Susan Fletcher - Alphabet of Dreams

by Susan Fletcher

  Babak called me Sister when we were alone. I couldn’t break him of that. I feared he would let it slip before others. But it was something he seemed to understand, a private name. Nevertheless, Zoya had guessed my secret and pried Mitra—my true name—from Suren.

  “Well, what’s this gift?” she asked now.

  I pulled the dates from my sash and held them out. Old Zoya squinted, peered, jabbed at them with a skinny finger. She looked back at me in disbelief.

  “Three … measly … dates?”

  “It’s three more than you had before! Do you think we’re made of food? I’ve got to feed Babak; he’s a growing boy.”

  “Pah! Paltry gift! Suren would’ve been bounteous. Pinch fisted as ever, you are. Pleading poor when all the world knows you come into a fortune today. Traipsing through the marketplace like fine folk, laying out coin for cheese and melon and roasted chickpeas …”

  I should have known. Old Zoya’s leathery ears were fine-tuned to the hum of gossip. Some of the cave dwellers spied for her—sniffing out which goods were scarce, which plentiful, and which approaching in the next caravan. Discovering who was feuding with whom and what information would bring something in trade. “It wasn’t a fortune,” I protested. “It was one copper. And the food’s nearly gone now; we were hungry.”

  “And I s’pose this is the last of the dates?”

  “Ah, well … there are four left. Only four. Do you want Babak and me to starve?”

  “Four more and there’d be seven.” She turned to the opening in the wall, seemed to address the stars. “Such a good, stout number, seven. Seven royal families. Seven Spentas. Seven days in a week. One date every morning’d be such a pleasurement for an old woman. But no one cares, no one cares.”

  “If three plump dates mean nothing to you, I can take them back—”

  “No call for that.” She whirled round and clamped on to my wrist with surprising speed. I considered yanking back the dates until she told me what I wanted, but I had said gift, and now I must live with it.

  She stuffed them all together into her mouth, slurping, mashing them between toothless gums. One date each day, indeed! If I’d given her seven, they’d have been gone as quickly as three. I wondered if Zoya’s manners had been so coarse back in the days when she midwifed to the sisters of a satrap, before an infant strangled on its belly cord and Zoya went into hiding. You would never think she’d been part of a noble household to see her now: filthy rags hung loose on a bone-thin frame, topped by a hooked nose and a tangled gray mat of hair. Still, she surprised me with her knowledge at times, and highborn words and phrases often peppered her crude speech.

  At last, smacking her lips, she swiped the back of her hand across the stream of juice that trickled down her chin. “Pah! Wouldn’t satisfy a gnat, and now my tongue’s set for dates.” She glared at me, then snatched up her stick and hobbled toward the far, dim threshold of her chamber.

  “The favor?” I demanded.

  She paused, no doubt wanting to make me sweat. But I knew her better than that. Curiosity would win over her desire to cheat me. “Well, out with it,” she grumbled at last, turning back.

  “Can you tell me something about dreams?”

  “Dreams! Why do you want to know?”

  “Babak has had … a strange one.”

  “Well? Tell me!”

  I related what had happened with the Scythian. Zoya drew near as I spoke, then motioned me to sit with her on the ledge. Below I could see the town walls and part of Rhagae itself, its mudbrick houses slumbering in the light of a bright wedge of moon.

  “Did it come true?” Old Zoya asked now. “Is there a child?”

  “I don’t know. He spoke of Babak’s dream only as an omen. A good one.”

  “And Babak never saw the man before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hmm.” Old Zoya pursed her lips, scratching at the long, sparse hairs on her chin. “Well, there are wishing dreams, having naught to do with the world as ’tis but soley with the wishes of the dreamer. This one—this dream—seems not so.”

  No. Babak’s dreams of food were likely wishing dreams. But not the one about the Scythian.

  “There are remembering dreams, where one thing’s fused together with another, unfitting thing, appearing in a strange light—backward or twisted, like. Transmogrified. To parse them you’ve need of a skilled diviner—such as myself. These dreams oft tell not of what’s to come, but shed light on what’s past but not yet fathomed by the dreamer. Dreams of revelation, like. But Babak’s dream, no. It appears to make perfect sense.”

