Cyrene
Morning came too soon after Sabra’s long vigil at the Temple. She had barely drifted into a troubled sleep when the jubilant crowing of a rooster broke through her dreams. She groaned, pressing her hands into her eyes. The splintering headache she’d hoped sleep would cure was still there.
Another rooster close to her window took up the morning call, and Sabra forced herself out of bed. In the half-light of dawn, Sabra dressed quickly in her plain robe. She was still fastening the laces of her sandals when Ayzebel came to tend to her hair.
Sabra frowned at her somber reflection in the polished bronze mirror as Ayzebel brushed out her dark hair. The priestesses of the Roman cults glittered in embroidered robes, their hair braided and bound with beaded fillets, as bright and shining as the gods they served. They didn’t realize that their rites meant nothing. Empty words spoken to empty ears.
And yet, all Sabra could think was how she looked nothing like them.
Her plain dark robe and loose hair were a sign to everyone around her that she was untouchable, that she served an older god, a darker god, than the gods of the Romans. No wonder Ayzebel could barely look at her.
“How long before the children come?” she asked quietly.
Ayzebel’s hands faltered. “An hour, mistress. Will you eat?”
“Maybe a little,” Sabra said. She studied the girl’s somber reflection, then, before she could stop herself, the words were out of her mouth. “Ayzebel, are you afraid of me?”
Ayzebel froze, meeting Sabra’s gaze in the mirror.
“I don’t understand,” she said, but for once she didn’t immediately glance away. Then she added with something like defiance, “I’m not unhappy.”
Sabra swallowed. Had Ayzebel been in the peristyle when she had said the same thing to Hanno? Why else would she speak so boldly, with that bright gleam in her eyes?
“You may go,” she said, pulling her hair free of Ayzebel’s hands. “I’ll eat later.”
“You’ve been fasting for days, mistress,” Ayzebel said. “You should take a real meal.”
Sabra hesitated. The fact that Ayzebel was talking to her was curious enough to keep her from brushing off the girl’s concern.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said.
She sighed and turned, and found herself face to face with Ayzebel. The girl stood with her hands in loose fists at her sides, her cheeks pale and her amber eyes troubled.
“Mistress,” she said. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?” Sabra asked.
“This morning you will teach the children about the god. And tonight one of them will be chosen for the sacrifice. How do you do it? How do you teach them how to die?”
Sabra swallowed, tasting dread like bile at the back of her throat. “I don’t,” she murmured. “They teach me.”
After forcing down a brief but hearty meal of grains and fruit, Sabra set out alone for the school in the Greek agora. Many of the city’s children received their normal lessons there, but not today. Today was the day of the winnowing—the day, second only to the day of sacrifice, that Sabra dreaded most.
As she made her way down the hill, head high, eyes down, she remembered what the old priestess had taught her about this day. Even now she could remember the smell of amber from the woman’s necklace, the dry rustle of her dark robes over a floor strewn with reeds.
“There was a prophecy,” the woman had said, standing at a tall window and staring out at the crumbling streets. “The god thirsts for blood, innocent blood…or do they say, flawless blood? Who knows what the sayings of seeresses mean? But he desires blood, and if we do not offer it willingly, he will stop the fountain and wait for us to fall wasted in the streets.”
After that, Sabra’s nightmares had begun. The dry spring, blood in the streets. Sabra shook her head, forcing the terrible images from her mind. She had enough to worry about without tormenting herself with specters.
When she arrived in the agora, a few of the ramshackle shops had just opened—dreary little stalls filled with broken bits of unwanted trinkets, forlorn merchants watching Sabra pass with only idle interest. Sabra kept her eyes down, her heart aching. Cyrene was dying. This city, its people…all dying.
Sabra stumbled and forced herself the rest of the way down the market street to the school, which was little more than a room nestled behind the decadent aromas of the baker’s shop. Sometimes the baker would bring the children scraps of dough fried up and laced with honey, but he had stopped bringing them for Sabra years ago. She’d always hated that she had to refuse them, but the god’s service was not for the weak. Even when she was free of her ritual fasting, she was forbidden to taste wine, meat, honey or sweets. She couldn’t even lawfully touch the steel of a knife, not even to save her own life.
