Written in the Ashes (4 page)

Jemir was the first to hear the odd sound from deep within the walls of the house. He looked up from the afternoon task of organizing the spices in his kitchen, an activity he greatly preferred to any interruption.

Then it came again.

It sounded as if a peacock had gotten into the house and started rearranging the furniture upstairs. He waited several minutes, and, hearing nothing more, took up a handful of fine cinnamon powder and set it on a sheet of parchment, which he then folded lengthwise and carefully tapped into a funnel set precariously on top of a jar. When the powder was half dispensed, a crash came through the wall with such sudden force that Jemir looked up with a start and knocked the funnel from the jar with his elbow, sending aloft a most expensive cloud of spice.

With a sneeze and a torrent of obscenities, Jemir threw down the rag resting on his shoulder and went in search of the interruption.

He was not the only one.

Leitah, the young Byzantine maidservant, simultaneously dropped her soggy sponge in the bucket on the stairs and crept through the house with her ear bent to the walls.

Both Jemir and Leitah followed the sound from opposite ends of the house, and came to stand in front of Tarek’s door. They shared a conspiratorial nod and Jemir set his hand on the iron latch, but as he lifted it, he found it was locked.

Jemir knocked. “Tarek? What are you doing in there?”

There was no reply. Then came the muffled, mysterious shrieking.

Jemir knocked again, but as his knuckles struck the door for the third time, it opened in front of him and Tarek appeared, shutting the door behind him. “It is nothing,” he said, beads of sweat at his temples, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. His bare chest bled where he had been scratched.

Leitah touched the blood on Tarek’s skin and recoiled. She showed her burnished red fingertip to Jemir without a word.

“You cannot bring a peacock in the house, Tarek.” Jemir pushed the boy aside. “They are stupid birds that will fight even their own reflections.”

“No.” Tarek covered the door with his scrawny limbs and fixed his eyes on the squat Nubian cook with a look that was not to be challenged.

With that, an argument ensued that involved much shoving and yelling of insults between Jemir and Tarek. Even a stranger could have inferred that each held unspoken past grievances against the other. Leitah slipped away unnoticed. When she returned, it was with two enormous red hounds and their master between them.

“Silence!” One ominous word from Alizar ended the squabble between Jemir and Tarek instantly. “Explain yourselves.”

Jemir and Tarek bowed their heads.

Alizar set his penetrating gaze on Jemir. “Speak.”

“He has a peacock in his room.”

“No, there is nothing,” insisted Tarek.

“A strange sound disturbed my work,” said Jemir. “I came up here to investigate. Leitah heard it as well.”

The mute servant girl nodded.

“Tarek, is there something in your room?” Alizar asked. Tarek cringed at the simple question, for he knew the wrath of Poseidon that would be unleashed if he lied. When punished as a child, Tarek would envision Alizar standing over him as if at the surf’s edge, wild white mane swirling in the storm above him, trident in hand, lightning flashing in the distance as his sonorous voice lashed out. Tarek wanted to lie, but he could not summon any story worthy enough. The truth would have to do.

“Yes.”

“Go on. What is it?”

Tarek pushed open the door. “Is
she
.”

And that was when he revealed to them his secret, the girl he had been hiding in his room for nearly a week. The girl he had purchased for one hundred gold
solidi
in the market who had neither died nor recovered.

“Hermes, Zeus and Apollo.” Alizar swept a hand through his white mane and stopped in the center of the room, for there was Hannah, naked, curled against the wall at the corner of the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her hair was matted and wild about her body, as though she had crawled beneath a dead bougainvillea bush. Her skin glistened with sweat, and the sheets beneath her were soaked through. The acrid stench in the room of sweat, urine, and vomit was overwhelming, and drew a curtain of flies.

Alizar did not turn his eyes from the girl. “Jemir, shut the door.”

The door clicked shut.

“Tarek, where did she come from?”

“The market.”

