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.
7
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 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 tose 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?'
'But that doesn't explain-'
'Cat. You are makong too much of this. I know you want the story to be more romantic than it is, although it's romantic enough. Everyone knows the Amazon soldiers were not allowed to marry on penalty of death. Yet she did marry, and she did leave Camjiata's army and she did come with your father to Adurnam to live with his family. So that means she lived in fear of being arrested as a deserter and a law-breaker by the agents of Camjiata. Meanwhile, she must also have feared that the agents of the Prince of Tarrant-who was, after all, one of Camjiata's most bitter enemies-would arrest her as a spy.'
'Aunt and Uncle are so ashamed of what she was that they've forbidden us to even speak of her. I can't even ask questions about her life. Is that fair?'
'I don't think it's fair. But if we Barahals are couched with
any possible stigma of association with the Iberian Monster, we'll lose all our business.'
'That's your father talking.'
'People must eat. That's why your parents came to live with the family in Adurnam, isn't it? What else could they do? Your father had to go to work again for the family. Yet his heart wasn't in it. He fought with everyone. The reports he prepared were useless. He did not want to leave your mother and you alone, and your mother could not travel with him into those regions that lay under the rule of Camjiata's empire where the family needed your father to travel.'
'To spy for them,' I muttered.
'Nor did your mother like living in this house, in Adurnam, where she felt vulnerable and maybe disliked. After a few years, the brothers quarreled. Your father and mother left, taking you with them. Then there was that terrible accident when the ferry crossing the Rhenus River capsized, and they drowned with a hundred others, and you survived, pulled out of the water, and so you came to us. Don't try to make the story more than it is, dear Cat. It's not a trap. You don't have to gnaw off your paw to get out of it. It's just sad that they died, that the two brothers remained unreconciled, that you were left an orphan at six years old. But at least you came back to us-'
'Hush,' I whispered through my tears.
Bee froze with her right hand clasped to her chest and her lace raised, posed unmoving like one of the living re-creations of the honored ancestors in a tableaux at the Feast and Festival or the Sun Sacrifice, which here in the north the locals called the winter solstice.
Put a saber in her upraised left hand, and she'd have run me through, just to put me out of my misery. Because she was right. Everything she said was right. It's just I didn't want the story to end that way.
'Beatriz? Catarina?' Our governess, Shiffa, had been imported all the way from the Barahal motherhouse in Gadir to teach us girls deportment, fencing, dancing, sewing, and how to memorize large blocks of text so we could write them down or repeat them later. All of which she did, and always with a rigid smile. Her giddily cheerful voice
