Written in the Ashes

by K. Hollan Van Zandt

  “Given the circumstances, it seemed I did not have much choice.” Alizar wrested his elbows free from the priests who had brought him, sending a painful twinge through his entire right arm. When the waves had spit them up on the beach, Hannah had pulled the arrow from his shoulder and wrapped the wound with the makeshift bandage she had created of his tunica, but the bandage was already soaked through.

  Cyril dismissed the Parabolans with a polite nod.

  “Alizar, you are an intelligent man. I think we both know you are in a great deal of trouble. I gave you orders to halt your ship, and you disobeyed.”

  Alizar attempted to stand taller. “There was nothing I could do to stop my ship, Cyril. I received your missive after it had already sailed.”

  Cyril came around his desk and leaned one hip against it, thoughtfully turning a small jar of ink in one hand. “Punish him,” said Cyril to one of the guards, who then punched Alizar in his wounded shoulder.

  Alizar crumpled to the floor, his teeth clenched against the pain that spread like blue fire through the whole right side of his body.

  Cyril set down the jar and whirled around to pace the room beside a long row of tall windows that overlooked the city’s square, his hands clasped behind his back. “I can charge you with paganism and kill you now, or perhaps treason against the church and have you imprisoned for the rest of your life, but I must say I am disinclined.” Cyril leaned down and got in Alizar’s face. “You see, I believe you and I can make a deal that will let you walk free.”

  “Just tell me what you want with me, Cyril,” Alizar growled.

  “You will address me as ‘Your Eminence’,” Cyril barked. “And what I want is for you to tell me the truth, namely, that you were persuaded in your actions to sail your ship with the Jewish children on board by Governor Orestes.”

  So that was it. Cyril wanted Orestes put on trial, not him. Alizar’s testimony could sentence him. With Orestes eliminated, Cyril would take control of the Alexandrian council, align church and state, and gain complete reign over the city.

  Alizar thought a moment. He had to find another bone for this hungry dog to chase. “I fought Orestes on his decision to put Heirax on trial. I attempted to dissuade the governor in his actions and failed.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “You have no reason aside from that I give you my word. I want only peace in Alexandria. Bloodshed is bad for business.” Alizar struggled to his feet to face Cyril. Even wounded, he was still an imposing figure. The guards held him firmly.

  “Heirax was a fine Christian and a close friend. His death does not sit well with me, or with God. I am a reasonable man, Alizar. Tell me what else Orestes has planned, and I will free you, or you will meet the fate of Heirax yourself. Your choice.”

  “I cannot tell you what I know nothing of.”

  “Another lie.” Cyril nodded to the guards who buried their fists in Alizar’s gut. “You try my patience, old man. What I know is that Hypatia and Orestes conspire against me, and I want to know the full extent of their plans. If you speak, you will be spared.”

  “Your Eminence, so far as I know their common interest is philosophy, not treason against the church.” Alizar staggered to find his feet.

  Cyril stopped and looked out the window, suddenly reflective. “As I recall, I captured a servant of yours, Alizar, by the name of Jemir. And to ensure his release, Orestes vowed to publicly denounce the pagan witch of the Great Library. Instead he denounced my church and gained the popular vote in the city with the help of the Jews in order to assure his election to praetorian prefect. You think I do not know this? Do you think me a fool? You will tell me what you know. And you will admit that Orestes ordered that you sail your ship with the Jews on board. May God save your soul!”

  Alizar hated to be threatened with God. He personally preferred the sanity of the Goddess, with her beautiful breasts on which to cry all tears of human suffering, though this was neither the time nor place to raise her name. But what was more, as he recalled, Christ was a compassionate individual who espoused to love others. Did these Christians actually read their own text? “I will admit nothing,” he said.

  Cyril nodded to the guards, who punched Alizar in the ribs and the shoulder. He fell to his knees and attempted to stand up, but was pummeled back down to the ground by the guard’s elbow. He sprawled there on all fours, managing to look up through his white eyebrows at Cyril.

