Stateless (20 page)

‘But how do they do what they're doing without being burnt? They're smiling, not screaming in pain.'

Abram looked carefully, and saw that the men blew some liquid out of their mouths onto the flaming torch, which then burst into flames, making it look as though they were actually eating the fire.

He smiled, and whispered, ‘They put something like oil or a strong drink into their mouths and then spit it out, which causes the firebrand to flare. It's a trick, Jonathan. And a good lesson. Never accept things for what they seem, only for what they actually are. Now, my son, pick up our bags and we'll find somewhere to sleep tonight.'

As they walked away from the ship that had been their home for the past four nights, taking them from the port of Joppa in Syria Palaestina to Alexandria, they didn't know that they were being observed. She was a tall woman, her head and much of
her face obscured by a black scarf, her body encased in black robes. It enabled her to become invisible in the shadows of the dock, allowing her to see who walked off the boats. Most were sailors or merchants, but some were travellers. Many were too old for her, but some were young men and they were of great interest to her.

And the youth who'd just walked off the boat from Palestine with the older man was of particular interest. So she followed them, walking in the shadows of the darkening night, waiting to see where they went.

Though they had been resident in the city for several days, Abram was a worried man. Day was becoming night, and he feared that his son, whom he'd sent on a mission, had become disoriented and lost.

The doctor looked out of the window at the position of the sun, and realised that it was approaching dusk. Jonathan had left their lodgings just after the noontime meal, and had been ordered by his father to go out, buy some bread, olives, peppers, and a roasted haunch of sheep from one of the many butchers in Alexandria so that they could enjoy their dinner. He was instructed to come straight back. Since midday, he had been entertaining Maria the Jewess, the most famous alchemist in Alexandria – perhaps, even in the whole world – and they had been engrossed in discussing the myriad of things that people of science and knowledge talked about when they were together.

His introduction to Maria had come through a merchant he'd treated for fever when the man was passing through Jerusalem on his way to Babylon. So impressed had he been with
the treatment that Abram had prescribed, and the modest cost compared to his doctors in Alexandria, that he had written to Abram, and kept in touch. It was the merchant who had suggested a meeting with Maria the Jewess and alchemist, and on the basis of the messages he'd received, Abram's wife, Ruth, had suggested that she, Abram and their young son should travel to the Egyptian coastal city to meet with Maria and to learn from her. But then Ruth had died of fevers, and Abram had spent the past two years mourning the loss of the love of his life.

But at the end of the previous year, he realised that he'd grown distant from Jonathan, and the lad was sensitive enough to feel the detachment. So Abram determined that as there were only two of them left, he would fulfil Ruth's wishes, and for the past four hours, he and Maria had been engrossed in discussions concerning alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into gold, the nature and reality of the Philosopher's Stone, and the ideas espoused by Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras. When he'd told her that in his younger days he'd become a Christian follower of a self-proclaimed messiah called Jesus who came from Nazareth in Israel, she nearly jumped out of her seat in excitement. She told him that although she was a Jewess, she was a student of the words of this very same Jesus, stories now being preached by bishops who lived and proselytised in Alexandria.

‘One night,' she told him, ‘when I was asleep, this very Jesus came to me and took me to the top of a mountain. I wasn't afraid because he held me and I felt secure. His skin was as black as pitch, like that of an Abyssinian. From the top of the mountain, I could see the entire world spread out before me. In the distance, I could see the Greek philosophers who were arguing in their academy. Then this very Jesus lay me down and his essence entered my body. I grew very frightened, but
he said to me, “Why are you afraid, oh ye of little faith; if I have shown you earthly things and you did not trust me, how then will you believe the heavenly things which I will show you?” Then I returned and woke in the morning. I told this to the bishops, but they cursed me, telling me that I was spreading heresy. They forbade me from entering into their prayer rooms.'

‘For me, and for my son Jonathan, we are more suited to the faith of Moses and Aaron, of David and Solomon.'

But the moment he mentioned his son's name, for the first time all afternoon, Abram realised that he'd been so absorbed by the conversation that the sun was about to set into the western sea, and Jonathan wasn't home. Maria noticed the look of concern on his face, and asked him why he was worried.

‘He is a young man. He doesn't know Alexandria. As a port, many people pass through here, strangers and sailors, merchants and slave traders. I shouldn't have sent him out on his own. I should have gone with him.'

‘He will come to no harm,' said Maria. ‘He will return soon. He's probably met a pretty girl in the marketplace and lost all sense of the time.'

But Jonathan wasn't talking to a girl; nor was he in the marketplace. Since he and his father had arrived some days earlier by boat, they had been carefully watched by a woman in a dark robe, her head perpetually covered in a cowl whenever she was outdoors.

The woman, Didia, was a slave trader who purchased Nubian, Abyssinian, Libyan, and Berber boys and girls sold to her by their parents or merchants, trained them, and then sent them off to Greece and Rome to work as servants or prostitutes.

