Hand of Isis Read online

  “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.”

  IF 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?”

  I hurried to do so. I wanted the word for birds.

  APOLLODORUS WAS NOT A STRICT TEACHER, and I know now that he well understood how a young child’s mind works, that there must be play and fascination rather than drudgery if there is to be real love of learning engendered. And if there was anything that was the birthright of a Ptolemy, it was learning.

  When we were eight, and had learned to write ourselves, Apollodorus took us to the great Library. In that day it held more than seven hundred thousand scrolls, in five great buildings built to house them since the day that the second Ptolemy, Ptolemy Philadelphos, had decreed that the scholars of Alexandria should collect every book in the world that had ever been written, so that anyone who would study all mankind had ever achieved should find it in one place within these halls. The catalogs were nineteen hundred scrolls long. Separate buildings held different disciplines, different languages. All in all, Apollodorus told us, there were more than twenty written languages understood in the Library, and dozens more known where people had produced no books.

  “What do they produce then?” Iras asked, her long black braids swinging against her neck as she looked up at the ranked rolls of scrolls that went nearly to the ceiling, daughter of a people that had produced books for three thousand years.

  “Other things,” Cleopatra said, standing free of us in the middle of the hall. “Grain and melons. Ships and tin and bronze and machines.”

  “You can’t produce machines without books,” Iras said.

  “Stories,” I said.

  Apollodorus smiled. “Every people produces stories. And there are many stories written down here that are told by people who have never learned to write and have no symbols in their language. But they have told their stories to priests or scholars, and those stories are kept here too, because we never know when we may need their wisdom.”

  “You can produce machines without books,” Cleopatra appealed to Apollodorus. “Can’t you? An inclined plane is a machine, you said, and it doesn’t take a book to see how that would work. Anyone with a brain can figure it out.”

  “An inclined plane is a simple machine,” Apollodorus acknowledged. “Like a lever, a pulley, and a screw. And there are people who use simple machines without a written language. However, once you move beyond simple machines into something more mathematically complex like Archimedes’ Screw, you need a symbolic language to per-form calculations. So you are both right in a way. It’s not books you need. It’s math.”

  Which of course was another part of our study. By the time two years were past, I could do great columns of figures in my head, though Iras and Cleopatra were both faster and I did not enjoy it as they did. It was only interesting to me if it did something.

  THE NEXT YEAR, Apollodorus deemed us old enough to take to the theater. We had seen scenes performed in the little palace theater, comic sketches put on for the court, and often acted in by amateurs who enjoyed that sort of thing, but at nine Apollodorus considered us old enough for Aeschylus. There was a production of The Myrmidons at the Theater of Ptolemy Soter, and so it was decided we should attend.

  We left the palace fairly early in the morning, bringing with us our lunches, for we would eat in our seats at the inter-act.

  There were seats in
the front for the Royal Family, of course. Ptolemy Soter had built the theater, being a great patron of plays. It was said that Thettalos had played Alexandria in his last years, he who had been Alexander’s player. I wondered if he had done the play we should see, and if whoever had the role now would be half as good.

  We weren’t sitting in the royal seats. One small legitimate daughter of Ptolemy, her handmaidens, and her tutor didn’t rate the royal seats and the full pomp and ceremony Pharaoh did. Instead we spread our himations on the stone seats, which were still chilly from the morning air, halfway down the tiers facing the stage. Mine was green, Cleopatra’s violet, and Iras’ yellow. Cleopatra’s was a finer material, but other than that you could not have told any difference. Apollodorus got out honey cakes, and we feasted under the clear blue sky of morning, chattering like little birds, and throwing the remains of our cakes to the finch that enterprisingly came to investigate us. He stood with his head to the side, his eyes evaluating, then hopped quickly toward me.

  “He knows you’ve the softest touch,” Cleopatra said.

  “I am,” I said, tossing him a crumb covered in sesame seeds.

