It was dark as Ezra drove back to Kaş. Gold lights shimmered and gleamed along the hills, reflecting in the black waters below as we drove out of Bodrum. This stunning seaside city was just as beautiful at night.
Ezra sped around each curve with confidence. His caution was lost with his mortality. My mortality was still fresh, and I kept tensing nervously with each turn. Ezra just grinned at me as he sped around another corner, punching the accelerator.
I decided to ignore the terrorizing drive by distracting myself. I turned on the interior light and sorted through Esther's mail. Most of it looked like junk. Ads, a cell phone bill, magazines, and slips of paper with handwritten numbers in designated spaces. Those must be utility bills. I recognized similar notices from the time I lived in Hungary. When I pulled out the large yellow envelope, I stopped, interested. The return address was from Texas. The letterhead above the return address showed a double helix with the title Family Tree DNA. I searched through the other envelopes and found what I was looking for. The same logo was on a small business envelope. I opened it and found a pay stub inside.
"Esther was working for a DNA research company in Texas."
"Hmmm... Then why was she living in Turkey?"
I opened the large envelope and pulled out three bundles of papers, each paper clipped separately. On top of the first bundle, there was a large post-it with a handwritten note.
I tilted the page to catch the light and read it aloud, "All three are the same as the others. Kaja shows the new marker Elke found. We were right, he is the source for region two." I looked at Ezra. "Is... does... does this mean what I think it means? Source... as in the first?"
"The first? The first what, Avati? Who is? And what is region two?"
I pulled the post-it off and stuck it to the dashboard. The first bundle of papers had Leif's name at the top. The next had mine, and the last had Ezra's. "They are DNA tests for us. Leif, too." I flipped through the pages, scanning the report on Leif. "How the hell did she get our DNA?"
I seethed between clamped teeth. She stalked
me, kidnapped me, tried to kill me, and now she stole my DNA. I felt so violated. My heart pounded as I sat rigid, staring out the windshield with my fingers clenched. Esther... there was so much revolving around one tiny person. I hated her... I wanted so much to hate her.
I felt Ezra's warm fingers wrap around my tight fist and unclenched my fingers. He stroked my wrist, trying to soothe me then shot a quick glance in my direction before returning his attention to the meandering road.
Sluggish rain fell to the ground as if it was unwillingly leaving the sky. Ezra ran toward me, his face full of rage, wearing armor made of thick leather. His hair was long and coarsely matted, dripping with rain. What skin I could see was covered with stripes of blue and black paint.
Behind him were hills of grass. The land was empty of everything but grass and rain. He continued toward a ravine, feet pounding, sending droplets of water up to splatter against his legs. From behind, I saw a longbow slung over his back and a quiver of arrows tied to his waist.
I ran after him. I wondered idly why I could feel cold rainwater dripping down my face but didn't have time to ponder it. Ezra approached a rope bridge but didn't slow down his stride. I stood at the edge, watching his feet pounded against the wood slats as the ropes swung like a pendulum. Suddenly the cables snapped. Ezra's feet flew out from underneath him, and he dropped backwards, colliding with the wooden boards. Ezra plummeted silently toward the ravine bottom. Something tugged at my navel.
"What does it say?" Ezra asked. I snapped out of the vision. It was just as well; I was morbidly curious and didn't want to see any more at the same time. I looked at the papers in my hands, confused for a moment.
"This first one is Leif's. It says 'autosomal markers were analyzed and revealed his principal ancestral lines are European, notably Icelandic, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, and German. There is also Croatian, Hungarian, Czech, Middle Eastern— notably Turkish and Armenian, and Jewish. Autosomal markers also determined a positive ancestral link to subject 020.'"
I flipped through a couple pages. "There are a lot of charts and tables with codes I don't understand."
"Fantastic. Leif will be thrilled to know this."
"Let's see..." I flipped Leif's pages over and pulled out mine. "I am European... go figure... German, Dutch, Highlands Scottish, Swiss, Hungarian, Czech, and Russian. There is also Middle Eastern— notably Turkish and Armenian, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Sub-Saharan African." Okay, that's interesting, I thought, inwardly delighted. "'Autosomal markers also determined a positive ancestral link to subject 020.' What is subject 020?"
