Hand of Isis (23 page)

“Oh,” he breathed, and I slid my wetness against him.

“Remember,” I said, and drew my nails across his chest lightly.

His body knew if he did not, knew what he needed, and he cried out when he spent, his arms tight around me and the need was almost unbearable. I showed him what I wanted, working myself against him to find release in the waves of sensation that washed over me.

Afterward, he lay against my shoulder, his face against my arm, and I felt the tears on his face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, stroking his hair with one hand. That was better than it had been with Lucan, so much better.

“I am broken,” he said, “and I’ll never be whole again.”

“Aren’t maidens the ones who are supposed to say that?” I teased.

“Do you think women are the only ones who feel?”

“Not hardly,” I said, and gathered him close. “Come here, dear.” I stroked his back gently. “Was it so bad, then?”

“It wasn’t bad at all,” he said. “But now I will want it always, and never be whole without it.”

“You are a very handsome young man,” I said. “I can’t see that you’ll ever lack lovers if you want them.”

The first rays of the sun picked out each golden hair on his chest with a distinct shadow, and he closed his eyes. “I love you forever,” he said, and fell asleep against my breast.

W
E SAILED
for Memphis in glorious weather on the largest of the royal ships. Egypt, Cleopatra said, was more than Alexandria and they must know that she knew it.

Caesar came with us. The skies were blue overhead as we sailed south. At each town along the banks groups of dignitaries came out to meet us, strewing flowers on the riverbanks and making speeches, choirs of children singing as though this were one of the annual processions of a god.

At each stop Cleopatra had a great deal to do, talking with all of the village elders in their own tongues to their vast surprise, since they had never met a ruler before who spoke Egyptian as well as Koine. Bubastis, I thought, and remembered our long apprenticeship there, at the feet of the Lady of Cats who had taught us what the Black Land was. At each stop there were offerings and meals, and then we were off again, the Nile winding behind us in a ribbon of light, shrunken with the dry season.

I stood behind Cleopatra on the high deck, arranging the awning over her so that it would not get too hot, rose pink and white stripes making patterns on the deck. She lounged on a couch, gravid and sleepy now, while Caesar sat next to her, for once quiet and unmoving.

She gave him half a smile out of the side of her mouth. “You see? Is this not better than going to Siwah?”

“I don’t need to go to Siwah,” he said, and closed his eyes against the sun. The reflection off the water played over his face, casting him for a moment in strange light, as though he rested underwater, already remote and beneath glass.

I took a sudden sharp breath.

Cleopatra twisted about to look at me. “Something wrong, Charmian?”

“My foot has gone to sleep,” I lied.

Osiris must pass into the west. It is the story.

Cleopatra smiled at me. “Then go and sit down for a while,” she said. “You don’t have to fuss over me. I’m fine.”

I went and sat with Agrippa in the bow, where he dangled his legs over the side. He put his arm around me, and I leaned into him. “Hello, darling,” I said.

Marcus Agrippa looked back toward the stern, his expression as unreadable as Caesar’s. “Have you been to the Soma?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Many times. Did you go, when we were in Alexandria?”

“No.” Marcus looked out over the water. The reflection of our ship wavered, the waves of our passage disturbing the water too much for it to reflect like a mirror, even in the bright sunlight of midday. “Is it very bad?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The most beautiful tomb Ptolemy could build, marble and gold, with painted walls so real you would swear they were windows into other lands.”

He shook his head. “I can’t imagine it. But I’m glad I didn’t go.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t want to think of Alexander as dead.” Marcus leaned his head back. “If I saw him lying there, he would be dead to me.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “There’s nothing gruesome about it. You can’t really see anything.”

“You are Egyptian,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s easy to forget,” he said. “You don’t look Egyptian. But there’s something macabre about it, isn’t there? Worshipping the dead and preserving their bodies forever, looking at their embalmed faces. All of those tombs in the Palace Quarter where you can just go in as though it were a dead man’s bedroom.”

“We don’t worship the dead,” I said irritably. “And it’s not as though we unwrap their bodies and look at them all of the time. The dead stay buried in a seemly manner. But they are the people who brought us where we are. There’s nothing frightening or cursed about them. When I walk among the tombs of my ancestors, and among the people who built the city, why should I be afraid of them? Why would their spirits do me any harm, loving the thing they built?”

“When you put it that way I suppose I can see it,” he said. “Like the Lares and Manes.”

“The Lares and Manes?”

Marcus nodded. “Household gods, I suppose you would say. The gods of a family. Our ancestors, kind of. We don’t embalm our ancestors; they’re cremated. But we keep a wax mask of their faces, and there’s a shrine where they go. I mean, the masks are for the Manes. The Lares are sort of more general household gods.” He looked vaguely confused, and it seemed strange to me that one could be confused about one’s own religion.

“Don’t you worship the Olympians?” I asked.

“Well, yes.” Marcus drew me closer with one arm. “But it’s not as though They take a particular interest in me. I’m not like some who don’t even think They exist. But it’s not as though Capitoline Jupiter is going to notice what I’m doing or care.”

“Why not?”

“They’re the gods of the Roman state. They may pay attention to Caesar, but They don’t bother with everybody, with people who are nothing special. If you take an offering to Venus or Mars or something you may be able to get Their attention about something specific, but other than making sure all of the rites are done correctly, They just aren’t that interested in people. Unless people are either Their sons or have offended Them in some way, the stories of the gods don’t usually have people in them at all. Except sometimes Jupiter notices beautiful women.” He blushed, and I wondered what all of those stories might be, though I could lay a fairly good guess, if it resulted in sons.

