The Abyssinian Proof

26

Balkis drained the last of the diluted powder from the glass and put it aside. It was her third potion in two hours. She knew it was more than the surgeon allowed her, but the pain was relentless. She knelt heavily on the divan, her body aching with the effort, and reached up to take the monstrance from the shelf. She ran her fingers over the sharp gold tines, letting them linger on the tine black with her mother’s blood. The heart of the monstrance was empty. Balkis pushed her finger into the circular opening where the Christians had suspended the wafer they believed to be the body of Jesus, the man they considered God. This too, she mused, was a Container of the Uncontainable. This too, like the Melisites, like her own body, was based on a lie.

Her body had been consecrated to an empty space that had slowly devoured her. There was the continuing pain that made even her daily ablutions a trial: the pus, the smell, the leaking urine. And more recently, sharp pains in her joints, her abdomen swelling up like a summer gourd. Gudit treated her with herbs, but it was Constantine Courtidis, with his Balat Balm and knowledge of western powders and medicines, who gave her the will to go on. She was too ashamed to reveal herself to the young surgeon, but he treated her nonetheless. She wondered whether Courtidis could take over from Gudit. Perhaps the Melisites should modernize, as Amida wished. In the modern world, no one had secrets anymore. What difference did it make?

She gasped and doubled over as the terrible pain burrowed through her. She lay groaning in a fetal position until the worst had passed, then slowly loosened her cramped limbs. She felt light-headed and was bathed in sweat, too weak to sit up. A barrage of thoughts pummeled her, drawing in their wake anger, fear, regret. Feelings she thought she had harnessed and defused over the years returned to run roughshod over her accomplishments. Her pain had cut them loose.

She had made the best of what fate had begrudged her. When she became priestess, she had learned the smuggling business. She was a good leader, discreet, firm, and fair. They had well-trained workers and loyal customers. Her one accomplishment was that under her leadership, the struggling sect had become secure and relatively well off. She had done it on her own, with no help from Malik. Now even that was being undermined by people like Kubalou, and by Amida, who in his foolish arrogance and ambition had brought these thugs and, as a consequence, the police into their community. Saba had told her that after she had refused to make a deal with Kubalou’s representative, Amida had taken him to meet the village men and they had brokered their own deal. The idea that Kubalou would send someone else in his place to negotiate without letting them know was galling. Whenever she thought of the charade of her discussion with the flame-haired imposter, she felt shame. She had been treated disrespectfully and duped, but her son’s perfidy was worst of all.

Her sweet, wide-eyed son whom she had sent to the monastery when he was twelve had come back a hard, compassionless stranger. She tried to remember the milky scent of his little body, slippery like a baby dolphin in the bath. She had licked his delicate chest, tickled him to make him giggle. “I’ll be your bride, won’t I, little lion?” The desire of mothers everywhere. Those years he was gone, she had grieved as if he were dead. Now Amida seemed to despise her. She had even caught herself wondering whether he had killed Malik. Her son had announced his readiness to sell off the one thing that would have given her life meaning, if it truly existed. Without the Proof of God, what was she guarding? Malik claimed to have found it after all these centuries. Was Amida right? Was it nothing more than an empty box? Malik said there were papers inside. What miracle could be contained in a pile of papers? If truth was the enemy of faith, she had neither.

She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling, her body heavy and listless, afloat on a sea of pain. She had to remind herself to breathe. What was there left to live for?

Her daughter had become a woman with religious ice in her veins, someone who would make a good priestess, who wouldn’t snap like a weak branch. Yet the girl had fallen apart after learning that Kamil was her brother. Balkis blamed herself for not telling her daughter sooner, and she blamed Malik for bringing them together. How little she had understood her children.

Tears trickled from the corners of her eyes and down her neck. She had always wanted too much. Her own mother had tried to warn her. She had said love is a fig full of worms. When you pull it open, you see delicious flesh studded with seeds. You sink your teeth into the fragrant fruit and when you look again, the seeds are alive with motion. There wasn’t just one snake in the Garden of Eden.

The emptiness inside her seemed truly uncontainable. She lay there, her eyes drawn to the opening in the middle of the monstrance that rested beside her like an uncaring mate. She heaved herself onto one elbow and pulled the monstrance toward her. She pressed the tip of her finger to the sharp tine until it pricked her skin. A tiny bubble of blood welled up. She pushed back her left sleeve, exposing the tender flesh of her wrist. She imagined the pain would be terrible, but purifying. What she didn’t know was whether she’d have the strength.