by June Trop
“Phoebe, I can’t. He reports to my father, and I can’t risk Papa’s finding out that I’m spying on him. Then I’d never discover why he needs money, and he’d be so indignant he’d never forgive let alone recover from the insult.”
“What about taking Binyamin with you, or better yet, sending him instead?”
“I can’t risk that either. That’s all we’d need, another excuse for Binyamin to needle Papa. Besides, it’s none of Binyamin’s business. It’s only become my business because Papa depends on me to run this household.”
A grave intensity clouded her childlike face.
“Don’t worry, Phoebe. Just bring me your lacerna. I can hide my body in its full mantle and bury my face in its deep hood.”
Staring through the wide, arched windows at the shapes of varying darkness, I continued to question my decision to follow Papa. Had my curiosity gone amok, or was Athena herself empowering me? Whether or not she’d protect me, whether or not her owl would guide me, I knew I had no choice. How else could I find anything out? Since Papa was too ashamed to admit that we needed to economize, let alone to explain why, he’d be too proud to confess to taking the scrolls, even if his intention had been as benign as redirecting me from Judah and alchemy to Noah and marriage.
And why was he pressing so hard for the marriage now? Noah’s interest was showing no sign of waning. Was it only Papa’s embarrassment or could it also be that he was facing financial ruin, a calamity that a speedy marriage to Noah could mask if not avert? Noah and his father would accept me not only without a dowry, but they’d extend any and all financial support to my family as if it were their own.
Looking back, I’m not sure why I coupled the loss of the scrolls with Papa’s troubles. Perhaps because my awareness of each followed one upon the other so closely. Perhaps because both were shrouded in mystery and the sale of the scrolls could so conveniently restore Papa’s solvency. But if Papa did intend to sell the scrolls on the black market, then why hadn’t word of them reached the streets?
I needed answers, and I needed them in a hurry. I had fewer than four days till Shabbat, fewer than four days to recover the scrolls so I could return them to Judah on Sunday, and fewer than four days till I was due to thrash out with Papa the date of my marriage to Noah.
I was still pondering these questions when a ghost-like reflection of Phoebe appeared in one of the windows.
“Here, take these,” she said when I turned to face her.
In addition to her lacerna, she’d brought me a portable lantern and a bundle of sesame cakes wrapped in vine leaves. “Be careful,” she said. “You can shield the lantern in the folds of the lacerna, but if the bearers carry your father into a winding alleyway, or worse yet into a backstreet haunted by drunken derelicts or half-starved dogs, turn around at once and come home. I’ll be waiting for you right here.”
I could feel her shoulders, now bowed, trembling as she enveloped me first in her lacerna and then in her cushioned embrace before handing me the lantern and bundle of sesame cakes.
“And one more thing,” she said with an unusual semblance of confidence. She reached behind her back and pulled out a silver-handled carving knife. “Tuck this under your belt. Just in case. You’re a Roman citizen. You have the right to defend yourself.”
Then it was time. Papa’s bearers were calling for him in the atrium. Any sense of security I might have gained from Athena evaporated as soon as I heard their brittle voices. After a few deep breaths to loosen the knot in my belly, I opened the center window against the night chill and sprang to the ground. Clearing the bed of chrysanthemums, I landed inside the arbor, its air dank, its leaves oily, its ceiling a seamless vault of arching shrubs, trees, and vines shielding a secretive world stirred by only the swoop of a bat, the scamper of mice, the call of an owl, or the shriek of its prey. Disoriented, scrabbling through its tunnels, dog-paddling against the leaves to find an opening to the night sky that could point me toward the street, I caught a glimpse of the sedan chair as it was heading toward the Bruchium Quarter and spotted the perpetual fire atop the lighthouse.
The fire burned like a brilliant star in the northwestern sky. On the eastern tip of Pharos Island, standing sentinel over the Great Harbor, the lighthouse is our most imposing landmark. The tallest building after the two Great Pyramids of Khufu and Khafra, Antipater of Sidon named it one of the Seven Wonders of the World. A tapering white stone tower, the Pharos Lighthouse reaches almost four hundred feet into the heavens and is visible, some claim, for a hundred miles.
