and caught, it yanked up against the tautening ropes, and the process of winching it down into the Rail Yard commenced.
"Best we hurry," said Bee. "You're cold."
We made our farewells to the other pupils and turned left at the high walls of the long-abandoned tophet, whose gates were always locked. A coal wagon rumbled past. Serving women walked with baskets weighing heavily on their arms.
"That was the most amazing thing I've ever seen!" cried Bee. "I can't wait to draw it! Only I'll give it a fish's eyes and a mouth and tail. As if it were really alive!"
From the main thoroughfare and its shops, we turned into a residential district populated a hundred years ago solely by families of Kena'ani lineage and built to their preferences: balustrades along the upper-floor windows and colonnaded front doors. These days, a diverse group of households with common mercantile interests shared the district. It was a clean, prosperous neighborhood, safe even in the evening because of the recent installation of gaslight on the major streets. Fenced parks with handsome trees and shrubbery ornamented the small squares, each centered around a carved stone monument. After a brisk fifteen-minute walk in which Bee remained oddly silent, no doubt distracted by her memories of Maester Amadou's dark eyes and the magnificent airship, we arrived at Falle Square and home.
When we reached the gate of our once-grand four-story town house, we closed the wrought-iron gate behind us and climbed the steps to the stoop. The door opened before we reached it. Aunt Tilly ushered us in with kisses and, after dusting the baking flour off her hands, helped us shed our boots and Bee her coat.
"Your cheeks are ice! Cat, how could you be so foolish as to run out without your coat?" She gave me a grave look. "I discovered them in the parlor this morning before anyone else was the wiser. Well, you're just fortunate you never get sick."
She herded us past the public rooms, which we rarely used
once the cold weather set in, to the small sitting room in the back over the kitchen. The stove shed heat through the floor. The abrupt change in temperature made me sweat. After stepping downstairs into the kitchen to ask Cook to heat milk for chocolate, Aunt returned and sat between us on the threadbare settee. She chafed our stiff hands between her own warm ones.
"You're looking bright, Beatrice," she said to her daughter.
"We saw the airship, Mama!"
"Did you? And you, Catherine? You look darkly menacing, as if you are tumbling sharp-edged rocks through that busy mind of yours. Did the;airship please you not so well?"
"No, it was spectacular. Bee is going to draw it but call it an airwhale, a mythical creature of the heavens."
"But that frown is still there. What subject has set you thinking so hard?"
I tucked my schoolbag against my legs, trying desperately to bring back the sharp, excited way I had felt on seeing the airship, but my thoughts were not air-bound but rather moored to the past.
"Lies the Romans told," I blurted out.
Bee shot me a startled look.
Aunt did not even blink. "The academy directors fought for ten years over the proper syllabus to be used in presenting the history of the wars between the consuls of Rome and the didos of Qart Hadast. To broach so volatile a subject! I wouldn't have expected that, now the controversy has died down."
"There is a book written on the theme."
"Is there?" Her sly grin was far more subtle than Bee's honey smiles. "I must admit, it would take up at least three lengthy volumes, don't you think?"
"What is 'rei vindication" I asked, and found myself tensing, as if Bran Cof's head were likely to materialize in the sitting room and chastise me lor having disturbed it.
"Oh, dear, are you studying law in your seminar now? It's a complicated Roman legal action to do with a difference between ownership and possession-"
"Tilly!" Uncle bellowed from the floor above. "I can't find my hat!"
She rose. "Cook and Callie are busy, so just run down and fetch the pot and cups yourself. You can take dinner at lamp-lighting in the nursery with the little girls, or wait and share a collation with us at evening's end when we get home from the academy. For the lecture tonight, you'll need to change into something more"-she frowned at my jacket and petticoats, a style I had assiduously copied from the plates of a very up-to-date fashion magazine Bee and I had seen in the window of a milliner on High Street last year-"more sober."
"Tilly!" Uncle called again.
She hurried out the door.
"Do you think it was the poet's head that spoke?" Bee whispered. "We'll never be able to tell anyone that we heard the famous Bran Cof declaim! Even if it was only two words. Now, I'll get the chocolate while you get that bag up to our room before Papa decides we must display our day's academic work at dinner for his delectation. That would be a disaster! He'd see my sketches. And you'd have to confess you stole a book from the academy."
"A book my father wrote!"
"A book whose author's name is the same as your father's. That doesn't prove anything."
She was right, so I retraced my steps to the entryway. Our governess was still up in the nursery with Hanan and Astraea; Cook and the hired girl Callie were busy with dinner; and our man-of-all-work, Pompey, would be stoking the evening fires or preparing trays to carry up to the nursery for their early dinner. I climbed the stairs to the Hist floor with the bag clinched
against me. At the top of the stairs, the huge hall mirror showed me myself-yes, that was me, as always, my face, my body, my long-fingered hands, my wishfully fashionable jacket and petticoats sewn as well as Bee's and my skill could manage. In the mirror, a ragged nimbus like a storm cloud fringed my form; it sparked in the mirror's reflection only if I was particularly annoyed or upset, and I knew how to furl it in, like binding back one's hair.
As I slunk along the first-floor hall past the closed doors of the front parlor and Uncle's office, Aunt's and Uncle's voices traded rhythms from behind the office door. Their knack for talking over each other without quite getting in each other's way reminded me of festival drums. Our factotum's bass rumble interposed an unexpected counterbeat, followed by a silence.
I hurried past the rack of fencing sabers and up the stairs to the second floor. I slipped through the fourth door, the one at the back of hall, into the room Bee and I had shared for the almost fourteen years I had lived in Uncle and Aunt's house.
The curtains were open, and the stove had been recently kindled. I threw myself across the wide bed and pulled out the book. After wrapping the feather coverlet around me, I shifted to catch what light remained from the windows that overlooked the back garden with its frosted earth and leafless trees. A twig scratched at the windowpane as the wind rattled it: Bee called that branch "the skeletal hand." It was an old friend from the tree that grew down past Uncle's office window, and its presence made me comfortable.
I opened the book and found the publication date: Most people across Europa used the Augustan year, dating from the installation of the first emperor of the Romans.
The year of my birth was 1818.
A man bearing my father's name had published a monograph the year I was born.
I flipped through the pages in the fading light, but the flare for the dramatic and the self-deprecating turn of phrase displayed by my father in his journals was absent here. This was an awkwardly written tome filled with dry recitation of ancient Roman accusations, taken from quotes by tedious Roman writers of ancient days and refuted with the usual unassailable truths.
The first lie: that our name for ourselves is Phoenician, when in fact we call ourselves Kena'ani.