The hidden palace, p.26
The Hidden Palace, page 26
Burden? Sophia thought.
“We can reach it by tomorrow morning,” the jinniyeh said. “Would that suffice?”
Sophia gaped. “Tomorrow morning? You can’t be serious!”
The jinniyeh pointed at the luggage. “But we must leave this behind. Take only what you absolutely need.”
“Dima.” Fear clutched at her. “I’ll freeze up there.”
The jinniyeh’s expression did not soften. “And I will exhaust myself. But neither of us will perish.”
Later that morning, a maid who was sweeping the hallway outside Sophia’s room noticed a strange breeze pulling at her ankles. She peered down in confusion as the breeze grew, whipping her skirt about her legs.
The door to Sophia’s room flew open with a bang.
Something fell over and shattered. Dust swirled, stinging the maid’s eyes—and for a moment she thought she saw a whirlwind, and a figure inside it, rising from the balcony beyond.
The wind died away, revealing a room in shambles, its lamps smashed, the curtains torn from the rods. Sophia’s campaign trunk lay tipped upon its side, its contents scattered. Its owner had disappeared without a trace.
The emigrants stood in a line that stretched along Jaffa’s narrow quay.
For days they’d gathered at the port, waiting. Most were European Jews, citizens of the Russian Empire, the ones who’d left the Tsar and his pogroms to build a new homeland in colonies like Tel Aviv and Petah Tikvah. But the war was worsening every day, and their own position had grown more perilous. Some of their neighbors had decided to take Ottoman citizenship; others simply declared that they would put their trust in God. But many had looked to the Ottomans’ treatment of their Armenian subjects—men killed village by village, women and children driven through the desert—and said, Perhaps it will be us next. These were the ones who’d packed their belongings and come to Jaffa to board the U.S.S. Des Moines, a towering wedge of steel among the wooden fishing-dhows, and now waited with their crates and carpet-bags in the morning sun.
The solitary woman who joined the end of their queue seemed to have barely survived some terrible ordeal. She wore a sheepskin coat and heavy shawls, far too warm for the morning, and carried nothing but a leather satchel that she clutched as though it might be torn from her by force. Her face was waxen pale, save for wind-burnt cheeks, and she trembled from head to toe. Are you ill, miss? someone asked her.
Sophia shook her head, but couldn’t speak. She closed her eyes—and she was in the whirlwind again, suspended high above the mountains, the wind slicing to her marrow. She wavered and fell.
At first the jinniyeh didn’t notice. Drained from her own efforts, she hung limply above the émigrés, staring at the curving, foam-capped sea and the unthinkable length of steel that pierced it like a poisoned thorn. How, she wondered, could there be enough iron in the world for such a monstrosity? Was it the only one, or were there more? And Sophia meant for them to travel upon it?
She heard the commotion then, and saw Sophia sprawled upon the ground. Others had gathered around her, and were stripping her of her heavy coat and woolen shawls while Sophia batted at them, her tremor worsening.
I could leave her here, and go back to the Cursed City, the jinniyeh thought as she watched. I could forget that I ever saw her. But the thought was feeble, fleeting. She would ride the monstrous steel ship across the killing waters; she’d find the iron-bound jinni and bring him home again. She had a purpose now, and it was stronger than her fear.
A moment later, a small green gecko landed upon Sophia’s chest and darted beneath her collar, out of sight. An impossible warmth spread outwards from its tiny body.
Within minutes the woman was able to stand again. She thanked the others for their concern, and collected her coat and shawls with hands that hardly shook at all. Only when they’d all taken their places in line again did she dare peek down at the gecko that sat upon her collarbone, staring up at her with one jet-black eye.
The line shuffled forward, and at last they reached the Des Moines’ gangplank. A navy serviceman, no older than nineteen, peered at her mussed braids and meager leather satchel and then at her passport, stained and creased from years of travel. “Winston, huh?” he said with a grin. “Any relation?” And he laughed and waved her through, not waiting for an answer.
