The Conqueror's Wife
Page 48
“Go. Gather flowers.”
“It’s dark out.” Comito hated the dark—she still liked to fall asleep with an olive oil lamp burning, although she claimed it was for Anastasia.
I pressed a frayed basket to her hand as Anastasia whimpered. “The lion will eat us if we go outside,” she said, her eyes big as plums.
I would have laughed—my father had been telling Anastasia myths from the Golden Age, most recently acting out the story of the Nemean Lion falling from the full moon—but instead I blinked hard and tweaked her nose. “Silly goose, Heracles slew the lion. You’ll be perfectly safe.” I bent down to whisper in her ear. “And you’re much scarier than any lion when you growl.”
She bared her teeth and made claws with her hands, her little mouth opening in an adorable roar. I swallowed hard and dropped a kiss on her head. “Help Comito pick a pretty posy. And find Uncle Asterius.” My voice quavered as I spoke to Comito. “He needs to bring a priest.”
They left and I was alone. I shouldn’t have been alone—this was my mother’s job. I didn’t know how to prepare a body, how to purify my father so he could pass to the afterlife. But there was no one else.
My hands trembled as I struck the flame for our oil lamp and rummaged through our lone trunk, past my father’s ivory backgammon set with its missing piece and the worn codex of Homer’s Song of Ilium. I tossed out Mother’s saffron wedding veil before I finally found what I was looking for—a single bottle of olive oil pressed from our own trees in Cyprus. I tried not to cry but had to set the bottle down to wipe the stream of snot and tears from my face. Once started, I couldn’t seem to stop.
I didn’t hear my mother return until she gathered me into her arms, the hot smell of wine on her breath as she pressed her lips to my forehead. Together we readied my father—she washed his body and redressed him in his green tunica, and my uneven stitches sewed him into his brown cloak until only his face and the splayed toes of his feet showed, the better to allow the angels to examine him and determine his fitness for paradise. He looked asleep, and I prayed that he might sit up and roar with laughter because we’d fallen for another of his jokes. Yet God was deaf to my prayers.
Myrrh choked the air and the sun had almost heaved itself over the horizon when Comito arrived with a priest and Uncle Asterius, Anastasia asleep in his arms with her thumb tucked in her mouth. He wasn’t really our uncle, but our father’s boss. As leader of the Green faction, he was also one of Constantinople’s most powerful politicians. He draped an arm around my mother. “You have my deepest condolences, Zenobia.” He crooned something in her ear that made her blanch white, but then she looked at us and gave a terse nod.
Uncle Asterius swept me into a hug that smelled of the lavender used to sweeten his linen. “Poor child,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
Even then, I knew that to be a lie.
The funeral began in the thin morning light as Uncle Asterius’ bleary-eyed slaves hefted the greenwood coffin onto their shoulders, my father’s circus whip and pitchfork nestled beside him. Yawning shopkeepers crossed themselves as we made our way to the cedar-lined path that led to the cemetery outside the Gate of Charisios. The air stunk like rotting fish, compliments of the nearby garos factories, forced outside the city walls with their vats of fermenting fish sauce. The flowers my sisters had picked on the banks of the Lycus River—daisies, blue crocuses, violets, and scraggly yellow poppies—had already begun to wilt over the sides of the box, and the calm hymns of the lone priest battled with the mournful dirges sung by a professional mourner paid for by Uncle Asterius. We recited a truncated version of the Divine Liturgy and each kissed the rough wooden cross the priest held over the coffin before accepting a square of dry bread and a sip of phouska, the watery, sour wine only the poor would drink. My mother’s hands trembled violently as she struggled to cut a lock of my father’s hair, and the tears ran unchecked down her cheeks. I took the knife from her.
I stared at the blade and ran my thumb down its edge, transfixed by the pearl of blood that dropped onto my father’s rough brown shroud. One swift cut and I could join him, free myself from grief’s jagged teeth.
Two dark eyes stopped me. Anastasia wiped her nose on her sleeve and took my hand in her little one, kissing the tip of my thumb above the blood. “You hurt yourself, Dora. Are you going to die, too?”
I shook my head, the words tangled in my throat. It would be cowardly to abandon my family. I had many faults—Comito was always quick to point out my temper and snitch on me when I lied—but I wasn’t a coward. Family was all we had.
I managed to cut a lock of my father’s dark hair, identical to my own, and folded it into my palm, mingling my blood with the black strands. My mother fell to her knees and refused to rise long after the slaves tucked him into the red earth. We were alone in Constantinople—no money squirreled away under a pallet and no way to provide for ourselves.
I’d have promised God anything then to have our old lives back. Unfortunately, our new lives were just beginning.
Photo by Katherine Schmeling Photography
Stephanie Thornton is a writer and history teacher who has been obsessed with infamous women from ancient history since she was twelve. She lives with her husband and daughter in Alaska, where she is at work on her next novel.
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