Written in the Ashes (5 page)

Hannah stared at the strange polished brass square in her hands. She lifted one finger to trace her eyebrows, her rounded nose. She flared her nostrils, then grimaced, then smiled and curled her plump lips back to examine her teeth. Hearing footsteps behind her, she abruptly set the brass mirror back on the table as her cheeks reddened with shame. Shame, the unbidden emotion that followed her everywhere like a hungry dog.

Alizar chuckled, intrigued by the girl whose aura filled the house like the scent of wild thyme. The ferocity of her sensual beauty was not lost on him, nor was the pain in her eyes. Somehow, in spite of all that had happened to her, she carried herself like nobility. No. More than that. He studied her. She stood like a proud bird of some kind, a heron or a hawk. That kind of grace could not be learned.

Alizar did not seem upset about the mirror, but handed her a broom and indicated the steps leading from the lower hall to the roof. “There is a door there at the top of the stairs. You are not to enter. Sweep the steps and then return to the kitchen to help Jemir prepare supper. We have important guests tonight.”

Hannah nodded. Alizar was still doing her the courtesy of speaking in Aramaic, but he was gradually mixing in some Greek so she would learn. When he left, she took the broom to the stairs and began sweeping the bottom step, gradually working her way up. The stairway was long and irregular, with three separate landings. It meandered around the perimeter of the house, which was beset with tiny windows offering views of the market, the fallen Serapeum, and a long and important seeming wall that shielded five large, ornate buildings. At the first landing, Hannah paused and took a long look out across her new world, the world she would escape at the next available opportunity. She had never been in a city before, only dreamed of them, but in her dreams she frolicked through the passageways and danced beneath the roofs. She cursed the Egyptians that built the city, but did not know that it was not the ancient Egyptians who built Alexandria at all. It had been the Greeks seven hundred years before her time, led by Ptolemy, Alexander the Great’s revered and trusted general who upon Alexander’s death had taken the legendary leader’s corpse with him into Egypt in the hope of founding a new seat for the Egyptian Empire in Alexandria. It was Ptolemy who envisioned and planned the Great Library, and Ptolemy whose lineage eventually birthed Queen Cleopatra. Hannah would learn these things and more once Alizar made his decision about her.

Broom in hand, Hannah resumed her task, and then realized that the sweeping would go much better if she started at the top of the stairs rather than the bottom so the detritus would gradually filter down. And that was when she saw the forbidden door, only she was not sure if it was the forbidden door or not, because there was another nearly identical door through a short passage just beyond it. Curiosity overcame her.

The first door she came to was unmarked, and there was a large key stuck in the lock. The second door beyond the passage had no key, and was marked by an unusual symbol burned into the wood: twin serpents ascending a staff toward a winged disk. Hannah decided that this had to be the forbidden door she was not to enter, and so made her way back through the passage.

Hannah had never seen a key before, or a door for that matter, until she came to Alizar’s house. In the pastures of Mt. Sinai, no one locked up the moon or threw a roof over the trees. The closest things she knew to architecture were the wooden staves of her father’s tent and the branches of the old olive tree on the hill. But by the firelight of many evenings, she had listened to the stories of the gypsies, and the palaces they told of in Persia and the Akropolis in Greece, and all the mighty ships sailed by swarthy men out of the Aegean Sea. So she was in no way ignorant of the wonders of civilization; those wonders had simply not included her before.

The key turned, and the door swung open on its own. Hannah stepped inside, forgetting her broom, for there on a bed in the center of the room lay an old woman, both hands folded over her ribcage. Was this a corpse? Hannah quickly shut the door behind her. She sensed that she should not be in the room, but she could not bring herself to leave. Who was this woman? And how did she come to be here? Hannah slowly approached the bed, knowing she could at any moment be caught. But she wanted to get closer to the luminous body of this celestial figure laid out before her.

