women secretly made sacrificial cakes for her. “Did you read the ‘Exaltation’?” I asked.
“‘Lady of all the divine powers, resplendent light, righteous woman clothed in radiance, mistress of heaven . . . ’”
“You can recite it?”
“Only a small part. It, too, was written by a woman, a priestess. I know because two millennia ago she signed her name to it—Enheduanna. We women revered her for her boldness.”
Why had I never signed my name to what I wrote? “I don’t know why you would leave such a place as that,” I said. “If I should be so fortunate as to be banished to the Therapeutae, you couldn’t pry me from it.”
“It has its goodness, but also its hardships. One’s life is not entirely one’s own, but is ruled by the community. Obedience is required. And there’s a great deal of fasting.”
“Did you run away? How did you come to be here?”
“Now, where would I have run to? I’m here with you because Skepsis did not cease in pleading my case to Haran. He’s a cruel man and a belligerent ass, but eventually he petitioned the council to let me leave the Therapeutae on the condition I also left Alexandria. They sent me here to your father, who is the youngest of us and had no choice but to obey his brother.”
“Does Father know of these things?”
“Yes, as does your mother, whose first thought upon rising each morning is that I am a thorn in her right side.”
“And I am the thorn in her left,” I said with some pride.
We were startled by a noise, a scrape of furniture beyond the door, and we drew up in silence and waited, rewarded at last by Shipra settling back into her voluminous snores.
“Listen to me,” Yaltha said, and I knew she was about to divulge the true reason she’d dosed Shipra’s drink and come to me in the middle of the night. I wanted to tell her about my vision, how it’d visited my dream—Ana, who shines—and hear her affirm the meaning I’d given to it, but that would have to wait.
“I’ve been meddling,” Yaltha said. “I took it as my task to listen at your parents’ door. Tomorrow morning they will come to your room and remove the scrolls and inks from your chest. Whatever it contains will be taken and—”
“Burned,” I said.
“Yes.”
I wasn’t surprised, but I felt the crush of it. I forced myself to look over at the chest of cedar in the corner. Inside were my narratives of the matriarchs, of the women and girls of Alexandria, of Aseneth—this my small collection of lost stories. It also contained my commentaries on the Scriptures, treatises of philosophy, psalms, Greek lessons. The inks I’d mixed. My carefully honed pens. My palette and writing board. They would make ash of all of it.
“If we are to thwart this, we must make haste,” said Yaltha. “You must remove the most cherished items from the chest and I will hide them in my room until we can find a better place for safekeeping.”
I sprang up, Yaltha trailing behind me with the lamp. I knelt over the chest, the slick of light coming to rest above my head, and lifted out armfuls of scrolls. They clattered across the floor.
“Sadly, you cannot remove all of them,” Yaltha said. “It would raise suspicion. Your parents expect to find the chest full. If it’s not, they will turn the house over, searching.” She produced two goatskin pouches from the girdle inside her robe. “Take only the number of scrolls that will fit inside these skins.” Her gaze bore down.
“I suppose I must leave behind my palette and writing board and most of my inks?”
She kissed my forehead. “Hurry.”
I selected my corpus of lost stories, leaving the rest behind. I arranged them in the pouches, which still carried the faint stink of an animal pen, wedging the thirteen scrolls into tight honeycombs inside the bags. Into the last one, I managed to slip two vials of ink, two reed pens, and three sheets of clean papyrus. I wrapped the goatskins in a faded purple