Valley of Decision

by Lynne Gentry

  “Back, plebs!” Soldier spears and shields were at the ready by the time they reached the end of the alley.

  “My daughter,” Lisbeth pleaded, not caring that her boldness put her in direct danger of the military’s shortened tempers. “I’ve lost my daughter!”

  “No one has come this way.”

  Lisbeth’s building rage exploded. Her eyes locked on the line of shields raised in her face. “She has!” Her swollen knuckles pounded into the nearest shield with such force the soldier took a step back. “I know it.”

  “Stand down, woman,” the soldier warned.

  Tappo and Pontius had her by the arms, but Lisbeth thrust her body forward. “Let me pass!”

  The soldier’s blow landed hard on her forehead. A cracking sound rang in Lisbeth’s ears. Gray wisps of smoke swirled the possibility that Maggie was lost to her forever.

  * * *

  AS LISBETH’S mental haze lifted, she realized she was laid out on a fine feather bed. Faces black with soot and eyes dark with concern stared down at her. Where was she and how long had she been incapacitated? The bitter taste of panic soured her tongue, but she couldn’t remember where the fear came from.

  “Pontius?” She needed to sit up, to extricate the smoke in her lungs, but the command never made it past the jumbled neurons fighting for order inside her head. It was all she could do to struggle for a deep breath.

  “She’s awake.” Pontius’s teeth were white against the gray of his ash-covered face.

  “Give her a minute.” The gravelly voice penetrating her grogginess was a voice of her recent memory, but she didn’t have the energy to identify the speaker or pinpoint why his presence was so reassuring. The need to get up nagged her. She attempted to push herself up to . . . She couldn’t remember what she needed to do.

  “Maybe she’s thirsty?” Tappo suggested.

  “Sit her up slowly,” the elderly voice directed. “Easy now.”

  Every fiber in her body rebelled against the rearranging. Her head weighed a ton and some evil little monster pounded a drum between her eyes. A cup appeared under her nose. The rising steam smelled medicinal. She cocked her head to shake loose of the nauseating odor and caught a glimpse of the man who belonged to the gnarled fingers wrapped around the cup. “Metras?”

  “Little sips.” His kind eyes encouraged her to cooperate.

  Lisbeth obeyed and parted her lips.

  “That’s a good girl.” The old man gently tilted the cup. A bitter mix of warm beer, fennel, sage, and something reminiscent of animal droppings lubricated her mouth and allowed her tongue to break free. “Go slow now.”

  Lisbeth swallowed, gasped, then launched into a coughing fit. When she finally caught the breath she’d been craving, she raised her head. “What happened?”

  “She’s going to be fine,” Metras announced with a toothless smile. “Bring me the basin.”

  “I don’t have time for this.” Lisbeth waved him off and swung her feet toward the floor. Her off-kilter equilibrium spun her back onto the mattress. “I may need to rest for a minute longer.”

  “You need those wounds tended.” Metras propped his cane against the bed, tied a towel around his waist, and dipped a clean cloth into the basin. “We’ll start with the nasty gashes on your head. Looks like you’ve been on the south end of a northbound mule for the worst part of a week.” Before she could protest, Metras began sopping up blood and rinsing dirt and debris from each knock she’d taken to the head. “Tappo, you and Pontius go on and see to our other patients. Send Tappo’s wife to me. Lisbeth’s going to need a woman’s help.” His face had deep tracks left by suffering and hard work. “Go ahead, Lisbeth. Close your eyes.” His hands were careful and gentle, a sculptor repairing cracks on a rare piece of marble.

  Lisbeth’s heavy lids sanded her burning eyes. “What happened?”

  “Shhhh,” Metras said softly. “I’m going to press this bandage to that gash on your forehead. Might hurt a bit.” She opened one eye enough to see he held a strip of muslin dripping with a sticky golden mixture. “Hold still.” A sickly sweet smell passed her nose as he lifted the strip above her head.

  “What is that?”

  “Pure honey. Apparently Titus has been holding back. Saving this treat for a special occasion.” Metras chuckled. “Good thing he thought you were special.”

  “Honey?” Her fingers traced the borders of the laceration while her cotton-stuffed brain worked to calculate the depth. “I probably need stitches.”

