The Fortune Teller Page 13

  On the last day of the celebration, Aadila snuck into the bedroom of Khalid’s future wife and cut off the girl’s nose. She put poison on the end of the janbiya to make certain the blade would be deadly. The bride-to-be died a week later and no one ever knew Rabka had been the one to strike. Now free of obligation, Khalid married Rabka, and the future unfolded as she foresaw it.

  Rabka should have been happy that she had obtained her desires, but she had not divined that she would have to move out of the palace. When Khalid told her, she broke every mirror and bottle of perfume in her bedroom. The smell of frankincense lingered with her grief for weeks. She raged to Rusa, the goddess of fate, and recited incantations of ancient sorcery in an attempt to change her future’s course, but the talismans and spells were useless.

  Khalid tried to assuage her. “The caliph has gifted this house to us. It is the finest in the city.”

  “I despise the city!” She sobbed, her eyes swollen from days of crying. “Am I to live with the stink?”

  Outside the palace the city was a melting pot. Over a million people—Arabs, Persians, Jews, Christians, Indians, rich and poor alike—lived together in the capital.

  “But the mansion has the finest architecture, equal to the palace!”

  The design included wind ventilation and there was also running water on the walls to keep the house cool. Its front doors were made of ebony and precious metal. But when Rabka walked through them she hated every room. Only simple flowers—lilac, jasmine, and violets—lined the inner courtyards, and the trees weren’t plated in gold. Even the roof, which transformed into a grand bedroom under the stars on the hottest of nights, did not appease her. Rabka was a queen without a palace, a poet without a court.

  When she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, she wrote a poem, one she never shared, about a wife who was secretly the mythical dragon, Azhi Dahāka, ready to breathe fire until her bones turned to ash. By the poem’s end, the wife stood beside the ruins of her former self, unable to return to the girl she was once was. It was the last poem Rabka ever wrote.

  As they settled into married life away from the palace, Khalid tried to ignore Rabka’s misery. They had three daughters, not the son Khalid desired. But still Khalid never took another wife, for he was unable to fathom the thought of more Rabkas. Instead he devoted himself to his work.

  * * *

  Caliph al-Ma’mun had dreamed that Aristotle visited his bedside. When he awoke he realized what it meant: that it was his duty to build the largest treasury of books yet so he could safeguard the knowledge of the world. This new center of learning, Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, would be both a library and an academy. He appointed Khalid to be one of the directors.

  On the caliph’s orders, Khalid sent scholars to the four corners of the earth to bring back all the ancient texts they could find—the first expedition ever of its kind. For years Khalid oversaw the translations of lost and forgotten manuscripts from Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit into Arabic in an attempt to unify what distance had divided. As Rabka foresaw so many years before, Khalid became the most honored scholar in all of Baghdad. But his star ascended without her.

  Even so, his spirit grew restless. Of Khalid’s three daughters, only the youngest, Maisara, noticed. One night after the servants had cleared the table, Khalid sat thinking, his mind so far away his body may as well have not been in the room. For twenty years he had been faithful to Caliph al-Ma’mun, helping him build his legacy with the House of Wisdom, but he no longer found solace in his work.

  He saw his daughter watching him. “I am covered in dust, Maisara,” he said in a tired voice. He motioned toward his chest and his head. “This heart and mind are covered. Perhaps the time has come for me to go walk in the desert and brush off the sand.”

  “What do you mean, Father?” Maisara asked, trying to understand.

  Her father smiled and beckoned her to his study.

  She followed with growing excitement for she had never been invited there before. She waited while he unlocked the cabinet where he kept his most treasured possessions. He pulled out a long scroll and unrolled the parchment.

  “What is it?” Maisara whispered in awe. She had never seen anything like it.

  “A map of the entire world,” Khalid said with satisfaction. Caliph al-Ma’mun had tasked geographers with traveling the globe and taking measurements to create the most accurate map of all time. Khalid possessed one of the few copies. They were priceless.