  As the theater began to fill, there was a rustle, and a boy descended the tiers above, jumping between people and leaping from seat to seat, like a bird himself. He landed beside Apollodorus, grinning. “Hello, Master Apollodorus,” he said.

  I looked up in surprise. He was a bit older than ourselves, eleven or twelve maybe, but still a boy, not a youth. His dark hair was neatly cut and trimmed, and his chiton was good, worked material with a border, but he somehow managed to look unkempt for all that.

  “I saw you down here,” he said, “and thought I’d see if anything interesting was happening.”

  “Hello, Dion,” Apollodorus said mildly. “Run off from your tutor again?”

  Dion winced. “Recitation,” he said. “Nothing new. Just the same lines from the Odyssey until I could do them in my sleep. Thought I’d find something different to do with my day.”

  “I could tell your father, you know,” Apollodorus said.

  “You won’t.” The boy gave him a sideways smile. “Not when I’m the most brilliant mathematician you’ve ever seen.”

  “I never meant that for your hearing,” Apollodorus said, but he smiled too. “Stand up straight now, and let me introduce the young ladies. Charmian, Iras, Cleopatra, this is Dion. He’s the son of a friend of mine at the Museum, and a hopeless scapegrace.”

  “Hello,” said Cleopatra politely. Iras and I said nothing, somewhat annoyed at this boy barging into our long-awaited special day.

  “Hello,” Dion said, and plopped down on the seats on the other side of Apollodorus. He leaned across him. “Have you seen the play before?”

  “Not this one,” Iras said quickly, forestalling my comment that I had never seen a play. She spoke strict truth, but gave him no room for superiority.

  “They do the gods with the crane here,” Dion said. “They don’t do it in every theater. Lots of them use the god walk above the stage instead. But this one even has fire effects for evening shows. It’s really impressive in The Furies. I saw that last spring. Lots of people get ripped apart on stage too, and there’s a big sword fight and then the rain comes down and . . .”

  He was prevented from giving us a complete description of the effects of every play he’d ever seen by the beginning of the play. I don’t, frankly, remember what I thought of it. The Myrmidons is not one of my favorite plays, and I have seen it half a dozen times since. Or perhaps the thing that was most memorable was Dion.

  He was never quiet. All through the play he kept up a running commentary on how this effect and that effect was achieved, critiquing with knowing eyes the workings of the crane and the sets, the thunder effect that announced the death of Patroclus. I got the brunt of it, as I was sitting next to him. I wanted to slap him.

  As soon as the play ended, Cleopatra gathered her himation about her shoulders, though the day was warm. “It’s been very nice,” she said, sounding like the best possible imitation of Asetnefer. “But we had best be going now.”

  We made our way up the tiers and out of the theater into the busy street, Dion sticking to us like a burr. “Athena’s my favorite,” he said. “Though she never gets lowered out of the sky. It’s usually Hermes. One time one of his lines snapped. They wear several, you know, so they won’t fall. Anyway, one of them broke and he descended from the clouds almost upside down. Everybody laughed.”

  I was trying to visualize that when I heard a roaring sound. Around us, the crowd was scattering, people going one way and another, trying to dash back inside the theater portico, or into one of the shops on the opposite side of the street.

  Up the main street came a huge mob, fighting and shouting, waving sticks and screaming for blood. One was waving something that might have been a man’s arm, blood dripping down his chiton. They were screaming and yelling.

  Apollodorus grabbed Iras’ hand, as she was closest. “Hold hands!” he shouted. “Hold hands and get back!”

  Iras grabbed Cleopatra’s hand, and Cleopatra mine. Dion grabbed my other hand just as the mob broke over us like a wave, pushing us before them with shoppers, theatergoers, and anyone who happened to be in the streets, running to stay ahead of the crowd.

  My new green himation fell from my shoulders. I saw it trampled underfoot as the crowd surged forward. Cleopatra screamed as someone shoved her hard, but she stayed upright, caught between Iras’ hand and mine. And then we were all pushed together, the mob surging around a corner.

