Just a Girl

by Jackie French

  But he was a Roman. No, not a Roman . . . he belonged to a Roman, or had belonged. That was different. And suddenly I knew for certain that Caius would never hurt us, and not just because he needed us for food and drink and shelter. Caius had been born again when his master left him in the wadi. He was free to make his own life now, just as we were free.

  Free for what? What would a freed slave choose to do? I didn’t know. But I was smiling, even though my eyes were filled with tears, as I used my skirt to hold the bruised and trampled pomegranates that the Romans had left on the ground. My skirt was so dirty already that any juice stains wouldn’t matter.

  I tied up the vegetables in a blanket. I would take them to the cave first, then come back for the pile by the gate, and finally lug back the pair of millstones, one by one and step by step.

  A pair of millstones was really too heavy for a girl to carry. But I had carried my sister and great-grandmother to freedom. I had even killed a Roman with my slingshot — even if he hadn’t really died and didn’t want to be a Roman any more.

  I could carry millstones.

  Chapter 15

  ‘The son of the Roman hairdresser can push the millstone for Baratha,’ said Rabba.

  Baratha stared. ‘Men don’t grind flour.’

  ‘He can,’ said Rabba. ‘And you can hold the lower stone for him.’

  It takes two to grind flour, and one of them must be strong, but I had never seen a man demean himself with women’s work before.

  ‘All right,’ said Caius. He didn’t meet my eye.

  Did Roman men grind flour? I didn’t think so. But maybe slaves did when there were no women. Or did the soldiers’ camp have women, like Sarah and Rakeal, to do that work? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. It was another world, and the less I knew of it, the less I could imagine in my nightmares. I was glad I didn’t have to grind the flour though. My arms ached from carrying the millstones.

  Rabba fixed me with her small date eyes. ‘Don’t just sit there like a pillar of salt. Go and catch some pigeons for us so we have meat.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘I know how good you are with that sling, girl. I saw more from my rooftop than the women gossiping in the courtyard. I saw you practise day after day.’

  Yet she had never complained to Ma about my unwomanliness. If she had, Ma would have scolded me. For the first time since we’d come to the cave, I grinned.

  Pigeons are easiest to catch in the late afternoon, when they’ve pecked at the seeds and drunk as well. They walk then, instead of fly, unless they sense danger. I crept between the pomegranate trees, past the grapevine terrace, to the edge of the barley field, four stones ready in my hand, another four carried in my skirt.

  About twenty pigeons waddled through the stubble, looking for grain we’d missed. I readied my slingshot. Wham! One fell, so quickly and quietly the others didn’t notice. Three more joined it.

  I reached for the other stones just as the remaining pigeons took flight . . . and aimed higher. Pigeons could not fly far nor fast, especially when their stomachs were full.

  Eight pigeons with eight stones! I could have danced with pride.

  I gathered them quickly and slit their throats in case they were stunned not dead, and so they could bleed. And now I’ll need to pluck them, I thought, suddenly exhausted. Pigeons have so many tiny feathers . . . I’d have to light the fire, bring in the goat and milk her, make the bread and collect water for washing. But at least we would have meat tonight.

  I carried the pigeons by their feet, the blood still dripping from their necks. It felt strange walking through the pomegranate trees, my back to the village, knowing that if I turned, there’d be no donkeys grazing outside, no sheep, no laughter from inside the walls, or smoke rising from the courtyards . . .

  Smoke! I could smell it! I ran down the wadi, scrambling on the steep parts. I could smell bread too. Wheat bread.

  I slipped into the cave and stared. Goatskins covered the floor like carpets, black and white and orange, with cushions made of rolled-up sheepskins. An oil lamp sat on top of an amphora, glowing gently. Dried sheep and goat droppings glowed hot in a small fire by the window. A chipped platter of fresh flatbreads and a bowl of the greens I’d picked that morning mixed with chopped onion and pomegranate seed sat on top of a barrel. The goat’s milk stood in a pot near the fire, freckled with rock weed to turn it into curds and whey, to make fresh cheese tomorrow.

