Hand of Isis (50 page)

There were two of us in the room instead of three, and her absence was like nothing else.

“I have her clothes laid out,” I said.

“I’ll wash her,” Iras said.

And we got up, making a wide path around the basket on the table. Outside, the sun had not yet quite set into the sea. “The day is done,” I said. “And I will never see morning.”

Iras put her arms around me. “Come, darling.”

We laid her out dressed in pleated linen, with bracelets of gold and a collar that should have adorned kings, the uraeus on her brow. The embalmers would do it all again, of course, but it should be done right.

And then it was Iras who put her hand in the basket.

“Mother” was the last thing she said, and her lips moved like a child nursing as she died.

I laid her at Cleopatra’s feet, and no tears dropped from my eyes. I had no more to shed.

I am the Hand of Isis, I thought, as I picked up the basket again. The Hand of the Lady of the Dead, standing before the Gates of Amenti. Gracious Isis, forgive me if I am frightened at the end! And I plunged my hand into the basket.

Perhaps it was tired, or perhaps it was already settling down for the night in the nice warm basket, but I had to poke the snake three times before it bit me. Sitting with my sisters’ bodies, tormenting a snake. At last it struck, and angrily slithered out of the basket and across the floor, looking for some place better to sleep where it would not be disturbed.

“Go with Set’s blessing,” I said, and sat down to wait.

The doors opened and the guard looked in, a slave beside him with our dinner tray. With a crash, the slave dropped the tray. I heard him screaming down the hall.

There is nothing to be done now, I thought, and sat back in the chair. Already there were coronae around the lights, my vision blurring. Dion was right, I thought. It doesn’t particularly hurt.

The door banged open again, and Marcus Agrippa came charging into the room with the guard. He looked over it in one glance, the Queen laid out on her couch, her face still and set, Iras lying at her feet with her hands folded on her breast.

He ran to me and grabbed me by the arms, dragging me to my feet. “Why?”

“You killed my baby,” I said. “You killed Caesarion. You killed my baby.”

“No, I swear . . .”

My vision was blurring, and I would have fallen if not for him holding me up. “I swear. And you will hear it, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Your house will go down in blood, and you will never know peace on this earth. Waking and sleeping, it will follow you. You will rise up with blood in the morning and lie down with it at night. You will never know rest, and you will walk this earth wallowing in blood until you have made amends.”

I saw him blanch, his handsome face distorted by my fading vision. I gasped for breath, but none came. My throat was closing.

“Charmian . . .” His voice sounded as ragged as mine, pleading.

I could no longer feel my legs.

“Was this well done by your lady?”

I strove for one more breath. “Very well,” I slurred. “As befits the last of so many noble kings.”

And the darkness took me.

Amenti

I bent my head before the thrones, and the tears once again choked me. “Gracious Ones, if You have any mercy, punish me as You will. All that I have loved is lost, and I desire nothing in the world except those who are gone.” I lifted my eyes to Isis. “At least I bid farewell to my sisters. But Emrys and Caesarion . . .” I could speak no more.

I saw a look pass between Them, and Serapis nodded. Somewhere away to the side a door opened, and I heard swift feet across the floor.

“Mother?”

I flew to him, wrapping my arms around Caesarion, my face against his shoulder. He had been at last taller than me before . . . and now he should never have any chance, never grow anymore, never love or be the man he might have been. I closed my eyes against him, weeping, and Emrys put his arms around my back.

“Don’t cry so much,” Caesarion said. There was that same awkward tone he sometimes got, when something unexpected had unnerved him. “Charmian? Mother? I’m all right.”

“You’re dead,” I said.

“Everybody dies,” Emrys said, his arm around my waist. His voice sounded freer, as though something had eased in him.

“Not at seventeen,” I said, and looked up at Caesarion. “Not with your whole life before you . . .”

His dark eyes were very grave. “I was the sacrifice. Don’t you see? Isis is the Grain Mother as well as the Lady of the Sea. It’s Her consort who can make the sacrifice, but also Her son. Son of Isis, son of Venus, twice royal. Blood of the Ptolemies, blood of Rome. Don’t you see? In the end, I was the only right sacrifice. The Black Land will continue under Roman rule, and Rome herself will be transformed. I had to be the sacrifice.” He ducked his head, as he’d always done as a child when he expected me to scold him. “My blood for the Black Land, freely given. That’s the bargain of the Ptolemies, the bargain of kings. Sometimes, like my father, you get to be very old first, but not always. I don’t regret it.”