“You mean your gods don’t love you?” It was hard to imagine. Of course some gods took a greater interest in some people than in others, but . . .

“Why would the Olympians love me?” Marcus looked blank.

“They don’t even know who you are?”

He shrugged. “Well, maybe. I do all of the rites as I’m supposed to and I made the offering when I came of age. But why would They love me?”

“Isis loves you,” I said.

“Why would Isis love me?” he asked, perplexed. “I’m not even Egyptian.”

“She’s the Mother of the World. She loves you and She loves me and She loves the humblest bricklayer in Elephantine and the richest man in Rome. She loves everybody.”

“But they aren’t Her people,” Marcus said.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “We’re all Her people. A mother may have a lot of children, and they’re all different from each other, but she loves them all alike and they’re all hers. Her compassion is for everybody.”

“Why would you want a god to be compassionate?”

He looked so honestly bewildered that I leaned against his shoulder and ruffled his hair. “Because we aren’t all best and greatest. Because there are a lot of people who are sad or who’ve had terrible things happen. Who do you think slaves worship and what do you think they pray for?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” he said. “Their own gods, I suppose. But their Gods can’t be very powerful or they wouldn’t have become slaves.”

“And if you were sick?” I asked. “Or if your mother were sick?”

“I’d make an offering to Asclepius and ask for His favor,” Marcus said. “But I don’t expect it would work.”

For a long moment he turned away from me, looking out over the river, at our spreading wake. When he spoke again his voice was different, as though he was thinking of something for the first time. “I don’t think I’ve ever needed compassion.”

“Then you have been very lucky,” I said.

“Perhaps I have,” he said, and his eyes were troubled.

I
N THREE WEEKS
we were back in Alexandria. Cleopatra wanted to sail as far south as Philae, or at least Thebes, but Caesar reminded her that he still had a civil war to conduct. Egypt might be won for him and stand at his side as an ally, but in Rome the Senate still named him rebel and organized armies. Not that he would leave Cleopatra undefended. He would leave three of his four legions with her, the Twenty-eighth that we had come to know and two others, their size cut in half by casualties, that had come with Mithridates. Caesar, his Germans, his Gauls, the veterans of the Sixth Legion, and the Fighting Jews would march eastward through Gaza and back through Jerusalem for Syria.

The Queen was eight months gone with child. It would have made more sense for him to stay, I thought. But the weather was against it. Soon the heat of summer would make the march more difficult. That was the official reason, of course. I remembered that his first wife had died in childbed, and also his beloved daughter. If something happened, Caesar would hear it far away, in a tent somewhere on campaign, when all this was as though it had happened to another man.

Marcus Agrippa, of course, would go with him. So would Emrys.

And so I stood with Dion atop the Gate of the Moon and watched them go, my gray cat Sheba perched on my shoulder. The Queen did not come. There would be no public good-byes. Whatever they had to say to one another, they had said in private, and if the Germans had heard they were conveniently deaf to Koine.

“Good-bye,” I whispered, and the sun glinted off Agrippa’s shining helmet, his white plume.

Dion put his arm about my waist. At least, I thought, I could publicly carry on. Dion could not without getting Emrys into a lot of trouble.

“Stupid Romans,” I said.

Dion laughed, and Sheba’s long tail whacked him in the face as she turned about. “We’ll manage, won’t we, my friend?”

“We will,” I said. And of course we did.

I
T WAS THE QUEEN
who noticed first, naturally. Being attuned to it herself, she stopped me in the bath as I held the towel for her, her body huge now with the child due any day. “Charmian.” She put her hand on my arm. “You too?”

I nodded. It was only a few weeks. It might be a mistake. It might just be the weather or something I had eaten. Though I knew it was not.

She put her hand to the side of my face, smiling. “They will be the same age, then. Perhaps your son will stand beside mine as you have always stood beside me. Anyway, who? Agrippa?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you want me to write to Caesar and ask him to send Agrippa back here? There are plenty of positions with the legions here for a tribune.”

I lifted my chin. I did at least have enough pride not to have my sister send for him. “He will not thank me for taking him from Caesar or from his chances of promotion to sit in a garrison in Alexandria. And it would hardly be fair for me to have what you and Dion cannot.”

“Oh, Dion,” she said, laughing again. “I had never thought to see him really in love. And who would have imagined a wild Kelt?”

“Who indeed?” I said. “Yet they seem to do well enough.” And turned the conversation neatly from her feelings and from mine, I thought. I stood as close to her as anyone, and yet I would never know what she felt for Caesar, or didn’t. My heart was always plain to the world.

“It is a good thing,” I said, “that you are the Queen.”

She put her arms around me, the hard mound of the baby tight between us. “You always have a place here with me,” she said. “You and any child of yours. You are mine.”

“Yes,” I said.

H
ER CHILD WAS BORN
on the second day after midsummer, a week before the helical rising of Sothis should signal the beginning of the season of the Inundation. The child was born at high noon, after a night of labor, when the sun stood straight in the sky overhead. I stood at her head, a damp towel in my hands, and when the doctor drew it forth I saw as soon as anyone else.

“Oh Gracious Isis!” I said, as the first sputtering wail shattered the air, and saw my sister turn her face to me, sweat rolling down her cheeks, even before the doctor spoke.

“Gracious Queen,” he said, “you have a perfect son.”

He lifted the child into the light from the window to see to tie and cut the cord, an ordinary enough baby with thin dark hair and the beginnings of the Ptolemy nose, kicking feet, and eyes shut to scream.

“Ptolemy Philometor Caesar,” she said. Cleopatra pushed up on her elbows, trying to see him better. “Horus, for Egypt.”