by Rice, Anne
I woke up screaming.
I was in my bed. Antioch. The lamp burned. Flavius held me. I saw the light shine on his ivory leg as it was stretched out. I saw the light shine on the carved toes.
“Hold onto me, hold me!” I said. “Mother Isis! Hold me.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Only moments,” he said.
“No.”
“The sun has just risen. Do you want to go out, lie in the warm sun perhaps?”
“No!” I screamed.
He tightened his warm, desperate comforting grip. “It was only a bad dream, my beautiful lady,” he said. “Close your eyes. I’ll sleep by your side, with my dagger here.”
“Oh, yes, please, please, Flavius. Don’t let me go. Hold me,” I cried.
I lay down and he snuggled next to me, his knees behind mine, his arm over me.
My eyes opened. I heard Marius’s voice again:
“Thank the gods that I don’t want you! Not enough to betray love for brief and bloody ecstasy.”
“Oh, Flavius,” I said. “My skin! Is my skin burning!” I started to rise. “Put out the light. Put out the sun!”
“No, Madam, your skin is as beautiful as it always was. Lie down. Let me sing to you.”
“Yes, sing …” I said.
I followed his song, it was Homer, it was Achilles and Hector, and I loved the way he sang it, the pauses he made, I pictured those heroes, and the high walls of doomed Troy, and my eyes grew heavy. I drifted. I rested.
He placed his hand over my head, as if to keep the dreams out, as if to be a human dream catcher. And I sighed as he smoothed my hair.
I pictured Marius, the sheen of his skin. It had been so like that of the Queen, and the dazzle of his eyes, so truly like that of the Queen, and I heard him say, “Damn it, Pandora, do you think I wanted my life foreshortened and my destiny extended forever!”
And there followed, before unconsciousness, the utter despair, the sense of worthlessness of all striving. Better that we be no more than beasts, like the lions in the arena.
8
I awoke. I could hear the birds. I wasn’t sure. I calculated that it was still morning, midmorning.
I walked barefoot into the next room, and through it into the peristyle. I walked on the tiled edge of the Earth and looked up at the blue sky. The sun had not yet risen high enough to be seen directly above.
I unbolted the door and went barefoot to the gate. To the first man I saw, a man of the desert wearing a long head veil, I said:
“What time is it? Noon?”
“Oh, no, Madam,” he said. “Not by half. Have you overslept? How lucky for you.” He nodded and went on.
A lamp burned in the living room. I walked into the Irving room and saw that the lamp stood on the desk which my servants had prepared for me.
The ink was there and so were the pens, and so were sheets of clean parchment.
I sat down and I wrote down everything that I could remember of the dreams, my eyes straining to see by the miserable little lamp in the shadows, too far from the light that filled the fresh green garden of the peristyle.
My arm hurt finally from the speed with which I scratched at the parchment. In detail I described the last dream, the torches, the Queen’s smile, her beckoning to me.
It was done. All the while, I had set aside the pages to dry all about me on the floor. There was no breeze or wind to threaten them. I gathered them up.
I went to the edge of the garden deliberately to look at the blue sky, this sheaf of papers close to my breast. Blue and clear.
“And you cover this world,” I said. “And you are changeless, save for one light that rises and sets,” I said to the sky. “Then comes the night with deceptive and seductive patterns!”
“Madam!” It was Flavius behind me, and very sleepy. “You’ve scarcely slept at all. You need rest. Go back to bed.”
“Go get my sandals now, hurry,” I said.
And as he disappeared, so did I—out the front gate of the house, walking as fast as I could.
I was halfway to the Temple of Isis when I realized the discomfort of confronting this filthy street in bare feet. I realized I wore the rumpled linen dresses in which I’d slept. My hair streamed. I didn’t slow my pace.
I was elated. I was not helpless as when I had fled my Father’s house. I was not edgy and in deep danger as when Lucius had pointed me out to the Roman soldiers last night.