  “Here is the circle of the city, the breadth of the empire, and all that lies beyond our borders.” He showed her how the oceans created one body of water. He showed her the seas, the great rivers, and the deserts.

  She listened, almost afraid to breathe lest her father stop talking. He had never spoken to her of such things; in fact, he rarely spoke to her at all. But that night he showed her the vastness of the world.

  “This is the journey I will make.” He traced the path to the desert with his finger.

  Maisara made a silent promise that one day she would do the same.

  * * *

  Caliph al-Ma’mun died unexpectedly a month later. Khalid risked the dragon’s fire and told Rabka he was leaving for the Arabian Desert to follow the way of the Sufi. He needed to see beyond the constraints of earthly life.

  Rabka erupted with the rage of a thousand storm demons. She screamed and called him the vilest names ever to cross a woman’s lips. But still Khalid left with only the robes he was wearing and a case the size of a scroll on his back. Maisara knew it surely held the map.

  After Khalid had gone, Rabka grew silent, now a whirlwind without force. Her daughters were terrified. In an instant, their world had broken. Rabka sat down in Khalid’s chair at the head of the table and laughed so hard tears watered her eyes. She had seen everything but the ending.

  They had no income and no male to protect them and, with the caliph’s passing, no relationship with the new ruler. Soon they would be destitute.

  At first they survived by selling Khalid’s prized belongings. Rabka sold off his library. He had thousands of books and rare works, including copies of the Vedas Scripts from ancient India, alchemy books written by Babylonian priests, and original texts from the Chaldean and Median Empires.

  Rabka wanted none of it. Her most important task was securing her daughters’ futures. With Asma, the eldest, Rabka worried there might be difficulty. The girl had ugly teeth, a wandering eye that could be disconcerting, and her father’s bulbous nose. After months trying to find her a husband, Rabka gave up in despair. Then a new opportunity presented itself.

  One of the only female trades was the textile industry. Rabka found Asma employment as a fabric dyer and spinner in nearby Baqdara, working alongside other women and children.

  “The wages will be poor,” she informed Asma, “but at least there are wages.”

  “Please, please let me stay,” Asma begged.

  Rabka turned deaf ears to her pleading and ordered her remaining daughters to sort through Asma’s belongings to see what could be sold at market. She didn’t think a fabric dyer needed much.

  Rabka sold her own beloved gowns and jewels to pay their exorbitant taxes and buy food. No longer could they afford pears from Nahavand, figs from Hulwan, or limes from Egypt. They couldn’t serve grilled lamb with Rabka’s favorite pomegranate sauce, or grilled anything for that matter. Meat was too expensive. Olive oil from Syria and honey from Mosul soon became distant memories.

  Baghdad had the most opulent cuisine in the world, and Rabka had been raised in the caliph’s court watching Harun taste thirty dishes a day with two servants standing beside him. One servant would hold thirty clean spoons so Harun could taste each dish, while the other servant waited to collect the dirty ones.

  What heights she had fallen from! She let their chefs go, along with all their servants. Now when food was set on the table, her daughters would snatch it like falcons.

  Maisara was the one who cooked and cleaned. She le
arned how to use each cooking vessel in the kitchen. She would spend hours washing pots and beating them with brick dust, then potash. Her hands became rough from all the labor, but she didn’t complain. She spent hours alone in the kitchen dreaming of how she would leave Baghdad one day. The room became her map as she plotted her escape.

  Rabka prohibited her second daughter, Alya, from performing any labor, for in Alya, Rabka saw her best chance. The girl was quite lovely, a gazelle, thin as a willow with high breasts, a long neck, and a curtain of hair that fell to her feet like silk. The son of an esteemed family Rabka knew from her days in court was traveling to China soon as an ambassador for the caliph, and he needed a bride.

