That was how I saw my village die. And could do nothing.
Chapter 5
The Roman donkey carts arrived. The empty ones clattered through the shattered gate. The carts loaded with chests and bundles stopped outside. Other men — in tunics, not armour, and with no swords at their belts — began to unload tents and put them up, unconcerned by the agony within, as if they had heard such cries a dozen times, a thousand. Probably they had.
The soldiers have just come to loot our food, I kept telling myself. They’ll only hurt those who don’t follow orders, just like the rebels. As soon as they have taken all the food, the sheep, the goats, the fodder for the animals, they’ll go away. We will have to live on wild greens and prickly figs and pigeons through the winter. But we will live.
I almost believed it as I stood there, still as a rock among the rocks. I waited for the screams to stop; for the women to cook food and bring wine to the conquerors.
Two men appeared carrying the limp carcass of a sheep. It was only when they threw it down that I saw they’d held a body.
It was Ma. Blood on her neck and thighs, her tunic, blood on her arms. Red blood, black blood.
She lay on the hard earth, with sightless eyes that almost looked at me, an expression on her face that I had never seen before. The knife she used to cut up cucumbers was still in her hand. I had not known that my mother would fight to save her daughters, would use a knife to attack soldiers. I had not known my mother at all.
The two men tossed out another body, throwing it on the ground like a bag of barley. An old woman: Naomi, widow of Joachim the basket-maker, her throat cut as neatly as you’d cut cheese.
They threw out Rivkah next, wife of Shimeon the carpenter, and then another woman, her crushed head too bloody to see who she was, except that she was old. Another body and another, all old women, joining Ma like sacks of bloody bones, piled on the ground for the crows and jackals.
The Romans worked quickly, wiping their swords, then striding back into the village. What was their hurry? No one had more than a kitchen knife to defend themselves with. This was not battle; it was slaughter. And then I remembered Rabba’s words from last night. These soldiers wanted their share, not just of food but of lives.
Time stretched. I stood for a month behind the rock, a year, a lifetime.
At last a line of girls and younger women stumbled through the gateway, roped together like goats, their dresses torn and dabbed with blood, their eyes like stones, if stones could bruise. Some sobbed. Some stared as if all they could see was yesterday; today and tomorrow were too hard to bear. Sarah, Rakeal, Martha who had been my best friend till I’d taken to sheep-herding — all the girls and young women of my life.
The Romans assessed the girls’ bodies, pointing and arguing like women choosing pots. Now I knew why they had hurried. These girls were loot. Every person young and fit enough to work had value as a slave.
Rabba knew this, I thought numbly. She saw slaves when she lived in Jerusalem. She understood what we did not. Girls’ bodies were more valuable than grain.
A soldier yelled something. A whip flicked towards Sarah, the first in line.
She must have understood the words for she walked slowly to an empty cart and climbed into it. Rakeal and the other girls followed her, awkward in their tethers.
I wanted to yell to them, to comfort them. I wanted to wail with rage and despair.
I could not move. I could not even let my shadow move. If the soldiers glimpsed me, they might hunt for me, then find Rabba and Baratha too. They must not suspect anyone had left the village in the night.
The girls and young women sat crammed into the cart. No hay, no pallets to make them comfortable. Sarah looked around desperately, as if wishing for James to rescue her, for Father and the army. Rakeal stared at Ma’s body in the dust, then at our village, as if saying farewell.
Had Sarah noticed I wasn’t there? Had Rakeal said, ‘Where is Baratha? Where is Rabba?’ If just one person said, ‘Judith and Baratha must have run away,’ the soldiers might start hunting for us.
My slingshot might kill a single soldier if I managed to hit him in exactly the right place, but if more than one came looking, there was nothing I could do but run.
Not down into the wadi. I would run to the hills, leading them away. I must save Baratha and Rabba.
