Hand of Isis

by Jo Graham

  “Look it up?”

  Emrys smiled. “You’ve the greatest library in the world at your fingertips. If you think you were there, if you remember things, you could look it up. Find him. Find you.”

  I voiced the thing I had not, not ever. “It’s just that people will laugh at me.”

  “So don’t tell everyone,” Emrys said. “You don’t have to tell everybody everything you really believe.”

  I started laughing. “No,” I said, “I suppose I don’t. But I can’t lie about it.”

  “There’s a difference between lying and not mentioning it. If people will laugh at you or make you feel badly, just don’t say anything to them.”

  “It’s hard enough to be taken seriously already,” I said. “There have been female ministers before, but not many. There have been ruling Queens of Egypt before. But it’s hard. If I stumble, there are always people ready to say, you see? That is what comes of entrusting a woman with high office.”

  “Cleopatra trusts you,” he said.

  I nodded. “And often that’s enough. I don’t mean to say it’s always bad, Emrys. Most of the men at court respect me. This is Alexandria. They didn’t grow up with their mothers cloistered in women’s quarters, and there are eunuchs with high office too, like the Minister of the Interior. Even the admirals have worked with people who aren’t men before. But it’s never entirely the same as if I were a man.”

  Emrys leaned back, swaying with the movement of the ship. “If I were a woman, I should want to live in Alexandria. I might like that better, I think. Next time.”

  I looked at him sideways. “Why?”

  “I should not have to go to war,” he said.

  I SLEPT IN THE ANTECHAMBER to the Queen’s cabin, which was astern on the uppermost deck, running the width of the ship. The antechamber was also the full width of the ship, but only half that distance across, filled to the brim with things too valuable to risk getting wet in the hold, the Queen’s spare linens and curtains, her clothes and other things of that nature. One of the dining couches was wedged in between the bulkheads where it wouldn’t shift too much, the distance between the Queen’s cabin and the outer door just long enough to fit it in. I slept there, where I could hear Cleopatra in a moment if she needed me, and where anyone trying to enter her cabin unauthorized would have to climb over me in the process. Not that I thought Antonius would try. It would be incredibly undignified to have that sort of bedroom farce.

  Emrys was indeed more fortunate than Antonius, though it was a near thing. People kept popping in and out to talk to the Queen until it was very late, and then I fell asleep while Emrys was still on deck with Antonius. I woke when he came in and sat down on the edge of the couch, ducking so that the unlit lamp hanging from the bulkhead above wouldn’t hit him in the head.

  “Oh,” he said quietly, “I didn’t think you were sleeping.”

  “I’m not,” I said, still mostly asleep.

  Emrys ran his hand over my hair, unbound over my arms in sleep. “It’s never the right time, is it?”

  “It is,” I whispered, and reached up and drew him down to me.

  It had been a long time since I had been Marcus’ lover, but that had never felt like this, as though we moved underwater, slow and smooth and quiet, our voices hushed so that we would not be heard through the thin partition. I had never been with someone more experienced than I was, not with Lucan or with Marcus, and I did not know how it could feel, the dance of tongues, the gentleness of his swordsman’s hands on my skin, the dreamlike warmth of it, of feeling passion rolling like long waves, answering to his touch while he stopped my cries with a kiss.

  Afterward, I lay beside him, my head on his shoulder with him crammed against the side of the ship. Above, the lamp swayed with each wave, swinging slowly back and forth.

  He closed his eyes, his eyelashes darker than his hair, a long sweep of lash against his cheek. “It feels right,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I said, fitting against him as though I belonged there.

  “Like I’ve dreamed we’ve done this before,” Emrys said. “The movement of the ship and the sound of the water on the hull, the way you feel beneath me.”

  “In some dream we’ve forgotten,” I whispered. And I fell asleep against him, listening to the sound of the waves.

  WE CAME INTO ALEXANDRIA in evening, with the city alight and Pharos throwing great beams out to sea like Prometheus unbound. A procession came down to the docks, and laughing and waving, the Queen and Antonius stepped into litters twined with vines and were carried to the palace.

