Written in the Ashes (53 page)

Alizar sat upon a flat grey stone in the floor, his elbows folded across his bent knees, head down, shoulders burdened with regret. A shaft of light from the window fell across his back where his
tunica
was torn, and an empty wooden bowl sat beside him, cracked through the center like a ripe melon split open in the sun. These were all the room contained, and had contained, for more days than he could count.

From time to time he stood, walked the five paces to the window, looked out, and then walked the five paces back to the stone where he always sat. So many emotions had moved through him, so much pain and sorrow, yet gradually, it had all emptied into stillness, dreary and vast as a winter sky in his heart.

During the first week of his imprisonment, even in spite of his painful wound, Alizar was hopeful, knowing that Hypatia would enter an appeal with the council. He simply waited and hoped. But the full moon had dimmed countless times. His wound healed badly, leaving him with a wheeze that never went away. Bowls of bread and grain or hot
fuul
had been slipped through the small hole in his door once a day, and then removed. No guards came to see about him. In fact, there were no visitors at all.

Hope became rage. Alizar stormed the tower, screaming profanities out the narrow windows to the world below him. Occasionally someone would look up, then go back to the chore at hand. His fury was fully unleashed for every injustice he had witnessed at the hands of the bishop, from the exile of the Jews and Orestes’s injuries, to his imprisonment. But he had grown tired of the shouting after several weeks, and fell silent. His thoughts of revenge gradually faded, as he knew where revenge led, always to more violence, which inevitably always came back to the vengeful.

Grief followed. For a time Alizar did not stand or stretch, or even lift his head. He missed Sofia, and longed to hear of her life and the years he had missed. And he wanted to know of Orestes, learn the hour when his friend had died, and what words had been spoken at the funeral service. What flowers had been chosen to wreath the dais? What poem? And his business, the vines, so many shipments…could his servants manage them alone for so long? There was no use in wanting to know. He would not know. So.

Alizar came to accept the ignominy and ceased hoping.

Some years into his imprisonment in the tower, a line of large black ants found their way in from a hole in the floor where he was expected to defecate. He awoke in the night to the sensation of being bitten in every spot imaginable, his eyelids, scrotum, belly and neck all aflame from the little welts. So the next morning, he waged war on the ants, killing them as they arose from the stench pit, smashing them with the heel of his palm. But at night when he slept, they returned to sting his lips, his ears, his thighs.

After two weeks of war with the ants, Alizar sat and meditated on his actions. Here they were sharing a world, albeit a small stone one, and he was attacking them, and so they were returning his zealous crusades with their own deft retaliation. In some ways, the ants reminded him of the rampaging thoughts in his mind that he could not control, each of which stung his pride, or his heart, or his hope. When he blamed Cyril, he became sullen and withdrawn. When he blamed himself, he felt the same effect on his psyche. If he fell into self-pity and remorse, his spirits dropped, and his heart burned and troubled him endlessly after he ate.

“There is a lesson here for me,” he said one morning to the ants, clutching the thin woolen blanket that had been slipped through the hole in the door with his food, a much-treasured new possession in the cold winter tower that was once a prison of heat in the summer months. “You are trying to teach me about my thoughts,” he said to them, sitting cross-legged before the hole of shit as they marched in erratic, aimless circles before him. “Perhaps if I observe my mind more closely, I will learn to handle the thoughts that sting,” he said. And so he sat diligently beside the ants, watching his thoughts for many hours. He ceased killing them, although there had been a remarkably large satisfaction in the tiny crunching sound their bodies had made as he crushed them, and he missed the game of their deaths and how it had passed so many hours of imprisonment.

The ants also gradually ceased their attacks on him. He began to feed them whatever precious breadcrumbs were left over from his supper, and they in turn left him alone. And feeding the ants, to his surprise, became an activity he relished far more than killing them. He also appreciated how such tiny beings expressed the intelligence of recognizing his change in attitude toward them enough to, in turn, change their attitudes toward him. The ants became to Alizar intimately cherished friends in so many hours of solitude.

But as the months grew colder, the ants retired to the garden and ceased to come. For many days, Alizar missed them, his tiny companions.

Some weeks later, a raven came to the window, and Alizar sat perfectly still, hoping the bird would stay for even a few minutes. But upon seeing him, the glossy black bird departed, cawing out across the city. Alizar went to the window and set a curl of crust from his bread where the raven had been. The following day, the raven returned, and then the following, and each day thereafter.

Alizar came to call the sententious bird “Caesar”, not after the Roman emperors, but after his beloved hound killed by the Parabolans. Eventually, Caesar would take the crust from Alizar’s fingers, and come to sit with him in the window by the hour. Alizar would ask him all that had happened in the city that day and imagine the bird’s responses, playing them out in his mind. But one day he did not return, and Alizar waited beside the window from dawn to dusk, calling out with the flawless, raspy vocal imitation of a raven that he had mastered over the months. The raven never returned. What Alizar never knew was that the bird had become too familiar with human companionship, and had flown over the necropolis where some boys were playing among the crypts. It had landed on a nearby obelisk that marked a grave, and one of the boys had hoisted a stone and struck it in the throat, and the raven had fallen to the ground dead, red blood soaking the black glossy feathers as the boys laughed and clapped each other on the back, never realizing they had murdered a lonely prisoner’s beloved friend.