Chapter 6
The men who’d walked behind the donkey carts had arrived at our village now. Most wore shabby tunics, and no armour. The men with weapons yelled orders at them as they marched inside the gates. The tunicked men reappeared carrying sacks of barley and wheat, amphorae of oil and wine and fruit syrups. The soldiers strolled out with arms full of candlesticks of wood or bronze, bronze cups and even cooking pots. I saw one carrying the silver candlesticks that belonged to Anna, wife of Matthias, part of her dowry from before I was born.
And as the soldiers carried out their loot, the two wagons with my sisters and every other girl or woman I knew began a slow progress down the road, the donkeys plodding under their heavy loads. Some girls cried, sobbing into each other’s arms. Others sat stiffly, trying not to show their terror.
Only Rakeal and Sarah looked towards the wadis. They were looking for me, I realised, for Baratha and for Rabba. They hoped we had escaped. But my sisters would say nothing. Ma fought the Romans with her big kitchen knife. Sarah and Rakeal opposed them with their silence.
If only Rabba had asked me to wake my older sisters too. But they wouldn’t have come. They would have woken Ma, and she’d have ordered me to bring Baratha and Rabba back.
The donkeys trod slowly along the dusty track, pulling the carts holding the bloodstained girls of our village. They turned the corner by the cliff and were gone.
The men in tunics carried out stools, benches, firewood. They piled them all into a giant bonfire over the bodies on the ground. I shuddered and found I couldn’t stop. Ma wouldn’t even have a proper burial. She and the old women of our village would be part of the soldiers’ fire.
Two men bent to the pile of wood. A curl of smoke rose into the morning sky, then flickered into flames that torched like the spires I had imagined in Jerusalem.
Screams rose from the village again. For a moment I wondered if ghosts could scream, then I realised the cries came from our sheep and goats.
Men in tunics carried out the roughly skinned carcasses, then thrust the meat on spits to roast. The soldiers didn’t need the women of our village to cook for them. They had cooks of their own.
The meat roasted; animal bodies cooking above human ones. The scent floated across the fields, over to my rocks. I felt sick. No jackals howled. The jackals knew that wolves feasted here today.
The sun rose high. So did more tents, as fast as flowers after rain; a small city in straight lines.
The Romans used their swords or daggers to slice off pieces of mutton or goat. They had taken off their breastplates and wore their swords over their tunics. They ate our food and drank from our amphorae, and laughed while the men in tunics served them.
Some of the serving men led the horses to the fields of barley stubble, hobbled the animals and turned them loose. Then they trudged to the well to bring buckets of water for the horses to drink. Other men carried baskets over to the pomegranate orchard and began to pick the fruit. The fruit wasn’t ripe enough for storage, but still full of juice. A man yelled triumphantly as he found the melon patch.
I did nothing that whole day. I just watched it all.
I could still see Ma’s body. Could still smell blood on the hot sand, stronger even than the scent of roasting meat. A crow flew down to investigate the pile of dead, more vivid than the fire and feast in front of me.
A shadow passed above. I looked up. A pair of vultures circled, gazing down at a pile of entrails from the sheep and goats. Waiting, I thought, for what would be left when the Romans departed.
But they weren’t going to leave tonight. Why put up tents if they meant to leave? And it would
take many hours to eat the feast of meat.
The sun fell down the sky again, untouched by the agony below. Shadows slipped across the ground, eating up the day. Rabba and Baratha would be waiting for me down in the wadi, thirsty, hungry, scared. I waited for the darkness.
The shadows thickened into night. Sparks from more fires leaped into the sky. Men laughed, drunken, celebrating. I heard women’s laughter too. I didn’t think they were women from my village. Now and then shadows moved beyond the firelight to relieve themselves, then staggered back to the scents of mutton, wine and blood. No one came any further.
The moon rose, smaller than the night before, but giving me enough light to see the pale soil and rocks of the wadi, the darkness where it dropped to cliffs.
At last I moved, stiffly at first, keeping my shadow in the deeper shadows of the cliff lest someone should see any movement that would betray me, and Baratha and Rabba too. Except I wasn’t me. The Judith of yesterday was not the same girl of today. My past had gone, thrown into the dust, carried on those carts to Rome or the nearest slave market. My future had vanished too. I was just . . .
