Hand of Isis (21 page)

I heard a step behind me and turned, but it was no more than Aurelianus. I supposed I should begin to think of him as Emrys. It is more polite to address people by name in their own language, even if you know no more of it than that.

He relaxed when he saw me, the wariness leaving his face. “It’s you,” he said.

I nodded. The siege was wearing on all of us. “Are you on duty?”

“Just came off the watch,” he said. “Why?”

“There’s something I want to show you,” I said, as a thought occurred to me. “Come and see.”

“See what?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there.” I wondered if he would follow, but he did. I did not expect him to trust me enough to follow me through the dark and winding passages of the palace, to follow me under the trees of the great park, skirting the walls and the very edge of the siege. But he did.

There, in a courtyard between a burned-out building and one of pristine white marble, we halted. In front of one of the lecture halls of the Museum, we stood silent, side-by-side.

Taller than a man, gleaming in the moonlight, the orrery turned, spheres inside spheres, tracing the paths of the wandering planets in the night sky, bronze glittering like electrum under the moon. The sun turned slowly on its unseen clockwork, and like dancers they turned and dipped in their slow and endless dance.

Emrys reached up, one hand brushing Mars as it swept past. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “What is it?”

“It’s an orrery,” I said. “It shows the paths of the stars.”

“As the gods must see them,” he said, and the moonlight turned his eyes to peridot, clear and light-filled.

“Yes,” I said. “I knew you would understand.”

“The love that moves Dion,” he said. “Science. Understanding what the gods have made.” He reached up, but his fingers did not quite touch the ribbon of bronze that held Jupiter suspended, turning through the night. He looked up at the stars dimmed over the great city. “Is it another sea, I wonder?”

“So they tell us,” I said, standing beside him and looking up as well. “A sea of aether, where the air gets thinner and thinner until it cannot be breathed, as it is on great mountains. But some scholars think the aether pools around the stars, and that after one reached a certain point of ascent, one would turn and then descend into another pool, through thickening air until one reached the ground.”

“On another world,” he said. Mars swung by again, and he stepped back.

“Yes,” I said, and for a moment it was as though I looked down incalculable years to a different young man, his limbs long and wasted from pushing only against thin air, his ship an envelope of steel and silver that answered to his mind, wings of gossamer filament extending at his thought, like the wings of a bird, turning in bright reflected sunlight in the void of the high aether.

Woman of Earth,
he said.
Oceans in her eyes.

For a moment I thought Emrys had spoken, but of course he had not. He was still looking at the orrery, walking around it and tracking the pattern of Mercury.

“I thought you would like it,” I said.

“How do we know they move in circles?” he asked, his fingers brushing Jupiter’s path.

“Ellipses, actually,” I said. “Astronomers in Egypt have observed the stars every night and kept records for thousands of years. They can calculate the paths of the planets fairly accurately now. The bodies that move around the sun, that is. The other stars are much more difficult.”

Emrys nodded, his eyes still lifted to the spheres. “Druids do that too. There are places where a certain star appears on a certain night of the year, or where the sun rises on certain days.”

“We have that too,” I said. “Sungates in temples where the sun shines on the altar on a certain day of the year, things like that. Though of course the sun never stands directly overhead in Alexandria.” Emrys looked confused, so I continued: “The angle of the sun is seven degrees, twelve minutes off the vertical at midsummer,” I said. “That’s how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth. He knew that it was five thousand stadia to Syene, a town in Upper Egypt where the sun is directly overhead at midsummer, so therefore five thousand stadia must be about one-fiftieth of the circumference of the Earth, which is two hundred fifty thousand stadia.”

Emrys blinked again. “And why do we need to know that?”

I grinned. “Because all of the known world is much smaller than that. From farthest Nubia to the Isles of Britain is less than a quarter of that. From the Gates of Hercules to India is about a quarter. So everything we know, all of the lands we have ever discovered, are less than a quarter of the whole world.”

