The Fortune Teller(42)

What heights she had fallen from! She let their chefs go, along with all their servants. Now when food was set on the table, her daughters would snatch it like falcons.

Maisara was the one who cooked and cleaned. She learned how to use each cooking vessel in the kitchen. She would spend hours washing pots and beating them with brick dust, then potash. Her hands became rough from all the labor, but she didn’t complain. She spent hours alone in the kitchen dreaming of how she would leave Baghdad one day. The room became her map as she plotted her escape.

Rabka prohibited her second daughter, Alya, from performing any labor, for in Alya, Rabka saw her best chance. The girl was quite lovely, a gazelle, thin as a willow with high breasts, a long neck, and a curtain of hair that fell to her feet like silk. The son of an esteemed family Rabka knew from her days in court was traveling to China soon as an ambassador for the caliph, and he needed a bride.

“Do not send me so far away to such a strange land! I will die there! I know it!” Alya screeched and threw herself at her mother’s feet.

“Better to die there than in the slums of Baghdad with the beggars and the cripples,” Rabka said with fierce conviction.

Now Maisara was the only daughter who remained. Out of all the sisters, she suffered the most, for poverty led Rabka slowly into madness. Rabka’s worst nightmare had come true. She was destitute.

At night Rabka would recite her poetry in weeping bursts, with only the deaf ears of the city to hear her cries.

Secretly, she began to prepare for her death. Even her funeral would cost money, and she had only one thing of worth left to sell: a deck of beautiful hand-painted picture cards that had been in her family for generations.

“But your mother made you promise to take care of them,” Maisara tried to reason with her. “They belong to us.” Maisara had always hoped the cards would one day be passed to her. She was the only daughter who stayed behind.

“They belong to me!” Rabka hissed. She knew they would fetch a high price, especially with the tale she could spin about their origins. Playing cards had become quite popular in the empire, particularly after the Mamluks brought their card games down from the high steppes of Mongolia. Many scholars had begun to collect cards from Mongolia, India, and the farthest reaches of China. And the collectors paid handsomely.

*

Rabka found the perfect merchant. Men like Jamal Azar had helped build the Muslim empire into what it was. He had traveled to Cordoba, Cairo, and explored the sea route to China. He knew every trade route—but he had never seen cards like Rabka’s.

“These cards came from Egypt in the time of Caesar.” Rabka held them out to him. “They survived the Great Fire in Alexandria and have been passed down through my family for centuries. Look at them!” She fanned the cards out on the table. “The artist was the same man who painted the pharaoh’s personal holy books.”

Jamal bent over to study the cards with his optical glass while Maisara looked on wide-eyed at her mother’s story.

“The paint is real gold,” Rabka added, “and worth twice as much.”

Jamal didn’t know if what Rabka said was true, but after careful examination he decided these cards would be a prize in his personal collection, the one he showed others to make his wares seem more expensive. He paid Rabka several gold coins but knew it was a good investment.

When Rabka and Maisara returned home, Rabka lay down on her pallet and Maisara covered her mother with a blanket.

“Was the story true?” Maisara asked.

“How would I know?” Rabka dismissed. “I wasn’t there.”

Rabka stared up at the ceiling for a long while. Then she let out a strange cackle and said, “This is my punishment for taking another woman’s husband.”

That night while Maisara slept Rabka took out a different bundle, one she had kept all these years. She unwrapped the Chinese silk and touched Aadila’s janbiya, the dagger her servant had used to kill Khalid’s betrothed. Rabka fingered the blade with only one regret: no one would witness her final act. Her death would have made a glorious poem.

When Maisara awoke the next morning, she found her mother dead with a Delphic smile on her face. She cradled her in her arms and cried tears so acrid they burned her skin. Now she had no one.

She paid for the burial with the gold coins her mother had fetched for the cards, and keeping the promise she had made to herself, set off for the desert like her father had done so many years before. She would walk the way of the Sufi and brush the sand from her heart.

*

With Rabka, my progeny severed our connection to the Oracle’s symbols. Rabka’s daughters went in three different directions, like a disbanded constellation that no astrolabe could measure. I often searched my mind’s eye for those lovely stars, but I never found them.

The cards, however, I could still see.

They left my descendents’ hands and were caught in the current of time like a piece of driftwood. I had to have faith that they would one day find their way to shore.





Wheel of Fortune

When Semele got on the train to work Monday morning, she felt like she’d entered a time machine back to the present. She had been translating all weekend. The past two days had literally flown by. She had turned off her cell phone and ignored the Internet—she’d ignored Bren too. She still owed him a call but couldn’t quite face him yet.