Ezra shrugged and shook his head. I turned to the next page filled with codes in various colored boxes. Someone had gone in and highlighted a code halfway down the page and wrote a question mark next to it. I turned back to the first page and reread it. My eyes drifted up to the post-it on the dashboard and then back down to the page.
"Oh..." I said startled. "Oh..."
"What?"
"There are four clusters of Avati. If you follow the migratory patterns of humans out of Africa, the Middle East would be the second cluster."
"And from the Middle East people traveled either up into Europe or east to Asia. You think region two is the Middle East?"
"And Europe, yes. If the regions are the various clusters then it's perfectly situated to link Europe with the East." My mind was whirling. Ezra frowned deeper.
"What does my DNA report say?" he asked.
I pulled his report out. "Okay. There are a lot of codes I don't understand. It says you are Turkish, Berber, Armenian, Iranian, and Egyptian. It says there is also some Bulgarian, and Romanian as well as Sub-Saharan African." I set the paper down on my lap. "It seems strange to name all of these countries when none of them existed yet."
"It's hard for me sometimes not to refer to the old names for places. For the longest time, France was just Gaul and filled with Celts."
"What do you think of America as?"
He laughed. "America is still too young for me to think of it as anything." He switched gears suddenly. "Does it say anything about an ancestral link to subject 020?"
I scanned the rest of the documents. "No."
Ezra drove quietly for some time. I watched for the occasional light flickering distantly across the sea. The golden lights seemed to be swallowed by the horizon's darkness. "Why?" I whispered to the window.
"What?"
"Why? What's the point? We've stumbled onto some sort of Avati genome project. But what does this knowledge do? What does all this research accomplish?"
"I don't know. Maybe they are trying to isolate the Avati gene. Or maybe it's not a genome project. Maybe it's just a census."
I considered that. But then what does a census achieve?
Outside the window, the sea saturated in black continued to grow ever darker, a swirling absence of light, until it suddenly reversed roles and became steadily warmer. Black turned to charcoal and then to indigo. My eyes dropped just as golden rays peaked over the horizon.
I stumbled sleepily through the house to the second floor, ignoring Ezra's jibes at my "zombie walk." I managed to crawl out of my jeans before collapsing across the bed. I was asleep almost instantly, relaxing and molding into the soft mattress.
When I woke the light spilling in through the windows was opaque. I must have been asleep for hours, past the day and into dusk and my body wasn't fully ready to move yet. I rolled into my side, curling softly into myself and pulled the sheets over my head. I thought of my grandfather reading me stories of Bába Yaga, and how I'd imagined her house looked as it darted through the forest on chicken legs. I wondered if Bába had an Avati counterpart or merely generations of stories demoralizing unwanted and scorned old women who no longer found themselves useful. If there was an Avati counterpart was it the old hag we tell stories of or the nubile young woman I saw in the etching all those months ago. Was that really only a few months ago?
Then I thought about the map on Esther's wall. Which name was Bába? Which names were the true identities of heroes and villains I'd grown up with? I thought of Esther's easy tinkling laugh on the video and how cold her fingers were wrapped around my throat as she tried to kill me. I shook my head to clear my mind and crawled out of bed. I pulled on a pair of yoga pants and shuffled downstairs to look for Ezra.
He was in the Great Room, bent over the coffee table with a couple scrolls rolled out in front of him, and a glass of wine resting next to him. He looked up and smiled lazily as I walked down the stairs, my fingers trailing along the banister. My heart fluttered lightly as he leaned back against the white sofa and watched me continue down the stairs and across the room toward him. His smile broadened. Ezra had never confirmed my suspicions, but I was sure he could hear every pulse of my heart.
"How long was I asleep?"
"More than ten hours. I'm surprised you made it to the bedroom at all."
"I guess I'll never be a surgeon. I don't function well without sleep."
