She would die today, one way or another. Cyprus Visibullis risked one glance over her shoulder without slowing her feet. They still pursued, those lecherous sailors, shouting words at her that would make Mater’s face flush scarlet if she could hear.
Abbas, though—Abbas’s flush would not just be over the sailors chasing her. It would be over his youngest daughter having ventured to the port to begin with. Never mind she had been waiting for him. He would see only the disobedience.
A shiver spurred her onward, faster. Abbas would kill her if the sailors did not. Or worse, sit her down and lecture her about how fleeting was a woman’s virtue. Threaten to keep her from worshipping with Mater and the twins, since it apparently did her no good. Ask for the millionth time why she could not be more like her sisters.
She darted around a corner and prayed to the Lord of heaven and earth that the sailors were not from Patara. That they would not know the streets and alleys as she did. And that God himself would strike her dead before he allowed those men to put hands on her.
How many times had her father warned her never to venture to this part of town on her own? How many times had he lifted a lock of her red hair and called it a curse? Strangers would steal her away, he had always warned her. Steal her and sell her into slavery at Rome—because no one the empire over was worth more as a slave in Rome than a redhead.
Tears burned the backs of her eyes. She would not cry, not now. But oh, when it was all over and she had escaped them—please, Lord God!—she may just curl up in a corner of her bedchamber at home and give in to that urge. Let the shaking come. Even let Alexandria and Rhoda fuss and croon and call her their little honey pot.
The thundering footsteps behind her held up, and harsh whispers slicked over her. She could not make them out, but she did not have to. The alley ahead forked, went around a building, joined together again. The sailors must know that, must be planning to split up and surround her. They obviously did know Patara as well as she.
Her throat went tight with all the things she could not afford to feel yet. She should bang on a door. Beg help from someone.
But no one in this section of town would help her. Everyone here knew her by sight, and none would give her aid—not being Abbas’s daughter as she was. Perhaps if he were here to invoke fear…but alone? No. They would say it served the merchant right to lose a daughter when he had shown no mercy to any of them in their times of need. That it was high time the stone-hearted Dorus Visibullis lose something precious to him.
Perhaps, just perhaps there were a few Christians among the poor in this neighborhood. They may help. But they did not know her either and always viewed her family with suspicion. Because why, if they were believers as they claimed, did they not gather with the brethren in fellowship?
No, no help would lay behind any of these doors.
She sniffed back the tears and latched her gaze upon a stack of wooden crates just ahead. Her family would not lose her. Not today, not to a bunch of seafaring slavers. Perhaps their legs were longer, their arms stronger, but she had youth and agility on her side. Rhoda kept warning that when her womanly curves began to develop, she would slow. But not today.
Cyprus scrabbled up the crates, latched hold of the roof, and kicked the stack over as she hauled herself up. If the curse from behind her were any indication, the sailor was not so good at scaling walls. And restacking the crates would take time. Time she would use to speed away. Pausing only long enough to stick out her tongue at him, she flew over the flat rooftop.
At least the houses around here were close together, their walls all but touching. At the edge of one roof she could simply jump to the next. And the next, and the next. The fourth one was higher than the others, but she managed that too. A crisscrossing alley loomed ahead though. Narrow, but still. If she jumped, could she make it? Did she dare?
Her father’s name would not help her today. No, the only thing that could possibly help her was a miracle from Almighty God.
Perhaps he would lend her those wings. “Please, Father. Please help me. I know I am not always a good girl, but I will be. I will be, I promise you. Please just save me.” She jumped over one last small division between the houses and sped over the final roof.
She had no choice. It was risk a jump or be caught by the men who would sell her so quickly into a life not worth living. Not daring to stop and think it through, she pumped her legs all the harder. Sucked in a breath. Held it.
For an eternal moment there was only wind around her, beneath her. For a moment, she could imagine the earth falling away and the sun growing close. Soaring over the sea, the hilltop, the whole world.
Then her foot struck the top of the roof across the alley, her other followed, and she was safe. Her heart soared on, though, so swiftly that she nearly laughed.
Curses stained the air behind, below. But she dared not look back again. No, there was only onward now, and on still more. Running, leaping, scarcely even noting when one roof gave way to another, when the wider spaces loomed. She was a bird, a hart leaping over the hills, a dolphin cresting the waves. And she rode them until the rooftops beneath her feet changed in structure, until the dome of the church loomed ahead.
The harbor and its cheap houses were behind her now. Once she was past the church, the neighborhoods improved, and then she would have to come down. The houses would get farther apart. Then, home.
