Written in the Ashes (21 page)

People began to grumble to one another, claiming the cats were a curse laid upon the city by the Jews. There was no one who had not fallen victim to the cats’ mischief. They crept into kitchens and stole whole chickens off the spit. They knocked over clay pots, spilling the winter supply of grain into the dust. They gave birth to wide-eyed kittens in the stables, spooking the horses. It was even said they extinguished candles set on family altars just by gazing at them.

For Hannah, though, the cats were welcome companions. A ginger cat slept beside Hannah in the stable night after night and finally gave birth to a litter of five tiny kittens that Hannah coddled and kissed. The elderly Jewish woman across the alley whose husband had died in the exile the month before toddled outside every morning to set a bowl of fresh goat milk out for the cats in order to woo them inside to sleep on her lap, which they did. Children cradled little kittens in their arms in hopes that they would fill the air with purring, which they did. Fishmongers adopted the cats, convinced that they could keep the rats away. Which they did.

So.

On the first clear morning after the rains, Alizar awoke. He lay in bed beside Naomi watching a black cat with glassy emerald eyes wash her ears with her paws. His mind was empty without even so much as a dream fragment to ripple the gloss. Alizar meditated on the movements of the cat as she passed her paws over her face, behind her ears, licked down her front and shoulders, then back again to face and ears. Face and ears.

Alizar gently adjusted his wounded shoulder, which was gradually mending. The arm corresponded to his bandaged hand, now missing the thumb. The right. At least it was not his sword hand.

Alizar looked at Naomi, taking in the comforting familiar curves of her profile, her neck, her rising chest.

“Naomi?” Alizar sat up. Her eyes were open.

She smiled at him.

Alizar turned and kissed her again and again. “A miracle!” he shouted, tears of jubilation in his eyes. And he held her. “Can I get you anything?” he whispered.

Naomi cleared her throat, her pale green eyes illuminated as if in the moonlight. “Water.”

Over the weeks that followed, no one ever remembered seeing Alizar so happy. Naomi’s recovery was his recovery. Soon she was sitting up, and then slowly walking across the room.

Hannah bonded to Naomi even more deeply in her recovery. Naomi often asked her to stay and sing in the evening, and there was nowhere else Hannah would rather be. Afterwards, she would lay her head in Naomi’s lap as Naomi played with her hair and told her stories of her own childhood in Constantinople. With her health, Naomi’s youth returned.

Late one afternoon Hannah came in from running errands and found Leitah at Naomi’s bedside, washing and dressing her. “The apothecary acted strangely today,” she said, setting the bag of medicines on a brass tray on a low table near the bed. One by one she pulled out and arranged the colorful glass vials.

Leitah, who was drawing a sponge of warm water along Naomi’s arm, paused to look at Hannah.

“How is Marcus?” asked Naomi, lifting her head to inquire after the apothecary. “I have not seen his family in ages. Are the children well?”

Hannah kept arranging the vials. “The children looked hungry and thin. His wife also. She asked me repeatedly if there was anything else I needed. And he was nervously rubbing his hands, as alarmed as if I were a ghost in the room. Could I have offended them in some way? Are they not used to Jews in that part of town?”

Naomi tipped her head and thought a moment. “Think nothing of it,” she said finally. “Perhaps it was a quarrel with the wife’s sister. She always wanted Marcus for herself. She is a tall, thin woman. Was she there?”

“Actually, there was a woman there by that description,” Hannah said. “She was standing by herself near the window, away from the rest of the family.”

Naomi smiled. “You see? It was not you, Hannah.”

Hannah sighed, realizing she had become suspicious of everyone. It was an exhausting way to live.

Leitah began to trim the nails of Naomi’s hand, filing them with a course wedged tile. Naomi set her other hand on Hannah’s cheek. “You are such a dutiful girl. I do hope you earn your freedom and find your father, if that is what you wish.”

The sudden, surprising words were spoken with such love that Hannah felt tears come to her eyes. No woman had ever spoken to her so intimately. She fell on Naomi’s neck, hugging her. Naomi kissed her forehead and rocked her like a child.

The weeks that passed in delight brought unfounded hope. Naomi grew weaker again. She collapsed back into her bed, needing more and more time to sleep and rest. Hannah came every hour, and Leitah never left her side.

Alizar looked up and dried his tears. “She is ready to join our son in the next world, I can feel it.”

Within a week, Naomi was dead. Her spirit passed very near the angel, who guided her to the light.

Alizar held his wife as her eyes turned to stone. It was a graceful, peaceful death, which was what he wanted for her, as much as he hated to see her go. In a way, she had set him free. He could stop worrying about her, stop fretting over Cyril’s threats. She had assured him of her love again and again. And that she would be happy. Her death fell hard on Hannah, though, who had adopted her as a mother in her heart. Each night she lay awake in the stable straw and mourned, for should it not be divine law that anyone who is loved, live?