I was not gripped in fear as I had been when the Queen smiled to me in the dream. Nor shivering as I had been upon waking.
I walked on and on. I was in the grip of an immense drama. I would see it through to the last act.
People passed—laborers of the morning, an old man with a crooked stick. I barely saw these people.
I took a cold small delight in the fact that they noticed my loose, free hair and my wrinkled gowns. I wondered what it must be like to separate oneself from all civilization and never worry again about the position of a fastening or a pin, to sleep on grass, to fear nothing!
Fear nothing! Ah, that was so beautiful to me.
I came to the Forum. The markets were busy; the beggars were out in full force. Curtained litters were being carried every which way. The philosophers were teaching under the porticoes. I could hear those huge strange noises that always come from a harbor—of the cargo being dropped, perhaps, I didn’t know. I smelled the Orontes. I hoped Lucius’s body was floating in it.
I went up the steps and right into the Temple of Isis.
“The High Priest and Priestess,” I said. “I must see them.” I walked past a confused and distinctly virginal-looking young woman and went into the side chamber where they had first spoken to me. No table. Only the couch. I went into another apartment of the Temple. A table. Scrolls.
I heard feet rushing. The Priestess came to me. She was already painted for the day and her wig and ornaments were in place. I felt no shock as I looked at her.
“Look,” I said. “I had another dream.” I pointed to the sheets which I had piled neatly on the table. “I’ve written down everything for you.”
The Priest arrived. He approached the table and stared at the sheets.
“Read it all, every word. Read it now. Bear witness lest something happens to me!”
The Priest and Priestess stood on opposite sides of me, the Priest carefully lifting the pages to study each one, while not actually turning over the stack.
“I am a migrant soul,” I said. “She wants some reckoning or favor of me, I don’t know which, but she lives! She is no mere statue.”
They stared at me.
“Well? Speak up? Everyone comes to you for guidance.”
“But Madam,” said the Priest, “we can’t read any of this.”
“What?”
“It’s written in the most ancient and ornate form of the old picture writing.”
“What!”
I stared down at the pages. I saw only my own words as they had flowed in a cadence from my mind, through my hand, through my pen. I couldn’t make my eyes fix upon the form of the letters.
I lifted the last page and read aloud, “Her smile was cunning. It filled me with fear.” I held out the page.
They shook their heads in firm denial.
Suddenly there was a little ruckus and Flavius, much out of breath and red in the face, was admitted to the room. He had my sandals. He took one look at me and rested back against the wall in great and obvious relief.
“Come here,” I said.
He obeyed.
“Now look at these pages, read them, are they not in Latin?”
Two slaves came timidly, hastily washing my feet and fastening on my sandals. Above me Flavius looked at the pages.
“This is ancient Egyptian writing,” Flavius said. “The oldest form I’ve ever seen. This would fetch a fortune in Athens!”
“I just wrote it!” I said. I looked at the Priest, then the Priestess. “Summon your tall blond-haired frie
nd,” I said. “Get him here. The mind reader, the one who can read the old script.”
“We can’t, Madam.” The Priest looked helplessly at the Priestess.
“Why not? Where is he? He only comes after dark, doesn’t he?” I asked.
They both nodded.
“And when he shops for books, all the books on Egypt, he does this by the light of lamps too?” I asked. I already knew the answer.
They looked at one another helplessly.
“Where does he live?”
“Madam, we do not know. Please don’t try to find him. He will be here as soon as the light fades. He cautioned us last night that you were most precious to him.”
“You don’t know where he lives.” I stood up.
“All right,” I said, I picked up the sheaf of my pages, my spectacular ancient writing.
“Your burnt one,” I said, as I walked out of the room, “your murdering blood drinker. Did he come last night? Did he leave you an offering?”
“Yes,” said the Priest. He looked humiliated. “Lady Pandora, rest and take some food.”
“Yes,” said my loyal Flavius, “you must.”
