Like most of her fellow Carthaginians, when the first of the frozen white crystals had fallen on their colony, Arishat had thought them an ominous omen. And, in a sense, they were, for it was not long after when the sickness first attacked her and her daughter.
Now that a week had passed since her husband had given them the new medicine he had obtained, she did not dread to look upon the snow outside their apartment anymore. Nor longer did she still think of it as “the white crystals of death”, as her brother called the stuff. With her fever having dissipated and her cough gone as well, Arishat could bear to walk out of her bed and into the white-draped world beyond her home.
Dressed in the warmest woolen clothes she could weave, their hands and feet sheathed with gloves and boots she had made from buckskins her husband had brought from the Inu’naabe, she and her family went down the street that led from their townhouse. Nikkal was skipping ahead far of her Abba and Amma, stomping into every drift of snow they passed, squealing with the jubilation of a child liberated from household confinement. Alongside them walked at least a dozen other families with children of their own, all headed in the same direction.
Unlike the other streets in the city, the Gallic servants had not bothered to excavate the snow from the town’s central plaza, other than the very edges where some merchants had their stalls set up. Isceradin and Arishat helped themselves to roast fish and strips of pork and beef on a stick from one of these stalls while they let Nikkal go to play with the other children. They watched and ate together while she gathered handfuls of the damp white crystals and assembled them into a larger globular mass.
Back in Carthage, Arishat and her daughter would build little fortifications or palaces out of the sand on the beach, with Isceradin sometimes drawing in lines to demarcate where they should place each wall or building. Was this what the girl was working on right now?
Nikkal topped the big ball of snow with another one, slightly smaller, and then another. Picking up chunks of gravel from the road around the olaza, she pressed them into the topmost mass to form a smiling face, a nose and eyes, and even rows of braided hair running down the back. Sticks from below one of the trees around the plaza became the sculpture’s arms.
“It’s you, Amma!” she announced. “Now watch me make Abba?”
“Why don’t I help with this one?” Isceradin asked.
It was he who assembled the body of the second sculpture, building each sphere of snow slightly larger than the previous one to represent a man’s greater size. Nikkal planted the arms and facial features as before, but she hesitated before giving the snow-person any hair like the one depicting her mother.
“What would your hair look like in stones, Abba?” she asked.
“If it’s not braided or textured like your Amma’s, maybe blades of grass would do?” Isceradin answered. “They run straight like my hair.”
Nikkal dug underneath the snow, pulled out a handful of yellowed grass, and stuck it on top of the snowman’s head. Now her Abba and Amma, memorialized in snowy form, were complete.
Isceradin beamed with pride, stroking the back of his hair. “Now I do see a certain resemblance.”
Something flew like an arrow through the air, smashing into the back of the snowman representing him. A boy older than Nikkal taunted her with a mean laugh as he pelted the product of her hard work and creativity with more handfuls of snow. She broke down into crying, her face wet with tears.
Arishat lifted her up and hugged her. “It’s alright, sweet child. You can always make more.”
“I know how to handle that boy,” Isceradin said.
He scooped up a sphere of snow as big as his fist and chucked it at the attacker. It missed, but the boy scurried away to the farthest corner of the plaza, hands held up as an admission that he would never to harass little Nikkal or her creations ever again.
“You sure know how to take care of your family, beloved,” Arishat said. “Which reminds me, you never did tell me who gave you that medicine. All you told me was that they weren’t Inu’naabe.”
Isceradin’s smile vanished. “This is not the place to tell you. Wait until we get home.”
Sundown had begun its encroach when Nikkal said she had grown tired of the snow. In the time that had gone by since their arrival, she had produced a whole population of snow people in her corner of the plaza, all modeled after those she knew from the colony, although Arishat’s personal favorite would be the one representing their family. It was a shame that the white stuff would all melt into water when exposed to heat, as she would have wanted to haul them all back home to stand there forever.
Once they had returned to their apartment, Arishat placed her hands on her hips. “So, beloved, what’s this secret you’re holding from me. Just who gave you that medicine for our flu?”
Isceradin rubbed the back of his neck with a sigh, his eyes gleaming with remorse. “It was the Shaawanaki,” he whispered. “They stole it from the Inu’naabe and gave it to me. They’ve dug their way into our colony, coming out of one of the wells, and are spying on us. They wanted me to keep that all hidden in exchange for the medicine.”
Arishat crossed her arms. “You know, I’ve suspected they were hanging around town myself. I see footprints in the snow on some of the roofs every now and then, and then I hear creaks under the roof. Thank you so much for confirming my suspicions.”
“If that’s been the case, I suppose it didn’t come as much of a shock to you as I feared. In all honesty, my love, I would have taken the medicine and then betrayed them to the garrison if they hadn’t threatened to go after you and Nikkal afterward. It’s only to protect you and our child that I kept it from you, from the colony.”
As much as Arishat did not like that her husband had withheld such information from her, she and her child would not have survived the flu had he not made that deal. And, if he were to come forth with the whole truth before the colonial leadership, there was no telling what those Shaawanaki spies would do to her and their child. If they did not already know where she and her family lived in the colony they were combing, they would find out sooner or later. Poor Isceradin would have had little choice.
“Tell you what, we should keep it between us for now,” Arishat said. “Though, if someone does catch those spies, you must tell the Senate everything you know. If we have them all captured, they can’t hurt us.”
“But what if they do get away before we can catch them?” Isceradin asked. “They’ll know how to defeat us on the battlefield, if not ambush us before. We, I mean I, could be responsible for so many lives lost.”
“Many lives are lost in every war. I’m sorry, but we shouldn’t be invading the Shaawanaki in the first place. That entire campaign has more to do with Absalon’s pride and greed than defending ourselves or the Inu’naabe. If we lose so many of our men’s lives on it, I’d blame him before anyone else.”
Arishat pressed her body onto Isceradin with a kiss. “I wish you had told me much earlier, but thank you for telling me the truth anyway. And, of course, for saving our daughter and I.”
“That is what matters to me most, my beautiful one,” he replied. “I can only hope that Baal-Hammon and all the gods watch over us on the campaign, no matter what the Shaawanaki have waiting for us.”
“And may the gods guide our leaders back to their senses.”
Together, they had a chuckle.