  I nodded.

  “Other dreams are of the prophesying sort, told in symbologies and sent by one god or another, or mayhap the Wise God, himself. But from what you’re saying … My mother’s sister—Babak oft puts me in mind of her—was visited time to time with other folks’ dreams. They’d come to her—noble ladies—with some fribble of a garment they’d worn. She’d sleep with it and dream. For good dreams they’d reward her well.” Old Zoya favored me with a wry smile. “I won’t say she didn’t twist a dream or two to make it seem auspicious. But, with the future, truth will out. That’s one peril in being visited by such dreams.”

  “One peril?”

  “Well, how if this Scythian’s wife gives birth to a girl? Or if the baby dies? Or the wife dies? I’ll wager the Scythian’s next meeting with Babak won’t be so profitable.”

  I swallowed. I had thought of this, of course. “I don’t think Babak is lying,” I said.

  She shrugged. “With dreams an honest err can be as deadly as a lie. And Babak’s gift for dreaming may be weak. Too chancy to be trusted. Another paltry gift.” She fixed me with a baleful eye, then sighed and scratched her chin. “Yet still.” She turned from me, gazed out at the stars. “Yet still, this isn’t the gravest peril, for Babak.”

  I drew in breath, hugged my arms to my chest. “What do you mean?”

  For a moment her face seemed to soften. “The gravest peril for Babak,” she said at last, “is if the dream works out to be true.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE MAN with BLUE TATTOOS

  It was with much on my mind that I found my way back to our chamber. Old Zoya had been right, had thought through to something that had not occurred to me. Which was troublesome. I was supposed to think of such things. I was the one who could parse the movements in the marketplace to read danger or opportunity before they broke the surface calm. With Suren gone, Babak and I must live by my wits alone, and I had missed something so clear….

  I stumbled, nearly dropped the lamp. What a fool I was! Like Babak, not minding where I walked.

  More carefully now I crept up the tunnel to our cave. I could barely see Babak—the lamplight had dimmed—but I lay a hand on his belly, felt his body move in the rhythms of sleep. I tucked his threadbare coat more securely about him; we had turned the corner into autumn, and the cave grew chill at night. I swept a lock of hair off his damp forehead, my fingers tracing the ridge of the scar that cleaved one eyebrow. He had been dawdling about, transfixed by one daydream or another, when he fell and split his brow open. Now he pulled up one knee, scratched it, made a little moaning sound. The kitten, nestled against Babak’s chest, yawned, stretched, then melted back into a shape that accommodated Babak’s knee. I nuzzled the back of my brother’s neck—he smelled faintly of melon and of dust and of the palm fronds on which he lay. Then, regretfully, I leaned back and blew out the lamp.

  Babak wouldn’t miss it. Like a small, furry animal, he reveled in darkness. He wrapped it about himself, comforting as a cloak.

  But I was profligate with light. I could navigate from our cavern through the dark passages leading to outside without it; even now I could see dimly in the milky radiance that leaked in from above. Seldom did I need light. But I craved it. I begged longer in the marketplace in order to replenish my precious store of lamp oil; I stole for it; at times I sacrificed food for it.

  Now, breath
ing in the last smoky traces of lamplight, I found a faint patch of moonglow on the floor and sat there to think.

  If the dream was true.

  Yes. People would come seeking us. Not just the Scythian—coming in anger if the dream was false. But many, coming with hope, looking to Babak to dream for them. Some would pay us, certainly. I had thought of that. It wouldn’t be much. Nobility would hardly have dealings with the likes of us—not as we were now. And Zoya was right: There would be some devious men sniffing round, seeking to use Babak and his gift without our consent.

  But I would be careful. And just think! We wouldn’t have to come by all our food by theft. Though I had acquired skill at stealing, it was chancy, dangerous. All too often we went hungry. All too often our store of lamp oil ran dry.

  And maybe … maybe we could even save enough … I let my mind touch it now: Palmyra.