She found a place at the rail among the others, many of whom were sobbing, or praying for safe passage. The ship’s horn blasted a warning—beneath Sophia’s shawls, the gecko tightened its grip—and the Des Moines pulled away from the dhows.
Excerpt of letter from T. E. Lawrence to D. G. Hogarth
Cairo War Office, February 1915
You’ll have heard about the recent trouble at the Suez. One almost has to pity the Turks—all that time and preparation made for a poor showing in the end. Of course they’ll be back to have another go, but no one expects anything to come of it.
Here is something unexpected: Last night, whom should I pass in the street but Sophia Williams, the American girl you’ll remember from Carchemish. She’d tried to weather the storm in Syria—I’d thought her more sensible—but gave up and retreated out of Jaffa, by the skin of her teeth. She was in Cairo for the day to outfit herself before sailing for home. I bought her dinner at Shepheard’s, and gave her a bit of money when I left—she seemed to need it. Now she is off to Port Said—and in her wake I feel my confinement more painfully than ever, here in my stifling office with pen in hand from dawn to dusk. Currently I’m at work on a précis about the divisions in Syria’s interior: race, language, tribe, religious feeling. But I doubt that many will read it, and doubt even more that those who do will learn its lessons.
T.E.L.
14.
The morning fog pressed itself upon Little Syria, sneaking through the gaps in the window-panes, weighting the air and dulling the senses. Mothers stood half asleep at their stoves, their pots of rice and lentils threatening to scorch. On Washington Street, the newsboys called out halfheartedly about Allied losses at Gallipoli, German deaths near Verdun.
In the kitchen of the Faddouls’ coffee-house, Maryam warmed the day’s first coffee-pot while Sayeed scooped the beans and cardamom into the grinder.
“I forgot to tell you,” Sayeed said as he worked. “I stopped in at Faris and Habiba’s yesterday, when I was in South Ferry. They told me they’re moving to Detroit. There’s a grandchild on the way.”
“Oh, how wonderful! Habiba will be such a happy grandmother. But—what about the restaurant?”
“They’ll have to sell it, or find someone to take over the lease. He asked if we were interested.”
Maryam glanced at her husband, startled. Was he suggesting that they move to Brooklyn? “What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know, myself—but that I’d ask you.” His eyes were on his work, but she could read his worry for her as clearly as if he’d spoken it aloud: How long can you go on like this?
A pause. Then, “No,” Maryam said. “It’s a lovely thought, but no.”
“It’s a good location,” he said quietly.
“It is. And someone will be lucky to have it.” She glanced at the clock. “It’s time. I’ll get the door.” She squeezed Sayeed’s arm as she left: an acknowledgment of his concern, and a plea for understanding. Away from his eyes, she took a deep breath and crossed herself, then unlocked the door and turned the sign from Closed to Open.
The first customers trickled in, yawning and sighing as they sat. Chair-legs squeaked against the floor. Maryam walked from table to table, pouring, smiling, listening. Gossip was shared more quietly these days, thanks to the war. Few felt comfortable bragging of success, or grumbling over a minor misfortune, when so many of their loved ones were in peril. The Mediterranean blockade had stretched the villages of Lebanon to the breaking point. The remnants of last year’s harvests had all been sent to the Imperial supply lines—and now, just as the spring crops began to ripen, came news of locust swarms unlike anything seen in a generation. They flew in clouds that blocked the sun, fell upon fields and stripped them bare in minutes. It seemed clear that no matter how much money Little Syria’s residents managed to send home, no matter how many coins they added to the collection plates, it wouldn’t be enough to ward off starvation.
They spoke little of it, among themselves. It was too difficult to talk about, too weighted with guilt and worry and helplessness. Instead they turned to matters of the neighborhood, and vented their frustrations there—which meant that Maryam didn’t have to listen for long before she caught the word Bedouin as it flew past her, flashing like a silver bird.
She angled toward its origin, a table in the corner, listening as she approached:
It’s been three years now. How long will he let the Amherst sit empty?
It’s a waste, and an eyesore, with all the windows papered over like that.