“I do not mean the market, boy. Tell me where she comes from.” Alizar studied the girl before him. This was no Egyptian slave. Her skin might have made her Persian for its smooth burnish the color of sandalwood, but her eyes…her eyes were a blue as dark and deep as the Sardinian sea.

“I, I do not know,” Tarek stammered. “I bought her.”

“You what?”

Tarek bowed his head and lied. “For you.”

Alizar’s eyes could have impaled the boy. “For me. I hardly think so. And that is a matter I will attend to in fine detail at another time. For now, I must see to this child. What language does she speak, Tarek?”

“I do not know.”

A whimper escaped Hannah’s lips as a tear slipped down her cheek. Her whole body shook as if in the cold, though the room was an inferno. She was aware that these strange men were discussing her, and the fear she had felt on the road was unequaled by this new wave of terror. What would they do with her now?

Leitah’s feminine instincts swelled within her, and she tiptoed to the bed. She reached out tenderly and took the girl’s hand. Hannah suddenly jolted to life, and struck out with flailing fists. Leitah stood up and reached forward to take her shoulders, whispering soothing words as Hannah thrashed about until she finally calmed down and began to cry. When Hannah had no resistance left in her, Leitah took the poor thing in her arms and rocked her, wiping the sticky hair back from her shoulders. This revealed the unhealed gash where the raiders had cut her. Hannah trembled soundlessly, her body given over to shock.

Jemir, who stood beside the door, said accusingly, “What have you done to her, Tarek?”

Tarek bowed his head. “Nothing. I swear it. I have tried to feed her and clothe her, and she refuses every piece of meat I give her. I give her clothes and return to find her like this.”

Alizar sat on the bed, touched the sheets, and regarded the deep festering gash that ran along Hannah’s breast to her sternum. “That needs to be treated by a doctor. Jemir, send for Philomen. Leitah, go and fetch a bucket of warm water and a sponge. Tarek, leave us.”

When they had gone, Alizar spoke softly in Greek. “What is your name, child?”

Hannah’s expression remained unchanged.

Alizar shifted his tongue to Latin. No response. Then to Egyptian. Then to the few words he could still remember from the northern territories of Gaul, then Persia. Nothing.

Finally, it was Hannah who spoke. “My father is coming for me.” She wanted to sound strong, but her voice was hardly a whisper. She lifted her head and spit in Alizar’s face for emphasis, which did more to charm than irk him.

Alizar wiped his cheek on his sleeve and smiled to himself, for here was a daughter of Abraham. Although he could see slight traces of that lineage in her, perhaps in the pout of her lips or the way her straight nose rounded and flared at the tip, it was undoubtedly the aristocracy of Rome he saw in her pronounced cheek bones, her well-sculpted jaw, her high brow and oceanic eyes. Alizar listened closely, turning her words over again in his mind. It was Aramaic, the language of the Jewish shepherds. How did she come to be so far from home? Her bronze collar seemed evidence enough. The metal was still new enough to retain its polish. She must have been captured, taken from her family, and then sold. “Calm yourself,” said Alizar in her native tongue. “No one is going to hurt you here. I have sent for a doctor. You are not well. You must rest. Do you have a name?”

“My father,” Hannah pleaded. Her voice was even weaker now, and her eyes had begun the inward collapse of the very ill.

Alizar stood, and opened the window to ventilate the stifling room. “I do not know, child. First, we must make you well. Then we will discuss your father, and how you came to be in Alexandria.”

“Alexandria.” Hannah tasted the beautiful word, the same word the men had spoken when they entered the city, and she knew then where she must be.

She did not remember the days that followed as a torrid fever struck her body, hot rivers of fire flooding her veins. The infection of the wound had taken deep root, and though Leitah traced a cool rag over her neck and forehead, it did not abate. Philomen, Alizar’s preferred doctor from the Great Library, came several times over the week to prescribe herbs and tinctures, but he finally clucked his tongue and told Alizar to secure a small grave. She would not live the night. Pity.

