The Alexandria Scrolls: Book One -- In Her Own Words

The Alexandria Scrolls

BOOK ONE

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In Her Own Words

Translator’s Foreword

Several years ago, I discovered five, long papyrus scrolls buried in a wooden chest in a Libyan cave. Unlikely as it sounds, this actually was the second time I had uncovered the treasure. My first discovery occurred back in the 10th century, when I lived as an Arab hydrologist surveying parts of the North African desert for underground water. At the time, I hid the scrolls in a cave in the northeast corner of what today is Libya, meaning to retrieve them after my geological appraisal was done. I know from past life hypnotic regression I did not survive to bring the scrolls to light back then.

My rediscovery of the five scrolls turned out to be a tale of international intrigue and spiritual reckoning, which I may one day tell. However, I believe the story of the discoverer is far less compelling than the discovery itself. In this case, because of the woman who authored the scrolls.

Astrologically speaking, the Age of Taurus brought the agricultural revolution, the founding of cities and religions – iconically represented by Isis, who likely was a real woman and sister-consort of the first Pharaoh. The following Age of Aries was the time of wars and conquest. For all its glorification of male heroes, Helen of Troy has come to famously represent the era. The woman who tells her story in the scrolls may well be the emblem for the Piscean Age, when the Church dispossessed the Romans of their empire.

As popularly conceived in our day, this woman might well be likened to a wax figure in a Madame Tussauds Museum diorama--sandwiched between Cleopatra and Madonna--made over to suit modern tastes for made-up history documentaries. As with Isis and Helen, the real woman is much more than the legend.

My sole caveat to you, dear reader, is to prepare yourself for someone completely different from the traditional narrative you have been fed. The truth is at once more prosaic and more wonderful. Bear in mind, of course, things like grammar, paragraphing, chapter organization, quotations and other stylistic practices have changed greatly over the centuries; not to mention English readers have different expectations from those for whom the scrolls may have been written. While keeping to the spirit of the original as much as possible I have made editorial adjustments, such as organizing the text according to the various places the writer lived at different times of her life. Thus, my divisions correspond roughly with her growth and metamorphosis.

In making this translation I have held nothing back. There certainly is enough horror, intrigue and magic here to entice general readers as well as to keep scholars busy for years to come. The experts are free to check my translation against the original scrolls when I make them available. Finally, for the record, the only things in the chest I pulled out of the cave in Libya were these scrolls. There were no advanced mathematical treatises or original philosophic expositions. There certainly was no astrolabe.

Brandon Blake, Translator

Los Angeles • New York • Oaxaca • Lago di Varano

Scroll #1: Casting The Net

Setting: HELIOPOLIS

‚ 1 ƒ

My story begins with the disappearance of my father when I was a young girl.

I still remember one day overhearing my father say to one of his soldiers, “People pray for many things and for these things they pray to many gods. Yet, if there are gods, there is but one gift they can grant. That is to open the door to inner knowledge. With luck, freedom may follow.”

Many years later I pestered my father about how to get the gods to heed our prayers. He answered in his usual pointed way.

“Just let the gods be. When the water rises, swim with the current.”

“So, Papa, are you saying we should not pray?”

“No, daughter. Pray. Just not to the gods.”

These were the last words he said to me before tucking me in for the night. Next morning he was gone. My mother said he was on assignment. Again.

Though it is now five decades past, let these words show the roads taken as seen through a girl’s eyes and felt in a girl’s heart as she changed into the woman I am.

‚ 2 ƒ

Papa was my first teacher. He taught me to count in the Roman ways and told us to always speak Latin, in or out of our home. Day to day, it’s Roman things that get you by. Measures of weight, distance, money. Numbers of things possessed or wanted. Then there is time, with divisions of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and so on. Each has a name; the name fixing it and making it more real. And everyone knows the Latin words for such things.

Papa always told my sister and me knowing numbers and the names of things is more valuable than anything else, especially if one day he could not be here with us. I did not, could not, know what he meant by that, but I think he was right. I mean, mostly Papa was right but other things are good to know, too. I’m pretty sure even what is Roman has to be part of something bigger.

