Hand of Isis (35 page)

A
lexandria.

Home.

I watched Pharos rising out of the sea at sunrise, glimmering like the evening star, and wept to see it.

The Queen had miscarried on the ship and she was still weak, so we came ashore without ceremony at the palace harbor. The news from Rome had not traveled faster than we, so no one yet knew that Caesar was dead. No doubt a fast ship would come tomorrow or the next day and the entire city would know.

Iras hurried off to talk with Apollodorus, muttering something about the effect on grain prices and the grain markets crashing. The crown must be prepared for the market’s reaction when the news came.

I settled the Queen in her own rooms, clean and pristine after so long an absence, and sat beside her while she bathed, talking of inconsequential things. Worn and exhausted, what was there to say? “I’m sorry” seemed pathetically inadequate.

“There is Caesarion,” I said.

She turned on me, her eyes flashing. “And that is supposed to make it better? As though one child were as good as another?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It’s wrong,” she said. “Don’t you see it’s wrong? I was supposed to bear this child, like Isis. After he was gone.” She turned away from me and leaned against the side of the bath. “I failed. And She has deserted me.”

“No,” I said. “No, my dearest sister. It will all be well.”

“Can you restore this child to me or bring Caesar back to life? If not, then leave me.”

“Of course,” I said, and went as far as the door.

T
HE NEWS FROM
R
OME
came in bits and drabbles. Antonius had spoken Caesar’s funeral oration, and the mob had risen against the conspirators. No, it was not true. Antonius and the conspirators had made common cause. No, that was error. Antonius and Octavian had made common cause, and Caesar’s will had been read, naming Octavian his heir.

In Egypt, it seemed very distant. Of course he had named Octavian, and the provinces he would have left to Caesarion had never been conquered, the prizes never won. We expected Cleopatra to be angry in her cool way, to plot furiously. But instead she hardly seemed to care. She slept and ate, bathed and dressed, but her passion was gone.

“Give her time,” the doctor said to me as he left her. “Her body will mend from the miscarriage soon enough, but the shock to her soul will take a little longer. She is a healthy young woman, only twenty-five years old. Once she has healed, there is no reason she cannot bear many healthy children. Give her a few months.”

“The business of the kingdom will not wait a few months,” I said.

“That is what she has you for then,” he said sharply. “She needs the company of her son and a few months’ rest. I should recommend a progress to Philae. On the river her business will be limited, and the change of scene will stimulate her mind. It will do her good to follow the Progress of Isis, and to do such other things as will remember him.”

The doctor had long experience of grief, and his advice was good. If she could not build a tomb, she would build a temple.

And so it was that we sat down with the plans before the week was out, the Caesaraeum on paper, a temple to the god he had become. It was beautiful, I thought, a square building like the Soma, with a round dome above, pierced to let in the light. Outside there would be a short avenue leading to the Canopic Way, bordered by sphinxes with Cleopatra’s face. Most fantastic of all, there should be four great obelisks of red granite, antiques nearly fifteen hundred years old, brought from Heliopolis. That in itself would be the work of a year, and would guarantee the pay of many skilled workmen.

“Let it be so,” the Queen said to all the architects might propose. Nothing should be too good or too fair for Caesar, and for her white city by the sea. “And now for my tomb,” she said, gesturing to another set of plans on the table as the architects crowded around.

I raised an eyebrow. She had never taken an interest in her tomb before, though many Pharaohs began building their tombs as soon as they were crowned. But then, money had been tight when she was crowned.

“I should like to lie in the Royal Enclosure,” she said, “as near as possible to the tomb of Ptolemy Soter. Can you show me what land there is that is not occupied by other tombs, and where there is room enough underground? I know that Ptolemy Physcon lies near.”

The architects, sensing a huge commission and ten years of work, all started talking at once.

“If you will each prepare plans for submission,” the Queen said, “I will review your work when I return from Philae.”

Iras raised an eyebrow at me from across the room. It seemed the physician knew his business.

T
HIS 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.”

I
N 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.

A
T
M
EMPHIS
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.

W
E TRAVELED UP THE
N
ILE
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.

W
E RETURNED TO
A
LEXANDRIA
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.”