His eyes lit, and I saw that he had it. “So what’s in the rest?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “But we know it’s there. Out there beyond the Gates of Hercules across the wide ocean, or over the Hindu Kush mountains, there are other worlds to find.”

Emrys lifted his face to the stars. “And there are men there like us.”

“Probably,” I said. “Eratosthenes writes that a ship was lost outside the Gates of Hercules, on the coast of Far Hispania, and driven across the ocean to come back with strange tales of another world. And merchants in Marakanda and Alexandria Eschate tell that there are trading routes north of the Hindu Kush to kingdoms twice as far away as India.”

Emrys looked at me keenly. “And why do you want to know these things? You are no ship’s captain or explorer. What use is it to you?”

I shrugged. “I like to know things. Like Dion.”

Emrys glanced away, studiously watching the orrery. “You and Dion are very close, aren’t you?”

“Dion is a brother to me, a kinsman,” I said, so that there could be no mistake. I knew Dion was in pursuit, and the last thing I wanted to do was to imply to Dion’s quarry that I was his wife or betrothed or some such.

“Then you know him well,” Emrys said. “I wonder . . .” His voice trailed off, as though he searched for the words he wanted in unfamiliar speech.

“I do know him well,” I said. “What is it that you wonder?”

“I wonder . . . ,” he began, then started over with a deep breath. “General Pollio, he is very good. He is young and he has been in Gaul with Caesar since he was seventeen. He is a good general and we all like him.”

Emrys looked at me and I waited expectantly for him to go on, not sure what Ansinius Pollio had to do with anything.

“He said when we left Gaul many things that are helpful. And he said that when Romans say one particular thing, it is not the thing we think it is. That what we do among ourselves, he does not care, but we should know that when a Roman asks us if we like to do it, it is grave insult. That Romans would not do such to another man unless he were a dog or a slave, someone without honor. And that we should not go with Romans, even if they ask, because they offer insult. I am wondering what Dion . . . sometimes I think he is asking something, but then I think I do not know, that I am misunderstanding. And I do not know which he would mean.”

I took a deep breath, trying to keep my face absolutely serious. If I had not misunderstood, Dion was spending a lot of time courting when a simple question would have done as well!

“Dion is not Roman,” I said carefully. “Dion is Alexandrian. We are not Roman, and we do not think of such things between men the way the Romans do. I am certain he offers you no insult, but rather that he is interested in you and is not certain if you would be insulted by that fact. He knows as little of Gaul, you see, as you do of Alexandria.”

Emrys’ face cleared, and I thought he was indeed very handsome, pretty enough for Dion’s somewhat exacting tastes. “It is not insulting here? Men with men? I’m sorry, I do not know a polite word.”

“Not insulting in the least,” I assured him. “Most men try it when they are young, though not so many are like Dion, and do not like women at all. Once a boy has become a youth, and is entered in the gymnasium, around sixteen or seventeen, he can be courted by one older than he, what we call an erastes.”

“That is what?”

“A man a few years older, twenty-five or so, who becomes his lover and instructs him in how to live as a man, in arms and in civilized arts. How to have a conversation, how to behave at a symposium, all the things a young man needs. He introduces him into society. It’s not just if he’s rich. It’s anybody—students, skilled craftsmen, soldiers. In fact, it’s looked down on to have an erastes far above your own social class. It looks crass.”

Emrys blinked, and I realized I’d used a word he didn’t know. “It looks like you can be bought for money,” I clarified. “The eromenos, that’s the younger man, is supposed to be choosing a lover out of love, not for the boost to his career. Of course some do, but people talk.” I looked at him curiously. “What do they do in Gaul?”