I tried to concentrate. Who was I now? What was I supposed to do?
Find Baratha. Find Rabba. Keep them safe until the soldiers left, or we could work out how to get away.
But how?
I could kill pigeons and gather wild greens for us to eat. There were springs of fresh water in the wadi. But we had no roof to shelter us; unless we went back to the village of the dead, where more Romans might come and find us. I didn’t even have a flint and iron to make a fire to cook a pigeon; and anyway, the Romans would see the smoke . . . I stumbled, brushing away tears.
‘Maaagh,’ said the goat. I had forgotten her. She stared at me, reproachful, as if she expected me to make good my promise to give her bread and barley. But she just wanted to be milked, I realised as I saw her full udder.
I reached for her tether and pulled her with me. She pattered along almost as silent as I was. A sheep would have bleated, scared by the smells of blood and strangers. But goats were smart. The nanny knew to keep to the shadows, to stay silent, as well as I did.
I turned down into the wadi. It smelled clean, of sun-soaked rock and ripened prickle figs.
I scrambled down the track to where I’d left Rabba and Baratha.
There was no one there.
For a moment I didn’t believe it. No soldier could have passed without me seeing him. The cliffs were steep, and there was no other path, except a few goat tracks that led to nowhere but the maze of smaller wadis and the hills.
Had they scrambled further down the wadi? Had Rabba fallen down the cliff, or Baratha? Had jackals snatched them while I hid behind a rock?
I dared not yell so they could answer me. I just stood there, aching, desperate, alone except for the goat, trying to work out what to do.
Chapter 7
‘What took you so long, girl?’ muttered Sawtha Rabba’s voice from behind me.
I turned and blinked. A crack in the rock wall glimmered with a faint light.
I slipped inside. It was a cave, the biggest I had seen. Half the size perhaps of our courtyard, but crammed with chests and pots and giant amphorae, all stopped with clay or wax.
I could see, I realised. I was in a cave, but I could see. It was almost as light in here as outside. I looked around for a lamp and found the moon instead, beaming in through a ragged window in the cliff.
Rabba leaned against a sack of barley, Baratha in her arms, asleep. Truly asleep, breathing steadily, no blood on her small arms or face . . .
‘Y-you can walk,’ I stammered, my mouth almost too dry to talk.
‘I can crawl if the Roman army is after me,’ snapped Rabba.
‘You know the army came?’
‘I heard,’ she said briefly.
‘What . . . what is this place?’
‘What do you think it is, girl? A pile of hay? The bathhouse? It’s a storage cave. I found it when I first came here. I stored my inheritance here so the fool who was your father wouldn’t spend it. After the zealots took our harvest last year, I persuaded your mother and some of the other women to store most of the new harvest here so thieves couldn’t find it. Once one pack of jackals finds you, more will come.’
‘But Ma said nothing.’
Rabba looked at me sharply. ‘Your mother is not an idiot. She just doesn’t know the ways of armies. The fewer who knew about the cave, the fewer who could give away the secret.’
‘She won’t tell now.’
‘Of course she will not tell! She will try to free her daughters and make her way back here.’
‘No, she won’t,’ I said flatly. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Ah,’ said Rabba. She was silent for a while, then said, ‘I’m sorry, girl. I liked her even though she thought me an old fool.’
‘Is Baratha all right?’
Rabba rocked the sleeping child to her. ‘I brought her inside so she wouldn’t hear the screams. I told her stories and let her eat dried figs. She’ll have the runs tomorrow.’
I thought Rabba would ask about what had happened, how Ma died, say prayers for the dead.
Instead she nodded at the goat standing impatiently behind me. ‘Milk her,’ she ordered. ‘There’s an empty milk pot over there.’
I looked in the direction she pointed. It was hard to think or to feel. I seemed to have used up all emotion. It was easier to obey orders.