Her would-be captors were nowhere in sight. She had to stop. Find a way down. As soon as she crossed one more chasm, she would.
The air caught her again, and she spread her arms wide to embrace it. Tilted her face up to receive the kiss of the sun on her cheeks. Arced up, up, stretched out her legs.
No rooftop touched her extended toes. Just air, and it rushed past her too fast. Gravity pulled too hard. She was not…she could not be—falling!
A scream tore from her throat, but too late. The ground struck, the sky wavered. Pain shafted through her, so fast and hot it would surely kill her.
Did he hear her, up in his heaven? She stared up at where he should be but saw nothing except the endless blue and wispy white. No loving face peering down at her. No gentle hand there to catch her. Nothing but emptiness, mocking and cruel.
Why had he given her wings only to let her fall now, when home was within reach? Why deliver her from the sailors only to kill her here?
Footsteps, loud and hurried. Two sets of them.
Tears choked her, pain blazed again. Get up, get up! But she could not. Could not move her arms, could not move her legs. They would come, they would laugh, they would grab her and…what? What would they do to her? See her broken form and deem her not worth it? Or take her and break her still more?
A sob tore out before she realized it was not the rough voice of one of the sailors. Masculine, yes, but younger. Its accents more familiar, more like this place that had been home for the last few years. The footfalls grew louder, closer, shook the ground beneath her, and then two faces blocked out the sun.
Did she know them? They looked familiar, almost. Maybe. Older than she, but by no means grown men. Were they among the boys who tripped and teased? Who stared with moon-eyes at Alexandria and Rhoda?
“She is alive.” Relief saturated the tone of the boy on her right. He reached for something, lifted something. She saw her own hand in his.
Paralyzed? No. No, she could not be paralyzed. She could not. What would she do? Burden her mother with such a child for the rest of her life?
She squeezed her eyes shut. Perhaps it was a blessing that she could feel nothing beyond the tickle of her tears down her neck.
He gripped her hand, tugged on it…and she was on her feet, the stones of the alley hot beneath her soles. The linen of her garment brushed her legs. The wind caressed her arms.
To know the power of God. She stared for a long moment at the stranger-boy and knew without asking who he must be. Not one of the adoring throng trying to win the hearts of Alexandria and Rhoda. Not one of the gang of boys who delighted in taunts and jests as harmless as they were frustrating.
Nay. She must be looking into the eyes of…of… “Wonder worker.” The words came out in a whisper.
“You need not thank us at all. Give your gratitude to the Lord.” Nikolaos angled away.
She shivered, wrapped her arms around herself. That was a truth she knew now—and one she would never forget. “Yes, please.” She fell in between the two boys, taking comfort in how tall they towered, how confidently they strode. How normal they sounded as they jested and teased each other over her head.
They did not say how they found her. If they saw her running across the roofs or heard her scream. They did not ask how she came to be doing so, or how she fell, if they had not seen it for themselves. They did not ask what had brought her out on her own that day or who her family was. They merely turned where she turned, their words a buzz in her head as they mentioned uncles and parents and bishops and something about Ephesus and the sea.
Cyprus could not convince her hands to let go her opposite elbows. Her stomach hurt. Her eyes begged for the release of tears. She wanted to curl into her mother’s side and let the twins fuss over her. And yet…she also wanted to climb back onto that roof and shout to the world that God had healed her. That her nerves still sang with his glory. That her very blood felt charged with a song her ears had never heard.
She would get in trouble with Abbas if she told what happened today—but could she keep it to herself? Would that be a sin?
Darting a glance up to her left, to her right, she nearly asked her saviors what to do. They would probably be happy to tell her—men always were, were they not? But she could no more speak than she could let go of her arms.
Whatever consequences came, they would be hers.
It had been years since the heat had filled him quite like that. Years since he had felt that surge of Spirit in his veins. Nikolaos put one foot in front of the other along with his cousin and the girl, but his mind was still in that alleyway. On the knowledge that had filled him. The certainty that this girl was not meant to be paralyzed. That her purpose was to be well, that she believed she could be well—whether she understood already from Whom that gift came or not. That it was for the Father’s glory she be well.
He had wondered, those years in Ephesus, if God would ever ask him to do something like that again. If something in Nikolaos had changed, to make it impossible for him to reach out and let the Spirit heal through his hands. If his faith had weakened as he grew up and learned how rare miracles were.
But they need not be. If ever he had doubted that, he would no more.
