by The Rock
Yakov was crying with vexation. "Oh, why did you not bring your spear, father?"
Akiba growled, "Where is our flock to graze now?"
They tramped back in silence to the town. Outside the gate her father said, "Take the goats up the river, Rachel. There is some fresh grass on this side, less than a mile up, on land which is fallow since Terence's wife died and he ran away."
The dog began to herd the goats around the outside of the town, but she heard a startled yell behind her and looked around. James, the Christian father, was falling backward, an arrow in his throat. Then she saw men coming out of the rank scrub which reached right to the wall. Peter cried, "Outlaws!" The day watchman at the gate seized his horn and blew until an arrow thumped into his chest, and the note quavered, hiccuped, and died. Rachel ran into the town, Akiba and the goats helter-skelter behind her. She saw a ragged outlaw rip his knife across Yakov's throat, then feel in his scrip. As she ran, she shrieked, "Outlaws! Outlaws!" Women rushed into their houses, doors slammed. Most of the men are in the fields, she thought, but they will hear the horn, they will come.
Theophilus stood naked in the middle of the street, his hand raised, his gray hair streaming. "Die, die! The hour of wrath is come! Slay the Jews, slay the wicked, let evil be wiped from the earth!"
She ran into her house, crying, "Block the door! Mother!"
Yakov's wife screamed, "Mother is at the river with Hadassah. Where's Yakov?"
"Dead," she snapped. Yakov's wife sank wailing to the floor. Rachel swept up the baby twins, hurried up the second ladder to the roof, left them, went down, found little Isa playing in the kitchen, and took him up, too. Akiba had seized a spear, and Rachel took a short, strong knife from her mother's carving board. She went back up to the roof.
The shrieking and shouting that had been so loud by the gate were muted here, and she saw few people—a man running; two outlaws, recognizable by their matted hair and short, filthy kirtles, breaking into a barricaded house across the street; a woman dead in the dust directly below the corner of the house.
The ladder creaked, and Peter joined her. "It's hopeless," he said. "There must be a hundred of them, and we are ... a hundred women and children, twenty men. John's dead. Clubbed when we were trying to close the gate. Your father's safe in our part of the house.... Here they come!"
She heard her name called from the street below and went to the edge of the parapet. Two score outlaws were gathered there, and out in front, by himself, Julius. The pagan who had been a lawyer and had fled to the mountains. She remembered him well.
He called up, "Let us in, and no harm will come to any of you."
She said, "Let them in, Peter. Or they'll break in and kill us all. I have children to look after."
A minute later Julius came to her on the rooftop. She heard the sounds of pillaging in the house. Peter stood back, glowering. Julius spoke in a low voice. "Your mother and little sister are dead. They saw us coming and some of our men held them under water. So is Avram. I had to kill him myself. Were you not to be betrothed to him?"
She wondered whether she would be able to sink her knife in his heart before he could raise his short, old-fashioned legionary sword.
He said, "Come with me to the forest, Rachel. You heard the Lover of God? He's right. There is no law, no government, no god."
"We trust in the Lord God of Israel," she said automatically.
He said, "I love you, Rachel. When I left, you were—what? thirteen?—and I loved you then."
She thought of Avram dead. Now she had no man to be her husband. Julius was strong and subtle and clever. He would give her babies and protect them. But where would be her home? What would be her land? She would never return to the Rock, towering there, cloud-crested. And what of her Secret, the deep-cleft ivory woman?
She said, "I must stay."
Confused shouting and curses rose from below, and Julius swore. "These people are hard to control, even for a moment, even in their own interests. Well, we shall be back when you have saved some more food." He ran quickly down the ladder and out of sight. Soon all the outlaws had gone, staggering back into the woods with their booty and driving stolen livestock.
A little later Rachel's father came to the rooftop. "They have taken everything except my special wine." He laughed wildly. His eyes glittered, and he moved with a quick nervous energy. "Your mother and sister are dead. Did you know?" She nodded. "It will be you next... me ... all of us."
She said, "Father," sorrowfully, and suddenly he broke down and wept, wailing brokenly. Her breast ached, and her eyes filled. Could this be her father, the lord of the household, now weeping like her child in her arms?
Peter said hesitantly, "Isaac, we cannot stay here. There is nothing, no seed com, little food, only one or two animals. We must throw ourselves on the mercy of Vitellius at the Villa Flaviana."
"Why should he take us?" her father said. "He already has a hundred men, all armed, most of them exlegionaries."
Peter said, "Because if he does not, then we must join the outlaws. All together, we would be strong enough to take the villa and sack it."
"Take, sack, bum! Ai, what a world! But I fear you are right. Gather our people. I will speak to a duovir, if I can find one."
The Villa Flaviana was two miles round the bay to the west. The estate, covering five thousand acres on the near bank of the next river, was one of the great latifundia where the very rich escaped from the duties of the towns and the supervision of the tax collectors and lived under the care and protection of a private army of field hands, guards, and servants, who were in fact almost slaves but better off in their semiservitude than as free men in the decaying towns.
Rachel thought, there would be no place but a barn or empty hay loft for them to sleep, no pots, no utensils. Yakov's wife was less than useless. She was the mother now. She called, "Akiba, here, fill that sack with..."
