Land of Silence

by Tessa Afshar

  At the sound of the knock I ran to the door, already beaming with the anticipated pleasure of seeing my friend. Flinging the door open wide, I cried, “You are early and I have no food to offer you yet.”

  Decimus Calvus grinned at me from the other side of the threshold.

  “What an enthusiastic welcome,” he drawled. “A man could grow used to such a smile, even without food on the table.” He was garbed in daunting military gear, his scarlet cloak flung over one shoulder, chain mail and leather belts covering his torso. His plumed helmet was tucked under one arm.

  I took a hasty step back. “What are you doing here, Calvus?”

  “I am stationed in Tiberias now.”

  “So Lady Claudia told me when she visited. What brings you to my door? Surely you know I have no wish to see you.”

  “But I have every wish to see you.” He brushed past me as he stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  “Get out,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Is that any way to speak to a man who has spent days searching for you?”

  “I do not know why you would waste your time with such a task. We have nothing to say to each other.”

  To my vexation, Calvus threw himself on the couch and stretched his legs as if he owned every cubit of the house. “Sit down, woman. I have things to say to you.”

  “What things?”

  “I hear you have been sick.”

  “Yes. Happy?”

  “Don’t be an imbecile if you can help it. Why would I be happy? I never wished you ill.”

  I sniffed. “You caused me more harm than anyone on this earth.”

  He shrugged. “I am in a position to undo the damage I unintentionally may have brought you. Though, in truth, I did you a favor. That Ethan you had your heart set on was—”

  “If you say one false word about him, I am walking out.”

  He lowered his eyelids. “Let us speak of more pleasant topics. I have been promoted, you know.”

  “I can see.” I gestured toward his impressive uniform with its gold embellishments.

  “And I divorced my wife.”

  “I am sorry to hear it. How unpleasant for you.”

  “On the contrary, it was the most pleasant thing that has happened to me in years.”

  I bit my lip. “You are a strange man.”

  He sat up. The illusion of relaxation vanished in one moment. Hard muscles clenched as he leaned forward. “Not at all. I never wished to marry her in the first place. My father pressed me into the arrangement for financial considerations. We owed her family a large sum. They cancelled our debt when I married her.”

  I could not help feeling sorry for any woman whose hand could only be purchased through a hefty bribe. Gingerly, I sat on my cushion. “Was she fearsomely ugly?”

  “Quite the reverse. She looked like Venus. She had also earned the reputation of a harlot before she had seen her sixteenth birthday.”

  I gasped. “I am sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I to be chained to such a strumpet. I tried to make the best of it. There was no best; her wild ways continued even after we married. I would have divorced her then, except the law required that I return her dowry, which I might add was a great deal of money to sweeten this dreadful bargain made in Hades. But I had already spent every denarius and had no hope of earning such a large sum any time soon. I volunteered for service in Judea to get away from her. And to find a way to earn enough to rid myself of her permanently. I have finally managed to do so.”

  I drew my legs up. “I am glad you are free of your misfortune. But I cannot see what it has to do with me.”

  He abandoned the couch and squatted before me on the floor. “I have always wanted you, from the moment I saw you biting and scratching and fighting like a tiger against that grimy thief. You were beautiful. Courageous. Bold. And yet so pure. You were the antithesis of the wife who chained me. In spite of the years of your absence, I have never forgotten you. The fates have brought me here, where you live. I mean to take their offering this time.” He grabbed my chin with a callused hand and forced me to look at him. His face—clean-shaven, lean, and well-formed—revolted me.

  “Let me go, Calvus.”

  “I am asking you to be my woman. I want to take care of you. You don’t need to live in this hovel anymore.”

  I slapped his hand away from my jaw. “You do not seem to understand the nature of my illness. I cannot be any man’s woman, even if I wished. Which I don’t.”

  “I know. So you bleed a little. You Jews are too delicate about matters of the flesh. I will take you as you are. It matters little to me.”

