Free The Abyssinian Proof by Jenny White Page B

pain into his own version of paradise.
    “In the future, I’ll add such details to my reports,” Omar promised, then turned to Malik. “My brother, I’ve learned that up on their unholy hill of Pera, the magistrates actually read the crappy reports we send them. That alone will help me sleep well tonight.”
    Omar was right, Kamil thought. The mystery lay in what the thief hadn’t taken. He began to see that this reliquary might be more valuable than he thought.
    He placed his hand on Malik’s arm. “Each loss is a counsel,” he reassured him. “There’s much here to help us.”

4
    T HREE YOUNG BOYS lay flat on the ground, heads hung over the edge of the cistern wall, frightened by the unprotected distance to the rocky earth below, but daring each other to creep closer. The wall was built in layers, five courses of brick and five of stone, scored at intervals by lines of large marble slabs, with moss and grasses growing from its crevices. Despite its great age and state of disrepair, the wall appeared massive and more enduring than any of the flimsy wooden cottages in Sunken Village below. At intervals, the cistern bent inward in shallow arches, revealing masonry the width of a man’s reach.
    The boys watched people emerge from their cottages and converge like trails of ants on the domed stone structure in the village square.
    “Why are they going to the mosque? I didn’t hear the ezan.”
    “And look, the women are going too.” The boy raised his arm to point.
    His friend pushed him and laughed.
    The boy quickly pulled in his arm and grabbed a protruding stone to keep from sliding over the edge. “Stop it,” he whined.
    “They’re slaves,” his friend pointed out proudly. “You know what they do in Africa? They cut off their yaraks.”
    “They do not. How do you know, anyway?”
    “My uncle told me. He was there. He said that’s where they make eunuchs.”
    “Where?”
    “Addis Ababa.”
    “That’s not really a place.”
    “Is too.”
    “Isn’t.”
    They tussled on the lip of the cistern until the third boy, who had been watching the line of people in the square below, turned and slapped them both on the ear.
     
    O NE DAY A red line had appeared at her mother’s wrist where she had cut herself on the tine of a monstrance, a top-heavy gold receptacle with a flattened face shaped like the sun. How and when the monstrance had come into the family’s possession was unknown, but it must once have served Roman Catholics to display the wafer they adored as the body of their God. The red line had slowly but inexorably lengthened, reaching up along the inside of her mother’s arm until Balkis imagined it had tied her heart up like butcher’s string and stilled it. After her mother’s death, Balkis kept the gold monstrance, tarnished by her mother’s blood, on a shelf in the receiving hall. It reminded her of many things: to live, never to forgive.
    This Friday, she had risen early and passed through the door at the back of her house that led to a small marble hamam bath. A servant fed the wood-fired boiler. Hot water flowed through ceramic channels beneath the floor and spilled from a spigot set over a marble basin. Balkis took her time bathing, allowing the heat to penetrate her muscles and release her from her body. The midwife Gudit, an old, square-shouldered woman with a face and neck like a bull, scrubbed her skin with a textured silk mitt and denuded Balkis’s body of hair with aghda, a mixture of sugar boiled with lemon juice, until the space between her legs was as smooth as an egg. After Gudit left, Balkis reached down and drew her fingers along the two lines of small round scars from the thorns that the midwife had used to pin her wound shut after circumcising her. A small pinhole at the center, where the midwife had left a straw reed inserted until the wound healed, was the only opening that remained.
    “Container of the Uncontainable,” Balkis thought sourly. They hadn’t told