Alizar thought of the raven as he sat upon his stone in the floor for most of the day, his heart plagued by loneliness, empty. It was then that a new visitor arrived.

“Regret is a dangerous companion,” said the voice.

Alizar did not even look up. “Yes, so they say.”

“I tried to warn you,” said the voice, coming nearer.

“Yes. You did,” said Alizar. “I was wrong to not heed your warning.” He spoke without looking up. He had long been speaking to the many voices that came into his small stone world, and so this one was no different.

“Not so wrong,” said the voice.

Alizar lifted his head and peered sideways at the shimmering figure of Master Savitur illuminating the room, the particles of his body dancing like dust motes, and a smile lifted his lips. He was so unpracticed at smiling that he felt he was discovering the gesture for the first time. “And so you have come at last,” said Alizar, his voice deadened as a drum skin soaked in the rain.

Savitur settled on the floor beside Alizar and stretched his legs as though they had both been imprisoned together for years. “You look as if you should already be drawing flies,” he said. “But I like the length of your beard.”

Alizar laughed, stroking his beard. “Yes, I suppose I am back in fashion.” He waited then, for the vision to fade, for Savitur to simply shimmer and disappear, but it did not. Instead, his body became all the more flesh, even exuding heat upon the stone where he sat. Alizar waited for his old master to say something more, and so when he did not, he ventured a conversation. “Tell me, how is the world?”

Savitur smiled. “The world is well enough. I would think that it misses you as you miss it.”

“Yes, I had thought there might be an appeal of Cyril’s actions in the senate, but I suppose I am not as important as I imagined myself to be.” Alizar laughed unconvincingly, as if he were an inexperienced actor practicing laughter. “Naomi would have prevented me from going out with Gideon that morning, you know. She was my wise restraint. Without her, look where I have fallen.”

“He is not dead,” said Savitur, his eyes glinting like coins in the bottom of a well.

Alizar wrinkled his brow in an effort to understand. “Not dead? Orestes not dead?”

“No.”

“But I saw his wounds. How could anyone have survived? I just assumed…”

“Ah, but you did not see him die,” said Savitur.

“No, I did not.”

“And so he lives.”

“How many years has it been?”

Savitur sighed, the weight of air leaving his lungs saying more than any number could.

Now feeling aventine Alizar quickly harnessed the opportunity to learn more of what had been happening in Alexandria, since he had not yet given himself over to the temptation to think Savitur’s appearance was merely the imagined apparition of a madman in prison.

“And Sofia? Have you seen my daughter?”

“She is married to Synesius, and with child. They are waiting for your release for the full celebration, I understand.”

Alizar smiled again, little pools welling at the bottom of his eyes. “Is that so?”

Savitur nodded.

Alizar gazed out the window, longing to see her heart-shaped face, summoning it with the strength of his heart’s memory until it floated before him, and he could almost touch her soft black hair.

Savitur let Alizar sit with his thoughts; a long time passed before he spoke again. He responded to each of Alizar’s questions respectfully, as though the information were nourishment for a starving man. Eventually, Alizar was satiated, and thankful, and sitting in a whole new world of knowing that let him feel again connected to those he loved.

Savitur stood then, as if ready to depart. “The city has called a meeting on Antirrhodus next week. All the council members and magistrates will be there.”

Alizar shook his head to dispel the settling flies that always came that time of day, drawn to the lumps of shit in the hole. “Is that so? Then it must be Lent. They always meet at this time. Then this is my third year. I think they have forgotten I am here.” Alizar stood and accidentally kicked the empty wooden bowl across the room where it hit the stone wall and clattered to the floor. “Why bring me this news? What of it? Has Hypatia managed to bring me a pardon?”

Savitur said nothing, his eyes full of firelight.

Alizar pursued the fading figure of his master across the room. “What will happen? Savitur?” But the particles faded, snatching away the last remaining light from the room in a quick flash that left a footprint of emptiness behind, cold and silent.

Alizar strode to the east window that overlooked the little island of Antirrhodus in the harbor across from Pharos where the royal palace still stood, mostly unused except for the city’s political affairs, the perimeter scintillating with torches as the sunset hues were eclipsed by darkness. What would the meeting of the council bring? Alizar dared, for the first time in years, hope for his release.

And so he walked to the north window, and let his gaze fall across the grey rooftops to his own beloved tower perched above his house where he had enjoyed so many hours of reverie. It was dark, as it had been whenever he looked at it. He pulled the dirty, fraying blanket around his shoulders, wishing Savitur had stayed to bring him more news. There were so many unanswered questions.

Alas.

Alizar had learned to live with them all.

34  

Hannah stroked Gideon’s hand. “So you will be there?”

“Have I ever missed one of your performances?” Gideon rolled his eyes playfully and pulled his hand free so that he could prop himself up on his elbows, digging his toes into the cool sand as the church bells rang over the city, calling the hour at the day’s end. Hannah lifted her finger to trace the dark scar that ran down his cheek from the edge of his eye to where it tapered off at his jaw. “How did this happen?”