Written in the Ashes (9 page)

Alizar’s ship sailed at dawn as planned. Hannah felt she would miss him, and contemplated his kindness as she went about her morning chores. There was no question the house felt different without him.

Jemir opened the window in the kitchen a little wider to let in the song that lilted down from the balcony. It had never occurred to him how quiet Alizar’s house had been before. He closed his eyes and let himself be swept up in the sweetness of her voice, as if it were an antidote to all that privately ailed him. Later, when Hannah came in and plopped down onto one of the cushions on the floor, he felt his heart warm with affection.

“You sing beautifully.”

Hannah’s cheeks blossomed. “I did not realize you could hear me all the way in here. I am sorry. I will sing more softly.”

“
Kuklamu
, if you sing softly you will offend the gods who gave you that voice.”

Hannah turned her eyes down to the floor in modesty, her eyelashes brushing her cheeks.

Jemir threw her a rag. “You know what today is?”

Hannah caught the rag in the air and began wiping down the table. She did not know.

“You go to the Great Library and the Museion. Alizar has arranged that you will have a tutor.” Jemir could see by the expression on Hannah’s face that the shepherd’s daughter had no idea what a rare privilege this was, especially for a slave—and a female slave at that. Maybe she had not heard the stories of what marvels the library housed. Jemir saw at once his opportunity to build the anticipation for her. She would think he was describing a dream. It did not matter. The library might very well be a dream of the gods.

Hannah took up a long wooden spoon from the table and turned it over in her palms as she wiped it clean.

Jemir started with something he knew that any girl would love to hear about: the butterfly enclosure. Thousands of blue and yellow and white spotted butterflies with elegant seashell wings collected from all over Africa and Europe. “You put honey on your finger and they land there.” Jemir held out his finger in the air and looked up at an imaginary butterfly that circled and then alighted.

Hannah smiled, almost happy. Jemir stopped short. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile, and it changed her face completely. Her beauty was amplified a thousand fold.

So.

He cleared his throat and continued. “There are enormous lions in cages, one even that lived in the great Coliseum in Rome and ate a hundred men, or maybe it was two hundred. But now the lion is old and has bad hips. The keepers cut the meat into bits for the elderly beast.”

Jemir hunkered next to Hannah and waved his hands through the air. He wanted her to feel the greatness of it in his words. He wanted the legendary size of the library to come alive for her right there in Alizar’s kitchen.

She laughed at his impression of the lion.

“Then there are the docks in the harbor with the manuscripts piled higher than any building in the city, even Alizar’s tower. Imagine. Forty men side by side, all writing translations of the most famous literary and scientific works in the world. Homer. Aristotle. Pythagoras. Plotinus. Euripedes. Archimedes. Erostosthanes…” Names that would mean something to Hannah once she learned their contributions.

Jemir explained that the fragrant lecture halls had been frequented by the greatest minds of the last three centuries. Mathematicians, philosophers, astronomers, rhetors, physicians, poets. Ptolemy penned his
Almagest
in the garden beneath one of the tall obelisks called Cleopatra’s Needles, crumpling the pages he disapproved of and tossing them into the manure pile behind the elephant enclosure.

Hannah’s eyes danced with some newly aroused feeling.

“The gardens were even planted by Cleopatra herself in honor of Caesar, or perhaps Mark Antony, no one can remember anymore. She and Antony were both buried beside the pond. It is said that the vine covering her golden tomb that appeared there one year after her death has lived these hundreds of years as a symbol of Cleopatra’s love for Egypt. When the vine blooms, women from all ends of the Mediterranean come to collect its pretty purple flowers and crush them into potions for love.”

Hannah hugged her knees to her chest and rocked. “This is Alizar’s gift to me?”

Jemir nodded. He had to tell her one more thing, and in the telling, confess his secret love, a love an entire empire shared with him. “Did you know there is a woman who runs the Great Library?”

“A woman? How could that be?”

“It is because she is a star descended to earth. Hypatia, The Great Lady, Virgin of Serapis, daughter of renowned astronomer and mathematician Theon of Alexandria. She is the most brilliant philosopher alive, a hermeticist said to alone hold the secret teachings of the Chaldean Oracles. She is a friend of Alizar’s house. Her mind and her beauty are the envy of everyone in Egypt. And so, as you can imagine, she has hundreds of friends, and more than a few enemies.”

