by Stant Litore
A clatter as his heel struck a pile of clay bowls.
“Hide!” the girl gasped, and her small hands shoved him down into a heap of bedding. She began reaching for blankets to pile over him.
“Why?” Koach panted. “Why are you helping me?”
A small scream, muffled against her closed lips. “Don’t ask questions!” she whispered fiercely. “Hide!”
A horse’s whicker at the door. Koach stiffened.
In another moment, there was a hard rap against the wood, as if something blunt had struck against it. The Outlaw’s sword-hilt, perhaps.
Another rap.
Then two more.
In the moments that followed, Koach could hear his breathing like a wind over the sea. He hadn’t known breathing could be so loud.
“Come out! If you’re in there, boy, come out!” A pause. “That’s how you want to die? Hiding? You come out, I’ll let you run.”
Shamed, Koach began to get up, only to feel the girl’s hand pressing him back.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He shook his head, tried to get up again.
Her hands pinned his shoulders. “No, he won’t break the door.” Her mouth barely made any sound, just the movement of her lips. “He won’t. He won’t defile another’s house!”
There was a harder pounding at the door, and a great crack. The girl’s face went white. Koach peered past her, through the tiny gap between the rug and the wall. He saw the outer door half fall to the side, the wood splintered about its rusted bronze hinge.
Barabba stood with his hand still on the ruined door, his expression lethal. For a moment, Koach’s heart clamored in his ears; he was sure the Outlaw would kick the door the rest of the way open and come for him with knife or stone, tearing aside the rugs to reveal the inner rooms, until Koach was found.
Yet the girl had been right: even as the door broke, Barabba hesitated. To violate the sanctity of another man’s house, a man of your own People, to stride in boldly as though you owned the house and all within, that would invite the wrath of holy God. That gave even Barabba pause.
The Outlaw’s eyes burned. As Koach and the girl held their breath, Barabba visibly struggled with himself. Then he turned partly away with a snarl. “Hide, then, in the house of good men!” he called, his voice thick with a fury that had been building perhaps for years, like a storm piling hot above the sea.
“Hide, little rat! But it doesn’t matter how deep you burrow. One day soon, when we’ve thrown the Romans into the sea, good men will rip you out of your hole, you and every heathen and every hebel and every unclean weakling, and drag you out to be stoned in the open before the eyes of God. Hide and shiver.”
“He’s right,” Koach whispered, barely moving his lips. “I’m not just hebel, I’m a coward.” He was shaking. Too well he remembered the pain from Bar Cheleph’s fists. Barabba would be worse.
“Shh! He’ll hear you!”
But he knew that he had to get up. Shimon his brother had stood before the Outlaw without fear in his face. Koach had not been permitted to stand before the other men in the synagogue; if he couldn’t stand like them now, or if Barabba did burst in and this lovely girl who’d hidden him was hurt in his place …
Koach took one of the girl’s hands in his, dislodging it from his shoulder. He opened his mouth to call out to the Roman-killer, who still stood furious in the door. The girl hissed in frustration, and then suddenly her small weight was pressed down on him and her lips found his and they were warm and soft, and his heart pounded in alarm. Any intent he might have had to call out or rise and stride to the door washed away like sand on the tide. After moment, his lips parted around her upper lip and he kissed her. His one good hand still clasped her wrist captive, for he did not know either to let go or to put his arm around her. It took his entire being just to manage the kiss. He did not even hear the Outlaw’s boot strike the ruin of the door, or his steps retreating, or the whicker of his horse as he reined it about, outside. Koach heard nothing but his own heart and her soft breathing through her nose as her own lips parted and the kiss became something new and different and overwhelming, something much more than just a frustrated girl silencing him the only way she could think of, something so warm and real and moist that it was painful.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped when the kiss ended.
Silence thickened between them.
Then she whispered, “I’m not.”
Startled, he looked into her eyes, which shone in the light from the window. There was a look in them he had never seen before. It scared him and excited him.
“What is your name?” he whispered.
“Tamar,” she said. “Tamar bat Benayahu.”
“Bat Benayahu,” he whispered. He had no idea what to say, or how to say it. So instead he touched her face with his fingertips. “You are so graceful,” he said.
She shook her head. “No. I know that’s not true.” She looked pale. “I’m not … not what you said. Graceful.”
“You are.”
Her eyes glistened. Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “He keeps me shut in here, mostly. Forbids me to step outside the door. Because I am ugly. Because …” She lowered her head so that her hair hid her face. “My father is ashamed that no one has asked for me.”
“You are not ugly,” Koach whispered. “You are beautiful.”
She shook her head sharply.
He put his hands on her shoulders. “You are beautiful,” he said again. “Beautiful as the moon on the sea and the shells on the shore.”
“You are kind,” she whispered, a catch in her voice. “I knew that. The last time father let me out, I saw you walking with your mother. My father says terrible things about you, and I know others do, too. I know that your arm is weak. But you are Yonah’s son. They say that, too. And I—I’ve seen how you help her. Your mother. Her face—you can tell that she cries often. You’re what she stays on her feet for. You’re not hebel. You’re kind.”
