Aleys smiles. “When I was small, my mother read me the saints’ lives. Well, she wasn’t lettered, but she knew their stories. I could read to you. Is there one you want?”
“What about the woman turned to salt?” Marte knows there was a wicked woman that God turned into a pillar of salt, but she doesn’t know what for. It must have been something terrible.
“Lot’s wife, you mean?”
“That one.”
Aleys moves to her table and shuffles through the parchment.
“Here. Genesis.” She plucks out a page and returns to her stool inside the window. Marte takes the parlor seat. She slides her hand into her pocket and rubs her nail along a small goose quill she picked up that morning.
“Go ahead, miss. I’m listening.”
Aleys explains that Lot was a righteous man living in Sodom, a city known for its wickedness. A pair of angels arrived at his home. “He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, brood zonder gist, and they ate.”
Marte tries to imagine angels at the door. “What were their wings like?” In Aleys’s psalter, there are angels of many varieties. Most of them have white wings they keep pinned back like their feathers might get in the way of chores. Others bear luminous wings of green and red and gold raised high above their halos.
Aleys hesitates. “I’m not sure they had wings. I think these two came disguised as men.”
Well, that’s a problem, thinks Marte. How are you supposed to recognize angels if they hide their wings?
Aleys continues, “The men of this evil town clamored at Lot’s door and demanded he hand over the strangers so they could have their way with them.”
“Have sex with them? The angels?”
“I don’t think the crowd knew they were angels.”
That’s what comes of leaving your wings behind, thinks Marte. But it would be rude, angel or no, to yield your guests to a mob.
“Lot spoke to the crowd.” Aleys angles the page to catch more light from the horn window; it’s too early to light candles. “‘Look,’ he said, ‘I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them.’”
“He said what?”
“Lot offered up his daughters in place of the angels.”
To be raped? Marte doesn’t understand. “Miss, I thought you said Lot was righteous.”
“I know. It’s ... difficult. I think he managed to keep them safe inside.”
Marte gives a snort. “This is the man God chose to save?”
“Well, the angels warned him to leave town with his family. He took his wife and youngest daughters. Just not their two married ones.”
How they love their virgins in this book. “What was wrong with the married daughters?”
“Their husbands thought Lot was joking when he said God was about to destroy Sodom. They laughed and refused to leave.”
“Lot’s wife must have had words for her sons-in-law.” Not to mention Lot, offering up her girls to the crowd. Marte would have left him, right there. That man was worse than Dagmar.
“Yes, well. The angels shepherded Lot and his wife and unmarried daughters into the hills. The angels ordered them not to look back, even as the Lord rained burning sulfur onto Sodom, and terrible cries rose from the city. But Lot’s wife looked back.”
Of course she did. Two of her children were in that town. How could a mother not respond to the cries of her daughters? Marte knows. She would have looked back, too.
“And so God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt?” Marte is incredulous. This is the crime that God smites her for?
“She was disobedient.”
Marte gives a huff. “It’s a strange story, miss. What does God want from us—obedience or love?”
