by June Trop
Chapter 21
Late Tuesday Night
I BLUNDERED HALF mad through the streets and haunted alleys, sometimes darting and dashing, other times tucking myself into the entrance of a tenement, edging my way, swiveling my head, listening for any creature that was about, suppressing my every shriek, swallowing my every whimper, pinning my every hope of survival on my position relative to the lighthouse. Only when its flames split the darkness above my left shoulder would I know that I’d escaped the claustrophobic Rhakotis Quarter. Only then would I be beyond the reach of the thieves and murderers who lurk there preying on the nameless and dumping their corpses into the canal to soak, bloat, float, and then putrefy in the next day’s baking sun. Otherwise, I felt only a hunger in the pit of my stomach that was the will to survive.
The fading glow of my lantern did little to disperse the shrill parade of macabre creatures that flitted across the screen of my imagination. Instead, they bred in the formless, flickering shadows that the lantern struggled to cast. The face of every tumbling tenement, the stench of every dank alley, and the scratch of every whirling piece of trash whispered veiled threats in my ears. At the same time, the dread of never recovering the scrolls coated the back of my throat with bile.
I neared an alley between the shell of an old slaughterhouse—no amount of sand or sawdust could blanket its stench—and an abandoned brewery, its only remaining door propped open with refuse, its yard choked with weeds and unidentifiable debris. Panic seized me. Something malevolent was seeping out of that alley. I couldn’t tell whether it was a sound or a smell, but some sentient life form was hovering in the squalor of that alley, on edge, poised for action.
I stopped.
Snuffed out the lantern.
Held my breath.
Footsteps? More than one pair?
I tiptoed to the mouth of the alley and bent forward.
Holding my breath.
Craning my neck.
Listening.
Was I hearing only the cold? Perhaps a breaker battering the rocks, fanning its spray into the sky. Or the whine of the wind whipping the treetops or rustling the underbrush. Or the echo of clattering hooves. Or the growl of a feral dog. Perhaps only the chatter of locusts, the yawn of a soldier, the squawk of a gull, or the groan of the Earth itself.
Was I smelling only the darkness? Perhaps the odor of the bricks, the tang of the sea, or the putrefaction of a carcass. Perhaps the vapor of my own stale sweat, the piss of a cat, the hair of an old dog, or the droppings of a sick mule. Perhaps the breath of a stable yard, the reek of rotting wood, the fetor of dying weeds, a derelict’s curdling vomit, a spill of posca, or an accumulation of the night’s panic and neglect. Or perhaps something more, like the odor of damp wool and the stink of male tension.
Was that the crunch of a boot on gravel? The swoosh of a lacerna? The beat of a heart quicker than my own?
The soft hairs on the nape of my neck warned me.
My fear blossomed.
I heard a voice like the hiss of an angry snake.
“He’s spotted us.”
Four panther eyes converged on me, as hard and glassy as flint.
Ditching their sacks.
Grabbing and flinging my lantern.
Pungent cloaks spinning.
Chilly belt buckles attacking me.
“By Zeus, it’s a woman! Kill her.”
A punch to my belly.
My guts somersaulting.
Loops of pain wrapping around my abdomen, rippling outward, shooting down my legs.
I pummeled the air and, spinning around, caught a left hook that split my temple and shrieked in my ear.
The ground rushed toward me.
Their grunts spiraled downward.
A stinking cloak muffled my cries.
A solid uppercut to the side of my head.
After that, a right hook and a bubbling cut.
A new galaxy of stars.
The blur of a kick.
Another.
Then I lost count.
I saw my mother in a nimbus of light.
“Good. She’s dead. Help me wrap her corpse in her himation. We’ll dump her in the canal and come back later for the loot.”
“Her fibula! She’s a Roman citizen. Gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, what in Hades is she doing here? There’ll be soldiers, a search, an investigation. They’ll trace the loot. They’ll arrest us, crucify us”—
“Run! Never mind the”—
My bones screaming like the blare of a siren, I separated from the filaments of pain and drifted into a private darkness.
Chapter 22
Wednesday Afternoon into the Night
LODGED SOMEWHERE in that intricate world between life and death, I drifted between the reality of a ringing, catastrophic pain in my left ear and a black, silk-lined delirium in which words floated about but had no meaning. Impressions of the events that had brought me here flicked before me in a sequence of ghastly images washed of color. But somewhere at the edge of that vision, through the slit that was the puff pastry of my left eye, I saw Phoebe.
“Am I in a tomb, Phoebe?” I could taste a sour whistling as the words came out, and whenever I moved, I felt the thieves’ fists pummeling my belly.
“You’re here, in your cubiculum, Miriam, and you’re safe. Close your eyes and rest.”
Lolling my head back, I eased into the pillow and curled onto my right side. I must have slipped back into a semi-consciousness where my memories met my imagination, where I was not yet ready to tackle the pain and even less ready to face the sliver of time left to recover the scrolls, let alone set my wedding date. Yet I was aware of the fading daylight arcing across my lids and my body taking an inventory of its working parts. And through the veil of my stupor, I sensed Phoebe at one with the shadows, cleansing my cuts, massaging my muscles, rubbing verbena into my temples and hands, feeding me barley broth fortified with the foul-tasting ash of beef bones, and treating me with a poultice of mossy herbs to combat the swelling around my eye. Finally, by the cool touch of night, I’d spiraled out of the daze with a need to know what had happened.
