Written in the Ashes

by K. Hollan Van Zandt

  Alizar did not turn his eyes from the girl. “Jemir, shut the door.”

  The door clicked shut.

  “Tarek, where did she come from?”

  “The market.”

  “I do not mean the market, boy. Tell me where she comes from.” Alizar studied the girl before him. This was no Egyptian slave. Her skin might have made her Persian for its smooth burnish the color of sandalwood, but her eyes…her eyes were a blue as dark and deep as the Sardinian sea.

  “I, I do not know,” Tarek stammered. “I bought her.”

  “You what?”

  Tarek bowed his head and lied. “For you.”

  Alizar’s eyes could have impaled the boy. “For me. I hardly think so. And that is a matter I will attend to in fine detail at another time. For now, I must see to this child. What language does she speak, Tarek?”

  “I do not know.”

  A whimper escaped Hannah’s lips as a tear slipped down her cheek. Her whole body shook as if in the cold, though the room was an inferno. She was aware that these strange men were discussing her, and the fear she had felt on the road was unequaled by this new wave of terror. What would they do with her now?

  Leitah’s feminine instincts swelled within her, and she tiptoed to the bed. She reached out tenderly and took the girl’s hand. Hannah suddenly jolted to life, and struck out with flailing fists. Leitah stood up and reached forward to take her shoulders, whispering soothing words as Hannah thrashed about until she finally calmed down and began to cry. When Hannah had no resistance left in her, Leitah took the poor thing in her arms and rocked her, wiping the sticky hair back from her shoulders. This revealed the unhealed gash where the raiders had cut her. Hannah trembled soundlessly, her body given over to shock.

  Jemir, who stood beside the door, said accusingly, “What have you done to her, Tarek?”

  Tarek bowed his head. “Nothing. I swear it. I have tried to feed her and clothe her, and she refuses every piece of meat I give her. I give her clothes and return to find her like this.”

  Alizar sat on the bed, touched the sheets, and regarded the deep festering gash that ran along Hannah’s breast to her sternum. “That needs to be treated by a doctor. Jemir, send for Philomen. Leitah, go and fetch a bucket of warm water and a sponge. Tarek, leave us.”

  When they had gone, Alizar spoke softly in Greek. “What is your name, child?”

  Hannah’s expression remained unchanged.

  Alizar shifted his tongue to Latin. No response. Then to Egyptian. Then to the few words he could still remember from the northern territories of Gaul, then Persia. Nothing.

  Finally, it was Hannah who spoke. “My father is coming for me.” She wanted to sound strong, but her voice was hardly a whisper. She lifted her head and spit in Alizar’s face for emphasis, which did more to charm than irk him.

  Alizar wiped his cheek on his sleeve and smiled to himself, for here was a daughter of Abraham. Although he could see slight traces of that lineage in her, perhaps in the pout of her lips or the way her straight nose rounded and flared at the tip, it was undoubtedly the aristocracy of Rome he saw in her pronounced cheek bones, her well-sculpted jaw, her high brow and oceanic eyes. Alizar listened closely, turning her words over again in his mind. It was Aramaic, the language of the Jewish shepherds. How did she come to be so far from home? Her bronze collar seemed evidence enough. The metal was still new enough to retain its polish. She must have been captured, taken from her family, and then sold. “Calm yourself,” said Alizar in her native tongue. “No one is going to hurt you here. I have sent for a doctor. You are not well. You must rest. Do you have a name?”

  “My father,” Hannah pleaded. Her voice was even weaker now, and her eyes had begun the inward collapse of the very ill.

  Alizar stood, and opened the window to ventilate the stifling room. “I do not know, child. First, we must make you well. Then we will discuss your father, and how you came to be in Alexandria.”

  “Alexandria.” Hannah tasted the beautiful word, the same word the men had spoken when they entered the city, and she knew then where she must be.

  She did not remember the days that followed as a torrid fever struck her body, hot rivers of fire flooding her veins. The infection of the wound had taken deep root, and though Leitah traced a cool rag over her neck and forehead, it did not abate. Philomen, Alizar’s preferred doctor from the Great Library, came several times over the week to prescribe herbs and tinctures, but he finally clucked his tongue and told Alizar to secure a small grave. She would not live the night. Pity.

