She could see two more men on the hill near her father’s fire before they covered her head. She struggled desperately, screaming to her father. Abba. Hear me. Stop them. Please. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a swallow caught in a closed chimney with no way back to the sky. She kicked at the men in the darkness as they bound her like a lamb, lifted her on their shoulders, and carried her off.
The angel, wings so heavy near the earth, could not help her.
When Hannah awoke, her head pounding, it was in the confines of a wooden cage, sweating, choking and drawing flies. The sack over her face was tied tightly enough at her throat to make her breath come short, but she could see through the thin mesh, just enough to make out her captors, the endless barren land, and the silhouettes of the three trembling women beside her, crying softly.
Hannah was not naïve. When the men spoke, she recognized their harsh tongue from the trader’s market near the southern sea, and although she did not speak a word of that ugly language, she knew precisely what it meant. Slave traders. They would be sold, each of them, for the highest price. The drought had brought the men like so many other predators.
All day she cried, wasting water, clinging to whispered prayers and bits of songs as if stringing words together would keep her from drowning in the dark abyss of fear that grew within her by the hour. She hoped her father was alive and tracking them. It brought her some comfort that at any moment he might burst through the tiny tent, sweep her up in his strong arms and carry her home.
The day was difficult, but the night was unendurable.
At sundown, the men tied their horses to each other and then to a stake in the ground. They drank. Before long, they chose a girl to slake their lust.
Hannah spit in their eyes when they removed the sack around her head. With a surprising, desperate burst of strength she managed to bite the hand of one, drawing blood, and kick another in his naked balls. But a knife was drawn to silence her, a cut along her breast not so deep but deep enough. A little gift, they called it in their language, the men that gifted her with bruises and semen and hatred so deep that you would think no mother had given them birth.
Hannah wept in hatred, then in shame. There was no word for how much she despised them, these men who gloated in her weakness and took turns upon her naked body from behind. She had never known a man before; she screamed in pain while they laughed, thrusting deeper, splitting her open, pulling her hair in sport. Her knees bloodied the ground, but she continued to strike at them with an intelligent timing to her blows that both angered and frustrated them. These were men accustomed to submission from the women they preyed on; anything else was inconvenient. They tired of her eventually and set upon the other women, mothers and daughters who would not be so much trouble. This was before one of the men considered that the price brought for fallen fruit would not be as high as for fruit plucked from the branch. And so at dawn they brought out dirty rags and coarse wire brushes meant for horses, and stood over the women with their short swords drawn to let them clean each other’s wounds.
No one spoke. Pain took the place of words. A cut on the lip, a gash to the thigh, a blue eye swollen shut like a ripe plum. The women could not meet each other’s gaze. To look at each other would be to see their own suffering mirrored back to them, which would only make it more real. The gash along Hannah’s breast blossomed with creamy pus and black silt. A girl still a child with soft brown eyes and slender fingers drained it gently. They knew their future, and still they prayed.
That was when the dust storm came. The wagon carrying the cage cracked a wheel, and so Hannah was pulled out to help push it with the other women still inside, her chains cutting her ankle with every step. When she fell on her knees the men kicked her to keep her walking. Tears washed her burning eyes of sand. Above them, a falcon screamed.
Silt clumped on the horses’ eyelashes and the men paused to tighten the ropes on the wrists of the women until they cut the skin. As if they would run.
A powder fine as flour blew through Hannah’s blindfold with each burst of wind and her eyes became painfully swollen and red. For strength, she sang, thinking of her father in the hour before the men came: strong, smiling, eyes twinkling with some inner laughter. She could not bear the agony of imagining him helpless, or dead, or left alone and in pain, calling out for her. She told herself she would see him again. He would come for her, or she would escape. She rested her heart in the comforting details of his worn clothes, his wiry beard, his leather rucksack full of fragrant herbs spilling out like entrails beside the fire and his shepherd’s staff beside him, familiar as certain stars overhead. The details of love cannot be lost.
