Seeker of Stars: A Novel

by Fish, Susan

  ~ 10 ~

  Breach

  It was an inauspicious start, but once the city was behind us, I sighed with relief. The stars were indeed promising for journeying, and so it had been two days of intense emotion and feverish activity. Now nothing more could be done. I settled on my mount, trying to look as though riding a horse was something I did regularly, when in fact I had ridden a horse only once before.

  It had been Stela’s birthday, and her father had thrown a lavish party for her. I had never quite been sure of my role when I lived with the chief astronomer. I was permitted to eat at the table with the family, and I could reply to their direct questions and smile at their jokes, but I soon realized I was not to initiate conversation. I became an adept watcher, my every nerve strung tight, while I appeared, I hoped, merely preoccupied with my meals. When a voice addressed my general direction, my head would whip up, so prepared was I to participate. I felt ashamed at my eagerness, and at times, I wished for the easy conversations of the servants’ tables, where merchants were welcome.

  Since my first night in the city, such arrangements had split my family. As the chief astronomer’s daughter, Stela had been permitted to lead me to the dining table, while my uncle and brother were left outdoors to eat with the slaves and servants. It was that way each time our caravan arrived for a visit. The laughter and voices floating in through a distant window made me long for my brother’s position, while desire was plain on Salvi’s face as he took in Stela’s beauty. To this day, I am not sure whether it was more my brother’s envy or my own infatuation with Stela that caused the breach with Leyla.

  Stela had blue eyes. I had never before seen anyone with blue eyes, and hers were white-blue, blazing in her golden face. Her hair was hennaed red, and she wore it in elaborate designs. She had the bearing of a young queen, and I was utterly captivated by her manner. Still, I was aware that if I held a limbo position at the astronomer’s table, much more uncertain were my chances with his daughter.

  And I was in love with Leyla. I wrote her long letters, and she replied to each with packages of figs and wine. My sister included small drawings and little stones until she learned to write for herself, which was around the time Leyla ceased to correspond with me. Leyla had never liked to reveal much, but she wrapped each fig carefully and responded promptly so that I knew I was secure in her heart.

  Once a year, I was permitted to go home for the harvest festivals. The first year I saw Leyla many times and spent only one night on my father’s roof with Omar and Reta, who were eager to learn of my discoveries and lessons among the astronomers. I was willing to teach too, but not as desirous as I was to see Leyla. I concocted excuses of taking food and wine to Aunt Babu’s, where I met Leyla and walked her home. Since she had begun to imagine herself as the future bride of a magus, gone were the provocative attempts of years past. Leyla was quiet, though when I kissed her cheek, I could feel a shudder of desire run through her body. Before she ran indoors, cheeks flushed, she smiled.

  Before my second visit home, Omar died of fever, and I mourned his death as that of a brother. When I went home for the harvest, my heart was a heavy stone. Omar’s mother, still in high mourning, clutched me to her breast, keening and sobbing. She pulled a bundle from her robes, thrust it into my hands, patted my head as if I were a little boy, and returned to her solitary grief.

  I waited until I was alone on the roof that night before I opened the bundle. It contained Omar’s stargazing cloak. He had made himself one after I showed him my own blue apprentice cloak and described the black cloaks worn by the astronomers. Omar’s coat was pieced together from scraps of different fabrics.

  “The apprentice’s apprentices all wear such cloaks,” he had joked.

  Now it was mine, along with a half-finished letter Omar had been writing me before the fever struck.

  The shooting stars that night mirrored my tears. Succeeding waves of remembrance would pass over me, and my tears would course forth again and again. When at last I came downstairs, Reta was sitting alone at the table. I indicated the robe, and she nodded.

  “He loved figs and jokes,” I said

  “And stars,” she added.

  “And stars.” I stood silent in the half light with Reta and became aware that she and I were now man and woman, and that with Omar gone, it would be unseemly for me to look at stars with her. “You understand, Reta, that we cannot—the stars—it wouldn’t be—”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s what Omar said.”