  It was beautiful. It was like a home. Even the goat looked contented, lying on clean barley straw, chewing industriously. It was impossible.

  Even more impossible, Caius crouched next to the cooking stone, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, pressing the bread dough onto the stone, then turning it quickly as the first side browned. Baratha sat next to him, patting out the dough and handing it to him, then putting the cooked breads on the platter.

  ‘You can walk!’ I said stupidly. And make bread, I thought. I had never known a man make bread.

  ‘I don’t think the bone is broken,’ said Caius quietly. I wondered if he always spoke quietly, if maybe a slave wasn’t allowed to make too much noise. ‘If I don’t bend my knee or put weight on my leg, I can manage.’

  ‘We made bread!’ announced Baratha. She looked almost happy.

  ‘I can see that. It smells wonderful.’ Wheat bread, which we only had for Shabbat or on feast days. And there was the lump of raw dough, the offering, just as Ma would have done . . .

  ‘Rabba told me where to find the cave with the sheep and goatskins,’ said Baratha excitedly. ‘There are lots of them!’

  I glanced at Rabba.

  ‘The wife of a tax collector knows how to hide sheepskins from the tax collector,’ she said.

  So these caves must have been used for years, I thought; not just for Rabba’s inheritance or after the zealots’ raid last year, but to cheat the tax collectors. No wonder there was so much food.

  ‘Rabba mixed the bread dough. It’s got honey in it, to make it light!’ Baratha said. ‘And Caius lit the fire — and now we have pigeons!’

  Which must be plucked. I looked hungrily at the salad, at the bread.

  ‘Eat,’ commanded Rabba, gesturing at an ancient wooden platter that held some of last year’s olives, raisins and almonds already cracked from their shells. ‘The boy will cook the pigeons.’

  I brushed away tears. They must have worked so fast to have this ready for my return; must have planned it this morning — Baratha gathering the firewood, Caius perhaps cracking the nutshells. I grabbed some almonds and ate them gratefully, though my mouth watered for bread.

  ‘If you could just help me pluck the pigeons,’ I said to Caius.

  ‘No need,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘I told the Wise Mother about the soldiers’ trick for when you don’t want the enemy to smell cooking, or the other soldiers to know you have meat.’ He gestured to a bowl filled with wet clay, which he must have scraped from the floor near the spring. ‘I’ll show you how to do it.’

  It took him as long as it took to say the Shabbat blessing to cover each bird in clay, then place them carefully in the fire. He added twigs and more tinder so the fire burned hot. The clay shrank and changed colour, almost as if it was turning into a cooking pot.

  I washed my face and hands quickly in the pot of water by the water seep, then sat cross-legged on the goatskins and picked at the nuts and olives, passing them up to the others to eat too. Rabba mixed more dough, and Baratha fetched and carried, and Caius cooked.

  At last he picked up one of the lumps of clay, quite black now, using two sticks as tongs. He laid it on the ground and pounded it gently with a stick. The clay cracked and the sides fell open, taking the pigeon’s feathers too. And there was a pigeon, not browned as it would have been on a spit, but smelling wonderfully of meat and comfort.

  Caius used the sticks again to place the cooked pigeon on a plate I’d found, chipped but with a fine red glaze. He quickly bowed his head. ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the
Universe, who creates varieties of nourishment.’

  Rabba stared. It was not quite the blessing Ma used to say before the meal, and he spoke it in Koine of course, not the language we used at home. But it sounded . . . right.

  ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth,’ he continued softly but stubbornly, as if it would take an earthquake to make him stop. ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the tree. Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, at whose word all came to be.’

  The cave was silent. At last Rabba said, ‘Thank you, boy.’

  Caius looked at me. ‘It is the first time I have said those words aloud. It is I who must thank you, for my freedom, for treating me as a guest not an enemy, and for food,’ he gave a slight smile, ‘especially the pigeons.’