  I choked, coughing until moisture filled my eyes. “Have you no shame?”

  “No.” He leaned forward and tried to kiss me.

  I slapped him as hard as I could. “You should have learned the last time you tried that—I have no interest in you.”

  “As I recall, you allowed me.”

  “I had no choice! I did what I needed to do in order to protect my family. In order to shield Ethan and Viriato from your violence. I know what you would have done to them with little provocation. This time, I have no one to shield. Leave me be, Calvus. You make my stomach turn. You always did.”

  “Liar!” He leaned into me until I was flattened against the wall. I was too weak to put up much of a fight. His lips landed on my cheek when I turned my face, pushing against his chest with ineffectual hands.

  “Kindly take your hands off her, Centurion. If you please.”

  Viriato! I had forgotten him completely. He stood in the threshold of my house with the door wide open behind him, framing his great body in the light of the moon. Not again! Not this scene of horrors, threatening the lives of those I loved.

  Calvus released me and rose to his feet slowly. It dawned on me that Viriato wore a smile and stood as peaceful as a lamb, no weapon anywhere in sight.

  “Leave us alone,” Calvus spat.

  “I am afraid I can’t do that.” Viriato crossed his arms.

  “You wish to be arrested?”

  “For what crime?”

  “Whatever you like, former slave. Don’t think I can’t land you in a cinnabar mine again.”

  I groaned and covered my face with my hands. A sudden noise made me raise my head. To my utter shock, there stood Titus with a host of soldiers at his back.

  “What goes on here?” he asked, his tone cold.

  Calvus straightened and slapped his forearm against his chest in a formal salute. I remembered that my friend now occupied a position of high rank.

  “Nothing worthy of note, my lord. Just visiting an old friend.” Calvus’s masklike face did not betray any emotion.

  “Elianna, did this centurion give you offense?”

  I thought hard. Titus would not always be here. It would not be wise to make an enemy of Calvus any more than I already had. “He made me an offer, which I refused. I believe he was about to leave, my lord.”

  “Don’t let us detain you, Centurion,” Titus said. He spread a hand in a courtly gesture. “The door is this way.”

  Calvus turned white around the lips. Before he could step outside, Titus spoke. “Decimus Calvus?”

  “My lord?”

  “I overheard your final comments to Viriato. Know that I have taken note of your conduct. Should anything happen to that man or to Mistress Elianna, I will not rest until I have seen you answer to Rome’s justice. Do we understand each other?”

  “With perfect clarity.”

  Titus then dismissed the soldiers who had accompanied him. “May I come in?” he asked with civility, as though it were an ordinary night and a few friends had gathered for a casual conversation.

  I sagged against the wall, shaking with reaction. “Please. And may the Lord bless you for rushing to our rescue. How did you come to be here so quickly?”

  “I happened to run into Viriato on the street only moments before he came to your house. He overheard enough of your conversa
tion with Calvus to grow concerned and ran back to fetch me. I am glad I was here to help, Elianna. Has that man made a nuisance of himself before?”

  “Longer than any of us realized,” Viriato said, his voice faint.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It is good for me that I was afflicted,

  that I might learn your statutes.

  PSALM 119:71

  VIRIATO HAD OVERHEARD most of my exchange with Calvus. He now grasped more fully the events that led to my divorce from Ethan. I saw no sense in hiding my secret anymore. In halting sentences, I told my friends what had taken place so many years before.

  “Why did you not come to me?” Titus asked, white with anger. “It is common enough for our soldiers to make pests of themselves with local women. The gods know we discourage them. There are rules against such behavior.”

  I drew a calming breath. “What could you have done then, Titus? You had your own troubles to contend with. Sejanus breathed down your back, and you did not know if you would survive from one week to the next. Besides, back then, you would have had no authority over a centurion in spite of your patrician origins.”

  “Why did you not tell me, then?” Viriato said. His voice was anguished. “I would have helped you and Ethan.”

