Bread of Angels

by Tessa Afshar

  He never insisted. Her father was too gentle for that. She wondered now if this was some test, this delay. Had he chosen to stay away from home to force her hand and leave her no choice but to embark on the process alone?

  She chewed on dry lips. Nausea clawed at her belly as she contemplated the mounds of yarn. Intentional or not, she needed to make a decision. Once she started soaking the linen, there would be no going back. She would have to see the dyeing of the linen through to the end. Stopping at the wrong moment would ruin the batch.

  Reaching for a fat wad of yarn, she began to unwind it so that it could be immersed into the liquid properly. Too many dyers filled their vats with an excess of yarn, thinking to save their dye. But that meant the yarn would not soak up enough color and would emerge patchy, without the steadfastness that her father’s process produced.

  When the linen was ready, she took a deep breath, her outstretched hands shaking as she crouched by the vat, poised to begin the process. An unexpected noise made her grow still. Just outside, along the narrow path that ran adjacent to their land, a man’s groan followed by the sound of heavy, shuffling steps broke the silence. Without warning, the door leading to the garden crashed open, hitting the wall with a great noise. Lydia jumped.

  Clutching the forgotten linen to her breast, she sprang to her feet. A man she did not recognize burst into the courtyard, half carrying someone slumped against his shoulder, one leg dragging with each step.

  She noticed two things before she began to run. First, blood. A great deal of blood clinging to the slumping man so that his hair, face, and leg were covered with it. And second, with dawning horror, she realized that the face so covered in seeping scarlet belonged to none other than her father.

  “Oh gods.” Her voice emerged as an indistinguishable croak. “Father! What has happened?” The yarn fell unheeded from her nerveless fingers to the stone-paved ground.

  Her father roused himself enough to give a weak smile. “It looks worse than it is. This young fellow saved my life.”

  Lydia spared the man who held her father in a tight grip a brief glance. She had an impression of light-green eyes and a face that Apollo would be happy to own before she returned her attention to her injured parent.

  With trembling fingers, she touched his warm cheek and quelled her desire to snatch him away from the strong, supportive arms of the young Apollo. Carrying her father into the house alone was not a realistic option. She would collapse under the burden of his sinking weight.

  “This way. Follow me. We must set him down so that I can see to his wounds,” she said. The young man trailed her into the house without comment.

  Her father’s thin mattress sat on the floor of his chamber, his blankets neatly folded at the bottom. “Settle him on the bed,” she said, her voice a thread. “Please,” she added, trying to remember manners in the midst of terror.

  “It’s a small injury, Lydia,” Eumenes panted. “Don’t worry yourself.” The loud groan of pain that escaped his lips as Apollo laid him down on the mattress did little to support his claim.

  “What happened?” she asked again, parting his tunic where it lay shredded against his leg. She winced, feeling queasy as she saw the long gash that ran the length of his thigh. The smell of blood, the sight of the wound, the heat of the room made her feel short of breath.

  Time seemed to recede, to double in on itself.

  For a moment she felt the world shift as if she were no longer in this room but in a chamber of dreams, kneeling next to a woman whose face was hidden in shadows. Blood covered everything—the woman’s clothing, the sheets—and dripped in fat drops on the stone-gray floor. Lydia took a shivery breath, trying to clear her mind of this strange overlap until her gaze returned to the bedside of her father and her thinking regained its focus.

  Eumenes squeezed his eyes shut. Gritting his teeth he said, “Crazy horse.”

  “A horse did this to you?”

  “Not entirely,” Apollo said. “I saw what happened. A man was leading a horse by its bridle when the animal began rearing up. Something must have spooked it. The beast pulled away from the hold of its master and continued to balk and rear on its hind legs. Your father was standing in the wrong place at the wrong moment. The horse’s hooves knocked him sideways. I happened to be on hand and managed to calm the horse and pull him back.”

  “He was like Hercules, bringing that monster under control with a touch,” her father said.

  Apollo grinned. “Your father began to regain his balance. His injuries would have been minor if not for the unfortunate coincidence that he was standing near the top of a hill. His foot slipped at the last moment, and he went over the edge. He cut himself on some jutting rocks and brambles as he rolled down. Most of these injuries are from his fall, not the horse.”

  TWO

  Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.

  1 PETER 4:12

  “THAT WAS NO ORDINARY HORSE, I tell you,” Eumenes murmured, his hand clutching his side. “He attacked me on purpose. I thought it was the end of me as I gazed into his mean, black eyes.”

  Lydia swallowed bile. “Thank the gods you were spared.”

  “I won’t forget that beast as long as I live. His coat was an unusual black, glossy with shine and good grooming. And right here—” Eumenes pointed to the middle of his forehead—“there was a white mark that looked like a half moon with a tiny speck next to it that resembled a star. It is amazing the silly details you note when you think you are about to die. The memory of that white moon and star I shall take to my grave. It was perfectly proportioned, as if drawn by the hand of an artist. The beast looked at me with venom in its gaze and attacked.”

  Their guest chuckled. “It was just a spooked horse.”