Ezra shook his head sympathetically as he automatically poured a glass of wine for me. "Another career ambition shot down in its prime. Pity." Ezra's phone rang just as he was about to say something else. He reached for the phone and looked at the screen. "It's Wu," he said suddenly perking up.
"I'm here. I can send you a photo." Clearly, the conversation had been going on for hours. My attention turned to the table in front of him. There were several scrolls opened, and a stack of half a dozen piled on top of each other. They were handwritten timelines with short descriptions at various points. The head of the scroll read Cykal, 5,200 BC with a question mark after it. Cykal? Was that a man or a woman? Beneath the name, it said Montenegro, pre-Turdaș-Vinča.
For a moment, I thought how odd it seemed that she used all the modern names for places. Esther had made herself into, what looked to me, a formidable anthropologist. I'd always had an interest in history, but I could only guess that the Turdaș-Vinča was yet one more ancient culture I'd never heard of.
In front of the pile of scrolls, closest to Ezra was a single timeline weighted down on the corners to keep it flat. The name at the top was Hattu. I moved over and sat next to Ezra curious about the girl with the vivid hazel eyes and heart-shaped face. It was difficult to imagine her more than the sweet and disarming girl from the photos I'd seen. But the thousands of years I could see displayed along the timeline told a different story.
Next to Hattu's name Esther had written Van? Eastern Anatolia. What did Van mean? The word slave sporadically littered the earliest parts of Hattu's timeline, beginning nearly a thousand years from the first entry. That surprised me. From everything I'd read and Ezra's descriptions, I had expected her life as a slave to begin almost immediately. When did slavery become common? One of the earliest marks on the timeline listed her as a 'challenge concubine, two years' to a man named Akkumajur in Mureybet. Tucked in parenthesis after Mureybet, Esther had written Northern Syria. That must have been the man she was traveling with when Ezra first met her. Beneath challenge concubine, Esther wrote first wife, twelve years.
Incredibly it seemed Hattu was a concubine to this man and then somehow became his wife. First wife, I supposed that meant there were others after her. Or maybe before her, and she was the highest-ranked.
I imagined a tall leather-clad man with deep bronze skin and wild hair falling down his back.
What was her life as a concubine like? Did she become his wife willingly? Did she have a choice? Each option seemed just as fascinating as the other.
After her life with Akkumajur, Hattu traveled North through Turkey and Armenia, rounded the Black Sea and headed into Europe, where she had spent most of her life. The timeline mostly discussed the types of villages where she lived for the first couple thousand years. Then as she moved further west, it became more detailed. For several thousand years she lived as some kind of priestess mostly in the Balkans and central Europe.
"Wu should be able to find it," Ezra said as he shuffled toward his laptop. He was still on the phone and must have switched to talk with Ása. He mentioned the name Akakios and Asclepius a couple times.
I noticed Ezra had already hung the map pilfered from Esther's collection on one of the walls. None of the pins had been replaced yet. I picked up my phone and began placing pins into their proper places. It was a slow and methodical process. I had taken nearly a dozen photographs of the spread of pins before we left Esther's house. I had to zoom in on every single photograph hundreds of times to get the exact placement of the names. Hattu was placed in the Middle Eastern cluster in a city named Van in Eastern Turkey. There was a large lake nearby. I could imagine that was why her people had chosen to settle there.
After I had more than half the pins in place, I realized the room had grown quiet. I turned to see Ezra watching me. When he saw me watching him, he crossed the floor and started helping with the pins. The names of the people were strange and exotic... Sargon, Lejka, Gashansunu, and Menexinos. Every once in a while, Ezra would stop and fix a long stare at a name and tell me a bit about the person he knew or rumors he'd heard.
I moved over to North and South America and began replacing pins. It took some time searching through the pins to find the right ones. I found a pin labelled Hatuey Naar J1 and stuck it in Haiti. The first pin I replaced in Virginia said Benjamin Falkner J2. The second pin read Ambrose Falkner J2.
Brothers?
"What is a challenge concubine?"
Ezra's eyebrows jumped and wrinkled his forehead.
