roofed inner court and tumbled into the high, haughty vault of the entrance hall with its carved plants.
'There you are! Late for luncheon. Running about unattended! What has the headmaster had to say to you?'
Maestra Madrahat uncoiled herself from the proctor's bench placed to survey the entrance hall; one teacher or attendant was always stationed on the bench when college was in session to watch for pupils sneaking about where they weren't allowed.
I leaped into the breach, not needing to feign the breathless fervor of a chastened penitent who has barely escaped the lash, because my heart was pounding so hard I could scarcely suck in enough air to talk, and my pulse was rushing in my ears like a whispering voice: Had the head of Bran Cof spoken? Did my father write that book?
I could babble with the best of them. 'He spoke to us, maestra. See poor Beatrice's tears'. He said to accompany him down to luncheon. But a ribbon on my slipper broke, and I had to pause to see if I might fix it. So he came ahead and we stayed behind. Now we are here.'
This stream of words made her frown, but my statement was so unexceptional she could not protest. I stared at the stolid turnip adorning the wall relief, avoiding Bee's face altogether lest I entirely lose my composure and burst into uncontrollable snorts of laughter fueled by excitement, relief, and the frightening memory of that disturbing whisper.
A huge crash, plates dropping and smashing on the floor, splintered the air, followed by shrieks of surprise and shouts of startled laughter from the dining hall. Even the maestra flinched at the tremendous sound. Bee hid her face in her hands, shoulders quivering. Hot tears started out of my eyes as I bit my lower lip. Hard.
In the dining hall, everyone began talking at once.
I had not taken three breaths before two figures appeared at the dining hall entrance.
The maestra muttered, 'Clumsy cow! How long have I been telling them they must hire a better class of servants rather than these used-up, unsightly widows of crippled soldiers!'
Bee sucked in her breath as hard as if she'd just been knifed under the ribs. I thought she meant to ruin everything by spitting in the maestra's bitter face, but instead she looked toward the arched entrance. Her expression altered, brightened; indeed, she positively glowed like the spring sun rising.
Maester Amadou emerged from the dining hall at a slow walk, supporting an elderly serving woman. The old dame was clearly rattled and unsteady on her feet; one of her hands was streaked with blood from where she had taken a gash.
He guided her across the room toward us. Bee became practically refulgent. No trading vessel's captain could have appeared as ecstatically delirious at seeing land in the wake of a mast-ripping storm.
But he was not looking at Bee.
'You are just the one to know what to do, Maestra Madra-hat,' he said in a mild accent tuned with a musical soporiferous-ness. 'The ancilla needs medical attention. She has cut her hand on the crockery.'
The old woman turned a glazed look up to his face. I wasn't sure if she was infatuated or in shock from blood loss. Yet, after all, she looked old and weary and pale, and if Bee had known what I had just been thinking, she would have kicked me and I would have deserved the kicking.
'If she had not clumsily dropped the tray, she would not have cut herself,' said the maestra ungraciously.
Maester Amadou smiled the comment into oblivion. 'While it was indeed she who dropped the tray, it was not the ancilla's fault, maestra. I had a leg stretched out in an inconsiderate fashion. The ancilla stumbled over my rude foot.'
The old woman gave him a startled look, which only I noticed because both Bee and the maestra could not take their eyes off his smile. He was not a particularly tall young man-he was barely taller than I was, although it was true I was tall for a woman-and he looked extremely well in his fashionable clothes, a tailored dash jacket of indigo cloth and a patterned kerchief tied at his neck in the informal style known as 'the Buccaneer.'
'If a physician could be called, maestra? Perhaps someone to sit with the ancilla until the physician arrives so she does not faint? I would do it, but I think it is not allowed for men to enter the kitchen, is it not?'
'It is not, indeed!' said the maestra. 'To mingle so freely! Well, I will just take her back there and let one of the cooks sit with her until a physician can be brought from the women's hospital.'
'In recompense for my inconsiderateness,' he added, 'my family will reimburse any fees required by the physician as well as the cost of replacing the broken dishes. I am sure the ancilla will be back at work as soon as she is able and that her position will be held open for her given that the fault was all mine.'
Bee sighed audibly.
The serving woman flushed to the roots of her silver hair.
Even I was mildly impressed by this daunting performance, beneath which Maestra Madrahat was entirely drowned. She retreated as if on an inexorable outgoing tide, bearing the injured ancilla with hen/
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 will-ingness 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.
