The Book of Longings(97)

“Have you ever sought a cure there?” I asked.

“No. I’ve been inside the walls only once and then merely out of curiosity. The Jewish citizenry doesn’t go there. It’s a transgression of the first commandment.”

Last night I’d learned to love her weakness; today it was her daring that excited me. “Did you go inside Isis’s temple?”

“Of course. I remember there was an altar there where people left little statuettes of Isis as offerings.”

“And the healing sanctuary? Did you go there, too?”

She shook her head. “To enter, one must present an illness and be prepared to remain through the night. Those seeking cures are put into an opium sleep in which they dream their cure. It’s said that sometimes Isis herself comes in their dreams and presents cures.”

So strange was all of this, it left me speechless, but inside me, there was a kind of humming.



* * *



? ? ?

THE OUTER COURTYARD swarmed with people making music. Sistrums rattled and flutes piped out soft curling sounds that spiraled like ribbons through the air. We watched a line of women wind through the scarlet pillars of the colonnade, their dance like a bright flowing centipede.

Yaltha, who understood the Egyptian tongue, cocked her head and listened to their song. “They’re marking the birth of Isis’s son, Horus,” she said. “We seem to have come on a day of celebration.”

She tugged me past the courtyard and dancers, small unnamed temples, and wall reliefs painted with blue flowers, yellow moons, and white ibises, until we arrived at the main temple, a marble structure that looked more Greek than Egyptian. We stepped inside into a foggy cloud of incense. Kyphi billowed out of the censers—the smell of wine-soaked raisins, mint, honey, and cardamom. Around us, a sea of people strained their necks for a glimpse of something at the far end. “What have they come to see?” I whispered.

Shaking her head, Yaltha led me to a low niche in the rear wall and we climbed up to stand inside it. I swept my eyes over the top of the crowd, and it was not something the throng craned to see, but someone. She stood erect in a robe of yellow and red with a black sash from her left shoulder to her right hip. It was covered in silver stars and red-gold moons. On her head, a crown of golden cow horns.

I’d never seen anyone so mesmerizing. “Who is she?”

“She would be a priestess of Isis, perhaps the highest of them. She wears Isis’s crown.”

The doll-like statuettes Yaltha had mentioned were heaped on the floor around the altar like mounds of washed-up shells.

The priestess’s voice came suddenly like a cymbal clap. I leaned toward Yaltha. “What is she saying?”

Yaltha translated. “O lady Isis, Goddess of all things, you bring the sun from rising to setting and light the moon and the stars. You bring the Nile over the land. You are the lady of light and flames, the mistress of water . . .”

I began to sway with her monotonic chant. When it ended, I said, “Aunt, I’m glad you allowed your fears about finding Chaya to thwart you for so long. If we’d come any sooner, we would’ve missed this great spectacle.”

She looked at me. “Just take care not to fall off the niche and break your skull.”

An attendant in a white tunic made her way to the altar, holding a bowl of water, taking feather steps as she labored to keep the liquid from spilling over the sides. The priestess took the bowl and poured the libation over a colorfully painted statue of Isis that stood on the altar. The waterfall splashed over the Goddess, spilling onto the floor. “Lady Isis, bring forth your divine son. Bring forth the rising of the Nile . . .”

When the ceremony ended, the priestess left the chamber through a narrow door at the back of the temple, and the multitude moved toward the entrance. Yaltha, however, made no effort to climb down from the wall niche. She stared straight ahead with rapt concentration. I called her name. She didn’t answer.

Gazing in the direction she stared, I saw nothing unusual. Only the altar, the statue, the bowl, the attendant drying the wet floor with a cloth.

Yaltha stepped down and strode against the crowd, as I scurried behind. “Aunt? Where are you going?”

She stopped a few paces from the altar. I had no understanding of what was happening. Then I looked at the attendant, who was lifting herself from the dried floor, her dark hair like brambles.

In a voice so muffled I almost didn’t hear it, Yaltha said, “Diodora?”

And her daughter turned and looked at her.



* * *



? ? ?

DIODORA LAID HER CLOTH on the altar. “Do you have some need of me, lady?” she asked in Greek. She bore a startling resemblance to me, not only in the kinks and whorls of her hair, but in the black eyes too large for her face, the small pursed mouth, the tall thin body like a gathering of willow boughs. We looked more like sisters than cousins.

Yaltha stood transfixed. Her eyes moved over her daughter as if she were not flesh and bone, but air and apparition, a visage she’d half dreamed. I saw her lip quiver ever so slightly, the commotion of a bee’s wing. Then she threw back her shoulders, as I’d seen her do a hundred times. Seconds passed, ceaseless seconds.

Give her an answer, Aunt.

“I wish to speak with you,” Yaltha said. “May we find a place to sit?”