Angels at the Gate (43 page)

“Hurry,” Mika says. “This may be our only chance.”

He is right. We shake off the hands that reach for us, and they are soon clasping others. In the sea of hunger and need, we are not hindered, except to keep our own heads above the water of desire that laps at us on every side.

Behind us we hear the chant from the temple, “Aliyan Baal lives; the prince, lord of the earth, is here!”

That evening the two angels came to the entrance of the city of Sodom. Lot was sitting there, and when he saw them, he stood up to meet them. Then he welcomed them and bowed with his face to the ground. “My lords,” he said, “come to my home to wash your feet, and be my guests for the night. You may then get up early in the morning and be on your way again.”

“Oh no,” they replied. “We'll just spend the night out here in the city square.”

But Lot insisted, so at last they went home with him. Lot prepared a feast for them, complete with fresh bread made without yeast, and they ate.

—Genesis 19:1-3

W
E REACH HOME AT DUSK
. Lot is furious. “Where were you?” he shouts. “I forbade you to attend the Spring Rites!” Then he seems to notice Mika and Raph standing behind us in the little gate. He clasps his hands, anger melting into confusion.

“I do not understand. Did you smite the people of Sodom?” he asks Mika.

At that moment, Pheiné and Thamma come from their room. Pheiné's face is flushed, but Thamma is pale. She has been ill for several days.

“Adira is not an obedient wife,” Pheiné observes without a glance at me. “In addition to bringing you shame with her smashed face and limp.”

Lila gasps.

I, too, am surprised. Not that Pheiné thought such things, but that
she is saying them. Her temper, so like her father's, has galloped free of rein since the last moon. I say nothing. What is there to say? She is right.

Lot shifts his weight. “Daughter, guard your tongue.”

“Why?” Pheiné crosses her arms. “It is the truth. She brings you nothing. No status, no wealth to speak of.”

Mika, my steady, calm-in-the-face-of-anything, steps forward, his voice as taut as stretched rope. “She is the daughter of Zakiti, as good a man as I have ever met, whose daughter does him honor.”

His defense of me and of my father brings tears to my eyes, but he is not finished.

“You cannot see her worth, because your own fears blind you.”

This stops Pheiné. “I am not afraid of anything.”

He says nothing, but his green eyes bore into her. I would not wish to be the one receiving their glare.

Lot steps protectively in front of his daughter, but his words to her are a warning. Perhaps he fears Mika will cast fire at her. “Pheiné, show respect to El's messenger.”

With a sniff, she steps back. “Yes, Father.”

I want to slap her again.

To his credit, Lot never spoke to me about striking her because of her complaint about Nami. Or perhaps Pheiné never told him. Not to protect me, I am certain, but to save her pride, or perhaps she feared Lot would recognize my position and not interfere. Lila would never tell him.

Danel pulls his gaze from the ground. He has been in his own world of sorrow. I am not certain he even heard our exchange. “My grandmother died yesterday.”

This silences everyone.

Danel looks at Lot. “When the ground shook, she was struck by one of the courtyard roof poles.” He sweeps his arm to include Mika, Raph, Lila, and me. “They came to help, but she died. We carried her to the tomb chamber, so the sky birds could take her, and her bones could lie with our ancestors.” His gaze is distant. “Where I will one day lie.…”

Lila puts an arm on his.

Mika's mouth twists. I know he is distressed at not saving Jemia.

“Mika,” I say into the silence, “I wish you to mark Lila as a free woman.”

Everyone turns to me with looks of surprise. I lift my chin. “It is best for a healer to do it.”

We add dried dung to the cook fire. I take my seal from my neck and give it to Mika. He removes the worn rawhide strip from the center bore hole and slips the cylinder onto a thin rod, holding it into the fire.

“What is she doing?” Pheiné demands of Lot. Pheiné never calls me by my name.

Lot frowns. “She is freeing her slave. It is her right, although it seems an awkward time for it.”

“Who is to fix our food and clean the house and—” she looks with distaste at Philot—“see to that creature?”

