Cold Magic (8 page)

“What is ‘
rei vindicatio
‘?” I asked, and found myself tensing, as if Bran Cof’s head were likely to materialize in the sitting room and chastise me for having disturbed it.

“Oh, dear, are you studying law in your seminar now? It’s a complicated Roman legal action to do with a difference between ownership and possession—”

“Tilly!” Uncle bellowed from the floor above. “I can’t find my hat!”

She rose. “Cook and Callie are busy, so just run down and fetch the pot and cups yourself. You can take dinner at lamplighting in the nursery with the little girls, or wait and share a collation with us at evening’s end when we get home from the academy. For the lecture tonight, you’ll need to change into something more”—she frowned at my jacket and petticoats, a style I had assiduously copied from the plates of a very up-to-date fashion magazine Bee and I had seen in the window of a milliner on High Street last year—”more sober.”

“Tilly!” Uncle called again.

She hurried out the door.

“Do you think it was the poet’s head that spoke?” Bee whispered. “We’ll never be able to tell anyone that we heard the famous Bran Cof declaim! Even if it was only two words. Now, I’ll get the chocolate while you get that bag up to our room before Papa decides we must display our day’s academic work at dinner for his delectation. That would be a disaster! He’d see my sketches.
And
you’d have to confess you stole a book from the academy.”

“A book my father wrote!”

“A book whose author’s name is the same as your father’s. That doesn’t prove anything.”

She was right, so I retraced my steps to the entryway. Our governess was still up in the nursery with Hanan and Astraea; Cook and the hired girl Callie were busy with dinner; and our man-of-all-work, Pompey, would be stoking the evening fires or preparing trays to carry up to the nursery for their early dinner. I climbed the stairs to the first floor with the bag clutched against me. At the top of the stairs, the huge hall mirror showed me myself—yes, that was me, as always, my face, my body, my long-fingered hands, my wishfully fashionable jacket and petticoats sewn as well as Bee’s and my skill could manage. In the mirror, a ragged nimbus like a storm cloud fringed my form; it sparked in the mirror’s reflection only if I was particularly annoyed or upset, and I knew how to furl it in, like binding back one’s hair.

As I slunk along the first-floor hall past the closed doors of the front parlor and Uncle’s office, Aunt’s and Uncle’s voices traded rhythms from behind the office door. Their knack for talking over each other without quite getting in each other’s way reminded me of festival drums. Our factotum’s bass rumble interposed an unexpected counterbeat, followed by a silence.

I hurried past the rack of fencing sabers and up the stairs to the second floor. I slipped through the fourth door, the one at the back of hall, into the room Bee and I had shared for the almost fourteen years I had lived in Uncle and Aunt’s house.

The curtains were open, and the stove had been recently kindled. I threw myself across the wide bed and pulled out the book. After wrapping the feather coverlet around me, I shifted to catch what light remained from the windows that overlooked the back garden with its frosted earth and leafless trees. A twig scratched at the windowpane as the wind rattled it: Bee called that branch “the skeletal hand.” It was an old friend from the tree that grew down past Uncle’s office window, and its presence made me comfortable.

I opened the book and found the publication date: Most people across Europa used the Augustan year, dating from the installation of the first emperor of the Romans.

The year of my birth was 1818.

A man bearing my father’s name had published a monograph the year I was born.

I flipped through the pages in the fading light, but the flare for the dramatic and the self-deprecating turn of phrase displayed by my father in his journals was absent here. This was an awkwardly written tome filled with dry recitation of ancient Roman accusations, taken from quotes by tedious Roman writers of ancient days and refuted with the usual unassailable truths.

The first lie: that our name for ourselves is Phoenician, when in fact we call ourselves Kena’ani.

The second lie: that the rulers of “Carthage” engage in the barbaric practice of child sacrifice to propitiate bloodthirsty gods.

The third lie: that “Phoenician” women are all whores.

The fourth lie: that “Phoenician” traders will lie, cheat, and steal to get a bargain.

Fifth, seventh, eleventh… There was nothing new here. Wasn’t there any scrap in this volume that might reveal something new about my father?