  “Sinew leaves a nasty scar.” Metras returned her hand to her side. “Honey seals the wound and keeps out the infection.” He pressed the bandage to her head and she moaned. “Quarry workers still call me when they need a wound tended.” He rinsed his hands in the bowl, then shuffled to the end of the bed.

  She felt his rough hand clasp her ankle. “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t tell if the blood on your foot came from your head injury or if we’ve got another problem. Afraid I’m going to have to take a look. I’ll go easy.” Metras untied the laces of her sandals and slipped them off. He lifted her foot for a closer inspection. “Thought I smelled infection. Your heel is rank. This didn’t happen today.” Gentle poking sent needles of pain up the back of her leg.

  “I stepped on a pottery shard my first night back.”

  “Back from where?”

  Another world? Another life? Another failed promise. “Uh, Maggie was sick. I took her to a special doctor. Remember?” Hot tears spilled onto Lisbeth’s cheeks. “Has anyone seen her?”

  Metras cast a questioning look at Tappo’s wife, who had slipped into the room with her arms full of supplies. The beautiful woman with raven-colored hair shook her head sadly. A cute little girl followed after her.

  Metras patted Lisbeth’s leg. “Don’t worry. We’ll find Maggie.” His gummy smile was strangely reassuring. “If we don’t get this infection stopped you’ll be in worse shape than Aspasius.”

  “Antibiotics,” she mumbled. “In my bag.”

  “Shhhh. I think we have enough of that potion down you to help you sleep.” Metras stroked the top of her foot. “Candia, you got an onion in that load of supplies you’re toting?”

  “And some garlic.” Tappo’s wife piled a fresh tunic, a wooden herb box, and a hairbrush on the bed. “Want me to make a poultice?”

  “You peel the onion, I’ll heat the rags.” Metras hobbled over to the glowing coals in the small brazier. He crouched by a pot and began crumbling leaves and bark into the rising steam. Soon the room smelled like wet wool and the corned beef and cabbage the hospital cafeteria served on Tuesdays.

  Lisbeth fought the warm, slushy feeling creeping through her veins. She searched her jagged memories for clues. What had happened and how had she ended up a patient in her own hospital? Losing the battle against whatever drug Metras had slipped into her drink, Lisbeth attempted to grab Candia’s hand. “Must. Save. Maggie.”

  Candia’s fingers found hers, then laid Lisbeth’s hand upon her chest. “Sleep.” Those same kind fingers gently grazed Lisbeth’s eyelids and slid them shut.

  Alone in empty darkness, Lisbeth lost her grip on the frayed edges of reality and plunged into the abyss.

  41

  BY THE TIME MAGGIE felt steady on her feet, late afternoon shadows spilled in through the grotto’s doorway. Leaving Barek to fight alone then falling apart the way she had was pretty pathetic, even for her. She couldn’t undo what she’d done. All she could do was move forward.

  She glanced around the underground graveyard. Jaddah’s face was flush, and when her grandmother thought no one was looking she clutched her middle as if someone were twisting her insides into knots. If they stayed, Jaddah would soon join the countless dead buried in this place.

  Maggie dusted herself off, then listened carefully. The earlier hustle of alarmed citizens and volunteer firefighters rushing about the streets outside the Tophet had subsided.

  Tough as the task would be, seeing her gra
ndparents safely tucked away in Barek’s old shop had to be her first priority. Next, she’d find out what happened to Barek and Eggie. The keys to the iron shackles were still with Barek. Maggie couldn’t do anything about the distinctive noise of the prison chains except pray the descending darkness would make it hard to pin down the source of the rattle. Maybe she could find some kind of hammer once they arrived at the shop and whack the cuffs off the way heroes in G-Pa’s westerns did. If they ever made it to the shop.

  And last on her very sketchy list, if Eggie hadn’t found her mother, she’d track down her parents and beg their forgiveness.

  “Let’s go.” Maggie helped her companions to their feet, then stuck her head out the back exit, the same opening in the cave she and Barek had used to escape the soldiers who’d chased them when she was a child. “Clear.”