Having withstood the ravages of storms and earthquakes for more than three hundred years, the lighthouse comforted me as I trailed behind the bearers, ducking under porticoes and behind colonnades, scuttling from monument to monument, and otherwise wedging myself behind statuary and topiary. Inasmuch as it would be hours before the city gates would re-open for the peddlers from the countryside to trek in with their goods, the streets were still. The only sounds were the chirr of insects, the occasional voice of a distant ship, and the beat of the bearers’ boots against the pavement. Constellations must have salted the sky, but all I remember once we left the torch-lined Canopic Way was a flawless darkness relieved by only the shaft of light from each bearer’s hand lamp.
AFTER AN HOUR or so, we branched off the main grid of the Bruchium Quarter. Passing a few more warehouses, we entered a knot of narrow, tenement-fringed lanes punctuated by shuttered shops and boarded-up street stalls. We were near the Rhakotis Quarter, judging by the shoulder-to-shoulder, ramshackle buildings, the swarm of skeletal cats on the prowl for a water rat, and the position of the lighthouse, now slightly to the east in the northern sky. The fungoid stench of the canal confirmed my estimate. At the same time, the appetite of the mosquitoes reminded me to draw into Phoebe’s hood.
My father must have given the bearers a signal, because the sedan chair stopped in front of a ground-floor apartment, giving me the chance to sneak up and crouch behind a fountain caked with pigeon excrement. The apartment looked as if it had been converted into a now-abandoned wine shop, its ancient entrance sealed with cobwebs and a pair of rickety wooden shutters. When one of the bearers knocked, the rusty hinges groaned in protest and the slats shed a shower of silvery splinters. A nightmarish creature with a coffin-shaped head unbolted the door immediately, as if he’d been standing just inside the grime-streaked entrance. After raking each bearer’s face with the beam of his lantern, he hobbled toward my father and, with his long, leathery fingers, handed him an amphora of Negrito, a respectable grade of dark red wine.
And then they were off again, with me emerging on cramped legs, dropping behind, picking my way around the potholes, rubble, and clumps of prickly weeds. Or sidling around a tree limb torn loose by the wind. Or pressing myself against a crumbling wall of mud bricks that was the facade of a tenement. Or dodging rubbish as it was thrown out of an upper-story window. Or worse yet, getting splattered by the contents of a chamber pot. A few minutes later, we arrived at a sleazy saloon squatting on the corner of an alley, its face also shuttered. The bearers carried the sedan chair to the back of the saloon, where I saw an oblong of light that was the open door.
Chapter 17
Late Monday Night
WHILE THE BEARERS were depositing Papa, I claimed a vantage point behind a garbage heap opposite the light-filled doorway. The bearers settled around the corner in the alley alongside the saloon, where I could hear their banter, even an occasional raspy guffaw, before their voices sank into a rhythm of phlegmy snores.
Only then did I dare raise my head to peer into the belly of the saloon and match the rattles, jingles, and rumble of voices to an image. A dozen ruffians, one more grotesque than the other, sat with Papa around a well-lit table courting their luck with each throw of the dice and toss of a coin. One among them sat facing the door, a beefy slab of a man with a club at his side. I named him the Enforcer becaus
e when he spoke, even the moths trembled.
Sometimes I could distinguish Papa’s wine-soaked groans spilling into the yard after he’d taken another gulp from his amphora and dipped once more into the leather purse secured to his belt. Sometimes he’d gnaw at the flesh around the tip of his thumb and spit out the pieces, his mind elsewhere while his tongue flicked like a snake’s. And sometimes I could spot a crescent of his face swollen with that same passion to win that I’d seen in Binyamin the day he strangled young Titus. But as Papa’s self-confidence degenerated into desperation, he became a crazed caricature of his former self, someone I hardly recognized.
Why was Papa gambling with a bunch of thugs? And more to the point, why was he gambling at all? Was this his way of recovering his solvency? Or was this the way he’d lost it? Was he holding onto the scrolls as a last resort to settle his gambling debts?
