On This Foundation

by Lynn Austin

  “His sons are in Beth Hakkerem, and I’m working here in Jerusalem. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  His shoulders sagged with relief. “If they ever lay their filthy hands on you, I’ll murder them. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You don’t need to worry, Dan.” She rested her hand on his arm to soothe him and again the urge to hold him tightly and feel his arms surrounding her was so powerful that she quickly pulled her hand away.

  “Where are you going? Can we walk together?” Dan asked.

  “I have to return to Master Malkijah’s house. It’s here in the city on the Hill of Ophel.” They started down the stairs, and when the crowd crushed them close together, Nava reveled in the warmth of his bare arm against hers.

  “I’ll be working here while Malkijah helps rebuild the wall. Did you come to Jerusalem to work on the wall, too?”

  “Yes. They called for volunteers, and since there’s not much to do on Abba’s farm because of this drought, I decided to come.”

  “Are you working at the Dung Gate with the other men from Beth Hakkerem?”

  “No, I refuse to have anything to do with your master. I’m helping on the eastern side of the city with the new wall that they’re building on top of the ridge.”

  “That’s wonderful! Maybe we’ll get to see each other more often. I’m allowed to come here to the sacrifice every morning.” They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Nava pointed to the left. “Malkijah lives down this street near the governor’s house. Walk with me and I’ll show you.”

  Dan reached for her hand now that the crowd had thinned. His grip felt warm and calloused and wonderfully familiar. “I don’t know which is worse, Nava, not seeing you at all or being with you and not being able to hold you in my arms.”

  “I know. I feel the same way.” She squeezed his hand. “I’m so glad I found you.”

  “Listen, the reason I came to the temple today was to pray. I haven’t been to any of the sacrifices since coming to work in the city, but today I came to pray for our future. There may be a tiny sliver of hope for us.”

  “I could use some hope.”

  “There’s an undercurrent of unrest that may work in our favor. The governor’s aide, a man named Jehohanan who is very high up in the new governor’s administration, came to our worksite the other day. He’s been visiting other sites, too, and talking to all the poor families like ours. He says we would have a chance of being heard by Governor Nehemiah if we staged a protest at the temple. Jehohanan is on our side, Nava, and he’s against all the wealthy landowners who are holding our mortgages and taking us as bondservants. He’s helping us meet together after work and get organized so we can confront the governor as a group. Jehohanan says if we refuse to work on the wall unless the governor helps us, he’ll have to do something about greedy men like Malkijah.”

  “Dan, please don’t do anything to get in trouble. What if Jehohanan is wrong about the governor being sympathetic?”

  “Rich men like your master need to be stopped. Our two families aren’t the only ones who are suffering. The same thing is happening all over the province, with other rich landowners taking farms and crops and enslaving children.”

  “Shh! Someone will hear you.” They were close to her master’s house, and she pulled him to a halt, lowering her voice. “I know how poor our people are. Most of the women I work with are bondservants for the same reason that I am. My friend Rachel had to leave her husband and two small children behind, and she can’t even visit them. But what good can come from a protest?”

  “We’ll get the governor’s attention if we all stop building the wall. Besides, we can’t possibly make the situation any worse than it already is, can we? Maybe the governor really will listen to us and do something about it.”

  “Please be careful, Dan. Malkijah is a very powerful man. You already made him angry once before when you broke into his house. I don’t think he’ll be as forgiving the next time.”

  “I don’t care. I hate him. And I’m not afraid of him.”

  “I need to go. Malkijah’s house is the last one on this street, so you’d better turn back. You can’t take a chance that anyone will see you or recognize you.”

  “Can we meet again tomorrow in the same place? Before the sacrifice?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there. But, Dan, promise me that you’ll be careful.”

  “I will. I love you, Nava.”

  “I love you, too.” She pulled her hand free from his and ran the rest of the way home, knowing that if she was near him one moment longer, she wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to throw herself into his arms and cover his beloved face with kisses.

  Chapter

  22

  JERUSALEM

  Chana finished packing the bread she had just baked into one of the carrying baskets and covered it with a clean cloth. “Are you ready to go?” she asked her sisters.

  “I think so,” Yudit said. “We can always run back home if we forgot something.”

  Chana’s nerves twitched with excitement. Today she would finally start rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall. She had barely been able to sit still beside the hearth all morning, waiting for each round of flatbread to slowly turn brown on the stone griddle. She and her sisters had been giddy with anticipation as they’d prepared this midday meal for Abba and his workers. Chana hoped he hadn’t changed his mind about allowing them to stay and work afterward.

  “That’s everything,” Sarah said. She lifted one of the water jars they had filled at the spring this morning and balanced it on her head. “Lead the way, Chana.”

  “Do you think the workers will appreciate how hard it was for us to cook all this food and bake bread on such a blistering day?” Yudit asked. “The paving stones are almost as hot as the hearthstones.”

  “I’m sure the workers already know how hot it is,” Sarah said. “It must be terrible to work out there without any shade, moving all those heavy stones.”

  “We’ll find out how hard it is soon enough,” Chana said. “The two of you can leave after we deliver the food if you want to, but I’m planning to stay and work this afternoon.”