In the early evening, the city of the gods appeared. Hannah was shut back in the cage and left to stare at it from between the bars. She had never seen walls so high, walls that started in the ground and scraped against the sky. The men in their strange language repeated a word like the chorus of a song. Alexandria. Alexandria.
They entered by the Gate of the Sun and were let through by armed guards after payment was made. With their eyes now uncovered, Hannah could see the massive buildings carved from granite and slats of limestone, towering over them. The east-west street they rode through was lined with tall columns so wide, seven children holding hands could not wrap their arms all the way round. Under any other circumstances Hannah might have found the city majestic, for she had never seen a city before and never imagined one so great as this. Massive fountains set at intervals down the center of the boulevard crowned with gods and spouting dolphins, nereids and goddesses splashed loudly into limpid pools while Parian marble sphinxes wedged into the architecture watched over the city with bald, lucid eyes.
The shepherd’s cunning daughter noted the tremendous city gates, the gates that would lead her back into the desert. By nightfall she would slip between them like a shadow and be gone. Steal a horse. Ride to Sinai. Her head ached with painful thoughts and the cage jolted as it struck a stone.
Everywhere the street bustled with activity. Horses hitched to chariots trotted swiftly ahead, always managing to avoid the people who passed on foot, many of whom carried chickens and goats in their arms or balanced baskets of sturgeon on their heads, fishtails flopping as they walked. A few shrewd looking gentlemen in flowing robes with papyrus scrolls tucked beneath their arms strode down the street and entered a large meeting hall. Kneeling priests weeded papyrus ponds. Beneath a tattered ecru tent, a woman yelled at a skinny yellow dog as she beat a kilim with a stick. Several soldiers leaned in the shade of an arch in disrepair, weapons at their sides, asleep, while a parade of women with gold hoop earrings walked before them, chattering like brightly colored birds.
As they rounded the final corner toward the market, a sudden commotion came over the street. Before them loomed the most magnificent set of carved wooden doors Hannah had ever seen. The wall they split was itself extraordinary, carved with languages and stories from every known civilization, a living mural of history. But before the wooden doors stood five tall men in black robes, their heads shorn. They shoved a man to his knees who was pleading for his life. There was a stone in the dust before him with a scroll flapping beneath it in the ocean breeze. The man brought his hands together, tears trickling from his eyes. He seemed so pitiful, so small before these enormous men in robes.
Suddenly the tallest priest pulled out a sword and deftly cut the man’s arms from his body in two strokes. A guttural scream filled the sky and everyone turned their eyes as the man fell to the ground. Then the priest pulled a torch from the wall and touched it to the bleeding man’s robes, lighting him aflame. The man screamed again and fell to the ground in agony.
The priest threw the torch over the wall and called out, “In the name of the Church of St. Alexander, this man is a pagan, a worshipper of numbers, and he shall die at the door of his master, Hypatia, a heathen witch.”
At that, the enormous wooden doors
opened, and a furious woman emerged flanked by two guards, her pale hair bound up on top of her head, her eyes condemning. She carried the torch that the priest had thrown.
“This man is my servant,” she cried out. “And he has done nothing aside from dutifully attend all of human knowledge with his whole heart. How dare you bring this spiteful war to our gates. You may tell your bishop I refuse to read his letter,” she picked up the scroll from beneath the stone and lit it on fire with the torch in her hand, and then tossed it at the feet of the priests. Then she spit, “And I curse him.”
Hannah and the others cowered in the cage, afraid of what these priests might do to the beautiful and daring woman who opposed them. But they simply turned and left.
The woman whispered something to one of her guards, who then unsheathed his sword and stabbed the man on the ground who had lost his arms and was still burning, whimpering and close to death. The sword pierced the soft flesh at the base of his neck, and sunk down into his heart, and it was over.
That was all Hannah could see of the scene as the cart turned the corner and left the mob behind. She thought she could hear the enormous doors swinging shut, bolted from the inside. Hannah was breathing heavily, her whole body trembling. But beside her the young girl broke into heavy wailing, screaming to be set free, throwing herself against the bars of the cage. Hannah pulled the girl into her arms and stroked her head, and then she began to sing to calm her. The song had its effect, and soon the girl was asleep.
