City of Ruins (17 page)

“Don’t lie to me. I’m sick and tired of
grownups lying to me.”

Now he puts his hands on my shoulders, and
stares at me, straight in the eye. His own eyes don’t quite seem as
crazy anymore — just sort of unknowable, like really deep pools. “I
ain’t never, ever gonna lie to you, son. That’s one piece of
reality you can hang on to forever. And listen, I got a couple more
secrets for you to keep. Here’s the first one.” He hands me
something, wrapped in paper torn from a book.

People have already been watching us since
we’ve been “rebuilding” part of the temple, trying to understand
the English we’ve been speaking the whole time. Now they see the
small item he’s about to pass me.

Even Jeremiah, who’s been sitting, still
surrounded by people, waiting to see how this is all going to turn
out. There’s enough firelight to let me see his eyes widen.

“Maybe later.” A.J. quickly stuffs it back in
his pocket, but not before I can see what it is: a small piece of
mirror with a little ceramic frame around it, one of those gifts
they were giving away at the Fairmont Hotel, where my mom lived
when she was in San Francisco. From that old time radio show,
One Man’s Family
: “You are reflected in your friends, family
and times!
One Man’s Family
on NBC Radio.”

“Glass hasn’t been invented yet, let alone
mirrors. It would startle ’em,” he whispers. “But I was gonna leave
it here, as the first offerin’ on the altar.”

“I think you already have left it.”

“What do you mean, son?”

“Someone in the future finds the mirror here,
when they’re digging around. They even find traces of you.”

“Me?”

“In new versions of the Bible that start
cropping up. You’re called ‘the Rebuilder’.”

“Really? The name sticks even in the holy
writ? That just seems wrong, boy, if they’re talkin’ about me. I
just said a few words, is all, about not givin’ up the ship. Talked
about the need to rebuild. Pretty humble helpin’ hand, in the
scheme of things.”

“Are you both magic?” Naftali asks us. He’s
been watching us the whole time and noticed the firelight the
mirror bounced on my face. “Where did you
really
come
from?”

But before A.J. or I can answer the question,
there’s a huge explosion — the kind that comes from
time-traveling.

People scream and scatter.

I hear one voice I recognize: “A good time to
meet?”

See several faces I don’t.

And at least one — straight out of the
picture A.J. showed me — that I’d hoped never to see again.

Chapter
Fourteen

Thea: Wakenings

583 B.C.E.

This time, I know I’m not dreaming. I see the
face of a woman, who introduces herself as Huldah, leaning over me.
I’m in a cave, lit by torches. From the sounds I hear, and what I
can see when I lift my head, this is an infirmary.

Have I been sick?

I know I’ve had vivid dreams — all the way
back to when I was with Sally Hemings, the Ethiopian princess, in
the time of Jefferson President. So many strange things have
happened since then — I spoke with a horse; we discovered the bones
of a slave girl named Brassy, who was important in ways no on knew
about; Eli and I discovered we’d each had birth anniversaries while
time-voyaging, and we even kissed each—

Kissed?

All of this occurred after it first seemed
the lingo-spot was speaking in a voice of its own. I know we came
back to Eli’s time, then were taken captive by his government,
though that feels dreamy, too, especially memories of a birthday
party that Eli and his father and Mr. Howe held in my room.

“You aren’t dreaming.”

It’s the woman who just introduced herself as
Huldah. She’s the healer here, I believe. She reacts to the look on
my face. I don’t even need the lingo-spot to understand her. She
speaks in one of the local tongues, the language of the
Hebrews.

“When you were feverish, you spoke out loud
about dreams, about your friend Eli.”

My face must be showing even more
surprise.

“Most people with the fever you had imagine
visions, phantoms, people who aren’t there. Eli was here. But he
has left with Naftali. It is often easier for people to let us tend
their loved ones when they don’t have to watch their agony. In any
event, you aren’t dreaming.”

Loved ones?
“I…had it then? The slow
pox?”

“Seraphic plague. Many people don’t come back
from it. However, we discovered the waters down here can be
beneficial. At first you didn’t seem to respond to our cure. Then
finally, your fever broke.”

