The Book of Susan

The sky was clear and the wind was brisk on the River Rhone today.  A small sailing ship with a single mast carrying a frayed mainsail and a torn topsail made her way steadily upriver, driven by a favorable south wind and the shear will power of her skeleton crew and three passengers.

If the wind stayed behind them and the ragged leaky sailing ship stayed afloat, this would be the last leg of a very long journey for three weary travelers.  The ship’s passengers were a family group, an Egyptian businessman named Kris traveling with two teenagers, his eldest son Phil and his eldest daughter Susan.  The trio had traveled by sea all the way from Alexandria, capital of the Roman Imperial Province of Egypt, to the Rhone River Valley in Gaul – the area known today as the South of France – to visit Kris’s mother, brothers, and sister at their family homestead, the Villa Avignon.

Kris had been raised near here, in Gaul.  But he discovered during his youth that he did not belong here, because he had been born far away, in Alexandria.  Longing to make his own way in the world instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Kris left the family estate when he reached adulthood at age 20.  That was some 25 years ago, during the 10th year of the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, in 50 A.D.

Kris went to seek his fortune in the city of his birth.  What he found was a comfortable life with a loving wife and children of his own.  Within a few years of his arrival in Alexandria, Kris was blessed with these most precious treasures.  They made him a very rich man, indeed.

Years passed.  After he settled into a comfortable life as a business man and a family man in Alexandria, Kris wished he could find a way to reconnect with the loving mother and father who raised him.  He had left them both behind in Gaul.

Kris sought and found employment based in Alexandria that permitted him to travel regularly back to his old family home.  Now he could cultivate family relationships and remember what life was like outside a pressurized city environment, where doors were bolted at night, windows were barred, and strangers were not to be trusted.

Usually Kris traveled from Alexandria to Gaul alone, but not this time.  On this trip, he was enjoying the company of his two oldest children.  It was a once in a lifetime trip for them, and for Kris as well.

Now, today, Kris, Phil, and Susan stood out in the fresh air on the open deck of a tattered commercial sailing ship.  They were sailing upriver on the River Rhone, with no more than 10 miles left to go before they reached Kris’s family estate and his brother’s shipyard, near the riverside colonial village of Avignon.

The ship was being shuttled to Kris’s brother Sid’s shipyard for a complete teardown and overhaul.  The crewmen were shipyard workers.  They were all freedmen who had once been slaves or the sons of slaves.  They had been sent last week to the Rhone River Port of Arles to pick up this ship and their Lord Sid’s brother, niece, and nephew.

Today, Kris was the ship’s Honorary Captain, and his son Phil was the ship’s Honorary River Pilot.  The crewmen knew the River Rhone much better than Kris did, and Phil had never sailed on the Rhone before, so of course the crew really managed the sailing, while Kris and Phil enjoyed pretending to be in charge.

Susan was not interested in the business of making a sailing ship go.  Instead, she concentrated on important business of her own.  She had made it her business to keep the forward area of the deck, where the families’ sea chests were stored, a “no fly zone” for those pesky riverside thieves, the seagu