Just a Girl

by Jackie French

  Dedication

  To those who teach, inspire and give,

  especially those who will not be stopped

  by the phrase ‘but she is just a girl’

  This is the story of five unlikely refugees in Judea in 71 AD, as the army of Rome swept like bloodstained locusts across the land. It is also a story of many kinds of love.

  Two young Jewish sisters, a Roman slave left for dead and a goat hide in a cave with a great-grandmother who remembers the young woman Maryiam of Nazareth seventy years earlier — a girl who was never ‘just a girl’.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  The sky was a cloudless cloak the day the Roman chariots galloped through the dust to our village. Only two chariots. How could we know the death, and life and love, to come?

  I gazed at the sweating horses from the hill. I stood with our sheep around me, my skirts hitched up, caught by the power of the horses, the two riders in their shining armour. That was all I was back then: Judith who watched the sheep, the lowest job a man could do. And I was just a girl. Behind me, the sun’s rusty bulk sank down into the wadi. The sheep kept munching grass. What do sheep care for war and Romans?

  Sawtha Rabba said the Romans who ruled our land were ‘poisonous vipers’. And yet these chariots were beautiful, the first I had ever seen. How could I be scared?

  Yes, down south the Roman army besieged Jerusalem, our holy city. My brother, my father and Jakob, my betrothed, were fighting to make Judea free. But Jerusalem was far away. Our village still paid the Roman taxes, despite the rebellion. We fed tax gatherers with roast lamb and wine. Maybe these men were tax gatherers.

  Our village had thick mud walls. Our gate was made of tree trunks. Two Romans could not break down our gate or walls.

  Besides, during the long two years of rebellion, the Roman army had never bothered with a village as isolated as ours. It had been a rebel group of our own people who had strolled through our open gates last year, smiles on their faces and daggers under their cloaks. We had greeted the men as guests — until they unsheathed their swords. The rebels killed three of our sheep, then made us cook them. And then they left, taking all of last year’s wheat and barley harvest.

  There had been no one to stop them. Our men and boys had all gone to fight in the war that had eaten our lives over the last few years. Only two men had stayed: Araan, son of Araan, who was blind; and Micah, our hakham, who was so feeble he had to be carried on his pallet.

  Micah had told the rebel leader that only jackals stole from their own people. The rebel leader punched him so hard that Micah vomited blood. He died a few days later. Micah had recited the scriptures every Shabbat and taught the boys the laws of Moses. Now no one in our village read the scriptures.

  The two chariots drew nearer. I could see the patterns on the men’s breastplates, their swords and spears.

  Tax gatherers didn’t wear armour! My sheep bleated and huddled around me, suddenly realising something was wrong. Goats would have scattered, making it harder to spear them. Sheep were as dumb as rocks. But useful. Just like rocks.

  Down by the village, the women and girls gathering olives had seen the spears too. They flung their scarves across their faces and ran to the gate. Should I run too? But the chariots would reach the gate before I could get there.

  The gate creaked as the women pushed it shut and barred it. Now there was no way I could get inside.

  Should I run down into the wadi? No. Movement attracted attention — I’d learned that from watching wild goats. You didn’t notice a goat until it moved.

  I froze, as still as a pomegranate tree. Only my veil trembled in the breeze. Maybe the Romans wouldn’t notice me up here among the sheep. I waited for the men to rein in their horses by the gates.

  But the chariots didn’t stop. Instead the horses cantered around the village. I watched the soldiers gaze at the mud walls, at the wheat and barley stubble in the fields, at the olive trees, the pomegranates . . .

  I knew the moment the soldiers spotted me. I felt their eyes assess the sheep, then me, like I was a sheep too.

  I grabbed a stone from my pouch and put it in my slingshot. Sawtha Rabba told us how soldiers carried off women and girls. I’d fight before I let them take me! But the men just whipped their horses faster. They left along the same track they’d arrived on, the dust bruising the air behind their wheels, their armour still gleaming bronze in the sun.

  I heard women’s laughter in the village. But I kept watching the chariots getting smaller and smaller across the narrow plain. Then they rounded a hill.