One might be forgiven for thinking he was up to no good in there—
And then Maryam arrived and refilled their cups, and asked if they’d heard that Faris and Habiba Mokarzel had decided to move to Detroit. Who, she wondered, would be left to run their restaurant? It was a good location, and it would be a shame to lose such a successful business. But then, perhaps someone would offer to buy it from them. With that, she danced away again while the men sat back, pondering the idea.
So went Maryam’s vigil each day, as she sought out each whisper, deftly uprooted it, and planted something else in its place. But the strain had taken its toll. Worry and fatigue dimmed her spirit. When she looked in the mirror, she saw new creases in her brow, new threads of silver advancing through her hair. But she couldn’t rest, she simply couldn’t—not when the Amherst exerted such a pull on the neighborhood’s imagination.
Since Boutros’ death, the building had taken on a new and foreboding personality. All the windows were covered over with butcher paper, five floors’ worth, from top to bottom. Groans and creaks rose at times from the depths, and the occasional muffled reverberation. The chimney-top still shimmered with heat, and snow that landed on the rooftop melted instantly, even in the coldest winter. Delivery trucks came monthly with their coal and ore, but there were no visitors, no customers—only its sole resident, a moving silhouette glimpsed occasionally at night, through the papered windows.
It was the most tantalizing of mysteries, and only natural that Little Syria should whisper about it—but what would happen if she allowed the whispers to spread? Her neighbors, powerless to stop a war elsewhere, would invent a battle nearby that they thought they could win. They’d convince themselves that the Amherst was a danger and its owner their enemy; they’d force their way inside and confront him—and then what? There was no way of knowing. No one had spoken to the man in years. The Golem, too, had vanished. Occasionally Maryam thought of the broken concrete in the alley behind the Amherst, and wondered what had happened between them—but she didn’t linger upon such thoughts for long. Their world and its considerations, she’d decided, were not hers to influence or understand. She would instead concentrate on her loved ones, and protect them from the danger that they would otherwise insist on rousing.
The Amherst’s owner, the man who’d caused so much consternation, stood at the forge with his hands buried in fire to the wrists, and looked up at what his building had become.
It was no longer a factory loft, not by any stretch of the imagination. The floors themselves had long since vanished, and the stairwell enclosure too: the boards ripped apart, the joists burned to ash, the plaster walls demolished, the stairs uncoupled weld by weld. In the months after Arbeely’s death he’d torn down every bit of the interior he deemed unnecessary, every pipe and wire and conduit, until all that was left was the support columns, a grid of brick pillars rising through five stories of empty air. Ready, at last, for his true work to begin.
It had taken him some time to settle on a design. Perhaps he couldn’t build his river-pebble of steel and slag, not yet; he had only the Amherst, and its boundaries suggested a different purpose. He thought of his glass palace, abandoned in its desert valley. The necklaces he’d once made, with their silver wires and discs of colored glass. The Pennsylvania Station concourse, its arches that shaped the sky beyond. The steel pebble, with its suggestion of a building without corners. He’d fuse them all together and create something entirely new, the first and only one of its kind.
The central column came first. He crushed the iron ore a handful at a time and reinforced the middlemost support pillar with steel, smoothing it onto the brick, building it up one layer at a time. He developed a feel for the mix of iron to carbon, adjusting its strength and pliancy as he went. The slag he set aside for later, a hill of glass growing slowly beside the forge. Inch by inch the steel ascended—and as he strengthened the column, he encircled it with a spiral staircase that grew rung by rung as he needed it. Whenever his body grew too cool to work the metal, he descended to the forge to warm himself, then went back up again, rising through the empty building.
When at last he reached the top, he began the arches.
They branched outward from the column, reaching up to form trusses that held the weight of the roof, then down again to hide the roof’s corners behind their iron curves. Where the trusses met the walls, he fit hidden bolts that sent the weight of the steel down through the bricks and into the bedrock.