But within the fever’s grip, Hannah turned. She dreamed the kinds of dreams that mystics stumble upon at the onset of enlightenment, when the world is luminous and still, staved with a golden light that comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Her body housed a shrine to the stars as galaxies unfurled in her belly, and the sun and moon circled like young lovers in her heart. The drum of her pulse became to her inner ear a siege of soldiers marching across a bleak desert, their steps pounding the parched earth. Everywhere she searched for her father, behind doors that blossomed into clouds, and in faces that dissolved into other faces from other times, some familiar and some utterly foreign and disfigured.

Jemir, Alizar, Leitah and Tarek each came to the girl’s bed independently of one another, each performing the same ritual. They stood in the room watching her breathe, unconsciously measuring the length of her inhalations and exhalations, studying the rise and fall of her chest, knowing at any moment she might die, perhaps at the very moment they were standing in the room. They were fascinated by the possibility even as it unnerved them. How they wanted to keep her with them.

In fleeting wakeful moments, Hannah searched for a feeling inside her body that would tell her that her father was alive. Would she not feel something if he was gone? A father-shaped hole in her heart? But she felt only the sickness.

So.

On the fifth morning, her fever broke.

By midday, she was able to nibble on the Roman bread and fig jam brought by Jemir. And then sleep, the deep relief of dreamless sleep.

Her recovery was quick after the infection left her body. The wound closed, leaving a slick scar glossy as a feather, and the doctor seemed pleased with himself and the work of the poultice. When she was well enough to walk, and stand, and dress herself, Alizar appointed Hannah the washing maid and set baskets of laundry in her arms, reluctantly forgiving Tarek’s blunder as he had a growing fondness for the intelligent girl. He hoped she would behave.

Hannah humbly accepted her new life, as she knew she had to appear complacent in order to plan her escape. There would not be much time. She had already been gone from the waning crescent moon to the full. Perhaps when she found her father they could repay Alizar with several fine goats from the herd. He had saved her life, and she did not want his generosity to go unrewarded.

In the evening she found an upstairs window and ate her supper alone, conspiring with the moon. She knew the odds of a young girl alone being caught by another slave trader on the road, but it did not matter to her. She knew she could be cunning, for she was raised in the desert. She could certainly escape a city.

Her opportunity came two nights later when Alizar’s cistern ran dry. They needed to go to the town well to buy water. It was open all night, guarded by soldiers who collected the fees and tried to prevent theft. Water was rationed and valuable, and could be sold by the gallon on the black market to anyone who could afford it.

Tarek, Leitah and Hannah left Alizar’s house with buckets hanging from sticks over their shoulders, and still larger barrels on a cart pulled by two goats that the buckets could be used to fill. The coins for the water were in Tarek’s possession. Hannah eyed them, swinging from a purse at his belt. She would need money. But it seemed wrong to steal from Alizar’s purse after he had brought her back from death, and so she decided to steal from someone else if need be. It was something she hated to do, as thieving was something her father always taught her was wrong. Certainly he might make this one exception.

As they neared the well, Hannah began to bounce in place with her hands between her knees. Leitah recognized the gesture immediately, and directed her to one of the public latrines in the next alley. Tarek gave Hannah one copper coin to pay the guard at the entrance. As Hannah hoped, Tarek and Leitah turned away to begin the long process of drawing the water. Instead of heading into the latrine, she pocketed the coin, walked down the alley, then turned into the next alley and broke into a run. No one saw her. She made her way through the alleys all night until she could see a promising patch of open desert at the end of Canopic Way and broke into a run.

She was caught trying to leave the Gate of the Sun. The guards there grabbed her wrists as she tried to pass and pushed her hair aside to reveal the bronze slave collar. They simply locked her in a cage until Tarek found her at dawn. The guards opened their palms, expecting payment. Tarek reluctantly complied with a
nummus
each. When they unlocked the cage, he smacked her hard across the face with the back of his hand, and she dropped to her knees. “Do not ever disrespect my father’s house again,” he said, and she began to cry.

She might have attempted another escape right away had she not discovered the secret door in Alizar’s house at the top of the stairs, and what lay beyond.

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