Written in the Ashes (47 page)

A few moments passed and then a stooped, formally clad elder appeared in the hollow of a small open passage that led out of the room. He wore long robes the color of sand decorated with black stripes, and for a moment Hannah thought perhaps he might be a scribe, until she noticed that one of the man’s long black sleeves concealed a withered hand. As he came closer, Hannah saw that this was not his only misfortune. Both his eyes were capped by snowy cataracts, a condition that she had seen many times among the elder shepherds of Sinai, which afflicted many desert dwellers due to the harsh conditions of the climate. The old priest sensed the strangers before him and smiled politely, taking a seat in front of them, swatting the flies away.

“Welcome, Welcome. Omar-the-Goat, I am,” said the elder in broken Egyptian. Then he coughed violently and spat on the floor. Tarek looked at Gideon, who looked at Alizar, who looked back at Jemir, who looked at Hannah. No one knew quite what to do, but since Tarek and Alizar were the only two among them who spoke Egyptian, they responded by introducing themselves, and then Alizar explained where they were from.

This pleased the old man who laughed, coughed, spat, and then said cheerfully, “The dung of your people has not been smelled here for a thousand years! Delighted we are you have come.”

“Is he the king?” Gideon leaned in toward Alizar.

“No,” whispered Alizar in Greek. “A magician or possibly a priest. I suspect he seldom has visitors. It could be the first time in half a century he has even spoken Egyptian to anyone.”

The priest nodded his head, as though he understood. Then he said, “Fruit we have for you, our guests.” Then he whispered to the crouching boy with the staff who leapt to his feet and rushed off, returning with a tray of the most beautiful food any of them had seen in weeks. There were perfect white grapes, blood oranges, dates, figs, glassy plums and a sweet red fruit that Hannah had never seen before that looked exactly like a tomato.

When they had eaten a little and praised the food to their host, Alizar opened his palm and rained silver coins on the straw mat before them. “We would like to consult the Oracle of Amun-Ra,” he said. “Can you take us there?”

Omar-the-Goat pressed his lips together and cast his limp gaze down to the floor for a long time. “No oracle,” he said.

“No oracle?” asked Alizar.

“No oracle,” said the old priest, scooping up the coins with his good hand as though he could see them perfectly, dropping them into the leather satchel at his hip. “No, no, no oracle today. Come tomorrow.”

Alizar began to protest, but Omar-the-Goat shook his head and resolutely held up the palm of his hand. “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said, and then he shooed the men and children out of the room as though they were chickens.

So.

The next nine days played out in precisely the same manner. Every morning the caravan would awaken to the flaming desert sun and the round, peaceful eyes of the children watching them sleep. The children would then rush them into the city to see the blind old priest who would feed them fresh fruit and announce happily when they inquired about the Oracle of Amun-Ra, “Tomorrow.”

“What should we do, Alizar?” asked Gideon, whose dark beard was growing in, gradually erasing the scar along his cheek. “The
Kahmsin
winds are approaching. If we do not leave soon, I fear we will be stranded here.”

Alizar poked at the campfire with a stick and a spray of sparks flew up and vanished in between the constellations. “The new moon is five days off. I believe this is why he is making us wait.”

“What if I go exploring the cliffs to the north of the city? I have seen people up there,” said Tarek, “and dwellings.”

“No, I think we should be patient,” said Alizar. “If by the new moon he does not agree to take us to the oracle, then I permit you to explore, Tarek.”

Tarek let out a sigh, but did not argue.

On the morning of the new moon, the caravan gathered at the mouth of the city and followed the children to see Omar-the-Goat. Right away, the routine shifted. Alizar smiled a knowing smile at the others as the children proceeded to lead them, not up the stairs like before, but behind the city and up a steep slope where a row of little huts stood huddled together like birds on a short branch. Eventually they came to a wide vista overlooking the entire valley where a large rectangular temple made of the same ruddy clay as everything else rose up impressively; its twenty or so columns of red granite were ornamented with intricate carvings depicting the story of one of the Egyptian pharaohs, presumably Akhenaton, given the long goose-like curve of his neck and the round belly. A mammoth obelisk stood in the courtyard just as Alexander the Great had described in his journals.