He worked in midair, upon a slender iron scaffold, a five-story drop at his back. Days and nights went uncounted, unnoticed. The filtered sunlight entered first one set of windows, then another. His life was heat and movement; his thoughts were in the sounds of flame and wind as much as human words. The forge sustained him, it was his companion and his storyteller, whispering to him from his past. Once there was a jinni who was injured in a storm, and took shelter inside a Bedu’s cooking-fire. Once there was an imp who tricked a wizard into falling in love with a horse.
When at last the arches were in place, he removed the rest of the support columns, tearing them down brick by brick. It was an agonizing process, and at each moment he expected the awful shifting groan that would mean he’d taxed the building beyond its limits. But the central column and its arches held steady; the iron bore the weight.
Then, he began the platforms.
Each was a steel disc roughly fifty feet in diameter, cantilevered out from the central column and held up by curving trusses. There were eight of them in total, and they rose around the column in a helix, each one making a curved half-roof for the next. When he stood at the top and looked down, they were a series of moons that spiraled away beneath him, filling the void with shining steel.
There was still much to be done. The hill of slag, growing beside the forge: he would melt it down, turn it into panes of glass, and then fit them in the spaces between the arches, a second roof snug inside the first. He’d run electricity up the central column, hang lanterns and fairy-lights from the platforms’ edges, create hanging sculptures that soared through the open air. There were any number of alterations he might make—enough to occupy his mind fully, and leave room for nothing else.
* * *
In the Culinary Science classroom at the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews, twelve girls in pressed white coats and hats stood eagerly around a rectangular island of countertop, each at her own place.
“Your attention, ladies,” their teacher said. “Today, each of you will prepare and stuff a chicken for roasting. The recipe is on the blackboard. Please take a moment to review it.”
The girls all looked to the blackboard, and read:
Roast Chicken with Stuffing
Singe bird.
Cut off head and remove any pinfeathers.
Remove feet and tendons.
Cut off neck, leaving skin intact.
Remove entrails and giblets.
Melt fat and mix with crushed crackers.
Stuff the bird.
“The main ingredients are before you, as you can see.”
The girls now turned their attention to the cutting-boards on the countertops, one for each girl, and the plucked chickens that sat atop them, stray bits of fluff still clinging to their flesh.
“You have thirty minutes to complete the recipe, and your success will depend on how well you manage that time. Which begins”—she glanced at the clock—“Now.”
For a long moment no one moved. Another teacher might have reminded them of the ticking clock, and scolded them into action. But she only examined them calmly, with all her senses. They were fearful, excited, but also disgusted by the raw birds: their yellowish skins, their wrinkled, reptilian faces.
The silence stretched. Their teacher waited. She had faith in her students. They would master their fears, and begin.
At last one of the girls lit her oil burner, grasped her chicken with both hands, and hoisted it above the flame. One by one the others gathered their courage and did the same, turning the birds evenly above the burners. The room filled with the acrid smell of burning feathers.
Now their teacher began her customary clockwise stroll around the island, assessing their progress, making notes on her clipboard. She had no true need for the notes, or the clipboard, but it was a useful prop nonetheless. It reassured the girls that cooking was a skill, to be learned like any other—not some secret art that could only be gleaned in a loving home, at a mother’s side.
There were scattered thunks as the girls took up their cleavers and unburdened the chickens of their heads. One girl already had advanced to step three; she laid one spindly orange foot across the edge of the counter, then gripped it, steeled herself, and jerked downward. There was a loud snap, and the foot came away trailing its ribbon of tendon. The girl burst into horrified giggles.
The others looked up, startled. Their teacher frowned. “Maddie.”
“Sorry, Miss Levy.” The girl composed herself, and removed the second foot with more dignity.
Their teacher kept her slow pace around them, judging their progress. One girl had wandered into a daydream, not realizing that she was about to slice through the chicken’s neck without first pulling back the skin. Ought she to intervene? No, better to let it happen. The lesson would be useful. They moved on to the stuffing, melting yellow cupfuls of chicken fat over the burners, pouring them into bowls of crushed crackers—and now the one who’d made the mistake realized it at last. She stared down at her bird; tears welled in her eyes. “Miss Levy?”
