Written in the Ashes (3 page)

A powder fine as flour blew through Hannah’s blindfold with each burst of wind and her eyes became painfully swollen and red. For strength, she sang, thinking of her father in the hour before the men came: strong, smiling, eyes twinkling with some inner laughter. She could not bear the agony of imagining him helpless, or dead, or left alone and in pain, calling out for her. She told herself she would see him again. He would come for her, or she would escape. She rested her heart in the comforting details of his worn clothes, his wiry beard, his leather rucksack full of fragrant herbs spilling out like entrails beside the fire and his shepherd’s staff beside him, familiar as certain stars overhead. The details of love cannot be lost.

In the early evening, the city of the gods appeared. Hannah was shut back in the cage and left to stare at it from between the bars. She had never seen walls so high, walls that started in the ground and scraped against the sky. The men in their strange language repeated a word like the chorus of a song. Alexandria. Alexandria.

They entered by the Gate of the Sun and were let through by armed guards after payment was made. With their eyes now uncovered, Hannah could see the massive buildings carved from granite and slats of limestone, towering over them. The east-west street they rode through was lined with tall columns so wide, seven children holding hands could not wrap their arms all the way round. Under any other circumstances Hannah might have found the city majestic, for she had never seen a city before and never imagined one so great as this. Massive fountains set at intervals down the center of the boulevard crowned with gods and spouting dolphins, nereids and goddesses splashed loudly into limpid pools while Parian marble sphinxes wedged into the architecture watched over the city with bald, lucid eyes.

The shepherd’s cunning daughter noted the tremendous city gates, the gates that would lead her back into the desert. By nightfall she would slip between them like a shadow and be gone. Steal a horse. Ride to Sinai. Her head ached with painful thoughts and the cage jolted as it struck a stone.

Everywhere the street bustled with activity. Horses hitched to chariots trotted swiftly ahead, always managing to avoid the people who passed on foot, many of whom carried chickens and goats in their arms or balanced baskets of sturgeon on their heads, fishtails flopping as they walked. A few shrewd looking gentlemen in flowing robes with papyrus scrolls tucked beneath their arms strode down the street and entered a large meeting hall. Kneeling priests weeded papyrus ponds. Beneath a tattered ecru tent, a woman yelled at a skinny yellow dog as she beat a kilim with a stick. Several soldiers leaned in the shade of an arch in disrepair, weapons at their sides, asleep, while a parade of women with gold hoop earrings walked before them, chattering like brightly colored birds.

As they rounded the final corner toward the market, a sudden commotion came over the street. Before them loomed the most magnificent set of carved wooden doors Hannah had ever seen. The wall they split was itself extraordinary, carved with languages and stories from every known civilization, a living mural of history. But before the wooden doors stood five tall men in black robes, their heads shorn. They shoved a man to his knees who was pleading for his life. There was a stone in the dust before him with a scroll flapping beneath it in the ocean breeze. The man brought his hands together, tears trickling from his eyes. He seemed so pitiful, so small before these enormous men in robes.

Suddenly the tallest priest pulled out a sword and deftly cut the man’s arms from his body in two strokes. A guttural scream filled the sky and everyone turned their eyes as the man fell to the ground. Then the priest pulled a torch from the wall and touched it to the bleeding man’s robes, lighting him aflame. The man screamed again and fell to the ground in agony.

The priest threw the torch over the wall and called out, “In the name of the Church of St. Alexander, this man is a pagan, a worshipper of numbers, and he shall die at the door of his master, Hypatia, a heathen witch.”

At that, the enormous wooden doors opened, and a furious woman emerged flanked by two guards, her pale hair bound up on top of her head, her eyes condemning. She carried the torch that the priest had thrown.

“This man is my servant,” she cried out. “And he has done nothing aside from dutifully attend all of human knowledge with his whole heart. How dare you bring this spiteful war to our gates. You may tell your bishop I refuse to read his letter,” she picked up the scroll from beneath the stone and lit it on fire with the torch in her hand, and then tossed it at the feet of the priests. Then she spit, “And I curse him.”

Hannah and the others cowered in the cage, afraid of what these priests might do to the beautiful and daring woman who opposed them. But they simply turned and left.

