A soldier came with bread and wine. He came again with fruit and that evening, with fish. She ate without pain. Eventually, she slept.
The next morning Cato came to Amani’s room. He sat with her as she pushed through the last effects of Ptolemy’s wine. Her hands trembled, and the room felt off-kilter, as if, at any moment, she might slide off the bed and tumble out the door.
“You had every reason to believe Ptolemy had poisoned the wine, and yet you drank,” he said.
She dangled her legs over the side of the bed and tested her feet upon the floor.
“You’re free to go, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you need,” he said.
She gripped his arm and stood upright.
“Ptolemy won’t hurt you within my sight,” he said. “Once you leave this city, however, there is little I can do to protect you.”
“If I can get to where I’m going, I should be safe from Ptolemy’s reach,” she said.
“Then a pray for you a safe journey.”
Cato walked beside her in the streets of the dignified city with its white and painted stone. Women passed them on the way to market, and a rooster crowed without purpose.
She walked alone where goats grazed at the road's edge and hedges lined fields and trees gathered without enough commitment to become a forest. A dog welcomed her on the edge of Bathzayith, but the street sat empty and the synagogue, dark. No one answered at Malachi's home, and cold came the stares from the villagers who stepped out of their homes or approached from the fields. The weight of their countenance pushed her on to Arsinoe.
She arrived at the little city on the morning of the spring tide. Its buildings glistened in the light by the sea. Young goats played. Women gathered to buy fish in the market one street south of the harbor, where men mended their nets.
Amani's ship was gone.
She sought answers but only found reminders that she was only a child and a woman in their eyes, and no one listened to her claims. So complete was their dismissal, it almost felt rational. Who was she to own a ship? To resist the will of Pharaoh? Or to save the last vestiges of her people's knowledge? Who was she to fight the greatest empires on Earth?
Though she had no answer, she pressed on. She climbed through the hills until, that evening, she stood above the rubble of the flooded temple. Pharaoh’s men stood at intervals around the shore. She heard others moving among the trees.
Amani kept low and quiet and hurried to the place where the winds had stunted the grass. She found the blackened rock and climbed down the chimney without a rope. When she dropped the last cubit, her feet splashed into water.
She heard what might have been a voice echoing down the chimney.
The only light in the cavern came from the mouth of the cave as the sky burned blue and red with the setting sun. Water rolled above the level of the stone walkways. The machines were gone.
Farther out in the cavern, halfway between where she stood and the cave opening, something twinkled in the starlight. It flashed white and then a metallic gray.
The voice in the chimney grumbled again. Pebbles tumbled from its mouth.
A gull cried somewhere beyond the cave, and its wail reached her above the percussion of the waves. The water distorted a sunken machine in brief moments of visibility.
A rock bounced out of the chimney, hopped past her feet, and landed in the water. The voices of Ptolemy’s men drew closer.
Lamp-lit figures appeared beyond the mouth of the cave. She saw them for a moment before a wave obscured them.
Perhaps it was Malachi. Perhaps, Ptolemy.
She thought of me, and then she stepped off the walkway. Maybe she knew the rock bottom was slick with slime and the current would slip her off her feet. She knew she might drown. If so, the saltwater would burn her lungs, and she would float, open-mouthed and open-eyed in the Great Green until monsters came to devour her bite by bite.
From the moment I agreed to become her tutor and she became the companion of the princess, her fate had entwined with the secrets of this annex. Perhaps it was in the will of the gods that she die in this place. In my old age, I'm inclined to entertain a separate notion, something I would have once left to the dreams of children. I tell myself she's alive, even now. Maybe, I believe it, but if I did more than believe it, if I knew it to be true, in the way Malachi knows his God, I'd be doing something more than writing a history I only half believe to be true.
She stepped off the walkway and sunk into the churning water. A wave knocked her sideways. It crushed her into the rock wall and then sucked her away. The outgoing current drew her toward the cave mouth. Waves crashed in violent eruptions of foam. She kicked and fought. Her foot struck rock and pain echoed through her body.
A wave caught a small boat and thrust it into the cave. The outgoing current rushed back to meet the wave, and the boat caught her like a falcon's talon and dragged her through the water.
She saw Malachi as he grabbed her arm. He couldn't budge her. Her legs dragged along the stone.
The boat hit rock with a sound like wood splitting. The hand holding her arm jerked away. She slipped beneath the water, beneath the boat.
The outgoing current caught the boat above and Amani below. It dragged her along the rock wall. She reached out, desperate, clawing. Her fingers found the boat's side, but she could not pull her head above water.
The boat drew away from her, and the next wave rolled in. She tumbled. Her lungs ached. The rock wall struck her shoulder and hip. She fought to right herself, to see through the surface glaze to the forms of men beyond. She struck her right arm upward, her hand splayed wide to grasp.
She felt flesh. Hands wrapped around her arm. Three men pulled her into the boat. She thrashed like a landed fish, not yet believing in her rescue, and looked up into the face of Malachi. Rivulets of blood snaked into her eyes, and waves battered the boat. Malachi held her as the others rowed. They plunged out of the cave and into the sea. In the distance, men watched from Amani's ship.