“We can reach it by tomorrow morning,” the jinniyeh said. “Would that suffice?”
Sophia gaped. “Tomorrow morning? You can’t be serious!”
The jinniyeh pointed at the luggage. “But we must leave this behind. Take only what you absolutely need.”
“Dima.” Fear clutched at her. “I’ll freeze up there.”
The jinniyeh’s expression did not soften. “And I will exhaust myself. But neither of us will perish.”
Later that morning, a maid who was sweeping the hallway outside Sophia’s room noticed a strange breeze pulling at her ankles. She peered down in confusion as the breeze grew, whipping her skirt about her legs.
The door to Sophia’s room flew open with a bang.
Something fell over and shattered. Dust swirled, stinging the maid’s eyes—and for a moment she thought she saw a whirlwind, and a figure inside it, rising from the balcony beyond.
The wind died away, revealing a room in shambles, its lamps smashed, the curtains torn from the rods. Sophia’s campaign trunk lay tipped upon its side, its contents scattered. Its owner had disappeared without a trace.
The emigrants stood in a line that stretched along Jaffa’s narrow quay.
For days they’d gathered at the port, waiting. Most were European Jews, citizens of the Russian Empire, the ones who’d left the Tsar and his pogroms to build a new homeland in colonies like Tel Aviv and Petah Tikvah. But the war was worsening every day, and their own position had grown more perilous. Some of their neighbors had decided to take Ottoman citizenship; others simply declared that they would put their trust in God. But many had looked to the Ottomans’ treatment of their Armenian subjects—men killed village by village, women and children driven through the desert—and said, Perhaps it will be us next. These were the ones who’d packed their belongings and come to Jaffa to board the U.S.S. Des Moines, a towering wedge of steel among the wooden fishing-dhows, and now waited with their crates and carpet-bags in the morning sun.
The solitary woman who joined the end of their queue seemed to have barely survived some terrible ordeal. She wore a sheepskin coat and heavy shawls, far too warm for the morning, and carried nothing but a leather satchel that she clutched as though it might be torn from her by force. Her face was waxen pale, save for wind-burnt cheeks, and she trembled from head to toe. Are you ill, miss? someone asked her.
Sophia shook her head, but couldn’t speak. She closed her eyes—and she was in the whirlwind again, suspended high above the mountains, the wind slicing to her marrow. She wavered and fell.
At first the jinniyeh didn’t notice. Drained from her own efforts, she hung limply above the émigrés, staring at the curving, foam-capped sea and the unthinkable length of steel that pierced it like a poisoned thorn. How, she wondered, could there be enough iron in the world for such a monstrosity? Was it the only one, or were there more? And Sophia meant for them to travel upon it?
She heard the commotion then, and saw Sophia sprawled upon the ground. Others had gathered around her, and were stripping her of her heavy coat and woolen shawls while Sophia batted at them, her tremor worsening.
I could leave her here, and go back to the Cursed City, the jinniyeh thought as she watched. I could forget that I ever saw her. But the thought was feeble, fleeting. She would ride the monstrous steel ship across the killing waters; she’d find the iron-bound jinni and bring him home again. She had a purpose now, and it was stronger than her fear.
A moment later, a small green gecko landed upon Sophia’s chest and darted beneath her collar, out of sight. An impossible warmth spread outwards from its tiny body.
Within minutes the woman was able to stand again. She thanked the others for their concern, and collected her coat and shawls with hands that hardly shook at all. Only when they’d all taken their places in line again did she dare peek down at the gecko that sat upon her collarbone, staring up at her with one jet-black eye.
The line shuffled forward, and at last they reached the Des Moines’ gangplank. A navy serviceman, no older than nineteen, peered at her mussed braids and meager leather satchel and then at her passport, stained and creased from years of travel. “Winston, huh?” he said with a grin. “Any relation?” And he laughed and waved her through, not waiting for an answer.