Emrys shrugged and looked away, at Mercury circling nearby. “Usually it is friends of the same age. Lots of boys try it. It doesn’t mean anything, good or bad. It’s just one of those things. Sometimes they promise blood brotherhood, and stand together in war forever, but blood brotherhood has a lot of obligations. It can’t be taken back, and it makes you kin, as though you were born brothers. Sometimes boys promise when they are fifteen and then regret it.” He smiled at me, expecting me to understand. “It looks bad to have someone too much older or younger. Like you say, people talk. It’s usually friends of the same age. Is that what Dion is asking?”

“I think so,” I said. “You and Dion are about the same age, which is unusual here, as Dion is old enough to find an eromenos of his own. He’s getting a bit old to play the youth. And I know he thinks you are very handsome and very interesting.”

A slow blush rose in Emrys’ cheeks. I thought he was handsome and interesting too, but clearly Dion had beaten me to the finish. “That is good to know,” he said very seriously. “I should not want to offend Dion.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

T
HE ROMANS CELEBRATED
their Lupercalia and began their new year. In Upper Egypt, the grain harvest was coming in, but we should see none of it. And Caesar should see no profit in it. Here was the money to pay his men, in the wealth of Egypt passing down the Nile to Alexandria and hence into the rest of the world, our grain, gold of the Pharaohs.

And still we waited.

To our surprise, envoys came from the Egyptian army for Caesar. I stood behind the screen while he spoke with them, a gesture of good faith from Caesar to Cleopatra, who of course could not be present. I did not recognize their voices or their faces, which in itself told me something. They were not of Memnon or the Adoratrice’s party.

Egypt, they said, needed Pharaoh. If Caesar would release Ptolemy Theodorus to them, Pharaoh would call to order his sister Queen Arsinoe and her tutor Ganymede, and would restore peace to the land. Surely Pharaoh would honor agreements with Caesar made in good faith, the siege could end, and most important, the grain harvest could get to market. This would be in the best interests of Egypt, and of course in the best interests of Caesar as well.

I told Cleopatra what I had heard while she paced her chambers. She was four months gone now, and when she was nude one could see it, though the drapery of her clothes would conceal her pregnancy a little longer. Her doctor had been brought in on the secret, and pronounced her in the best of health, saying that in a few weeks he should be able to hear the baby’s heartbeat through a tube placed against her belly, and that any day now she would begin to feel the baby move.

“He will tell them no,” Cleopatra said. “It’s a ploy and a fairly transparent one.”

Pharaoh Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe. It was a situation that would satisfy everyone. Except Cleopatra, who had played a card that made her invaluable. Caesar had no living child or grandchild.

“He will tell them no,” she said. “I know he will.”

I
NSTEAD
, he told Theo that he would be delighted to release him to his own people, and that he would send him off with many gifts, that Pharaoh might return to his city shortly as a friend and ally of Caesar and Rome.

I thought that General Pollio should have to be treated for apoplexy, and that Emrys would break a blood vessel. Even the Germans looked at each other with frowns, as if wondering if Caesar had at last lost his mind.

The Queen said nothing, at least not in my presence. If Caesar had betrayed her, she said nothing to anyone but him. Tight-lipped and pale, she kept up her daily routines of meetings and work as though everything were as it had been. For a few days the palace was very quiet.

Then the word came that Pharaoh had taken charge of the Royal Army, and called upon all Egyptians to drive Caesar into the sea. Oddly enough, they seemed to be doing this by lightening the guard on the Palace Quarter. While the siege wasn’t lifted, their sorties were fewer and lighter, and in each place where they were tested their defenses were thinner.

Dion shook his head, and said he could make nothing of it.

“I can,” Emrys said, dropping his voice as he sat with us, eating bread and fish beside one of the columns of the portico. “They’re pulling troops out. That means they have to face something else somewhere else.”

One of the legionaries hurried up. “Master Dion? Caesar and the Queen require you immediately.”

“I’m coming,” he said, dusting the bread crumbs off his robe. He cast Emrys a glance. Emrys did not follow him into Caesar and the Queen’s presence without being asked, but I did.