and blue pillows.

Dion took a deep breath. “Well, that was a new experience.”

I canted my head to try to see his face. “Good? Bad?”

“Um . . .” He stared up to the awning above, as though trying to quantify the experience.

“Scientific analysis,” I said. “On a scale of one to ten . . .”

Dion squeezed me gently. “You know I prefer men. Not that you were doing something wrong or anything. But I just . . .”

“Prefer men,” I said, putting my hand to the smooth flesh of his shoulder. He had a much hairier chest than Emrys. “I know, Dion. It doesn’t make us lovers.”

“I did like watching Emrys with you,” he said, letting me soothe away the tension in his shoulder, as unerotically as though he were at the bath. “I truly did.”

“And I liked watching him with you,” I said. “Not that I wouldn’t have you if you wanted. But it’s not that way between us, truly, is it? Philia, not eros.”

“I know.” Dion placed a kiss on the top of my head. “As though we were both wives of one man. Or I his wife, and you his erastes.”

“Oddly enough,” I said. “It makes more sense that way. It’s your home, and you’re the one who takes on the duties of a wife. And I am his male lover, with my own home and child.”

“That would make us family still. Sort of.”

I rolled over and embraced him. “We’re family, Dion. Always.”

“In a strange sort of way. But if it shows promise, then the experiment should continue. Not that you and I should . . .”

“No, not that you and I should be lovers,” I said. “But you could watch me with Emrys sometimes if you like it.”

“I do,” he said. “And that time when we all three shared a bed, just to sleep. I liked that too. I shouldn’t mind that sometimes.”

“I did too,” I said. “It was very good, actually.”

He put one hand awkwardly on the middle of my back. “And you’re pretty. For a woman, I mean.”

“Thank you, Dion,” I said, laughing.

“I do appreciate the opportunity to study,” he said very seriously. “So much has been said about it that one wonders.”

“Stop while you’re winning,” I said, and pushed the dampened hair back from his forehead.

“This couch is really small,” Dion said. “The armrest is right in the middle of my back. Do you think we might try the bed?”

“We could,” I said. I got up and followed him into the bedroom, trying to shake out my clothes. I should have taken the long chiton off first. It was linen, and the wrinkles wouldn’t shake out.

Emrys had moved around the bolsters in Dion’s bed, and held out an arm to me. “Come and get warm.” Dion trundled after, carrying the blanket, which he carefully rearranged across the end of the bed on top of the sheet and other blanket, folded so it covered our feet. He’d taken off his crumpled chiton and wasn’t wearing anything at all.

I gave him a sideways glance. He blushed, but climbed in with an arch look.

“Fine, then,” I said, lifting mine and pulling it off over my head to drop on the floor.

Emrys’ eyebrows lifted, and he drew me to him. “An absolute den of debauchery, this innocent Kelt has fallen into.”

“Absolute,” Dion said, hooking one leg over Emrys’ knee as I curled in on the other side. “Complete.”

“Yes,” I said. The rain beat against the awnings, and I slept.

E
MRYS STAYED
three months more.

“You’ve got the money that your general gave you for the provisions,” Dion said. “We could just take the coin and run away together with it. To Hispania, or maybe Mauretania. We’d be rich there.”

Emrys shook his head, smiling. “You know I can’t do that. And that’s why he sent me.”

“And what about me?” I asked Dion, laughing. “I have to work! I can’t run away to Hispania with a couple of wanted desperadoes.”

“Besides,” Emrys said, beginning to pack his things. “Dion, how would you live without a great library and takeout on every corner?”

And so we said farewell again.

I
HELD CAREFULLY IN MIND
that it was more than Cleopatra had. Antonius was still in Athens, and his letters were all official letters, sent in the diplomatic bag.

Dion was philosophical. “He’s scared to face her, Emrys said.”

“He ought to be,” I said. “But the more he pretends he’s never heard of Cleopatra the worse it will be.”

“Maybe he thinks he can just ignore it forever.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Sooner or later he will need something. And then we will see Marcus Antonius again.”

A
nd yet Antonius stayed in Athens. His troops, under a general named Sossius, sacked Jerusalem and were only called from wholesale slaughter by Herod paying them off. Some remarked at court that it was lucky for Herod, as he had not been popular before, but because his first deed the moment the Romans installed him had been to empty the treasury in bounty to prevent the ruination of the city, he was well enough liked now.

Iras and I looked at one another, thinking it was not perhaps as lucky as all that. Inheriting a bankrupt kingdom was not so easy.

T
HE HARVEST CAME
, grain barges toiling down the Nile to the sea. The dry season came and went, and with the Inundation, Caesarion’s tenth birthday. I was surprised, standing behind him at the ceremony, how tall he had gotten, and how straight and muscled his legs. He was growing again in a spurt, and dressed in the stiffened white linen shenti of Pharaoh, he moved with dignity.