He looked at the road beneath his feet while Petros kept Cyprus entertained, and he sent silent, uncountable praises heavenward.
He followed his companions around a corner and looked up into the afternoon sun with narrowed eyes. The girl led them down the most prosperous street in Patara—the very street his parents had lived on. The one he had lived on before their deaths six years ago, when he had moved in with Uncle. There, on the corner, was his old house. His step faltered for just a moment as he looked at it, as the memories swept through him. Mother, with her luminous eyes and ready smile. Father, with his deep laugh and gentle lessons.
He was nearly a man now—had gone away for his schooling, had just come back, was already a reader for Uncle in the church. He knew who he was, what the Lord was calling him to. But sometimes…sometimes he still awoke in the night and thought he was in that bed he’d spent his first eleven years in. Sometimes he thought the voices he heard in the hallway to be Mother and Father, laughing together. Sometimes he thought the missing of them would break him in two.
Sometimes he still remembered looking at their feverish forms, trying to heal them, and the cry that had wrenched him apart when he realized he could not. That it was not the will of God that day.
He flexed the fingers he had touched them with. No Spirit had warmed them then. And it had not since. Not until now.
God had spoken to him in other ways during those long years. He had heard his Lord calling him into service and had not doubted it. But the grief had been there all that time, a wall between them, and Nikolaos had not even known it.
Only now, with it in crumbles at his feet, did he realize he had drifted one crucial step away from his God.
When the girl between him and Petros came to a stop and tightened her arms still more around her middle, Nikolaos focused on the here and now again. Her current troubles were not something he could help. So he sent his cousin a glance that said, Work your wonders. No one could make people relax as quickly as Petros, with his quick wit and quicker smile.
She nodded, and the sunlight caught on her extraordinary red hair. When they had heard the shouts of the sailors and had seen the white-clad figure flying overhead as they passed through the alley, it had taken only a moment to realize what was happening. The sailors spoke with the accent of Rome—and they were probably all too happy to steal a girl from her homeland and sell her for a tidy profit in Italy.
“You believe.” Nikolaos had not been sure her faith was already in the Lord. Sometimes God sent healing upon one of his children, a testament to their faith…and sometimes he touched a heathen, to draw him to Christ and redirect to him their existing faith in the dead gods of Rome. But a family that could trace its Christianity back two hundred years, to virtually the beginning of the Way—Nikolaos stood taller, smiled, and opened his mouth to ask if she knew any of their stories.
“I will hurt you if I must.” Grinning the grin that only his cousin could elicit, Nikolaos dispensed the obligatory shove to Petros’s arm.
It was not just Uncle’s way. He could still remember the first time he had heard the whisper of the Lord in his ear, when he was just a boy too young to realize everyone else did not hear God so clearly. When his faith was so pure and true that it never once occurred to him to doubt that the Lord could and would do whatever his children asked of him.
The years in Ephesus, learning all the great philosophy both of his Christian family and his Hellenist neighbors, might have called Petros to the law, but it had only made firm what Nikolaos had already known. This was his calling. His purpose. He would serve the church. Follow in the footsteps of the apostle and live a life unfettered by a wife and the concerns of a home. To go wherever the Lord led him, whenever he beckoned.
To be a conduit of the Spirit, whatever he asked him to do.
And her father, if that was who the hulking shadow in the doorway belonged to. A man stepped through, out onto the street, glowering just as Uncle did when Nikolaos spent too long poring over a manuscript and neglected his other duties. That distinct scowl that bespoke worry and love, not just displeasure.
With a glance at his cousin, Nikolaos followed Cyprus across the stone street, Petros now beside him. No whisper came to warn him that harm would befall the girl if he left, but still. He would see with his own eyes that she received no more punishment than was due a girl who had disobeyed her father’s order. She had been injured enough for one day.
It was on the tip of Nikolaos’s tongue to beg off—Uncle was expecting him back, and he wanted some time in the quiet of his chamber to pray and let this afternoon sink in—but he made the mistake of looking down into Cyprus’s face. She had her hands clasped in front of her, her blue eyes wide and pleading. No doubt she would want the buffer of guests between her and her father’s anger as long as possible.
Beside him, Petros’s lips twitched into a grin. No doubt at her silent begging. Nikolaos drew in a breath and nodded. “It would be our delight.” Except that, as he followed the two into their home, he had the distinct impression that something had just shifted in the fabric of his life, something other than realizing the Spirit would still move through him.
He very nearly spun and ran out again.
