Written in the Ashes
Copyright © 2011 K. Hollan Van Zandt
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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
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Author photo by Dan Fauci
Map designer
Shimmering Wolf
Winged Isis image
K. Hollan Van Zandt
Cover design
Andrew Mays
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3514-2 (e)
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3513-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3515-9 (hc)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011908237
Printed in the United States of America
Balboa Press rev. date: 7/6/2011
Contents
Time Line Prior To This Story
Prologue
Part i.
Alexandria
Part ii.
The Emerald Tablet
Part iii.
The Great Library
Epilogue
Glossary
Translations
Book One
Of
The Mediterranean Trilogy
For the librarians of the world,
then and now.
And for my beloved grandparents
Sissy & Daddyman
with bushels of love and acorns.
Acknowledgements
No book comes into being without tremendous support from a whole host of people that offer the depth of their patience, faith, honesty and most importantly, their love. I am thankful to have been the fortunate recipient of the finest assistance imaginable, divine and otherwise. Some of my supporters stayed for a just a season of the writing journey, and others remained steadfast through the entire decade it took me to complete this first book in my Mediterranean Trilogy.
I must begin with thanks to the man who spurred me toward a lifelong relationship with language, my mentor, novelist Tom Robbins. His encouragement was as invaluable as his critique, ultimately shaping line by line, my eye and attitude toward the craft of fiction. I also extend a heartfelt acknowledgment to my first writing teacher at Palisades High, Mary Redclay, who knew better than to give me an easy A. Also to my ninth grade history teacher, Daryl Stolper, who shared the more obscure and interesting stories that made our world what it is. I must also thank (or curse) my friend, scholar Jamba Dunn, for getting me started on Egypt with our agonizing debates about ancient gods and light bulbs when I was still a teenager.
A warm and humble thank you to my father, Jacque Van Zandt, who was guided by God to offer me an opportunity to share this book with the world. What a gift! There are no words of gratitude deep enough to thank my stepfather Scotty Peck, whose longstanding faith in me and this book are the only reason you were able to read it. I also must thank my beautiful mother, Shannon Peck, for always believing in me and allowing me to find my own path in life. This is perhaps the greatest gift a parent can give a child, and it was my good fortune to be so blessed. I also extend my deepest appreciation to my beloved friend Stuart Volkow. Thank you for your love and encouragement. Woof!
An affectionate thanks to Mark R. Harris, producer extraordinaire, and Josh Conviser, whose input was tantamount to sculpting the final version of this story. Josh, you are a genius! And a huge hug to the amazing producer/artist Dan Fauci, whose course The Mastery should really be a requirement in schools worldwide. Thank you to my early readers Andrea Reitman (who was of great assistance with Jewish history, names and traditions), Toby Shaw, Kia Miller, Shelly “Inanna” Heit, Jim Greenberg, Jacqui Lalita. My appreciation goes out to research assistance from David Michaels, the ancient coin director at Heritage Auction Galleries, and the firemen at the Los Gatos Fire Station. Thank you to beautiful Sofia, whose poetry crowns this novel. Also to Jack Lamb for introducing me to one of Cleopatra’s Needles now standing in Central Park. Thank you to my therapist Elizabeth Lee (who could really be a professional psychic should she ever decide to change careers). Thanks also to my generous lawyer, Phillip Rosen, proof that there are still nobles left in his trade.
Every writer should be so blessed as to enjoy working with her editor. There is no manuscript I will ever complete without first consulting the brilliant service of Rebecca Faith Grossman who, I’m proud to say, made with her editing prowess and education a better writer of me. And thank you to Shimmering Wolf for sharing his magical artistic talents, making my vision a reality. Also to the helpful folks at Balboa Press who helped me midwife this story into print.
My gratitude goes out to the California university libraries at Berkeley (UCB), Los Angeles (UCLA), and Santa Cruz (UCSC), Cabrillo College, and to professors Kathryn Pope at Antioch University and Professor Claudia Rapp Ph.D. at UCLA. If I had one wish it would be to possess a skeleton key to all libraries, especially those libraries that denied me entrance (ahem, Oxford) so I might make mention of them in acknowledgments in books to come.