  They were gone.

  The shadows had eaten the wadi. Dusk was settling like a grey blanket on the land. The sheep bleated, telling me it was time to head back to the village for their hay. Sheep like things to be done the same way every day. I began to walk, knowing the sheep would follow, then stopped. A fat pigeon scrabbled through the saltbushes in front of me.

  I pulled out my slingshot again. A girl wasn’t meant to use a slingshot, just like she wasn’t meant to herd sheep. But those laws had shattered the day the zealots urged every man and boy to leave his family to rebel against Rome.

  Five heartbeats later, my stone hit the pigeon’s head. It dropped in a small heap of feathers. I ran to it, ignoring the annoyed bleats of the sheep, and cut its throat. It was obviously dead already, but I could pretend the blood had flowed. Then I plucked and gutted it.

  It was probably unclean for a girl to kill a bird, or to prepare it to eat. But I was just a girl. And our family needed meat.

  Chapter 2

  Ours was a small village, huddled between lion-coloured hills. The springs that seeped from the thin soil, even in summer, allowed us to grow terraces of olive trees and pomegranates, our gardens of cucumbers, lentils, melons and onions, and our patches of barley and even a little wheat.

  I led the sheep through the pomegranate trees, then tried to push open the ‘needle’, the small door in the main gates. But it had been barred too. I knocked, then knocked again more loudly. At last the gate creaked open.

  Old Elishaba peered out, staring critically at my muddy feet and scratched legs, and the dead pigeon dangling in my hand. I probably smelled of sheep too.

  ‘Did you see the chariots?’ she exclaimed as the sheep pushed past her.

  ‘Yes. The bronze shone in the sunlight.’

  ‘Bronze!’ Old Elishaba spat in the dust. ‘I give that for bronze. And Romans too. We’re keeping the gates shut in case those sons of jackals come back. You’re filthy, Judith! Straighten your veil, girl! And your hair needs combing.’

  ‘It was windy up on the hill,’ I said, pushing the gate shut again. Did Elishaba think I sat up there oiling my skin and watching the view? But she was already tromping back to her home, the second house by the gate.

  I ran down the street, the sheep trotting before me. I washed at the doorway to our courtyard, then said the blessing and touched the mezuzah. The good smel
l of the bread we’d had for breakfast mixed with the scents of hay and animal dung as I opened the door. Voices argued in the courtyard.

  Home.

  The sheep shoved past me, knowing there was water and hay for them in the open ground floor of our house. The nanny goat and her kid were already in their corner, munching hay.

  ‘No more of that kind of talk, Sawtha Rabba!’ said Ma angrily. Ma sat under the citron tree, chopping cucumbers with the big kitchen knife. Rabba sat against the courtyard wall next to her, small and withered like a dried-out olive, her bones almost as thin as a coney’s, her ancient hands spinning wool, her mouth set and stubborn. Rabba glanced at me as I came in, with eyes as sharp as a sparrow’s. She was probably thinking that none of the girls she’d known when she was young and rich in Nazareth and Jerusalem had herded sheep or carried a dead pigeon. I wondered what she and Ma were arguing about now.

  ‘I will say what I like!’ Rabba declared. She glared back at Ma. ‘If you had any sense, you’d listen.’

  Rabba was Father’s father’s mother, and so old that she had forgotten how to die. My sister Sarah said Rabba was a hundred, but no one could be a hundred. Rakeal said Rabba was really a stump of an olive tree pretending to be a person so we would feed her. But Father had told us we owed Rabba respect, as the oldest woman of our house.

  Ma wouldn’t have argued with her own mother or mother-in-law. But two generations of wives had eroded Rabba’s position in our household. It was hard to remember to respect an olive stump who argued.

  ‘Did you listen when I warned you the frost last year would kill the melon vines? No! Did you listen when I said that the red pot was too thin to put on the fire?’

  Ma’s knife slipped. She sucked her cut finger. ‘Will you be quiet!’ said Ma, exasperated.