2
So.
It was Tarek who bought the girl in the agora.
The slave traders had set her on the block, long dark hair swept in front of her shoulders to hide the ugly gash across her breast, wrists bound so that she could not feel her fingers. The humiliation stung worse than a field of nettles.
Another bidder, an older gentleman with a gilded cane, eyed the girl on the block with her young plump bosom and her long limbs, checking her teeth and running his hand down one of her sinuous arms, then smacking her hip as if she were a horse and clutching her breast in his hand. She spit in his eye.
Tarek had been on his way to see a whore he favored. He could not remember her name. They were to meet beside the city fountain. He had not intended to stop in the market, but he wanted to buy a flute. His was broken. All women love a flute, and he wanted where flutes lead. But instead he saw the trembling girl on the trader’s block, and her eyes reached for him and pleaded beauty he had never seen. He forgot the flute and counted his coins.
He knew his father would protest. But those eyes. Perhaps he could purchase her and keep her all the same. The mind that wants can reason anything.
Hannah stood in her soiled clothes before a hungry crowd that pressed the block. She was the last to be sold. Her captors had done well. The pretty girl with brown eyes had gone to the wealthy bawd of a brothel on the wharf. The mother and daughter as chattel to a decorated captain on his way to Rome. Hannah was left. Their prize. She was illiterate, but of extraordinary beauty, and the one was worth twice the other. And then there was her talent. Oh, yes. She would bring them a handsome coin.
Sing, beauty.
She sealed her lips.
A knife was pressed to the small of her back.
Sing.
Her lips parted.
Twenty solidi.
Fifty.
Seventy-five.
Then a skinny boy with a tangle of dark hair dismounted and led his horse through the crowd, waving a bag of coins. One hundred solidi.
Sold.
After surrendering his gold coins to the slave traders the girl was shuttled from the trader’s block and pushed into the hairy arms of a blacksmith who swiftly bound her neck in a bronze collar which read the name and address of where to return her should she escape. His fiery clamp hissed in her ear as metal found metal, and it was done.
The boy took her hands in his, and the cool dampness of them disgusted her; he had fish where hands should be. She looked away.
“You will come with me,” he said. “My name is Tarek. I will take you to a bath and a good home. My father’s home.”
Hannah heard the Greek like some new melody. She did not know the meaning of the words, but could feel the warmth within them. If this stranger offered some protection, then she would stay with him until he slept, and then escape to find her father. And so she allowed herself to be led, limping barefoot across the cobbles, her feet still swollen and bloody from miles of walking the road.
Tarek’s guilt at spending the money gnawed holes in his gut where certainty should have been. This girl would eat and drink and cost his father’s house, and there might be upheaval. The money he had paid for her was to go to supplies for the vineyard. This would not go over well. Tarek considered other options. Then it struck him that he could hide her in his room. Give her mending to do and keep her a secret until, until… and it was here his reasoning dissolved. Perhaps he would just hide her and figure out the rest when the time came.
Tarek guided her through the market district just outside the Jewish Quarter along the narrow alleys that wound beneath a small hill, atop which stood the skeleton of a massive temple library once called the Serapeum. The ruins were flanked with marble statues of Isis kneeling all along the periphery, most of them missing heads or bearing broken wings. At the center of the courtyard stood a tall black column twenty-six meters in height, twenty feet in diameter, and crowned with the porphyry statue of Diocletian, a ruler now forgotten. It was a latrine for beggars now.
As they wound deeper into the labyrinth of the city, Hannah began to loose her footing. She struggled to hold her head up as a sudden faintness came over her, and the heat surged upward in her blood. Her limbs became heavy and tired. Then her knees buckled.
It seemed Tarek had bought her only for her to die.
3
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.”
&
nbsp; “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.
Written in the Ashes Page 2