Hand of Isis

by Jo Graham

  THIS TIME, I would go and Iras would stay. Financial matters in the capital required her touch, and I should be needed with the Queen. There was no doubt that Prince Caesarion would go as well. His mother would not be parted from him now, and he was turning three years old. It was time that he became acquainted with his kingdom, and his people with him.

  The night before we were to go, Iras came rushing into my bed-chamber as I was undressing, waving a scroll in her hand. “This is for you,” she said, smiling. “And I think you will be glad to see it. There was another for Dion, and I sent a boy to find him at his apartment.”

  “Oh!” I said, and it came out half a sob, for I could only think of one thing that would come to both me and Dion. I tore the wrappings open, almost tearing the paper in the process.

  Hail Charmian,

  If you are reading this then you will have guessed that I am not dead. I am in Massalia, with Marcus Antonius. Rome is at war, and if we all must choose a side, I am choosing the side of the man who says he will avenge Caesar. I know from you that it is Horus who is to avenge his father, but I do not think this business can wait until Caesarion is grown.

  I did not think that men could murder in cold blood a man they would be afraid to face in battle, even aged as he was, and still call themselves men of honor. Still less can I believe that other men could name them so, or debate over whether they did right or wrong. It is a mystery to me how they can claim any excuse for it, or how people can continue to argue whether or not what they did was lawful. How can killing an unarmed man, twenty against one, be lawful? How can anyone even consider this well done? They talk in pretty words of tyrannicide, and of ancient kings killed for freedom, but this is not that. This is murder for political advantage, and if any king in Gaul tried it, his warriors would be ashamed of him.

  There are no pretty words for murder. If I am to march for one or another, let it be for the hand of justice, with Marcus Antonius who is at least doing what is proper. So I have taken my ala over to Antonius. Octavian is no soldier, and he is very young, and Caesarion still a child. So that is why I am in Massalia, where we have withdrawn for reinforcements. We face a Consular army, but Antonius will have no trouble recruiting troops here. Indeed he has already called the men of the Sixth out of retirement at Arelate, whom you may remember from Alexandria.

  The battles so far have not been pretty, and there are more to come. I do not know, now, if I will ever come to Alexandria. Even the autumn seems a lifetime away. There are so many things we did not say, and now perhaps never will.

  Sigismund sees me writing, and asks to be remembered to you.

  Emrys Aurelianus, Praefectus

  I read it twice.

  “I take it he’s well,” Iras said, smiling.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak at this reprieve unlooked for. I had counted Emrys and Sigismund dead.

  Iras put her arms around me. “You don’t have to pretend to coolness,” she said. “I’m glad too.”

  IN THE END, it was Egypt that healed her. We made the Progress of Isis, the widowed Queen and her young son, traveling by ship through the length of the Black Land. In Memphis, Cleopatra went ashore robed in a blue so dark it was almost black, her hair veiled in a net of silver, and the people cried out to her, wailing and beating their breasts as though they, too, mourned Caesar. At that she lifted her head, and the silver beads rang against each other as she smiled and waved to the crowd. When she picked up Caesarion, and he raised his arms to them like a runner crossing the finish line, I thought they would go mad with screaming.

  “Isis! Isis!” The cordon of guards was hard put to keep them back, lest they trample us in their eagerness. But then, Memphis had always loved the Queen.

  Isis incarnate, they said, bearing the world upon her slender shoulders, and the beautiful young prince who would come after.

  “He is his father’s son,” she said afterward, ruffling his hair, and there was less pain in her voice than I expected.

  “I like them to yell for me,” Caesarion said. “They think I’m the prince in the story.”

  “You are Horus,” I said. “The Son of the Widow. They cheer for you because someday you will be their king and protect them from every bad thing.”

  “That sounds hard,” he said.

  “It is,” his mother said, bending him to her. “It’s very hard, baby.” There were tears in her eyes, but it was a clean grief, like a wound that bled enough to get the fever out.

  He looked up at her, and there was something in his eyes very like Caesar. “I’ll help you, Mama,” he said.

  “You will,” she said. “You can help me now. It’s time to learn to be a prince.”

  At three and a bit, Caesarion took up his labors. We had been five, but there had been older children then, and our father lived.

  AT MEMPHIS the messengers reached us, officers sent by Caesar’s friend Dolabella. It seemed that Dolabella had taken charge of the legions Caesar had massed in Syria, and now he squared off against the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius. He asked that the legions that Caesar had left in Alexandria be sent to him without delay.

  “Go,” Cleopatra said, “with my blessing. Go and avenge Caesar.” For a moment her face changed, and I thought her more Sekhmet than Isis.

  “That will leave us without troops,” I observed privately, when we were aboard ship once again. “We have nothing else to defend us.”

  Cleopatra’s brows twitched. “And nothing to defend against. All the Romans are quite occupied killing one another again.” She sighed, looking out over the river. “The flood is rising well. The harvest will be good this year. For once there is nothing to be afraid of.”

  “For once,” I said, and leaned on my elbows beside her.