“Enemies?” As Jemir spoke Hannah remembered the woman holding the torch who had come running from out of the gates when they first arrived in Alexandria. Could it have been Hypatia?

“People cannot abide purity,
kukla
. It offends the poor and the rich at the same time.” A lightness entered Jemir’s features as he sighed, and for a moment Hannah could see him as a youth, before the deep lines had settled around his eyes and beside his mustache.

Realizing he had become lost in his infatuation with Hypatia, Jemir quickly regained his composure, excused himself, and went outside to check on the bread in the oven.

When Tarek strode into the kitchen and asked Hannah if she was ready, she leapt to her feet. “Jemir was telling me about Hypatia,” she said as Jemir came back inside, set the bread down to cool, and busied his hands with a cloth, wiping down the windowsill.

“Oh, I see.” Tarek rolled his eyes. Every servant in the house knew about Jemir’s affections for Hypatia. Years earlier, when Tarek was a boy spying on the servants, he had seen Jemir writing pages of poetry that he tucked away behind the spice jars whenever anyone came in. Tarek showed the poetry triumphantly to everyone he could think of. After that, Jemir’s fondness for Hypatia was no longer a secret. When Jemir had confronted him about the missing pages, Tarek insisted he had no idea they belonged to him. Jemir snatched the pages out of his hand and said, “Who else spices your food?” He wielded the words the way he drew a sharp knife up the belly of a small fish.

Tarek took Hannah’s elbow and lead her down the hall toward the cistern stairs. She stopped to tie her sandal to get out of his grip. “Why are we going this way?”

“I am taking you the secret way. The Parabolani are out.”

Hannah cocked her head. “The what?” This city was full of a thousand new things to learn.

“The Parabolani, the bishop’s henchmen. He originally recruited them under the auspices of feeding the poor and planting city gardens. Now he uses them to dispose of anyone who threatens his way to power.” Tarek slid a large iron key into a lock on a tall wooden door and popped it open. The door swung open easily for its size, as if it were in constant use.

Hannah thought immediately of the men she had seen the first day she entered Alexandria, the ones who cut the man’s arms from his body and lit him on fire. “They wear black robes,” she said.

“Yes,” said Tarek. “They wear their hair shorn to the scalp, dress in black robes, and walk together in threes. If you see them, hide and hide well.”

So.

Hannah followed Tarek down the carved limestone steps and through a chthonic passageway lit by flickering torches. Soon she could hear running water and the squeal of rats in the walls.

A slow river loomed before her, the brackish water dank and deep.

Tarek strode over to a plank barge tethered to a stone post. Beside him a footbridge arched over the water leading to a stairway on the other side. Taking a torch from the wall, Tarek unleashed the barge, sweeping the long pole up in his free hand. Then he leapt onto the barge, which rocked precariously in the dark water. “Jump,” he said.

Hannah just stared at the tenebrous tunnel.

“I suppose you expect to float upstream?” asked Tarek.

Hannah eyed the barge. Then she took a deep breath and walked to the water’s edge.

“Come on.” Tarek leaned the pole on the barge and extended a hand.

Hannah glanced at him. Then she leapt, light as an antelope, without touching the hand floating in her direction, and settled herself on the front of the barge with her legs tucked beneath her.

Once underway, Hannah tugged the hem of her
himation
up over her nose in disgust at the miasma of rotting city refuse dumped in the tunnels. Tarek steered the barge around corner after corner, until beside a wall lit by sunlight pouring from a grate in the street above, the hairs on the back of Hannah’s neck began to tingle and she sat up, uncertain as to why.

“This is where the poor secretly buried their dead a hundred years ago when the cost of purchasing tombs in the necropolis was raised. Quite illegal.” Tarek made the enthusiastic announcement as though he were commenting on a fine frieze decorating a palace wall.

“Ick.” Hannah wrinkled her nose, glowering at the honeycomb walls where all sizes of skeletal feet stuck out the ends. Some still had bits of rotted cloth clinging to the twisted toes.

