Written in the Ashes (2 page)

(410 C.E.)

1  

Hannah pressed her cheek to the gnarled trunk. Silver leaves shimmered around her like so many netted minnows in the wind. Then stillness. She crouched to make an offering of water that had taken her days to collect, uncapping her water horn and trickling it over the exposed roots. Though it had stood for centuries and bore scars of fire and war, the olive tree had lost its grasp during the dry winter winds, leaning in time toward the earth. Drought had struck Sinai, lengthening through the dusty afternoons like a deadly shadow, killing everything it touched. The shepherds talked of nothing else. Empty grain sacks withered on the sun-baked clay while scrawny newborn sheep and goats were left to the vultures’ talons. Egypt was scoured by dust and hunger; flowing streams atrophied to sand.

Above her, an angel circled and then settled in the eaves of the sky, content to wait. A door would open. The warrior would come. The light had promised it.

Hannah touched her lips to the rough bark in goodbye. A dead leaf caught in her hair. The olive tree, now only leaning, would soon settle on the earth and die. Perhaps its fallen torso would house a fox family when the rains returned, but she would be happier remembering it this way, fierce and tall and full of life. She did not want to leave, but leave they must. She and her father would travel to seek water, for there was none left in the brittle pastures on the mountain flanks. Half the herd had died, and summer was not yet upon them.

Hannah shuddered as the warm breeze tousled her hair. There would be no more gypsies dancing to the pounding drums in the summer meadow, or listening to the stories of the Torah read by the Rabbi and his sons. No more familiar silhouette of the mountain at sunrise. She grew impatient with the drought; if only the rains would return.

From spying on the gypsies, Hannah learned there were sages who could read embers in a fire, speak to animals, or even proclaim that a comet’s blue smudge in the night sky would mean the end of a king. She wanted to find one of these sages to interpret the drought and predict its end. She held a secret frustration with her father for his disinterest in the language of omens the heavens and stars seemed to speak. He knew only the language of goats. But it was a language he spoke fluently. So fluently she felt certain he had a bell for a heart.

When Hannah returned to camp, she reluctantly packed her belongings and joined her father in the morning sunlight on the deer path.

They walked for many days, often encountering muddy springs already drained by other herdsman. Soon, all the youngest and weakest of their herd had fallen.

Sometime after dark and a meal beside the fire, Hannah collapsed in exhaustion and had a dream. Birds by the thousands soared above crumbling columns, their wings on fire, spiraling ever higher in blind chaos while far beneath them, men in black robes surrounded a golden-haired woman and forced her to the ground; their robes covered her completely until she was lost, screaming in a churning sea of blood. Hannah awoke with a jolt, her breath short. This was no ordinary dream; she felt it portended something evil. She sat up in the dust, covered her eyes with one hand, and offered the
Shema
as her father had taught her, taught her as if she were not a daughter, but a son.

So.

There were weeks of walking. Vultures circled their camp day and night. Hannah felled two small hares with her shepherd’s sling and carried them on her shoulders to the fire.

Her father, Kaleb, licked the wine from his mustache. “We cannot go toward the roads, Hannah. Thieves may give us trouble, and we have only the one knife between us.”

“Then to the sea, Abba?” Hannah prodded the fire with a stick and a shower of sparks lifted into the sky.

“No, I think to the river in Egypt.”

The river in Egypt. Hannah had heard stories of the ancient Egyptians and how they lived on the east bank of the Nile, the direction of life, and buried their dead on the west bank, the direction of death. When the Pharaoh left his corpse, his spirit flew toward the rising sun and the life-giving waters. The pyramid tombs had been designed so he would know his way home. In that way, he was like the geese or the great whales, one of the few among creatures of the earth that knew where he belonged.

Hannah closed her eyes as a smile settled on her lips. She imagined the fragrant baths of the Egyptians inside their glowing temples painted with the blue lotus revered for its beauty and youth-giving properties, the mosaics rimming the pools, the colorful murals of the gods stretched on the walls. There would be strong, bare-chested men standing beside the doors holding papyrus fans, and round-hipped women whispering to one another in the water, splashing, laughing. Hannah began to sing softly, feeling hopeful again about their future. Surely the Nile would nourish them.

Kaleb allowed himself to bask in his daughter’s reverie until her song trailed off. “Hannah, I have a gift for you. Something I have been saving, and I want you to have it now.” Kaleb reached into his leather satchel. Hannah came to sit at his feet. She closed her eyes, held out her hands, and he closed her fingers over the gift. Hannah knew it by shape at once, and her eyes flew open. “Abba, you bought it for me? Nothing could make me happier.”

Kaleb smiled triumphantly. He had saved every coin to buy her the silver Athenian hairpin in the likeness of a sleeping swan that she had admired in the market the year before.

