Free Hand of Isis by Jo Graham

“Her voice and Her hands.”
    “Her voice and Her hands,” Cleopatra repeated, looking down at her wrists, at her slender, ordinary hands against her lap.
    “Her avatar,” I said. “Isn’t that what you are, when you give your bracelet to the doctor to fix those children’s eyes? You’re a princess of Egypt, born to be the voice of Isis.”
    “You may not have enough bracelets now,” Iras said. “But there’s plenty of gold in the Royal Treasury in Alexandria.”
    “Not really,” Cleopatra said. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? My father ran out of money. The wealth of the Black Land is in grain, and in our trade. We have to manage our trade as carefully as our farms if we want them to yield well now and every year. And we have to get the money out of Alexandria and into the countryside.”
    Iras frowned. “How?”
    Cleopatra smiled at the back wall of the chapel that made up her bedroom. “Just like Osorkon did. You pay people to build things for the public good, canals and temples and dockyards. When they have money they spend it on food and cloth and household things, things that are made by other people. Then the merchants are happy and the craftsmen are happy, and so is the Royal Treasury, because the taxes enrich us. Then we spend that money again on things that we need.”
    “Like a fleet,” I said. “So we never fear the Romans again.”
    “Like schools,” Iras said. “So that we invent new things that make things better, like Archimedes’ Screw makes it much easier to irrigate the fields.”
    “Like hospitals,” I said, thinking of the one in Alexandria where the young doctors learned how to treat every disease, and would work on poor people for free for the practice.
    “Like floodgates and cisterns,” Iras said, “so that when the Nile doesn’t rise enough we can still get enough water.”
    “The Royal Treasury isn’t mine,” Cleopatra said. She let her hands fall to her lap.
    We all waited, while it hung in the air around us: treason.
    The cool touch was at my back again, as though something huge turned on a fulcrum. I shrugged and said it. “It should be.”
    Iras looked at me, her face inscrutable. Then she nodded like a soldier facing his opponent in a practice bout. “You’d be a better queen than Berenice.”
    “You’re the avatar of Isis,” I said. “You’re Her hands.”
    “I’m thirteen,” Cleopatra said. “Berenice is twenty-one. She has a soldier husband and an army, a powerful faction of the nobles, and the city of Alexandria at her back. I have exactly two handmaidens and a tutor.”
    “You have Isis,” I said.
    Iras and Cleopatra both looked at me.
    The absence of Apollodorus made me bold. “Well, what is the use of being the avatar of Isis if you don’t ask Her for anything?” I said. “She has the power to make you queen. I don’t see the harm in asking Her to do it.”
    “What, just ask?” Iras said.
    “She’s the Mother of the World,” Cleopatra said thoughtfully, chewing on her lower lip. “What’s the worst She will do? Say no, as a mother will, when you ask for something that’s not good for you? Charmian’s right. She won’t punish us for asking.”
    “?‘Us’?” I said.
    Cleopatra gave me a penetrating look. “If we’re going to do this together, all of us Her hands, then it’s not going to be just me asking. You’re both of the blood of the Ptolemies. Either one of you could be Her avatar. Either one of you could be Pharaoh, if you were boys. Auletes was the son of a woman of the harem. He had no more claim to the throne than you. If we’re going to do it, then we’re going to do it together.”
    Iras nodded solemnly. “Then we need to do it right, so it’s respectful.”
    We all fell silent. None of us was quite certain how to do it.
    “We could go in the chapel,” I said. “There’s no one in the Chapel of Isis at night. And they don’t lock it up like the sanctuary of Bastet, because there’s no Inner Room,