She glanced up at him through her hair, and her eyes were wet. They caught at his heart.
“Is this what it’s like to be kissed?” she whispered. “You press your lips to a boy’s, and your heart falls out? And suddenly you’re saying things you didn’t mean to?”
“Yes,” he whispered back. “Or … I don’t know. I haven’t kissed anyone before.” For Koach, it wasn’t like his heart spilling from him in a rush of words. It was more like all the words in the whole word getting stuck in your throat, and being unable to get any of them out.
Suddenly he remembered.
“Your father—your father is hurt,” Koach gasped.
She gave him a wild look.
“I don’t think he’s hurt badly. But Barabba was striking at people by the synagogue.”
She glanced at the broken door, and her eyes held terror and dread. “I have to find out what’s happening.”
He grabbed her arm, but she shook her head.
“Wait here. Quietly. I won’t be here to hush you,” she added, blushing.
“If I shout, will you kiss me again?”
“I might,” she whispered after a moment.
Her face was a deep red now, and Koach felt a flash of anger at her father. How could he have told her she was ugly? He cupped his hand behind her neck and drew her face to his, quickly, before he could change his mind, and kissed her, open-mouthed and anxious.
When the kiss ended, she rushed to her feet and darted across the atrium, swift as a deer. Koach sat dazed.
Then she was gone.
Koach lay beneath the wool bedding, which smelled like Tamar—a scent of sawdust and wood and clear water and long-held fear that seeps into the skin so deeply that it becomes a scent, too. The warmth of her lips remained with him, new and bewildering, as though God had touched him and changed something inside him, forever. He didn’t know what had changed. He only knew that he was not the same youth he had been an hour earlier.
He wanted to know her, know eve
rything about her. Did she climb to her roof sometimes and gaze at the moon over the sea, as he did? Did she like to sing softly in the evening? Did she have a secret place, a place God had shared only with her, where she went to think? He wanted to listen to her talk of herself, as no one had ever done with him, and he wanted to kiss her again.
There was a shout at the broken door, and Koach tensed. He’d heard no hoofbeats. Wood creaked as the remains of the door were yanked open. Then steps and loud breathing. He peered out at the atrium from under the corner of his blanket. A thin, wiry man with a dark shock of beard was moving quickly from one room to the next, glancing through the inner doors. Benayahu. He held one hand clutched to his right eye, and there was blood seeping through his fingers. A gash opened his cheek below his hand and it gaped red and dark in the dim light. His mouth was curved in a snarl of rage, his face flushed; the way he moved, the aggression and violence latent in his body, made Koach hold his breath.
“Tamar!” her father roared. “Tamar!”
When there was no answer, he made a low feral sound—a sound Koach had never heard a man make before—and he stooped over a basket in the atrium and tore out a cloth, pressing it to his face. He swayed on his feet a moment. Then he glanced across the atrium at the small chamber where Koach lay. Koach drew the blanket entirely over his head, tried to make himself as small as possible beneath it, and lay very still.
Benayahu strode near, seized the rug over the door, and tore it aside, letting in a flood of sunlight. He stood there looking in, breathing hard.
Koach didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe. He began to count silently.
He made it to four.
Then the nagar’s breath hissed out between his teeth. He let the rug fall back.
Benayahu strode to another room without speaking. Koach heard the flapping sound of another rug pulled aside. Then another. When Benayahu stepped back into the atrium, Koach shivered at his glimpse of his face. He had seen such a face before. He remembered the way Bar Cheleph had stood over him in the grasses, beating him. In a dull horror he remembered the bruises he’d seen on Tamar’s arm. He swallowed and lay very still, hardly daring to breathe.
He remembered the small carving he’d made, a fish, torn from his hand, though he’d tried desperately to hold onto it. And the scent of the grasses, the way a few wild blades had brushed his face as he shielded his head with his good arm. The sharp, violent pain that came with each blow of Bar Cheleph’s feet. The shouts of “Hebel! Hebel! Hebel!”
And that terrible moment when he wondered if he was going to die, if Bar Cheleph and the other young men were going to beat him to death there on the tideline.
Then Bar Cheleph’s strangled yell.
The blows stopped.
Startled voices, then running feet. Running away from him.
Koach lay still. His back and left side were one dull burn of pain.
A hand on his shoulder made him tense. He was rolled onto his back. He found Bar Nahemyah’s face above his, stern but concerned. The shofar hung about the man’s neck, and the knuckles on his right hand were bloodied.
“On your feet, Bar Yonah,” he said.
Koach just looked at him, dazed, trying to breathe.
“I said get up. Yonah would have been ashamed of you. He would have wanted you to fight.”
Bar Nahemyah grasped Koach’s arms and pulled him up until he was sitting. Then he took a closer look. “God of our fathers, your face is a mess,” he muttered.
“Don’t hit me anymore,” Koach whispered. “Don’t.”
“No one is going to hit you. But put away your wood and your knife. This is a town of Yehuda tribe, not a settlement of pig-eating Greeks, worshippers of wood and stone.”