  WE TRAVELED UP THE NILE as far as Philae, to Elephantine where the river breaks over the great cataracts in its wild dash from Nubia and comes boiling out of the gorges to water our land. There is a Temple of Isis there, on an island. When we were children, Asetnefer told us that this was where Isis Herself had come, heavy with Her son, to bear Him in secret and in safety. They tell a different story in the Delta, but it is true that the temple there has power, more than any I have felt anywhere, except perhaps the Serapeum in Alexandria.

  Of course, business followed us even there. Dolabella met Cassius in the field and was utterly defeated by him. This left Cassius in control in the east, and we had no troops to face him. Fortunately for us, he had other things to consider, as Octavian had met Brutus, and Brutus had come off the worse. It was said that Octavian was no general, but he had with him a young commander who had managed to pull off a fighting retreat against clear odds. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was barely twenty, but he was already worthy of note. Cassius had to leave off whatever he planned in the east and hasten to Brutus’ aid.

  WE RETURNED TO ALEXANDRIA with the autumn, with green fields beside us and the grain growing long in the rich soil. Demetria would be three soon, and she was filled with curiosity. In Philae she had been much taken with the temple musicians, and now she carried a battered old sistrum everywhere, shaking it at everything that moved. The day Caesarion threw it overboard was a sad day indeed, until one of the rowers leaped over and brought it back, to the Queen’s applause and reward.

  Caesarion went to bed without supper. “You may not just do as you please even though you are a prince,” Cleopatra said. “And you may not take things that are your subjects’ only to please yourself.”

  He cried himself to sleep. Coming in later that night to pronounce him forgiven, I found Demetria curled up sleeping beside him, their arms and legs entwined like so many kittens. She had forgiven him long before the unjust adults.

  There was a letter waiting for me in Alexandria.

  Hail Charmian,

  I am in Rome again. Octavian and Antonius have made common cause, and for now they hold the city together. We hear that Brutus has fled east to Cassius, and that whatever they plan will be there. For now we are getti
ng into winter, and I do not think much will happen before the spring. . . .

  For us, it was the season of the harvest, and the grain came pouring in, as though the land itself were pleased.

  I had more work than ever.

  When a kingdom is ill served, everyone notices. When there are wars and diseases, when there is little food and it grows more expensive each day, everyone notices. But when a kingdom has peace, when there are doctors and food enough, when an honest workman’s wages buy food and good things, no one notices. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I have clean water! Thanks be to the gods who have worked through Pharaoh, through the men of the Royal Engineers, through the scientists who have designed our sluices and gates, through the men who have built our wells! All praise to the woman who oversees the Queen’s domestic projects!” Of course they do not. This work is invisible when it is done well, just like the work of a servant. For that is what we are. We are the servants of the people.

  MEANWHILE, from Dion I learned other things. He had agreed to teach me the esoteric disciplines he practiced, and now our lessons began in earnest. I had thought that perhaps some of the work of the Magus that he practiced should be forbidden to women, but Dion dismissed that. “Nature contains both male and female, and the gods are male and female alike. Why should women be barred from the study of magic? That’s not logical, though it is true that there are some disciplines that seem to come easier to men than women, and the inverse.” He shrugged. “I do not know why this is true, but observation indicates that it is.”

  I learned the four elements and their properties, the names of their guardians and their proper invocations. It was complicated, for Dion insisted that I should learn them in several languages and several systems.

  “The concepts are universal,” he said, “but just as the Greeks and the Egyptians may use different names for the same gods, people use many different names for the elemental guardians, depending on their need and the nature of the place where they live. In the Hebrew, we use the winged angels, the Messengers of God. The Romans call them differently, dryads and nereids, salamanders and creatures of air. In Egypt, the Sons of Horus stand at the corners, as they do about the bier.”

  I nodded. “But which is the right one?”

  “They all are,” Dion said. “Some tools are better suited to one task than another, but they are not better tools! If you need a hatchet and pick up a hammer, is the fault in the hammer or in you? The better you understand all systems, the more tools you have in your workbox. I prefer the Hebrew system for manipulation, the Egyptian for divination. Neither is better. I have a hammer and a hatchet!”

  “And some tools,” I said, as I understood, “are better suited to one workman than another. I am more useful with the stylus than the plow.”

  Dion bent and kissed the top of my head. “Ah, but that is because of the kind of tool you are! The gods did not make us all the same, nor give us the same gifts. What good would it do them to have a bucket of hammers and nothing else?”

  I laughed. “And what is it that they do with their hammers?”

  His face was sober. “Build the world. The world is not a garden, Charmian, but a wild place ill suited to kindness. It has been so since the earliest days, when men and women ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and in ceasing to be animals lost their paradise.” He put his robe over his arm, cleaning up after teaching. “Look at the lions in the desert, or the cattle in the field. They have no knowledge of good and evil, no understanding of what mercy should be, no sense of justice. They are happy and they live in the moment alone. They do not wonder what next year’s harvest should be, nor build granaries against scarcity. They dwell still in paradise.”

  “And we?” I asked, bending to blow out the lamp on the table before us. “Why are we different?”

