Written in the Ashes (54 page)

Gideon closed his eyes. “It was a long time ago.”

“And?”

“There is a pirate I fought for my second ship, the
Persephone
. He came for gold, and he took it. Ares Danzante. He is the greatest knife fighter in the Mediterranean. It is how I lost my ship and came to sail for Alizar.”

Gideon shifted in the sand so he could hold her. “But let me ask you in return, then. What about this scar here?” His fingers traced her breast. He had never asked her, and she had never offered.

Hannah’s fingers brushed her sternum and found the spot there where the skin had healed, glossy and smooth as the inside of a conch shell.

Gideon touched her hand, sensing she had become uncomfortable. “You do not have to tell me.”

Hannah let her eyes drift across the sea to where she imagined Julian was sitting in meditation on the isle of Pharos. It would be unfair of her to keep anything from Gideon now.

But before she could speak, a familiar cry pierced the air.

Hannah instinctively swept the seashore with her eyes. Then she quickly stood up, her heart beginning to pound.

“Mama?” said a little voice behind her.

Hannah laughed with relief. “Alaya, you scared me. Why did you cry?”

The little girl twisted a toe into the sand and fluttered her eyelashes, a new talent for flirtation she was practicing. “I hurt my knee, see?” She pointed at nothing.

Gideon smiled and then suddenly grabbed Alaya and stood up, hoisting her up onto his shoulders. “I think it is your turn for a spinning!” he said, as he began to turn circles while Alaya shrieked and giggled happily. Then he stopped, flipped Alaya backwards onto the sand and tickled her. Alaya shrieked with glee, and Gideon growled like a terrible lion and pretended to haul Alaya off to his cave in the direction of the waves, her little feet kicking against the sand.

Hannah closed her eyes and shook her head in disbelief at the passing of time. How was it that Alaya was already nearly three years old? So much had happened in those three years, and yet time had rocked to a stop for most of them since Alizar had been imprisoned. Whenever Hannah went to visit Jemir, Tarek, Sofia and Synesius she saw that Alizar’s household managed to function without him as though he was still there, much like the organs of a body during sleep. No one was there to use them, yet they managed without pause.

Things in the Great Library, however, seemed to be changing at a more significant pace. Since Orestes’s recovery, Hypatia had disbanded her public lecture platform to focus her attention upon the core group of students that had been with her for the bulk of her career, formalizing the esoteric teachings of Platonism for them as she interpreted it. She became selective about who she taught or saw socially, even foregoing walks in the city, preferring the company of the library’s elite and the quiet hours of her own study where she could meditate, write and practice yoga. This meant that Hannah was not performing as often, and so she became entirely devoted to cataloguing music. Through the many hours of the day she sat inventing a musical language that could be used to notate the songs and melodies she knew, and that others brought to her. Often she went walking through Alexandria with a notepad and a stylus to sit beside the fountains where the women sang and told their stories so that she could find a way to re-create them later on back at the library. It was tedious work, and often she found that her notations were still too unrefined to capture the songs she encountered. The sailor songs on the wharf, however, were occasionally simple enough that her basic notation would do, and so after many weeks of work, when she found she could reproduce even a few lines from a song, she was ecstatic. But more often than not, there were many frustrating hours of time lost and notes still too unclear to musically reproduce. Hannah began to wonder if Hypatia had known what a Sisyphusian task a music scholar endured.

During those weeks when frustration was her only companion, Hannah sometimes fantasized she had a tent in the hawker’s bazaar to sell jewelry instead: beaded necklaces, anklets, hair adornments, and other things she made herself, maybe even giving palm readings. Perhaps as the women of the bazaar became acquainted with her fine taste, Hannah’s little business would grow. She could acquire rare Indian silks for veils and headdresses and stitch lovely designs with dangling glass beads along the fine gossamer fabrics. In her mind she would create glorious costumes for dance that the women haggled over endlessly. But back in the library, Hannah bent over dozens of scrolls with her lyre, attempting to make sense of a language that simply did not lend itself well to being captured on paper.