Sabra edged inside the school, standing for a moment in the half-light filtering through the tree just outside. The long wooden benches squatted in a semi-circle, waiting for the children whose names had been enrolled in the lottery for the first time. These were the ones who needed to learn what they were facing, what honor would await them if their name was chosen. Eventually, if her father could sway the elders to the god’s purpose, she would teach all the children in Cyrene. But not everyone served the ancient deity, though his worship kept them all safe—the vapid gods of the Romans held sway still. And then there was that new god, the virgin-born. His cult was growing.
Perhaps that is why the god is angry.
Sabra realized that she was holding herself tightly. She didn’t understand why her father permitted these heresies to flourish. Time and again she had tried to tell him, to warn him. But he was too far under the sway of Roman politics to listen to her premonitions.
She heard voices behind her and moved quickly into the chamber. The children slipped into their places on the benches, their smiles extinguished like candles in her presence. Most were girls, some as young as seven years old. As she studied their fresh faces and wide, frightened eyes, she felt suddenly weary, soul-tired as she had never felt before.
It was best just to get it over with.
She began quietly, lifting her eyes to look at each of the children in turn as she spoke. “You are here because you may be asked to give the greatest measure of service to our god. When he first reached these shores, a terrible earthquake heralded his arrival. The ground broke open and brought forth the Kyre, the spring that gives water to our city. The Greeks called it Apollo’s, but in truth it is the old god’s alone. It flows, or not, by his will alone. Almost forty years ago there was a new earthquake, and great waves lashed the shores of Apollonia, our sister city. Temples fell, the great library was destroyed. Death and disease followed in its wake. One by one the priestesses of the god fell ill and died, until only one remained.”
Sabra paused, just long enough to see the fear-white faces of the children staring back at her. One small girl on the front bench hunched over, her dark hair spilling over her face. Sabra knew from her trembling shoulders that she was weeping, and wished she could spare the girl from the terror that was coming.
“The priestess had long felt the anger of the old god,” she continued. “Strange things were happening near the god’s cavern in the Green Mountain. Smoke and fire, the earth shaking as if stirred by the steps of an enormous beast. Some people claimed they saw the manifestation of the god himself, prowling the hills wrapped in flame and shadow, questing for something to quell his appetite. The god, you see, was hungry.”
One of the boys actually gasped, and several other children started whispering nervously. Sabra held up her hand and they fell silent, all at once. So, they had come to that moment, the moment she always dreaded. She had told them of the god, of his manifestation and his hunger, and now they had pieced it together with what they knew about her. This dark god—this was who she served. She was the voice of the god, no, the face of the god. So now, she was the one they feared.
She sighed and went on, “The priestess continued to offer prayer and ritual fasts to show the god that he hadn’t been forgotten. Some believe he revealed himself to her. She never told me if it was true. But she knew the god had to be appeased.”
“Have you seen the god?” one of the children asked.
Sabra drew a slow breath and pressed her hands together, trying to hold back the dread bubbling up inside her.
“I…I’m not certain,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. The last priestess was given a vision foretelling the great destruction of all Cyrenaica unless the god could be satisfied, but she didn’t know how. My father sent a messenger to the Delphic oracles, requesting guidance. How could we stave off the destruction he was planning against us?”
The little girl in the front shuddered and said, “Sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice,” Sabra repeated, quietly. “The oracle said that each month we were to offer to the god an innocent life. At first, we tried to offer what we offer to all the other gods. Spotless beasts—goat kids, sacred chickens, unblemished lambs. We even offered first-born calves and the finest stud colt in my father’s stables. But the god only got angrier and angrier. People went missing. Traders left the city at night and never reached Apollonia. The ground began to tremble and break, swallowing herds, destroying homes. Foul vapors seeped from fissures in the broken earth. And the priestess, now an old woman, finally divined the meaning of the god’s desire. The oracle asked for innocent life. Animals can be spotless, but they cannot be innocent. The sacrifice would have to be a human child.”
The boy began to weep openly. “You mean,” he gulped, “when you talk about us serving the god, you mean we get served to him?”
“What do you think happened to Juba when he was led up the mountain?” one of the older girls asked him, stoic.
“He got eaten?” he gasped. His voice broke on the word, and he stared at Sabra through terrified eyes.