  One by one they followed her out into the deepening twilight. Their bedraggled group wove through the leaning gravestones of the Tophet yard. Maggie checked over her shoulder every few seconds, although without her knife there wasn’t much she could do if they were discovered. “Come on, everybody. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  The farther their little entourage traveled from the heart of the city, the slower her grandmother moved. G-Pa was doing his best to prod Jaddah forward, but each step was an effort. Maggie fell back and joined arms with her grandparents. “Lean on me.” What if her grandmother’s strength gave out before they reached the dye shop?

  Darkness was settling fast over the city as Maggie led her frightened little group through the narrow, twisted streets lined with mounds of crushed seashells. The dye district stank worse than Mom’s car had after what her family jokingly dubbed “the sand dollar incident.” The summer of Maggie’s tenth birthday she’d talked her mother and G-Pa into taking her to Galveston. She’d loved walking the beach and picking up sand dollars. She’d begged to bring her living treasures home. Mom said the fragile creatures would die in the hot car, but Maggie sneaked them aboard anyway. They weren’t halfway back to Dallas when Maggie realized the price everyone, including the dead sand dollars, would pay for her disobedience.

  Maggie put out her hand, indicating everyone should stop and keep quiet. “Hear that?” The rusty creak of metal and the scrap of wood brought a relieved smile to her face. “It’s the wooden tooth.” She led them toward the sound. “We’re almost there, Jaddah.”

  A few more weary steps and they were standing outside the boarded-up windows of the dye shop. The labored breathing of her grandmother and the rapid pounding of Maggie’s own heart were the only signs of life in the eerily silent rug and dye district. She did as Barek had instructed and checked to make sure they’d not been followed.

  “Let me go first.” Maggie moved toward the latch. Her hand froze midreach. The door was slightly ajar. She didn’t want to go inside, but after today’s very public trial, Jaddah’s face might as well have been posted on Facebook. Everyone would recognize her. Even more important than securing a place to hide, her grandmother needed medical care.

  Wishing once again that Barek hadn’t taken her knife, Maggie picked up a stick. “Stand back,” she mouthed. Hiking her flimsy club, she used her foot to push the plank open a couple more inches, hoping for a better look inside. Scents of rotten fish, wool, and abandonment rushed out to greet her. At the scuffle of feet too big to belong to a rat, she backed away from the door.

  “Who’s in there?” Adrenaline jangled her body. “Barek?”

  The door opened slowly. Everything inside her screamed Run! But her feet had rooted to the ground and the club swayed over her head like a branch in a thunderstorm.

  “Maggie?” Eggie stuck his head around and waved a cautious hand. “It’s me.”

  “You scared me half to death.” She still hadn’t lowered her club. “Where have you been?”

  “Me? What about you?” Eggie opened the door. “I’ve been here for hours.”

  “Do you have my mother?”

  “By the time I made it back to the Forum, she was nowhere to be found.”

  Worry scampered over Maggie’s skin. She lowered her stick and all of them stumbled into the dark room. “Barek’s not here?”

  “No. Isn’t he with you?”

  “We got separated.” When Barek didn’t show up at the Tophet, she’d refused to believe the worst. Instead, she’d told herself he’d decided it was safer to meet them at the rendezvous spot. But deep down she knew he’d never leave her to navigate this dangerous city on her own. Something wasn’t right. “Is there any light?”

  “Didn’t want anyone to know I was here so I haven’t moved around much,” Eggie said.

  “Well, I’ve got sick and wounded who can’t be tended in the dark.”

  Their hands outstretched, everyone but Jaddah crashed about the shop in a terrifying game of blindman’s buff. Maggie had never missed Barek more. If he were here he’d know exactly where to find the lights and what to do next. Kardide was the first to come up with a lamp. Tabari discovered a small jug of rancid oil and a flint in a cupboard. Iltani struck the flint, and a weak spark became a tiny flame that gobbled the dry wick. The place where Barek had grown up slowly materialized.

  “Looks like Barek’s family left in a hurry.” Eggie plucked a blanket off a small bed and draped it over the boarded window to make sure no light escaped.

  “They moved in with my father after his conversion.” In the flicker of the oil lamp, Maggie could make out the remnants of Barek’s past life.