She found a place at the rail among the others, many of whom were sobbing, or praying for safe passage. The ship’s horn blasted a warning—beneath Sophia’s shawls, the gecko tightened its grip—and the Des Moines pulled away from the dhows.
Excerpt of letter from T. E. Lawrence to D. G. Hogarth
Cairo War Office, February 1915
You’ll have heard about the recent trouble at the Suez. One almost has to pity the Turks—all that time and preparation made for a poor showing in the end. Of course they’ll be back to have another go, but no one expects anything to come of it.
Here is something unexpected: Last night, whom should I pass in the street but Sophia Williams, the American girl you’ll remember from Carchemish. She’d tried to weather the storm in Syria—I’d thought her more sensible—but gave up and retreated out of Jaffa, by the skin of her teeth. She was in Cairo for the day to outfit herself before sailing for home. I bought her dinner at Shepheard’s, and gave her a bit of money when I left—she seemed to need it. Now she is off to Port Said—and in her wake I feel my confinement more painfully than ever, here in my stifling office with pen in hand from dawn to dusk. Currently I’m at work on a précis about the divisions in Syria’s interior: race, language, tribe, religious feeling. But I doubt that many will read it, and doubt even more that those who do will learn its lessons.
T.E.L.
14.
The morning fog pressed itself upon Little Syria, sneaking through the gaps in the window-panes, weighting the air and dulling the senses. Mothers stood half asleep at their stoves, their pots of rice and lentils threatening to scorch. On Washington Street, the newsboys called out halfheartedly about Allied losses at Gallipoli, German deaths near Verdun.
In the kitchen of the Faddouls’ coffee-house, Maryam warmed the day’s first coffee-pot while Sayeed scooped the beans and cardamom into the grinder.
“I forgot to tell you,” Sayeed said as he worked. “I stopped in at Faris and Habiba’s yesterday, when I was in South Ferry. They told me they’re moving to Detroit. There’s a grandchild on the way.”
“Oh, how wonderful! Habiba will be such a happy grandmother. But—what about the restaurant?”
“They’ll have to sell it, or find someone to take over the lease. He asked if we were interested.”
Maryam glanced at her husband, startled. Was he suggesting that they move to Brooklyn? “What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know, myself—but that I’d ask you.” His eyes were on his work, but she could read his worry for her as clearly as if he’d spoken it aloud: How long can you go on like this?
A pause. Then, “No,” Maryam said. “It’s a lovely thought, but no.”
“It’s a good location,” he said quietly.
“It is. And someone will be lucky to have it.” She glanced at the clock. “It’s time. I’ll get the door.” She squeezed Sayeed’s arm as she left: an acknowledgment of his concern, and a plea for understanding. Away from his eyes, she took a deep breath and crossed herself, then unlocked the door and turned the sign from Closed to Open.
The first customers trickled in, yawning and sighing as they sat. Chair-legs squeaked against the floor. Maryam walked from table to table, pouring, smiling, listening. Gossip was shared more quietly these days, thanks to the war. Few felt comfortable bragging of success, or grumbling over a minor misfortune, when so many of their loved ones were in peril. The Mediterranean blockade had stretched the villages of Lebanon to the breaking point. The remnants of last year’s harvests had all been sent to the Imperial supply lines—and now, just as the spring crops began to ripen, came news of locust swarms unlike anything seen in a generation. They flew in clouds that blocked the sun, fell upon fields and stripped them bare in minutes. It seemed clear that no matter how much money Little Syria’s residents managed to send home, no matter how many coins they added to the collection plates, it wouldn’t be enough to ward off starvation.
They spoke little of it, among themselves. It was too difficult to talk about, too weighted with guilt and worry and helplessness. Instead they turned to matters of the neighborhood, and vented their frustrations there—which meant that Maryam didn’t have to listen for long before she caught the word Bedouin as it flew past her, flashing like a silver bird.
She angled toward its origin, a table in the corner, listening as she approached:
It’s been three years now. How long will he let the Amherst sit empty?
It’s a waste, and an eyesore, with all the windows papered over like that.