“He was accepted by the god and the city survived another month,” Sabra said. “There is such honor in that! Each month, one of us has the chance to keep our people safe. If the god is satisfied with us, he will leave the rest of the city in peace.”
“Us?” asked the girl in the front.
Sabra lifted her chin, because this was her best chance of making them brave. “Yes, us,” she said. “My name is there with yours in the lottery.”
As she expected, they stared at her with a new regard.
One of the girls asked, “Are you afraid?”
Sabra smiled faintly. “Who wouldn’t be? But that doesn’t mean I am unwilling. I will do whatever the god asks of me, if it means keeping our city safe.”
“What if no one got sacrificed?” the little boy asked.
Sabra shook her head. The voice had come muffled to her ears, as if from far away. She stared at the cracked stones beneath her feet, dry and barren, dazzling in the blazing sunlight. A desiccating wind buffeted her, thick with the smell of burning grass, burning flesh. Turning away from the fierce afternoon sun, she gazed at the city spread in panorama before her.
Empty streets. Empty markets. All empty.
Nothing remained of her beautiful city, nothing but smoke and shattered stone. She turned and found herself facing the Fountain of Apollo, the narrow cavern from which the Kyre flowed…or used to flow. The rocks were dry. The moss on the stones had turned to patches of brittle grey. The conduit that once carried the water to the city…empty.
“Empty,” she whispered, and the cavern echoed back to her a word that she had not spoken: “Dead.”
She leaned into the low mouth of the cavern, and saw Death itself staring back at her.
“Mistress Sabra!”
She reeled back, torn from the vision by the child’s frantic cry. The room cut into focus around her, stark and dim, quiet but for a chatter of noise seeping in from the market. And in front of her, thirteen children stared at her open-mouthed.
“Mistress Sabra, are you all right?” the dark-haired girl asked.
Sabra blinked and slowly unlocked her fingers from the edge of the podium. Her palms were damp with sweat, but her whole body shook from a sudden chill. Gradually her heartbeat slowed its hectic chattering.
“I’m all right,” she murmured.
“You just went completely white,” the girl said. “And your eyes…you kept staring at the ceiling, like you saw something there. Something terrible.”
“And you were muttering,” the boy said. “But I couldn’t understand any of it.”
“Was it a vision?” the older girl asked, voice hushed and almost reverent.
Sabra shuddered. “I’m not sure.”
If only the old priestess were still alive, she could explain all of this. Was that what she had seen, that terrible vision of a forsaken city? And what did it mean? Sabra didn’t even know who to ask. She alone served the god and knew the secrets of his worship. There was no one who could help her.
She drew a deep breath and managed a faint smile. “You asked what would happen if we failed in the sacrifices. We would lose everything. That is why you should consider yourselves fortunate, even blessed. If you are chosen to offer your blood, you will redeem the whole city.”
“I don’t want to die,” the older girl said suddenly, with unabashed honesty. “I don’t want to be a sacrifice.”
Sabra stepped away from the podium, tucking her hands in the dark folds of her robe. “I know it sounds terrible. Your older sister is Jezbel, am I right?”
The girl nodded, curious.
“I taught her, too, at one time. Think about it this way. What if someone told you that either you or Jezbel had to die, and you had to choose which of you it would be. What would you do?”
The girl paled and sat up straight, then she whispered fiercely, “I’d never let anyone hurt Jezbel. Never.”
Sabra didn’t answer; she didn’t need to. The girl’s words hung heavy in the air, as the other children grasped the meaning of what she’d said. They were always smart that way. Gods help them, but they were smart.
“What does the god look like?” another girl asked. “You said the old priestess saw a manifestation of him?”
“My grandfather told me he saw the god up in the hills,” the older girl said. “He said he had the horns of a bull.”
“Ten horns!” another interjected.
“And wings like a bat,” the little boy said. “And smoke comes off him like he’s on fire.”
“I heard he has fangs like a snake!” another girl cried, almost shouting to be heard over the other children’s chatter.
“Teeth like a crocodile,” the older girl corrected.
“That’s enough,” Sabra said, feeling queasy. “It is blasphemous to speak so freely of the god.”
Most of the children bowed their heads, chastised, but the older girl held Sabra’s gaze.
“Please tell me one thing, Mistress,” she said. “Do we see the god, there at the end?”