As if he’d heard my questions, he got up from the table and staggered out the door not five paces from my crouch. But rather than answer me, he lifted the skirt of his tunic to relieve himself. The steam of his offerings and the sound of his grunts rose above his squat while the ground beneath me swayed.
“Hey, those Jew dogs are no better than the rest of us, huh Glaucus?” From the sound of this grotesque, I guessed he was the thug sitting next to the Enforcer. He spoke in a drunken, guttural voice and had a face so long and eyes so far apart that I named him the Horse.
The whoops of wild laughter he triggered settled into consensual snickers.
I’d seen and heard enough. As soon as Papa ducked inside and resumed his place at the table, I figured a way to get out from behind the garbage heap and back to the lane without the bearers seeing me. I’d cross the rear yards until I happened upon another alley that led back to the lane, and by keeping the lighthouse in my sight, I’d find my way through the maze of lanes around the saloon and guide myself due south toward the Canopic Way.
Confident of my plan but acting too quickly, I tripped on the tail of a scruffy mutt while crossing into the next yard. I pacified its whine with Phoebe’s sesame cakes, but it was too late. The bearers had awakened from their thin stupor. Armed with their lanterns, they combed the yard, shafts of their light grazing me as I scurried behind the next building.
Only to confront a fierce black hound.
Hackles up.
Snapping, snarling, growling.
Challenging me.
Its fiendish eyes ablaze.
Its stiletto teeth threatening.
Foam dripping from its flews.
Poised to spring.
I drew back, dropping my lantern, my own jaw agape.
Whipping out the carving knife, gripping its handle, raising the blade.
Just before it lunged.
Its stiff whiskers brushing my jaw.
Its steamy breath coating my neck.
A clammy chill against my blistering skin.
The blade rushing downward, slicing the air, slashing the fur, then the throat, defying the bone.
The head diving forward.
The trunk and limbs crumpling at my feet.
Spurting a geyser of blood.
And a spray of excrement.
Splashed with its sticky splatter, unclenching my fingers, dropping the knife but recovering the lantern, I bolted. Charging helter-skelter down one lane, up another, drenched in fear, a stitch in my side, my heart pounding, my lungs billowing, my chest heaving, my airways wheezing, I paused only when I’d reached the Canopic Way. While I was catching my breath, I heard the first wave of peddlers and wondered what lie I could tell Papa if his bearers had recognized me crossing into the yard next to the saloon.
PHOEBE WAS EXACTLY where she said she’d be, watching for me from that same sitting room window. She must have seen the arbor’s canopy sway as I tripped through its tunnels because she’d materialized in a rectangle of light by the time I reached the bed of chrysanthemums. Upon opening the window, she leaned out with her index finger pressed to her lips. I flashed a beam of light from the lantern to acknowledge her warning, whereupon she tossed out the end of my bed sheet, now coiled and strung with knots. She’d moved the sofa under the window and tied the other end of the sheet around one of its legs so, when I shinnied up the few feet to the windowsill and she hoisted me in, I landed on its cushions.
What would I ever do without my Phoebe? Gratitude filled my chest like warm honey.
“Miriam, what’s happened to you? You’re smeared with filth.” The corners of Phoebe’s lips were trembling.
I had to search a few moments for my tongue. “Oh, that’s just from the hound I killed.”
I explained all that had happened, except, of course, for Papa’s bodily functions. I couldn’t bear to tell her that. But I did tell her about the darkness, the narrow twisting lanes, the wine shop, the saloon, the ruffians, the gambling, Papa’s losses, the mutt and the hound, the sesame cakes, and the carving knife.
I remember Phoebe’s preparing me for bed, bathing me and mixing for me a sleeping draft of chamomile tea fortified with opium before unrolling the pallet so she could sleep beside my couch. Still, I had a chaotic dream about that monstrous hound, that same black Saluki, but now twice the size, towering over me. Not just the one but a pack of them, seven swift hunting hounds bounding in for the kill.
Panting feverishly.