  I stood at the rail, my arm around Emrys, and I felt the exact moment when he stiffened.

  Dion was making his way toward the ship. He looked up.

  “Charmian,” Emrys said, and I saw the indecision on his face.

  I gave him one last squeeze. “Go on, my darling,” I said. “He’s been waiting for you so long.”

  I saw their eyes meet, speaking eyes above the crowd. I watched Emrys go down the plank, watched him walk through the public bearers jostling and shouting and proclaiming they gave the best fares to anywhere in the city, guaranteed. I saw them meet, but not touch. Emrys was still in uniform, and still before the eyes of Romans.

  And if I cried, it was bittersweet as I watched them walk away together.

  In The City of Isis

  Antonius got what he wanted when they were on Egyptian soil.

  Unlike Caesar, who had had a great deal to do when he was in Alexandria, Antonius had very little to demand his attention. The bulk of his army had stayed in Tarsus, and the contingent he had set upon the road would be months yet before it arrived in Alexandria, having to march overland throughout the length of the Middle Sea. He had brought with him no more than a couple of bodyguards and a handful of officers, men who spoke Koine well and could be of assistance to him.

  What did Antonius want? I thought I knew. He wanted a power base that owed nothing to Octavian and that would be loyal to him. And he wanted the Queen. That much was desire, not politics. Perhaps it had been simmering beneath the surface since we were in Rome, when he could say nothing with Caesar beside her, a living man. But now Caesar had been dead three years. Even a queen cannot mourn forever.

  Of course she intended it to be an act. It was theater, what we did in Tarsus. But it is a trap I have noticed often with the actors who can make you weep at the beauty of their words. They make themselves weep too. The tears are real. They cannot pretend to mourn Hector as Priam without drawing deep from some well of human experience, without imagining that their own beloved child lay thus. They must believe it. It must become real. So, I think, the trap closed on Cleopatra. In pretending to love, how could she not feel it? Or perhaps Isis, who opens the hearts of all women, played her own game.

  In any event, the fourth day back in Alexandria I went into the Queen’s quarters in the morning to find them both in the bath, Cleopatra and Antonius. No slave stood by, and when I came to the door I understood.

  Antonius sat on the seat of the pool under the wide oculus, with her straddling him, her hands against the flat plain of his chest, his arms on her waist as he guided her up and down upon him. His face was a study in abstracted ecstasy, knowing nothing but her, and her slow, sensual smile was entirely unguarded. The light poured down from above, from the silvered mirrors.

  I backed out quickly, hoping they had not heard me. They hadn’t, of course. They were lost to everything but each other.

  This was not like Gnaeus Pompeius, where I knew too much, or Caesar, where I knew too little. This was not meant for me to know at all.

  I left word with the bath slaves that if the Queen wanted me I should be at the Library.

  I HAD NOT SPENT AS MUCH TIME in the Library as Iras had, but it was hardly unusual for me to be there. Generally I needed geography or current affairs, the recent histories of nearby peoples so that I might brief the Queen on the lineage of some person she would meet, or upon the history of a tribe or hous
e, or the economy of some particular place. For our trip to Rome, the briefing scrolls had been thirty scrolls long, and covered such topics as the speeches of Cato and Cicero, and the reputed love affairs of Publius Clodius.

  This time I wanted older topics. “Excuse me, Master,” I said to the head of references. “I am in need of help with a search.”

  The scholar inclined his head as he recognized me. “I’ll do what I can. What city and what people are you in search of?”

  “This city,” I said. “I am looking for one of the men who came to Alexandria with Ptolemy. A cavalryman. Not a Macedonian, I think, nor a Persian. Someone in the Companions at the time of Alexander’s death, but who lived after to see the building of the city. His name might be Lydias.”

  The scholar must have been perplexed, but good manners kept him from asking why in the world I wanted to read about a man dead two hundred years or so of whom I already knew so little, whose name I might have heard in a dream. “You said he came with Ptolemy. Was he known to him?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. I felt certain of that. Ptolemy son of Lagos had always seemed terribly real to me.