  Skeins of yarn, dusty and dry as everything in this city, hung from the rafters like a fading rainbow. In the corner near the only window, a loom was strung with a project that appeared to be more than halfway completed. Maggie ran her fingers over the tightly woven threads, wondering what it would have been like to have a closely knit family, one where everyone lived in the same century. The tapestry was an exquisite garden scene similar to the one hanging in her father’s atrium. On the opposite side of the room, near a door that led to the alley, the limestone tiles beneath a huge copper vat were splattered with multiple colors.

  Maggie closed her eyes, breathing in the scent of people who had lived and loved within these four simple walls. She could imagine Barek chasing his father’s dogs around the dye vat and stubbing his chubby little toe on one of the wooden feet of his mother’s loom. She could hear Ruth’s laughter as she reached out for him and drew him onto her lap.

  No wonder Barek wore such a scowl now. He must have been so happy here.

  “Let’s see if we can’t find something to get these iron bracelets off these ladies.” G-Pa’s touch snapped her from her guilt-ridden fantasy.

  Maggie went to the table beside the dye vat and retrieved a mallet and a piece of iron that looked kind of like a tent stake. “What about this?”

  G-Pa smiled. “That’s how they do it in Dodge.”

  Barek’s father hadn’t brewed his famous purple dye in this place in nearly three years. Yet various shades of deep violet still ringed the empty dye vat the way her mistakes ringed her heart.

  If Maggie had stayed home today, as her mother had asked, guilt wouldn’t be closing in, pressing against her chest and making it difficult to breathe. Jaddah was definitely not well. They had no food or water. Every soldier in town was looking for them. And worst of all, her parents and Barek could be dead in a gutter because of her. Hadn’t the sand dollar episode taught her the danger of doing whatever she wanted? She longed to bust out the windows and suck in huge, cleansing gulps of fresh air.

  Murex shells crunched beneath Maggie’s feet as she jammed the tip of the iron stake into the lock on Kardide’s wrist. “Hold your arm still.” She hammered as if she were driving a stake for one of G-Pa’s excavation grids. Breaking someone out of chains was a lot harder than it looked on TV.

  It took a few solid hits to the stake before Kardide’s cuff broke open and her chains fell to the floor and raised a cloud of dust. Everyone gave a muted cheer. Maggie did a little victory dance, w
aving the hammer above her head like a tomahawk. Maybe God could redeem her mess after all. She freed the rest of her grandmother’s friends with renewed strength. They all set to work quietly righting stools, clearing tools from the table, and searching the cupboards and storage crocks for anything edible.

  “Everyone stand back.” Eggie gave the straw tick that had been on the small wooden bed frame a good shake. Spiders and dust flew everywhere. It took all of them to convince Maggie that it was safe for anyone to use the bed, let alone Jaddah, who seemed to be melting right before her eyes.

  “We need water and a way to boil it,” Kardide ordered, sweat dripping from beneath her blood-stained turban.

  “You need a fresh bandage and a good rest yourself.” Jaddah’s deepened cough turned everyone’s head. “Maggie, see if you can find some clean rags around here.”

  The uneasiness seeping into Maggie’s bones wasn’t worry about what they would eat or drink. It was how she was going to keep her grandmother alive. Not only did she lack the proper medications, she didn’t even have the basics: Cool, clean water for sponge baths. Mild broth. And several gallons of the nasty rehydration drink Naomi pushed on everyone who had a fever. Maggie needed more than her mother’s medical expertise; she needed her mother.

  “We have no way to clean this woman’s wounds unless I find a well,” Eggie offered.

  They all agreed the proconsul had probably added extra patrols. The risk of Eggie’s being caught while moving around the city outweighed their thirst or injuries. Best if they waited until morning, when those who’d been denied running water were forced to trudge to the wells. Maggie found an old cloak in a trunk. Tomorrow she would disguise herself, hoist a water jug to her shoulders, and slip in the procession of women making their daily water runs. For now they should all try to get some rest.

  Jaddah’s friends made a pallet near the loom and curled up together.

  Eggie, armed with a stained paddle he found in the dye vat, stationed himself by the door. “I’ll take the first watch.”