  Finally Cyril spoke. “I have ways of making you speak, Alizar. Call Peter!”

  One of the guards left, and a beautiful youth emerged from an adjacent room carrying a small dagger. Then Peter followed, his sandals hissing against the stone floor. Conviction burned in his eyes.

  Two gruff Parabolans hoisted Alizar up by the elbows. Ammonius presented the blade to Peter, who took it gladly.

  “Kill me if you like,” said Alizar. “I will never assist you.”

  “Is that so?” Cyril’s eyes flickered. “I hear your wife is ill. I know how disappointed you would be if anything happened to her. I can promise you a swift death, Alizar, but she will not be so fortunate. Perhaps I should even put her on the breaking wheel and let her suffer as Heirax suffered. But I know you would not want that, so this is your last opportunity to comply.”

  Alizar bristled, and a feverish sweat broke out across his brow. Peter set the cold blade against his throat.

  Cyril took a seat at his desk and leaned back in the chair with his hands folded over his chest. “Kill him,” he said.

  At those words, Alizar lifted his knee and brought his heel down as hard as he could on Peter’s naked toes. There was a sickening crack and Peter dropped the knife instantly. Behind him, the beautiful youth, Ammonius, collected the knife and swept it through the air where it collided with Alizar’s hand as he attempted to defend his face; a thumb fell to the floor.

  In the ensuing panic, Alizar managed to steal the knife with his good hand from the young boy, who was unskilled at fighting. “Do what you like to me, but if you touch my wife I will see this knife run from your bowels to your throat, do we understand one another?” Alizar held the knife aloft.

  Cyril leaned back in his chair. “If you do not die today, then you will die tomorrow.”

  Just then, Peter attempted to apprehend Alizar, but missed as Alizar stepped aside. The other Parabolans surrounded Cyril to protect him. This left the door unguarded and Alizar saw his chance.

  Alizar flew out the door, slamming it behind him and kicking a large wooden bench before it to block it. Then he turned and limped down the passageways of the church, dripping blood behind him. He rushed through the halls until he found the back door that let out into the garden. He passed several priests strolling peacefully together who saw him and jumped aside, leaving a clear run for the gate.

  Alizar caught the latch and found it was not locked. Once in the street, gasping for breath, he looked back twice over his good shoulder as he sidled past the church’s sidewall with its rows of peaceful irises all in bloom. He did not stop until he arrived out of breath at the little green door that led to his atrium. He opened it, and collapsed on the floor.

  13

  When Hannah left Alizar on the beach, she ran to get Jemir and Tarek. There had been no sign of the Parabolani. When she returned with the men of the house, Alizar was gone.

  Hannah was asleep in the kitchen when she heard the front door open. Jemir, Tarek and Leitah also heard it and ran to the atrium. They found Alizar in a pool of his own blood, unconscious.

  “Hannah, run for the doctor,” said Jemir. “Take the grey stallion, hurry!”

  Hannah ran to the stable and grabbed one of the bridles from the wall, and caught the spritely stallion by offering him an apple. Then she hoisted herself up, grabbed a clutch of mane, and pressed her heels into his sides. The stallion lurched forward, and she galloped towards the library, praying it wa
s not too late.

  So.

  The poets of the Museion suggested it was the tears of all the Roman women in the city that brought the flood that year. The waters of the Nile, as though lifting up to cradle the heavy hearts of the people, spilled from her banks and overflowed the floodplain. All the entrances to the catacombs were sealed with stone doors to prevent leakage as nature ran her course.

  Then came the most welcome miracle of all, clouds. Prayers that rose into the air on the smoke of temple joss sticks were met by storms that snuffed out the remaining fires in the Jewish Quarter, adding to the feeling that the city was, in effect, crying. Besides, sunlight would have been an insult. Dark skies were more suited to grief.

  Everyone waited to see if Alizar would live or die.

  As the days wore on, Hannah walked silently beside Leitah through the empty marketplaces assisting those families in need. Even Tarek joined them on occasion. The city seemed deserted by all but flies and rats as the remaining people gathered indoors, in temples or in their flats, to mourn the tragedy.