One might be forgiven for thinking he was up to no good in there—
And then Maryam arrived and refilled their cups, and asked if they’d heard that Faris and Habiba Mokarzel had decided to move to Detroit. Who, she wondered, would be left to run their restaurant? It was a good location, and it would be a shame to lose such a successful business. But then, perhaps someone would offer to buy it from them. With that, she danced away again while the men sat back, pondering the idea.
So went Maryam’s vigil each day, as she sought out each whisper, deftly uprooted it, and planted something else in its place. But the strain had taken its toll. Worry and fatigue dimmed her spirit. When she looked in the mirror, she saw new creases in her brow, new threads of silver advancing through her hair. But she couldn’t rest, she simply couldn’t—not when the Amherst exerted such a pull on the neighborhood’s imagination.
Since Boutros’ death, the building had taken on a new and foreboding personality. All the windows were covered over with butcher paper, five floors’ worth, from top to bottom. Groans and creaks rose at times from the depths, and the occasional muffled reverberation. The chimney-top still shimmered with heat, and snow that landed on the rooftop melted instantly, even in the coldest winter. Delivery trucks came monthly with their coal and ore, but there were no visitors, no customers—only its sole resident, a moving silhouette glimpsed occasionally at night, through the papered windows.
It was the most tantalizing of mysteries, and only natural that Little Syria should whisper about it—but what would happen if she allowed the whispers to spread? Her neighbors, powerless to stop a war elsewhere, would invent a battle nearby that they thought they could win. They’d convince themselves that the Amherst was a danger and its owner their enemy; they’d force their way inside and confront him—and then what? There was no way of knowing. No one had spoken to the man in years. The Golem, too, had vanished. Occasionally Maryam thought of the broken concrete in the alley behind the Amherst, and wondered what had happened between them—but she didn’t linger upon such thoughts for long. Their world and its considerations, she’d decided, were not hers to influence or understand. She would instead concentrate on her loved ones, and protect them from the danger that they would otherwise insist on rousing.
The Amherst’s owner, the man who’d caused so much consternation, stood at the forge with his hands buried in fire to the wrists, and looked up at what his building had become.
It was no longer a factory loft, not by any stretch of the imagination. The floors themselves had long since vanished, and the stairwell enclosure too: the boards ripped apart, the joists burned to ash, the plaster walls demolished, the stairs uncoupled weld by weld. In the months after Arbeely’s death he’d torn down every bit of the interior he deemed unnecessary, every pipe and wire and conduit, until all that was left was the support columns, a grid of brick pillars rising through five stories of empty air. Ready, at last, for his true work to begin.
It had taken him some time to settle on a design. Perhaps he couldn’t build his river-pebble of steel and slag, not yet; he had only the Amherst, and its boundaries suggested a different purpose. He thought of his glass palace, abandoned in its desert valley. The necklaces he’d once made, with their silver wires and discs of colored glass. The Pennsylvania Station concourse, its arches that shaped the sky beyond. The steel pebble, with its suggestion of a building without corners. He’d fuse them all together and create something entirely new, the first and only one of its kind.
The central column came first. He crushed the iron ore a handful at a time and reinforced the middlemost support pillar with steel, smoothing it onto the brick, building it up one layer at a time. He developed a feel for the mix of iron to carbon, adjusting its strength and pliancy as he went. The slag he set aside for later, a hill of glass growing slowly beside the forge. Inch by inch the steel ascended—and as he strengthened the column, he encircled it with a spiral staircase that grew rung by rung as he needed it. Whenever his body grew too cool to work the metal, he descended to the forge to warm himself, then went back up again, rising through the empty building.
When at last he reached the top, he began the arches.
They branched outward from the column, reaching up to form trusses that held the weight of the roof, then down again to hide the roof’s corners behind their iron curves. Where the trusses met the walls, he fit hidden bolts that sent the weight of the steel down through the bricks and into the bedrock.