“Tell me again where I am, Phoebe, and how I got here.” I tried to sit up and open my eyes, but all I saw were sparks against a swirling blackness. So, clutching my belly, I curled back onto my side and closed my eyes.
“You’re right here with me, Miriam, safe and sound in your cubiculum. It’s Wednesday night. Nestor brought you here. He’d finished his stint in our market and was making his late afternoon deliveries to the restaurants, cookshops, and kapeleia across the city when he found you in the Rhakotis Quarter in an alley beside an old slaughterhouse. At first he thought you were just another pile of rubbish, but when the sun caught the gold in your fibula and threw a disk of light against the pavement, he stopped, and upon recognizing you, dumped his remaining produce in the street, lifted you into his cart, and brought you home. He can’t imagine what you were doing there. Needless to say, I said nothing, but he’s concerned about you.”
“I thought Binyamin would be meeting a broker around here. Otherwise I’d never have worn the fibula.” My words dribbled out on a lacy strand of spittle.
“It saved your life, Miriam. Your mother was watching over you and praying to Isis that you’d be rescued. So Isis sent Nestor to prevent your nightmare from coming true. I remember your mother always wore the fibula. She told me your father gave it to her as a wedding present, as a symbol of not only his love for her and her rank as a Roman citizen but of their family’s future. His grandmother and mother had it before her, and when he gave it to your mother, he told her that someday it would belong to their daughter. I remember Iphigenia putting it away each night and bringing it to your mother every morning. Nestor’s finding you proves that your mother wants you
to study alchemy.”
“But the fibula didn’t save my mother’s life, Phoebe, and the truth is I wish it hadn’t saved mine. I don’t have the scrolls, and I have no idea where they are and how I can get them. I know only that Binyamin took them. But I can’t accuse him because I have no proof. So there goes my career as an alchemist, over before it began. I might just as well marry Noah, who doesn’t care about my honor or my shame, my ambitions or my fiascos.”
“I know your mother wants you to live. She valued life, and I say that not just because she saved mine. You’re too young to know how tenderly she took care of me, but I remember. Before I would go to sleep, she’d bathe me and clothe me in one of the embroidered linen nightdresses she’d been saving for a daughter. But she took care of strangers too. On Friday afternoons, she and Iphigenia would deliver scores of meals to the poor, wonderful meals, the same food the cook prepared for your parents’ Shabbat guests. And your mother delivered them to not just the Jewish Quarter but the Bruchium and Rhakotis Quarters as well, to soup kitchens throughout the city. She said it was her holy obligation, but she did it anonymously so no one could feel beholden to her.”
My mother continues to be a living presence for Phoebe.
“You too are generous, Miriam. You honor your father with your mother’s tradition of hospitality, and you protect your brother by helping him with his lessons and shielding him from the brunt of your father’s temper.
“Iphigenia told me that when your mother realized she was dying, she made your father vow that no matter what happened to her, he would see to it that Binyamin and you—despite your being a girl—would have the best possible education. So your father purchased a slave to escort your brother to a school that would prepare him to enter the Gymnasium as an ephebe, and he purchased Hector to tutor you at home. I can still hear Hector bragging to your father about you, that you were a discuplina bona (a good disciple), that you worked hard to learn, and that you knew Latin so well that you could masquerade as the emperor’s wife.
“So I know your mother wanted you and Binyamin to have a life of your own choosing. You don’t have to marry Noah. You can manage this household and your father’s investments and do anything else you want. You don’t need Noah for that.”
Her compassion bubbled through me.
“You too, Phoebe, should have the life you want. Surely my mother would have wanted that too. As soon as I’m up and around, we can apply for you to become a free resident of Alexandria.”
“Miriam, I’ve told you before. You are my family and my life. I want to go wherever you go. And now it’s time for you to get some rest. I’ll bring you a sleeping draft, and in the morning, we’ll see what the day brings.”
Chapter 23
Thursday Morning
OTHER THAN A pulpy black eye, a bump on the side of my head, and a few eggplant bruises from my hard landing and where the thieves had kicked me, I didn’t look so bad. Phoebe had brought me an early breakfast of another bowl of barley broth and a dose of hellebore for the pain, so I felt no worse than yesterday, ready to face the day—in this case to speak with Binyamin, proof or no proof. He was bound to ask me about my wounds, and given his imminent departure and the fast-approaching deadline for my returning the scrolls—only two days until Shabbat and then I’d have to see Judah on Sunday—I convinced myself to be direct with him. So, after slipping a short, sleeveless tunic over my capitium, I knocked on his door.