How strange that I never came down with the
pox during any of the outbreaks in Alexandria — that I had to move
centuries away from home to become its victim. Perhaps it is a
different form of the illness that I became vulnerable to. Whatever
form, words seem to come with some difficulty when I try to
speak.

“You can…cure the pox? Mother was only able
to reduce the s-s— the symptoms — she never could treat
it…compl—”

My tongue suddenly seems stuck in my mouth,
and I am aware of how much larger than normal it feels. I motion to
my mouth.

Huldah nods, and picks up a cup from the
ground. “Yes, pox sufferers need to keep wet inside. The body must
stay supple.”

“A cure?” I ask again after I’ve sipped.

“The waters here in the pond — from the
wadi
” —
wadi
, the old familiar word for
river
— “it brings some of the sufferers back to themselves after a few
days.”

“How did you learn this?”

“I discovered it when I first came down here
myself. I was also suffering from the fever. This was shortly after
the Babylonians burned our city. Wanderers and strangers came to
pick through the ruins. And shortly after, the one called the
Rebuilder came. Not to loot the rubble, but to tell us Jeremiah was
still right. A new city could rise in this place, if we wanted it.
But it has been hard for so many broken hearts to place much faith
in such an idea.

“At first, it was hard to know if I was ill;
when you are a ‘prophet,’ you already suffer a number of unwelcome
voices in your head, so sometimes it is hard to tell if you are
ailing in the usual way.”

I knew of prophets in Alexandria. “Voices
from the gods?” I ask.

“Not only God. To be a prophet is to hear
everyone’s voice. Everyone’s suffering. That’s what makes the task
so difficult.” Huldah turns away. “And the fever made it
unbearable, especially with all the suffering Jerusalem has seen.
When I took ill, I came down here to remove myself from the world
above…and let the seraphim take me. It seems the heavens had
something else in mind for me, however, in this world below the
city.”

“What happens when you go back above?” I look
around the large cavern and try to remember my own fever dreams of
arriving in Jerusalem with Eli, to remember what the world looked
like above us.

“That’s the one thing the waters couldn’t
cure,” Huldah tells me. “I still haven’t been able to go back above
to our city of David. I still cannot bear to see it, or see the
conditions of those who can barely be called survivors.”

“But don’t they need you up there, as
well?”

“My work now is to stay down here and do what
I can.”

I sip water for a few moments before speaking
again.

“I can see that being a prophet isn’t such an
easy task. Especially now in…Yerushalayim.” I sound out the name
slowly, as more of my fever dreams come back to me.

“Yes. Or what’s left of it. There’s no place
left to send you, now that you’ve healed.”

“You remind me of my mother,” I tell her,
using the Hebrew tongue as best I can.

“Your mother? I suspect I am old enough to be
your grandmother. At least.”

I try to rise up from my sleeping mound, but
my body is stiff — my back, my legs.

“That’s usually what happens when the fever
leaves — the limbs are fatigued. You’ll have a hard time moving,
for a while. But still, you are lucky. Better to rest.”

One of the men sleeping near me begins
screaming, “No, I did not!
No I did not go to Gehenna!
”
Yelling to no one in particular, he then just as suddenly lapses
into a wide-eyed, shivering silence.

Gehenna.

“I was…Gehenna-marked?” I ask. I’m not sure
what it means, but I recall that someone accused me of that
recently.

“I don’t let them use that phrase here.
Gehenna is one of the valleys where the dead are said to dwell. To
be ‘Gehenna-marked’ is to have no hope of recovery. But you, and
others, have proven them wrong.” That way she talks, she seems
deeply sad, the way Mother did, in those last weeks before
Alexandria burned, when the civil war had broken out, and people
were attacking one another on the streets.

The shivering man starts yelling again.

“Excuse me.” Huldah, with her Mother-like
smile that isn’t quite a smile, turns to walk over to him.

“Wait,” I say, but she doesn’t hear; she’s
given her attention to the man.