  Dion lifted it gently for me, careful of the heat of the flame. “We are taught that once men and women lived in Eden, in paradise as I have said. In that garden there was a tree, and its branches held the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. God had said that they might eat any fruit in the garden save that, but the first woman was curious. Lilit, her name was. And so she ate of the fruit, and when she did all was different. She knew that night would follow day, starvation follow plenty, and pain would follow joy. And in that moment were all the demons born, all the dark thoughts and worries that trouble mankind. For before we knew that sorrow waited, who worried? Before we knew that someday we should die, who regretted? Before we knew that ill could come to us even in the midst of joy, what had we to trouble us? Lilit knew, and she was no longer an animal like the other animals.”

  Dion blew out the lamp. Its flicker illuminated his face for a moment before it was plunged into darkness. “So she left her band and went apart, dwelling alone as no human did, and her man took another mate. Her name was Eve. One day, she walked alone gathering food, and she stopped beneath the tree. Lilit came to her and she spoke to her, and offered her the fruit. And Eve tasted it. When she did, her innocence was gone, and she cried bitterly for all of the knowledge that had come upon her. What of the child she expected? What if it were sick, or if it were taken by a lion? What if it were lost and she could not find it? What if death came for her son? She cursed Lilit, but she could not forget. She could not be as she was before, an animal.”

  “So what did she do?” I asked.

  “She brought her man to the tree, and begged him taste of the fruit even though it was forbidden. And when the first man put it in his mouth, he gained the knowledge of good and evil as well. But he was made of stronger stuff than Eve.”

  “Like Lilit,” I said.

  Dion smiled. “He said, let us build a shelter against the storms that will come. Let us plant grain here by the river against the day when there is no food and the hunting is poor. Let us drive the lions away from here with fire, so that they may not hunt our children. Let us make of this world a better thing than we found. We cannot know less, but we can know more.”

  Dion put the lamp down. “And so mankind was driven from the garden, and since that day we have all toiled according to our natures, some to build and some to worry, some to put up walls and some to teach.”

  “And some to go apart,” I said, thinking of Lilit. “To go apart and guard the sacred mysteries.”

  “Just so,” Dion said. “And now you are here with me, building the Temple.”

  I smiled into his eyes and led him out onto the terrace where the clean night air washed over us. The harbor spread beneath us in a bowl, the waves white touched in the starlight. Across the water, Pharos gleamed, each beam of light cutting far out to sea as the vast mirrors turned. “And is this part of it not beautiful?”

  Dion put his arm around me. “More beautiful than anything I have ever seen,” he said.

  WITH THE DRY SEASON and the new year an envoy came from Cassius. The other clients in the east had made their bows to Cassius. Would we? Our tribute to Rome was due, ten million sesterces, payable immediately to Cassius.

  I should not have liked to have been the envoy when Cleopatra rose in her chair and handed him a lump of soil. “This is all your master will ever have of Egypt,” she said. “I do not pay tribute to dogs and murderers!”

  He went away empty-handed, and we armed for war. Some of the money coming in would pay for more ships, and to hire a guard of our own. Wisely, the Queen hired mostly veterans of Caesar’s legions, either legitimately discharged, or men who would not serve the conspirators. We should not hold against an onslaught for a week, but we had to begin somewhere.

  It was as well we did, for in the summer his envoys came again, demanding tribute and grain.

  “You shall have no grain,” the Queen said. “The Inundation is inadequate this year, and we shall need all of the surplus we have stored. There is none to give your master.” So they went away empty-handed again.

  It was true the harvest would be inadequate. Caesarion’s first act as Pharaoh beside his mother wa
s forgiving all farmers this year’s taxes, that they might not lose their fields if they were in debt, nor mortgage all they had to buy seed for next year. He put his name to the papyrus very seriously, and I watched him biting his lip as he did it, the careful letters that said that they would owe nothing in this hard time, by order of Pharaoh Ptolemy Philometor Caesarion. The ministers and nobles could not help but smile, and say that it was well done.

  Hail Charmian,

  You will be surprised to hear that I am at Apollonia in Epirus, and wonder why. We have come across to Greece to see if we cannot bring them to bay at last. Antonius is a good general, very workmanlike, and we are in good supply. I also cannot fault Agrippa, who is better than I imagined. He has the talent, and that is saying something.

  It is hard to believe that Caesar has been dead almost two years. It seems like a hundred, or a thousand, that he died in some ancient past like Alexander. I am glad to hear your description of the temple for him. They have declared him a god in Rome too, and Octavian has coins minted saying that he is “the son of the God Julius.” He is calling himself Caesar’s son now instead of his great-nephew, through some Roman custom of adoption, which I think is all very confusing. He is already the closest kinsman of age, and he is doing what he should to avenge his great-uncle. Why does he need to say more?

  I wish that I might see you and Dion again, but I fear you would find me greatly changed. War does that.

  I expect you will hear from Octavian and Antonius soon, now that you have got a fleet. We need to keep Brutus and Cassius from escaping by sea, when we have finally trapped them. . . .

  That request came soon enough.

  “The Triumvirs Octavian, Antonius, and Lepidus request that Queen Cleopatra send her fleet through the blockade at Cape Taenarum and into the Aegean, so that the murderers of Caesar may not escape vengeance by sea.”