Your city has become a strange city; how can you now exist?
—Lamentations of Ur
LILA AND I WALK THROUGH the city with Danel, who keeps watch for anyone who might think to throw a taunt or a stone. A dry wind deposits dust on clothes and skin, and I hold my headscarf over my nose for more reason than to hide my face. Without the season’s rain, the river has shrunk into trickles. I recall digging my fingers raw into a dry wadi in the desert, searching for water. Will it be that way here? With every day that the sky withholds rain, anger toward Lot intensifies. He has hired an armed guard to escort him to the market and even to his fields.
The hatred cast toward me as we walk the street is palpable, but Danel is an imposing man. Still, we do not linger. We have been invited to the home of Danel’s grandmother Jemia for the evening meal. Lot, Pheiné, and Thamma, not surprisingly, pled other plans.
My discomfort is not just from the hard stares as we pass. I feel as if I have forgotten some part of my body, like my hand or foot, because Nami does not pace at my side. For the first time since Raph found me barely alive in the cave, I am without her. Danel has asked this for the sake of his grandmother, who is old and cannot tolerate animals near her. She does not breathe well, and they make her difficulty worse.
I explained it all to Nami, reinforcing my command not to jump out the window, and then closed the slatted covering. But I expect her to find a way through it and follow me. She found me once in this city, picking out my scent, and once in the desert. Every few steps, I turn, looking for her behind us.
The sun is a round red stone balancing on the western cliffs, spreading a bloody stain across the sky. The air, sucked of moisture, stinks more than usual. Earlier that day, I watched huge bubbles form in the sea and burst with an accompanying stink. Pheiné and Thamma were home, but unimpressed with the sea’s activity. Pheiné played her harp, which I had to admit was not unpleasant. I recalled how she had sent smoldering glances in Raph’s direction. How jealous that had made me!
Finally, we have heard news from Babylonia. War. Lila made certain to ask details, and I was greatly relieved to learn it had been from the east, as Mika predicted. Each morning, I put aside a small piece of my food and leave it on the sill for the birds to take to El with a plea to protect Raph and Mika. I pray Raph made it home safely with his precious stone. And I pray Babylonia’s king takes good care of his sage. Would Samsu-iluna demand more visions of Mika? What would Mika do with only a false stone on which to lay his head?
We pass the layered lime-washed bricks of the goddess’s temple. My step slows. I could go inside and ask for sanctuary. It would not matter that I am ugly or that I am the wife of Lot. I could live there for the rest of my days in peace and dignity. The power of that pull toward the temple surprises me.
Perhaps sensing my turmoil, Lila’s grip on my arm tightens. As my slave and handmaiden, she would have to come with me. My gaze finds Danel’s profile. He walks close beside Lila, between her and the donkeys and street merchants. He steals glances at her when he thinks she does not know. I have studied men’s expressions and behavior all my life, and I know as surely as I know anything, I cannot take Lila to the goddess’s temple.
We pass through the Gate, the city’s heart. Merchants are closing for the day in anticipation of the evening shutting of the gates, packing away their dates and figs, baskets of seeds or beans. Some spread their blankets to sleep near their wares. We pass one such man, who sees us and indicates a hanging section of lamb, its sides scored from the knife’s slices and unseen bites of flies. “Not too late,” he says, with a grin that displays the gaps between his crooked yellow teeth. Lila shakes her head, and we move on. No beggars line the walls, as there would be in Babylon or any other city. Sodom does not welcome them; a person seen offering a pittance to one would be fined and the beggar expelled.
From the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of a young boy running down an alley. Only his back is visible. The way he runs is familiar, though I cannot place it. Dogs bark and chase after him for a short way, and then he disappears around a corner.
The bray of a donkey distracts me. There is a pained quality in it. I stop.
“What is it?” Lila asks.
“Wait a moment,” I say, watching the scene unfold before us. A man, his back to us, is whipping his donkey for failing to move forward with the wagon he has just loaded with heavy clay pots of pitch. “Move on, you sorry beast of Mot!”
I approach him. “What has this creature done that warrants your beating it?”
He rounds on me. “Who are you—?” The sight of my face stops him, and recognition, or perhaps disgust, widens his eyes. He is a swarthy man with black hair that crawls up his chest to meet his thick, unkempt beard. The unwashed stench of his body overpowers even the efforts of the sea and the debris of the city. From his stance and tone, he is not a man accustomed to challenge.
I do not step back from him. “I am Adira, daughter of Zakiti and wife of—”
He does not allow me to finish, but spits at my feet, “—wife of that son-of-the-underworld, Lot. I know who you are.”
“Well,” he demands after a pause, “what do you want?”