A tap on the door roused me. I stuck the book under the pillow, but it was only Bee with the chocolate. I let her in and, closing the door behind her, unbuttoned my jacket, shifted out of my overskirt and petticoats, and asked Bee to lace me into a simple chemise with a sober, respectable overdress of evergreen-dull wool.

“What’s your hurry?” Bee asked, sipping at her chocolate.

“You go up to dinner,” I said. “Tell Aunt I’ll eat later. Come down to the parlor and warn me when it’s almost time to go.”

She set down the cup. “It will be on your head. Can I have your share of the chocolate?”

“Yes. Will you help me dress?”

First, she hid her sketchbook in the base of the wardrobe. Then she finished my chocolate. After that, with her accomplished fingers, she laced up the back of my clothes and arranged my hair pleasingly with clips and combs. She was more careless with her own dress, possessing that knack of making any piece of clothing look fashionable just because she was wearing it.

By the time the dinner bell rang, she, too, was ready in her soberest finery to go up to the nursery and give my excuses. Callie and Pompey stamped up the back stairs with trays while Aunt and Uncle climbed the front stairs, Bee in their wake. I shut my eyes and listened down the threads of magic: Cook and Evved were talking quietly in the kitchens. Something about codebooks? Our governess, Shiffa, was in the nursery, pouring water into a basin for the girls to wash their hands as they said the blessing.

Aunt and Uncle would spend some time with the little girls over the nursery dinner before repairing to their rooms to dress. One had to dress carefully in our circumstances. Appear too obviously impoverished, and folk would avoid us. We had to keep up appearances in order to attract the business that supported us.

I had time to hunt. I grabbed the book on lying Romans and padded downstairs and into the empty parlor where at dawn I’d finished my hasty essay. It was the custom in Aunt and Uncle’s house to take an early dinner and after it a session of necessary sewing and mending accompanied by reading aloud. We were sent to our beds soon after the sun set. Aunt often said that she chose to follow the ancient Kena’ani tradition of rising and falling with the sun, but I supposed it to be not a “traditional” but rather a cost-saving measure, because oil and candles and coal and wood were expensive. Shivering, I lit a single lamp, all I needed, and drew my hand along my father’s journals, which were shelved in numerical order. The physical books came in various sizes and widths, some cheaply made with crude stitching or a poor grade of paper, others with calfskin bindings so creamy my fingers lingered on them. Some had been battered and stained in the course of their individual journeys, while others remained pristine.

Daniel Hassi Barahal had begun his travels, and his journals, when he turned twenty, as I would in a mere eight days. From that time until my birth, he had always been traveling, and he had always been writing. When one book was filled, he would start another and leave the finished volume at any Kena’ani trading house to be shipped through to the Hassi Barahal mother house in Gadir. After the death of my father and mother, the journals had come into my uncle’s possession.

I pulled down the journal numbered 46, his account of the opening weeks of the Baltic Ice Sea Expedition, and opened it to the final entry. First came a vivid and lengthy description of the aurora borealis. Then, a detailed accounting of my father’s political debate with Lt. Tara Bell, a young lieutenant from the Amazon corps of the army of the infamous Iberian general Camjiata, known most commonly as the “Iberian Monster.” Twenty years ago, Camjiata had tried to conquer Europa while claiming he was only trying to restore the glorious days of the early Roman Empire. It was he, or his council of advisors, at any rate, who had funded the expedition. Lt. Bell had been assigned watch with Daniel Hassi Barahal for the brief span of gloom that passed as night.

When my father argued that an empire was a violent and unjust form of government, she retorted that the Romans had created peace among warring tribes. When my father pointed out that anyone can make a desert and call it peace, she replied that there is just as much, if not more, injustice among the multitude of principalities and duchies and independent city-states that had arisen throughout Europa after the empire finally fractured into pieces in the year 1000. Certainly the Celtic peoples loved their petty feuds and cattle-raiding wars; her own Belgae people did, and they were Celts, weren’t they?