Their legs trembling.
Their yellow eyes feral.
Their shadows leaping toward me.
Their frenzied howls enclosing me.
Their frothy muzzles pointing at my throat.
Their fangs bared.
Their luminous tongues licking the air.
Drooling sparks of foam-streaked saliva.
First nipping at my feet. Then gnawing at my legs, my blood spewing, their flews dripping a slaughterous red, their ferocity mounting.
I must have screamed when their teeth tore off my limbs, because the next thing I knew Phoebe was wrenching me from the tentacles of the nightmare. Kneeling at my side, she cradled me in her arms, subduing me with her coos and wiping the perspiration from my brow.
We both knew the meaning of that dream.
“If you go out like that again, Miriam, you’ll surely be killed.”
Chapter 18
Late Tuesday Morning
PHOEBE BURST INTO my cubiculum. “Miriam, your father’s been asking for you. He wants to see you right away.”
The alarm in her voice wrenched me out of a blessed unconsciousness. I would have given anything but the scrolls to plunge back into that sweet oblivion, but Phoebe had already awakened the memories the sleeping draft had anesthetized—the wine shop, Papa’s gambling in the saloon, the hound from Hades, and the stink of its blood and excrement.
“What do you suppose he wants?” she asked, her features frozen with apprehension.
I was too thick with sleep to answer. Instead, I rolled over and slipped down into the warm envelop I’d made of my sheets.
Phoebe yanked on my bedding, reached over my shoulder, and thrust the polished bronze mirror from my washstand in front of my face. “Do you want him see you like this, Miriam?” Her imperious fuss reminded me of Iphigenia when she’d have to get Binyamin ready for school.
She helped me change from my rumpled capitium, the light chemise I wear for sleeping, into a long yellow sleeveless tunic made of polished linen dyed with saffron. Then she twisted my hair into a loose braid and slipped a pair of sandals on my feet, crisscrossing the ribbons around my legs and tying them in a bow just below each knee.
“There,” she said, turning me around. “I can’t say you look great with those half-moons under your eyes, but you’re presentable. Now go to your father.”
Why was he summoning me? Surely he couldn’t have found out that I’d followed him. My shadow
y memory of last night triggered a spasm through my bowels, while the dread of yet another reprimand kept distracting me from counting the steps as I made my way to his study.
And then, standing at the threshold, I saw it. Through the open doors and before his unyielding gaze. On the otherwise-bare surface of his polished desktop. The silver-handled carving knife.
Compressing my lips and swallowing hard against the gelatinous reflux that surged up my gorge and coated my tongue with bile, I took a seat before his desk, moving slowly while I rummaged through my repertoire of lies for some semblance of an explanation.
A shaft of light from the peristyle backlit his upper body and projected a thickened silhouette of him across the desk. He’d been drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair, but when he saw me, he leaned forward and rested his hairy forearms on the desk.
His gaze poked me like a sharp stick.
“How do you suppose I got this, young lady?” He spit out the words in a voice choking with fury.
With his thumb and index finger, the other fingers splayed, he lifted the knife by the merest corner of its handle. Then, extending his thick arm, he thrust the tapered edge in my face, the filth still smeared along its blade.
Splinters clogged my throat. I could only shrug, my hands at my sides, my palms turned up.
“Well, I’ll tell you how. My bearers gave it to me. They said someone dropped it. How do you suppose your mother’s favorite carving knife ended up in the Bruchium Quarter last night?”
Another spasm ripped through my bowels. This one turned my insides watery.
“They told me about a shadowy figure who’d been following them as far back as the Canopic Way, some slender man, a slave, they said, judging from his lacerna. But he disappeared before they reached the inn. Only when the whine of an animal alerted them did the beam of their lanterns catch a piece of him as he darted behind an adjacent building. And then they dared not desert the chair to follow him. But Orestes got curious and decided to find out what the man could have been after. He found the fresh corpse of a Saluki and this knife, which he brought back to prove his pluck and present for a reward. He could hardly have imagined I’d recognize the knife as coming from my own household.