One of the women who is helping her — it is
hard to tell the difference between those who are well and those
who are ailing in a place like this, as both are underfed, dressed
in rags, with scars and wounds— goes over to the man after scooping
out some hot broth from a bubbling kettle nearby.

I swing my legs off the straw pad and though
they hurt, I set them down on the floor.

I can’t quite sense the ground under my feet
— my legs feel like sword tips are jabbing them, over and over,
while my feet feel as though they’ve spent too much time in cold
water and have a kind of numbness about them.

I try to stand but instead fall down.

Huldah turns from the shivering man to help
me. “Really, you should rest, young friend,” she says, as she lifts
me back up.

She doesn’t even know my name. “Thea. My name
is Thea.”

“Thee-ah?” It is good, a comfort, to hear her
pronounce it. “Thea, if I may say, while plague-sufferers are known
to hear different voices and have visions while in the grip of
fever, I have never known any of them to use as many different
voices as you did, while you were in its throes. So many voices,
Thea. Has anybody ever suggested that you, too, might be a —”

She doesn’t get to finish. From the opening
of the tunnel, on top of the rough stairs carved out of these
rocks, comes the sudden, though distant
boom
of an
explosion.

That explosion is followed by shouting, and
terrified screams, as explosions usually are.

Whatever color is left in Huldah’s face
drains away. “No. Not more Babylonians,” she whispers. “There is
nothing in Jerusalem left to destroy.”

Eli. Where is Eli?

“Did you say my friend was up there?” I
ask.

“Yes —”

I try to jump off the sleeping mound but
still meet difficulty as my legs buckle underneath me. I pull
myself up and start to move toward the stairs, wobbly as I am.

With the sound of the explosion, more people
in the room have been groaning, yelling about their fever
dreams.

“I can’t lose…my friend,” I tell her. “We
are…all we have left.”

“But you can’t…”

But I do, even though I fall to one knee —
twice, each time a different knee, and each time it hurts — while
trying to walk with prickly, numb legs.

“Go with her.” Huldah motions to the woman
who’s been helping her with the screaming man, and she comes over
and puts my arm around her shoulder, and we move forward—haltingly,
but forward. She’s emaciated, and looks haunted, too. Seeing her
face in the torchlight makes me wonder which one of us should be
supporting the other up the stairs.

On our slow, steady way up — I only slip
once, and bang my shin instead of a knee — I learn her name is
Yehudit and that she’s not that much older than I am but already
has a husband and a child, both of whom were taken by the
Babylonians.

“They want slaves and workers,” she says,
“everybody working to make their empire bigger.”

She tells me the invasions came about when
Israel’s king, Zedekiah, refused to keep paying ransom money to the
Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. “As we were once warned,” Yehudit
says, “kings get to decide, and we suffer.”

“Maybe you’ll get to see your family again,”
I tell her, to be helpful. At least they weren’t murdered, like my
mother was. And they are all still living in the same time, which
makes a reunion somewhat possible.

“That’s what keeps me alive,” she replies.
“That’s my hope.”

But then it also strikes me how no one is
really left alone by history, it swallows us up when all we want to
do is share a meal with someone we love or sit about on a warm
afternoon with a friend.

We’re at the top of the stairway. It’s dark
outside, but we can see the shadows moving about.

“I’m not going out there,” Yehudit tells me.
“If it’s more Babylonians, I don’t want to know. I can’t.”

“You’ll be all right,” I tell her.

What makes me suddenly reassure her? It’s
almost like a lingo-spot voice were telling me, a voice from
outside — and yet, from inside at the same time. As if my own
thoughts and the voices heard by the lingo-spot are merging
together, becoming one.

A great quantity of voices and thoughts, all
channeled through me.

I’m not sure I like the idea. But perhaps I’m
wrong. I should ask Huldah about this. About how you protect
yourself when it seems your eyes and ears are open to the whole
wide world. “The people outside aren’t Babylonians,” I reassure
Yehudit.

And I know
exactly
where that
knowledge comes from: one of the voices is carrying in the night
air.

“A good time to meet?”