Something cold and smooth struck her thigh. Amani turned her head enough to look. Rescued machines littered the boat.
“These are men from the village,” Malachi said. “We thought your treasure should be waiting for you when you returned.”
He covered her with a blanket.
Papyrus 5.24
Upon his return to Alexandria, Urban wandered through the palace as an object of respect without purpose. I never considered us close before Cyprus, but afterward, I would come to his rooms to talk about Amani. Later, when we heard that Berenice’s forces were overwhelmed in Pelusium, Urban came to me.
I took a room in a house with a view of the library, and his bad leg struggled with the stairs. He rejected my suggestion of the gardens. What he had to say required privacy.
“If I'm here when Ptolemy arrives,” he said, “the kindest thing he can do is kill me. The days of the city falling over itself to feed and honor me are ending. I must either choose to go or to die, and I've decided I'm not quite done living, yet.”
He had not, however, come to me only to share his plans and wish me a fond farewell. In Cyprus, he had been ignorant of the annex and our adventures. Once back in Alexandria, he learned the truth.
Before Urban left the city, he wanted to meet Moira.
Moira never left her rooms except by royal command. She had copies of the Cypriot scrolls and others she had requested from the regular archives. It was these latter books that interested her the most, and she spent most of her days reliving the Alexandria her people had missed.
Berenice had assigned her a scribe to copy documents, and, as the weeks and months passed, her collection grew. She rarely requested visitors and often turned them away, but when I approached her about Urban, she agreed.
A wind blew through the closed shutters and chilled her room. Violent winds surged from the north, and when they blew, no ship could depart the harbor. We became prisoners, under siege by the gods.
Moira had a sense for
the dramatic and hung from the ceiling as we entered, clinging to beams she had strengthened for that purpose. I am confident the look on Urban's face meant everything to her.
She lowered herself to the ground and sat upright on a high stool, her metal arms positioned behind her. I made formal introductions. Urban, too, sat on a high stool, his walking stick balanced on his lap.
“People talk about the ancient knowledge,” he said. “Every person I come across is ready to opine on its wonders, but I have an earnest question.”
“Everyone has questions,” Moira said. “What is yours?”
“What purpose does it serve?”
I saw in Moira's eyes a rise to indignation, but it did not last. Either she lacked the angry energy of youth, or she saw the humility in Urban's eyes.
“Purpose?” she asked.
“Everybody knows it will be glorious, but nobody knows why.”
Her smile revealed a tenderness I'd never seen before.
Urban postponed his trip and asked if Moira would see him again. She agreed. Each day for a week, he delayed his departure. Soon, he quit talking about leaving the city, and then he stopped going home.
When Ptolemy came and Berenice lost her head, Moira hid Urban in her rooms. He let her fate be his.
Ptolemy allowed Moira to keep her rooms, and Urban stayed with her. I may have been the only person to know she kept him there.
I was also the other person to hear her answer when he asked the purpose of the ancient knowledge.
“Were it not for Alexander,” she said, “the Egyptians would have soon overthrown their Persian Pharaoh. The purpose of the knowledge is independence.”
“Independence,” he said.
“If we can outrun our own Alexander.”
“And after that?” he asked.
“Dominance.”
Papyrus 5.25
Jerusalem
I left Jerusalem this morning to ponder the path Amani took from Cyprus. She and Malachi sailed to Salamis and from there landed in Joppa. Now, I sit at the well outside Bethany and wait. Word of my arrival will spread.
When the cool of the morning has passed, a woman comes to me. She's in her mid-forties. Her brow furls over a sharp and angular face. She comes as far as the last sprig of vegetation but stays outside the circle of trampled earth which holds the well at its center.
I stand. “Are you Miriam?”
“Half the women of the village are named Miriam.”
“I need to speak to the Miriam who befriended a young Egyptian woman who lived here many years ago.”
She shakes her head at me, almost laughing. “Anything for Herod's minister.”
As far as the Mount of Olives is east of Jerusalem, so Bethany is to the southeast of the Mount. An almshouse serves the poor and the sick, and a way station benefits travelers to Jerusalem.
She leads me through a gate into a courtyard lined with vessels full of grains and wine. The door of the main house stands open, revealing rows of straw beds covered in goat’s hair cloth. Thin and haggard women occupy a few of the beds. From the upper room, I hear a man’s wet cough.
My hostess slips into the house and returns a few minutes later with a chalk plate, a piece of bread, and a few herbs. She hands me the plate and cup of wine. “Take these to him.” She gives a darting glance upward.
I follow her gaze. The deep cough rattles out through half-open windows.
“Rafi, a minister of Herod is here,” she calls. “His name is Philostratos. I’m sending him up with food.”
No response comes, but she shoos me along. I walk up the stairs that follow the side of the building. Four straw beds lie on the floor, all but one empty. Rafi is an enormous man, with leathery skin and wild, unkempt hair. His muscular frame takes up the breadth of the straw and spills out onto the floor. His barrel chest rises and falls with labored breathing.