Sabra swallowed hard. “I don’t know.”
Was she supposed to tell them they would be blessed to receive a vision of the god? Or that they might die of fear? Part of her hoped that it wasn’t true, that the victims died suddenly, without time to feel terror. But she didn’t know. She had never stayed at the god’s cave longer than she was permitted.
When the girl didn’t keep questioning her, she murmured, “You are all free to go. Fortune favor you tonight.”
They got up one by one and slipped past the curtain, letting in fickle shafts of dazzling daylight and the smell of roasting meat and nuts. Only two girls remained—the little one in the front row and the stoic older girl. Sabra went and sat on the front bench, facing them.
“Is everything all right?”
The younger one sighed shakily and nodded; the other shrugged and kept her gaze averted.
“What are your names?” Sabra asked.
“Elissa,” the little one said. “My father works for your father in the Prytaneum.”
“I’m Dido,” the older girl said, then added, “Yes, named after the famed queen of Carthage.”
Sabra smiled. “Did you need to ask me something?”
“How do you keep from feeling afraid?” Dido asked. “I’m so scared of the lottery. I don’t even want to go.” Tears started to her eyes, and she blinked them away in embarrassment. “I just turned fourteen,” she whispered. And then, all in a rush she said, “And…there’s a boy, and he smiled at me yesterday as if I was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. What if he really cares about me? Is it so wrong of me to want to live? I don’t want to die. I’m not ready.”
Elissa ducked her head, smiling in spite of herself. But Sabra couldn’t smile, not even at Dido’s honesty about the boy. Her heart felt strangely sick, something like doubt or dread gnawing a hole deep inside it. She knew what she should say: Dido ought to be honored at the idea of giving her life to the god. Fear was weakness; fear didn’t belong to true piety. But somehow, she couldn’t say any of those things.
All she could say was, “None of us knows when we will die. And we shouldn’t live in fear because of that. I just know that, when my time comes, I want to be able to face that dark gateway and say honestly, I did all I could.”
Dido nodded unenthusiastically. Sabra didn’t really blame her. No matter how carefully she cultivated her sense of duty, her piety to the god, deep inside there was always a remnant of dread. Better not to dwell on it, though, lest the god mistake it for apostasy.
“And you, Elissa?” she asked, forcing the thought away.
“I’m not afraid to die,” Elissa said, more boldly than Sabra expected. Then, voice hushed, “I’m just afraid of the god.”
“That is not unwise,” Sabra murmured.
“But you serve him!”
“Listen, Elissa. Have you ever been to the contests where they bring out a lion and make it fight against a man?”
Elissa nodded, crinkling her nose.
“Well, someone has to bring it food and water, right? To keep it alive?”
“So the god is like a lion?” Elissa asked, eyes wide. “I see. The lion-keeper serves the lion, but he isn’t friends with it, because he would be stupid to try. The lion is too dangerous.”
“Yes,” Sabra said.
“So you’re the lion-keeper.”
That would be so much safer, Sabra thought, but she only nodded.
“And we might be the man in the ring, only we would have no weapons.” Elissa hesitated, turning rather grey. “Actually, we might be the next dinner.”
“Oh, Elissa!” Dido cried, and clapped a hand over her mouth.
“But I saw a man kill the lion once,” Elissa went on, undeterred. “Does that mean…is it possible someone could kill the god too?”
Sabra flinched instinctively, throwing one hand before her in a sign against evil. Elissa just watched her through wide, innocent eyes while Sabra held her breath, expecting the god to strike one or both of them dead at any instant. When nothing happened, when the breeze carried on and the people kept chattering in the market, she sighed and bowed her head.
“We don’t talk of the god that way,” she whispered. “It is impossible even to imagine. Forget the lion. It was just an example, and a poor one at that. Now, go on, you two.”
Dido got up first, bowing her head. “Thank you, mistress. I’ll try to be braver.”
Sabra smiled at her in farewell, and jumped in surprise when Elissa suddenly threw her arms around her neck.
“I think you’re too pretty to be the god’s priestess,” she said.
“Silly!” Sabra laughed, patting the girl’s back awkwardly.
Her eyes burned and she found herself trying—and failing—to recall the last time anyone had embraced her. Even Hanno never did that any more.