I looked up at Emrys, his green eyes on Caesarion. “And what do you say?”

He nodded, one soldier to another. “I say it was well done, my Prince. First and last, hail Ptolemy Caesar.”

Emrys looked younger, the lines of the last campaign erased from his face, the gray from his hair, and turning in his arms to lay my face against his chest I could not help but feel that it was right, that he was whole.

“And Rome?” I asked.

From His throne, Serapis spoke. “There are times when a nation has come so far from all it holds dear, when the blood of innocents cries out. Only the sacrifice can heal—only the brave young man who is willing to die for all that is highest and best.”

“But time grows short,” Isis said. “Time is still passing, out in the world, beyond the Gates of Amenti.”

I did not want to leave the circle of Emrys’ arms, but I turned in them. “Do You not have to weigh my heart?”

Serapis smiled. “Daughter, We have already weighed your heart and found nothing lacking. You are not without fault, but your faults are far outweighed by your virtues. You have earned the Peace of Amenti.” He looked up at the ceiling full of stars. “If you wish, you may stay here with those you love and be healed of the hurts of this life. You may walk in the forests beneath the stars of heaven with your lover and your son, greet your sisters again and those others you have loved. You may choose to be healed and in this place weep no more. I think it will be a long time before Cleopatra and Antonius come forth by day again.” He glanced at Caesarion. “And Caesar, that wind through the world, must not venture forth too often in the same lands.”

“Or?” I had not meant to say it, but I did.

Isis stood, and the movement of Her robes was like the movement of the sea by night. “In the world, time is still passing. They have reached Rome.”

“The children.” I felt my throat tighten. Helios, Philadelphos, and Selene. Even now they might be suffering. “They aren’t here.”

“They live still,” Anubis said. “Though even We cannot say for how long.”

I held Isis’ eyes. “Is there a chance?”

She inclined Her head gravely. “Yes. They may live. Or they may die before you even draw your first breath in that world.”

“Or they may live like Arsinoe,” I said, and felt Emrys’ arms tighten around me. I remembered her suffering, worse than death by far.

Isis nodded.

I asked the question, though I already knew what Her answer would be. “Can you prevent this?”

“No, but you may.”

I lifted my chin, and the last tear ran down my face, the last one. “Can You send me to the children?”

“Yes,” Isis said, and Her eyes were as dark and implacable as night. “I can send you now to Rome, without healing, without time. I can send you as a helpless infant, with no power or means to fight except what you carry in you. It’s hardly a fair match.”

Emrys’ arm was tight about my waist, but I knew he would not try to stop me. He never had.

“And Iras?” I asked, though I thought I knew this too.

Isis looked at Serapis, but it was Mikhael who answered. “Iras has already gone to Rome.”

I nodded, lacing my fingers with Emrys’. We were alike, my sister and I. Iras had promised Helios, and death would not keep her from her promise. I looked at Caesarion, who would not plead that I suffer for his brothers and sister. “My brave, sweet boy,” I said, and smiled at him. I leaned up and kissed Emrys, warm and gentle as I had always remembered.

“Be careful, love,” he whispered, and I knew that he understood me bone deep.

“Where will you be?” I asked, running my hand through his hair.

He shrugged, gave me a lopsided smile. “I’m thinking I might try Alexandria. Maybe as a girl. I’m tired of war.”

“That should give Dion fits,” I said, and kissed him again.

Then I released him, and stepping forward away from Caesarion and Emrys, faced the thrones. “I am ready, Gracious Ones. Send me to Rome, to the children, without the delay of healing. I will do my best.”

I saw Isis smile, and then Anubis took my hands. For the second time darkness took me, and I knew no more.

EIGHT YEARS LATER

I
was born in the Subura, and the first things I remember are the narrow streets slicked with rain, and my mother trying to get in the washing hung to dry on a line between two buildings before the clothes were all soaked again. It is this I remember, a tiny apartment on the fourth floor, sleeping beside my older brother on a pallet under the window, where the night air sometimes brought in breezes from the Esquiline Hill and the scents of distant parties and dinners. My younger sister Lucilla slept with my parents, until baby came and she joined me and Lucius on the pallet. We slept like puppies entwined, and I was very happy, except that I did not like it when Lucilla wet the bed.