  But within the fever’s grip, Hannah turned. She dreamed the kinds of dreams that mystics stumble upon at the onset of enlightenment, when the world is luminous and still, staved with a golden light that comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Her body housed a shrine to the stars as galaxies unfurled in her belly, and the sun and moon circled like young lovers in her heart. The drum of her pulse became to her inner ear a siege of soldiers marching across a bleak desert, their steps pounding the parched earth. Everywhere she searched for her father, behind doors that blossomed into clouds, and in faces that dissolved into other faces from other times, some familiar and some utterly foreign and disfigured.

  Jemir, Alizar, Leitah and Tarek each came to the girl’s bed independently of one another, each performing the same ritual. They stood in the room watching her breathe, unconsciously measuring the length of her inhalations and exhalations, studying the rise and fall of her chest, knowing at any moment she might die, perhaps at the very moment they were standing in the room. They were fascinated by the possibility even as it unnerved them. How they wanted to keep her with them.

  In fleeting wakeful moments, Hannah searched for a feeling inside her body that would tell her that her father was alive. Would she not feel something if he was gone? A father-shaped hole in her heart? But she felt only the sickness.

  So.

  On the fifth morning, her fever broke.

  By midday, she was able to nibble on the Roman bread and fig jam brought by Jemir. And then sleep, the deep relief of dreamless sleep.

  Her recovery was quick after the infection left her body. The wound closed, leaving a slick scar glossy as a feather, and the doctor seemed pleased with himself and the work of the poultice. When she was well enough to walk, and stand, and dress herself, Alizar appointed Hannah the washing maid and set baskets of laundry in her arms, reluctantly forgiving Tarek’s blunder as he had a growing fondness for the intelligent girl. He hoped she would behave.

  Hannah humbly accepted her new life, as she knew she had to appear complacent in order to plan her escape. There would not be much time. She had already been gone from the waning crescent moon to the full. Perhaps when she found her father they could repay Alizar with several fine goats from the herd. He had saved her life, and she did not want his generosity to go unrewarded.

  In the evening she found an upstairs window and ate her supper alone, conspiring with the moon. She knew the odds of a young girl alone being caught by another slave trader on the road, but it did not matter to her. She knew she could be cunning, for she was raised in the desert. She could certainly escape a city.

  Her opportunity came two nights later when Alizar’s cistern ran dry. They needed to go to the town well to buy water. It was open all night, guarded by soldiers who collected the fees and tried to prevent theft. Water was rationed and valuable, and could be sold by the gallon on the black market to anyone who could afford it.

  Tarek, Leitah and Hannah left Alizar’s house with buckets hanging from sticks over their shoulders, and still larger barrels on a cart pulled by two goats that the buckets could be used to fill. The coins for the water were in Tarek’s possession. Hannah eyed them, swinging from a purse at his belt. She would need money. But it seemed wrong to steal from Alizar’s purse after he had brought her back from death, and so she decided to steal from someon
e else if need be. It was something she hated to do, as thieving was something her father always taught her was wrong. Certainly he might make this one exception.

  As they neared the well, Hannah began to bounce in place with her hands between her knees. Leitah recognized the gesture immediately, and directed her to one of the public latrines in the next alley. Tarek gave Hannah one copper coin to pay the guard at the entrance. As Hannah hoped, Tarek and Leitah turned away to begin the long process of drawing the water. Instead of heading into the latrine, she pocketed the coin, walked down the alley, then turned into the next alley and broke into a run. No one saw her. She made her way through the alleys all night until she could see a promising patch of open desert at the end of Canopic Way and broke into a run.

  She was caught trying to leave the Gate of the Sun. The guards there grabbed her wrists as she tried to pass and pushed her hair aside to reveal the bronze slave collar. They simply locked her in a cage until Tarek found her at dawn. The guards opened their palms, expecting payment. Tarek reluctantly complied with a nummus each. When they unlocked the cage, he smacked her hard across the face with the back of his hand, and she dropped to her knees. “Do not ever disrespect my father’s house again,” he said, and she began to cry.

  She might have attempted another escape right away had she not discovered the secret door in Alizar’s house at the top of the stairs, and what lay beyond.

  4

  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 t
hought 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.”