The doorman at the great house called loudly to the interior when he saw them coming. Other servants came out, swords drawn, but Isaac went forward steadily, bent under a heavy sack, and then Peter, and she after. Soon the majordomo came and then the lord of the estate, old Vitellius Flavius, fat and small-eyed, and later his son, young Gaius, plump and smooth, estimating her like a piece of choice meat. Isaac began to talk, dignified in his weariness.
She looked back. Ten more families stood behind them, patient in the spring rain. Ten more were on their way, and as many would come tomorrow. The rest had decided to stay in Carteia. Vitellius stared nervously at them from the porch, the twilight fading fast and his servants lighting lamps along the outer arcade. "They look dangerous to me," he said to the majordomo.
"We must take them in, master," the majordomo muttered. "There's that band of Vandals to the north and, I hear, Visigoths coming down from the east. We may need every man we can muster."
"Very well," old Vitellius said. "Put them in the barns. Give them something to eat. See that they work for their living and fight, if need be."
The majordomo motioned them around to the side, to the scattered buildings of the home farm. He showed them into a huge stone-built bam, nearly empty now of the hay which the cattle had been eating all winter. "Here and in the next bam," he said. "But no fires inside. Food will be distributed in ten minutes."
Isaac's family settled in a corner of the bam and Peter's close by. More families moved in and spread out until the bam was nearly full, but there was very little noise. Servants brought bowls of pease porridge, but Isaac took cakes of unleavened bread from his sack and gave a piece to each of his family. Next he opened a flagon of wine and mixed it with water in his brass cup. He bowed his head over it, and said, Baruch atta adonay elohenu melech ha-olam borey peri haggafen—Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who createst the fruit of the vine."
Then over the unleavened bread, "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who bringest forth bread from the earth."
They drank and ate. The rain bea
t louder on the high roof. Isaac turned to Akiba, for his youngest son, Isa, was only two. "Akiba," he said, "do you remember the questions boys asked of their fathers at the Haggadah night?"
Akiba intoned, "Why is this night different from all other nights? For on all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread, but tonight..."
The ritual of the Haggadah continued, with Isa asleep in Rachel's arms and Yakov's fatherless twins sprawled in the hay. When Isaac had finished retelling the Passover story, Peter came over to them and said, "We wish you a happier Passover next year than this."
"And a happier Easter for you," Isaac answered gravely.
Peter's chest was wide and flat, crossed with smooth bands of muscle. His eyes were wide-set and his nose short and straight. He was looking at her now, and she remembered how close he had held her ... could it have been this same morning? She remembered the taste of his flesh in her teeth and lowered her eyes.
Soon they settled themselves to sleep.
The next day they sent for her to work in the big house. She protested that she had little Isa to care for, but the servant said Yakov's wife must do that. Peter looked unhappily after her, but she had to go.
At the villa they had a swimming pool and a heated bathhouse and tinkling bells and everywhere a subtle perfume. They gave her clean clothes of fine linen and wool and told her to wait upon the lord's youngest daughter. She ate their leavings and even so ate more, and better, then she had ever known. Young Gaius smiled lazily on her and after a week said, "Come to my couch tonight, Rachel."
She made to pass by, but he said, "Otherwise, back to the barn and work in the fields."
She hurried on, frowning. But as the hours passed she knew she would go. It was too cold, too wet out there. With him she would never feel hungry again. He was not as handsome as Peter or even her dead Avram, but he was a man. He would give her children—and the Rock was still there within reach.
In the big house everyone slept for a couple of hours in the middle of the afternoon. She awoke to a scream. "Up, up! To arms!" She scrambled up, rubbing her eyes. A trumpet began to call. She ran through the villa to the front door. A ragged mob of barbarians was sweeping up from the river, shrieking, screaming, waving spears and clubs. Ahead of them, in the center, pranced the Lover of God, a flaming brand of wood in his hand. She heard his strangely accented Latin above the din. "Kill, kill!" Rachel ran to the bam.
The Flavian men-at-arms and the male refugees from Carteia hurried together out of house and stable and granary, short swords drawn, buckling on light armor, helmets awry; but more barbarians came from the river, and they were not such a rabble as they seemed, for groups of them wheeled in blocks, one such taking Vitellius' servants in the flank with a mighty shout.
Yakov's widow had vanished with the twins. Rachel picked up Isa, grabbed her short knife in the other hand, and went back to the door. More barbarians were coming down through the olive groves, and the women who had fled that way ran straight into them. She saw a sword rise. Yakov's widow fell, cut almost in two. Peter's mother and sister went down under clubs, and a man with a wolf's-head hood picked up the baby twins and swung them by the heels against an old olive tree.
Now they were coming from the big house toward the bam, the Lover of God in the van. Her father and the young men were trying to hold them. Her father drew back his spear arm, and a tall barbarian stepped in under the throw and rammed a knife under his ribs, so that he jerked, coughed, and fell. Peter killed one barbarian and stepped back quickly, his sword flickering out again. At his side his brother Young James died, felled by a spear thrust in the knee and then clubbed on the ground. Akiba the Jew and Peter the Christian fell back slowly, side by side. Rachel waited, her knife ready.
