“What’s your hurry?” Bee asked, sipping at her chocolate.
“You go up to dinner,” I said. “Tell Aunt I’ll eat later. Come down to the parlor and warn me when it’s almost time to go.”
She set down the cup. “It will be on your head. Can I have your share of the chocolate?”
“Yes. Will you help me dress?”
First, she hid her sketchbook in the base of the wardrobe. Then she finished my chocolate. After that, with her accomplished fingers, she laced up the back of my clothes and arranged my hair pleasingly with clips and combs. She was more careless with her own dress, possessing that knack of making any piece of clothing look fashionable just because she was wearing it.
By the time the dinner bell rang, she, too, was ready in her soberest finery to go up to the nursery and give my excuses. Callie and Pompey stamped up the back stairs with trays while Aunt and Uncle climbed the front stairs, Bee in their wake. I shut my eyes and listened down the threads of magic: Cook and Evved were talking quietly in the kitchens. Something about codebooks? Our governess, Shiffa, was in the nursery, pouring water into a basin for the girls to wash their hands as they said the blessing.
Aunt and Uncle would spend some time with the little girls over the nursery dinner before repairing to their rooms to dress. One had to dress carefully in our circumstances. Appear too obviously impoverished, and folk would avoid us. We had to keep up appearances in order to attract the business that supported us.
I had time to hunt. I grabbed the book on lying Romans and padded downstairs and into the empty parlor where at dawn I’d finished my hasty essay. It was the custom in Aunt and Uncle’s house to take an early dinner and after it a session of necessary sewing and mending accompanied by reading aloud. We were sent to our beds soon after the sun set. Aunt often said that she chose to follow the ancient Kena’ani tradition of rising and falling with the sun, but I supposed it to be not a “traditional” but rather a cost-saving measure, because oil and candles and coal and wood were expensive. Shivering, I lit a single lamp, all I needed, and drew my hand along my father’s journals, which were shelved in numerical order. The physical books came in various sizes and widths, some cheaply made with crude stitching or a poor grade of paper, others with calfskin bindings so creamy my fingers lingered on them. Some had been battered and stained in the course of their individual journeys, while others remained pristine.
Daniel Hassi Barahal had begun his travels, and his journals, when he turned twenty, as I would in a mere eight days. From that time until my birth, he had always been traveling, and he had always been writing. When one book was filled, he would start another and leave the finished volume at any Kena’ani trading house to be shipped through to the Hassi Barahal mother house in Gadir. After the death of my father and mother, the journals had come into my uncle’s possession.
I pulled down the journal numbered 46, his account of the opening weeks of the Baltic Ice Sea Expedition, and opened it to the final entry. First came a vivid and lengthy description of the aurora borealis. Then, a detailed accounting of my father’s political debate with Lt. Tara Bell, a young lieutenant from the Amazon corps of the army of the infamous Iberian general Camjiata, known most commonly as the “Iberian Monster.” Twenty years ago, Camjiata had tried to conquer Europa while claiming he was only trying to restore the glorious days of the early Roman Empire. It was he, or his council of advisors, at any rate, who had funded the expedition. Lt. Bell had been assigned watch with Daniel Hassi Barahal for the brief span of gloom that passed as night.
When my father argued that an empire was a violent and unjust form of government, she retorted that the Romans had created peace among warring tribes. When my father pointed out that anyone can make a desert and call it peace, she replied that there is just as much, if not more, injustice among the multitude of principalities and duchies and independent city-states that had arisen throughout Europa after the empire finally fractured into pieces in the year 1000. Certainly the Celtic peoples loved their petty feuds and cattle-raiding wars; her own Belgae people did, and they were Celts, weren’t they?
When my father objected that an empire could not be natural because no one after the Romans had managed 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.”