  I suddenly wondered about Omar and Reta. In my mind, I had been the force drawing us all together and upward to the stars. I had been away two years. Omar had never mentioned Reta in his letters, but I had never asked. A wave of a different emotion swept over me, but I dismissed the jealousy as foolish. I didn’t know how to speak of Omar to Reta. Was he—had he been her lover? At the very least, he had been a friend to her in this country so far from her home.

  When I arrived back in the city, I could not decide what to do with Omar’s ragtag robe. Part of me wanted to wear it under my usual robe when we went observing, but I did not want to be subjected to the usual teasing such aberrations caused. I decided I would wear it to sleep and left it hanging over my bed each day.

  One day Stela came to my room with a message. Her eyes were drawn to my colorful spectacle with some amusement. “A little gift from your beloved, Melchior?”

  I flushed. “My best friend. It was his.”

  “A touch of home. How sweet.” She turned to go, but then, with a glance over her shoulder, she paused. “But you do have a girl, don’t you, Melchior?”

  I blushed deeper as her eyes burned into me. “Yes,” I managed to say.

  “That’s a pity.” Stela’s silk skirts clung to her hips as she walked away.

  From that day forward, I sensed I was an amusement to Stela, a plaything. Though I was flattered, not once did I take her seriously. Neither did I realize Stela’s intentions.

  Stela began by making light gestures—picking a leaf from my robe or brushing a stray hair behind my ear. She laughed at my jokes and often turned her bright eyes on me at the table. As she helped pass wine around after dinner, she took care to let her arm brush mine.

  She was a dazzling butterfly of a girl, and my eyes were delighted by her. At no time did I consider it anything more than Stela’s game and my own incidental pleasure. My useless hand, my social status, my lack of ancestry in the magi meant Stela would never consider me seriously.

  My eyes were not so fully taken up with Stela that my ears failed to notice a new voice at our table. As the chief astronomer’s nephew, Shaz had joined our household. Shaz shared his opinions freely on every topic and had a willing audience in his family. Other than his teeth, which reminded me of a camel’s, Shaz was remarkable to look at—tall, bronze-skinned, and sleek-haired. I found his manner distasteful, but I could see how others were drawn to him and how he fed on their attention.

  Only Stela stood aloof from this. She was as courteous to Shaz as she was required to be by blood and position. Her blossoming attention to me had made me see her coldness to Shaz by contrast; I admired her judgment of the man.

  On Stela’s birthday, her father arranged with his brother to borrow two of the king’s horses for guests to ride. I was waiting for my uncle’s caravan to arrive and was surprised to be invited to join the celebration.

  “Ride with me,” Shaz commanded his cousin. Stela wrinkled her nose but was persuaded. I had just ridden with her sister and was still removing my gear when a messenger informed me that my uncle and brother had arrived. Shaz and Stela completed their circuit.

  “Melchior!” Stela called. “Come hold my horse while I dismount.” I did as she bid, but as she climbed down, her foot became tangled in the skirt and she slipped. I caught her awkwardly, hindered by my useless hand.

  “Thank you, Melchior,” she said, kissing me
full on the mouth. It was over in a second and no one commented on it, but when my brother joined me five minutes later, his face wore a dark look of disapproval. I decided not to ask or tell anything, unless he spoke of it, which he did not, but when he left that night the chasm between us had grown wider.

  When I arrived home five moons later for the harvest, tension was there, too. Taz and Salvi were going to be late, so the first evening, my father and I went together to Manu’s house. I sat across from Leyla, who was lovelier than ever. I felt no guilt about Stela. Indeed I did not think of her once. Her amusement with me had passed, and I had realized Stela had been using me largely to make herself more desirable in Shaz’s eyes. Once she had succeeded, she relegated me to the status of outsider again, though I liked to think she was kinder than she had been before.

