Susan Fletcher - Alphabet of Dreams

by Susan Fletcher

  Alphabet of Dreams

  Also by Susan Fletcher

  Shadow Spinner

  Walk Across the Sea

  The Dragon Chronicles

  Dragon’s Milk

  Flight of the Dragon Kyn

  Sign of the Dove

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Susan Fletcher

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  The text of this book was set in New Baskerville.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Simon Pulse edition April 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Fletcher, Susan, 1951–

  Alphabet of dreams / Susan Fletcher.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “Ginee Seo Books.”

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Mitra, of royal Persian lineage, and her five-year-old brother Babak, whose dreams foretell the future, flee for their lives in the company of the magus Melchior and two other Zoroastrian priests, traveling through Persia as they follow star signs leading to a newly-born king in Bethlehem. Includes historical notes.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-85042-4 (hc)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-85042-5 (hc)

  1. Iran—History—To 640—Juvenile fiction. [1. Iran—History—To 640—Fiction. 2. Princesses—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Dreams—Fiction. 5. Zoroastrianism—Fiction. 6. Jesus Christ—Nativity—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F6356Alp 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2005036264

  ISBN-13: 978-1-439-11542-8 (eBook)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-85152-0 (pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-85152-9 (pbk)

  To my sister,

  Laura

  Contents

  Part I: The City of the Dead

  Chapter 1: Babak’s Dream

  Chapter 2: Hope

  Chapter 3: Paltry Gift

  Chapter 4: The Man with Blue Tattoos

  Chapter 5: Pandora’s Box

  Chapter 6: Shaggy Beasties

  Chapter 7: To Steal a Dream

  Chapter 8: Slit-Nose

  Chapter 9: Pebbles and Stones

  Chapter 10: The Eyes and Ears of the King

  Chapter 11: Captured

  Chapter 12: Star Dance

  Chapter 13: People of the Marsh

  Chapter 14: Hell Hag

  Part II: The Journey

  Chapter 15: The Caravan Road

  Chapter 16: He Cries for You

  Chapter 17: Melchior

  Chapter 18: A Place of Many Secrets

  Chapter 19: Procession of the Doomed

  Chapter 20: A Great Journey

  Chapter 21: Sweet Dreams

  Chapter 22: The Fortress

  Chapter 23: He Sleeps

  Chapter 24: The Wanderers

  Chapter 25: He Waits for You

  Chapter 26: Across the Plateau

  Chapter 27: A Plan

  Chapter 28: Qanat

  Chapter 29: Koosha

  Chapter 30: Eyes to See

  Chapter 31: How Would It Be?

  Chapter 32: If You Were a Girl

  Part III: To Follow a Star

  Chapter 33: Ecbatana

  Chapter 34: Star-Taker

  Chapter 35: Balthazaar

  Chapter 36: Lose This World

  Chapter 37: Two Farewells

  Chapter 38: The Way to Babylon

  Chapter 39: The Garrison

  Chapter 40: The King’s Men

  Chapter 41: Madmen and Stargazers

  Chapter 42: Across the Desert

  Chapter 43: Blood

  Chapter 44: Mirage

  Part IV: Judea

  Chapter 45: Kings

  Chapter 46: Bethlehem

  Chapter 47: Mercy

  Chapter 48: They Bring Death

  Chapter 49: Three Visitors

  Chapter 50: The Babies

  Chapter 51: Soldiers

  Chapter 52: This Perfect Dark

  Part V: Epilogue

  Chapter 53: Home

  A Note from the Author

  Works Cited in Author’s Note and Books for Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  BABAK’S DREAM

  When we lived in the City of the Dead, my brother dreamed mostly of food. Banquets he would have there, curled up on the stone floor among the ossuaries—melons and olives, chickpeas and dates, lentils and bread. Even noble folks’ food was not too fine for his dreams—honeyed lemon peel and almonds, saffron-roasted flesh of lamb.

  How did he know of such food, I used to wonder. Was it seeing it in the marketplace? Or does one’s true nature bubble up and show itself in dreams? We’d ceased eating as nobles do three years before, when Babak was scarcely two.

  Still, this dream food seemed to satisfy him someway. He did not wake weak and peevish with hunger, as I did. There was a kind of glow upon him while the aftertaste of nocturnal feasts suffused his face with joy.

  “Sister!” he would say to me. “Such a dream I had. Roasted chickpeas! I ate till I nearly burst! And oranges, all peeled for me and sprinkled with leaves of mint. And warm rounds of bread with sesame seeds!”

  But this talk of feasting only made me hungrier, crankier. “Move your feet, Babak,” I would snap at last. I would drag him through the honeycombed cave passageways and out toward the gates of Rhagae. “You can’t eat dreams,” I would say.

  But I was wrong about that. Dreams can feed you, can send you on journeys to places beyond imagining.

  I know this, because it happened to us.

  “This way, Babak! Come!”

  I snatched his hand and pulled him along the street as he veered toward a broken-winged pigeon that foundered in the dust, then yanked him away from some sobbing beggar woman he was drawn to, drying his tears, because of course he must cry too.