  Many Persian exiles had gone to live there, I had heard. In Palmyra the family of Vardan would stand tall. Would be served and honored according to our rightful station. Suren seemed able to tolerate the miserable existence we now had, but I could not. Would not! I couldn’t bear to think that we would stay like this, eking out a miserable life among the rabble, forever!

  I sighed, wrapped my thin coat around me, and lay down on the floor beside Babak. But I did not go right to sleep.

  There was a broom in my mind that I used to sweep across the distant lands, with little seeking straws that could find my family. I began in Palmyra—beyond the edge of Persia. The broom swept up my aunts and my uncles and my cousins, and my mother—she had found her way there as well. Then it swept them over the deserts and high plateaus, across the rivers and valleys, until it found my brother Suren, and it swept him along too. Then the little seeking straws, they probed at the crevices in the land until they teased out the place where my father, Vardan, was, even though I had heard that he was dead. But this was my broom, and it did what I wanted it to, and it found him, too—alive—and brought them all to Babak and me. Then it swept us across the high plateau back to Susa, back to our fine old home in the hills above Susa, where we were sated with good food, and attended upon by many servants, and esteemed according to our high station, and safe, and loved. My pony was still there; now he came galloping through the green pastures and nudged my hands for treats and gave that whicker that I used to know so well, that whicker that said, Oh, where have you been? I’m so glad you have returned.

  I did this, with the broom, nearly every night. It was a waking dream, not a sleeping one. Not a dream that came to visit, for, since Susa, dreams had shunned my slumber. No, this was a dream I conjured for myself.

  And then, after I had made the dream, I could sleep.

  The next morning, as we neared the bottom of the twisting path that led down the rocky slope to Rhagae, I saw him right away. The Scythian. Round of belly, bow slung over a shoulder. Wild yellow hair, blue-tattooed face. He was gazing round just outside the city gates, accosting one man, then another. Asking questions, I surmised, because each man shook his head in response, then walked away.

  “Get down,” I said to Babak. “Here.” We crouched behind an outcropping of boulders. I peered over the top of it, watched the Scythian. He approached a spice merchant and laid his hand flat on the air at about Babak’s height. Then he moved his hand up to where, had I been standing there, it would have rested on my head. My scalp, feeling the ghost of his touch, prickled.

  “Sister?” Babak whispered. “What’s amiss?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. But of course he would. So long as he felt my worry, he would worry. I looked again, tried to see if the Scythian seemed angry. But I couldn’t tell. “Let’s go.”

  All that day we stayed within the City of the Dead. Babak did not understand why, and I didn’t want to tell him. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you presently,” I said. “It doesn’t concern you,” I said. Lies and lies and lies. But a child’s ceaseless questions can drive you to madness. I told him again of our old home in Susa, of the fountain courtyard, paved in bright blue tiles and sweet with the scent of lilies; of the flowering trees hung with cages of singing birds; of the gold-inlaid wine cups and water ewers of pure chased silver. I told him again of the princes and satraps who came to visit our father. “Remember who you are,” I told him, echoing my grandmother. “Never forget.”

  When Babak wearied of my stories, we played games with almond shells. Setting a pebble under one shell and mixing it in with others, then asking him to guess where the pebble lay. Tapping a shell hard on one edge to make it jump, and setting up a contest to see whose shells would fly farther. To a child Babak’s age, shells can be fleets of ships in battle or cups for fairy wine or hats for pebble creatures.

  We shared with the kitten our last scrap of cheese, then I pulled a long thread from the hem of my tunic and dangled it before the little creature.

  “Brave kitten,” Babak said, as it pounced upon the string and pulled it from between my fingers. Babak threw back his head and roared. “It’s a lion!” he said. “Grroar!” The lion caught sight of its own tail and lunged for it, then bounced round and round in dizzy pursuit. Babak bubbled with happy laughter, as I hadn’t seen him do in so long….