Not soon enough, they floated past the stacks of tombs and turned several more corners before coming to an area in the underground river where seven wide slats of light streamed in from grates overhead.

“We are beneath the theatre district now. Sometimes valuables fall into the catacombs here. I have found coins and jewelry when the water is clear enough to see to the bottom, usually after the annual flood. Once I even saw a whore pissing through the grate.” Tarek smirked with pride at this memory.

Hannah winced. The noxious assault on her nostrils was making her ill. For a moment she thought she could use the catacombs as an escape—she would just have to steal the barge—but the labyrinth continued and she became convinced she would get lost and end up dead in the sewer.

Soon there was torchlight on the walls ahead.

Hannah wanted to look presentable, so she undid her dark hair and let it cascade down from her shoulders to the small of her back. Then she began to pick through the tangled curls with the silver hairpin that her father had given her. A few moments later, she looked up from the knots in astonishment.

A pair of twin sphinxes illumined by two torches sat side by side at the base of a wide set of four stone steps. At the top were two tall burnished doors with ebony and brass handles carved to look like vines. Hannah started to stand, but Tarek allowed the barge to float past. She looked back at him in confusion.

“Oh, that is just the zoological entrance.” He waved his hand to show insignificance. “One of the lion cages is on the other side of that door… Ptolemy’s idea, in case his soldiers were followed into the catacombs.”

The barge drifted a bit further before the roof of the tunnel dropped to a hand’s width above the water, preventing further passage. Beneath it, the river silently drifted into the dark sea. In the torchlight, clusters of barges tethered to posts clunked together, rocking in the gentle current.

As soon as Tarek had the barge secured and they leapt off, he produced a string from under his
tunica
and applied the key at its end to a small lock in one of the doors. It opened with a noisy creak. They ascended a flight of narrow steps and then rounded a corner toward a rectangle of daylight, emerging through a small, unassuming door in a magical garden. Above them stood a tall stone obelisk carved top to bottom in hieroglyphics.

Hannah blinked back the sun. Jemir was right; it was a dream of the gods. She never imagined such beauty existed. Everywhere there were cascades of flowers and fountains, reflecting pools and immense marble statues. Tarek pointed across the garden to the Shrine of the Nine Muses: a rotunda of columns with beautiful maiden statues in various poses holding writing instruments, masks, lyres and scrolls; and to the thirteen lecture halls beyond it, the medical wing, and the zoology and botanical wings, the outdoor theatre, the gymnasium: each more magnificent than the last, painted with intricate murals of Egyptian and Greek myths and set with rows of elaborate Roman tile.

This was the Great Library of Alexandria, more beautiful than any heaven.

They passed over a little footbridge and then walked toward a palatial structure with rows of massive, ornate columns set before it like sun-bleached whalebones; each was decorated with intricate painted scenes at the base. Hannah had never seen a structure so large before. She wondered how many camels standing on top of each other it would take to reach the top. As her count topped eleven, Hannah’s eyes reached the large cupola that crowned the high walls where glass of white, ruby, orange, violet, indigo and emerald scintillated in the sunlight. Tarek proudly explained the Alexandrian technique of variegated ornamental glasswork that was renowned the world over. Hannah was breath-taken. She only wished her father were there beside her to see it.

On the ground all around them were marble statues of Zeus, Thoth, Hermes, and Serapis with rippling muscles and lifelike eyes that watched over the garden as men in long wine-red robes sauntered past, their hands clasped behind their backs, their somber faces preoccupied with scholarly tasks.

Hannah followed Tarek between the widely spaced columns and through a massive and intricately carved teak door that, he explained, Ptolemy and Alexander the Great had brought back from India. It was held open by a chain of stone links as large as ostrich eggs, and carved from the same granite boulder in a masterpiece of stonework.

Beyond the doors lay the greatest room Hannah had ever seen. It stretched up three stories high, and people were suspended on skeletal ladders that led to narrow catwalks. The walls were speckled with thousands of tiny pigeonholes where thin ivory handles of parchments projected above Greek letters etched in the shelves. Tarek explained that sorting in the library was never-ending.