  Dion was pressed up against my back so tightly I could feel his heart pounding. It gave me some comfort to know he was as frightened as I was.

  “Hold hands!” Apollodorus shouted again. “Don’t let go!” I couldn’t see him in the press. Everyone else was bigger than me. If I fell, they would step on me.

  “To their gates! Impious ones!” a man shouted almost in my ear. “Killers! Impious ones!”

  I had no idea who had done what impiety. I wished we could push our way into one of the shops, but the shopkeepers who could had bolted their doors and closed their shutters. A vegetable seller who hadn’t been able to stood pressed against his own door, shouting imprecations while his stock was trod underfoot, ripe melons sending up a heady fragrance into the air, mixed with the smell of fear and blood. As I watched, one of the rioters picked up a melon and threw it at him. “Oh, shut up,” he yelled. “Roman lover!”

  “What has happened?” I shouted to the world at large, Dion’s elbows in my ribs.

  “A Roman killed a cat.” One of the rioters looked at me, no doubt an honest drover or workman. “He killed a cat for sport and then went and hid in their ambassador’s house when he was caught. So we’re going to burn him out.”

  “A cat?” I gaped. I couldn’t imagine who could be so stupid as to kill a cat, thereby calling down Isis’ wrath upon himself.

  “We’re going to break down the gates and light the Roman embassy on fire,” he said, “if they won’t turn him over to Pharaoh’s justice. Romans think they can go anywhere and do anything, and that we’ll all just roll over and kiss their pricks. Er . . .” He stopped, embarrassed no doubt to have used such rude language in front of a well-brought-up girl. Even with my hair falling from its pins, there was no mistaking my Koine or my dress.

  The crowd shoved us apart, splitting where the Canopic Way divided and the crowd must take one of two smaller streets toward their goal.

  Two large men shoved in opposite directions, half-crushing Cleopatra between them. My hand was numb in hers, and I heard her struggling to get her breath. The bones in my fingers ground together.

  And then she was free, shooting out like a cork bobbing up in water, staggering against me and Dion. She and Iras had let go.

  Companion’s Oath

  Dazed, the three of us clung together in front of a potter’s stall. Fragments of household pottery littered the street where vessels had been broken by the mob. Only
the biggest pots were untouched, the tall ones half my size meant for storing lentils or beans. Above us, the red and white awning hung from its poles. The door to the shop behind us was closed.

  Cleopatra tried it, and Dion joined her, shoving with his elbow, while the mob still pressed us tighter and tighter. Too many people were trying to fit into the square, or were carried there by the pressure of the crowd with nowhere to go. The door didn’t open. The shopkeeper had barred it. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before we were separated, or crushed beneath the press of feet.

  A woman shoved Dion, and he staggered back against one of the pots and nearly fell.

  I seized his arm. He had filth all over his chiton from something someone was throwing. I had to shout for him to hear me. “Up!” I said, pointing at the awning.

  The poles were only meant to hold cloth, and would never take the weight of a full-grown man, but we were three children. Above the awning was a second story, windows with the shutters closed, but there was a ladder to the roof. Doubtless the shopkeeper lived above his shop.

  Dion followed my eyes, and I saw he took my meaning instantly. He grabbed Cleopatra. “I can boost you up!” he shouted.

  She nodded, hitching up her skirts. Dion lifted her, and she got her belly over the pole. He gave her a shove, and she got one foot on the bar, reached up, and grabbed the awning where it fastened at the top. Luckily, it was good sturdy canvas. She hauled herself up, then looked about, judging the distance to the bottom of the ladder. The toe of one sandal found purchase, but the other didn’t, and she kicked the sandal free. Without it, her toes wrapped around the bar, and she stood, stretching. It took a second to get the ladder, and she was up.

  “Now you,” Dion said.

  Over the din of the crowd, we heard trumpets, and the wild whinnies of horses. Pharaoh had sent out troops to control the riot. They were fighting into the square, blue headdresses above the fray, laying about with the flats of their swords. People were screaming and trying to get out of the way, but there was nowhere to go.