  “A horse possessed by demons, I tell you. If not for this young man, it would have gone on to trample me to death. I don’t know how, but my friend here charmed that animal into calm. One word from him, and the horse stopped its thrashing. I thought I was safe until my foot slipped, and over I went. Even then, my champion would not leave me but clambered down to help carry me all the way home.”

  Apollo gave a modest smile. “I’d best fetch a physician. Your father will need some stitching for his wound.”

  “Wait!” Lydia called as he turned away. “What is your name? I can’t keep calling you—” she stopped midsentence, realizing that she had been about to call him Apollo to his face. “I mean, I should know your name, since it seems we owe you a great debt.”

  “Jason. My name is Jason.”

  Of course his mother would have bestowed the name of a hero upon him, Lydia thought. “With all my heart I thank you, Jason. Now please hurry. I don’t want him to bleed to death.”

  “A mere scratch,” her father said.

  “And the Nile is a tiny puddle that little girls jump over in their bare feet. Find a good physician, I beg,” Lydia said over her shoulder.

  “But not expensive,” her father said, his voice fading.

  “I shall bring you a reasonable—” Jason gave Lydia a furtive glance—“but accomplished physician.”

  Lydia began to clean her father’s wounds with warm water. She shuddered, her whole body shivering uncontrollably. “I might have lost you,” she said, shaking her head.

  Eumenes patted her hand. “A horse is no match for me.”

  As she cleaned his dirt-encrusted flesh, she discovered deep bruises already leaving ugly marks on his skin; his left eye was swelling shut, and his right one continued to bleed from a cut in the corner. In spite of the profusion of blood, Lydia realized his claim that his injuries were not fatal was probably accurate. She detected no broken bones, though the physician would have to confirm her suspicions. Relief washed through her, leaving her weak in its wake.

  Eumenes’s thigh bore the deepest wound, and Lydia suspected that it would require a good number of stitches. She fetched wine
sweetened with honey and held his head as he gulped it down thirstily.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I am as fit as a gladiator.”

  Lydia snorted. “I see your fall has not interfered with your ability to stretch the truth.”

  “I stretch no truth when I tell you that you will have to start working on the linen without my help.” His voice was strained. “I cannot work for a day or two.”

  Lydia shrugged, pretending a nonchalance she was far from feeling. “As long as you are there to guide me, I will manage.”

  He tapped the air above her shoulder. “I knew I could count on you, my brave girl,” he said, his voice slurring. His eyelids fell shut and he began to snore softly. She was glad for this respite, for the attentions of the physician were sure to prove painful.

  Jason returned with surprising haste, a surgeon in tow. Judging by the man’s expensive garment and the gold clasp holding his cloak, Jason’s idea of reasonable differed substantially from her own. Lydia felt too embarrassed to ask for the rate of his services. He seemed proficient in his craft, which allayed some of her anxiety.

  She held on to her father’s purple-stained hand through the physician’s ministrations. Eumenes tried not to moan as the needle pierced his flesh over and over again.

  “A few days and he will return to his old vigor,” the physician said when he had finished rubbing salve on Eumenes’s wounds. The scent of myrrh mingled with blood made Lydia’s head swim.

  “He has no broken bones, though he is severely bruised and shaken.” The physician wiped his hands on a clean towel.

  “His face . . . there was so much blood.”

  “The lacerations on his face and head are superficial. Let him sleep the rest of this day and through the night. He will need quiet to recover from all his excitement.”

  “Sleep all day?” Lydia’s voice sounded faint. They could not afford to lose a whole day of work. She would have to resume the dyeing process without even her father’s oversight.

  “I shall return with Jason tomorrow to have another look at him and clean his wounds. We must guard against corruption.”

  “Tomorrow?” Lydia gulped. Another visit from the sophisticated physician would probably cost a fortune. She felt guilty about her trivial worries when the life of her father had been spared. They would manage the fees somehow, as they always did. She needed to remember this day could have resulted in a tragedy that would have ripped her life apart.

  Another realization dawned, knocking all other thoughts out of her head. “With Jason?”

  “This delightful fellow.” The surgeon clapped Apollo on the shoulder. “He wishes to return and check on your father.”

  “If you don’t mind?” Jason’s green eyes crinkled in the corners, a confident smile on his chiseled lips. Lydia doubted any women, young or old, had ever minded a visit from this particular man. No wonder the horse had quieted at his command. It was probably a mare.

  “Of course not,” Lydia said, wanting to kick herself as she felt warmth rise to her cheeks. “I will have to tend to the dyeing. But you must visit with my father whenever you wish. I have not even thanked you properly for coming to his aid. We shall ever be in your debt.”

  Jason seemed baffled. “Dying? But I thought he had no serious injuries!”

  “Oh no! I mean, yes. I was speaking about dyeing linen. Purple dye. That is my father’s business. I will have to work on our orders while he recovers.”

  “You work?”

  For the first time, Lydia noticed his toga, which was made of expensive linen and marked him as a Roman citizen. On his middle finger he wore a signet ring made of a great deal of gold and a shiny green stone she did not recognize. Jason was not only handsome and heroic; he was also wealthy. So wealthy that he could not conceive of a woman working in her father’s workshop.

