Just a Girl

by Jackie French

  Chapter 20

  The rains that had caused the canyon to flood finally reached us that night. The skies opened and threw down buckets of water. The air turned liquid. We woke to find a stream running down the centre of the cave from the spring. The canyon roared like a thousand lions below us.

  I carried out the wet goatskins and dug a drain so the water flowed out the entranceway. ‘Now we have a fountain in our courtyard,’ I told Rabba and Baratha.

  Rabba coughed. It was worse today, despite the marrowbones last night, deeper, racking her thin body. ‘Build up the fire,’ she muttered. ‘Then milk the goat.’

  As if I did not build up the fire every morning and tend the goat. ‘She is almost dry,’ I said. ‘It’s hardly worth milking her now.’

  ‘Maaagh,’ said the goat, as if she knew we were talking about her. Perhaps she did. You never knew with goats.

  ‘Then we should eat her,’ said Rabba, leaning back like a shrivelled apple on her sheepskin pillows, her eyes shut.

  ‘No!’ cried Baratha. She ran to the goat and put her arms about her neck. The goat endured it.

  ‘We can’t eat the goat!’ I said.

  Rabba’s date eyes suddenly gleamed at me. ‘Why not, girl?’

  ‘She . . . she . . .’ I could not tell Rabba that the goat was my friend.

  The entranceway darkened as Caius came in, a sheepskin above his head to keep off the rain.

  ‘Caius, tell Rabba why we shouldn’t eat the goat,’ I said.

  ‘She’ll be too tough.’ He draped the wet skin over a rock to dry. It smelled strongly of sheep. I still missed them. ‘We should let her go.’

  Rabba snorted. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she has been a faithful servant and deserves to be free.’

  ‘Maaagh,’ agreed the goat, who had never let me milk her without trying to kick over the bucket, and would have eaten my dinner any night if she could have reached it.

  ‘And Judith brings us all the meat we want,’ added Baratha.

  Which was what I should have said. We had no room to store more meat with all the venison drying above the fire.

  Rabba coughed again. I must gather more mint leaves and marshmallow root for a tea for her as soon as the rain stops, I thought.

  ‘I want my breakfast,’ she said feebly.

  The rain turned into mist while we ate — fresh bread and dates and some of the olives I’d cured, and cold venison with marrowbone jelly spread on the soft bread for Rabba. I didn’t think the Emperor of Rome could eat better.

  Caius, Baratha and I led the goat up to the top of the wadi, away from the anger of the floodwaters. The grass spread green and lush and wet where there had only been dust and stubble a few months before. Mist drops shone in the winter sun.

  I untied the goat’s tether. ‘Goodbye,’ I said. Some other words seemed needed, so I added, ‘Thank you for the milk.’

  ‘Maaagh,’ said the goat.

  For a moment I thought she was going to stay with us. But then she sniffed the air and trotted away through the olive trees.

  Thunder muttered behind the hills, sending us scrambling back down to the cave. I managed to pull up a couple of marshmallow plants and some oregano leaves just as the next wall of rain swept through the wadi. The ground vibrated from the monster in the canyon below.

  I heated the cough potion for Rabba. She sipped it, then lay down again. Her breath was harsh and uneven. I wanted to ask Ma what to do to make Rabba better. But I knew what she would have said: Sawtha Rabba is an old woman. Winter is no friend to old women, especially if they must live in a damp and smoky cave.

  I tucked more sheepskins around her, then moved to sit by the cave entrance with Baratha and Caius, where the light was better. We wore sheepskins around our shoulders for warmth.

  Caius had put a wide, shallow pot of sand by the entrance, and he held three sticks. He handed one to me, one to Baratha and kept one for himself.

  ‘This is how you make the first letter,’ he said, drawing in the sand. ‘It is “alpha” and it makes the sound “a”. If anyone reads that sound to you, you know it is this letter.’

  Rabba peered at what we were doing, snorted, then shut her eyes. In a heartbeat she was snoring.

  ‘Why would anyone want to say “a”?’ asked Baratha.

  Caius smiled. ‘You put it with other sounds to make words. Like “animal” or “apple”. Now you make the letter.’