I stand in the doorway.
“Philostratos?” His eyes open to a squint, but otherwise he does not move. “I know that name. You served with Cleopatra.”
I nod.
“Must have had a way about her,” he says. “Seduced the world.”
I set his food beside him but say nothing. He is repeating Rome's only answer to a woman of power. It cannot be that her strength came from intellect, charm, and character. They have told the world she used her beauty to seduce and sleep with great men. This is the power Rome will allow and no other, but once Cleopatra shed her childhood, she was not beautiful. Her hard features magnified her intensity and fierce intellect. She drew people to her, enthralled and charmed them; none of which anyone who knew her would have credited to her appearance.
When I return to the courtyard, the woman hands me a cup of wine.
“My father ran the way station when I was a child,” she says. “Which meant he worked in the fields and my mother tended to the guests. My work kept me isolated, preparing food, but Mother would call for me when children came to stay. She thought it might comfort them to see someone their own age. That's how I met Amani.”
“You're Miriam,” I say.
She nods.
“Malachi sent me to you. He's helped me trace Amani's life in Jerusalem, navigating the changes made by Herod's building projects. He tells me what he can remember, but those years remain incomplete.”
“Why?” she asks. “What are you hoping to learn?”
I consider her for a long moment. Amani came here with secrets, and Miriam is protecting them still. “If you're worried about her papers and her experiments, we haven't found them, and I don't know what we'd do if we did.”
“Herod would reward a man well for the wonders she possessed,” Miriam says, “but I don't suppose that's occurred to you.”
“She came back to Alexandria to study the knowledge of her people. That's undeniable, but I'm unsure of her intention.”
“Her intention?” she asks.
I nod.
“Stay the night,” she says. “Tomorrow, I'll go with you to see Malachi.”
It is dark, but the dawn will soon come. Miriam, her family, and I sit together and eat bread. As the sun rises, Miriam and I join others making the short journey to Jerusalem. Through the tiny Essene Gate, we gain entrance to the lower city which sweeps up through the valley like a great river lit by the breaking dawn.
We join Malachi at his house and he takes us to the roof where we sit under a canopy, feel a breeze that never reaches the street. From here, we can view the hippodrome and the Jewish temple for which Herod has such lavish plans.
Malachi remarried long ago, and his son and his family live in the same house. His daughter-in-law waits on us while we talk. She is young. Miriam is mature, and Malachi and I are ancient. He looks good, though; his hair is white, and his face cracks like a dried-up riverbed. It suits him.
“She found faith,” Malachi says.
“I was her friend for six years,” Miriam says, “if she had converted, I would have known.”
“I never said she converted.”
Sometimes, I forget to listen when it's a story Malachi has told before. My mind drifts.
When Amani returned to Alexandria, she didn't give Malachi her research, only a journal of her thoughts and memories. The narration flows as if she expected the reader to understand the historical context and minutia of her life. What she focuses on are feelings. It's redundant and overwrought and wonderful.
Malachi tells us about his favorite passage. It deals with the influence that living in Jerusalem had upon her concept of religion.
They believe in their god, she writes. The moment this realization hit me, I was deep in a mechanical creature we had rescued from the Cypriot workshop. For months, I had stripped it, piece by piece, carefully documenting every step and every insight into how it might have worked. Inside its metal casing, someone etched the figure of a man with a frog's head, in honor of the Ogdoad, the first gods of the first Egyptian religion.
In all likelihood, I had overworked myself into
exhaustion. I was thinking of the characteristics of the creation moment represented by the Ogdoad, and I drifted from there into the creation story of the Jews. That was the moment I understood their sincerity of belief.
I wonder if the early Egyptians believed in their gods the same way? Do the Egyptians of today? Does my family? Growing up in the palace, I never saw religious ritual as anything but the pageantry by which power is maintained. Everyone I knew kept up a facade of religion, and no one I knew took it seriously. I thought the whole world like that, but maybe it was just the little world of the palace.
Faith is a tool of control and oppression. It was part of the system that stole from my people, but I see now, there can be more. For the first time, I wonder what it's like to believe.
Malachi smiles at us. “That moment changed her life.”
Miriam turns to me. “What do you say? Did you see such a change?”
“I saw many changes,” I say.
“But this one?”
“I remember something about religion.”
“What?” Malachi asks.
I do my best to quote her. “You who know no god make yourselves to be god and take for yourselves the last vestige of strength left to the people you rule.”
For a long time, no one speaks.
Then Malachi puts down his mug. “Amani and I were alike. I came back to Jerusalem to fight for the faith and heritage of my people, and she returned to Egypt for the same reason. Whatever she learned here, we couldn't give her a sense of her history and the people who share it. You cannot understand your future without first understanding the past.”
I've heard it before, so I just nod, and though he's heard all my thoughts, he asks me, anyway. Why do I think she returned?
There is one possibility I've never said, and I don't say it now. Amani returned to Alexandria because we could not be trusted.
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