  She lifted her head and gave him a haughty glance. “Certainly. Don’t you?”

  He blinked. “Don’t you have any brothers?”

  “Only child. You?”

  “I have two younger sisters. At home.”

  Lydia gave a sweet smile. “Where else would they be?”

  THREE

  She seeks wool and flax,

  and works with willing hands.

  PROVERBS 31:13

  LYDIA TUCKED HER SLEEPING father under his woolen blanket, kissed his brow, and walked softly out of his chamber and back into the garden. Settling herself by the vat, she stirred the dye and examined it under the light of the sun to ensure that it was the right hue and consistency.

  Like all the dyes her father had developed over the years, this one made no use of the exorbitant sea snail and as a result cost half the price of competing dyes. The purple derived from the precious secretions of sea snails made the color prohibitive except for the wealthiest of patrons, while her father’s purple was accessible to many.

  Purple-in-One-Vat, Eumenes called this particular dye. They had decided to use this formula for one of the large orders, as it worked faster than his other methods.

  Usually Eumenes preferred a more complex process, producing purple through an immersion of the yarn in several baths of varying colors, starting with indigo and ending with a solution made from the roots of the madder plant. Eumenes had perfected this process to a fine art. No other merchant in Thyatira managed to create Eumenes’s vibrant shades of purple, nor make them colorfast without the use of sea snails. Part of his secret was that he used a touch of vermilion to give his purple a deeper hue, closer to scarlet than blue, the color so highly favored by Romans.

  For convenience, however, he had also created this rare, simple process of making purple without the use of repeated baths, which made this dye easier to sell to fabric merchants around the empire. One package of dye. One vat of water. A little mordant. Any dye master could make a reasonable success of it. Although it was not their highest grade of purple, the convenience and affordable price made it their most popular product.

  It remained a mystery to Lydia why they had never grown rich. Given the undeniable quality of her father’s creations, she could not understand how they still managed to struggle from one month to the next, worrying over finances.

  There was no denying that her father had little interest in accounts. He kept no track of expenses and purchased what satisfied his artist’s heart, not his merchant’s head. If he had half the talent for managing money that he had for creating purple, they could have built a sumptuous villa on their land and retired to a life of luxury.

  As it was, sumptuous villas were a distant dream, and Lydia could not delay a whole day for her father to recover from his injuries. For the first time in her experience, she would have to work entirely alone.

  Grabbing a hefty wad of yarn, she prepared it with careful movements and dropped it into the vat. Perspiration drenched her face as she stirred the dye with a long, wooden rod. She was moving too slowly, she knew. Her father would have finished two wads by now.

  When she judged the linen to be ready, she pulled it out of the vat, squeezing the extra dye out before sinking it into a second vat, this one filled with mordant, a substance of her father’s creation that made the dye colorfast. The mordant solution was pungent. After years of working with it, Lydia had grown used to the sour, sharp stench. Still, on a hot, breezeless day, even her lungs cringed at the aroma that wafted out of the vat.

  Finally came the washing. Lydia threw the freshly dyed yarn in a basket and carried it to the well.

  Next to her father’s brilliance, the well was their greatest asset. Few businesses boasted a well of their own. To have ready access to water in the dye trade was crucial. To have access to it in one’s own backyard was a rare advantage.

  Lydia had prepared a water bath earlier. She sank the linen into it now and watched the excess dye seep into the water, turning it violet. Again she wrung out the yarn and carefully hung it from a branch to dry. She would have to replicate this process a number of times until the purple saturated t
he wool to just the right shade.

  Hour after hour she repeated this procedure until her back ached and her thighs began to object every time she bent down. Between immersions she ran back to the house to check on her father. To her relief, he seemed to be sleeping comfortably, his breathing deep and regular.

  Not until twilight gave in to the darkness of night did she finally stop. With the aid of a flickering lamp, she examined the piles of linen still remaining. She had been too slow. Mountains of linen yarn lay in their baskets, twisted in knots, needing to be unraveled and prepared.

  She would have to start a new batch of dye and mordant in the morning, which would take two or three hours. Only then could the dyeing process start again. She would never be able to finish in time for the promised delivery.

  Ominous dreams came to her that night. Confused images of someone writhing in pain, begging for help. Dreams of blood spreading into a lake. And in the end, the old familiar dream of the woman with the sweet smile. Lydia reached out to touch her face, her heart full of longing. To her horror, the smile turned into a grimace of agony. Then the screaming started, a soul-shattering wail that would not stop. Lydia jerked awake, her body shivering in the hot summer air.

  FOUR

  Why are you cast down, O my soul,

  and why are you in turmoil within me?

  PSALM 43:5

  SHE KNEW FROM experience that she would not be able to sleep again after the dream. Fetching fresh water from the clay jar outside the house, she washed, dressed, and twined her long hair into a braid, which she left to hang down her back. Anticipating her father’s hunger, she made bread, her hands kneading flour with practiced strokes, her mind on the work ahead. Before starting her labors, she tiptoed into her father’s chamber to find him stirring lightly.