  “Do not send me so far away to such a strange land! I will die there! I know it!” Alya screeched and threw herself at her mother’s feet.

  “Better to die there than in the slums of Baghdad with the beggars and the cripples,” Rabka said with fierce conviction.

  Now Maisara was the only daughter who remained. Out of all the sisters, she suffered the most, for poverty led Rabka slowly into madness. Rabka’s worst nightmare had come true. She was destitute.

  At night Rabka would recite her poetry in weeping bursts, with only the deaf ears of the city to hear her cries.

  Secretly, she began to prepare for her death. Even her funeral would cost money, and she had only one thing of worth left to sell: a deck of beautiful hand-painted picture cards that had been in her family for generations.

  “But your mother made you promise to take care of them,” Maisara tried to reason with her. “They belong to us.” Maisara had always hoped the cards would one day be passed to her. She was the only daughter who stayed behind.

  “They belong to me!” Rabka hissed. She knew they would fetch a high price, especially with the tale she could spin about their origins. Playing cards had become quite popular in the empire, particularly after the Mamluks brought their card games down from the high steppes of Mongolia. Many scholars had begun to collect cards from Mongolia, India, and the farthest reaches of China. And the collectors paid handsomely.

  * * *

  Rabka found the perfect merchant. Men like Jamal Azar had helped build the Muslim empire into what it was. He had traveled to Cordoba, Cairo, and explored the sea route to China. He knew every trade route—but he had never seen cards like Rabka’s.

  “These cards came from Egypt in the time of Caesar.” Rabka held them out to him. “They survived the Great Fire in Alexandria and have been passed down through my family for centuries. Look at them!” She fanned the cards out on the table. “The artist was the same man who painted the pharaoh’s personal holy books.”

  Jamal bent over to study the cards with his optical glass while Maisara looked on wide-eyed at her mother’s story.

  “The paint is real gold,” Rabka added, “and worth twice as much.”

  Jamal didn’t know if what Rabka said was true, but after careful examination he decided these cards would be a prize in his personal collection, the one he showed others to make his wares seem more expensive. He paid Rabka several gold coins but knew it was a good investment.

  When Rabka and Maisara returned home, Rabka lay down on her pallet and Maisara covered her mother with a blanket.

  “Was the story true?” Maisara asked.

  “How would I know?” Rabka dismissed. “I wasn’t there.”

  Rabka stared up at the ceiling for a long while. Then she let out a strange cackle and said, “This is my punishment for taking another woman’s husband.”

  That night while Maisara slept Rabka took out a different bundle, one she had kept all these years. She unwrapped the Chinese silk and touched Aadila’s janbiya, the dagger her servant had used to kill Khalid’s betrothed. Rabka fingered the blade with only one regret: no one would witness her final act. Her death would have made a glorious poem.

  When Maisara awoke the next morning, she found her mother dead with a Delphic smile on her face. She cradled her in her arms and cried tears so acrid they burned her skin. Now she had no one.

  She paid for the burial with the gold coins her mother had fetched for the cards, and keeping the promise she had made to herself, set off for the desert like her father had done so many years before. She would walk the way of the Sufi and brush the sand from her heart.

  * * *

  With Rabka, my progeny severed our connection to the Oracle’s symbols. Rabka’s daughters went in three different directions, like a disbanded constellation that no astrolabe could measure. I often searched my mind’s eye for those lovely stars, but I never found them.

  The cards, however, I could still see.

  They left my descendents’ hands and were caught in the current of time like a piece of driftwood. I had to have faith that they would one day find their way to shore.

  Wheel of Fortune

  When Semele got on the train to work Monday morning, she felt like she’d entered a time machine back to the present. She had been translating all weekend. The past two days had literally flown by. She had turned off her cell phone and ignored the Internet—she’d ignored Bren too. She still owed him a call but couldn’t quite face him yet.