The woman whispered something to one of her guards, who then unsheathed his sword and stabbed the man on the ground who had lost his arms and was still burning, whimpering and close to death. The sword pierced the soft flesh at the base of his neck, and sunk down into his heart, and it was over.

That was all Hannah could see of the scene as the cart turned the corner and left the mob behind. She thought she could hear the enormous doors swinging shut, bolted from the inside. Hannah was breathing heavily, her whole body trembling. But beside her the young girl broke into heavy wailing, screaming to be set free, throwing herself against the bars of the cage. Hannah pulled the girl into her arms and stroked her head, and then she began to sing to calm her. The song had its effect, and soon the girl was asleep.

2  

So.

It was Tarek who bought the girl in the
agora
.

The slave traders had set her on the block, long dark hair swept in front of her shoulders to hide the ugly gash across her breast, wrists bound so that she could not feel her fingers. The humiliation stung worse than a field of nettles.

Another bidder, an older gentleman with a gilded cane, eyed the girl on the block with her young plump bosom and her long limbs, checking her teeth and running his hand down one of her sinuous arms, then smacking her hip as if she were a horse and clutching her breast in his hand. She spit in his eye.

Tarek had been on his way to see a whore he favored. He could not remember her name. They were to meet beside the city fountain. He had not intended to stop in the market, but he wanted to buy a flute. His was broken. All women love a flute, and he wanted where flutes lead. But instead he saw the trembling girl on the trader’s block, and her eyes reached for him and pleaded beauty he had never seen. He forgot the flute and counted his coins.

He knew his father would protest. But those eyes. Perhaps he could purchase her and keep her all the same. The mind that wants can reason anything.

Hannah stood in her soiled clothes before a hungry crowd that pressed the block. She was the last to be sold. Her captors had done well. The pretty girl with brown eyes had gone to the wealthy bawd of a brothel on the wharf. The mother and daughter as chattel to a decorated captain on his way to Rome. Hannah was left. Their prize. She was illiterate, but of extraordinary beauty, and the one was worth twice the other. And then there was her talent. Oh, yes. She would bring them a handsome coin.

Sing, beauty.

She sealed her lips.

A knife was pressed to the small of her back.

Sing.

Her lips parted.

Twenty
solidi
.

Fifty.

Seventy-five.

Then a skinny boy with a tangle of dark hair dismounted and led his horse through the crowd, waving a bag of coins. One hundred
solidi
.

Sold.

After surrendering his gold coins to the slave traders the girl was shuttled from the trader’s block and pushed into the hairy arms of a blacksmith who swiftly bound her neck in a bronze collar which read the name and address of where to return her should she escape. His fiery clamp hissed in her ear as metal found metal, and it was done.

The boy took her hands in his, and the cool dampness of them disgusted her; he had fish where hands should be. She looked away.

“You will come with me,” he said. “My name is Tarek. I will take you to a bath and a good home. My father’s home.”

Hannah heard the Greek like some new melody. She did not know the meaning of the words, but could feel the warmth within them. If this stranger offered some protection, then she would stay with him until he slept, and then escape to find her father. And so she allowed herself to be led, limping barefoot across the cobbles, her feet still swollen and bloody from miles of walking the road.

Tarek’s guilt at spending the money gnawed holes in his gut where certainty should have been. This girl would eat and drink and cost his father’s house, and there might be upheaval. The money he had paid for her was to go to supplies for the vineyard. This would not go over well. Tarek considered other options. Then it struck him that he could hide her in his room. Give her mending to do and keep her a secret until, until… and it was here his reasoning dissolved. Perhaps he would just hide her and figure out the rest when the time came.

Tarek guided her through the market district just outside the Jewish Quarter along the narrow alleys that wound beneath a small hill, atop which stood the skeleton of a massive temple library once called the Serapeum. The ruins were flanked with marble statues of Isis kneeling all along the periphery, most of them missing heads or bearing broken wings. At the center of the courtyard stood a tall black column twenty-six meters in height, twenty feet in diameter, and crowned with the porphyry statue of Diocletian, a ruler now forgotten. It was a latrine for beggars now.

As they wound deeper into the labyrinth of the city, Hannah began to loose her footing. She struggled to hold her head up as a sudden faintness came over her, and the heat surged upward in her blood. Her limbs became heavy and tired. Then her knees buckled.

It seemed Tarek had bought her only for her to die.

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