I point to the blood oozing from the donkey’s hide. “Beating your donkey does not work. You must lure it with a treat or startle it forward, but yours is not being stubborn. She has hurt her back foot, either strained it or picked up a stone.” I point. “See how she stands with her weight off it.”
He grunts and cocks his head, exposing what I could not see at first, a wide scar that runs from the outer corner of his eye to his ear. Despite my mind’s assertion that Scar, my Babylonian tormentor, is dead, my body goes as rigid as one of the goddess’s poles. I am chilled and sweating at the same time. I have lost my voice, my ability to move.
We remain that way for long heartbeats, the man too stubborn to check my assertion, and I locked in a past terror, waiting helplessly for a rain of blows, until I feel Lila’s hand on my arm. She turns me, and she and Danel help me walk away. I am surprised my shaking legs remember how. After we turn down another street, she produces my staff, which I apparently dropped, though I have no memory of it.
She has me sit on a low wall, once part of a house that has long since come down, possibly from the earth tremors.
Why has no one repaired it? I think inanely, seeking a distraction from the reality that I am no longer the person I thought I was—no longer the girl who would jump on a horse and ride after her father’s murderer—only a woman scarred inside as well as out.
I do not want to weep, not here with eyes on us. I feel the stares, though Danel has positioned himself so his thick body screens me somewhat.
“Let’s go on,” I whisper hoarsely.
WE ARE WITHIN sight of Danel’s house when, as if to prove Lila’s words true, the ground trembles, followed by a loud boom and the sharp smell of brimstone. When we recover our balance, we stare one another other. A long moment of stillness hovers over the street before people explode into discussion: “What was the noise? Why are the gods angry?”
Danel opens the door and waves us inside. “Grandmother, are you all right?”
There is a groan from the courtyard, and we rush there to find her on the ground. Danel kneels beside her. “Are you hurt?”
“Maybe a bruise on my hip,” she says. “It should feel welcome there with all the others.”
Another woman hurries in with a basket of flatbread balanced on her head. She sets it down and rushes to Jemia’s side. “Do not move,” she commands, her thick hands pressing and prodding. We step back, allowing space for the woman, whose arm bears the scarred slash of a slave brand. She is as large and brusque as Jemia is small and fragile. I marvel at Jemia, lying curled on her side on the reed-strewn floor. How can this woman have produced Chiram? She is even smaller than Lila.
When Jemia’s slave is satisfied nothing is broken, she scoops the tiny woman into her arms and starts to take her to a back room. Jemia makes a fist and beats it against her shoulder. “No, no! Put me down, Flava.”
“You should rest.”
The fist does not pause in its assault. “Are you blind, woman? I have guests. Release me.”
With reluctance, Flava sets her gently on her feet. “Remember how long you spent abed the last time you fell?”
Jemia ignores her, straightening to her full height, which amounts to level with Flava’s bosom. Despite Flava’s hovering, Jemia’s dignity belies her stature. “I cannot go to bed every time the ground shakes.” Then she turns to us. “Be welcome in my house.”
Since we are not travelers, she does not insist on washing our feet, and we simply return to the little gate and remove our sandals.
Lila tries to help Flava serve, but I insist she join us. We sit on cushions around a large clay platter, using flatbread to scoop the pungent mixtures of meats, onions, and beans. Dates, goat cheese, and fresh milk follow the main servings, and then honey cakes almost as good as Hagar’s. I appreciate the extravagance of serving such food.
I finally sit back with a rounded belly, leaving something of my portion to assure our hostess there has been plenty to eat. Now it is polite to speak, and I compliment her on the meal and ask questions about its preparation. We meander into conversation about current events. “This new king does not understand his people,” Jemia complains. “They never do. I have seen three of them, you understand.”
“Grandmother, do not get yourself in a tangle,” Danel says.
“I am not tangled. My old eyes see better than yours. This city is fearful and isolated; we are overripe and rotten.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She slaps her palm against her thigh. “There is closing the gates, and there is closing the gates.”
I shift on my pillow, trying to ease the burning ache in my hip and leg. “I do not go out much, and hear very little other than what Lila tells me,” I say as apology for knowing little of what goes on in the city.
“What do you make of the explosion, Grandmother?” Danel intercedes, in an obvious attempt to change the subject from politics.
She lifts her shoulders in a shrug.
“Have you ever heard such before?” he insists.
She squints, as if trying to see into a distant memory. “When I was a young girl, there was a noise like the one today. It was down where the pitch pits lie.” She spreads her hands wide, her voice dramatic. “The ground cracked open—shooting a tower of flame into the sky!”
“A tower of flame?” It is the first time Lila has spoken.
“Believe me or not,” Jemia says crossly.
“I believe,” Lila says, her gaze solemn. “The gods are angry with this city.”