“The fish—”
Bar Nahemyah glanced about, his lips in a thin line. “Bar Cheleph took it when he ran, I think.”
Koach moaned softly. A terrible sense of loss.
“Be thankful. It can curse his house instead of yours. What were you thinking, making such a thing?”
“It was beautiful.”
“So is a blade, or a woman’s body. But there are times when it is evil to hold one.”
Koach didn’t understand. He groaned when Bar Nahemyah lifted him to his feet.
“Damn,” Bar Nahemyah whispered. “You can’t stand, can you?”
Koach tried, but the world seemed to tip; Bar Nahemyah caught him and lifted the boy into his arms with a grunt. “I’d better take you to your mother,” he said grimly, carrying the youth as he began walking through the grass toward the houses, his body lean and wiry against Koach’s. “If your brother finds you here, like this, he may kill Bar Cheleph. He is Yonah’s son.”
Rahel had already been awake when Koach returned to his brother’s house. She’d listened with fierce eyes as he told her what had happened and hissed through her teeth at his bruises. Then she swept him into her arms and crushed him to her. “My son! Oh my son. My son, my son.”
She cleaned his face with a damp cloth and lay him in his bedding, and for a while she sat beside him singing to him softly, though her eyes burned dark with fury.
The ruined outer door shut with a crack, and then Benayahu was gone. Koach let out his breath. Now that the danger was past, he thought of Tamar. The bruise he’d seen on her arm.
He wished he had some way to warn her that her father knew she was gone from the house and was searching for her. His own body felt sore with remembered blows, and he thought: Tamar and I are the same.
Except that he had been beaten once, while she lived under her father’s roof and might be beaten many times. Bitterness twined about his heart like a thorny weed, and the hurt of it was far more cruel than anything he had felt before.
People often think that violence, though it causes pain, is something that can be shrugged away, or healed, or walked away from afterward. But it isn’t. The violence of a man’s fists on a boy’s body, or of a man’s sex forced into a woman’s body or a girl’s, doesn’t just inflict pain. It tears away another person’s security, their ownership of their own body, their faith in their ability to direct and protect themselves. However briefly, they become another’s property, another person’s thing to beat or destroy, and when it is done, it is a long work, a fierce work, to convince themselves entirely that they are their own again.
“He’s gone.”
Koach opened his eyes blearily. Tamar’s face was inches from his, her breath soft and warm on his cheeks. It was pleasant.
She straightened, smiling, and he rose to his elbow. His eyes were dry with sleep. The exhaustion and adrenaline of this morning had been too much for him.
“He’s gone, Koach,” she said again.
“Is my mother all right?” The words rushed from him.
She nodded. “She’s hurt, but others are helping her.” She saw his face and added quickly: “Not badly hurt. The horse—its hoof struck her hip. The priest says the bone is broken but he thinks she will heal. Seeing her struck—a mother of Israel—it made everyone furious. When Barabba rode back to the synagogue and saw it, even he looked ashamed. Then everyone started lifting stones; they were going to kill him, Koach. They were going to try.”
“What happened?” he breathed.
Her eyes were bright. “They made him go away. Out along the north track, toward Threshing. He was yelling and screaming over his shoulder. I’ve never seen anyone look so angry, not even—” She blanched.
“Not even your father,” Koach said softly.
She gave a tight nod.
Koach reached out to her with his left hand, gripped her arm just below the bruise, but he let her go quickly when he saw her wince. She looked at him.
“He shouldn’t do that to you.” His voice hoarse with emotion.
They sat silently for a while. Then she whispered, “I have to get you out of here. Before my father comes.”
“He came while you were gone.”
She flinched.
“Come to my m
other’s house,” Koach said suddenly.
“What?” Her eyes widened. “But—I am my father’s. I’m not betrothed to your brother, or—or you. I’d be stoned. Father would think I was in your bed, or Shimon’s.”
“You hid me,” Koach said quickly. “I want to hide you, from whoever would hurt you. I want to keep you safe.”
He couldn’t believe the words that were rushing from his heart to his lips, but neither could he stop them. The urge to protect her, to do something, rushed through him like wind and fire.
“I—You have to go.” She tugged the blankets from him, and Koach got carefully to his feet. Tamar grasped him by his sleeve and led him quickly through the atrium, glancing at him over her shoulder.
Koach stopped by the outer door. “Wait—”
Her eyes were round and dark.
“Thank you,” Koach said after a moment. “For hiding me.”
He could hear the beating of his heart.
“Go,” she whispered. And unlatched the door. “Go.”
He leaned in quickly and brushed his lips over her eyelid, everything in him suddenly tender. He heard her breath catch. Then the battered door creaked open, and her hand between his shoulder blades pushed him through. He stumbled out, caught himself. The door rattled shut behind. He stood blinking in the sun in the empty street, and in the direction of the synagogue there were many voices shouting.
For a moment he stood dazed. He stared at the cracks in Benayahu’s door, reluctant to leave. Everything in him was a rush of feeling and want and hope and fear. Then he recalled the danger to Tamar if she was caught with him, and he turned and ran the few steps to his mother’s door.