When I was four I tried to run away, they said, and I was gone all day while my mother and then my father, too, searched for me frantically. After nightfall I turned up, brought home by the owner of a tavern four blocks away. He said he had found me in his back alley, and that I claimed I was on my way to Alexandria.

My parents showered him with tears and thanks. I clung to him and did not want to come home. A few days later I ran away again, and was caught this time halfway to the Happy Ham, where I said I was going to see my friend. My father and I made a deal at that—I should be allowed to go to the Happy Ham, if it did not annoy the owners, Sigismund and Mucilla, overmuch, and if I would give off running anywhere else.

Running, of course, was the operative word. Going a block out of one’s way to look at something didn’t constitute running away, and by the time I was seven or eight I knew perfectly well that Alexandria was too far to go by myself, and that I would need a ship at least. Besides, by then the entire city of Rome was open to me. I had no lessons, and there was another child at home and still far too little money, so it seemed natural that I should work deliveries for the Happy Ham, taking people the dinners that they had ordered and bringing back the payment. Sometimes they would give me a little extra for my trouble, as I could run fast through the neighborhood with ham and fresh bread, mustard and cheese, and everything else that one might want. I never lost the money or took it for myself, though I was proud of the coppers that Sigismund paid me, as good as if I’d been his own daughter.

Once, some boys tried to take the money from me when I was coming back from a delivery, but I ran and got away from them and told Sigismund who they were. After he’d had a word with them that never happened again. He was an enormous German with a scar across his face and the stump of a right arm, but it was rumored that he’d been Caesar’s own bodyguard, and that he’d once killed a man with his teeth. He looked scary enough to have done it, but I didn’t think the teeth story was really true.

“How do you know it’s not?” he asked with a wolfish grin as he cleaned off the bar one day, while I hung around waiting for a delivery order to be packed. “I might have.”

I shrugged, kneeling on the bar stool with my elbows on the counter. “I just know it’s not. But you were really a bodyguard for Caesar. That story’s true.”

His face sobered, and he tossed the cleaning rag in the bus pan. “It’s true,” he said. “And Antonius after him. But look at me alive, and both of them gone!”

“And both of them knowing their fate,” I said. “They are not the ones we should mourn.”

Sigismund turned around, looking at me sharply. “You’re a fey little street rat, Lucia. Some god touched you in the womb, the way you say things sometimes.”

I shrugged. I was a street rat, and there was nothing to be offended about in that. I put my elbows on the bar again, tracing old patterns there that some bored patron had carved with a knife. “Sometimes I feel like there’s something terribly important, only I don’t quite know what it is. Like I can’t quite remember it.” I glanced up at him from beneath my long brown hair. “Sometimes I dream strange dreams, and you’re in them. Do you think the gods would help me find out?”

“Maybe,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure which god it would be.”

Something occurred to me that I wondered about. “Sigismund, do the gods of the Germans have a place in Rome?”

His seamed face broke into a grin. “They do now,” he said. “A man called Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa just built it. I’ll show you.”

And that was how I found the Pantheon.

After that I went there—not often. It was too far to go in the middle of the day without missing deliveries. Once in a while. When there was time.

This particular day, a patrician’s slave had called suddenly, demanding the whole ham that was just coming out of the oven, glazed in honey and spices. His master had returned to Rome unlooked-for by his household, and all was shambles as there was no dinner for him, no food suitable for an important man.

Mucilla bundled the whole ham up, with suitable accompaniments, and packed it off with the slave for a fine price. She was actually singing as she sent Sigismund to get another ham down from where it hung and started mixing up more glaze. “We won’t need you this afternoon, Lucia. It will be hours until this one is done.”

So I took off, letting my feet and my whim guide me through the city, until at last I came to the Pantheon.

It was a new temple, younger even than I, and had been finished only three years ago. Round in form, it looked like nothing else in Rome. Inside, there was no light except what streamed down from a huge oculus in the ceiling far above the ground. In the center, where one might have expected a statue, there was nothing except a vast expanse of polished floor. All around the walls, some in niches, some standing freely, were images of the gods.