He worked in midair, upon a slender iron scaffold, a five-story drop at his back. Days and nights went uncounted, unnoticed. The filtered sunlight entered first one set of windows, then another. His life was heat and movement; his thoughts were in the sounds of flame and wind as much as human words. The forge sustained him, it was his companion and his storyteller, whispering to him from his past. Once there was a jinni who was injured in a storm, and took shelter inside a Bedu’s cooking-fire. Once there was an imp who tricked a wizard into falling in love with a horse.
When at last the arches were in place, he removed the rest of the support columns, tearing them down brick by brick. It was an agonizing process, and at each moment he expected the awful shifting groan that would mean he’d taxed the building beyond its limits. But the central column and its arches held steady; the iron bore the weight.
Then, he began the platforms.
Each was a steel disc roughly fifty feet in diameter, cantilevered out from the central column and held up by curving trusses. There were eight of them in total, and they rose around the column in a helix, each one making a curved half-roof for the next. When he stood at the top and looked down, they were a series of moons that spiraled away beneath him, filling the void with shining steel.
There was still much to be done. The hill of slag, growing beside the forge: he would melt it down, turn it into panes of glass, and then fit them in the spaces between the arches, a second roof snug inside the first. He’d run electricity up the central column, hang lanterns and fairy-lights from the platforms’ edges, create hanging sculptures that soared through the open air. There were any number of alterations he might make—enough to occupy his mind fully, and leave room for nothing else.
* * *
In the Culinary Science classroom at the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews, twelve girls in pressed white coats and hats stood eagerly around a rectangular island of countertop, each at her own place.
“Your attention, ladies,” their teacher said. “Today, each of you will prepare and stuff a chicken for roasting. The recipe is on the blackboard. Please take a moment to review it.”
The girls all looked to the blackboard, and read:
Roast Chicken with Stuffing
Singe bird.
Cut off head and remove any pinfeathers.
Remove feet and tendons.
Cut off neck, leaving skin intact.
Remove entrails and giblets.
Melt fat and mix with crushed crackers.
Stuff the bird.
“The main ingredients are before you, as you can see.”
The girls now turned their attention to the cutting-boards on the countertops, one for each girl, and the plucked chickens that sat atop them, stray bits of fluff still clinging to their flesh.
“You have thirty minutes to complete the recipe, and your success will depend on how well you manage that time. Which begins”—she glanced at the clock—“Now.”
For a long moment no one moved. Another teacher might have reminded them of the ticking clock, and scolded them into action. But she only examined them calmly, with all her senses. They were fearful, excited, but also disgusted by the raw birds: their yellowish skins, their wrinkled, reptilian faces.
The silence stretched. Their teacher waited. She had faith in her students. They would master their fears, and begin.
At last one of the girls lit her oil burner, grasped her chicken with both hands, and hoisted it above the flame. One by one the others gathered their courage and did the same, turning the birds evenly above the burners. The room filled with the acrid smell of burning feathers.
Now their teacher began her customary clockwise stroll around the island, assessing their progress, making notes on her clipboard. She had no true need for the notes, or the clipboard, but it was a useful prop nonetheless. It reassured the girls that cooking was a skill, to be learned like any other—not some secret art that could only be gleaned in a loving home, at a mother’s side.
There were scattered thunks as the girls took up their cleavers and unburdened the chickens of their heads. One girl already had advanced to step three; she laid one spindly orange foot across the edge of the counter, then gripped it, steeled herself, and jerked downward. There was a loud snap, and the foot came away trailing its ribbon of tendon. The girl burst into horrified giggles.
The others looked up, startled. Their teacher frowned. “Maddie.”
“Sorry, Miss Levy.” The girl composed herself, and removed the second foot with more dignity.
Their teacher kept her slow pace around them, judging their progress. One girl had wandered into a daydream, not realizing that she was about to slice through the chicken’s neck without first pulling back the skin. Ought she to intervene? No, better to let it happen. The lesson would be useful. They moved on to the stuffing, melting yellow cupfuls of chicken fat over the burners, pouring them into bowls of crushed crackers—and now the one who’d made the mistake realized it at last. She stared down at her bird; tears welled in her eyes. “Miss Levy?”