When my father objected that an empire could not be natural because no one after the Romans had managed to build one, she laughed and told him the Celts were simply too quarrelsome to unite on any endeavor. And, anyway, she went on, Camjiata was, on his father’s side, descended from the Mande lineage called Keita, who had ruled the Mali Empire. Any fool, she added, knew that Mali’s armies had once spanned West Africa. That was before the salt plague had released the ghouls that had driven out much of the population. Just because an empire had not been achieved again in Europa did not mean it could not be achieved elsewhere by others or ought not be attempted for the benefits it offered. What might those be? my father had wondered sardonically. Security and prosperity, she had replied with, he wrote, “the heartwarming blind certainty of a loyal soldier.”

Was my father disputing with her out of his own fiercely held beliefs, or just to play his part in a friendly debate in order to pass the time? Perhaps argument was his way of flirting.

The volume closed with the argument.

The parlor door opened.

I jumped, but it was only Bee, slipping inside.

“So much for working in secret. If it hadn’t been me, you’d have been caught.” She picked up
Lies the Romans Told
from the table, flipping through it casually. “No illustrations! Bah!”

“The dates don’t make sense,” I said.

She raised dark eyes to examine me, then set down the book. “I’m cold. Let’s go sit under the blanket in the window seat.”

In the window seat overlooking the square, we tucked a wool blanket over us to keep off the chill and closed the heavy curtains behind our backs to hide us from anyone who might wander into the parlor. We did not worry about someone from outside looking up and seeing us there because of the cawl knit into the glass as a screen against prying eyes.

Our breath made steam flowers on the windowpanes. Winter’s cold had truly settled, although it was still eight days away from year’s end according to the common year: Hallows Night, as they measured such things here in the north. Outside, snow glittered in the square and in the canopies of trees; the streets had been swept clean.

“Go on,” Bee murmured, leaning against me.

I frowned. “I wondered that if my father wrote that monograph on Roman lies, I might find some trace of its being written in his journals. Interviews, stories, chance encounters, notes. But the last entry from the ice sea expedition is dated in the summer of 1816. The next two numbered journals are missing.”

“The record of the rest of the expedition.”

“So we must suppose. There stands my father on some benighted barren island in the Baltic Ice Sea, in the summer of 1816, debating with my mother over the legality of Camjiata’s war while watching the aurora borealis. Journal forty-nine opens eighteen months later in the final months of 1817. He is drinking and dining in the city of Lutetia.”

“The city of light, as its Parisi inhabitants call it. I’d love to visit.”

“Yes. So there he is, acting as a secretary to the legal congress presided over by Camjiata before the general elected himself permanent first consul of the restored Roman Empire. How my father got a post as secretary in Camjiata’s court is never explained. I’m sure that would be much more interesting reading than five volumes recording fifty-eight days of debate and discussion over law and legal codes.”

“Tell me the utter truth. Have you actually read every single word in those five volumes?”

“I have! Once. But only to see if he ever mentioned the ice expedition, its rescue, and what happened between him and Lieutenant Tara Bell. He never does.”

Bee sighed as with unfathomable sorrow, pressing her forehead into the glass and shutting her eyes, making me wonder if she really did have a headache. The square’s stone monument was visible by the light of the streetlamps: a proud female figure standing between pillars, facing the viewer, her right hand raised in the orator’s style and her left hand clutching the sigil of Tanit, protector of women. At the full moon, Bee and I left flowers, or a smidgeon of honey, or a tiny cup of wine at the base of the stele, in honor of those who had come before us, the Kena’ani women who had lived and died in Adurnam, far from their ancestral home and yet tied, always, to their ancient roots. Maybe they watched over us, as mothers watch over their precious children, those children fortunate enough to have living mothers.

“Go on,” she said into the glass.

“Eight days before the turn of the year, he is summoned. It’s the last entry, just those two words: ‘Am summoned.’ ”

“Summoned to what?”

“It never says. That’s the last journal. Doesn’t that all strike you as odd?”

Bee straightened as she shook off whatever melancholy possessed her. “Cat, listen. The most reasonable explanation is that he returns in haste to his wife, who bears a child, which is you. With a young wife and a new child, I don’t think it at all odd he might not have written more journals. He wrote them when he traveled. Couldn’t it be that this was the one time in his adult life he stayed in one place? By the hearth with his beloved wife and newborn child?”