  I could not catch Leyla’s eye throughout the meal, and I began to wonder if she, like Stela, was playing a game. After the meal, I began whispering into her ear. She stiffened.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She shook her head and delivered wine to our fathers. “The evening is fine,” I heard her say. “Why not sit in the courtyard?” The men agreed, and I heard Leyla promise that I would join them soon. When she turned toward me again, I saw that her face was earnest. She shook her head once more. I reached an arm out to her.

  “No, Melchior. I am betrothed now.”

  “What?”

  “And you—are you not betrothed also?”

  “Of course not—what do you mean?”

  “Salvi told me everything. The blue-eyed girl in the big house. The kissing. The caressing. And you say you aren’t even betrothed?”

  I was aghast. I tried to explain, but I could not translate the culture, the game, Stela, or how it had been only flattery to me. I declared my love plainly for Leyla and begged her to break off the engagement. Tears rolled down her face.

  “You belong to a different world now,” she said.

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Leyla—you have to believe me.”

  She hesitated and shrugged.

  “Then marry me!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I promised him.”

  “Who?”

  “And I am pregnant.”

  I sank to the floor. Leyla belonged to another. My faithful Leyla had been true until she believed me to be unfaithful. “And your betrothed?”

  “Salvi.”

  ~ 11 ~

  Pomegranate

  This journey to find the new king reminded me of Salvi. These desert routes had been his home so long that the family jokes about him being a nomad now described him well. My relationship with Salvi was not as it had been for our father and uncle, and though I was forever glad to be done with my work in the shop, I missed the easy connection between us. Perhaps even without the accident, without Stela, without the magi, this distance would have grown. We were so different. At the same time, in this lonely place, I longed for my brother, for his simple words that cut cleanly through my confusions, for his hearty laugh I had rarely heard in years. Salvi and I had never spoken of what had happened between us, but nothing had ever been the same. My heart grew heavy at the thought of him, and each time we met, the silence was unbearably awkward.

  Salvi had had his own struggles: the business could not afford a second caravan, but after years as Taz’s equal, my brother was full of frustration. The fact that the rugs were made by girls was also a source of occasional ridicule and mirth to many. Such comments, I knew, must sting Salvi, especially since one of the girls was his wife.

  Salvi married well. I can say that much. It took many years and distance for me to be able to accept fully Leyla as Salvi’s wife, although now I can truly say that my love for Leyla is easily that for a sister. At times, I find it hard to imagine she was the girl of my dreams so long ago. At first, I fled into the desert, blindly traveling through a storm toward the city. My own storm broke when Balzar saw the pain I tried to hide and made a place for it to be revealed; I would never forget his kindness. When the storm was finally spent, I still felt disoriented, tricked, grieved. But it was done. I returned to my work, only occasionally finding a piece of grit from the storm still chafing me.

  Salvi’s Leyla has many outlets for her industry—her four sons and her work. She is the most precise of the weavers, though my fateful experience with the loom has left her forever afraid to set the strings; that task she leaves to her father or to Daria.

  Daria runs the workshop now. They—we—obey her in everything. She is bossy and imperious but also wise and clever, and her judgments of people are precise and true. It was Daria who wrote to me when I fled back to the astronomers and my beauties after Leyla confessed her betrothal. All the announcements of Leyla’s children came from Daria too.

  I was afraid to hear Daria’s opinion of my own surprising betrothal, and I managed to avoid serious conversation with her until I was safely married. Daria had always treated Reta well, as far as I knew, from the time Daria entered our father’s household, but whether she welcomed a Hebrew servant as a sister, or merely tolerated her—as I suspected Leyla did—I was uncertain. For the first time, I began to allow the question to invade my thoughts unguarded. Our paths had crossed only when Reta and I came home for the yearly harvest festival, but on this journey to Israel, where I had much time to be alone with my own thoughts, I wondered about Daria’s ideas about my wife.

  My brother, I knew, still worried about me with Leyla, especially since Reta and I had had no children of our own. When would the tumult settle? The most genuine smile I had seen on Salvi’s face sprang forth when we announced our hoped-for child. The smile was one of relief.

