Maester Amadou politely addressed his comments to both of us.
“Are you coming in?” he asked without a trace of self-consciousness in the face of Bee’s smile, which would have rendered unconscious any other young man. “There is room at the table with my sisters, if you would have in your heart the willingness to share our benches with us.”
I saw by Bee’s blush that we would accept and we would be pleased and we would eat our luncheon sitting at the table of Maester Amadou and that afterward, for the next week at least, I would hear his praises sung and spoken all day and whispered of into the late hours of the night in our shared bed until clawing off my ears would seem a less agonizing fate.
However, as I was the eldest Maestressa Hassi Barahal, even if by a mere two months, it was my place to accept or reject the invitation on behalf of myself and my dearest cousin.
“How kind, but”—Bee’s dainty foot pressed down on my left slipper and began to really squish my little toe—“ah! Of course we would be delighted to join you.” She eased off. I forced a smile as my toe throbbed. “Is there still yam pudding? It’s my favorite.”
6
Bee was floating, and I was brooding, when we departed the academy midafternoon after our seminars. My shoulder ached under the emotional weight of the purloined book within the schoolbag. Its pages were silent because closed, but my mind was howling with questions.
Did my father write this monograph on lying Romans? And if so, why had no one ever told me of it? Why was there no copy in our house? But these were only stepping-stones to the brink, where the edifice on which my tender life trembled as on a knife’s edge. One question rose time and again whenever I was troubled enough to brood over the man whose miniature portrait nestled in the locket I wore at my neck and whose journals graced his brother’s parlor, or over the woman who had left no portrait and only a handful of remembered words in my heart.
My parents had drowned during a river crossing along with a hundred other people, yet the only detail my uncle had ever given me when he spoke of the gruesome task of identifying their water-soaked corpses days later was that beasts had done damage to their features, so he had had to identify them by other means: the locket and greatcoat my father wore, my mother’s red hair still coiled in a single thick braid, and a silver brooch later sold to pay the burial costs.
But if that were true, how could we be sure those were their bodies? Lockets and brooches could be given away or stolen. Other people had red hair and coats. So how could we be sure they were really dead, not just run away, kidnapped, or somehow lost?
We hurried along the high street that led past the academy grounds and the adjacent temple sanctuary. Kena’ani temple gates never closed, no matter day or night, winter or summer, storm or fair weather, not that many people in these enlightened days ventured inside those gates except as sightseers. Every guidebook to Adurnam noted that this temple, dedicated to the goddess Tanit, was the ancient center of the Phoenician trading settlement founded two thousand years ago on the banks of the Solent River.
I glanced in now, as I always did when I passed, wondering if the goddess would summon me to the court of truth at which all my questions about my parents would be answered. Our ancestors marked sacred ground with a lustral basin for washing at the entrance, an arcade of pillars, and a marble altar whose ceiling was the blessed heavens. The sign of Tanit, protector of women, face of the moon, both bright and dark depending on Her aspect, was carved on the gates, on each pillar, and on the altar stone.
In one corner of the enclosure, a pair of elderly priests in shabby robes shivered on the raised porch of the winter house. A veiled woman stood at the base of the steps. She held a birdcage in one hand and a basket covered with a scrap of linen in the other.
Bee kept striding, but the woman’s tense posture drew my gaze, so I paused to watch.
The supplicant set the laden basket down on the porch. The priests accompanied her to the altar stone. Their feet squeaked on the afternoon’s dusting of fresh snow. Their shaven heads and exposed ears looked shiny with cold. The drape of the woman’s loose robes hid the identity of the bird, but when they reached the altar and withdrew a turtledove from the cage with gentle hands, I knew the woman had come to ask for the blessing of a child.
Their bodies blocked the brief ceremony. One of the priests would break the bird’s neck; his arm moved sharply as he afterward cut off the head. Blood would be spilling on the stone, but the wind was blowing both smell and sound away from me. Probably the cold air was already congealing the blood. Feathers, bones, and flesh would be consumed in fire, while the priests would eat as their evening’s meal whatever provender the supplicant had brought in the basket.
“Cat!” Bee had stopped lower down on the walk.
Four street sweepers worked on the intersection beyond her. As I hurried toward her, my hands began to stiffen and my lips felt blue.
“What happened to you?” she asked, falling into step as I strode up.
“A woman in the temple made a burnt offering. Probably hoping for a child.”
“She’d be better served asking her physician to examine her husband for signs of pox.”
“Who’s heartless now? My father wrote… let me see…” I dredged words out of my memory. “ ‘Until the scholars can fully explicate how our actions in this world echo in the spirit world, we ought to assume any action may have repercussions we can’t predict.’ ”
She glanced at me, then veered toward the street sweepers—thin children younger than Hanan and as ill dressed for the cold as I was—and pressed a bronze as into the gloved hand of each startled child.
When she caught up with me, she spoke in a low, firm voice. “I admit there are forces in the world we do not understand. But the priests of our people are relics of another time. Still, even relics have to eat. I suppose there’s no harm in the offering if it comforts her and feeds them. So, do you think Maester Amadou likes me?”
“Why do you even ask?” I demanded, laughing.
She flashed me a triumphant smile as she linked her arm in mine. Her cheeks were bright with the cold. She’d pulled off her hat to give to me, and her hair spilled in unruly black curls to her shoulders. The afternoon’s dusting of snow made our passage easier as we walked downhill, but without coat or cloak, I was, like the impoverished priests, shivering deeply.
Where we passed the remains of the ancient town walls, the land dropped away into a wide hollow. Now filled with buildings, in ancient times it had been a harbor and marshland shore. The eastern hills lay smeared with a smoky pallor of coal haze in the failing afternoon light, but I could easily see the triple spires to the west that housed three of the mighty bells whose music made the city famous. A single high plinth, visible across the distance, marked the site of the village founded by the Adurni Celts when they had come to do business with foreign traders on the marshy banks of the Solent River.
rents had drowned during a river crossing along with a hundred other people, yet the only detail my uncle had ever given me when he spoke of the gruesome task of identifying their water-soaked corpses days later was that beasts had done damage to their features, so he had had to identify them by other means: the locket and greatcoat my father wore, my mother’s red hair still coiled in a single thick braid, and a silver brooch later sold to pay the burial costs.
But if that were true, how could we be sure those were their bodies? Lockets and brooches could be given away or stolen. Other people had red hair and coats. So how could we be sure they were really dead, not just run away, kidnapped, or somehow lost?
We hurried along the high street that led past the academy grounds and the adjacent temple sanctuary. Kena’ani temple gates never closed, no matter day or night, winter or summer, storm or fair weather, not that many people in these enlightened days ventured inside those gates except as sightseers. Every guidebook to Adurnam noted that this temple, dedicated to the goddess Tanit, was the ancient center of the Phoenician trading settlement founded two thousand years ago on the banks of the Solent River.