“Not a chance,” I said. Clutching the pages, I walked across the great hall to the front doors. They pleaded with me. I ignored them.
I went out into the heat of the day. Flavius followed. The Priest and Priestess pleaded with us to remain.
I scanned the enormous marketplace. The good booksellers were all grouped at the far left end of the Forum. I walked across the square.
Flavius struggled to keep up. “Madam, please, what are you going to do? You’ve lost your mind.”
“I have not and you know it,” I said. “You saw him last night!”
“Madam, wait for him at the Temple, as he asked,” Flavius said.
“Why? Why should I do that?” I asked.
The bookshops were numerous, containing manuscripts in all languages. “Egypt, Egypt!” I cried out, both in Latin and Greek. There was lots of noise, many buyers and sellers. Plato was everywhere, and Aristotle. There was a whole stack of the book of his life by Caesar Augustus, which he had completed in the years before his death.
“Egypt!” I cried out. Merchants pointed to old scrolls. Fragments.
The canopies flapped in the breeze. I looked into one room after another, at rows of slaves busily copying, slaves dipping their pens, who did not dare to look up from their work.
There were slaves outside, in the shade, writing letters dictated by humble men and women. It was all very busy.
Trunks were being brought into one shop. The owner, an elderly man, came forward.
“Marius,” I said. “I come from Marius, the tall blond one who comes to your shop only by night.”
The man said nothing.
I went into the next shop. Everything was Egyptian, not merely the scrolls rolled out for display but the fragments of painting on the walls, the chunks of plaster holding still the profile of a King or Queen, rows of little jars, figures from some long-defiled tomb. How the Egyptians loved to make those tiny wooden figures.
And there I beheld just the sort of man I sought, the true antiquarian. Only reluctantly did he look up from his book, a gray-haired man, the book a codex in modern Egyptian.
“Nothing that would interest Marius?” I asked, walking into the shop. Trunks and boxes blocked me at each turn. “You know, the tall Roman, Marius, who studies the ancient manuscripts, buys the most prized of them? You know the man I mean. Very blue eyes. Blond hair. He comes by night; you stay open for him.”
The man nodded. He glanced at Flavius and said with a lift of his eyebrows, “Quite an ivory leg there.” Cultured Greek. Excellent. “Grecian, Oriental and perfectly pale.”
“I come on Marius’s behalf,” I said.
“I save everything for him, as he asks,” said the man with a little shrug. “I sell nothing that isn’t offered first to Marius.”
“I’m sure you do. I come on his behalf.” I looked around. “May I sit down?”
“Oh, please do, forgive me,” said the man. He gestured to a sturdy trunk. Flavius stood perplexed. The man sat back down at his cluttered table.
“I wish I had a proper table. Where is my slave? I know I have some wine around here. I just … I was reading in this text the most amazing story!”
“Really,” I said. “Well, take a look at this!” I thrust the pages into his hand.
“My God, but this is beautiful copying,” he said, “and so fresh!” He whispered under his breath. He could make out many of the words. “Marius will be very interested in this. This is about the legends of Isis, this is what Marius studies.”
I drew back the papers gently. “I’ve written this for him!”
“You wrote it?”
“Yes, but you see, I want to surprise him with something, a gift! Something newly arrived, something he hasn’t seen yet.”
“Well, there’s quite a lot.”
“Flavius, money.”
“Madam, I don’t have any.”
“That’s not true, Flavius; you wouldn’t leave the house without the keys and some money. Hand it over.”
“Oh, I’ll take it on credit if it’s for Marius,” said the old man. “Hmmm, you know, several things came onto the market this very week. It’s because of the famine in Egypt. People were forced to sell, I suppose. You never know where an Egyptian manuscript comes from. But here—” He reached up and took a fragile papyrus from its niche in the dusty crisscross of wooden shelves.