  In the end, over a hundred and fifty thousand Jews had been exiled into the wilderness of the desert, while another thirty thousand had been slain, their bodies buried in the massive necropolis beside Lake Mareotis by those friends and family who had survived and remained behind to pick through the unclaimed bodies in search of a familiar ring on a hand or some other identifying mark.

  Hannah found her only solace in helping people. Her anxiety and sadness abated a little more at every house where a woman needed a hand with the wood for her kettle fire, or a baby required changing, or an extra arm to lift stones from the rubble of a fallen room was appreciated. Hannah was able to lose her own concerns in the concerns of others; for the first time in months, she stopped thinking of her father and whether or not he was alive, forgetting even her precarious life of slavery. None of that mattered for now.

  Beautiful memorial shrines appeared overnight beside the charred and ruined synagogues and in the agora, so that those who lost their lives in death or exile could be remembered and cherished. But the shrines were increasingly vandalized, and so the remaining Jewish men kept watch beside the memorials to defend the dead. Hannah dropped a flower on each shrine when she passed.

  Like many cities once occupied by Rome, Alexandria had a short memory for the many tragedies that had befallen her. Synesius had once explained that even the fury of Caracalla, who had once killed every boy in the city, had been forgotten. So it was that merchants became anxious for business to resume, and children could not be kept indoors forever. After eight weeks of mourning, the people realized that they would have to put their grief behind them and carry on with work whether they felt like it or not. Such was the power of necessity.

  And so it was that when the rains finally ceased and the populace began the arduous task of forgetting what can never be forgotten, something unusual occurred.

  Strangely, it seemed the stray cats of Alexandria had multiplied their numbers by the thousands and were suddenly a formidable presence in every pocket of the city. Lily white, ginger, brindle-striped, calico and black as the space between the stars, they roamed freely, marking their territories with pungent urine and shitting in the lush church gardens where they were chased by outraged priests. At night their stentorious cries were so inexhaustible that the populace of Alexandria became completely sleep-deprived and short-tempered. Politicians with bloodshot eyes arrived late for government meetings, soldiers grew too weary to lift their weapons, and frustrated mothers burned their stews as babes cried into the night.

  People began to grumble to one another, claiming the cats were a curse laid upon the city by the Jews. There was no one who had not fallen victim to the cats’ mischief. They crept into kitchens and stole whole chickens off the spit. They knocked over clay pots, spilling the winter supply of grain into the dust. They gave birth to wide-eyed kittens in the stables, spooking the horses. It was even said they extinguished candles set on family altars just by gazing at them.

  For Hannah, though, the cats were welcome companions. A ginger cat slept beside Hannah in the stable night after night and finally gave birth to a litter of five tiny kittens that Hannah coddled and kissed. The elderly Jewish woman across the alley whose husband had died in the exile the month before toddled outside every morning to set a bowl of fresh goat milk out for the cats in order to woo them inside to sleep on her lap, which they did. Children cradled little kittens in their arms in hopes that they would fill the air with purring, which they did. Fishmongers adopted the cats, convinced that they could keep the rats away. Which they did.

  So.

  On the first clear morning after the rains, Alizar awoke. He lay in bed beside Naomi watching a black cat with glassy emerald eyes wash her ears with her paws. His mind was empty without even so much as a dream fragment to ripple the gloss. Alizar meditated on the movements of the cat as she passed her paws over her face, behind her ears, licked down her front and shoulders, then back again to face and ears. Face and ears.

  Alizar gently adjusted his wounded shoulder, which was gradually mending. The arm corresponded to his bandaged hand, now missing the thumb. The right. At least it was not his sword hand.

  Alizar looked at Naomi, taking in the comforting familiar curves of her profile, her neck, her rising chest.

  “Naomi?” Alizar sat up. Her eyes were open.

  She smiled at him.