  But the lion soon curled up to sleep, and Babak grew restless. I struck a light with my flints and ventured with him deeper into the caves, where the walls grew damp and cold, where the air tasted old, of death. We crept through the black passageways to the haunts of his “friends”—he considered nearly everyone his friend—but only the ones I knew to be safe: The pockmarked woman who conversed all day with a husband who wasn’t there. The head-twitching youth who claimed to be the emperor of Rome. The one-armed beggarman who told stories of India and Egypt, Greece and Rome. The old woman with a withered leg and a hump on her back.

  Our visits pleased Babak because I usually tried to keep him away from these friends of his. They were rough of tongue and manner—baseborn, despite a few grandiose claims. Grandmother would have shuddered to see us mixing with such people. But for now they kept Babak distracted from the worry he must feel radiating from me.

  We went to see Zoya, but she was not in her chamber. Thanks be to heaven we hadn’t given all our food to her. There remained yet two dates apiece, a pomegranate, and a few handfuls of chickpeas and almonds.

  But I couldn’t hide much longer. I had to know soon how the land lay, and then decide what to do.

  From time to time I ventured to an opening in the caves and peered out. We were too far for me to recognize faces there below, though I could see streams of men issuing forth from the direction of the caravansary near the eastern gates, no doubt supplying the Magus’s party as he bathed in the healing waters nearby.

  I wondered: Was the Scythian angry with us because things had not gone as Babak had foretold?

  Or had Babak’s dream come true?

  CHAPTER 5

  PANDORA’S BOX

  Old Zoya called up to me when we were napping in the heat of the day. I could see her lamplight flickering at the end of our tunnel. I checked Babak—sound asleep with the kitten—then crept down to meet her.

  Zoya had perched atop a heap of fallen boulders in a lightless chamber near our room. “Did you eat all of those dates?” she asked.

  “We finished them earlier.”

  She heaved her skinny shoulders in a disappointed sigh—a bit overdone, I thought. “Well, I’ll give you this for free,” she said. “That Scythian is looking for your brother and you.”

  “I know that. Why do you think we stayed in the caves all day?”

  “Eh! You know so much, s’pose I needn’t tell you about the baby.”

  I would have loved to have said no and turned my back on her, climbed right back up to our chamber. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of lording over us whatever she had to tell. But I had to know.

  “What about the baby?”

  “Oh, so you haven’t heard? And I thought you knew everything!”
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  “Tell me.” I moved toward her, but she brandished her walking stick at me. I stopped where I was. “Tell me about the baby.”

  The light from the lamp she had set beside her bled yellow across her ravaged face. She lifted an eyebrow, tugged at a long black hair on her chin. Her walking stick went tap, tap, tap upon the stone.

  “Please.”

  She shrugged. Tap. Tap.

  “What do you want?” I sighed. “I beg of you.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.” Her face crumpled into a toothless smile, mouth and eyes disappearing in a sea of wrinkles. “Seems like Babak’s dream came true. The Scythian’s wife bore him a healthy boy.”

  A healthy boy. The words struck me in the spine, sent shivers arcing up my back. Little Babak could do this? I could scarce believe it, and yet … He was a strange child. I had known that always. He someway couldn’t separate himself from others. If you were sad, he was sad. If you stubbed your toe, his toe ached. Wounded birds, homeless cats, cripples, lepers … if they were hungry, he was hungry.

  But this—

  “How do you know?” I demanded.

  “I have my ways.”

  Of course. Her spies.

  “Here’s the nub of it,” Zoya said now, scooting down to the next boulder. “The Scythian isn’t talking about the dream. Only craves to find Babak.”

  “So?”

  “So a thousand bloodsucking fortune hunters won’t come slavering after your brother!”

  “Just one. The Scythian.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he only wants to reward Babak. But it’s likely he craves more dreams. Anyway, we can treat with him.”

  “We?”

  “Seems like you”—she jabbed her stick in my direction—“need a go-between. A body that’s wise in the ways of the world. A body that can … make arrangements, like, without letting on where you live. That can make sure you get your due in solid copper.”

  “Seems to me Babak and I could just make ourselves scarce for a while until he forgets about us or moves on.”