  “How? By attacking a Roman official and landing yourself in another abominable mine in some forsaken land? I could not live with that. I could not buy Ethan’s and my happiness at the cost of your destruction.”

  “So you sacrificed your own happiness for the sake of our freedom?” Viriato said.

  “Someone had to pay that price. I could not trust you and Ethan to remain cool. Even if you managed to control yourselves this time, what of the next? I worried that Calvus would not stay away. I feared he might renew his attentions, whether because he wanted me or merely to provoke a fight with you two. He is a volatile man who flips from kindness to violence without warning. You and Ethan would remain in danger as long as Calvus stayed in Jerusalem.”

  “Elianna!” Viriato cried. “When I think of what you lost in order to shield us . . . it is worse than the mines, I tell you. Knowing what you suffered for my sake, without ever telling anyone.”

  “Rest easy, my friend. Calvus did us all a favor. Would you have wanted Ethan saddled with a wife like me? At least, free from me, he was able to have a child. A sweet girl he adores. He experienced the love of a good woman for some years. What could he have had with me? An ailing wife he could never even touch. A barren woman with nothing to offer. If you ask me, you should write a letter to Decimus Calvus and thank him from the bottom of your heart.” I tried to look lighthearted as I spoke, but my eyes stung with unshed tears.

  One afternoon two weeks later, Keziah told me that she had to fetch water.

  “But we have plenty.”

  “I wish to do laundry.” She scratched her arm and looked away.

  I frowned. “Keziah, you finished the wash two days ago. We have nothing that needs washing.”

  “I forgot my old tunic. I won’t be long, mistress.”

  She slithered out before I could ask another question. I shook my head. She must feel cramped and restrained, stuck indoors with no one but me for company most of the time, I thought, and resolved to send her abroad more often. I pulled out my roll of parchment and had started to write the account of Decimus Calvus’s extraordinary reappearance in my life when a sound made me look up.

  Ethan stood in the room. He must have come in silent as a cat for me not to hear the door open and close. At first, I thought he must be a figment of my mind. I blinked and stared. To my utter stupefaction, he did not disappear.

  “Ethan?” I croaked, my voice barely a whisper.

  He strode toward me without a word and, before I could object, grabbed hold of my hands and hauled me into his arms.

  “Ethan! I am unclean!”

  He cradled my head against his shoulder. “I have never known a cleaner woman.”

  I struggled to get free of him. I felt defiled by my sickness; it horrified me to touch him with this bewildering intimacy. He subdued my attempts to pull away. “Be still, Elianna. I have dreamt of this moment for days. Let me hold you for a few moments longer.” He reached for my fingers and held the hands that had ached to be held for so long.

  I had not laid eyes on him for eleven years. But everything about him felt as familiar as it did when we were young. The scent of him. The timbre of his voice. The feel of his arms around me. The hardness of his chest, the softness of his breath as it stirred against my temple. I was shivering like a leaf caught in a thunderstorm.

  “Viriato spoke to you?”

  “As soon as he returned.” He pulled away long enough to gaze at my face. “Why did you never tell me? Why didn’t you explain afterward, when the dust had settled?”

  “Could the dust ever settle on such a matter? I was afraid for you: your sense of justice, Calvus’s mercurial temper. No good would have come of your knowing. And later, when you were betrothed, it did not matter.”

  “Of course it mattered! I thought you had broken faith with me. Knowing the truth would have freed me of that pain, at least.”

  “Knowing the truth would have confused you. What could you have done? Break your covenant with Sarai? Remain with her and feel guilty about me? No, Ethan. I made the right choice for all of us. I have never regretted it. When I fell ill, I knew that we were never meant to belong to each other.”

  Ethan stepped away and pulled an agitated hand through his hair. I noticed that there were faint threads of silver at his temples. He was thirty-seven years old, I realized with a pang. Our youth had flown so quickly, lost to us forever.