At the foot of the bed, Hannah paused. Though the woman’s eyes were closed, a thin thread of breath wove in and out of her nostrils. She was sleeping.

Hannah cautiously edged around the bed, completely captivated. The pale stillness of the woman’s face made her look as though she had been carved of marble, and though she was old, her beauty had never faded. The mysterious woman exuded a tranquil peace that seemed to calm all Hannah’s fears instantaneously. How could a sleeping body do such a thing? Hannah sat on a velvet-cushioned stool beside the bed facing the woman and watched her for a long time, grateful to be in such soothing company, unaware of the passage of time. It was the first time in weeks Hannah felt safe, a treasured feeling she had nearly forgotten.

A slight ocean breeze from a north-facing balcony nudged two sheer luminous veils draped around the bed, lifting them like the hands of a dancing phantom. The scent of the sea was stronger in that room than in any other Hannah had been in, sweet and salt-laden. She relished it, breathing in and licking her lips. She did not want to leave the woman’s bedside the way she would not want to draw her cold hands away from a fire. So she closed her eyes and dozed lightly in the chair.

After a while, a rustling sound woke her, and Hannah glanced down on the floor to see loose pages of parchment fluttering like so many dying fish. Without thinking, she bent to collect them and bound them into a stack with a bit of red string left on a table near the bed. Then she remembered her sweeping, paid the peaceful old woman a long last look, and returned to her chores, turning the key in the lock as she left, relieved she had not been discovered.

Each day, Hannah felt compelled to return to the woman’s bedside. She would hurry through her washing to have enough time remaining to sweep the stairs before Jemir needed assistance in the kitchen. Each day it was the same. The pages of parchment had been strewn about the floor by the breeze, and so Hannah would collect them and bind them and set them on the table. Then she would sit for as long as she could on the backless chair that was turned toward the bed where the woman lay in absolute peace.
In peace
. That she lay in perfect peace was all Hannah knew about her. Of course, she wanted very much to know more, but feared that any inquiry would expose her secret visitations to the woman’s bedside, and she could not bear the thought of not being able to return to her private refuge. For that was what sitting beside the sleeping woman had become to her: a refuge.

After several weeks, the secret routine had not changed. There were the papers, the chair where Hannah sat and watched the woman sleep, and then sweeping the stairs. But one day, Hannah did something she had not done previously, and it would not go so easily unnoticed.

She opened her throat in song.

Hannah had simply wanted to give something back to the beautiful woman that had brought her a handful of precious peaceful hours.

So.

Even the angel listened in the eaves, waiting.

Hannah sang a childhood song full of warmth and merriment as tears flowed down her cheeks. Hannah could not remember the last time she had sung. In Sinai, shepherd songs had been the marrow of her days. She did not know who she was without them. Yet in Alexandria, she had forgotten the sound of her own voice and become someone else. A silent, orphaned slave.

Jemir came looking for Hannah when he realized they were running low on water, and more would need to be drawn from the cistern for the soup. He opened his mouth to call her name from the bottom of the stairs, but he heard the singing and froze, for it was the most beautiful sound that had ever reached his ears. He drank it in, closing his eyes. He wanted it to go on as he was transported back to his boyhood, when his mother and his sisters sang together, a time when his family was still alive. A tear sprouted from his eye, which he quickly wiped away.

Alizar passed through the lower hall a few minutes later and saw Jemir standing there with his ear tipped to the wall, and assumed he was listening for a rat. “I do hope you kill it. It has eaten all the basil in the upstairs pots.”

“No, come listen.” Jemir waved for Alizar to stand in the same spot and hear what he was hearing.

“Praise Zeus,” Alizar whispered. “Is that girl singing to my wife? I told her that room was forbidden.” Alizar nudged him. “Go and get her. Governor Orestes is coming for dinner, and there is much to prepare.” Jemir looked at him. “Go on,” said Alizar.

And so Jemir ascended the steps, swinging the empty water bucket, only Hannah met him at the second landing. “Jemir,” she said. “I have finished the sweeping.”