"That was one of the names we used to call men and women who were stolen or won during battle."
"Men and women?"
"Of course. Men, or boys usually, were used just as often for sex as women. No more or less than they are today." Yes, naturally, I'd read all about that, but I suppose I was used to thinking of a concubine only in terms of women. I had visions of harems of women waiting idly for their master to call.
I thought about the other part of his statement. "Stolen?"
"An efficient way of acquiring a woman when one isn't otherwise available. Like the Romans and the Sabine women."
"But they kidnapped those women and made them their wives."
He shrugged, "Wife... concubine... same difference." I scowled at him. A concubine wasn't a wife. He ignored my scowl. "In some places, a concubine had the same status as a wife. In other places, she had the status of a slave. In the end, her job was the same, to service his bed and give birth to his children, ideally sons." Ezra looked at my horrified expression and sighed. "That was their job, their purpose in life, and they did it."
And if she didn't want to service his bed... it didn't take much imagination to know how that would turn out. He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. "It didn't matter what they wanted. Nobody would have asked, and if they did, nobody would have cared." Ezra could read my face as easily as if I had said what I was thinking.
I fumed for a minute, then moved the conversation in another direction. "So, to start off as a concubine and then become a wife?"
"That was unusual. A woman was a concubine because she couldn't be a wife. Either she didn't have a high enough status, or he was already married, although already having a wife wasn't often a problem. It would be strange for a woman to suddenly acquire enough status to go from being a concubine to a wife."
Ezra handed me another pin. "Just east of Fes in Morocco," he said, pointing to the location. I stuck the pin in its place and reached for another. "You're thinking about Hattu."
I nodded.
"I don't remember much about the man I saw her with. I'm not sure, but I think I must have been near Leif's age by then, maybe older. Most of it is a blur. The man was a large and powerful warrior. He traveled with a small group of warriors, servants and several concubines like Hattu. My master wanted some favor from him and gave him two of his daughters. Most of the people with him seemed to love him. They were thrilled to be his companions. One particularly beautiful concubine and a young man were very frightened." Ezra shrugged and dismissed the thought.
The phone rang again, and Ezra stepped away to answer it. I finished the map while he droned into the phone— to Leif this time. From what I could tell, Leif took the news of his DNA report with irritation and amusement... a typically ambivalent Leif reaction.
The map complete with every pin in place left me with little to do. Ezra was still attached to his cell phone, so I wandered over to the bookcase and began scanning for something interesting to read. I grabbed a copy of Herodotus and headed back to the curved white sofa, poured another glass of wine and settled back into the cushions. The spine cracked as I opened the book. It had clearly never been read before and was probably meant to be ornamental. Wu's business associates were obviously not big readers.
As I read about ancient Greeks, Persians, Egyptians and Scythians, Ezra studied Esther's files and took several phone calls. After one lengthy phone conversation after another, the ringing slowed and eventually stopped. Ezra sat bent over his laptop, searching for something. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack when you don't know what a needle looks like.
I wasn't particularly shocked to read about the Scythian sacrifices. They had taken men captive in war, chopping off their arms and flinging them into the air in dedication to Mars or their cloaks of human scalps and gilded cups made of skulls.
Scythians were vicious warriors and I was becoming accustomed to such scenes. I laughed in amusement at the idea of Darius' Persian army chasing phantom Scythian armies across Eastern Europe. As nomads living off the land without cities or supplies, the Scythians simply picked up and moved every time Darius' army drew near. Eventually, Darius had to leave exhausted without ever finding any of the Scythians. Of all the stories I'd read of ancient battles and conquering armies, that one tickled me the most.
My hand instinctively moved to cover my throat as I read about the burial of a King taking a concubine and dozens of other servants and horses with him to the grave. I knew it was coming, but still, it was shocking to read.
Ezra looked over at me. "Are you alright?"
"What's the point?" Ezra shook his head at me and frowned. "The Scythian kings had to have all those servants killed to take with him when he died." We've all heard the stories before of servants being killed to accompany the Emperor or King in the afterlife. It all seemed so cruel and wasteful. I could never allow myself to really understand it.
