When the morning sun broke, red dust from the nightly breezes lingered in the air above the grand aqueduct. It was a marvel of antique engineering that brought cold pure water from the snow-topped mountains down to the palace and its gardens and then got distributed to the various fountains and bathhouses. The whole water system of the city largely dated from the unremembered past, long before our aging King's great-grand father was dreamed of.
I went to the marketplace but it was closed in honor of Prince Kareem's birthday and there were guards to enforce the ban on business. There were no jobs to be had. Without the bathhouse, people were washing themselves in the marketplace fountain. The water was murky.
Some years ago, I remember finding a papyrus scrap at the dump: "Boiling water prevents sickness." I could tell the City Elders, but wouldn't they would laugh off an uneducated orphan? The urge to shout it, to nail a sign to the fountain itself, gnawed at me, but who was I? Besides, half these people didn't have access to enough fuel to boil water. Aside from our orchards, and a few tenacious scraggly bushes in the mountains, there was no source of wood. For those in outside the upper class, you could get animal dung if you were sufficiently out of poverty. I thought back to my father. Had he died because no one knew, or no one cared to make sure that the water was safe and that bathing or cleaning in it made it hazardous.
Far from home, the city met its end in the Great Heaps. Nestled at the junction between the rocks of the mountains and the endless sea of red sand were mountains of refuse, accumulated over countless centuries. Carrion birds soared overhead, hungry for a windfall of rot.
I had memorized it all. From the ash piles of the smithies to sinking, rotten food and other detritus. The east side was usually kitchen scraps from households, nothing even remotely usable. The western slope was for artisans: broken pottery, wood shavings, and, if you were lucky, a few scraps of cloth.
I searched for any disturbance since my prior visit for a place to begin my typical rummaging. There was a pile of almost regal refuse on top of a location I knew to contain broken bricks and dust. My pulse quickened and my belly growled. I made a detour and began digging. The normal smells from palace refuse were there: sour wine and exotic oils. Broken amphora, shards of a smooth, material that wasn't pottery or stone.
Suddenly - leather.
I froze.
It had been years since leather this size had appeared in the dump. My pulse quickened. It was worn, cracked at the edges, but definitely leather. I tugged gently but it was bound to something. I pulled harder and it came free. It was a codex. Not just a merchant's record on papyrus, but a full codex on vellum.
The burning air grabbed my throat as I gasped. My grimy hands vibrated as I turned it over, feeling the weight. I opened it. The pages were smooth and soft. On the first page in a flowing script a name was written: Elias.
I flipped through the pages of text and illustrations. Then I glanced down again.
I saw another volume. And another Over a dozen in total.
Then below the codices were papyrus scrolls. At least twice as many.
A ravenous ache seized me, fiercer than the one in my stomach. In an ecstatic trance I grabbed the tomes, one after another. These were more valuable than food, more valuable than water. More valuable than all that Dalia I possessed or had ever earned, and likely would ever earn over a hundred lifetimes. I clutched them tightly to my chest.
But the scrolls. My arms were already burning from the codices. I had no bag and certainly no cart. To leave them for an hour was to lose them forever. My threadbare tunic, though full of holes, came off over my head and as the blazing sun burned my bare back, I laid it on the ground like a blanket and carefully arranged the codices and scrolls in a way that would minimize damage.
I could barely read. Before my father died, he taught me how the alphabet was written and the sounds of the letters. I could read signs on buildings or papyrus fragments if I spent long enough sounding them out. I'd never had an opportunity to practice.
Who knew what treasures lurked in these volumes?
My legs carried me with boundless energy. I didn't go back to the loft. Instead, I clambered up a hidden rocky path into the mountainside, to my cave. My father and I had found it years ago, looking for sticks with which to build a small fire. It had been our secret. After he died, it became my sanctuary. Inside, the cool, slightly moist air was a relief. I laid the codices down with a reverence I'd never felt for any physical object. They rested with my other treasures: the mended jug, the smooth stones, my two precious lenses.
With shaking fingers, I picked a random codex and opened it. The smell of palace dust and old oil greeted me. This book had been cared for at some point. Such a dense, elegant script, and far beyond my meager skills. The illustrations were magnificent. I could see diagrams of buildings I recognized: arches of the aqueducts, the palace, the towers. With my finger, I traced the letters my father had taught me, sounding them out.
Another tome contained diagrams of animal and human anatomy. Skeletons. Lines pointed to heart, lungs, stomach, and other organs, all carefully labeled. I retraced the drawing of the lungs with my finger. Then the muscles, nerves and blood vessels. I'd never though of how intricate the human hand was until I saw the diagram. Lists of medicinal herbs and treatments for every sort of ailment were included in a sequel volume.
The last I had a chance to read samples from one was full of legal statues. The role of the Council of Elders. Criminal and civil statutes that I had never seen enforced. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes my limbs tingled with warmth. Not only could I eventually learn to read fluently, I could spend years studying all this and not know half of it. But I swore to myself, on my parents' graves, that I would savor every morsel of knowledge contained in all this bounty.
The hours disappeared like breath. With my eyes worn out and the daylight fading, I picked the chipped, worn pieces of glass up, fitting one before the other in my hand to form my makeshift telescope. Compared to the books, they were simple glass, but they were mine. I'd pulled them from the same dump years ago. They were my window out of this world.
I peered out at the city, a sprawling collection of chaos. Then, I angled the lenses upward, a canvas of perfect, predictable order. I found an evening star, and held my breath, concentrating to see its shape. Ah, this wasn't the tiny one that hugged the sun, nor the steadfast one that shown a brilliant white. This one was the double. Not a perfect circle, not tonight. It was a slender crescent with shifting whites, just as I had recorded on a pottery shard last week. Inseparable was its smaller pale sibling that seemed to alternate between left and right, always with the same crescent shape as the larger. I scanned for the father star and its four tiny daughters and smiled when I found it, a secret family dancing in the black. They moved every night, following rules I could almost grasp. I had theories, of course, but no knowledge. People in our city didn't talk about the stars. Perhaps these volumes did. I wished I could understand all of it, right now.
A feast for the mind, but nothing to soothe the cries of my empty stomach. One who feeds only his mind and neglects the body risks losing both. I could only hope that Dalia's sparkling eyes and hard work had gotten us another piece of bread or a tuber.
I soon made it home and I was not disappointed. That evening, as Dalia recounted her day at the inn, she coughed. It was a small, dry sound, quickly stifled. But to me, it was as loud as thunder. My fist clenched as my mind flew to the filth around the fountain. What kinds of clothes was she cleaning? I remembered my father's burning skin. The serpentine fear that coiled in my stomach was colder than the cave and more jagged than the rocks. The materials in the cave felt a thousand miles away. All that mattered was the slight, rasping sound from my sister's chest.