Jemia appears lost in her memory. “When it finally burned out, foolish children that we were, we went to look down into the crack, pushing and jostling each other, fearful Mot would reach up and grab us.”
I remember poking sticks into holes with Ishmael to see if we could wake a demon. “What did you see?” I ask.
She shudders, though it is overly warm from the day’s heat. “Mot’s kingdom.” She pauses, well aware of the drama of her telling. “We saw the layers of the earth, down, down, so deep, there was nothing but blackness.”
“Mot’s Tongue,” Danel says. “I have seen that place. The older children take the younger there to frighten them. I went, before Father took me with him on the caravan. It is just as you describe, but I never heard of a fountain of fire erupting from it. That must be why they call it a ‘tongue.’ I always wondered.”
I feel my eyes widen, and a sense of doom grips me. Beneath us, in the depths, fire rages, waiting for the earth to shift to release it. Mot’s Tongue could erupt anywhere.
“It happened long before you were born,” Jemia says. Then, as if it is part of the same subject, she points a bony finger at me. The skin of her hand is creviced like a piece of parched earth. “There are other things that happened before you were born that do concern you.” The finger stays extended, but sweeps to include Danel, “And you.”
Danel looks perplexed.
Knowing she has our attention, she retracts the finger, folding it with the others in her lap. “I must tell you a story.”
“Your father, Chiram,” Jemia begins, “was a good boy.”
The sense of danger lingers, but I am hungry to learn more about Chiram and lean in for her story.
“Perhaps not as quick as others, but steady and dependable,” she continues. “You are much like him in that, Danel. When he was a young man, he traveled to Mari to visit his uncle, and he met a beautiful woman. He was warned she had spells of darkness, but he was so taken by her, he brought her home as his wife. They were happy and, in due time, she had a child.”
“Which was me,” Danel says.
“Yes, it was you. But it was a difficult, painful birth, and something broke in her mind afterward. She seemed to forget who she was and did not acknowledge either her husband or her child. She would wander out into the streets, and Chiram had to find her and bring her home to suckle you.”
Danel’s hands clench into fists. “I know this, and I know the rest. She disappeared, and Father brought me to you to raise.”
“Only for a while.” Jemia stops a moment to get her breath. I can hear the faint wheeze, and am now glad I did not bring Nami and make it more difficult for her.
“Danel’s father—my Chiram—was almost as lost as his bride,” she continues. “He was a shaper of knives, but returning to his profession only made him think of his lost wife, so he tried his hand at various things. He had it in his mind that a traveling caravan had snatched his wife, so he attached himself to various ones, finding a place by hunting and cooking for them. When Danel was old enough, Chiram came for him.”
Jemia’s watery eyes travel from Danel to me. “Hear now the part you do not know, and I, too, did not know until Chiram came to Sodom after Zakiti died and you, Adira, disappeared into the desert.”
Everyone’s attention intensifies. Jemia sways a bit, as if the weight of what she knows rocks her off-center. “When Danel was four summers old, Chiram found his missing wife.” She looks directly at Danel. “Your mother.”
Danel jumps to his feet. “What? Where is she? How?”
“Be calm, grandson.”
But Danel will not be. “Why are you telling me this now, in front of guests? I do not understand.”
It is Lila’s cool, small hand on Danel’s calf that settles him. He looks down at her, his mouth tight. She says nothing, yet much passes between them. He sits. “My apologies, Grandmother.”
She goes on as if never interrupted. “Many seasons had passed when he found her, and she was the wife of another man, the owner of the caravan.”
I draw a shaky breath, putting this together. “My mother? Your son’s wife was Talliya?”
Jemia nods and gives us a moment to absorb what she has told us.
Finally, I ask, “Did my mother remember Chiram as her husband when she saw him?”
“No, she did not. And Chiram, though he longed for her, did not claim her. She was married to a man Chiram respected, and she seemed happy.”
I feel blood drain from my face, and I stare down at my hands. “When we were captives in a cave in Babylonia, Chiram told me— ” I must take a slow breath to relieve the tightness in my chest. “Chiram told me that when he and my father left to fight against Chedorlaomer, my mother was pregnant.” I look up. “With me.” My mouth is dry. I had not told Danel these details. “Chiram said my mother went throughout the camp, telling everyone her son would soon be born, and that would set things right.”
Tears glimmer in Jemia’s eyes. “Deep inside, a part of her knew she had lost her son.”
“She told everyone I was a boy.” My own voice breaks over a closing in my throat.
Jemia reaches out and takes my hand.
“And so I was raised,” I say, “even after she died.”
“And so,” Jemia echoes, “Chiram stayed near her. And her son, Danel, was companion and friend to her daughter, though neither knew the other to be family.”
Danel takes a deep breath and looks at me, his brows lifting with a sudden understanding. “We, then, are sister and brother.”