Despite her whining, Lot does not interfere. He cannot. I have the tablet he marked with his own seal.

Mika takes a little bowl from his bag. My gaze follows the familiar pattern of whorls in the wood, remembering our fight for survival in the desert. When I first desperately dug it from his pack, how magnificent that small bowl appeared! I used it to boil onions for a poultice, to carry water, and to cook whatever I found or Nami brought us. It saved our lives, that little bowl.

Lila sets a bit of the water to boil for him in a small copper pot. Lot is mollified with such a use of water by the fact it was Jemia's portion. The smell of burning pitch drifts into the house. My worries turn to the oily water gushing from the ground. Surely it will run downhill, southward and not threaten the city. But what if it finds other shafts to rise in? I do not miss the irony that we are dying for lack of water, and what might come to us, like the sea beyond my window, is undrinkable. Perhaps Mot's cruel joke on us.

N
IGHT HAS FALLEN
, and the torches that light the streets are burning. We eat flatbread and stew. Pheiné stands at the door, her ear pressed against it. “The revelry has spread,” she says.

Raph's brows rise in question.

Still attentive to him, perhaps hoping she can woo him from his lover, she answers his unspoken question. “On this night, the holy rite yields to revelry. Young men roam, drinking and copulating with any woman who has not the sense to be inside.”

“I remember this from our previous visit,” Raph says.

Mika frowns. This is evidence of his suspicion that the holy has been twisted in this city.

Raph's words hurl me into the past, to the night when Mika, Raph, and I watched the torches from the cliff overhang. We were too far away to see the details, but the sounds reached us. On that night, my father still lived, my heart ached for Raph's touch, and Mika held blue fire.

“It will be worse tonight.” Pheiné's troubled tone pulls me back to the present. Despite her arrogance, she has not been blind. “There are packs of men who will hunt the street. The coupling at the temple is a holy thing, but tonight—”

“Will they come to this house?” Raph asks.

“They never have,” Thamma says.

Pheiné shakes her head. “But Mot's Tongue has never erupted the day before the Spring Rites and—” She glances at her father, knowing as well as we his ranting has increased the ire of the Sodomites to a high pitch. “—it has still not rained,” she says instead.

“I have said nothing El has not blessed,” Lot declares.

To my surprise, Thamma, who sits upon the raised hump of earth in the courtyard as though it is a throne, says, “Has it truly been El's desire that you be so important, Father, or is it your own desire?”

Lot's fingers curl into fists. “What have I raised? Daughters or backbiters?”

She flushes, but does not apologize. It is that kind of night.

“The water is boiling,” Lila says to distract us. At Mika's instruction, she pours it over the crushed herbs in his bowl. When he is satisfied with the color, he calls Lila to him and cleans her arm where an old knot of scarring mars her skin. He allows nothing to touch it until it is dry. “You must hold very still, or the mark will not be readable.”

Lila nods, her chin high. “I will not move.”

She does not, her gaze steady, looking out the window to the sea. The moon has not yet risen, and it is dark. Normally, we can hear the waves, but tonight the sound is lost among the cries from the streets. I wonder what Lila is thinking—of her mother? Her past? Or her future?

Mika places the hot stone cylinder on her arm and rolls it, as one would on clay, leaving the fiery red imprint of the goddess, Lama, on her skin. Wasting no time, he sets down the seal and covers the burn with a thick salve.

“Does it hurt much?” Danel asks, drawn from his sorrow by concern for her pain.

She looks at him, her eyes wet with unshed tears. “I welcome the pain of freedom.”

Danel turns to me. “Thank you, Adira. But why? I offered to buy her. I would have freed her myself.

“I know.”

“Then why?”

“Then she would have been in your debt. Now, she is not, and it is her choice whether to wed you.”

As Danel digests this, another irony pricks my mind. I, who was a free woman, had to marry the man my family chose for me, but Lila, a slave, is now free to marry whomever she chooses. It is a strange world.

The world chooses this moment to become even stranger.

But before they retired for the night, all the men of Sodom, young and old, came from all over the city and surrounded the house. They shouted to Lot, “Where are the men who came to spend the night with you? Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them!”

