Fires of Alexandria, Page 2

  Chapter Two

  Heron wrapped the moist cloth around her chest, calling out to her niece Sepharia to finish the binding. She'd injured her shoulder last night during final preparations for the new miracle at the Temple of Nekhbet and couldn't reach back to fasten it.

  Sepharia hustled into the dressing room wearing her glass blowing leathers over her chiton. Leather sleeves were connected across her chest in a half-tunic, strapped together with buckles. Gashes and burns littered her once white chiton, while soot smudged her pale face. Hidden amid the luscious curls on her head were make-shift glasses: two round cuts of darkened glass, held by copper bindings and connected by a leather strap.

  Heron bounced a loose flaxen curl from Sepharia's head in her hand, while the girl worked on her binding.

  "What I wouldn't give to have long hair again," said Heron. She ran her free hand through her own hair, kept short in the male Roman style and dyed black.

  "And I would cut mine so I could leave the workshop without being treated like an imbecile, Aunt Ada," said Sepharia.

  Heron clamped her hand over Sepharia's mouth. The cloth came unbound, releasing her smallish breasts.

  "Hush, child," growled Heron. "I've told you never to speak that name."

  Sepharia's eyes glistened with tears as she tried to speak beneath the clamped hand. Heron released her hand, threw an unwrapped chiton over her shoulder and wandered to the window that overlooked the busy street.

  "—didn't think anyone was around."

  Heron pushed the flowing lavender curtain aside. Warm scents of baking bread flushed her senses, briefly overcoming even the salty air and pungent smells of hundreds of people passing beneath. No one lurked beneath her window, nor would it have been possible that Sepharia had been heard amid the clatter. Heron walked back, picked up the moist binding and set it in Sepharia's hands.

  "While it's true only Punt is in the workshop and Plutarch and the rest are at the temple, we cannot, even for a moment let our guard down," said Heron. "I must always be your father, my dead twin, to you. Not Ada. Never Ada."

  Sepharia cinched the cloth, forcing Heron to suck in a breath, reminding her that the binding symbolized her life. With the binding in place, she threw on a tunic and stepped into the special undergarments that created the appearance of male genitalia.

  Throwing a satchel across her shoulder, Heron prepared to leave her living quarters by the spiral staircase. She paused when Sepharia made a coughing noise.

  A question lurked on her niece's lips. A question Heron knew, even before Sepharia spoke.

  "No," Heron whispered. "You may not come."

  Fierce longing welled up in Sepharia's brown eyes, reminding Heron of herself at that age. Heron opened her arms and her niece ran into them. She squeezed Sepharia tightly, inhaling the strong charcoal smell from her leathers.

  Heron held her niece at arm length. "Be content. I know you're itching to make your mark on the world, but the Romans could have you killed for practicing a man's trade. No reason to flaunt yourself in public."

  Sepharia sniffed and wiped her eyes. "But Cleopatra sparred with kings and studied from the philosophers and did anything she wanted."

  Heron had heard this argument before. "She was a queen, which is a form of god. But in the end, she died as a woman, just as gods sometimes do."

  "Gods can die?" The tears had dried on Sepharia's face.

  "If no one worships them they do. Which is why most of our earnings come from the temples these days." Heron sighed. "If it weren't for these unholy burdensome debts, we wouldn't have to conjure their miracles and subdue coinage from the masses."

  Sepharia's eyes went wide and her mouth formed a little O. "I nearly forgot." Her niece backed away.

  Heron crossed her arms. "What?"

  "A man came to the front gate earlier when you were still asleep," said Sepharia with her eyes lowered.

  Heron grabbed her niece's arm. "I told you not to show yourself."

  "I was curious and you were exhausted from being up all night. And he was insistent, banging on the door." Sepharia pulled her arm free.

  "Well, out with it."

  "He said he was the customs man."

  Heron put her hand to her head. "Did he say his name? No? Then what did he look like?"

  Sepharia squinted. "He wore a richly decorated chiton with a crimson chlamys. He was short with a pot belly, black curly hair and eyes so small I wasn't sure he was awake."

  "Plato have pity. That was Alexander Lysimachus. You should not have shown yourself to him. He had only stopped by to taunt me with my debts, ones I am fully aware of."

  Heron looked at her niece with the flaxen locks, high cheekbones and wide expressive eyes. She knew what Lysimachus had seen. Sepharia was flowering into a beautiful woman, ready to be sold for a dowry.

  "You cannot leave the house now and are strictly forbidden from answering the door again," said Heron.

  Sepharia stifled a cry and ran down the spiral staircase, shaking the metal supports. Heron knew her niece would bury herself in her work, just as Heron had done when she was her niece's age.

  Heron picked up an ornately clasped box the size of her fist. Two serpents coiled together forming the handle. She opened it again even though she knew it was empty, cursing it for being so. She licked her finger and ran it along the edge, hoping a few grains remained.

  She decided to leave through the workshop in case Lysimachus was lurking around the front gate. Her debts were worse than she'd let on to Sepharia. Lys the Cruel, as he was commonly known in Alexandria, had come by to remind her that she was past due on her taxes. Running a workshop was an expensive business. She'd gone over the books before she collapsed on her bed the previous night. If it weren't for the debts that she'd taken on when she assumed her dead twin's name, she'd be solvent, but his business mistakes and gambling habits had buried him and threatened to do the same to her.