He laid it down reverently and most cautiously opened it. The papyrus had been well preserved, but it was flaking at the edges. The thing would disintegrate if not handled with care.
I stood to look at it over his shoulder. A dizziness overcame me. I saw the desert and a town of huts with roofs of palm branches. I strained to open my eyes.
“This is,” said the old man, “positively the oldest manuscript in Egyptian which I have ever seen! Here, steady yourself, my dear. Lean upon my shoulder. Let me give you my stool.”
“No, not necessary,” I said gazing at the letters. I read aloud, “To my Lord, Narmer, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, who are these enemies of me that say I do not walk in righteousness? When has Your Majesty ever known me not to be righteous? Indeed I seek to do always more than what is asked of me or expected. When have I not heard every word of the accused so that he may be judged in fairness, as would Your Majesty?…”
I broke off. My head swam. Some brief recollection. I was a child and we were all going up into the mountains over the desert to ask the god Osiris, the blood god, to look into the heart of the evildoer. “Look,” said those around me. The god was a man of perfection, bronze of skin and under the moon; he took the condemned and slowly drew out his blood. Beside me a woman whispered that the god had made his judgment and rendered punishment and the evil blood would go back now to be cleansed and reborn in another in which it would do no harm.
I tried to banish this vision, this sense of enclosing remembrance. Flavius was greatly concerned and held me by the shoulders.
I stood suspended in two worlds. I gazed out at the bright sun striking the stones of the Forum, and I lived somewhere else, a young man running up a mountain, declaring my innocence. “Summon the old blood god! He will look into my husband’s heart and see that the man lies. I never lay with another.” Oh, sweet darkness, come, I needed it to shroud the mountains because the blood god slept by day, hidden, lest Ra, the sun god, find him and destroy him out of jealousy.
“Because she had conquered them all,” I whispered. I meant Queen Isis. “Flavius, hold me.”
“I have you, Madam.”
“There,” said the old man, who had risen and pushed me down on his stool.
The night over Egypt filled with stars. I saw it as distinctly as I saw this shop around me in Antioch at midday. I saw the stars and knew I had won. The god would rule. “Oh, come forth, please, from this mountain, our beloved Osiris, and look into my husb
and’s heart and my heart, and if you find me in the wrong, then my blood is yours, I pledge it.” He was coming! There he was, as I had seen him in childhood before the Priests of Ra had forbidden the old worship. “Righteousness, righteousness, righteousness!” the crowd chanted. The man who was my husband cowered as the god pointed his finger in judgment at him. “Give me this evil blood and I shall devour it,” said the god. “Then bring back my offerings. Do not be cowards in the face of a rich priesthood. You stand before a god.” He pointed at each of the villagers and pronounced his or her name. He knew trades. He could read their minds! He drew back his lips and showed his fangs. The vision dissolved. I stared at common objects as though they had life and venom.
“Oh, yea gods,” I said in genuine distress. “I must reach Marius. I must reach him now!” When he heard these things, Marius would draw me into the truth with him. He had to do it.
“Hire a litter for your Mistress,” said the old bookseller to Flavius. “She is overtired, and it’s too long a walk up that hill!”
“Hill?” I perked up. This man knew where Marius lived! I quickly went faint again, bowing my head, and with a weary gesture said, “Please, old gentleman, tell my steward precisely how to reach the house.”
“Of course. I know two short cuts, one slightly more difficult than another. We deliver books to Marius all the time.”
Flavius was staring aghast.
I tried to suppress my smile. This was going much better than I had ever hoped. But I was torn and bruised from the visions of Egypt. I hated the look of the desert, the mountains, the thought of blood gods.
I rose to go.
“It’s a pink villa on the very edge of the city,” said the old man. “It’s just within the walls, overlooking the river, the last house. Once it was a country house outside the walls. It is on a mountain of stones. But no one will answer Marius’s gate by day. All know how he wants to sleep all day and study all night, as is his custom. We leave our books with the boys.”