  What Daria thought of Reta was far less certain. This question became stuck in my mind as we rode, like a melody echoing again and again, through the monotony of sand and the lulling rhythm of our horses’ paces. I longed to gallop ahead, but for Balzar’s comfort and Shaz’s sense of dignity we moved across the sand in a steady but slow rhythm. Sometimes I found myself nodding off to sleep on my horse. Nearly always my mind drifted during the heat of the day. It was at night when the temperatures dropped and the stars pierced the skies that my mind became alert and steadied. By day, my thoughts drifted and shifted and swirled so that past and future mingled. What Daria thought of Reta became one of those vague but fixed ideas rattling around behind my eyes. I recalled expressions on Daria’s face that made me wonder exactly what she had been thinking when she saw Reta and me at family gatherings each year. Though knowing Daria’s thoughts might be useless to me—what could I do?—I became driven to know.

  I would have an unusual second visit with my family in three days’ time, as Shaz had determined my village would be the best place to load up on stores of water and food for our long journey. I would have a day or two to see Daria.

  “What do you think of Reta?” The question, which had been forming itself in my mind as I listened to the hypnotic thud-swish of the horses’ hooves against the sand, sprang forth the instant Daria and I were alone.

  Daria smiled, though her eyes looked puzzled at the urgency of my question. “She is lovely. Why?”

  Why indeed? I shrugged, unable to find words.

  Daria excused herself and returned with a pomegranate from the tree outside. “Eat this, Melchi,” she commanded. I shook my head, but she insisted. “They’re very good this year. Try one.”

  Obediently I stripped the pomegranate of its leaves, cracked the outer casing with my teeth, and peeled the fruit and pith from its shell. I filled a small bowl with water and cracked the pieces of pith underwater. Tiny rubies fell to the bottom of the bowl and I fingered them out from under the floating casing and put several in my mouth, feeling them explode with tart sweetness. I smiled as I savored the bite. “There are no pomegra
nates like the ones at our oasis!”

  “That’s Reta.”

  I tried to grasp her meaning but failed.

  “Reta is like a pomegranate,” she explained. “She is rich in spirit and mind and heart, but she keeps herself hidden away, just as the fruit of the pomegranate is hidden behind layers of hard casing. I was delighted when you saw that in Reta because you have depths in you, too. Leyla would not have satisfied you, Melchi. She is beautiful and I love her dearly, but she does not have the depths Reta offers you.”

  I pondered my sister’s words long into the night as I lay on the rooftop we had once used as our observatory. The house was Salvi’s now. Though he was away, his wife and children slept below. Daria slept in a little apartment at the back of the workshop. Salvi had built it at Daria’s request. It was unusual for a woman to have her own home, and it would have been customary for Daria to stay with her brother’s family until she married, but everyone understood that Daria meant no slight to her family, nor was she being aloof. She ate more meals at the house across the garden than she did in her own kitchen, but she liked having her own kitchen too.

  “I can’t go from being the master of the workshop all day to letting Leyla be my wife too!” she said with a laugh.

  Thoughts of the kitchen made me hungry, and I slipped downstairs to find some fruit. After so many years, the kitchen in the big house, as they now called our childhood home, was not entirely Leyla’s but still Reta’s. I had never spent much time in the kitchen, but I found little had changed since Reta had left.

  Why exactly had I married the girl? And why had she married me? I had considered the first question many times but never really the second. Had I simply been a way out of a difficult situation? A source of provision?

  Until the time of our father’s final illness, I had certainly never thought of Reta in any way other than absently counting her among our father’s household assets.

  News of our father’s illness had come by horseback. Daria and Leyla had decided the illness was grave enough to justify the expense of bringing Salvi and me home. The chief astronomer immediately gave me leave to return home, for which I was grateful. The messenger continued on his way, searching for Salvi, and I hired a camel and driver and spent four days clinging to the back hump, being swayed about with nausea, grief and confusion mingling.