  “I heard of your sickness a few years ago. How long has it been?” he asked.

  “Eleven years.”

  “Eleven years! Have you tried many physicians?”

  “Everything possible. I fear I have run out of true alternatives. The last physician insisted that I spend a week in the temple of Asclepius. Of course, I could not do that. I would rather receive the silence of the Lord than the healing of an idol.”

  “Oh, Elianna.” Ethan cradled my cheek in his palm. “I am truly sorry for what you have suffered.”

  “It has not all been bad, Ethan. I have grown closer to the Lord because of it, and that is a treasure I would not lose.”

  He nodded. “I can understand that. I have felt the same many times.” He sighed and gestured toward the couch. “May I sit?”

  “I shall have to be inhospitable and refuse you.” I gave a wobbly smile. “Having touched me, you’ll have to go through ritual cleaning first. I keep that sofa and most of the other furnishings in the house unpolluted by my touch for the sake of Joanna and Chuza as well as Keziah.” I tapped a wide cushion sitting on the floor beside mine. “You can sit here, if you wish. Since it is after sunset, I fear you will be considered unclean until tomorrow evening, even if you wash yourself and your clothes when you leave tonight. I am sorry for the inconvenience I have caused you.”

  “You speak of the inconvenience of ritual cleaning to me? When I know what you endured on my account?” He shook his head. “I abandoned you, Elianna. When you needed me most, I walked away.” He fisted his hands. I saw they were shaking badly.

  “We both know that is no fault of yours.”

  Ethan lowered himself on the cushion near me, his movements awkward, as if someone had punched him hard and his body hurt. “When Viriato told me what you had done, I was assailed by such a tumult of emotions, I hardly understood what I felt. At first, I felt guilty, and then deeply angry. Perhaps there is a shade of that anger still left in me. I know you lied in order to protect me. But, Elianna, you took our whole future into your own hands. Without consulting me, without including me, you made a decision that changed our lives irrevocably.”

  I felt my face redden. “Ethan, what else could I have done? You were about to attack Calvus and get yourself killed, wounded, or arrested. You weren’t in any state to listen to reason. Nothing
would have stopped you short of what I said.”

  “I grant you, in that moment there was little else you could have done. But what of later? An hour, a day, a week after that horrible afternoon? I had calmed by then.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Had you? How could I have been certain?”

  “You should have trusted me.”

  “I was tempted a hundred times to come to you and confess. Then I would think, to what purpose? I could only bring you trouble, Ethan. In the end, I felt you deserved better in a wife.”

  Ethan brought his fist down on the floor, making me jump with the force of its crash. “That was my choice. I loved you, Elianna! Loved you more than my own life. You ripped my heart out with your decision.”

  “And my own! But you are alive. You have enjoyed a good life. You married an excellent woman. You have a beautiful daughter. With me, you could have had none of those blessings.”

  His eyes captured mine. In the lamplight they looked very dark, glittering with emotion. “I never stopped loving you. Even when I thought I hated you, the love was there, just under the surface.”

  I wiped a tear. Another escaped. “You were good to me, Ethan. The quiet divorce, your decision to speak no ill of me in public. And you sent Viriato to me. I was grateful for the many considerations you showed me, given what you thought I had done at the time.”

  “You must have been so lonely. Did you ever tell anyone?”

  “Only Gamaliel, after my father died.”

  “You told Gamaliel? What did he say?”

  “He surprised me with his gentleness. A few years ago, I saw him again; he prayed for me. That I might be healed. For Joanna, too.” I told Ethan about Joanna’s longing to have a child. I knew she would not mind Ethan knowing.

  “What of Calvus? Has he shown up again since the night Titus threw him out?”

  “To my great relief, he has not. Ethan, you will not go anywhere near him? Please?”

  “After the sacrifice you made to keep Viriato and me safe from that man, I could not bring myself to touch a hair on his head. You have cured me of all desire for revenge.”