But for the past two days, she'd been following the movements of the Jewish doctor Abram and his son, Jonathan. Her captivation with the lad began the moment she saw him. It was when he walked from the boat on which he and his father
had arrived in Alexandria, to the time they purchased room and board in a lodging house near to the dock, to this sudden meeting with Maria the Jewess. Not that she was interested in an alchemist, nor her fame for heating things in a bath of hot water for which she had become famous, but because she was monopolising Abram the doctor. And because the alchemist and the doctor were ensconced in his room all afternoon, he had unwisely allowed his beautiful son, Jonathan, to wander Alexandria alone.

And being a young lad, alone in a strange land, he'd left the main merchant streets and was wandering along alleyways to see what sorts of houses and public buildings were in the city. Jonathan's curiosity enabled Didia to do what she most wanted since she'd first happened to see them leave the boat when they arrived. It was only through the intervention of the gods of Egypt that she had spotted him. Had she not been sending her latest batch of slaves off to the Roman port of Ostia, she wouldn't have been on the dock and wouldn't have spotted Jonathan walking alongside his father.

At first, she couldn't believe it. She looked, and felt her legs turn to water. But on closer scrutiny, even though she kept to the shadows, the resemblance to her own dead son was even more remarkable. His hair, the shape of his face, his broad shoulders, and even the way the young lad walked, striding in footsteps that seemed too large for his body, was identical to the way Didia's beautiful son Kheti had once been. She barely kept up with the two men as they walked from the dock into the town. She felt as though a brilliant beam of light had descended from the heavens. Seeing Jonathan brought her beloved son, Kheti, back to life. For over the year in which he had taken to die, Didia had seen her beautiful son wither away, emaciated, coughing, weak and shrunken, an incongruously withered being compared to the glowing son she had loved with all her
heart. She'd known of the wasting disease in many slaves from the poorer lands south of Egypt, but never thought that her beloved son would become a victim.

Yet as Jonathan walked, she saw not Abram's son but her own beautiful boy. And for the first time since he'd died a year ago, she felt her heart beat in excitement. Now he was hers. She sat in her home and looked at him closely. The resemblance was nothing short of remarkable. The colour of his hair was slightly darker, and his nose was more Roman than Egyptian, but aside from those differences, they could have been brothers. On her orders, Didia's slave had thrown a sack over the boy as he walked into an alley, bound him with rope and brought him struggling and shouting to Didia's home.

‘You're wondering why you're here, aren't you, boy?' she said.

His mouth was full of cloth and a bandage was tied tightly around it to stop him from shouting; and he was bound hand and foot and couldn't move. But he could nod.

‘You are very valuable to me, in ways that you could not even begin to understand. If you promise to remain quiet, I will remove the bindings around your mouth, and give you food and drink. Do you promise not to shout? Not that it matters, but be assured that it won't help you, because nobody can hear, and if they could, this is the house of slavery and so people of your age shout and scream and beg all of the while. But I don't want you to shout. My son Kheti never used to shout. So, will you promise?'

Jonathan looked at the woman. She'd removed her cowl, and he could see her greying hair and her face, lined with worry. She was much older than his own mother, Ruth, before she'd died, but still, there was a resemblance. The shape of her face, her arched eyebrows, the way her mouth turned up when she smiled.

When he remembered his mother, it was her smile that had always given him such pleasure when he entered the house. A warm and loving smile, until she became ill and withered. But this woman was not his mother, and he was frightened of her. Still, he was desperate for a drink and he was hungry, so he nodded.

Didia nodded curtly, and her slave removed the bandage around Jonathan's mouth, and pulled out the rag. He licked his dry lips.

‘So, boy, what's your name?'

His voice was hoarse, but he tried to sound confident. ‘Jonathan.'

She nodded. ‘From now on, you will forget what your mother and father called you. From now on, in my house, you will honour a different name. I will call you Kheti.'

Abram and Maria the Jewess searched every street near to his lodgings. But when it was pitch black, with only a few street lights to pierce the darkness of the moonless night, they met again in the doorway of a baker's shop.

‘Nothing,' said Maria.

Abram nodded. ‘I'll pray to the Almighty God that he's safe and unharmed; that he's met with some other lads and is with them; that he's drinking and has fallen into a sleep. I will pray because without prayer I am nothing.'

Maria shook her head. ‘You can pray, Abram, but I have an evil feeling in my bones that prayer won't help you. I've seen your boy Jonathan. He's tall and beautiful. And in Alexandria, we have dozens of men and women who trade in the lives of
slaves. Alexandria is well known as an unsafe port for boys and girls.'

Abram looked at her in horror. ‘A slave?'

‘You must face that reality, Abram.'

‘My son . . . my Jonathan? No!'

‘These are evil times, my friend. And Alexandria is an evil place.'

‘But this is the most enlightened city in the world. Your library, your schools of philosophers, your . . . how can you allow the evils of slavery, the barbarism of –' He couldn't continue.

Maria looked at his disconsolate face in pity. ‘Alchemy teaches that the three emanations of sentient beings – intellectual, celestial and corruptible – form a fourth, which is the one machine of the whole world. But the ancients tell us that it is also necessary to have the corruptible in order to form a fifth essence, the quintessence, in order to have unity. We have to have evil, like these slave traders, in order to have the quintessence of life. I'm so sorry, my friend.'