This early in the day the temple was almost deserted. A couple of elderly women were over by Adonis, and the doorkeeper was sitting on a stool under the portico, his head back against the wall, his mouth opened with snores. If his job was to keep the indigent from moving in, he would hardly notice today if half the town squatted there.

I wandered about, looking up at the bright sun streaming in. It was chilly inside. My favorite statue was two thirds of the way around.

Isis was robed in blue and white, infant Horus on Her lap. He was a very pudgy baby, and He looked out at the viewer with the smug I’ve-got-something-in-my-mouth-and-you-don’t-know-what expression that my own little brother wore. Her face, in contrast, was serene and a little sad, Her features dignified rather than beautiful. She might have been beautiful, I thought, had She not had such a long nose.

There was someone there, and I didn’t see him until I came around her, a tall man in the worn leathers of a soldier, a mud-splattered traveling cloak thrown over them. He was forty-five or so, much older than my father, with a lined, handsome face and brown hair streaked with gray.

I squeaked, and started to back away.

He turned and gestured with one arm. “Don’t let me keep you away, little one. I don’t bite.”

“No, of course not,” I said, edging back. He had startled me, that was all. There was nothing frightening about him. Of course.

He turned away from me and bent his head, lowering his eyes before Isis again. He looked so sad it was hard to be afraid.

I had a few flowers I’d picked up, ones that were dropped and trampled in the flower market, but still good enough to use. I always brought Her something. I knelt quickly, laying them at Her feet. “All hail Isis, Mother of Compassion.”

“Compassion.” There was so much misery in his tone that I looked up. “Do you need compassion, little one?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, not much. I’ve not much to feel sorry for myself about, but the money is awfully tight and the baby’s teething so nobody can sleep at night because we all live in one room, and my brother needs lessons if he’s ever going to make anything of himself but a common laborer and my father says we’ve not sunk that low, so where’s the dowry for me in that, not that I need one yet. But there are a lot of people who need compassion. Isis is the Mother of the World. She has enough for everybody.” I looked at him sharply, at the deep graven lines around his mouth. “You look as though you could use some. Did someone die?”

He looked up at the statue, a curiously blank expression on his face. “Oh yes. Lots of people died.”

I felt a chill run down my back. “You must be used to that, being a soldier.”

“If you get used to it you are a beast, not a man.” He looked at me sideways, as though weighing something, the two lines between his brows deep furrows. “Have you ever done something so horrible and so irreparable that you knew there was nothing you could ever do to fix it?”

“No,” I said gently. “Mostly because I’m eight.”

He cracked a smile, as I had meant for him to.

“But I think you just have to try to put it right,” I said. “If you can’t fix it, then you have to make amends.”

He looked up, his eyes seeking the light pouring in through the oculus. “I have tried,” he said. “I built this. A temple for all of the gods of humanity in the heart of Rome. A hearth where everyone is welcome. I have tried.”

“And yet?”

“And yet,” he said, his eyes falling again to the serene, empty ones of the statue.

“Then you must try harder,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “You must try all your life. That’s the best any of us can do. Carry the banner proudly in our own time.”

He looked down at me, and for the first time I thought he really saw me, eyes roving over my sharp, thin face, my long brown hair escaping from an untidy braid, my quick and restless hands. “I was asking Her forgiveness,” he said, “like a boy who begs pardon with his pockets still full of stolen apples.”

“Maybe you should give back the apples first,” I said.

“What about the ones I ate?” The corners of his mouth moved in a hint of a smile.

“I don’t think She wants those back,” I said.

“Try harder?”

I nodded. “And don’t do it again.”

He laughed, and I thought it was quite a nice laugh, if a little rusty from disuse. “I don’t think I’m likely to have the opportunity to do it again.”

“I wouldn’t be sure of that,” I said.

He sobered, and once again his eyes searched my face. He nodded at what he saw there and something changed in the set of his mouth, something eased. “I thought at first that you were a little girl,” he said, and turned to go.

“And what do you think I am now?” I called after him.

He stopped, his nailed sandals ringing on the stone floor. He turned just out of the light of the oculus, in the shadow. “I think you are the Hand of Isis.”

He took his plumed helmet from under his arm and put it on, striding out into the portico while I stood beside the statue, the Mother of the World with wilted flowers at Her feet.

“You’re right,” I said, and in that moment all my life stretched before me. “I am.”