“
Omm Beyda
,” whispered Alizar.

The Temple of Amun-Ra.

So.

The children scattered and disappeared with whoops of excitement, leaving the caravan outside the temple to wait in the growing heat of the day. At first they stood and paced eagerly, but as time wore on they realized that an immediate audience with the oracle was not in store. Tarek took out a sheet of parchment and a sprig of charcoal he had sharpened on a stone that morning and began to take impressions of the carvings. Hannah and Alizar opted to recline against the shade of the wall and chat while Gideon and Jemir played several rounds of tipstone, a game where two opponents used alabaster balls rolled at a distance toward a triangular configuration of twenty rectangular stones, ten white and ten black, in attempts to tip the opponent’s stones while leaving their own upright. Tarek remained reticent seated on the wide cliff overlooking the palace of the king and queen with its four sprawling courtyards and tremendous statues set at specific intervals to catch the sunlight, statues that according to legend would speak at certain times of day.

“Do you imagine we will be going home soon, Alizar?” Hannah’s eyes looked hollow and dim. In the last several days, her optimistic curiosity had been replaced with deepening concern.

Alizar placed a hand on her shoulder. “Do not worry, Hannah. We will be back even before the moon turns another cycle. You will see.”

“If you say so.”

Alizar lowered his voice. “Are you well?”

Hannah nodded. “How is it you remain so strong after all you have been through, Alizar? You have lost a son and two wives, yet you seem so full of faith.”

Alizar closed his eyes against the sun and thoughts drifted like clouds through his mind. “Hannah,” he began slowly, “as a shepherd you have within you a sense of the natural world and its forces that the people of civilization cannot even begin to imagine. In this way, you have something even greater than faith because you have an understanding of your place in the family of things, whereas I cling to my cumbersome instruments and my incomplete maps, always unsure. My faith, if you can call it that, stems from knowing that whatever trial I face is my teacher. Resistance takes energy, you see. Better to just surrender to the greater forces that brought us this birth.” Alizar licked his rough lips and looked up at the sky, running a hand through his matted hair. “At my age, Hannah, I have seen that even my mistakes were the right path, so I do not worry so much about making them anymore, but I do make an effort to keep some fuel in the lantern, so to speak. You cannot let your light go out, no matter what you face. You must keep your humor in adversity; it is all you have.” Alizar touched Hannah’s shoulder to reassure her.

Hannah smiled weakly, looking out over the sea of palm trees dancing in the scorching breeze, and then she turned back to Alizar. There was a question she had been meaning to ask him, and she decided that this was an opportune time. “In the time I have lived in your home, Alizar, I have seen you come and go from many different churches and synagogues. But what God do you pray to?”

Alizar smiled and stretched his arms overhead as Jemir scored three tips in his game and howled in victory, his elbows thrust out in a quirky chicken dance. “Why, I pray to them all, Hannah,” he said.

Hannah made a face. “You cannot pray to them all,” she said flatly.

“Oh, but I do,” said Alizar, a playful look in his eyes. “You see, the one God, the Great I Am of Moses, is a radiant mystery, like a light that is too bright to look upon. And so we interpret that light through colored glass, a bit like the dome in the Great Library. Each color is a name we give it: Yahweh, Ahura Mazda, Krishna, Isis, Poseidon, Demeter, Elohim. It is as though we can only describe that much greatness by naming it in part. By definition, I think God, or Goddess, must be beyond our intellectual comprehension, the way geometry is beyond what a fish can ever know.”

Hannah folded her arms. “If what you say is true, then for the Egyptians, Seth and Osiris would be the same, but that cannot be, as one is evil and one is good.”

Alizar smiled. “You are right. Osiris and Seth are as opposite as day and night. But day and night have something subtle in common, do they not?”

“They have nothing in common.”