  “Then begin with Ptolemy,” he said.

  So I found myself in one of the study rooms, my hands washed twice to make sure there was no trace of grease on them, alabaster weights holding the scroll unwrapped so that I would not have to touch it, the same scroll that Apollodorus had shown us so long ago on the first day of our lessons, that we might come to love learning.

  These are the words of Ptolemy Soter, I thought, Ptolemy son of Lagos, who wrote them when he was eighty years old, that men might remember what he had done.

  So many things have been written of Alexander, and many of them are not true. Therefore I must set down what I remember before Death takes me as she has taken so many others down into the Kingdom of Shades. Of those of us who began with Alexander at Mieza, I am the only one left. And so I write this in Alexander’s City, Alexandria by the sea . . .

  Five hours later Dion found me thus, the scroll still spread by weights, with ten others about me and a wax tablet on which I scribbled, ink being forbidden in the Library.

  I had entirely forgotten that I had last seen him with Emrys, and if he had expected reproach or tears he was taken aback when I looked up, the light of conquest in my eyes. “Dion, have you ever heard of the Hipparch Lydias?”

  “What are you doing?” Dion sat down on a stool opposite me.

  “I’m looking for the Hipparch Lydias,” I said. “He’s mentioned over and over, but there’s not much about him.”

  “Who was he?” Dion twisted around, trying to see the scrolls.

  “One of Ptolemy’s men, the first Ptolemy,” I said abstractedly. “He’s mentioned here as a Friend of Pharaoh in the last year of Ptolemy’s reign. He must have a tomb or grave stela or something. Surely a Friend of Pharaoh had enough money for a nice one.”

  “I know where it is,” Dion said.

  I looked up.

  “In the park,” Dion said. “There’s a tomb. I’ve seen it several times.”

  I knocked my tablet onto the floor. “Of course there is!” Now I remembered where I’d seen his name. “I saw it when there was the fire. We were waiting by the tomb.” I struggled to remember. “I think it was a family tomb.”

  “Let’s go look,” said Dion, always keen in the search for something interesting.

  IT WAS THERE just as I remembered.

  “?‘Hephaistion son of the Hipparch Lydias and his wife Chloe, faithful soldier of Ptolemy Soter, fallen in battle in the twenty-first year of his life,’?” Dion read. The letters cut into the marble were hardly worn at all.

  A son who was the pride of his father, I thought, not the oldest child, but the one most like his father in temperament.

  Dion was looking farther down the passage into the tomb, another sealed door. “There’s a sister here. ‘Demetria, daughter of the Hipparch Lydias, wife of Demarios of Cyprus, beloved by all who knew her, laid here in the twenty-seventh year of her life, the year of the plague. Isis receive her. Her children and her parents mourn her.’?” Dion ran his hands over the stone carving. “And here’s her husband with her. Demarios of Cyprus, died at the same time. He’s standing under an acacia tree with his wife, bidding farewell to two boys and a girl.”

  I came down the passage, trailing my hand on the cool marble. “Two boys and a girl who lived with their grandparents.” I closed my eyes. For a moment I could feel again the weight of the child against my chest, a little girl about three years old, clinging to me while her parents were put in this ground here, their wooden sarcophagi painted with the Book of Coming Forth by Day. I could feel her arm around my neck, her face against my chin.

  “Demetria,” Dion said. “The same name.”

  I nodded, trying not to let the tears that welled in my eyes spill over. “Demetria,” I said. The same name. My baby, named for a daughter I had loved, a daughter I had lost too young.

  I sat down on the steps and leaned against the cool stone. I had been here before, with Lucan. I had been here before, with Cleopatra. And much longer ago, I had been here before. What had I indeed to fear from the shades? These were no evil spirits, no dark creatures of nightmare. The only spirits here were those of my family, of people who had loved me.

  “I expect the Hipparch and his wife are down here,” Dion said, “behind these sealed doors. I don’t want to damage anything.”