Cyprus looked up from the cloth on her bed that she had been studying with far more attention than it really needed. Mater stood in the doorway to the room Cyprus shared with the twins. She wore a smile that said, Do not be afraid. She held out a hand that said, Trust me.
But Cyprus still trembled at the thought of what Abbas might say now that their guests had left.
She slid off the mattress though and eased her way across the floor. Put her trembling fingers into her mother’s.
Calm settled over her, starting at Mater’s fingers and working its way through Cyprus until it stilled the quaking. She looked up the few inches that remained between her own height and her mother’s.
Mater smiled at her and squeezed her fingers. She was so beautiful—the twins had inherited her looks. The lovely dark hair, the gleaming brown eyes, the flawless olive skin and almond-shaped eyes rimmed with blackest lashes. But mostly when Cyprus looked at her mother, she saw not the beauty but the love.
She did—of course she did. She hated being confined always to these walls, unable to step outside but for into their courtyard garden. She had seen Aella go out, skipping along to the markets on some errand for Helena, no doubt, and she had thought, The slaves can do what they want—Aella is no older than I am, and she goes about freely. Why should she enjoy what I cannot?
But she had been a fool. She had envied her slave and had nearly ended up one herself. Sorry did not begin to cover the shame that surged through her. Her impulsive actions had very nearly been her destruction. First with those sailors…and then the fall.
Cyprus clung to the familiar arms, breathing in the familiar scent of jasmine and love and Mater.
At Abbas’s voice, Cyprus pulled away. Mater smiled when she heard him calling her name. Cyprus cringed. The twins always said she was his favorite, the apple of his eye…but she had her doubts. They never did such foolish things. They never conjured up his temper like this. Which was why he would no doubt ask her, for the hundred millionth time, why she could not be more like them.
The old rivalry chafed now. It did not fit, somehow, alongside this new song in her veins. Forgive me, Abba God, for those thoughts.
“Come, sweet one. His mood will not improve with the waiting.” Mater took her hand again and pulled her down the corridor, into the main room with its familiar furnishings of the best woods, softened with plush cushions in bright colors.
Abbas, of course, was not sitting. He was pacing before the hearth, his face in hard lines, his dark hair mussed as if he had run his fingers through it one too many times. When he faced them, his eyes snapped.
Not with anger. With calculation. Which was so much worse. He held out a hand and pointed at one of the couches.
Cyprus slunk to it, grateful when Mater kept hold of her hand and lowered herself to a graceful seat at her side.
Abbas rolled his eyes. Within a day or two, Mater would have reminded him that the gods of the Hellenists would have no place in their house—but when fresh from a voyage, his lips always spoke as his sailors did.
“His uncle means for him to dedicate his life to the church.” Mater sounded weary.
Cyprus’s brows tugged down. Mater knew an awful lot about Nikolaos, for him having not even been in Patara since they moved here. And for the brethren keeping them always at arm’s length.
Cyprus pressed her lips together. Mater could have just let it go. Let Abbas focus on marrying off the twins. Why must she draw his temper down on Cyprus’s head?
Because you deserve it. Because Mater is more interested in you learning to be good than in you being comforted.
She curled her fingers into her palms. Sometimes she wished her mother would be just a bit lazier about shaping her daughters’ characters. Just a bit. Now and then. Or that she would at least let go of Cyprus’s hand when she said such things, so Cyprus could just be angry with her instead of being too aware of the love behind her actions.
That strange song pulsed, stretched itself out inside her. Her fingertips tingled where they dug into her palm.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of all the places she could have run off to, that was definitely the stupidest.
“They? Who?” He stood again.
Curses blistered the air in two different languages, and a few dialects she had never heard.
Mater slipped an arm around Cyprus’s shoulders. And reached up to cover her ears, as if she were still a baby who had never heard foul language. As if she could not hear perfectly well through her mother’s fingers.
Mater stared at her with wide eyes, fingers pressed to her lips.
It was not all. She knew it was not. She had not felt—and now she did, so very much. And this song pulsing through her veins with her blood…she had never felt anything like it.
It was a miracle. It was God, the one true God, reaching down and touching her through that boy’s fingers.
No point. No point in saving her?
The song faltered. Disappeared behind…noise. Cyprus sank down to the couch. “But…” She had been healed.
Cyprus leaned into Mater’s side and closed her eyes when Abbas started talking about marriages and matches again. And she tried, she did, to hear those beautiful notes of heaven through his words.
But his voice drowned it out. And all she could hear was that question, pulsing with every beat of her heart.