It was late in the afternoon, and the reading room was full of gold light. Marcos was lying across a bench with his feet on a pile of scrolls, which he knew Sophia hated.
“When I’m older,” he announced to the ceiling, “I’m going to be a senator. I’ll have a house on the Palatine, and I’ll never read anything again.”
“You will,” said Demetria, without looking up from her copying. “You’ll read the bills.”
Sophia smiled and lifted his feet off the scrolls, one at a time. “Tomorrow we’re reading Herodotus,” she said. “The lesson starts at the second hour. If you’re late, you will be copying his whole first book by the end of the month.”
Then Philo came in, almost running, with a bundle of papyrus under his arm and ink on his cheek.
“I’ve decided,” he said. “I’m going to explain Moses to the Greeks. Not just translate him: explain him. The garden, the serpent, the ladder to heaven. It all means something deeper, Sophia, and I’m going to show it. I’ll have written the first book by the spring.”
“Show me,” she said, and held out her hand.
He gave her the first sheet. Her fingers touched the wet ink, and she froze.
She was standing in a cold hall of marble, far from the sea. An old man was waiting in front of a young emperor, and the old man had Philo’s eyes. The emperor was walking quickly from room to room, giving orders about windows and paintings, and he did not look at the old man once. Then he turned and laughed. “Why don’t you people eat pork?” he asked, and his courtiers laughed with him. The old man did not laugh. Behind him, very far away, she saw smoke rising over the eastern quarter of a city she knew.
“Sophia?”
The reading room came back. Philo was looking at her. So was Demetria. Even Marcos had sat up.
“You were somewhere else,” Philo said.
Sophia looked down at the sheet in her hand. Her thumb had left a mark in the ink. “It’s good,” she said. “It’s very good. People will be reading you for a long time, Philo. A very long time.”
“How long?”
“Longer than this library will be standing.” She gave the sheet back to him, carefully, and he laughed, because he thought she was joking.
She did not tell him the rest. She did not tell him that one day, when he was old, he was going to travel to Rome for his people, and that a young emperor would mock him. She did not tell him about the smoke. Some things, she thought, a friend should be spared, at least for now.
That evening, when the others had gone, Demetria found her alone at the window, watching the lamps being lit on the Pharos.
“What did you see?” Demetria asked quietly.
Sophia was silent for a long time. “I don’t know yet,” she said at last. “But I think I’m going to find out.”
And as she spoke, there was one more picture, quick as a flash of lightning: a broad-faced soldier with the hands of a farmer, sitting in the great temple of Serapis, and a blind man kneeling at his feet. Then it was gone, and there was only the lighthouse, and the dark sea.