Alizar’s house became black once again. He wanted no more visitors for the time being. He shut and locked his tower door. He knew the only tonic that would work on his grief. He wanted to plan his alliance with Orestes against Cyril.

So.

Tarek found a moment when Hannah was alone, washing the stairs, and stood before her, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, looking like a vulnerable little boy.

Hannah glanced up and when Tarek did not walk past, she set her rag down. She had thrown herself into cleaning as if scraping the crud from every corner would do the same for her heart. She sat on her heels and wiped her forehead. “What is it, Tarek?” she asked, and her voice sounded harsher than she intended.

“I am sorry I cursed you,” he said. His eyes were laden with grief.

Hannah smiled, knowing how hard those words must have been for him to say. “I forgive you,” she said.

He took three halting steps forward, then began to cry. She caught him as he fell into her arms, sobbing.

If only he could always grieve so, she thought. His grief was the only window open to his soul.

So.

At all hours after Naomi’s death, friends came to call, and Jemir tried to console them with little cakes and sighs of understanding when he was not assisting Leitah with the cleaning or helping Hannah with kneading bread and preparing hot
fuul
and tea. Tea. Endless tea. Hannah became the tea-bearer, bringing it even when it was not needed, setting hot cups beside everyone all through the day and into the night. There was no other consolation they could lean on.

Alizar did not come down from his tower. Hannah visited in the evenings, her footsteps so light in the hall, it was as if she were concerned she might disturb the floor by walking on it. She squeezed her master’s hands, ardently kissed his knuckles, served him wine and warm Roman bread with olive spread. “Can I help you with that?” or “How about with this?” and so much fussing he thought she meant to help him breathe and beat his heart and blink his eyes for him all at once. He finally shut her out.

After another month had passed, Hannah decided that Alizar needed to at least have a walk, after all it was unhealthy to remain indoors for so long, just watching the light change across the floor. She knew that kind of pain. It did not abate on its own; effort must be made, a pushing from within, enough to break the skin.

She put on the fine indigo dress that Jemir had bought for her because it matched her eyes and bound her hair back into a long braid with a scarf of the same color.

When she glided into Alizar’s sitting room he looked up from his tea and smiled his approval. “So the rumors are true,” he said.

Hannah looked at him, perplexed.

“We have a goddess in our midst.” Alizar stood, the two red Pharaoh hounds standing with him.

Hannah bent her head and spoke with her gaze on her feet and fibbed a little. “Jemir thought that you should have a walk.” She had not seen Alizar for a month, and in truth, his gaunt appearance startled her. He was so thin that his clothes simply hung on him as if his shoulders were tree branches. But the bandage was off his hand, as it had healed.

Alizar winked at her. “And Jemir is right. I should walk. So I should.” He did not move. The hounds, however, turned their ears toward him, tongues lolling. They knew the word immediately.

Hannah waited.

Alizar said nothing.

Hannah picked up his sandals from beside the door and set them beside his chair. A walking gesture.

The hounds whined in high-pitched expectation and wagged their tails.

“Bother,” said Alizar. “Wait a moment and I will put on a robe in case I should see someone who wants to pester me with unwanted sympathy.”

Hannah smiled, and the hounds shot out the door ahead of them.

The market was busier than usual. The merchants seemed irritated, each trying desperately to draw potential customers into their stalls. There were no Parabolani about, nor had there been in weeks, but no one thought of the priests for the moment as the need to make up for lost business in the stalled economy had everyone scurrying, trying to please, please, please, which only meant the customers felt pestered.

Rather than push their way through the bustling marketplace, Alizar purchased two ripe plums from a fruit merchant and they walked toward the Gate of the Moon at the other end of Canopic Way, sucking the sweet red juice from the fruit as it ran down onto their fingers.

Hannah could not think of what to say that had not been said already, and so she decided to go back, back before the riots, and the deaths, and the fires, and so many nights without sleep, and Naomi’s death. “Tell me about Athens,” Hannah said as they stepped onto the beach where the tall, thin waves fell over on the shore like so many fainting women. Before them, a jagged little burm had appeared along the shoreline so they walked along the surf instead, their garments trailing circles in the sea foam.

“Athens,” Alizar repeated. “Athens is the home of many sages and still many more boasters and charlatans. Piraeus is full of filth and charm, and the Akropolis is another word for beauty. The people are mad when they are not riveted by some new philosophy that offers them another kind of madness. The only thing Athenians love more than fish is women, and the only thing Athenians love more than women is wine. We Greeks argue over things that do not matter to anyone. But they do to us. Once I had an argument with my head gardener that took the better part of a month over what color bougainvillea to plant in the courtyard. He planted red. I wanted fuchsia. He refused to plant the fuchsia. I planted the fuchsia myself and came back to find it missing. We went on like that.”