How could she notate emotion? Notes were simple, as were lyrics, but emotion was something she began to feel more and more would never find an expression in words or symbols. She began to wonder if perhaps it would even be better that way. The notation would leave the interpretation up to the musician, and so in that way the songs would be the same yet always re-invent themselves. Hannah often worked well into the night, seated on the balcony of her upstairs bedroom overlooking the Caesarium gardens, attempting to make some sense of all her scribble. Sometimes Gideon came to sit with her, but more and more often as she spoke, his eyes leaned toward the sea, and his ship in the harbor that had not sailed in many seasons. At first she had minded this new longing that had separated him from her, but quite soon, she became at peace with it, as it left room for longings of her own.

Hannah smiled, watching her daughter and Gideon playing on the beach. He had been out riding with friends visiting from Cyprus the day her daughter was born, spiraling from her womb into the world. She had danced naked in the room through her early labor, her belly full as the harvest moon, turning her hips, her wrists, listening intently to the drum the midwife played to call the child into the world. Eventually, she had settled upon the blankets on the floor, satisfied that the birth would be in the company of women. The child came without pain.

The angel had found flesh. The doorway had been promised. The warrior had come. Now she would know the heaviness of earth, the beauty of sky and sea. Waiting had transformed into this.

Deep creases of regret had appeared around Gideon’s eyes when he found that he had missed the birth, but he had been there every day thereafter. Their wedding had been set for early spring, but with Alizar imprisoned, three springs had come and gone. A time of celebration felt impossible without him.

As Hannah watched her daughter at play on the sand, she marveled at the differences between them. Where Hannah had always perceived herself as shy and reserved, Alaya had no inhibitions whatsoever. She constantly entertained anyone who would watch her, singing little songs that she made up, or dancing with one of the veils Hannah created, flirtatiously batting her long dark lashes in a way that no one had needed to teach her. She had a natural capacity for theatrics and impersonations, always pretending to be outrageous personalities: the empress of an island in the sun, a gypsy with magical potions to cure snakebite, and goddesses like Isis or Aphrodite. Her impersonation of Jemir had been so accurate, lifting one eyebrow in his characteristic manner with her arms folded over a pillow she had stuffed under her shirt to be his belly, that Jemir and Tarek had nearly pissed themselves they laughed so hard the first time they saw it.

“Mama, can I go in the water?” Alaya wrapped her sandy arms around Hannah’s neck, pressing her cheek to her mother’s.

“No, love. We are going home now.”

Alaya nodded and dashed off to chase the sand plovers that skittered at the water’s edge as Hannah collected their things. Alaya had stepped out of the womb with a passion for the sea. Every time Hannah looked at her, she saw that passion mirrored back to her in Alaya’s enormous eyes, eyes that sparkled like emeralds in certain light, chimerical eyes that danced like waves on the surface of the sea on a clear day. They were more colorful than Julian’s, and even larger than her own, always looking into the world with a sparkle of joy. Just after Alaya was born, Hannah had caressed her baby’s hands and feet and the soft down on the crown of her head, finding all the little details of her daughter. Alaya had Julian’s golden skin, her own wide brow and pouty lips, and though it was impossible, her grandfather Kaleb’s dented chin.

Gideon had embraced his role as Alaya’s father even though he knew the child was not his, and so she called Gideon her “Papo”, a name she invented for him all on her own, a name he treasured hearing more than any other word.

Alaya had only asked about her Abba, her father, once. Hannah had been planning for years what she would say if that day came, but in the moment, all her carefully rehearsed answers had evaporated.

They had just awakened, and Hannah was stroking the long curls back from her daughter’s dolphin forehead when Alaya had turned to look into her mother’s eyes and asked sweetly, “Mama, is Papo my Abba?”

Hannah had been caught completely by surprise. “No. Gideon is your Papo. Your Papo who loves you.”

“But my Abba?” asked the little girl, understanding more than what seemed possible at her age.

“Your Abba is in India,” said Hannah, which was true as far as she knew.

Alaya sat up. “India?”

This led to endless questioning about what was India and where was India and could they go there, and why not.

So.