  Sarah and Rakeal sat on a rug under the fig tree, grinding barley between the millstones to make the flour for the evening’s bread, carefully ignoring the argument. Obedient girls did not argue with their elders. Their hair was neat, their veils straight. My littlest sister, Baratha, sat next to them.

  Father used to joke that he had been cursed with four daughters and only one son, which meant four dowries to find. But he laughed as he said it. Our family owned ten good fields and all the pomegranate orchards. Sarah and Rakeal would have already been married if it hadn’t been for the war.

  ‘Did you all see the chariots?’ I asked, to change the subject.

  Sarah jerked her eyes towards Rabba, as if to say, Don’t mention the soldiers, or you’ll set her off again! Sarah had been among the women harvesting olives, but her hair shone like a black waterfall under her veil. As always. I thrust my hand through mine and picked out some twigs.

  ‘Cooing like doves!’ muttered Rabba. ‘“Oh, good!”’ she mimicked. ‘“The chariots have gone away!” There’s not a mustard seed of sense among the lot of you!’ Her voice rose again, shaking with age and anger. ‘Those soldiers will come back. We need to gather what we can. Leave the village. Hide!’

  So that was what Rabba and Ma had been arguing about. I looked from one to the other. Was Rabba right? Were we in danger?

  ‘Nonsense.’ Ma put down her knife. She crossed over to the cooking pot, inhaling the steam, then added a handful of chopped mint. ‘Why would we leave the safety of the village walls? There were only two soldiers. Two! The Roman army is far away. There is nothing for them here.’

  ‘All this year’s harvest, the sheep, the fruit, the oil.’ Rabba’s eyes, sunk in her wrinkles, assessed Sarah and Rakeal, Baratha and me. ‘And you girls would make fine slaves for Rome. When I lived down in Jerusalem, my Gideon, may his name be a blessing, bought me many slaves. Two had been captured in war —’

  I thought of the soldiers’ swords, their spears. ‘Could they really be after our harvest?’ I asked. Baratha stared, wide-eyed and scared.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ma impatiently. ‘We have too little here for the Roman army to bother with. Hush, Sawtha Rabba, you are alarming the girls!’ She sat beside Rakeal, who was now sifting the flour.

  ‘They should be alarmed!’ insisted Rabba. ‘Why does no one listen to an old woman? The Roman governor himself visited my house. I know the world!’

  ‘The world of a hundred years ago,’ said Sarah softly. Rakeal giggled.

  Rabba heard. She subsided, glaring like the goat did when it ran out of hay.

  I held the pigeon behind my back and sidled over to the cooking pot simmering in the corner. Lentils and wild greens. I slid in the meat. Ma pretended not to notice. So did Sarah and Rakeal.

  Little Baratha grinned, her fear forgotten. ‘Meat!’ she mouthed. It would be the first we’d tasted for weeks.

  I grinned back. Ma and Sarah and Rakeal would eat the meat, carefully not mentioning it, in case the way it had been killed did not follow the law. But Ma would make sure that we didn’t drink goat’s milk tonight, so no more laws would be broken. The law said we should not cook a kid in its mother’s milk, which meant no meat should be cooked with milk or cheese, nor could we eat the two together.

  I washed my hands again quickly in the ewer by the door, saying a blessing again, then lifted Baratha high into the air so she squealed.

  ‘Stop that!’ protested Ma. ‘You’ll make her as hoydenish as yourself. Go wash your feet, and pull your skirt down! What would Jakob say if he saw you now?’

  ‘A modest girl is as beautiful as a red harness on a white horse,’ said Sarah, quoting the old saying. ‘No man wants a wife with scratched legs and suntanned skin. You could at least keep your veil over your neck and face out on the hills.’

  Ha, I thought, you try catching a lamb with a veil blowing in your eyes.

  Rakeal smiled at me. ‘Never mind your brown skin, Judith. My Nathaniel told me once that virtue clothes a woman like silk and silver. Maybe one day Jakob will say that to you.’

  ‘If young Jakob had any sense,’ muttered Sawtha Rabba, ‘he would say her legs are as fine as peach trees in spring, and her fruit as sweet as grapes in autumn. But then if Jakob had sense, he’d be snuggling in his marriage bed tonight, not off to war. And so would your Nathaniel.’

