Reluctant Concubine by Dana Marton Read Free Book Online Page B

to send my spirit into Keela’s body to seek the illness and draw it out, to tell her spirit how to help me, what to do.
    My mother used to say youth had its own healing powers, and to them I entrusted Keela. She was young, her body strong. I hoped strong enough—for both our sakes.
    I held her hand, anchoring her body to life by the power of touch. I talked to her, for her spirit to hear and find the way back, should it wander. I told her the story of Lawana, the merchant and the beggar boy, the faithful wife, and by the time I got to the Guardians and the Forgotten City, her breathing had grown even.
    “You would have liked the Forgotten City.” I wiped her face with a wet cloth. “The houses and towers were beautiful beyond anything that exists now in the world. In the middle of the labyrinth of streets stood a round building of wonders, topped not by a flat roof but something that looked like a giant bowl turned upside down. They called it a dome.”
    She gave no indication that she heard me, but I went on with the tale.
    “The outside they covered in sheets of lustrous gold. The inside of the building was one large open space, with seats enough for multitudes. They painted the ceiling blue and attached golden symbols for all the stars as they stood in the moment of the creation of the world. So exact were their measurements that scholars came from distant kingdoms to study them.”
    I glanced at Keela, and although she did not look in need of clarification, I explained anyway. “Scholars were magical people who studied all things and could explain even the unexplainable.” I did not know anything more about their strange order than that.
    “In exchange for seeing the Map of Eternity, they brought wondrous gifts, metals many times the strength of iron, and lamps that used less oil and burned ten times brighter than the ordinary ones. They even taught the people of the Forgotten City how to make water come to their houses, so nobody had to pull water from a well or go to the creek.”
    This had always seemed the most impressive part of the tale to me, and as a child, I had often wished the secrets of the Forgotten City were still known to us.
    “These scholars gladly gave any knowledge they had for a glimpse at the Map of Eternity, for when they compared it to the position of the stars of their own times, they could tell many things that passed before in the world and even predict events that were to come.”
    I went on, for her sake as much as my own. I needed to think about something else than what would happen to me if I failed to restore her health.
    “Other strange people came to the Forgotten City too, philosophers, the wise men of the world. They came together in the Forum—their name for the building with the dome that held the Map of Eternity—and by sharing their knowledge, they increased it a hundredfold. The three Guardians of the city asked only one thing of all these masters of knowledge—that before they left, they wrote their wisdom onto scrolls to preserve in that place. The walls of the Forum were covered in holes from floor to ceiling, like honeycomb. And these recesses held all the knowledge of the world.”
    I wondered what Keela would have said to such a thing could she have talked. Many of the Shahala did not believe the myth of the Forgotten City and thought of it as another of our many tales that were but entertainment for small children. My mother, however, talked about the Forum often and with such detail as if she had been there, so it lived vividly in my memory.
    “I do not know what to tell you,” I said to the pale-faced girl and squeezed her hand. “Each person must choose what they believe.”
    The breeze brought the smell of baking bread from the kitchen and the sound of servant women singing. I could see the blue sky through a small window that stood open to let in fresh air. It seemed as if all life stretched out there, shut away from me, and I was already buried in the