  He handed the pigeon on the platter to Baratha to give to Rabba. ‘For you, Wise Mother.’ He cracked open the next lump of clay, then handed its pigeon to me. ‘For the girl who can hit a pigeon with a stone, who saved a slave and —’

  ‘That’s quite enough of that,’ snapped Rabba. She eyed him. ‘Tomorrow night you’ll sleep in the cave with the sheepskins. It is not seemly for a man to sleep with women.’

  ‘Yes, Wise Mother.’ Caius passed the platter of bread to Rabba.

  She took a piece solemnly and tore it in half, then handed one half to me. The piece should have gone to Caius first, as a man and as a guest. But he was a Roman, and Rabba was . . . Rabba. If this was the way she wanted it, I would not argue. I tore my piece of bread and handed part of it to Baratha, who tore hers and gave the last piece to Caius.

  It was not seemly for women to eat with men who were not their family either, but we did. It hadn’t seemed strange before, when we had eaten just to satisfy our hunger. But this was a feast. The bread was hot and sweet and flaky — the best I had ever eaten. The pigeons tasted a little of clay but mostly of pigeon, the insides shrunken away from the flesh and more tender than any I’d ever eaten. The juice ran down my fingers, and I licked it off as I ate and ate.

  Two pigeons for each of us; more meat and more wheat bread at one meal than I had ever eaten before. We have more grain here than we can eat before it goes bad, I thought. Parched barley and well-dried wheat would keep for years, and so would oil, but much would not keep beyond the winter. All the more reason to eat now.

  Two pigeons each, all the bread we could eat, and a salad as good as Ma’s . . .

  I could not think of her. Ma, who had scolded me for behaving like a boy, but had defended her daughters with the kitchen knife.

  At last Rabba burped and handed me the almost empty platter of bread. Baratha was nearly asleep, leaning against Caius. I stared at them in the lamplight: my little sister sitting so trustingly with the enemy. This young man had been with the men who had raided our village and killed our people. He had watched the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, even if he had been as helpless as we were.

  And yet I trusted him. If the Romans came again, he could easily call to them and lead them to the storage caves, and see us taken prisoner and made slaves so he could be rewarded.

  But he would not. Caius bent his head again to pray. Baratha blinked and sat up straight.

  ‘Lord, we thank You for the food, and for the land that has provided it, and for Your goodness in all things. Amen.’

  Once again it was not Ma’s prayer, though it spoke of the same things. Except for Jerusalem, I thought. Ma and Father had always thanked God for Jerusalem. Had Caius’s sect remembered Jerusalem too, far away in Rome? They probably had if their Jesus and Simon Peter had grown up in Judea and were proper followers of the law. But Jerusalem was no more.

  I gave the goat the leftover bread. She snatched it from my fingers as her due. I wet a rag and wiped Baratha’s face and hands, then coaxed her sleepily up to Rabba.

  Rabba waited till she had curled up like a small black-headed lamb beside her, then said abruptly, ‘Boy.’

  ‘Yes, Wise Mother?’

  ‘Those prayers you said. How do you know them? Have you studied? Do you know the laws?’

  He bowed his head. ‘I know very little, just as I told you, Wise Mother. I think most of our prayers are based on yours. But Simon Peter told us in Rome that the Messiah gave us a new prayer to say, the most important one of all. I can recite it for you —’

  ‘You will do no such thing! I won’t have Gentile prayers said in my house.’ Rabba glared at him, her arms around Baratha. ‘Tomorrow night you sleep in the sheepskin cave,’ she repeated. ‘And no more Gentile prayers!’

  What if he left us? I wondered. Surely he wouldn’t want to stay in a cave now he was free. It was so good to have his help. But until his leg healed, he probably could not even hobble out of the wadi. I looked up at Rabba. She winked at me, and I knew she had thought of that too.

  ‘Caius,’ I said slowly.

  He turned around from dampening down the fire with ash to keep the coals alight for tomorrow. ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are you going to do when your knee is better? Go back to Rome?’

  He shook his head. ‘Rome would be too dangerous. I might be legally free, but I can’t prove it. I don’t have manumission papers.’ I wondered what those were. ‘There are other cities where a scribe can make a living,’ he added uncertainly.

