Alexandreia was a lot filthier than she remembered from her visits years past; it seemed to wear a cloak of smoke and soot as protection against its many troubles. The fabulous marble causeways were pitted with decay. Many of the statues had been shrouded in great sheets of oilcloth.
The representatives of the bibliophylax, the director and archivist of the Mouseion, hurried her and her luggage off the street before the Mouseion’s famous Eastern Stoa, then put her in a rickety cart, insisting that she ride rather than walk.
The women’s residence hall was a brick and stone two-story block dropped inauspiciously in a dusty, treeless corner of the Mouseion grounds. Rhita’s heart fell when she saw it; Lugotorix, riding beside the driver on the cart, gave a low whistle of contempt.
They pulled into the broken brick and pounded-dirt courtyard. An elderly woman in a black shawl swept dust and sand half-heartedly in the shade of the inset double doorway, giving them barely a glance. The door opened and a blond, matronly young woman about the same age as Rhita stepped out with hands clenched over her head in greeting.
“Welcome! welcome!” she shrilled, clicking her tongue and dropping her hands to lift her long brown robe out of the dust. “You are from Rhodos? From the Hypateion?”
Rhita smiled and nodded at her. The cart jerked to a sudden stop and the driver gave the Kelt some small assistance in dropping her luggage to the curbside. “You can’t stay here, you know,” the woman told the Kelt sharply. “No men here.”
“He’s my bodyguard,” Rhita said.
“My dear, bad as things are for us in the Mouseion, none of us need bodyguards! He’ll have to stay elsewhere. You are Reee-ta Berenikē Vaskayza?”
“Yes.”
The woman hugged her briskly. “I am Jorea Yallos, from Galatia. Your houseguide. You study mathematics?”
“Yes.”
“Fascinating. I study animal husbandry in the school of agriculture. I have been told to show you your quarters and answer your questions.”
Rhita’s hopes fell when Yallos urged her to the upper floor and bustled before her along a dark hallway. “We appreciate your coming here. I’m sorry we can’t do better for you. In the summer, these rooms cool off more quickly at night. In the winter, that’s not what you want. They’re comfortably warm during the day, however.” She withdrew a large iron key and inserted it into the padlock, pocketed both lock and key, and pushed and kicked the thin wooden door open. It scraped sadly over the broken tile floor.
“Are you a daughter of Isis?” Yallos asked.
Rhita entered the room. It was like a cell in a monastery, with a pair of small windows mounted high in the outer wall and a leather bed pushed into one corner. Behind the door, a wobbly stand supported a chamber pot and bowl. Against the right hand wall, a scabrous wooden desk had been propped under a faded mural of the Kanopic Isis with her small, wide-eyed, feathered infant son and protective snake.
“No,” Rhita managed to answer.
“Pity. Dorca, the woman here before you, a lovely helper, she was quite fond of Isis. You can’t redecorate without the women’s council’s permission.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rhita said. She gestured for Lugotorix to bring in her luggage. He squeezed through the door with traveling case and wooden boxes under both arms, gently lowered them to the floor, and stood to one side, away from the suspicious Yallos.
“He’s a Kelt, isn’t he?”
“From the Parisioi,” Rhita affirmed.
“There are plenty of Kelts in Galatia,” Yallos said. “I’m of Nabataean and Hellenic ancestry, myself.”
Rhita nodded politely.
“We have a group council at the first hour of sunset. If you’d like to join us, you’re welcome. Let me know if you need anything. We women have to stick together here. They don’t much care for us, Kallimakhos and his people. We’re not good for his defense contracts.” Yallos stood in the doorway. “The Kelt has to come with me now. I’ll get him a room in the old baths, where the groundskeepers bed down.”
Lugotorix flicked his slitted eyes from Yallos, whom he clearly loathed, to Rhita. “Go,” she told him. “I’ll be okay here.” She was none too sure of that, however. She already felt homesick and out of place. The Kelt shrugged and followed the houseguide. Rhita suddenly thought of something and called to her in the hall. “Can I have the lock and key?”
“No locks,” Yallos said.
“I need a lock,” Rhita persisted, irritated now and worried for the safety of the Objects.
“Come to the council meeting. We’ll discuss it. Oh…if you’re not a sister of Isis, what are you?”
Rhita made up her answer with surprising speed. “I belong to the sanctuary of Athēnē Lindia.”
Yallos blinked. “Pagan?” she asked.
“Rhodian,” Rhita replied. “It’s my birthright.”
“Oh.”
Rhita shut the door and faced her squalid cell. So much for her reception in the Mouseion. Her grandmother’s shadow obviously did not stretch this far. Was this the queen’s doing, or was Kleopatra even aware of Rhita’s arrival?
She sat for a while, shivering in the gloom. A single electric light over the bed cast a yellow glow over that corner and little else. It was already midday and the room was just beginning to warm. How much risk should she take with the Objects, not to mention her own safety? How much risk would she take before—if—she reached her goal?
Prying at a shutter jammed over one small, deep-set window, she broke an already-short fingernail to the quick. She swore beneath her breath, one green eye bright in her meager success, a thin line of indirect sunlight.
Rhita wiped gritty dust from the desk, used a frayed withy broom to sweep the floor, and opened her trunk to put her clothes away. In the late afternoon, the guides had told her, she would meet with the bibliophylax.
She did not look forward to it.