  “I’m staying, too,” Yudit said. “Unless Abba goes back on his promise.”

  “He wouldn’t dare!”

  Chana’s arms ached as she walked down the Street of the Bakers from their house carrying the heavy load. A few minutes later she passed the governor’s headquarters near the Valley Gate, where a knot of men stood around a worktable, conferring beneath a roof made of rushes. Even before she left the city through the gate, she could hear shouts and grunts and the clang of tools in the distance, the in-and-out whooshing sound of a saw, like breathing, as someone cut wood. The road led immediately downhill into the steep valley from the gate, and Chana and her sisters had to turn around to see their assigned section. It began to the left of the gate and continued north all the way up the hill to the Tower of Ovens. The jagged remnants of the wall weren’t even half their original height, and a jumbled blanket of fallen stones littered the slope below it. But what stopped Chana in her tracks were the laborers. They had removed their tunics in the broiling heat to work in nothing but their under breeches. Their bare chests glistened with sweat. She whirled around to face the other way at the same time that her sisters did.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” Sarah said. “Those men are . . . indecent!”

  Chana wondered if her cheeks were as red as Sarah’s. “No, come on,” she said, turning around again. “We’ve all seen a man’s bare chest before, haven’t we?”

  “Not that many at once!” Yudit said. She had turned around again, too, and she stared at them, wide-eyed.

  “Just find Abba, and don’t look at the men,” Chana said. “And quit staring, Yudit! It’s always indecent to stare at people no matter how many clothes they have on.”

  “Or off,” Sarah said.

  Abba called for a lunch break when he saw Chana and her sisters coming, and the men quickly gathered a
round, grateful for the food and water. They sat down on the ground in a circle and passed around the basket of bread, putting the bowls of cooked lentils, spiced chickpeas, chopped cucumber salad, and roasted eggplant in the middle where everyone could use their bread to scoop into them. While they ate, Chana explored the site, unable to sit still. The long stretch of wall was difficult to get close to because of the steepness of the slope and the scree of toppled stones. She could see where some of the men had labored all morning to clear an area directly in front of the wall, and judging by the orderly piles of rocks, other workers had sorted stones according to size. Nearby was a pile of logs and the saws the men were using to cut them. She hoped the laborers would eat quickly and return to work so she could join them.

  “Thank you for the food, my angels,” Abba said when the men finished and the baskets and bowls lay empty on the ground. He placed one hand on Chana’s back and the other on Yudit’s and tried to gently herd them back toward the gate. “You deserve a long nap this afternoon after all that cooking.”

  Chana wiggled away from his guiding hand. “I have no intention of resting, Abba. I’m staying here to work.”

  “So am I,” Yudit said.

  “You promised we could, remember? Now give us jobs to do.”

  “I . . . but . . . you . . .” He was so flustered that Chana wanted to laugh. He was ruler of the half-district of Jerusalem, yet he couldn’t speak. She would have felt sorry for him under any other circumstances, but she was not backing down.

  “A promise is a promise.”

  “How did I ever let you talk me into this?” he asked, tugging his beard.

  “It doesn’t matter, Abba. But you gave us your word. Tell us what everyone is doing, and we’ll see what we can do to help.”

  “Well . . . as soon as we finish clearing some of those blocks away from the wall, we’ll erect the scaffolding. They’re cutting the wood for it over there. As you can see, we’re fighting the slope of the hill, so both the stones and the scaffolding could easily shift. It’s dangerous work, which is why I wish you would go home and—”

  “We won’t stand where it’s dangerous,” Chana said. “What else needs to be done?”

  He hesitated, then said, “We need to build a crane and anchor it in place, then outfit it with ropes to hoist the larger blocks to the top of the wall. Again, it’s very dangerous work because if one of the ropes should happen to break—”

  “You can’t discourage us, Abba. What are all those tools for?”

  She could see he was losing patience, but, being Abba, he answered just the same. “We use the levers to pry up the blocks so we can fasten ropes around them and lift them with the crane. The barrows are for moving the lighter stones. The chisels and cutting tools are used to smooth off the rough, broken edges so the stones will fit together better.”

  “And how will they actually build the wall? They can’t just pile up all these rocks, can they?” Chana hoped that if she kept her father talking, he would get used to having her and her sisters here.

  “No, there is a system to it. We set the largest stones in place first, width-wise, then wedge the smaller ones in between along with mortar until it’s a solid layer. We’ll make plumb lines and level lines from those cords and clay weights over there. Each course of stones must be straight vertically and level horizontally in order for the wall to stand. If it isn’t, the wall will topple.”

  “It sounds important to get that right,” Chana said.

  “It’s very important. We’re fortunate that the foundations are solid in our section. We won’t have to dig trenches for new foundations like they do on the northeast corner.”

  Abba had called it “our” section. Chana smiled to herself. He was softening. She had been looking around while he talked to see which task she and Yudit and Sarah could handle, and she decided that the simplest job would be to sort stones, picking up the ones they could easily lift and piling them to one side. She retied her scarf around her hair so it hung down her back like a horse’s tail, and as soon as Abba was distracted by a question from one of the workers, she made her way up the hill through the debris to where the men sorted rocks. She knew better than to ask Abba’s permission. Why give him a chance to stop her? Yudit and Sarah hurried up the hill to join her.