  “There’s no need to look,” I said. I was not there. The mummy that lay beyond, in layers of linen and wood, was less real than these other things. After all, I had never looked on my own mummy or seen my own body wrapped for burial. It was less real than that half-captured day, two months after the plague had run its course, when we laid Demetria, her husband, and their youngest child to rest, while my granddaughter clung to my neck. What do we do now? I had wondered. But the answer was obvious. Start over again, our house full of children in our old age. Begin again, with the tutors and the bedtime stories, the dowry for a little girl with gray eyes.

  Dion read it anyway. “?‘The Hipparch Lydias, Archisomatophylax of Pharaoh Ptolemy Soter, laid to rest in the fifth year of Pharaoh Ptolemy Philadelphos, the seventy-first year of his age. Chloe, beloved wife of the Hipparch Lydias, laid to rest in the sixteenth year of Pharaoh Ptolemy Philadelphos, the sixty-second year of her age, mourned by her children and grandchildren.’?” Dion looked up at me. “It’s a lovely carving of Hermes coming and taking them by the hands.” I didn’t move from my step, and he squinted at the carving again. “Peculiar,” he said, bending closer. “It almost looks like Hermes has wings folded behind him.”

  “He probably does,” I said, and the tears flowed down my face. They were not tears of grief, but of gladness. I remembered, and it was real.

  We had built this city and defended it and loved it, poured into it all our sweetness and our joy, and dying I had wished nothing more than to return to this place I loved. And I had returned to walk again beneath this sky, to work for her and strive for her in the service of another Pharaoh. When it came time for me to go down into the earth again, I should fear nothing. For what was there to fear? In time, like bulbs sleeping underground, I would again come forth by day, drawn by love as by sunlight.

  Dion came and put his arm around me. “Charmian? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and embraced him, feeling the warmth, the realness of his skin, cool from the shadows, against my face. Here and now, Dion was my friend. Here and now, this was real.

  I will remember, I thought. I will remember this, because I want to.

  “Is this about Emrys?” Dion said perplexedly.

  I laughed through my tears. “No,” I said. “Not in any way that makes sense.”

  “Who’s the Hipparch Lydias?” he asked.

  “Me,” I said.

  WE WENT TO DION’S APARTMENT and sat under the striped awning, drinking wine mixed with fruit juices and spices, slices of lime floa
ting in it. Emrys wasn’t there. I assumed he had some duty or other.

  Dion and I sat together on the couch eating our dinner, with him reclining behind me. He waited until we had little plates with cheese and olives, and until the cool wine had begun to relax us. The breeze off the ocean stirred the treetops in the courtyard below. We looked out into them, and onto the porches of ten of his neighbors. On the second floor, a man was cooking meat on a brazier. The scent of the spices rose to us, and the clamor of the children playing under the trees in the twilight.

  “About Emrys,” Dion said.

  I leaned back against the couch cushions and closed my eyes. “What about him?”

  He reached over me for the cup.

  “Do you mind that I lay with him?” I asked, twisting my neck around to see his face.

  Dion shrugged. “Yes and no. More no than yes. It’s been almost five years. I hardly expected for nothing to have changed, or for him to be true to me.” Dion’s arm lay around my waist. “I might never have seen him again. Or if I had, it might have proven to have been no more than one of those romances that does not stand the test of time. Either way, there’s no point in wasting time on recriminations.” He looked down at me and grinned. “I’ve never seen the appeal of women, but everyone has their own taste.”

  I laughed and leaned back against him. “I see the appeal of women. How can one not? The beautiful skin, and bared breasts just so, the way nipples pucker and darken in cold water. . . . How can one not notice in the bath?”

  “I don’t usually take baths with naked women,” Dion said.

  “So I understand,” I said. “If I were Pharaoh, I’d have a harem. And everyone could be in it but you.”

  “But me?” Dion propped up on his shoulder and refilled the cup. We were drinking rather a lot in our relief. “Why not me? I’m perfectly good-looking.”

  “You are very handsome,” I agreed, “but you have no taste for women, you just said.”

  “If you were Pharaoh, you’d be a man,” he said.