  Her twin had a beautiful and creative mind, but no practical sense. She called him Sunny, her secret childhood twin-name since she couldn't think of him as Heron any longer. He'd called her Moony, as she was darker and infinitely more pensive.

  A burst of light from the forge fire brought her back from her memories. Punt was charging the furnace with fresh charcoal and iron ore while orangish-red light played across his glistening bald head and broad back. He wore a leather wrapping around his waist, darkened goggles over his eyes and nothing else. His bronze skin seemed to soak up the light that poured like honey from the combustion chamber.

  The unmanned bellows fed the furnace with fresh air, heating the combustion chamber to a fierce white light from which she had to shield her eyes.

  Heron smiled at the mechanism she'd built for the bellows. It captured the warm air flowing across the top of her workshop from the sea with huge spinning sails and converted the energy into a crank that pumped the bellows endlessly.

  Even when the winds were dead, which weren't often, she'd made a rope and pulley system that Punt could wind up. Working a forge fire usually required assistants, but her mechanisms made it possible for Punt to work alone.

  Heron pushed through the curtains that separated the foundry from the assembly warehouse. In comparison the air felt cool against her face.

  Even though most of the creations in the next room were of her design, walking through always set her heart aflame and made her feel like a child full of wonder. Only the Curiosity Rooms in the Great Library also made her feel this way.

  The haphazard clutter conjured images of forgotten behemoths readying themselves for ancient battle. The shoulders and head of a bronze Horus sat precariously over a scaffolding of heavy timbers, falcon face leering across the warehouse. A nearby structure of tubes would, when filled with water and set inside the Horus statue, produce a falcon cry or mute silence - depending on the position of the rotating notched discs inside - and give the
oracle-seeker his fortune.

  Other constructions, in various states of assembly, littered the warehouse floor. Bronze tubes sprung from barrels like bushels of grain, polished stone blocks were strewn across tables, implements of measurement seen nowhere else in the world than in Heron's workshop, sat precariously amid other building materials.

  Heron meant to make drawings of them so they wouldn't be forgotten if they were accidentally destroyed, but there was never enough time with all her projects. She'd hoped to teach Sepharia, but her niece was more inclined to delicate artistry, rather than practical mechanizing.

  As she left the workshop, the layered scents of the busy streets—incense, bodily musks and cooking fires—contrasted with her smoky workshop. A slender man with a basket balanced on his head rammed into her as she pushed into the crowd.

  The streets were more crowded now than when she first came to Alexandria. Recent census had put the population near a million. Only Rome claimed more residents.

  Newcomers were flooding into the city at high rate. Temporary cities were popping up outside the walls until the east and southern sections of the city could be expanded. The influx brought with it a certain air of expectation. Pushing through the crowds, Heron could feel it. Like an electricity passing through them all. It was enough to erase the morning’s concerns. A good miracle would bring enough to make a sizable dent in her debts to Lys the Cruel.

  Avoiding an overturned cart, Heron detoured through Fountain Square. A huge fountain commanded the center of the cross-street. Four versions of the cat goddess Bast sat at the four directions, representing her four aspects, holding: a ceremonial sistrum, an aegis, a solar disc, and empty handed. From the mouth of each statue poured glistening water. A huge windfan, suspended on a center pillar, spun lazily in the morning breeze.

  A dark-skinned man in a richly colored full length robe stood near the fountain with a young boy at his side. He appeared to be from regions deeper south past the deserts. A trader perhaps. They were getting more of them every day.

  “This is truly the City of Wonders,” she heard him tell the boy. “This must be the work of their greatest miracle worker.”

  Heron cursed under her breath. It was hers, of sorts. Philo had bought her designs from a former disgruntled worker and had placed the fountain in the square as a gift to the city, along with a few other attractions. He’d been buried in work after that, taking half her customers.

  The other half had left during a series of unfortunate mishaps. It seemed like someone was sabotaging her work, but each time she investigated the failure, it rang as a simple accident.

  She practically had to beg the Temple of Nekhbet to let her make their miracle for them, doing it at a substantially reduced cost when compared to her rivals. Even still, the design had intrigued them and would fetch an ample profit if all went well.

  It helped that the temple priests had been desperate, too. New gods, brought by the hordes of immigrants, were springing up in the city every day. Nekhbet was an ancient Egyptian goddess, sometimes presented with a vulture head, and the sister of Wadjet. But she had fallen out of favor and the other temples had better miracles as of late.

  Heron reached the temple gates. A massive stone statue of Nekhbet poured water from a jug into a pool. The pool represented the waters of chaos, which the goddess had been in charge of before creation.

  Below the pool, a huge brazier waited unlit. The brazier was her creation, one commonly used throughout the city. When the fire was lit, the heat forced air into a pit of water beneath the brazier. The pit would overflow into a large bucket and the weight would activate a series of pulleys, opening the door.

  Heron walked up the steps past the brazier and the statue and past the big red doors that wouldn't open until later. She cut around the stone building to a hidden entrance behind a hedge.

  She took a deep breath before she went in, praying that the evening's miracle didn't turn out like the last few had. If she didn't pull it off, then she might have to take Sepharia and flee the city before the debts crushed her like they did her twin.