  I copied the sign in the sand, then watched as Baratha did it too. It was easier than I’d thought — a bit wobbly, but all right.

  Baratha moved close to me and whispered, ‘I need to make water.’ She slipped out of the cave and ran down to the overhang we used as a latrine when it rained.

  ‘Can women be scribes?’ I asked Caius. I had been trying to think what I might do if we ever left the cave. The thought frightened me, but so did the idea of Baratha and me growing into old women in the wadi, forever alone.

  ‘I have never heard of any public scribes who are women,’ Caius said. ‘Well-born women in Rome have other women who write for them, or copy manuscripts. But they are usually slaves,’ he added. ‘Not servants or scribes for hire.’

  ‘What about in other cities?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t think so. The only women I saw in the cities we passed through who could write a few words, and knew numbers, were tavern-keepers or pagan priestesses.’

  I didn’t want to be a tavern-keeper or a pagan priestess. ‘Is there any other work unmarried women do?’

  ‘In Rome? They are servants sometimes, but not often. Most people would rather buy a slave who can’t leave after they’ve trained them. I’ve seen women shopkeepers and cooks. There are women who run businesses, but they’re usually widows carrying on a family firm.’

  I couldn’t cook, or at least not well enough to make food strangers might want to eat. And I didn’t have a family business, only the abandoned fields of a deserted village. I doubted anyone would want me as a servant, even just to sweep or mend, if they saw my stained tunic, and I had no other. Anyway, I must stay here to care for Rabba. It was just a dream.

  But maybe not for Caius, I thought. As long as he stayed away from the army and anyone who might recognise him, he could leave at any time.

  ‘Have you thought where you will go to be a scribe again?’

  To my surprise he answered at once. ‘To a city with a Christian community. Ephesus, perhaps — I heard there are Christians there. I speak Greek too. One day I might be able to write the story of Jesus, and the teachings of Simon Peter and Paul of Tarsus. I may not write them well,’ he added. ‘Others will need to add things I don’t know. But writing lasts, as men do not.’

  ‘Is that why you keep asking Rabba questions?’

  ‘Yes. I keep going over what my parents taught me secretly, what I heard Simon Peter say so I don’t forget. I know too little to write the story of Jesus yet.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise not to laugh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I was a little boy, I prayed to be taught to write, like my father. My master saw me practising in the sand, like we are now, and laughed and told my father he was allowed to teach me. Years later I prayed that I might be free, and you hit me with your stone and here I am, not a runaway, but free by the Emperor’s decree.’

  ‘So your God gives you whatever you pray for?’

  ‘I think it is the other way around,’ he said quietly. ‘I think when we pray, when we trust, we are given the strength and courage to do what must be done.’

  Jakob would never have talked to me like this, I thought suddenly. Nor Sarah’s James. They studied and argued only with other men.

  Baratha raced back inside, panting and wet. She changed her sheepskin for a dry one and we began our letters again.

  ‘This letter is “beta”,’ said Caius.

  By the time Rabba woke up, coughing and complaining and demanding more herb tea, Caius had shown us all t
he letters, right down to omega.

  ‘Look!’ cried Baratha, holding up the pot of sand to show Rabba the omega. But Rabba just coughed again, then lay down weakly.

  And suddenly I was scared; as scared as I’d been when I watched the Romans in our village. Because Sawtha Rabba had been part of my life ever since I could remember, but one day she would die. And Baratha and I would be by ourselves.

  One day, soon perhaps, Caius would leave to become a scribe again — a freeman making his own life. I’d hoped that now he knew I was no longer betrothed, he might ask me to be his wife. But apart from pulling me from the flood, he had never touched me. He had never even mentioned that he might marry when he became a scribe. Maybe as a slave he’d never thought of marriage. Or perhaps he planned to find a Christian wife.

  None of the future I had expected could ever happen now. I would never marry Jakob and be a farmer’s wife, or a soldier’s, or follow him to Jerusalem. Suddenly I realised I didn’t want to follow any man, not unquestioningly. Walk with him perhaps, side by side. Through all the chaos and tragedy of the last few months, I had also been freed — like Caius. But for what?