  ‘Sawtha Rabba,’ remonstrated Ma, ‘that is no way to speak in front of the girls!’

  Old Rabba smiled grimly, showing her black gums. ‘When I was young, they used to say a glimpse of my ankles was worth a hundred camels. Good work, girl,’ she added to me, nodding to the pot.

  ‘My name is Judith,’ I said. I told her twice a day. She forgot it twice a day too.

  Her small date eyes stared at me. ‘What do you think, girl? Were the soldiers in those chariots only curious? Or should we hide?’

  Why was she asking me? All I knew was looking after sheep.

  ‘She is just a girl,’ said Ma sharply. ‘Judith, carry Sawtha Rabba back to her bed. She must be tired from sitting out here all day.’

  ‘I am not tired! I am trying to warn you,’ argued Rabba. She glanced at Sarah and Rakeal, but they avoided her gaze.

  Ma gave the sky a look, as though to say, See what I put up with!

  I thought of the gleam of the Romans’ armour, the swords at their belts, their expressions as they looked at our fields, the sheep, at me. ‘Maybe someone should stand watch up on the hill, in case they come back . . .’

  ‘Perhaps you should learn to cook instead of girding your skirt up to your loins like a man and herding sheep,’ said Sarah. ‘No wonder Jakob has not come back to visit you.’

  ‘But Judith brings us meat,’ began Baratha.

  Ma silenced her with a look. Tonight’s meat would not be spoken of.

  I bit my lip and crossed the courtyard to Rabba, then bent down so she could clamber onto my back — a bundle of bones and skin. She put her skinny arms around my neck. She weighed less than a year-old lamb, but was more awkward. I thought she might start to argue again, but Rabba knew when there was no point wasting her words. She didn’t even mutter arguments at me as we climbed the stairs.

  M
a and my sisters slept in the room above the animals now the autumn nights were cooling. Rabba and I liked the stars. I carried her to her pallet on the roof and laid her down, carefully avoiding the bits where the roof had worn away. It was only plaster, laid across the reeds, and needed patching. Plastering was men’s work, but if the war did not end soon, we women would need to do it.

  ‘I’ll bring up your supper,’ I said.

  ‘You are as kind as a cool breeze at midday, girl,’ said Rabba absently, gazing across the hills towards the track that led through the hills and finally to the road to Jerusalem.

  ‘Rabba . . . does Jakob not want me because I am . . . unwomanly? Is that why he hasn’t come back?’

  She looked at me then. ‘How does Jakob know who you are or what you have become? No man has come back from the army for over a year. No tax collector has come from Rome or the Temple or the King this year either. The only men we have seen are the zealots who stole our food, may their tongues wither, and the Romans,’ she spat, ‘this afternoon.’

  ‘Will . . . will Jakob ever come back?’

  ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘But the Roman soldiers will. What does your ma know of the world? What do any of the women in this village of mud and olives know? Just how to spin wool and make the bread. But I lived thirty years in Jerusalem. My husband was a tax collector . . .’

  I stopped listening. I’d heard the tales a thousand times: her grand stone house, the visits to the holy Temple . . . If what Rabba said was true, I should be crying for Jakob, for the marriage I wouldn’t have. But I’d only met Jakob three times, for he lived with our cousins a day’s walk away. I could hardly remember his face.

  ‘. . . even the governor came to that wedding feast,’ said Rabba. ‘We had peacocks stuffed with wheat and raisins in pomegranate sauce, and alabaster bowls to wash in. And one time —’

  ‘No Roman soldier has ever come here before,’ I interrupted. ‘Why should they come back? We pay our taxes every year.’

  It was hard to remember now why the men had been so ferociously sure they must free Judea from Rome. Rome took little from us; only three parts of wheat or sheep or barley from every hundred. The Temple’s and the King’s taxes took nearly half the crop. What were Roman taxes compared with our own? Our men didn’t even have to serve a time in the Roman army, like other men across the Empire, nor did we have to bow down to Roman gods.