mats had left me yawning and heavy-eyed the next day. But it was worth it. She was telling me now about Theano, whose illness prevented him from tending the library. “He has a weakness of the heart. It will give out soon.”
Listening as she gave an all too vivid account of the bodily complaints she’d heard, I began to feel I should return and set to work on the hymn to Sophia. The forty-ninth-day vigil was tomorrow night and I sat idle on a rock while Diodora spoke of foot ulcers. “It surprises me,” she said. “After all the years I spent at Isis Medica, I do not yet miss it.”
“What about Isis? Do you miss her?”
“There’s no need for me to miss her. I carry her inside me. She is everything.” She continued speaking for many minutes, but I heard nothing more. I felt the song I would write quicken to life inside me. I didn’t know how to go on sitting there.
I stood. “We must go.”
She threaded her arm around mine. “The day we met, you said, ‘Let us be more than cousins. Let us be sisters.’ Do you still want that?”
“I wish it even more now.”
“It’s my wish, too,” she said.
* * *
? ? ?
AS WE DESCENDED THE PATH, I spied a figure beneath the eucalyptus tree where I collected my aromatic leaves. He wore the white tunic and shaggy cloak of the Therapeutae, but I couldn’t identify him. Treading farther, I lifted my hand to shield the sun and saw it was the spy, Lucian.
“It’s late in the day,” he said as we came nearer. “Why aren’t you engaged in study and prayer?”
“We could ask the same of you,” I said, assailed by the uneasy feeling he’d been waiting for us.
“I’ve been at prayer here beneath the tree.”
Diodora bristled. “And we’ve been at prayer up there on the cliffs.” I gave her an approving look.
“The rocks up there are treacherous and there are wild animals,” he said. “We would all be saddened if you came to harm.”
His face had such a quiet malevolence that I looked away. He seemed to be threatening us, but I was unsure how. “We feel safe enough there,” I told him and attempted to pass. The words She is everything were like a fire in me. I had no time for him.
He stepped to block the path. “When you are in need of a walk, it would be safer to travel down the hill and along the road to the lake. There are solitary places on the shore that are as beautiful as the sea. I will be glad to show you.”
Ah. That was it. The lake lay down the hill and across the road, just beyond the protection of the Therapeutae’s precinct.
I said, “The lake sounds like a pleasant place to pray. We’ll go there another time. Right now we have duties to attend.”
He smiled. I smiled back.
“Don’t attempt to go to the lake,” I told Diodora when we were some distance away. “You’ve just met Lucian, Haran’s spy. He means to lure us onto the road, where the militia wait to arrest us. The boy who brings the salt said the soldiers stop everyone who passes from the west, looking for an old woman with a drooped eye and a young woman with unruly curls. They could easily mistake you for me.”
My words sobered her.
When we arrived at our hut, we found Yaltha sitting in her spot in the courtyard reading a codex from the library. Seeing her, Diodora said quietly to me, “It isn’t merely a question of whether Yaltha will choose to go to Galilee or stay in Egypt, is it? It’s whether any of us will be able to leave at all.”
She’d spoken my fear out loud.
* * *
? ? ?
LEAVING DIODORA AND YALTHA in the courtyard, I cleansed my hands and face in preparation to enter the holy room and write the hymn that was burning a hole in my heart. I set the lamp on