Entering his suite, I saw him poised on one knee before his sleeping couch, the sole of his front foot pressing into the floor to balance his weight. He was leaning over the tousled bed linen, a few pieces of our mother’s jewelry laid out alongside two sheets of papyrus, a pen case, his seal, and a silk-lined drawstring pouch. He must have been making an inventory for Sergius and a copy for himself, recording a description of each piece before slipping it into one of the many pockets of the pouch. I wondered with a sorrow that filled my throat whether our mother’s Alexandrian pearls were among the pieces he was assigning to Sergius. When finished, he’d draw the strings closed, melt a stick of wax across the flap that folds over the mouth of the pouch, impress the wax with his seal, and tuck the pouch inside his belt.
The morning sun poured through his open windows, its lemony light spilling across the mosaic floor, catching the gleam of his perspiration, spinning his skin into gold. My eyes surveyed his sparse, austere furnishings: a sleeping couch flanked at its head by a wicker chair and at its foot by a cedar wardrobe, its doors open, his remaining tunics, sandals, and boots in a jumble at the bottom, some spilling out. The other furnishings were a freestanding brass candlestick and his athletic equipment, namely a set of barbells and bench, an exercise mat, and his discus. Otherwise, only a ripe tang filled the room, his own heady scent mingling with the odors of stale bedding, candle wax, last night’s cheap wine, and above all, sadness.
He’d been up for hours, judging by the film on the food that remained on his breakfast tray, the length of the inventory, and the plumpness of the pouch, but the barber had yet to bathe and shave him. Barefoot and wearing only a bleached cotton robe, he’d set aside in one corner of the room a pair of boots, an embroidered linen tunic with a belt and matching sandals, his chlamys, which is a sporty traveling cape shorter than a himation, and an Iberian leather travel bag crammed with sundries.
Seeing the bag was a more stunning blow than all of last night’s kicks and punches combined. The rest of reality dissolved around me as if I were viewing it through a tunnel, this single leather bag packed with the essentials, perhaps a memento, and all the sorrows of his childhood, its antagonisms, disappointments, losses, and rejections. My fist flew to my chest as if it could plug the puncture in my heart and blunt the realization that today he would leave this house forever to kill or be killed for the cheap entertainment of a mob.
Binyamin turned to look up at me, interrupting the whirl of childhood images and emotions I thought I’d blotted out years ago. Then, squinting against the light, he waved me toward the chair.
“Whoa! What’s happened to you, Sis?”
“I wanted to speak to you about that.”
Edging back and settling onto the seat of the chair, I angled toward him, my arms folded across my thighs.
“I was out the other night, doing something foolish I know, spying on you in the Rhakotis Quarter. I was trying to recover the scrolls taken from my cubby between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. Thinking you might have taken them to finance your trip and were about to sell them, I’d hoped to interrupt the sale and convince you to return them to me. On my way home from the cookshop, I met up with some thugs. As for the rest of my story, the purple welts speak for themselves.”
He hunkered down before me, his head thrust forward like a turtle’s. Narrowing his eyes, he looked me over, his forefinger under my chin, turning my head from side to side. Then, brushing aside the pouch and sheets of papyrus, he sat across from me at the head of the couch.
“My G-d, Sis, you look terrible, but I have to hand it to you. You’ve got nerve.” And then, tipping his head back and chuckling, he added with a nod, “You are definitely my twin.”
“I’m sorry to have blamed you for taking them. I first thought Papa had done it, but when he convinced me he hadn’t, I had to conclude it was you.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Who else could have known where the scrolls were? Who else could have been alone in the library, and who else could have hoped to benefit from taking them?”
“But how could a few scrolls finance a voyage? What do they contain, the secrets to eternal life?”
“They’re more dangerous than that. They contain experimental recipes, albeit incomplete and purposely obscure to confound the uninitiated. But more important, the information in the recipes could incite another pogrom.”
“By Zeus, what on earth are you mixed up in, Si
s?”
I wasn’t going to open up that topic so I asked him how he happened to get Sergius to finance his trip.
When he paused and took a deep breath, I knew I was going to hear a long story.
“I used to see Sergius at the games, where everyone would make a fuss over him, but I didn’t get to meet him until I became an ephebe. He would come to the Gymnasium’s palaistra to watch us wrestle. I noticed he began to pay particular attention to me, coming to all my events, even the pentathlon in the stadium. After each of my competitions, we would talk, sometimes in an exercise room or the baths, sometimes in the garden.
“He told me about his life as a gladiator, how by volunteering, his debts had been forgiven and he came to be accepted as a member of the school’s familia gladiatoria. He even earned the title of best combatant, primus palus, and was ultimately awarded the rudis, a wooden sword symbolizing his permanent discharge. But mostly he talked about the thrill of living on the edge and becoming a popular hero.
“You see, Sis, volunteers are treated better than the prisoners and slaves condemned to the arena. Yes, we too have to swear allegiance to the gods of the Underworld; be tattooed on our face, legs, and hands as property of the school; and submit to the rules of the barracks, but as valuable property, we’re fed well and treated by physicians trained right here in Alexandria. And the duration of our service is limited by contract.”
I would have liked to remind him that he’d still be a slave, a warning my father surely had reiterated countless times, but his face beamed with so much pride that I held my tongue. Anyway, it would have been useless.