“But they do. Day and night are events of the sky. Now the sun. Now the stars. Now the moonlight. They sky does not say, ‘Oh, the sun is leaving and I cannot abide the night’s return. I think I shall just be day from now on.’ So when I say I pray to all the gods, I do. They are each a necessary aspect of the formless God.”

“So you are a pagan, then?”

“You ask me if I am pagan, I say yes. You ask me if I am Christian, I say yes. You ask me to which religion I adhere, I answer that I adhere to any religion that has love as its foundation, truth as its windows, faith as its door. Anything less is drawing lines in the sand. How should we decide where to draw those lines? I draw one here, you draw one there. We erect cities and we defend the lines and many innocent people die. For what? For God? God has no boundaries. God knows no separation. We are the ones who imagine separation. For us, Hannah, there is leaving God in birth and there is returning to God in death, and in between there is only this breath. Whatever the religious interpretation, I believe it is the breath of God.”

“Are you not afraid of the Parabolani?”

“I have no fear of the Parabolani or the bishop. If they kill me, they will kill only a man.” Alizar smiled, quite satisfied with himself.

The angel within Hannah’s womb turned, listening. The door had offered this new delight.

“Thank you, Alizar. Your words give me courage.” Hannah smiled as a flock of songbirds swept over her head.

Alizar walked to the ledge, thinking to himself how all his life he had been one of those loquacious little pfiefes, jabbering on and on about things that no one else bothered to consider. For a moment, he felt an ache of longing in his heart for the privacy of his tower, where the muse permitted him endless hours of uninterrupted contemplation and creation. This was something that Alizar had never been able to reconcile: when high in his tower, creating and inventing, he longed for adventure and the world, and when out in the world, he pined for his little tower and the universes it contained. He was nothing to himself if not this endless wheel of contradictions.

As the sun approached its zenith in the sky, the otiose caravan sought shade around the temple to escape the blaring heat. Without much else to do, they fell asleep. Late in the afternoon they awakened from their naps to devour the remainder of Jemir’s bannocks. As they began to argue about how long to keep waiting, a tall Egyptian priest appeared beneath a slim archway in the outer wall. “The Oracle of Amun-Ra will see you now,” he said with a formal nod.

Hannah was the first to fly to her feet.

The stoic Egyptian priest led them through a high-walled courtyard and a narrow tunnel and into the first hall of the temple. It was a spectacle that no one could have imagined. Inside, the large rectangular limestone temple was supported by six massive columns set at even intervals around the room, and at one end, a gurgling spring bubbled cool water into a wide stone basin. “
Fons Solis
,” whispered Alizar, quoting again from Alexander’s journal. “The Fountain of the Sun. It feeds the entire oasis.”

Seven steps led up through a tremendous archway carved of pale stone, covered in hieroglyphics. Tarek translated the words set in stone above the steps. “Look down, not towards the step above, lest ye become proud.” Beyond the inscription stood the second hall, where high overhead, the body of the celestial goddess Nut had been painted across the entire ceiling, her arms and feet stretching from one wall to the other, her mouth swallowing the sun. The columns, walls, and even floor had also been painted with colorful Egyptian murals, most of which depicted the god Amun-Ra interacting with his priests, but a few indicated the tasks of every day life. Women held blue lotus flowers before their naked bellies as men fished from small lateens encircled by crocodiles. Vertical lines of hieroglyphics bridged the images. Alizar instructed Tarek to make several quick sketches, hoping their host would afford them the time to linger a moment.

A sight at the end of the temple caught Hannah’s eye. There, beyond the swirling smoke of the thick incense, sat a long golden barge on a raised dais. Hannah looked up to the wall and noticed an identical barge in miniature captained by Amun-Ra and supported by twenty priests, the weight of it set upon the shoulders of the god’s willing devotees. She pointed it out to Gideon, and as she did, she realized it was the first time she had thought to share something with him without wishing he was Julian. Her hand went to her belly. She would have to tell him of the child. She had wanted to tell him every day, but there was always some interruption. In truth, she might have overcome these, but she feared he would reject her, and she had come to rely on him, and appreciate his support. She had to admit her attachment had grown so strong that she did not want to lose him.