  Alizar turned and kissed her again and again. “A miracle!” he shouted, tears of jubilation in his eyes. And he held her. “Can I get you anything?” he whispered.

  Naomi cleared her throat, her pale green eyes illuminated as if in the moonlight. “Water.”

  Over the weeks that followed, no one ever remembered seeing Alizar so happy. Naomi’s recovery was his recovery. Soon she was sitting up, and then slowly walking across the room.

  Hannah bonded to Naomi even more deeply in her recovery. Naomi often asked her to stay and sing in the evening, and there was nowhere else Hannah would rather be. Afterwards, she would lay her head in Naomi’s lap as Naomi played with her hair and told her stories of her own childhood in Constantinople. With her health, Naomi’s youth returned.

  Late one afternoon Hannah came in from running errands and found Leitah at Naomi’s bedside, washing and dressing her. “The apothecary acted strangely today,” she said, setting the bag of medicines on a brass tray on a low table near the bed. One by one she pulled out and arranged the colorful glass vials.

  Leitah, who was drawing a sponge of warm water along Naomi’s arm, paused to look at Hannah.

  “How is Marcus?” asked Naomi, lifting her head to inquire after the apothecary. “I have not seen his family in ages. Are the children well?”

  Hannah kept arranging the vials. “The children looked hungry and thin. His wife also. She asked me repeatedly if there was anything else I needed. And he was nervously rubbing his hands, as alarmed as if I were a ghost in the room. Could I have offended them in some way? Are they not used to Jews in that part of town?”

  Naomi tipped her head and thought a moment. “Think nothing of it,” she said finally. “Perhaps it was a quarrel with the wife’s sister. She always wanted Marcus for herself. She is a tall, thin woman. Was she there?”

  “Actually, there was a woman there by that description,” Hannah said. “She was standing by herself near the window, away from the rest of the family.”

  Naomi smiled. “You see? It was not you, Hannah.”

  Hannah sighed, realizing she had become suspicious of everyone. It was an exhausting way to live.

  Leitah began to trim the nails of Naomi’s hand, filing them with a course wedged tile. Naomi set her other hand on Hannah’s cheek. “You are such a dutiful girl. I do hope you earn your freedom and find your father, if that is what you wish.”

  The sudden, surprising words were spoken with such love that Hannah felt tea
rs come to her eyes. No woman had ever spoken to her so intimately. She fell on Naomi’s neck, hugging her. Naomi kissed her forehead and rocked her like a child.

  The weeks that passed in delight brought unfounded hope. Naomi grew weaker again. She collapsed back into her bed, needing more and more time to sleep and rest. Hannah came every hour, and Leitah never left her side.

  Alizar looked up and dried his tears. “She is ready to join our son in the next world, I can feel it.”

  Within a week, Naomi was dead. Her spirit passed very near the angel, who guided her to the light.

  Alizar held his wife as her eyes turned to stone. It was a graceful, peaceful death, which was what he wanted for her, as much as he hated to see her go. In a way, she had set him free. He could stop worrying about her, stop fretting over Cyril’s threats. She had assured him of her love again and again. And that she would be happy. Her death fell hard on Hannah, though, who had adopted her as a mother in her heart. Each night she lay awake in the stable straw and mourned, for should it not be divine law that anyone who is loved, live?

  Alizar’s house became black once again. He wanted no more visitors for the time being. He shut and locked his tower door. He knew the only tonic that would work on his grief. He wanted to plan his alliance with Orestes against Cyril.

  So.

  Tarek found a moment when Hannah was alone, washing the stairs, and stood before her, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, looking like a vulnerable little boy.

  Hannah glanced up and when Tarek did not walk past, she set her rag down. She had thrown herself into cleaning as if scraping the crud from every corner would do the same for her heart. She sat on her heels and wiped her forehead. “What is it, Tarek?” she asked, and her voice sounded harsher than she intended.

  “I am sorry I cursed you,” he said. His eyes were laden with grief.

  Hannah smiled, knowing how hard those words must have been for him to say. “I forgive you,” she said.