  “She’s nothing to you, Babak. Remember who you are!” We arrived at the head of the caravan as the first horseman passed the carpet weaver’s market. “Look for Suren,” I said, though now Babak had no need of instruction. His eyes, fastened on the passing travelers, were hungry with hope.

  The swaying tassels, tinkling bells, and bright-woven saddlebags lent the caravan a festive air. Seemed to presage a celebration. A songbird trilled from its gilded cage, and a net filled with cooking pots clanked merrily. A camel-riding musician struck up a tune on a double-pipe; another shook a tambourine, filling the air with its gay, rhythmic jingle. Though I tried to fend it off, I too felt hope seeping into the chambers of my heart. I breathed it in with the dust that bloomed up from the animals’ feet, with the smells of sweat, dung, and spices. A Magus, resplendent in his white cloak and tall cap, rode by astride a magnificent stallion. A lesser priest came behind, swinging a silver thurible that perfumed the air with smoke; another bore aloft the coals of the sacred fire in a brazier of hammered copper. I studied the others’ faces as they pas
sed—the horse-archers; the attendants and servants; the camel drovers and donkey drovers; the musicians and entertainers; the pilgrims and merchants and grooms. I willed our brother Suren to be among them, to have attached himself to this caravan and returned to us.

  But the last of the travelers passed, and no Suren.

  I was reaching for Babak’s hand to lead him away—not wanting to look at him, not wanting to see what was gone from his eyes—when I noticed a jostling up ahead, by the fruit seller’s market. There was shouting, and cursing, and an exchange of blows—a circumstance made in heaven for us. “Move your feet, Babak!” I said. In a trice I had slipped three pomegranates beneath the folds of my tunic and stripped a sack of dates from a fair-haired Scythian nomad with blue tattoos. The fracas suddenly veered in our direction; the Scythian stumbled, fell, flattened Babak beneath him.

  It was then, I now realize—when Babak was pinned beneath the Scythian, when I was kicking the Scythian’s back to get him to move—that the man’s fur cap fell off. Babak must have tucked it into his sash.

  That night, back in the City of the Dead, Babak pillowed his head on lynx fur and dreamed—not of food, but of a birth. A happy occasion. A boy. He recognized the Scythian in the dream. Someone bringing him the baby, settling it in his arms. Someone saying, “Father.” Babak dreamed the dream, he told me, as if the Scythian himself were dreaming it.

  By chance, we caught sight of the man near the rope makers’ market the next day and, before I could stop him, Babak sang out, “A boy! It will be a boy! A healthy boy!”

  “Hsst!” I said, and snatched up Babak’s hand, and ducked behind a donkey, behind a spice merchant, behind a crumbling wall, and tried to lose ourselves in the crowd before the Scythian could catch us.

  But he did.

  As it happened, the Scythian didn’t recognize Babak from the day before. As it happened, the stolen cap and dates were the last things on his mind. As it happened, he was hoping for tidings—though not from a marketplace waif.

  As it happened, his wife was expecting a child.

  This dream of my brother’s was a good omen, he said, when he had pried it from us. Then he handed Babak a copper. With which we bought food—something I had never done in all the fourteen years of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  HOPE

  “This … dream,” I asked Babak later, squatting on the rough floor of our cavern, licking the last sweet drops of melon juice from my fingers, “have you been visited by other such? Dreams of Suren, maybe? Dreams of things to come?”

  A draft stirred the lamp flame; shadows swam across the cave walls, then settled back round the edges of the chamber. In the distance I could hear the nighttime sounds of these old caves: a leper’s bells, an echoing cry, and the constant soft shufflings and murmurings from near and from deep. High up, where the cave opened to air, glimmered a small patch of stars.

  “I don’t know,” Babak said.

  He wiped sticky fingers on his tunic. Pomegranate juice ringed his mouth. He reached for a chunk of goat cheese.

  “How can you not know a thing like that?”

  Babak shrugged his thin shoulders. He held out a crumble of cheese to the kitten he had smuggled into our chamber without my seeing, a kitten with one eye scarred shut.

  “Don’t feed it!” I said. “We’ve nothing to spare. There’s vermin aplenty; let it catch its own.”

  “But it’s hungry!”

  Of course it was hungry. All of the miserable souls who lived in these caves were hungry. And the ones who survived were those who took care of themselves—not every wretch and stray that came along.

  “Have you ever dreamed of Suren?” I persisted. “Of when he will come for us? Of where he is? Of what he has found?”

  Our older brother had left forty-two days before, according to the scratches I’d made on the wall. I’d pressed him to find work in a caravan bound for Susa, where we used to live. Suren knew where our father had buried caskets of gold coins. All he had to do was dig them up and return to us. Surely he could manage that! Then we could all book passage on a caravan to Palmyra, where, we had heard, our kinsmen had fled.

  “I dream of you sometimes, Sister,” Babak said now. “Of eating food with you. Sometimes Suren is there. I used to dream of Mother….”

  Mother.

  Women screaming, soldiers through the gate. The flash of sun on swords. Mother calling, “Suren, come!”