Six months younger, Demetria was nine and a half. Already her figure was changing, the straight boyish lines of childhood beginning to ripen. She had a waist, I thought one day as I helped her drape a new chiton and fasten the girdle. Soon her hips would curve, her breasts begin. Her face had more definition than before, the Ptolemy nose and Agrippa’s broad forehead, a combination that didn’t entirely suit a young girl.

She turned around, and her eyes were at the level of my chin, her long brown hair flowing behind her, pinned back over her ears. “What’s the matter, Ma?”

“Nothing, darling,” I said. “I was thinking that you’re growing up.”

“Of course I am,” she said, with a half-amused tone that sounded oddly like Emrys. “What did you think I would do?”

I smiled, tying off the end of her girdle with the same fashionable knot the Queen used. “I don’t know.”

“You think I’m as small as Selene,” she accused. Selene was not quite three, and she wanted to follow Demetria everywhere, only she usually created havoc when she did.

“I know you’re not,” I said.

Soon Caesarion would go to his own household, away from the nursery, any time now really. And then Demetria’s path and his would begin to separate, Caesarion to the life of Pharaoh, and Demetria to what?

“Demetria,” I said slowly, sitting down on the couch, “what do you want to do?”

“Do? You mean this afternoon?”

“Something for you, I mean. While Caesarion is having his riding lessons and learning to use a sword. When he does those things, what would you like to learn how to do?”

I expected her to say that she would like more time with the tutors, or perhaps to follow Iras in the accounts and the treasury. I would have liked it if she had said she would like to come with me and learn to do what I did, though I did not expect it.

“Oh!” Her face cleared, eyes bright. “I know exactly what I want to do! I want to go to the Temple of Isis and study with the temple singers.”

I blinked. I hadn’t known she had any special interest in music, beyond the songs that all children learned.

“Don’t you hear it, Ma?” she asked. “The way the music is in the temple?” She hummed the beginning of one of the songs of praise, the evening liturgy. “?‘Star of Evening, She who made the skies, watch us, Mother, in the night. . . .’ That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

“Be a singer?”

“Be a priestess,” she said.

“Oh.” Any desire I might have had for that life had been quashed at Bubastis, where it seemed to me that all adolescent yearning must be damped down behind endless work and ceaseless repetition of the offices. But I was not Demetria.

She was watching me, waiting, neither begging nor defiant yet. Waiting to see which she needed to be. Demetria had all of the Ptolemy calculation.

“You could study music at the temple,” I said. “But it will be very difficult, and if I arrange it for you, you must promise that you will study a full year before you give it up. It’s very, very hard to be a priestess. And you will have to work hard for years.”

“I promise,” she said. “I’ll work really, really amazingly hard.”

S
HE DID
. It gave her great pride to have something that was hers alone, not mine nor Caesarion’s, or anyone else’s. Anything she achieved there, she did so because of her talent and effort.

It made chaos of schedules, however. I could not leave the palace every night just before the dinner hour to go get her at the temple, and I thought her still too young to wander around town by herself. Fortunately, Dion agreed to get her four nights a week, when his lectures were done not too far from the Serapeum. She went home with Dion and had dinner, and then I came for her later. Sometimes, when I could leave early, I was there in time for dinner with them.

As Emrys had pointed out, Dion couldn’t cook, but he knew every single takeout shop in town. We ate Ethiopian or Palmyran, or something less exotic, Demetria telling me everything she had learned, the rhythms of the sistrums or the flute or drum. She loved all of those things, but it was her voice that was her best instrument, a clear, high voice with surprising power for a girl her age.

“My master says I will be good in a few years,” she said depreciatingly, after singing something that seemed good already to me. “I’d like to be good.”

Dion nodded. “I think you will be,” he said.

Demetria glowed.

A
ND THIS WAS HOW
Demetria came to moonlight as a performer in the Jewish theater. Dion had a cousin who had a husband that Dion sometimes did some work with, a vague recommendation that seemed to involve the chance to try a practical application for some bizarre invention of Dion’s. It seemed that he was looking for a young girl to play a role in the first act of a new production, and Dion told him he ought to listen to Demetria. While I was working, and oblivious to this, Dion took her to audition. By the time I heard about it, she had the part.

“I’ll die if I don’t do it!” Demetria begged, falling to her knees at my feet. “I have to! I gave my word!”

“Commercial theater? You’re not quite eleven years old!”

“I’ve sung in the temple choir in front of people!”

“That is entirely different,” I said. “Singing in a choir at the Serapeum is entirely different than appearing as a paid performer in musical comedy. Women don’t act in real theater, only in bawdy musical revues and comedy for dinners. And who knows what kind of unruly crowd there is!”

“You have singers with dinner at the palace all the time!”

Dion shifted from one foot to another. “My cousin’s husband runs a respectable troupe. It’s musical comedy, yes, but it’s not low comedy.”

I gave him a gimlet stare. “And you stay out of this. I have words for you later about taking her to auditions without telling me.”

“I promised!” Demetria wailed, catching me around the ankles like an overdone suppliant in Euripides.