Besides numbers, Papa taught me a little how to read. Once I got started I learned some more on my own. People in the marketplace have come to know I am good in this way. They ask for my help with reading and writing, despite my age.

My name is Tuya. My sister’s is Tem. Our Momma named us this way because she never wanted us to forget we are Egyptians – that we are Egypt. The land. That’s what she told us when we got older, though I’m not sure what she meant by it.

Tem and I were born in the Year 70 A.D., anno Diocletiani.

Diocletian is dead now, along with a couple of other imperators who came after him. This is what Papa said to us sometime before me and Tem reached eleven just a while ago. I remember he looked at each of us then with sad eyes below his short haircut and, with his voice breaking a little, said the world just changed too fast for his liking. But for me, it seems time moves too slowly and I will never grow up and I will always be in this place where I remember having lived my whole life with my twin sister.

Oh, yes, my sister and I are twins. She came out of our Momma just a short time after me. Momma says Tem almost didn’t make it because she didn’t cry right away. Tem has that extra finger on her left hand though and the midwife told Momma maybe that’s what finally helped her, but she should try to not let people know about it.

As though the midwife herself wouldn’t talk. I know she did because people stare and whisper. Even about me. Twins, you know. Or maybe it’s something else, but I don’t mind.

I’m glad I have my twin sister. Funny, even though we are twins, we have always been opposites of each other. I am lighter. She is darker. My hair is reddish brown. Hers is brownish black. I talk a lot. Tem is the quiet one. Those who know both of us say I am the more practical, too.

Over a month ago, like I said, we passed our first decem anni by one year more. Ten years plus one together. Me first. Then Tem. But together.

Many children do not get as far as us, I know. Women are always losing their babies here and it must be the same everywhere. Papa told me how he was the third baby his momma had had. One came out blue and dead; the other came out with too many arms and legs, so both times they paid someone to leave them on a hilltop in the night. That really made Papa the first, like me; the oldest brother, like I’m the older sister. But he had four more after him. Three sisters and one brother. I just have my sister Tem. I love her and am glad no one took her out to a hilltop – but I think she’s enough.

Papa says he is more than four tens old. Quadraguinta. This seems a really long time to me, but somehow I can’t think of Papa as old. I mean, he doesn’t seem old to me at all. I just wonder where he is and when he’ll come back.

“Back before your mother and I met, I was not much more than a foot soldier.

“They came through our village in my father’s land of Macedonia--Great Alexander’s birthplace--looking for conscripts. You remember where Macedonia is, right?”

“Across the big sea!”

“Yes, Tuya-miau, across the big, big sea. Mare Nostrum. Good girl. Well, then they shipped myself and another hundred or so conscripts off to serve under the Dux Aegypti. Tem-Tem, it’s your turn to tell me what that is.”

Tem only stared at the floor and didn’t say anything, so Papa continued his story. I don’t know how many times he had told it to us, but I never tired of hearing it.

“Well, Dux Aegypti is the Egypt Command. So, having never been at sea before, I got terribly ill–“

“And you barfed your guts out over the side but it was ok because it fed the hungry fishes, right?”

“Exactly right. Unfortunately, our sea passage met with worse than sea sickness. A few men fell overboard but the ship’s pilot would not change course to find them. Then after the third sunset–“

“You all tried to take the ship and turn it back!”

“Ha! Not quite the way it happened! You know your Papa would never do something like that! Nor would most others. Being a mutineer shows a lack of honor and a lack of understanding about the work of Fate. But the few experienced soldiers on board quickly got matters under control and the rebel leaders were dealt with severely.”

“They got dragged behind the ship in the water so the sharks could eat them up! Yeah!”

At this point, Tem usually faked being asleep. She would wake up soon enough and when Papa finished she would jump off his lap and run to the kitchen where Momma would be making preparations for next day’s breakfast.

“Things went smoothly after that trouble. No one dared try anything again. Once back on land in the port of Alexandria, I quickly recovered from my sea-sickness. Then, as luck would have it, they marched me off to Heliopolis with a detachment of other soldiers. All now joined with the 5th Macedonian Legion. Along the way, I befriended a barbarian soldier named Cunos, and together we mostly patrolled the city streets and alleyways. Just our being around kept the peace during the day.