  ‘But we don’t want you to go,’ cried Baratha. ‘Tell him, Judith! We need him here — to help light the fire and grind flour and . . . and lots of things.’

  I glanced at Rabba. She looked back at me expressionlessly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said at last. ‘We need you here.’

  ‘Then I won’t go,’ he said. ‘As long as you need me, I’ll be here.’

  He looked like I had felt earlier. Free.

  Chapter 16

  ‘The sheepskin cave is twenty paces down the wadi, then uphill for eight paces, and the entrance is behind a saltbush,’ Rabba told Caius the next morning as we ate more freshly baked wheat bread, made with honey again, and dates and olives.

  She looked stronger for having eaten the good meal last night. So did Baratha. But it seemed wrong now to have enjoyed it so much, with our family dead, our village gone, the heart of our land destroyed.

  ‘I heard you tell Baratha where it was,’ Caius reminded her.

  ‘Ha! But did you remember?’ Rabba peered at him through the gloom. ‘People who write things down forget how to remember. I learned that in . . . when I was young.’

  ‘I remember,’ he said, and glanced at me. ‘I might need help getting up the cliff.’

  I looked at Rabba.

  ‘So help him,’ she said.

  ‘Maaagh,’ said the goat, annoyed. She didn’t like being in the cave. It didn’t have air and light like the ground floor and courtyard of our house where the animals usually lived. Perhaps she misses her kid too, I thought, and maybe even the sheep. It was hard to tell if goats were sad.

  ‘I’ll take the goat down the wadi today,’ said Baratha.

  ‘Make sure the knot is good when you tether her,’ I warned.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, Judith.’ She untied the goat and led her out.

  Caius managed to make his own way out of the cave, leaning on a stick, and along the wadi. He turned to me apologetically when we had to climb uphill.

  ‘May I lean on your shoulder, Judith?’ He added hastily, ‘Do you mind if I call you Judith?’

  I looked at him, surprised. ‘What else should you call me?’

  He spoke a word that sounded like Latin, then saw I didn’t understand. He flushed and said, ‘Mistress. It is how a slave addresses a free woman.’

  ‘But you aren’t a slave now.’

  ‘No,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I’m not.’

  He put his hand tentatively on my shoulder, but after a few steps, he took it away. Even when we climbed upwards, he didn’t need my help. The stick gave him all the support he needed.

  I push
ed aside the saltbush and met a gust of sheep smell. There was the cave, just as Rabba had said. How many more hidden caves were there? I wondered. I had played in this wadi all my life, and herded sheep here more recently, but I’d never noticed either of the two caves I now knew about.

  This entrance was wider than the one to our cave and would have been more obvious if not for the saltbush. The cave was smaller too, the ceiling lower. It was crammed with wooden pallets topped with roll after roll of sheepskins. I stared. There were years of skins here, more years than we’d been at war. I supposed they had been kept until they were needed for dowries, or to be sold perhaps if the village needed to buy a new plough.

  Caius laughed. ‘At least my bed will be soft here, and I’ll be warm. We should take some more skins back to the other cave for cushions.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We grabbed a bundle of lambskins and unrolled them. They’d been well cured — maybe even by my father. I had a sudden memory of him scraping skins, washing them, rubbing them with boiled brains then lanolin, scraping and stretching them over and over, day by day, until they were supple. Apart from the good scent of wool, the leather didn’t smell at all. They just smelled of sheep, my dear familiar sheep . . .

  ‘You’re crying,’ said Caius gently.

  ‘I’m not.’ I brushed away the tears.

  ‘I’m so sorry about your mother, your sisters, your home . . .’

  ‘I was crying for my sheep,’ I said. ‘I used to guard them, after the boys left, to keep the jackals away, to lead them to new pasture each day. I . . . I loved those sheep. I know that sounds silly,’ I added hastily.

  ‘I loved a frog,’ he said. I stared at him, and he smiled. ‘I was eight years old and it lived in the fountain in the courtyard. I’d watch it every morning when I had a spare minute, till someone cuffed me and made me attend to my work again.’