Hannah turned the precious gift in her hands, fingering the long sharp prongs, the smooth feathers of the regal bird molded by a talented artisan. “But Abba, we cannot afford this. Not now.”

Kaleb kissed and squeezed his daughter’s hands. “There is only now,” he said, and he nestled the hairpin in a wave of her burnished dark hair.

When the fire grew red and dim, Hannah yawned and kissed her father’s whiskered cheek. She would stay with the herd through the night, and he with the fire. He needed the light to repair their tent, cut sinew with the knife, and then lash the skins together. She curled up beneath a woolen blanket in the field and shut her eyes, listening to the tinkling of the goat bells, unable to sleep. She wondered if she should go back to the fire and check on her father, but she knew he would prefer she stay with the herd. Eventually, she fell asleep.

So.

Hannah’s eyes sprung open. Rustling grass. The goats bleating, scattering. She sensed a predator and felt for the knife beneath her head, but realized that her father had it by the fire.

Suddenly, there were rough hands at her throat and over her mouth.

Panic seized her. Two cloaked men. One with breath that stunk of barley mead grabbed her, the other laughed, clearly pleased. She flailed and was fisted across the face. Once. Twice. She broke away and ran five paces up the hill before they caught her ankles and dragged her backwards. Clawing the earth, her hand found a stone and she turned and struck out, hitting one of the men in the eye, drawing blood but not enough.

She could see two more men on the hill near her father’s fire before they covered her head. She struggled desperately, screaming to her father. Abba. Hear me. Stop them. Please. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a swallow caught in a closed chimney with no way back to the sky. She kicked at the men in the darkness as they bound her like a lamb, lifted her on their shoulders, and carried her off.

The angel, wings so heavy near the earth, could not help her.

When Hannah awoke, her head pounding, it was in the confines of a wooden cage, sweating, choking and drawing flies. The sack over her face was tied tightly enough at her throat to make her breath come short, but she could see through the thin mesh, just enough to make out her captors, the endless barren land, and the silhouettes of the three trembling women beside her, crying softly.

Hannah was not naïve. When the men spoke, she recognized their harsh tongue from the trader’s market near the southern sea, and although she did not speak a word of that ugly language, she knew precisely what it meant. Slave traders. They would be sold, each of them, for the highest price. The drought had brought the men like so many other predators.

All day she cried, wasting water, clinging to whispered prayers and bits of songs as if stringing words together would keep her from drowning in the dark abyss of fear that grew within her by the hour. She hoped her father was alive and tracking them. It brought her some comfort that at any moment he might burst through the tiny tent, sweep her up in his strong arms and carry her home.

The day was difficult, but the night was unendurable.

At sundown, the men tied their horses to each other and then to a stake in the ground. They drank. Before long, they chose a girl to slake their lust.

Hannah spit in their eyes when they removed the sack around her head. With a surprising, desperate burst of strength she managed to bite the hand of one, drawing blood, and kick another in his naked balls. But a knife was drawn to silence her, a cut along her breast not so deep but deep enough. A little gift, they called it in their language, the men that gifted her with bruises and semen and hatred so deep that you would think no mother had given them birth.

Hannah wept in hatred, then in shame. There was no word for how much she despised them, these men who gloated in her weakness and took turns upon her naked body from behind. She had never known a man before; she screamed in pain while they laughed, thrusting deeper, splitting her open, pulling her hair in sport. Her knees bloodied the ground, but she continued to strike at them with an intelligent timing to her blows that both angered and frustrated them. These were men accustomed to submission from the women they preyed on; anything else was inconvenient. They tired of her eventually and set upon the other women, mothers and daughters who would not be so much trouble. This was before one of the men considered that the price brought for fallen fruit would not be as high as for fruit plucked from the branch. And so at dawn they brought out dirty rags and coarse wire brushes meant for horses, and stood over the women with their short swords drawn to let them clean each other’s wounds.

No one spoke. Pain took the place of words. A cut on the lip, a gash to the thigh, a blue eye swollen shut like a ripe plum. The women could not meet each other’s gaze. To look at each other would be to see their own suffering mirrored back to them, which would only make it more real. The gash along Hannah’s breast blossomed with creamy pus and black silt. A girl still a child with soft brown eyes and slender fingers drained it gently. They knew their future, and still they prayed.

That was when the dust storm came. The wagon carrying the cage cracked a wheel, and so Hannah was pulled out to help push it with the other women still inside, her chains cutting her ankle with every step. When she fell on her knees the men kicked her to keep her walking. Tears washed her burning eyes of sand. Above them, a falcon screamed.

Silt clumped on the horses’ eyelashes and the men paused to tighten the ropes on the wrists of the women until they cut the skin. As if they would run.