Omar pointed to one of the open chests. “If I wanted to steal something, I would have taken some of these.”
Kamil looked over and saw dented gold plates, a chalice, and other objects he didn’t recognize, some elaborately decorated with niello work and a few with jewels.
Omar lifted up a heavy gold chalice studded with rubies. Kamil was flabbergasted. A chalice like this could buy a small villa. “Why are these objects not under lock and key?” He thought of Hamdi Bey’s museum with frustration.
Malik looked embarrassed. “The imam occasionally likes to do an inventory.”
It could have been the imam, then, who had drawn his fingers through the dust. Omar flipped open a small carved box, revealing a cache of coins, not a few of them gold liras.
“Tithes. The thief didn’t take them either.”
“Was the box open?” Kamil asked.
“For inventory,” Malik repeated, then paused before pointing to a small, upended medicine bottle on the tray. “The imam has terrible toothaches. Sometimes he’s a bit forgetful after taking his medicine.”
“Forgetful enough to leave the door unlocked?”
“I always check the door before I retire,” Malik insisted. “Whoever came in here had the key.” Malik sounded so despondent that Kamil found himself wondering whether Malik had an idea who had taken the reliquary.
Kamil sniffed the mouth of the bottle. “Laudanum.” The imam had turned his pain into his own version of paradise.
“In the future, I’ll add such details to my reports,” Omar promised, then turned to Malik. “My brother, I’ve learned that up on their unholy hill of Pera, the magistrates actually read the crappy reports we send them. That alone will help me sleep well tonight.”
Omar was right, Kamil thought. The mystery lay in what the thief hadn’t taken. He began to see that this reliquary might be more valuable than he thought.
He placed his hand on Malik’s arm. “Each loss is a counsel,” he reassured him. “There’s much here to help us.”
4
Three young boys lay flat on the ground, heads hung over the edge of the cistern wall, frightened by the unprotected distance to the rocky earth below, but daring each other to creep closer. The wall was built in layers, five courses of brick and five of stone, scored at intervals by lines of large marble slabs, with moss and grasses growing from its crevices. Despite its great age and state of disrepair, the wall appeared massive and more enduring than any of the flimsy wooden cottages in Sunken Village below. At intervals, the cistern bent inward in shallow arches, revealing masonry the width of a man’s reach.
The boys watched people emerge from their cottages and converge like trails of ants on the domed stone structure in the village square.
“Why are they going to the mosque? I didn’t hear the ezan.”
“And look, the women are going too.” The boy raised his arm to point.
His friend pushed him and laughed.
The boy quickly pulled in his arm and grabbed a protruding stone to keep from sliding over the edge. “Stop it,” he whined.
“They’re slaves,” his friend pointed out proudly. “You know what they do in Africa? They cut off their yaraks.”
“They do not. How do you know, anyway?”
“My uncle told me. He was there. He said that’s where they make eunuchs.”
“Where?”
“Addis Ababa.”
“That’s not really a place.”
“Is too.”
“Isn’t.”
They tussled on the lip of the cistern until the third boy, who had been watching the line of people in the square below, turned and slapped them both on the ear.
One day a red line had appeared at her mother’s wrist where she had cut herself on the tine of a monstrance, a top-heavy gold receptacle with a flattened face shaped like the sun. How and when the monstrance had come into the family’s possession was unknown, but it must once have served Roman Catholics to display the wafer they adored as the body of their God. The red line had slowly but inexorably lengthened, reaching up along the inside of her mother’s arm until Balkis imagined it had tied her heart up like butcher’s string and stilled it. After her mother’s death, Balkis kept the gold monstrance, tarnished by her mother’s blood, on a shelf in the receiving hall. It reminded her of many things: to live, never to forgive.
This Friday, she had risen early and passed through the door at the back of her house that led to a small marble hamam bath. A servant fed the wood-fired boiler. Hot water flowed through ceramic channels beneath the floor and spilled from a spigot set over a marble basin. Balkis took her time bathing, allowing the heat to penetrate her muscles and release her from her body. The midwife Gudit, an old, square-shouldered woman with a face and neck like a bull, scrubbed her skin with a textured silk mitt and denuded Balkis’s body of hair with aghda, a mixture of sugar boiled with lemon juice, until the space between her legs was as smooth as an egg. After Gudit left, Balkis reached down and drew her fingers along the two lines of small round scars from the thorns that the midwife had used to pin her wound shut after circumcising her. A small pinhole at the center, where the midwife had left a straw reed inserted until the wound healed, was the only opening that remained.
“Container of the Uncontainable,” Balkis thought sourly. They hadn’t told her beforehand that the priestess became the container, never to be opened again, forever empty. After performing the circumcision, the midwife had told her that she would look beautiful, but Balkis had felt only despair. Now, seventeen years later, her wounds had healed, but the rage she felt was still raw.
After her bath, Balkis lay wrapped in a towel on a bench in the cooling-off room, thinking through her plan. She was short and plump, with a round face, a patrician nose, and lips tightly pressed, a door slammed shut on an elegant ruin. Her golden complexion highlighted her alert brown eyes, framed in starbursts of wrinkles; the face of a once beautiful woman violated by time.
Gudit brought a glass of tea and withdrew.
Balkis ran her fingers over the designs cut into the crystal and thought about the community she led, the Habesh and their Melisite sect. She focused her mind on her two children, Saba and Amida, who would lead the sect when she and her brother, Malik, passed away. It was all well and good that Saba believed in their sacred mission, but the girl would have to stop reading long enough to learn the affairs of the community. Bees only rush to the hive with a queen bee in it.
She wished Malik took more interest in Amida, her beautiful boy who had become such an attractive, talented, but wayward young man. They had to find a way to channel his angry energy into the community. The Habesh needed his leadership so they would become prosperous again and so that the young people would stay in the village. Without a thriving community, the Melisite traditions wouldn’t survive. Four hundred years of Melisite ancestors sat in judgment, should she fail.
The Habesh had long supported themselves by serving as intermediaries, buying stolen and forged items from certain families in Charshamba and passing them on to dealers in the bazaar. It was a risk-free business based on trust, and lucrative enough to have supported her village for generations. She remembered her own mother in the receiving hall of this very house, setting terms with men from the Covered Bazaar. But in the past year, the supply had dried up and the villagers were suffering. Young people were moving away to look for work. Their children would grow up Muslim, never knowing the joy of witnessing God, the blessing of their ancient community. She had to find a way to keep them here and the community alive. They must love her and, through her, their God. This sacred hunger, to which she fed her rage, was what kept her alive.
Balkis returned to the house. In the dressing room, Gudit rubbed her down with warm towels, then laid out the traditional garments worn by the priestess. Shivering with cold, Balkis put on a finely worked, backless linen robe held up by straps of pearls. She lowered her head so Gudit could place a gold chain, from which hung a key, around her neck. Gudit then settled a turban on Balkis’s head and draped a welcome cloak around her shoulders.