“Night patrol was a different story. Drunken men and women brawling and screaming in taverns and in the streets. People killing each other in alleyways and on rooftops. Spouses who normally did not have to face each other by day, quarreled once both at home after dark–too often with evil effects for one or the other, and too often for any children they might have.”

In anticipation, I stayed quiet. The best part laid ahead.

“Thieves did what thieves do; especially the bands of roving youth, brigands who as often as not would taunt and attack us soldiers. During one night’s round-up, while dispatching an infamous gang we had cornered in a dead-end alley, it was then I found your mother.”

‚ 3 ƒ

So, because of my smart soldier Papa--now optio, not just munifex--that’s how I know a lot of what I know. The rest I find out for myself.

I can keep track of how more than ten tens or so kinds of different birds live around our river parts. For each kind though, they number too many to count. I mean, if you could even count them when they all fly up so beautifully together. Their wings glint in the day sky like the stars in the night sky. I think sometimes the way they group or cry must have some hidden meaning. Really, I think they do talk to us in their way. Some people say they are messengers and we just need to learn how to listen or read their signs.

I try. Other times, too, I think like Tem says maybe there are things not meant to be counted or named. Then, birds are just birds.

Still, I try to follow what kinds of birds come and go with the seasons, wondering where they go and why they return. I watch for the long-legged ones like the diver birds, the Great Cormorants, the pink-backed pelicans and cranes that come in winter. Usually they don’t lay eggs here, but they come back with young birds, so they must make babies in the other places they go. Some kinds of geese and ducks, quail, kingfishers, shrikes and kestrels do all nest with us, though. Some stay here all the time; others take their surviving children away across water or desert when seasons turn.

One bird, a dusky-shaded brown and green ibis, flies in to visit its cousin called Pharaoh’s Ibis with its striking, black-fringed wings. I like pretending our stay-at-home ibis invites its distant relative in for lotos and beer in exchange for stories of far-away lands.

Like I said, many other birds stay here all the time, just like we do. The benu, egrets and bitterns; doves and pigeons; cuckoos, owls, crows and bats; black kites, Horus falcons and vultures all seem to like it here well enough. But, like the ibis, they have winged cousins calling on them year-round, while no one ever comes by to see our family.

The way I remember the different kinds is like this. I might make one kind of nest for one kind--in my mind of course--and another sort of nest for a different bird. Or I see them moving in a particular way in the sky in my mind’s eye, individually for some and in flocks for some others. Certain birds I remember by seeing them showing off in a mating dance, or challenging one another with puffed out chests and ruffled feathers, or fluting a few sad notes of a song, or swallowing a frog.

This is all helpful because along with Papa’s salary, birds add to our family livelihood. Me and Tem have been coming out with throw sticks, hoop nets and small ground nets to catch them since we were old enough to sit quietly in boat or blind, first with Papa and later with Momma when Papa started getting called away more and more. Because Momma has other things to do, later just me and Tem went out by ourselves.

Other birders, either singly or in groups, hunt with arrows, javelins, slings, clap-nets and long net fences. Some use tethered bitterns with their eyelids sewn shut to trick curious apedu with the decoys’ pitiful cries.

I do well enough without such deceits.

In recent months, Tem has come out less and less. When I ask if she will accompany me in the reed boat Papa made for us to hunt along more river bank, she stiffens her back and shoulders, saying she needs to stay home to help Momma. She says seeing I am the one who likes sitting out under the hot sun with the flies, gnats and crocodiles, why don’t I just go by myself? Then she turns and walks away. I don’t know what has gotten into her, but if all she’s going to do is complain and scare the birds off she can stay home sweeping the dust from the floor and washing down the walls with natron.

Speaking of crocodiles, I don’t know what Tem is afraid of. They never bother me. It’s like they don’t even hear or smell me. I am less than a shadow to them, I think. It’s like we move in two different worlds. Besides, there are a pair of hawks who always seem to fly low overhead as a kind of warning for me to get off the river and, sure enough, then something you don’t want around comes around. One time, a hawk dove right down to the back of my skiff and took off again. It happened fast but when I spun to look all I saw was the hawk flying off with a cobra in its talons.