  ‘Maaagh!’ said something large and wet at the entranceway. It was the goat. She gave me an evil look, as if to say, It’s your fault I’ve been out in the cold and rain. She trotted over to her corner and lay down, giving me a look that meant, Where’s my dinner?

  I giggled. She suddenly looked like Rabba.

  ‘What’s so funny, girl?’ demanded Rabba, lifting herself shakily on one elbow. She coughed, then squinted into the dimness. ‘What’s that animal doing here?’

  ‘She wants to be here,’ I said.

  ‘She likes us,’ said Baratha, hugging the goat’s wet neck. The goat allowed it again.

  ‘Ha. She just wants barley porridge and dry hay and somewhere out of the rain and wind,’ said Rabba.

  ‘We have plenty,’ I said. ‘Enough for the goat too.’

  ‘Maaagh,’ agreed the goat.

  I took the pot of sand and practised the letters — alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon — while Baratha stopped the goat chewing the sacks by giving her a bowl of parched barley, then tethering her before she made us fresh bread.

  Caius cooked one of the long sausages he’d made the night before, turning it over and over to heat it above the fire. It was good too. Even Rabba ate it.

  Afterwards, Baratha sang one of Ma’s spinning songs, and Caius described the sea and ships, and Rabba lay back and listened, sipping more of the herb tea. She even smiled now and then. And the goat lay on her straw, munching Baratha’s freshly made bread. My home was gone. My family too. But here in the smoky cave, I had another home and family, and riches too.

  I had looked through a window to a new world: one where I could read scrolls, and even write them. I had imagined ships upon the seas. Tomorrow, or next month, might be frightening, but today had been one of the best days I had known.

  Chapter 21

  Week after week, the winter rains fell. The nights stretched longer, eating up the light. The wind crept around the cave, sneaking in the crevices, or howling like a jackal. Mud the colour of old cheese washed down the wadi to join the torrent in the canyon. At times it seemed like there could be no mud left to wash away, but every day the rain ate more from the cliffs.

  We rationed our firewood. I dried the goat’s droppings to burn too. Wet wood will burn if the fire is hot enough, but it doesn’t give out much heat. Goat droppings do. And we needed heat. The cave grew even damper; moisture beaded the walls. We lived with the smell of wet wool and smoke and goat and people who had been inside too long.

  The goat glared at us from her corner, as if the rain was all our fault. Rabba huddled in as many sheepskins as we could pile on her, but still she shivered and coughed.

  Baratha, Caius and I spent most of our time near the entranceway, where there was light and fresh air. We gazed at the grey rain and yellow flood, listening to it roar below us, watching as loosened boulders plopped down the hill to be swept away in the torrent as Baratha and I learned how to write words and to read the simple phrases that Caius wrote out for us in our language, which he only knew a little of, and Koine, which we all knew, and even a few words of Latin, which was used throughout the Empire.

  But still we weren’t able to read the scroll in Hebrew. The words that Micah had spoken every Shabbat in our everyday language didn’t seem to match those at the beginning of the scroll.

  It was a strange time. A timeless time. Days stopped mattering; even night and day. Our lives were ruled by rain. When it fell like buckets emptied from the sky, we deepened the drains in the cave, and sheltered the fire from stray raindrops, and felt the cave shake with the force of water raging below. When it drizzled, we ran out to empty chamberpots, or to gather the wild greens that sprang up in the rain — wild lettuce, chicory, mallow, garlic tops, mustard greens and dandelion leaves, dancing upwards. All the world had turned green now, except where it was rock or mud.

  We warmed pots of water to keep ourselves clean. I brewed up a solution of wood ash to wash the sheepskins, then hung them on bushes for the rain to rinse. We had to wait days for them to dry. But we had time, as well as wheat and barley and fruit to eat. We talked as well as studied. Caius told us how everyone in Rome had to pretend the Emperor Nero was the most handsome man ever born, even though he was short and bandy and had a nose like a radish; Baratha and I explained how cousins and second cousins used to come to our village for Passover feasts, and how the youngest asked the questions every year.