I would like to extend posthumous gratitude to Shannon Richardson, beloved friend and feminist, and also to Manolimu, my tour guide to Delfi. Shannon, may you always have irises at your door, and Manolis, if there are warm seas in heaven, I pray you sail them in the arms of Eros. Huge thanks to my fellow authors Neil Strauss, Michelle Moran, Ellen Snortland and Robin Maxwell. Also to Johnny Depp for his excellent recommendations in antiquarian bookstores. Special thanks for early encouragement from Jacques de Spoelberch, Garry Shandling, David Field, Leigh McCloskey (whose art should really hang in the Louvre), and yogis Seane Corn and Rusty Wells. Thank you to Judy O’Beirn at Hasmark Services. Also thanks to the patient staff who served me bottomless cups of Earl Grey at Lulu Carpenter’s, Santa Cruz, and to Dragon Books in Los Angeles, and Bookshop Santa Cruz for the best resources a writer could dream of under one roof.
And last, but in no way least, a special thank you to two kitties who will never know what an impact their companionship had during the challenges of writing this story: Mukha and Zee Zee Bug. They both make cameo appearances in this novel, as does the osprey who lived in our harbor until she was shot down by some nameless coward.
There is sim
ply not enough space to set down here the names of everyone who helped me in some way over the last decade of writing. I want you to know that it is not my thanks, but the thanks of Hannah and Alizar and the other characters in this novel that go out to you. If there are librarians in heaven, they know exactly what you contributed, and I pray you are honored by always having a wonderful story to read, to live and to tell.
Time Line Prior To This Story
347 C.E.* − Birth of Emperor Theodosius I, who in his lifetime will make Nicean Christianity (under the Catholic Church) the official religion of the Roman Empire. He is the last emperor to rule the united eastern and western halves of the Roman empire.
375 C.E. – birth of Hypatia of Alexandria
391 C.E. – Emperor Theodosius I declares by Imperial Edict that all pagan practice shall be punishable by death
391 C.E. – The Serapeum Library, or “daughter library”, in Alexandria is destroyed by a Christian mob
395 C.E. − Emperor Theodosius I dies, leaving his son Arcadius on the Eastern throne of Constantinople and his son Honorius on the Roman throne in the West. The Empire will never be united again.
408 C.E. − Emperor Arcadius dies, leaving his seven-year-old son, Theodosius II, on the throne of Constantinople. His eldest daughter, Pulcheria, age fifteen, is proclaimed Augusta by the senate and assumes the regency for her younger brother.
* Note: the non-religious term C.E. means “Common Era”
and is equivalent to A.D. “anno domini”
Beneath this well
lay buried the hearts of the fallen gods.
They are rotting into the soil like apples,
sweetening the water.
Come, drink.
-Sofia Grey
…Whosoever would be great among you,
must be your servant: and whosever
would be first among you must be slave of all.
-Christ Jesus
Mark 10: 43-44
Prologue
All trees hold secrets. From tiny saplings just piercing the earth to the old sentinels that stretch toward the sky until they founder, what the trees have witnessed, we can only dream. They harbor the winds and the great changes of time, recording reunions, catastrophes, even unremarkable sunrises in concentric rings that lie concealed in darkness, deep within.
Trees are consummate listeners. A fibrous canopy above the earth, they gather into their taut, hollow bodies all the stories of the world. Like the angels, trees will not interrupt, disagree or offer advice. Perhaps this is why the ancients thought them wise.
Trees are the first libraries, the oldest houses of wisdom and knowledge.
And they remember everything, even a girl.
Part i.
Alexandria
(410 C.E.)
1
Hannah pressed her cheek to the gnarled trunk. Silver leaves shimmered around her like so many netted minnows in the wind. Then stillness. She crouched to make an offering of water that had taken her days to collect, uncapping her water horn and trickling it over the exposed roots. Though it had stood for centuries and bore scars of fire and war, the olive tree had lost its grasp during the dry winter winds, leaning in time toward the earth. Drought had struck Sinai, lengthening through the dusty afternoons like a deadly shadow, killing everything it touched. The shepherds talked of nothing else. Empty grain sacks withered on the sun-baked clay while scrawny newborn sheep and goats were left to the vultures’ talons. Egypt was scoured by dust and hunger; flowing streams atrophied to sand.
Above her, an angel circled and then settled in the eaves of the sky, content to wait. A door would open. The warrior would come. The light had promised it.
Hannah touched her lips to the rough bark in goodbye. A dead leaf caught in her hair. The olive tree, now only leaning, would soon settle on the earth and die. Perhaps its fallen torso would house a fox family when the rains returned, but she would be happier remembering it this way, fierce and tall and full of life. She did not want to leave, but leave they must. She and her father would travel to seek water, for there was none left in the brittle pastures on the mountain flanks. Half the herd had died, and summer was not yet upon them.
Hannah shuddered as the warm breeze tousled her hair. There would be no more gypsies dancing to the pounding drums in the summer meadow, or listening to the stories of the Torah read by the Rabbi and his sons. No more familiar silhouette of the mountain at sunrise. She grew impatient with the drought; if only the rains would return.
