Hand of Isis by Jo Graham Page B

fresh bread, honey, eggs, and milk and there was plenty of it. Still, breakfast was an ordeal for me.
    From the first day, no one would sit beside me except Iras. The other girl servants all moved down to the far end of the table, whispering and speculating in native Egyptian.
    Iras gave them a scornful look and sat beside me. “They don’t think you understand,” she said.
    I shrugged. “Do you think I care if they talk to me or not? Or if they think my hair is too light and my skin looks like an unbaked pastry? I just don’t understand why they hate me and not you.” For it was true that as we went about our work, other girls were happy enough to talk to Iras.
    Iras shifted on her bench, looking down at her dish. “It’s because I look like them. Nothing more. We have the same father, you and I. But you look Greek.”
    “I’m Egyptian,” I said. “We both are. We’re Ptolemies.”
    Iras laid aside the piece of bread she had picked up and glanced sideways at me. “They don’t count the Ptolemies as Egyptian, here. We may have been in Egypt nearly three hundred years, but that doesn’t count for much in the Black Land. We’re not real Egyptians. Or you’re not. They asked who my mother was, who my people were, and when I told them my mother was from Elephantine, the daughter of a scribe sold into slavery to pay her father’s debts when he died, they all understood that. Don’t you see? I have a place and people here. You don’t. Your mother was a foreigner from across the sea. And no matter what you believe or how you’ve been raised, your face says you don’t belong.”
    I got up and ran outside, ignoring the derisive giggles that followed me. No doubt they thought Iras had put me in my place as well. Tears blinded me, and I dodged about the columns and courts without thinking. I heard Iras calling after me, but I didn’t turn back. Left and right and left again.
    If I went back to our rooms, Cleopatra would ask me what was wrong, and I didn’t think I could bear to tell her. They must hate her too. Only they could not touch her because she was a princess.
    I finally sat down in a sunbeam that came in through the sungate in the roof in the Chapel of Horus. If I sat between the statue and the wall, no one could see me from the door. At this hour the chapels were empty and quiet. I curled my knees up and hugged them to my chest.
    Iras found me anyway. She came in and sat down cross-legged opposite me, her saffron chiton all Greek, not Egyptian. “It’s stupid,” she said. “I didn’t say it was right. I just said that’s how it is.” I didn’t say anything, and she went on. My chest hurt too much to talk.
    “It doesn’t matter in Alexandria,” I said.
    “It doesn’t matter as much,” Iras corrected. “Do you think there aren’t places in Alexandria where people stare at me? They don’t expect a native to speak such good Koine. Or that the scholars don’t watch me closely when Apollodorus takes us to the Library?”
    “But you’re brilliant!” I said. “You’re much better at mathematics than I am!”
    “I’m an Egyptian, and I’m a girl.”
    “There are plenty of women scholars in Alexandria,” I said stubbornly. “There’s no reason you can’t be one.”
    “But there aren’t in Athens,” she said. “Even Plato says that women are by nature inferior to men in intellect, and that true companionship and discourse are only possible with equals, not with women and barbarians.”
    “Who cares about Plato?” I said rudely, sitting up. “We aren’t in Athens. And I don’t see what Athens has on Alexandria, anyway. It’s been generations since anything came out of Athens except posturing and hubris. Euclid and Archimedes, Herophilus and Pythagoras, they were Alexandrian, like us. They belonged to the freest, most interesting city in the world. We both belong there. In a place where it doesn’t matter so much who your mother was, but what you can do. People may look at