Secret Magdalene by Ki Longfellow Read Free Book Online Page A

now steaming with damp. Tata is not used to such walking, and Ananias frets that we are being led into worse danger than the danger we flee. They both grumble at the thorns that catch at their clothes, the abuse to their feet. Addai shifts my weight and I ask him if I should walk. “Hush, child,” he says, “we are very near.”
    “Near where?”
    But he does not answer me. We are walking down a steep
nahal
in the dark, a ravine of bare rocks rising to either side, and only a thin strip of stars to light our way. The air changes. The smell of the air changes. It stinks of rotten teeth. “Addai, what is that nasty smell?”
    “Home! This is the land of Damascus.”
    Damascus? We could not be anywhere near Damascus. Damascus is a hard nine or ten days walk, at best, to the north. But I am too tired to bother with this puzzle. I lay my head back on his shoulder. We drop through a final
nahal,
and before us in the starlight, far as the eye can see, shimmers a still flat sea. It is the sea that stinks.
    “Behold,” says Addai, “we are where we meant to be.”
    I behold. Addai points to our left. Perched on sheer steep bluffs of powdery rock is a village. Or maybe it is a fortress. Whatever it is, it looks carved from the soft rock itself. If Addai had not pointed right at it, we might never have seen this place.
    It is another hour of hard climbing before we find ourselves near. Addai has led us around a stone wall, and I think there is no gate, until there is. The sun is touching the tops of the mountains on the far side of the flat and stinking sea when we pass through this gate. We are in a courtyard, as deep as it is wide. Beside us rises a stone tower the height of many men. Over to our right, there are steps leading to a huge stone pool. And right in the middle of the courtyard is a simple sundial on a dais. Father’s sundial is twice as big, but Father prefers that things of value be seen. Straight ahead there is another gate that leads out of the courtyard into what looks to be a narrow street.
    Leaving our donkeys tethered to a post beside a small cistern, Addai leads us to this gate and through it. Where are we? Is there anyone here at all?
    My question is answered a moment later.
    Out of the shadows cast by the rising of the sun from beyond the stinking sea steps the handsome man in the perfect white linen tunic.
    “How welcome you are, Ananias of Alexandria,” says the man who has called himself one of the Few. “I see you have brought our children home.”
    Salome and I dart startled looks at each other.
Remember what the Voice said,
she is saying.
Remember?
Ananias is come to take you home.
    I remember.

THE THIRD SCROLL
    The Wilderness
    I
t is more than
a month from the evening Father sent us away. We are in the wilderness, lost to the lives we once lived, lost to the city of our childhood, lost to all we knew, lost to our very gender. More alien than the place are the people. We are children of wealth and privilege. These are poor nobodies! We are children of taste and gorgeous artifice. Here, our floor is dirt, our walls are skin and hair, our
dukha
is a stick for digging a hole in the ground.
    Here, there is no one to fan away the heat that wilts us, no one to brush away the biting ants that torment us in our beds. No one comes to bathe us, to comb our hair, to clean away what we have messed, to bring us sweets. No one but Tata. But as we are now males and she is not, she lives with the women. This is nothing as it was at Heli and Dinah’s house; it is not a grand adventure.
    For the first time in our lives, we are bit by bugs, stepped on by camels, shoved aside by strangers, made to fetch and to carry, slapped by cooks, shooed away by potters, shouted at by men. And oh, how we rush to the poor tents we’ve been given, there to stomp around and to howl when we discover we can no longer eat whenever we like or whatever we like.
    In short, we are miserable.
    We make Tata miserable. We cling, or we