From spying on the gypsies, Hannah learned there were sages who could read embers in a fire, speak to animals, or even proclaim that a comet’s blue smudge in the night sky would mean the end of a king. She wanted to find one of these sages to interpret the drought and predict its end. She held a secret frustration with her father for his disinterest in the language of omens the heavens and stars seemed to speak. He knew only the language of goats. But it was a language he spoke fluently. So fluently she felt certain he had a bell for a heart.
When Hannah returned to camp, she reluctantly packed her belongings and joined her father in the morning sunlight on the deer path.
They walked for many days, often encountering muddy springs already drained by other herdsman. Soon, all the youngest and weakest of their herd had fallen.
Sometime after dark and a meal beside the fire, Hannah collapsed in exhaustion and had a dream. Birds by the thousands soared above crumbling columns, their wings on fire, spiraling ever higher in blind chaos while far beneath them, men in black robes surrounded a golden-haired woman and forced her to the ground; their robes covered her completely until she was lost, screaming in a churning sea of blood. Hannah awoke with a jolt, her breath short. This was no ordinary dream; she felt it portended something evil. She sat up in the dust, covered her eyes with one hand, and offered the Shema as her father had taught her, taught her as if she were not a daughter, but a son.
So.
There were weeks of walking. Vultures circled their camp day and night. Hannah felled two small hares with her shepherd’s sling and carried them on her shoulders to the fire.
Her father, Kaleb, licked the wine from his mustache. “We cannot go toward the roads, Hannah. Thieves may give us trouble, and we have only the one knife between us.”
“Then to the sea, Abba?” Hannah prodded the fire with a stick and a shower of sparks lifted into the sky.
“No, I think to the river in Egypt.”
The river in Egypt. Hannah had heard stories of the ancient Egyptians and how they lived on the east bank of the Nile, the direction of life, and buried their dead on the west bank, the direction of death. When the Pharaoh left his corpse, his spirit flew toward the rising sun and the life-giving waters. The pyramid tombs had been designed so he would know his way home. In that way, he was like the geese or the great whales, one of the few among creatures of the earth that knew where he belonged.
Hannah closed her eyes as a smile settled on her lips. She imagined the fragrant baths of the Egyptians inside their glowing temples painted with the blue lotus revered for its beauty and youth-giving properties, the mosaics rimming the pools, the colorful murals of the gods stretched on the walls. There would be strong, bare-chested men standing beside the doors holding papyrus fans, and round-hipped women whispering to one another in the water, splashing, laughing. Hannah began to sing softly, feeling hopeful again about their future. Surely the Nile would nourish them.
Kaleb allowed himself to bask in his daughter’s reverie until her song trailed off. “Hannah, I have a gift for you. Something I have been saving, and I want you to have it now.” Kaleb reached into his leather satchel. Hannah came to sit at his feet. She closed her eyes, held out her hands, and he closed her fingers over the gift. Hannah knew it by shape at once, and her eyes flew open. “Abba, you bought it for me? Nothing could make me happier.”
Kal
eb smiled triumphantly. He had saved every coin to buy her the silver Athenian hairpin in the likeness of a sleeping swan that she had admired in the market the year before.
Hannah turned the precious gift in her hands, fingering the long sharp prongs, the smooth feathers of the regal bird molded by a talented artisan. “But Abba, we cannot afford this. Not now.”
Kaleb kissed and squeezed his daughter’s hands. “There is only now,” he said, and he nestled the hairpin in a wave of her burnished dark hair.
When the fire grew red and dim, Hannah yawned and kissed her father’s whiskered cheek. She would stay with the herd through the night, and he with the fire. He needed the light to repair their tent, cut sinew with the knife, and then lash the skins together. She curled up beneath a woolen blanket in the field and shut her eyes, listening to the tinkling of the goat bells, unable to sleep. She wondered if she should go back to the fire and check on her father, but she knew he would prefer she stay with the herd. Eventually, she fell asleep.
So.
Hannah’s eyes sprung open. Rustling grass. The goats bleating, scattering. She sensed a predator and felt for the knife beneath her head, but realized that her father had it by the fire.
Suddenly, there were rough hands at her throat and over her mouth.
Panic seized her. Two cloaked men. One with breath that stunk of barley mead grabbed her, the other laughed, clearly pleased. She flailed and was fisted across the face. Once. Twice. She broke away and ran five paces up the hill before they caught her ankles and dragged her backwards. Clawing the earth, her hand found a stone and she turned and struck out, hitting one of the men in the eye, drawing blood but not enough.
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