But without looking back, he trudged up a dusty track that wound away into the higher country. The sable male padded after him and halted on the track, tail lashing, to watch until he vanished beyond stands of wide-canopied trees bearing colorless thorns and white flowers.
What an idiot I was, standing here while he walked away! I had absolutely no idea how to return to the mortal world. I dashed over to the oak and found my bundle on the ground. As I grabbed it, the cloth flapped open and a heavy leather pouch thudded to earth beside my gloves. Inside lay silver denarii and five gold aurei. Yet the coins weighed heavy in my hands. What message had he meant to send me by leaving them with my things? That he was sorry? That he wanted me to live? Was the coin meant in payment for the cut? Had he, in that last moment when we grappled, actually changed his mind and only cut me purely by accident as he broke away? For so it seemed to me now, looking back on it.
Or perhaps he was far more clever than he looked. Perhaps he had deliberately trapped me here; perhaps I was actually dead and could never return.
I strode to the fire and faced the djeli, who lowered her fiddle. How had I first mistaken her for an aged, frail, starving woman? She was not young, certainly old enough to be my mother if I had a mother, but with a healthy shine in her face and a robust, healthy build.
“How do I return to the mortal world? Must I run after him and hope to catch him so he will show me the way?”
“The cat and the horse do not eat the same dish.” She raised the fiddle. “A dry mouth cannot sing.”
I laughed. “It is the way of djeliw to speak in riddles, is it not?”
“You mistake me for a Celt. It is I, Lucia Kante, who cups knowledge in my heart. I await the ones who will learn from me, but you are not that one.”
The big male sashayed up and thrust his head against my hip to be petted. After I had rubbed his ears and nape, I drew up a bucket of water, carried it over, and set it down beside the djeli, and then retreated to sit beside my cloaks and coin. Maybe I wasn’t a Barahal, but I had been raised among a people for whom bargaining was the same as breathing.
“Is this water your offering?” she asked.
“A dry mouth cannot sing,” I answered, “but perhaps water will not quench your thirst. Are you a mortal woman or a creature of the spirit world?”
“I am the person I am, a multitude held in one flesh.”
“Most tales say that time runs differently in the spirit world than in the mortal world. I would not want to stay here too long. I need to go back. Will you show me the way back?”
She held out a hand, palm up. “For a payment. The same as he made.”
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “Since it seems that’s the coin you seek. In the beginning, the people who call themselves Kena’ani founded the city of Tyre. There presided the gods and goddesses, the kings and the high men of the temple, the queens and the priestesses. Their ships explored the great sea. In time, the children of Tyre founded trading towns and ports like Gadir all along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea and farther afield south along the coast of Africa and north along the coast of Europa. In time, there was born to the king of Tyre a daughter named Elissa. When she grew to be a woman, she understood that the king, her own father, hated her and wished to sacrifice her. So she fled Tyre with her people. The blessed Tanit raised winds, and on these wings brought her to a distant shore. Elissa bargained with the tribe that lived in that region. She said, ‘Let me have for my people only as much land as one ox hide will encompass, and we will settle there and be content.’ Thinking her simple-minded, the tribe agreed, but she trimmed the ox hide into a leather cord and extended that cord to encompass a mighty swathe of land. Her people called the city founded there Qart Hadast, the new city, and she became its dido, its queen.”
Perhaps the air of the spirit world breathes a fragrance that intoxicates. How else could I possibly have looked upon Andevai and not despised him, merely because of the way he had looked sidelong at me and the way his hand had felt, holding mine? Intoxication leaps from mind to tongue. A dizzy compulsion overtook me as I kept talking, and talking, and talking. I was the vessel full of wine and she the one drinking. As long as she listened, I could not stop. I told the tales the Kena’ani tell their children, of the trials and struggles of the gods in ancient days, of the long war against the Romans, of the Persian invasion and the arrival of refugees from the empire of Mali. Of mercenaries and merchants, spies and historians. How Daniel Hassi Barahal had ridden into the world at the same age I was now and traveled across Europa and the north of Africa in the service of his family, seeking secrets to sell for profit, and in the service of his own desire to comprehend the way of the world.