“Yes,” said Jemir. “Good.” He did not make any mention of her singing. How could he? He did not want her to stop.

That evening, Jemir and Hannah arranged three place settings at a long wooden Byzantine table in the courtyard beneath a sprawling old fig tree that had seen many gatherings beneath its curling branches. Jemir explained that the governor and his wife were coming for supper, and that it was imperative that all the serving go perfectly. Hannah nodded in understanding.

Alizar was seated within the hour, his large red Pharaoh hounds resting at his feet as he enjoyed a cup of Mareotis wine in the mosaic pattern of light cast from the candles.

“Orestes, Phoebe, welcome to my table.” Alizar stood for his guests and opened his hands, indicating the places set for them. He wore a burgundy robe of fine Damask linen, embroidered along the length with edging of golden acanthus, a
corona
of lavender flowers on his head. He looked like an emperor to Hannah, who had never seen such finery. She brought out the baskets of Roman bread and bowed politely.

Orestes and Phoebe took their seats on twin blue silk cushions that adorned the high backed chairs, and remarked between them that it had been years since they had seen Alizar looking so happy, a reference to his recent gain in weight, which they knew to be a sign of contentment and prosperity. The garrulous old friends chatted happily as the feast was brought out, for they had not seen each other in some time.

There was lamb roasted with honey pepper sauce set beside leafy cabbage fans cradling a lentil tomato pilaf, as well as three large baked hogfish stuffed with cheese and slathered in olive oil and vinegar, served whole on a bed of finely sliced onion. At the center of the table were two amphora filled with the wine from the eastern shores of Lake Mareotis, and on either end, twin ceramic
amphoriskos
carved with scenes of black satyrs, brimming with viscous olive oil. The wine amphora bore a stamp in the clay of two griffins rearing over a chalice resting between them.

Hannah watched from the window in the kitchen, a stray band of dark hair plunging between her eyes toward her chin like a knife. “Jemir, what does he do?”

Jemir dried his large hands on a rag at his hip and walked to the window. “Alizar? He is a vintner.”

“Vintner,” repeated Hannah.

“Yes, makes wine.”

“Ah, wine!” exclaimed Hannah, understanding this new word that she had learned earlier in the day. She fetched a bottle from the table and brought it to Jemir. “His wine?”

Jemir smiled, his yellow teeth wedged within a face as black as licorice bark, and took the bottle. “
Neh
.” Then he cracked the head of the bottle on the edge of the table and poured two cups, one for each of them.

Outside, Alizar spoke with his hands, gesticulating with the playfulness of the Greeks. There was an ease between him and his guests that comes only with the passing of many years; each finished the sentences of the others, and laughter was as much there for what was said as for what was left unsaid.

Jemir took a sip of the heady dark wine and fingered his mustache contemplatively, then continued his earlier explanation for Hannah’s benefit. “His vineyards here in Egypt are twenty-five kilometers outside of Alexandria to the east, on the fertile shores of Lake Mareotis. He owns twelve presses and thirty kilns, and there are almost seventy women who tend them. When he inherited the vineyards from his uncle he did not have men for the harvest, so he offered to house fallen courtesans and their sons that would have otherwise been left to beg in the street. Everyone in Alexandria called him a madman, but the wine he set on their tables in following years gained him the prestige he now has, of being the finest vintner in the whole of the Mediterranean. When he inherited the business forty years ago, its worth was counted in
tremissis
, but now it is worth a purse of gold
nomismata
. In the last ten years he has acquired more land outside of Athens, and planted another vineyard there as well. And I have been with him now for nearly thirty years, as I was with his uncle before him in Epidavros when I was just a boy. The time has passed so quickly.” He smiled, the years showing nowhere but in the crinkle of skin beside his eyes. Where silver hair would surely crown his head, his skull was shaved smooth. “The gods have been good to us.”