  Right now she didn’t want to deal with the office either. She couldn’t care less about her meeting with Mikhail. They were supposed to discuss Beijing, but her focus on work was gone; at this point she barely had a grip on reality. She was immersed in Ionna’s story, still unable to fathom that Ionna had envisioned the birth of Baghdad and the House of Wisdom.

  Had Ionna also seen the library’s annihilation in 1258 when Genghis Khan’s grandson razed the city? And what had happened to the Oracle’s cards? Where did they go after Rabka sold them to Jamal Azar?

  Semele’s mind raced with possibilities. She was reading a bona fide prophecy, and the more she read, the more Ionna’s words were affecting her. Semele could no longer deny the sense of purpose that had begun to fill her. She was meant to find this manuscript. Two thousand years ago Ionna had foreseen that Semele would read her words, and Marcel had left them to her, knowing she was a part of the story.

  How much did Theo know? This was the question burning in her mind now—and her gut told her he knew more than she did.

  He is coming to see me on Friday.

  Where did that thought come from? Goose bumps traveled down her arms. Was he really? And, if this was true, then why? The whole idea was unsettling. Even worse, she couldn’t stop the feeling that, before Friday, something terrible was going to happen.

  * * *

  A policeman stood at the entrance of Kairos’ building. “Ma’am, I need to see some identification before you can go in.”

  “What’s going on?” Semele asked, digging out the work badge buried in the bottom of her purse. The officer scrutinized her picture and didn’t answer.

  “Sign here,” he said. He held out a logbook and finally allowed her to enter.

  Semele joined the huddle of people in the lobby, then spotted Cabe coming off the elevator. They made a beeline for each other.

  “Hey. What’s going on?” she asked him.

  “Didn’t you get my message?” He looked astounded. “I called you like five times.”

  “Sorry, no … I had my phone off,” she mumbled, starting to feel light-headed.

  “There was a break-in last night. On ten,” he stressed, lowering his voice. “That manuscript you told me about was taken.”

  Semele covered her mouth in horror. The manuscript was gone? She could feel tears threatening to form and furiously held them back.

  “I think you should tell the police you were being followed,” Cabe said.

  “What? Why?”

  “What if it’s the same guy?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No, this is crazy.” He motioned to the chaos in the lobby. “We were robbed. By professionals. Do you know how much security this place has?”

  Semele did know and her head was spinning. She looked around as if the thief were still
there. Of course the man following her was connected to the theft. He had to be. And now she had the only copy of what they had taken.

  “Listen,” she said, lowering her voice. “Don’t tell anyone I made a digital.”

  Cabe scowled.

  “Promise me,” she insisted. “It’s safer if no one knows.”

  “I don’t know.” He let out a deep breath. “This doesn’t feel right.”

  “You’re telling me,” she agreed. Mikhail got off the elevator and headed toward her. In all her time working for him, she had never seen him this stressed.

  He sounded rushed. “Semele, I uploaded the Beijing file to the server. We’re going to have to meet tomorrow.” His eyes scanned the lobby. “I’m dealing with the FBI and insurance agents today. They’ve closed off all the floors.”

  “You mean, I can’t go upstairs?” She needed to see Marcel’s collection, to see for herself that the manuscript was really gone.

  Mikhail shook his head. “Keep your phone on. There’s a chance the investigators will want to question you.”

  Semele nodded, though the possibility of being questioned made her stomach lurch. She had brought the manuscript to Kairos. And she’d made a secret copy. She glanced over at Cabe.

  “Fritz is handling things—for now.” Mikhail noticed their silent exchange. “But the investigators may want to speak with you too. Cabe, you’re with me.” He hurried to go shake hands with a suited man who had just entered the building, most likely the insurance agent.

  Semele shot Cabe a look. They’d talk later.

  * * *

  Semele hurried to the subway station, looking up and down the street with a growing sense of panic. If she had the only known copy, would whoever stole it come after that as well?

  Her cell phone rang and the number flashed across her screen.