Written in the Ashes Read Online Free

hip as if she were a horse and clutching her breast in his hand. She spit in his eye.
    Tarek had been on his way to see a whore he favored. He could not remember her name. They were to meet beside the city fountain. He had not intended to stop in the market, but he wanted to buy a flute. His was broken. All women love a flute, and he wanted where flutes lead. But instead he saw the trembling girl on the trader’s block, and her eyes reached for him and pleaded beauty he had never seen. He forgot the flute and counted his coins.
    He knew his father would protest. But those eyes. Perhaps he could purchase her and keep her all the same. The mind that wants can reason anything.
    Hannah stood in her soiled clothes before a hungry crowd that pressed the block. She was the last to be sold. Her captors had done well. The pretty girl with brown eyes had gone to the wealthy bawd of a brothel on the wharf. The mother and daughter as chattel to a decorated captain on his way to Rome. Hannah was left. Their prize. She was illiterate, but of extraordinary beauty, and the one was worth twice the other. And then there was her talent. Oh, yes. She would bring them a handsome coin.
    Sing, beauty.
    She sealed her lips.
    A knife was pressed to the small of her back.
    Sing.
    Her lips parted.
    Twenty solidi .
    Fifty.
    Seventy-five.
    Then a skinny boy with a tangle of dark hair dismounted and led his horse through the crowd, waving a bag of coins. One hundred solidi .
    Sold.
    After surrendering his gold coins to the slave traders the girl was shuttled from the trader’s block and pushed into the hairy arms of a blacksmith who swiftly bound her neck in a bronze collar which read the name and address of where to return her should she escape. His fiery clamp hissed in her ear as metal found metal, and it was done.
    The boy took her hands in his, and the cool dampness of them disgusted her; he had fish where hands should be. She looked away.
    “You will come with me,” he said. “My name is Tarek. I will take you to a bath and a good home. My father’s home.”
    Hannah heard the Greek like some new melody. She did not know the meaning of the words, but could feel the warmth within them. If this stranger offered some protection, then she would stay with him until he slept, and then escape to find her father. And so she allowed herself to be led, limping barefoot across the cobbles, her feet still swollen and bloody from miles of walking the road.
    Tarek’s guilt at spending the money gnawed holes in his gut where certainty should have been. This girl would eat and drink and cost his father’s house, and there might be upheaval. The money he had paid for her was to go to supplies for the vineyard. This would not go over well. Tarek considered other options. Then it struck him that he could hide her in his room. Give her mending to do and keep her a secret until, until… and it was here his reasoning dissolved. Perhaps he would just hide her and figure out the rest when the time came.
    Tarek guided her through the market district just outside the Jewish Quarter along the narrow alleys that wound beneath a small hill, atop which stood the skeleton of a massive temple library once called the Serapeum. The ruins were flanked with marble statues of Isis kneeling all along the periphery, most of them missing heads or bearing broken wings. At the center of the courtyard stood a tall black column twenty-six meters in height, twenty feet in diameter, and crowned with the porphyry statue of Diocletian, a ruler now forgotten. It was a latrine for beggars now.
    As they wound deeper into the labyrinth of the city, Hannah began to loose her footing. She struggled to hold her head up as a sudden faintness came over her, and the heat surged upward in her blood. Her limbs became heavy and tired. Then her knees buckled.
    It seemed Tarek had bought her only for her to die.

 
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    Jemir was the first to hear the odd sound from deep within the walls of the