—Book of Genesis 19:4,5

P
HILOT'S EARS TWITCH, AND HE
peels back his lip, exposing his upper teeth, a donkey's signal that he smells something strange. It is the only warning we receive before a deep rumble and spate of shaking, lasting no longer than an exhaled breath. This one has thrown Thamma from the mound of raised earth, but not altered the ground. I am thankful Mika was not in the act of applying the freed-mark to Lila's arm.

“El is angry,” Lot declares. “But he will protect us. Has he not sent his angels to us?”

I almost laugh at Thamma's rolled eyes, which her father, thankfully, cannot see. Something has changed her since I slapped Pheiné. Perhaps she is no longer in her sister's thrall.

“I hear voices,” Raph says, stepping toward the door. Pheiné steps aside, and he opens it. I clump across the floor with my staff and peer under his arm at the living wave of torches that approach.

Raph closes the door. “They are coming this way. Is there a way to barricade the door?”

“Where is your guard, Father?” Thamma asks, a note of panic in her voice.

Lot shrugs. “He left when I could not pay him with water.” He lifts his arm toward the door. “I do not fear them. El is my god. He is friend to Abram, my uncle. He will not let me die.”

“Everyone dies,” Raph snaps. “If you do not wish it to be your day, help me with the door.”

He shrugs. “I have nothing to barricade the door, but it will not be needed. In Sodom, it is the worst of manners to disregard the door of another's house.”

“These people are angry and frightened, Lot,” I say. “And probably drunk, as well. They do not care a whit for manners.”

Within moments, they are here. We can see the glare of their torches through the door seams and even at the back window where I have closed the lattice. Perceiving that as the most vulnerable point, Raph draws his sword and takes a stand there. Danel pulls his own knife from his sash. I am glad to see it. City dwellers do not always go about armed, but Danel spent most of his life, as I, on the caravan trail.

Pheiné and Thamma cling to one another, and Lila goes to comfort them. I am amazed at her, considering all she has endured from them. Perhaps being a freed woman is not yet a reality for her. Or perhaps she does care for them, in spite of their ways.

I do not.

The mob shouts. Stones strike against the door with sharp
thwacks
. Philot brays and pulls back against his rope. I draw my knife. I may be crippled, but the man who comes at me, the first one at least, will pay a price.

Suddenly, the noise quiets, sending a chill racing up my spine. A voice shouts, “Lot, don't hide behind Abram's robe!”

Lot moves to the door and shouts. “What do you want?”

Another voice calls out, “We want those men you say are here in the name of your god!”

“Yes, give them to us!” another yells.

Fear, fury, and lust fuel the mob's laughter. The sound washes cold through me despite the sweltering head, an echo of the jeers of the Babylonian guards as Chiram and I lay at their mercy.

The loudest voice raises again. “If these so-called ‘angels' do not join our rites and have our women, give them to us, and
we
will know them!”

Lot's face burns with anger. It is a great insult for one man to threaten to rape another. Before Mika can stop him, Lot is out the door, closing it behind him. Pheiné rushes forward, but Mika holds her back. I step close to them.

“Pheiné,” I say sharply into her ear, as she struggles, “if Mika has to fight to protect us, he does not need his hands full with you.”

She stiffens but is still, and Mika releases her.

“People of Sodom,” Lot's voice rises over the din. “Do not do this wickedness!”

“You dishonor our god, Lot! It is Spring Rites. Baal must ascend from Mot's grasp. Are you blind that you do not see the spouting of his Tongue? His anger at Baal's struggle?”

“These men are my guests,” Lot cries. “Take my daughters. They have never known a man. Do what you wish to them, but don't touch my guests who are under my roof.”

I am stunned, but not more so than Pheiné and Thamma. These men are not here observing the rites of their gods. They hold Lot responsible for disaster. Vengeance and violence drive them.

Thamma begins to cry. Pheiné backs from the door as though to put distance between herself and her father. Mika grasps her arm to get her attention. Her look is one a sacrificial lamb might give at the cut of a knife into its throat.