  “Be careful, my angels!” he said when he discovered what they were doing.

  “This isn’t hard at all, Abba,” she called down to him as she threw another rock onto the pile she was making.

  “We’re stronger than you think, Abba,” Yudit told him.

  “You girls better watch out for snakes,” one of the workers warned as Chana bent to lift another stone. She dropped it in surprise, barely missing her foot. But she wouldn’t let a snake or the other workers discourage her. “Thanks for the warning,” she said, smiling at the man.

  Everything about the work should have made Chana run home—the intense heat, her aching back from bending all afternoon, the way the rough stones scraped and cut her hands. The worker had been right about snakes, and she shrieked when she spotted one slithering between the stones near her feet. Yet Chana felt happier than she had in a long time and knew that working on Jerusalem’s wall was having a healing effect. She was fighting back against Yitzhak’s murderers. They would never sneak inside the city again. No other woman would have to suffer the senseless grief that she had suffered.

  “Hey, Chana!”

  She looked up to see why Yudit had called to her. Her sister’s hair looked like a glowing halo around her beaming face. “What, Yudit?”

  “You’re singing again!”

  It was true, Chana realized. She had begun to sing as she worked.

  Chapter

  23

  JERUSALEM

  Nehemiah was standing deep in the foundation trench that his workers had dug on the northeastern corner of the wall when the messenger arrived. “We spotted the provincial governors and their entourage,” the man said, panting. “They’re about a mile north of here on the Damascus Road.”

  Nehemiah stifled a groan. He would have to lay aside his work for this official state visit. His brothers, his aides, and all the men on his council would have to stop working, too. Many of those councilmen supervised a wall section or a gate, and Nehemiah hated to take them away from their work, but he must follow protocol. “Is their delegation a large one?” he asked.

  “It appears to be. They brought soldiers with them.”

  “Very well.” He brushed dirt from his hands and reached up to Hanani, who stood on top, for help climbing out of the trench. “Tell my staff to go to the Yeshana Gate and get ready to greet them,” he told the messenger. “I’ll be there shortly.” He turned back to the men digging the foundation trench and said, “You need to make it deeper. The ground has shrunk because of the drought. When the rains finally do come, the earth will swell and cause the foundations to shift. Expansion and shrinkage are facts of life in our climate, so our foundations must be deep.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  He saw Hanani eying his dusty, sweat-soaked tunic. “Shall I have someone bring you a clean robe, Governor?” he asked with a grin.

  “I suppose I should change. Thanks.” He looked at the bustle of work all around him, the jumble of scaffolding and ropes and tools, and hated to leave. The sounds of progress—shouting workers and pounding chisels—were like music to his ears.

  “You know it’s going to be impossible to disguise what we’re doing,” Hanani said.

  “I wouldn’t hide it even if I could.”

  His brother left to help the messenger alert the council members and district leaders that the delegation was about to arrive. Nehemiah quickly doused his face and hands with water and put on his clean robe, which arrived just in time for him to stand at the gate and welcome the procession. Sanballat led the way, of course, overdressed in the oppressive summer heat in heavy, ornate clothing. Sweat ran down his round face, which was as red as his robe. It took two horses to pull him
and his chariot, while Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arab rode on horseback. A gaggle of their underlings and aides swarmed around them, raising clouds of dust on the parched road. Sanballat had also brought an escort of mounted cavalry and foot soldiers, which Nehemiah recognized as an attempt to intimidate him. He remained unfazed.

  “Welcome,” he said, forcing a smile. “I hoped your first visit could wait until we weren’t quite so busy. As you can see, we are in the middle of a major building project.”

  “What is this you are doing?” Sanballat asked, gesturing to the scaffolding that framed the Yeshana Gate. He was playing dumb. It was obvious to anyone with eyes what they were doing, even though work at the gate had halted to allow the delegation to pass through without the risk of falling rocks and debris.

  “The walls of Jerusalem are in need of repairs,” Nehemiah replied. He could play dumb, as well. “I decided that the months between the end of summer and the beginning of the winter rains were a good time to get the work done. Please follow me, if you will. I have prepared my assembly hall for your visit. My councilmen and district leaders will join us shortly.”

  “I think I’d like to see some of your work, first.”

  Nehemiah had anticipated this request and was ready with a reply. “You can get a glimpse of the work right here at the Yeshana Gate. But I’m afraid it would be impossible to take your delegation any place else. We’re still in the very early stages of construction, and a great deal of rubble litters most of the sites. The Yeshana Gate is an exception because it’s been in use all these years. This way, please.”

  Sanballat didn’t move. “You’re rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem.” It was statement, not a question.

  “Yes. We are.”

  Sanballat laughed out loud. He turned around in his chariot to face his associates and the Samaritan army that had accompanied him. “Did you hear that? What do these feeble Jews think they’re doing? Will they restore the wall? Will they offer sacrifices for divine help? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble—burned as they are?”