To pacify her daughter’s sudden interest in the mystical country far to the east, Hannah had searched the Great Library for any texts or maps that had been procured from India. She found very little, however, as they were all under lock and key for fear of Cyril’s threats, so she went to Synesius with her conundrum, and he had brought down a codex out of his personal collection and presented it to Alaya with pride. It was a book with pictures of the gods painted in ink surrounded by whimsical Sanskrit lettering, presumably prayers, which no one could interpret, but the pictures were more than enough to satisfy Alaya’s imagination: Ganesha the great elephant riding on the back of a rat; Krishna with his flute flirtatiously calling to his gopis; Vishnu reclining upon his serpent bed in the milky cosmos; Hanuman leaping to Ceylon to rescue princess Sita from the demon king Ravana.

Alaya had hugged the book to her heart and danced with the codex of colorful pictures all around the Main Hall. It had been the perfect gift.

From that day forward, Alaya had begun to impersonate the postures and expressions of the gods and goddesses in the book. She created her own
mudras
and begged her mother to make headdresses for her that were precisely like the ones in the pictures. Following the gift of the codex, Alaya also began to expand her repertoire of imitations to include the expressions on statues around the city. She practiced Athena’s majestic smile, always pouting when it made the adults around her laugh, and Isis’ triumphant posture down on one knee with her wings outstretched.

“I want to be a goddess one day,” Alaya had whispered to her mother late one evening when Hannah was carrying her to bed.

Hannah kissed her daughter’s shoulder. “Then you will be,” she said, her heart flooding its banks with love, thinking of how the time had come to also take Alaya to the synagogue, so she would know her grandfather, and her heritage.

Alaya had been born at twilight, in the city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile, on the first day the dog star was sighted in the night sky, on the day of the autumnal equinox under the sign of Libra. Hannah’s daughter’s birth had been swift, swifter than usual for a first child. Alaya had emerged from the womb head-first with the milky afterbirth still perfectly wrapped around her tiny body, the sign of a fortunate life. When the midwife had cleaned the baby and handed her to her mother, she had exclaimed, “I have never seen such a beautiful child. She has fallen from heaven to your arms.”

With tears of joy, Hannah had kissed her child for the first time and gazed into her oceanic eyes.

“What will you call her?” Gideon had asked, holding Hannah’s hand with his own still crusted in dust from the gelding he had ridden through the reed beds that day.

Hannah had planned to name the baby “Iris” after her friend from Pharos who had been so kind, but looking down upon her, suddenly the name seemed not to fit. Instantly a new name came to her unbidden, one she had forgotten until that moment. And so she had chosen the name that had belonged to Julian’s mother, the name he had whispered to her in the tower that first night of winter: Alaya. Her daughter would have at least one piece of her true father, if only in a name.

As Hannah, Gideon and Alaya strolled from the beach up Canopic Way, Hannah caught sight of the sundial above the fountain and stopped, checking to see that the time was correct. Gideon stopped too, realizing they had dallied at the beach far longer than they had thought, but there was still the afternoon. Suddenly, he took Hannah’s arm and kissed her hand. “I have an idea,” he said.

She looked at Alaya in his arms where she rested her cheek against his shoulder and sighed, her heart full. “What is it?”

Gideon’s eyes came alive. He reached to his belt and untied the bag of coins.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I must use the latrine first,” he said. “Who knows who would try and rob me. There are nothing but pirates and thieves on this side of town. Take them.”

Hannah felt the heavy bag of coins drop into her hand. It was a great sum of money. She looked into his eyes and saw infinite trust there.

“I will meet you on the steps of the Tabularium in a few minutes,” he said, transferring Alaya to her arms. Then he turned and went down the alley to the public latrine.

Whatever did he want to go to the Tabularium for? That place was nothing but records of lands transferred, and birth and death, and the names of criminals. Still, she would go. Hannah slid the bag of coins into her dress and quickened her steps toward the Tabularium.

The fastest way would be through the fish market on the wharf, so Hannah decided to cut through the cobbled alleys behind the knoll of the Serapeum that wound around the hill much like the Plaka of Athens. She shifted Alaya to her back so they could move more quickly over the multitude of worn white marble steps that went up and down the hill beneath the overgrown red bougainvillea just coming into blossom.