  I closed my eyes, pushed it away. You would think, after all this time, that the edge would have dulled, or at least that you’d be ready for it—not pierced, capsized, and sinking every time.

  “How did you dream of her?” I asked. “Of where she is now? Was it Palmyra you dreamed of? Or only—”

  “Only as she was,” he answered, “before, in Susa. When she was with us.”

  Babak was looking up at me, his eyes huge and grave in the flickering lamplight. I willed the worry from my countenance so that he would not absorb it into himself.

  I didn’t know much about dreams, hadn’t been visited with one in years. But I had heard that they can come from different places. That some of them foretell things and some do not. That some of them come from the Wise God. Or other gods—I had heard that as well. These foretelling dreams did not visit everyone, but only a few. Might Babak be one of them?

  Something stirred inside me. How to find out?

  Old Zoya knew about dreams. But the mere thought of asking her pricked my pride. Besides, she’d exact a price.

  “Babak. This is important. Have you had any other dreams of things to come—even about strangers?”

  “I don’t know.” Babak hunched over the kitten, turning his back to me. I had pressed too hard. He scratched the kitten behind its ragged, flea-bitten ears. It began to purr, still licking his cheese finger with its tiny pink tongue.

  I sighed. If Babak didn’t want to tell me now, I couldn’t drag it out of him. Muleheadedness ran raging through our family like a river in spring flood. Even Babak—the most tender-hearted boy alive—was not exempt.

  And yet this dream, this dream of the baby. Perhaps we might put it to good use. Perhaps I might turn dream into coin another time and perhaps scrape together passage. Then, when Suren returned—whether or not he had found the hidden gold—we could go there.

  Palmyra.

  I breathed in deep and felt it stir again, warming the cold, empty spaces:

  Hope.

  CHAPTER 3

  PALTRY GIFT

  Later that night, when Babak and the kitten were asleep, I counted out the last of the dates, hesitated, put four back, then tucked the rest into my sash. I crept backward, lamp in hand, down the dark, narrow tunnel that led from our chamber. It was a snug fit.

  I had discovered the passage when, after fleeing Susa, we first came into Rhagae and needed a place to go to ground. I had crept up and found the small room, which opened to air high up on the cliff, too high to be reached from outside. Suren was too big to squeeze through the tunnel. “But I can find another cavern to sleep in,” he had said. “What matters is that you and Babak will be safe.”

  Much of the time it was fairly safe in these caves, known as the City of the Dead because of the bones left here in ossuaries long ago. Still, you had to keep your wits about you. Strangers did venture in from time to time. But no one came here anymore to honor the bones of their dead. Even the descendants of these dead—were dead. Most beggars preferred to dwell within the walls of Rhagae, in some abandoned hovel or in the ruins of an old palace. The air was fresher there, not stale and full of death. There were no bones from crumbled ossuaries rolling about loose and rattling beneath your feet.

  Only those who must hide from other beggars—unprotected women, the sick or crippled, the very young or very old—lived in these ancient caves.

  At the end of our tunnel I paused, listened, then made my way in the flickering gloom through a chain of tall caverns and narrow passageways to an ancient stairway hewn into the rock at the e
dge of a chasm. I held the lamp carefully as I climbed, clinging to protuberances in the wall with my other hand and nudging bones off the steps with my bare toes—a hip bone, a thighbone, a skull. I heard them ricochet off the sides of the chasm, then clatter, echoing, below. I lofted skyward a prayer against contamination—though little good it might do me. It was well that my grandmother couldn’t see me now. I moved through more rooms, more passages, more stairs, until a breath of fresh evening air touched my face.

  Old Zoya occupied a spacious cavern that, like ours, opened high on the side of the cliff. But her opening reached clear down to the cave floor and was nearly as wide as the front door of our home in Susa. I peered in and saw her sitting in the moonlight on the lip of the opening, conferring with the youth who often attended upon her, a young man with slanted eyes under a broad, low forehead: thick of tongue and slow of thought. In a dark corner, the coals from her brazier glowed. I blew out my lamp flame, knowing I could relight it before I left, and stepped into the chamber.

  “Eh! Who’s there?” she cried at the sound of my footsteps. She jumped up, snatching her walking stick, and brandished it at me.

  “It’s I,” I said, edging into the moonlight to show myself. “With a gift. And a favor to ask.”

  She lowered the stick and peered at me. After a moment she flicked a hand at the youth; he scuttled away.

  “Mitra? With a gift? Huh! That’s something new.”

  “Shh! Don’t call me Mitra. It’s Ramin!”

  Old Zoya was one of the few people who knew I was a girl, and I wanted to keep it that way. I had disguised myself as a boy shortly after we came to this place nearly two years before, discarding my ankle-length gown and cloak for a ragged tunic, trousers, and a coat of coarse weave; cropping my hair to my shoulders; and affecting my father’s straight-as-a-bowstring stance and chin-forward gait. Suren had chosen the name Ramin, after his best friend in Susa. It was safer to be a boy. Besides, a girl couldn’t roam the streets freely, as I did. As I must, especially now that Suren was away.