I found the pot. It sat by a seep in the rock, where a tiny trickle of water dripped into a small hollow in the rock floor. I scooped up water in my hands, thinking the blessing as I drank. The ache in my throat eased, letting the pain of loss blossom.
‘Maaagh,’ said the goat. She shoved past me to drink from the pool.
I pushed her back, found a dish for her to drink from, rinsed the milk pot and began to milk her. Her udder was tight and full. Squirt, squirt, squirt. She stayed still till I was half-finished, then kicked at the pot. But I was used to that and held it firmly.
The goat nudged me. Barley. I had promised her barley.
I untied a sack, scooped out some parched cracked barley, already cooked and dried, and put it on the floor for her. Then I retied the sack before she could get her nose inside. The goat ate slowly, her belly already full of grass. She must have been grazing at a safe distance all this long impossible day, while I had stood and watched . . .
I began to milk again. Squirt, squirt, squirt . . . At last the pot was almost filled. The goat’s udder was empty.
I looked at the milk, not at Rabba, and said, ‘The soldiers came. I saw —’
‘I know what you saw, girl. I saw the Romans put down a rebellion long before you were born.’
‘You can’t know,’ I insisted.
‘I can guess.’
I accepted that.
‘Ma’s body lies under the fire where the Romans cooked their meat. Her bones are either burned, or will lie there for the jackals and vultures to carry away. Our whole village is dead, or carried off as slaves. You guessed that too?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t you do something?’ I cried, before I remembered to be quieter. The cave would muffle our sounds, but even a faint echo of a girl’s voice might bring soldiers to investigate.
‘I did,’ said Rabba flatly. ‘Remember? I argued. I tried to tell your mother and sisters we must hide. But no one listens to an old woman. I did everything I could. I saved you and your sister.’
And the goat, I thought hysterically. And yourself.
‘We could have brought others here last night,’ I said.
‘And then the whole village would know where we’d gone. Someone would have said, “We should have escaped to the wadi with Judith and Baratha.” The soldiers would have heard them. We would be dead or taken into slavery too. Drink the milk, girl.’
I lifted it to my lips, knowing it would make me sick. But it was warm and smelled of goat and didn’t make me sick.
> At last Rabba held out her bony hands. She drank, then shook Baratha gently. The child’s eyes opened, but she didn’t quite wake. She drank though, hungry and thirsty after the long day. Or had she drunk from the water seep? I looked around, realising for the first time how much food was stored here.
‘Tether the goat,’ said Rabba. The nanny was already nosing towards the sack of barley.
‘To what?’
She shrugged. ‘If you tie her to a sack, she will nibble her way through it, or break an urn to get to what’s inside. Find a big rock, too heavy for her to drag, and tie her to that. Not near the water,’ she added, ‘and away from the food. Give her a pot of water to drink from so she doesn’t foul the pool.’
I found a rock near the entrance and carried it over, tied the goat to it, then gave her another handful of parched barley when she glared at me.
‘Now go and get the pallets,’ ordered Rabba. ‘And whatever else you carried from the village.’
‘I . . . I can’t,’ I said.
Suddenly my legs were logs and my head felt like honey. How long had it been since I’d slept? Nor could I face seeing the village again, or the flames that burned my mother, the vultures who called themselves men.
‘If you don’t get the pallets, the soldiers may find them and realise people escaped. Besides, we need them,’ said Sawtha Rabba. ‘And if you sleep now, you will sleep for a long time.’
I didn’t want to sleep either. If I slept, I would see Ma, see the carts straggling along the track . . .
I forced myself to my feet and stumbled out.
The Roman camp was quieter now, though the big fire still burned higher than all the rest. It gave enough light, even behind the ridge, to find what I needed.
I staggered back down the wadi, found the entrance again and dumped the pallets on the floor.
Rabba nodded to a spot next to where she sat with Baratha still in her arms. ‘Lay mine and Baratha’s there.’
Just a Girl Page 3
