you funny, but they’ve never tried to stop you from learning, have they?”
“No,” Iras said. She shook her head. “No. Not like they would in Athens. It just hurts sometimes, the things we read.”
“They’re stupid,” I said.
“You can’t call Plato stupid.”
“I can,” I said. “If the things he says are contradicted by the evidence of my senses and by my practical experience of life, it’s only intellectually responsible to dismiss him.”
Iras laughed. “You don’t dismiss the gods so easily.”
“Oh, that,” I said, glancing up at the gilded statue of Horus that loomed above us. They called him Harpocrates in Alexandria, but he was the same person. “Isis is the Mother of the World. It’s just that people can’t see things as clearly as She can. Just because the Adoratrice isn’t nice doesn’t mean that Isis doesn’t love me. After all, the Adoratrice is just a woman.”
Iras put her arm around me, tanned skin against my cream. “Sometimes I’ll never understand you, Charmian. But I love you anyway.”
“I love you too, sister,” I said.
O UR LIVES SETTLED into the long, slow rhythms of the life of the Black Land, harvest and fallow and inundation, season following season. My blood came in, and then Cleopatra’s. We grew taller and our shapes changed, the curves of our bodies carrying us toward womanhood.
In the mirror we looked like variations on a theme. Cleopatra and I were the same height exactly, while she and Iras had the same eyes, warm brown and beautifully expressive. The sun lightened my hair with gold, while Iras’ remained dark and Cleopatra’s the same shade of medium brown as always. Yet our faces were alike. The shape of our noses and chins, the arch of our brows were identical.
Outside these walls, girls only a little older than us were courting and marrying, moving to the houses of husbands and mothers-in-law, bearing their first children. In Egypt, wives were not kept apart, as they are in some lands. They would be working at trades, brewing beer and making paper, tending animals and weaving cloth, selling goods in the markets and shopping too.
We were neither dedicants of Bastet who might look forward to a life spent in the temple precincts, nor servants who might come in to do work and then go away again. Nor were we the other girls, orphans or children of the temple who lived here until they were grown and married. Bastet loves children, and there were always orphans coming and going. Sometimes they stayed only a few nights until some relative from another city came to claim them and conduct their parents’ funeral rites. Sometimes they stayed years, until they were grown, if there was nobody who wanted them.
We were not like them, learning proper trades by doing the work of the temple. I was not sure what we were.
Yet to my surprise, I found myself coming to love Bubastis. It was true that I no longer had lessons, and instead had hard work to do, but there was a piercing beauty to it. When I stood in the temple for the evening rites, seeing the first stars appearing above in their endless dance, I felt my heart fill with a sense of rightness. Here, there was love. Here was peace. Here it mattered to serve Isis and Bastet through service to Their people.
Iras missed lessons terribly, and I pretended that I did too, though in many ways I was relieved not to have them. I had always been the slowest of the three, the one who fell behind in mathematics and sciences. I did not know, then, that Apollodorus had pushed us far beyond our years, and the lessons I had been behind in were normally given to men of twenty, not girls of twelve. I merely thought myself much stupider than my sisters.
Here, other things mattered. I could remember every word of the offices and hymns after hearing them once or twice, every word of the long complicated litanies that the acolytes took years to learn.
“All hail Isis, Mother of the World. I am She who rises with Sothis.
“No,” Iras said. She shook her head. “No. Not like they would in Athens. It just hurts sometimes, the things we read.”
“They’re stupid,” I said.
“You can’t call Plato stupid.”
“I can,” I said. “If the things he says are contradicted by the evidence of my senses and by my practical experience of life, it’s only intellectually responsible to dismiss him.”
Iras laughed. “You don’t dismiss the gods so easily.”
“Oh, that,” I said, glancing up at the gilded statue of Horus that loomed above us. They called him Harpocrates in Alexandria, but he was the same person. “Isis is the Mother of the World. It’s just that people can’t see things as clearly as She can. Just because the Adoratrice isn’t nice doesn’t mean that Isis doesn’t love me. After all, the Adoratrice is just a woman.”
Iras put her arm around me, tanned skin against my cream. “Sometimes I’ll never understand you, Charmian. But I love you anyway.”
“I love you too, sister,” I said.
O UR LIVES SETTLED into the long, slow rhythms of the life of the Black Land, harvest and fallow and inundation, season following season. My blood came in, and then Cleopatra’s. We grew taller and our shapes changed, the curves of our bodies carrying us toward womanhood.
In the mirror we looked like variations on a theme. Cleopatra and I were the same height exactly, while she and Iras had the same eyes, warm brown and beautifully expressive. The sun lightened my hair with gold, while Iras’ remained dark and Cleopatra’s the same shade of medium brown as always. Yet our faces were alike. The shape of our noses and chins, the arch of our brows were identical.
Outside these walls, girls only a little older than us were courting and marrying, moving to the houses of husbands and mothers-in-law, bearing their first children. In Egypt, wives were not kept apart, as they are in some lands. They would be working at trades, brewing beer and making paper, tending animals and weaving cloth, selling goods in the markets and shopping too.
We were neither dedicants of Bastet who might look forward to a life spent in the temple precincts, nor servants who might come in to do work and then go away again. Nor were we the other girls, orphans or children of the temple who lived here until they were grown and married. Bastet loves children, and there were always orphans coming and going. Sometimes they stayed only a few nights until some relative from another city came to claim them and conduct their parents’ funeral rites. Sometimes they stayed years, until they were grown, if there was nobody who wanted them.
We were not like them, learning proper trades by doing the work of the temple. I was not sure what we were.
Yet to my surprise, I found myself coming to love Bubastis. It was true that I no longer had lessons, and instead had hard work to do, but there was a piercing beauty to it. When I stood in the temple for the evening rites, seeing the first stars appearing above in their endless dance, I felt my heart fill with a sense of rightness. Here, there was love. Here was peace. Here it mattered to serve Isis and Bastet through service to Their people.
Iras missed lessons terribly, and I pretended that I did too, though in many ways I was relieved not to have them. I had always been the slowest of the three, the one who fell behind in mathematics and sciences. I did not know, then, that Apollodorus had pushed us far beyond our years, and the lessons I had been behind in were normally given to men of twenty, not girls of twelve. I merely thought myself much stupider than my sisters.
Here, other things mattered. I could remember every word of the offices and hymns after hearing them once or twice, every word of the long complicated litanies that the acolytes took years to learn.
“All hail Isis, Mother of the World. I am She who rises with Sothis.