"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 rose in volume as she entered the parlor. "Girls! It's time to leave for the lecture."
We did not move. In the square outside, a trio of men barged out of Ranwise Close at a strong clip. I recognized Banker Pisilco's stoop. He reached the park gate opposite our window, waved a farewell to his companions, and opened the gate into the park. The other two forged on with heads bent together, deep in conversation, but the banker struck out across the lit path past the monument and through the park toward the houses on the far side of Falle Square. It was odd to watch his shadowy form pass from shadow into the aura of gaslight and back into shadow, from light into shadow, light into shadow, and all the while, whether in light or in shadow, his hat glimmered as though dusted with tiny stars.
"Girls?" Shiffa stumbled among the couches and rattled the journals I'd left lying open on the table. "Oh, dear," she muttered in a grating tone of fond exasperation. "What are these doing out again? That child!"
Abruptly, her breathing shifted. Her fingers fluttered pages, and she sucked in a hard breath and whispered to herself in a tone so steely it was as if a different person were speaking, "Melqart's Curse! We were assured every copy of the codebook had been burned."
Bee lowered her hand to grasp my wrist, her fingers tightening until I thought she would crush my bones. We had left Lies the Romans Told on the table. The codebook?
"Have you found the girls, Shiffa?" My aunt's voice rose from
the direction of the stairs. She sounded as if she were trying not to laugh.
"No, they're not in here, maestra," called Shiffa in her fussy, happy voice, which now sounded utterly false to my ears. "They weren't in the nursery or in their bedchamber, those mischievous creatures!" She moved out the door, and Bee let go of my wrist as I grimaced.
"I told you, Tilly!" My uncle's voice rumbled from farther below. "They're hiding in the attic."
Aunt moved down the staircase to the ground-floor foyer, still speaking. "It's you? own fault for trying to force them to attend a lecture that they assured me they already heard once today."
"We are not attending to hear the lecture, but to be seen. The girls have made excellent connections at the college. Tonight's lecture is more about politics than aerostatics. It's a bold step for the Prince of Tarrant and his court to agree to tether an airship in the Rail Yard, much less hold a public exhibition of it for all to see. He and his clan are declaring through this act that they do not support the mage Houses' opposition to the new technological innovations."
"As I am well aware, dear. Yet we must be careful never to show an inclination to any side. You know we must not draw the attention of the mage Houses."
"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "They've forgotten about us. That was a long time ago. Camjiata has been safely locked away in his island prison for over thirteen years. Anyway, those rich Fula bankers will be at the lecture."