“You should at least see it,” Dion said as I tried to get my feet loose. “Come on now, Charmian. It’s not bawdy. Demetria is like my own daughter. I’d let my daughter do it. My cousin’s daughter would be doing it, only she can’t sing half as well as Demetria.”

“And she’s about seventeen and old and her looks have gone,” the suppliant said from the floor.

“No skimpy costumes?”

“Not on Demetria.” Dion held up his hand. “My word of honor. Come and see, Charmian.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “And you can see my self-propelled scenery too.”

“Oh, Dion,” I said.

T
HREE DAYS LATER
I went with him. It wasn’t held in a proper theater, but in one of the tiered lecture halls around town that were for rent to scholars who needed more space for large classes. It could hold about two hundred people, which would be quite a big lecture, though Dion assured me that he held lectures here himself from time to time, as his cousin’s husband gave him an excellent rate on the rental.

“What do you lecture on to two hundred people?” I asked him.

“You needn’t look so impressed,” Dion said. “Astronomy. Empirical science. I do a series on the introduction to the scientific method that’s universally enjoyed. It’s recommended for new students by masters of more advanced classes, who don’t want them till I’m done with them.”

“You must have something of a following,” I said.

“I do my best,” Dion said somewhat smugly.

A sign announced the day’s performance. “
Moses: A Musical Comedy in Three Acts
?” I looked at Dion skeptically.

“I promise you, Demetria’s part is very respectable,” Dion said. “It’s only the dancing girls later on that anyone might mind. They’re there to demonstrate Egyptian excess.”

“I see,” I said.

We took our seats, and the play began rather conventionally. A woman (and I could not tell, masked, if she were really a woman or, more reasonably, a man in a mask) lamented that her children would be born in slavery, for Pharaoh held them all captives, and had vowed to kill every child of the Jews. After a long declamation, she produced a baby doll from beneath her robes and swaddled it. “Mariamne! Mariamne!” she called.

Demetria came on, looking lovely in her simple white chiton. “Yes, Mother?”

“We will save your baby brother by hiding him in a basket in the reeds. We will set it to drift on the Nile. Better that than he die. Take this basket to the river.” Putting the doll in the basket, she handed it to Demetria.

I was frowning at what seemed to me the distinctly anti-Egyptian tone of the piece, and wondering why in the world Dion had thought this was a good idea, when Demetria took the doll to her breast and began to sing.

“?‘Sleep, my love, on the breast of the Nile. Sleep while stars shine down on thee. Sleep, my love, on the heart of the waves. Sleep, my brother, sleep. Sleep my brother, promised one, sleep while God watches over thee.’?” Her voice was clear and cool, without a single tremor or shake, a bright treble falling like water, innocence personified. She stood with one knee bent, the doll to her shoulder, her face raised as though to invisible stars. Light shone in her eyes. There was not a sound in the entire house.

She laid the basket in the painted waters and let it go, bidding farewell to the baby they must expose, the baby they could not keep. She stopped on the edge, half turned as though watching it drift away.

Somewhere in the audience, a woman took a breath almost like a sob.

And then she turned, raising her eyes to the audience, or to the invisible God. “I have to follow him,” she said. “I have to!” And she ran from the stage.

I clutched Dion’s hand. “She’s good, Dion.”

He bent his head toward me. “I told you she was. Charmian, she’s exceptional. She’s not but eleven years old.”

There was a flourish of drums and trumpets, and with great pomp a royal procession appeared, a princess in the center, clad in pleated linen.

“Every day,” she said, “I go with my maidens to bathe and play beside the river. I am Pharaoh’s daughter. But what is this I hear? Is that a baby crying?”

One of the princess’ handmaidens came forward with the same basket. “Here it is, Princess. It is a baby, in a basket that had drifted into the reeds. A little boy.”

Pharaoh’s daughter lifted the doll from the basket and held it to her, her face painted, not a mask. I could swear that was a real woman, not a man. I didn’t think the Jewish theater had eunuchs on stage. “A child of the poor who could not keep him. Well, he has come to me. Do not be afraid, little one. I will care for you.”

At this point Demetria sprung up, as though from among the reeds. “Gracious Lady, I know a Hebrew woman who would make a good wet nurse. She has lost her own son. Shall I go and get her?”

“Yes, do so,” she said.

Demetria paused at the edge of the stage, looking toward the audience as though to take them into her confidence. “I will go find my own mother, that she may nurse her son for Pharaoh’s daughter.” And then she went off again.

Dion leaned to me. “That’s Demetria’s whole part. When Mariamne comes on again later in the play, she’s grown up. Demetria only plays child Mariamne. She has that one song.”

“That was lovely,” I whispered. “I had no idea she could sing like that. Or act. She could do the Mysteries.”

Dion looked amused, and whispered back, “These are the Mysteries, Charmian. The stories on our holiest scrolls, done before all the world, for anyone to see. That’s why people mind.”