"Of course he did."
"Why? What good would killing all those innocent people do? And then a year after he died they killed fifty more people and horses all over again. What's the point?"
"There was no point. He did it because he could. He was the King. They were servants. That's what they were there for." He was so matter-of-fact and detached about it as if none of it mattered. These were people. They weren't kings, but they were still people. They mattered.
He sighed again. "Kaja, they were slaves... they served him," he repeated as if that explained everything. "Their job was to serve him in life and then in the afterlife. That's why they existed."
"You say that as if their lives didn't mean anything."
"They didn't back then."
"If the lives of the slaves didn't mean anything, then why did you kill all those slavers?"
He stared at me, hard and unwavering. "Because I could. I was stronger, more powerful than they were. Because I could, Kaja. You only see with the modern perspective." Frustration seethed between every word as he answered me. "Today, every life has value and meaning, every life is precious. That isn't what people believed then. The world didn't think that way. The lives of neighboring tribes, the lives of foreign civilizations, the lives of slaves and servants had no value. No value. They killed the servants of the king because they were slaves. They were cattle. It was their function in life, their purpose was to serve the king and then die.
"The modern belief that everyone is equal and deserves the same rights and opportunities would have been preposterous. All anyone had to do was look around at the land we depended on, at the animals we hunted and worked, at the people we ruled to know the undeniable truth... the world was not equal. No one would have thought to suggest anything else. No one believed they had a right to live. No one believed they had any rights at all." He stopped and looked at the floor for a moment.
"That was the world I lived in, and I never wondered if it was evil or good." His voice was stern, and I could see severe frustration coming off him in waves. He was trying to help me understand and was aggravated by his failure.
"When I was a slave, my only value was in serving. When I was a warrior, my only value was in death. The world didn't care about anything else. Equality didn't exist. There were slaves and masters. If you were a slave, it was because you deserved to be. It was proof of your inferiority. The gods were vicious and vindictive. If they didn't favor you, you were fodder—unimportant and useless."
"The gods were vicious and vindictive..." I repeated slowly.
"Yes. I was vicious and vindictive."
I stopped. Thoughts swirled around me, and I clutched at them helplessly at first. Slowly they became clearer. That was the moment I understood or at least the beginning of understanding. Being an outsider and learning to accept the strange and unusual is blocked by the unimaginable... things so unbelievable that it never occurs to us to try. The world Ezra was trying to explain was simply impossible... too impossible to exist... to impossible to be real.
That was the moment I understood giving up our most fundamental beliefs is not the most challenging part of accepting a new world. It's finally accepting that another belief is even possible.
The inherent value of life, all life, was too apparent to me to be argued. It seemed no more or less evident than the fact that we all bleed red or need air to breathe. It simply had never occurred to me that anyone couldn't or wouldn't believe it.
I realized I was still punishing him. Every day I was delving further into research of another ancient civilization, each more brutal and bloody than the last. With each new revelation at my horror and disgust, I was punishing Ezra for being a product of the world he lived in before anyone knew better.
I must have relaxed slightly as these realizations flew through me.
Ezra reached out suddenly and grabbed me. He pulled me toward him and covering my mouth with his, he pushed me back onto the sofa. The anger and frustration gripping his body were still there, still surging. He tightened his fingers harshly around the back of my neck and rested his forehead against mine, breathing deeply with his eyes closed. His hands, his mouth, his muscles drew taunt. With no release for his mounting frustration, he clung to me, gripping tightly. He pulled my legs up to his hip and kissed me deep and long, pressing every muscle against mine. Both hands were wrapped around the sides of my face when he suddenly broke away and hovered a few inches above me. He didn't move for a long time. Finally, he buried his face in the side of my neck. I wrapped my arms around him and curled my fingers through his hair. He moaned softly.
I was vicious and vindictive.
Yes, you were, I thought.
"You were a man," I said, allowing my fingers to move through his short hair curling along his neck. "Beautiful, strong, powerful, and flawed... Just a man."