  Each time the sun appeared we carried everything we could outside to dry: goatskins and sheepskins and pallets. The goat headed out too, grazing so much lush grass that her droppings grew sloppy. They were messy to clean up and now were no use to burn in the fire.

  We carried Rabba out to a sheepskin on sunny days too, with another skin rolled up for her to lean against. Her cough grew deeper as the days grew shorter, her breathing like shallow gusts of wind. It’s the smoke, I thought, now the fire is larger and she can’t go into the fresh air as much. She will be better when spring comes.

  If the rain stopped for longer, I ran up to the village, but always by myself. Ever since Rabba’s outburst, Caius had been careful not to be alone with me; and Baratha still refused even to look at the place where our family had once lived.

  Vegetables from last year’s seeds had sprung up in the village plots: long red radishes, fat purple turnips, feathery fennel and long white parsnips. They were easy to pull up from the mud, but left me even muddier.

  The rain had cleaned our village too. Some walls and roofs had collapsed, as they did every winter, the plaster eroding away. There was no one to repair it now. But the rain had also washed the Roman muck from the street and even from the bathhouse. It was fed by its own spring that now flowed strong and clear. I was able to have a proper bath, even though it left me goose-pimpled and shivering. But it was good to be clean again. I wished Baratha had come with me so she could be truly clean too.

  Winter deepened. Snow clouds hung above the valley, fat as a pregnant sheep, purple as grapes. Snow fell in sharp cold flakes and gathered into icicles that slithered down the wadi walls like frozen snakes. The water seep froze, and the pool too, so we had to melt snow to drink and wash, and to fill a bowl for the goat. Sheets of ice hung from the cliffs like daggers, dropping in the brief sun of midday and piercing the ground below.

  I had never known a winter so cold: it was as if the Romans had stolen the sun as well as our land. We kept the fire as high as we could, but the cold ate its warmth. Baratha and I made hooded cloaks of sheepskin, and leggings and rough boots for us all, oiled to keep out the damp, but still the cold sneaked in and stole the warmth from our bones.

  I heated rocks by the fire and tucked them into the sheepskins around Rabba. We jammed sheepskins into the cave window each night too. It helped, but we could not barricade out the cold. Caius slept in the main cave again now. He would freeze i
n the smaller cave without a fire, and even the extra heat of his body made a difference in the small space.

  At last it grew too cold to sit in the entranceway writing or reading. Our fingers were too numb to hold the sticks.

  ‘Show me how to use a slingshot,’ Baratha demanded one day as we stood stamping our feet by the fire, our hands tucked into our armpits, trying to get warm.

  Behind us, Rabba slept, or at least lay with her eyes shut. She napped much of the day now, in between bouts of coughing.

  ‘Girls aren’t supposed to,’ I began, then laughed. The village rules seemed to have been swept away by the flood. ‘All right. Caius, do you want to learn too?’

  He blinked, startled. ‘I . . .’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s like my thoughts have to crash through a door. Slaves are not permitted to carry weapons.’

  ‘Even when you’re invading someone’s country?’

  He shook his head, another foreign gesture. ‘If slaves had weapons, they might rise up against their masters.’

  ‘Ha,’ muttered Rabba without opening her eyes. ‘Maybe a slave is someone who doesn’t dream of challenging his masters.’

  Caius shot her a quick glance, then looked back at me. ‘Yes, please. I would like to learn the slingshot.’

  We practised all that day and the next too, digging out stones from the cliffs on either side of the cave. By the end of the second day, both Baratha and Caius could hit a rock on the opposite side of the wadi.

  ‘We are great hunters!’ crowed Baratha.

  I grinned. ‘Very great. You have just hunted a rock. But what if the rock was moving? And can you hit an animal hard enough to make it fall? Where must the stone hit to bring it down?’

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’ve watched you.’

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  She smirked. ‘Maybe I am a good hunter then.’

  And Caius had followed me and Jakob without me noticing him either, I thought. I must take more care. Where they could follow, others might too.

  But it was good to know they could move quietly and safely through the wadis and across the land above.