Now, with no apparent reason, the blocks of barbarians began to eddy and break up. Some ran this way and some that, until the actual attackers here were reduced to eight men, led by one as tall as Peter but older and stronger, with reddish hair. His face was wide, square, and flat, his eyes pale gray. This man rested his heavy sword and called in a guttural Latin, "Hold, Romans! No need to die. We want slaves."
Rachel saw Peter's back muscles tighten up and called out quickly, "No, Peter!" And then, in the tongue of Hispania, she added, "Tomorrow is another day. Put up your swords." To the barbarian leader she said, "We have nothing. We are in flight here ourselves from Carteia. The outlaws took all that we had a week ago."
"All? Priest say all man's rich here," the leader spoke, glowering.
"He is wrong. There was plenty in the big house, nowhere else."
The barbarian followed her eye. A group was dragging Vitellius' body out of the front door of the great villa. Another half dozen ran by, hurling the head of young Gaius from hand to hand in a boisterous game.
The barbarian slipped his sword back into its hanger and pushed past Akiba and Peter as though they did not exist. To his men he threw a dozen words over his shoulder, and they hurried off toward the big house. He said, "I am Wildigern, Visigoth. You are surprised I talk Latin?" He glowered down at her, "I live near Romans all my life. Romans ... poof." He blew into the air. "I kill many. Come." He laughed and led the way to the barn. Rachel went with him, little Isa holding tight to her hand, and Akiba and Peter followed doubtfully behind. The barbarians were strange, she thought: all the killing seemed no more than a passing storm, and now the sun was out and all was forgotten. This Wildigern was quite without fear, going alone now into the darkened empty barn with Peter and Akiba, armed, at his heels, their kin lying slaughtered under the olives.
Wildigern looked about. "Rich. Rich land. Farmers?" She nodded. "Your land, where?"
She pointed over the arm of the cork woods that separated the Villa Flaviana from Carteia. Wildigern gazed. "H'm ... by the white mountain. What call?"
"Calpe," she said. "The Rock."
Wildigern made up his mind. "This place here"—he waved to the great estate—"this for our leader Wallia. For me—your house, land, all. You cook, make babies for me. You"—he jerked his chin at the two young men—"you work fields, teach me. Together we fight Vandals, kill outlaws. Together—eat, drink! ... Come."
He strode out of the door and raised his voice in a great bellow. His eight men tumbled out of the villa, staggering under loot. Four Roman servant girls and a couple of wounded men-at-arms followed, also heavily loaded.
Peter muttered, "If he touches you, Rachel, I shall kill him. I love you. I learned that while you were away from us in the big house."
She said, "See that plenty of wine and brandy are brought to Carteia from the cellars."
"But..."
"I can't talk now. Or think. Later."
Theophilus, the Lover of God, was seated cross-legged outside the gate of the villa, his eyes closed, his hair and beard splashed with blood. His begging bowl lay beside him, and as they passed, the Visigoths threw rings and coins and gold ornaments into it with a curious defensive gesture, as though they feared the fanatic might turn them to stone. She thought, they might call themselves Christians, but it was the gods of their forests and magic and madness that they really feared. She made sure her knife was in her waistband and followed the others into the cork forest.
Two hours after dark the Visigoths lay dead drunk all over the house—upstairs, on the roof, and sprawled in the goats' droppings below. The captive Roman men-at-arms, all Spanish-born, had fallen into the service of the new masters as easily as the old. After the first flagon of wine the servant girls had abandoned themselves to the barbarians' lust with no shame or hesitation, so that there had been a singing and coupling and grunting all evening. Once Wildigern dragged Rachel to him, but she held him off, smiling, fearful for Peter's life, for he was close by, white and shaking. Later another Visigoth tried to rape her, and Wildigern cracked his skull with such a blow from the butt of his sword that the man lay unconscious for an hour.
Now it was quiet save for the snores and drunken mumbles of the sleepers. She went to a dark c
orner of the first floor, near the head of the ladder to the street, and Peter and Akiba came to her. Peter said, "We must go—now. But where? To the outlaws?"
"No," she said automatically. If they went to the outlaws, Peter would not live long; for Julius the Pagan wanted her, and he would not tolerate a rival. But more important than that, the outlaws promised no home, no children, no peace, only the opposite—a return to the way of the hunter, a descent from house to cave, from tilling fields to gathering nuts ... and surely, soon, back to holes in the ground.
"Where, then?" Peter said. "Hispalis? Corduba? But the barbarians must have taken and ruined those cities on their way here."
Akiba said, "I know! ... We will go to Africa. I know where there is a boat hidden in a sea cave of the Rock. It belonged to Simon the merchant, and he used it to smuggle salt. No one else knows. I... I helped him sometimes."
Rachel did not hesitate. Perhaps they would go to Africa; perhaps they would not; perhaps she could stay here—for Wildigern was no worse then many other men, only less subtle in his cruelties, and as her mother had told her often enough, "What is born of a Jewish womb is a Jew": But the plight of the young men tugged at her heart, so she said, "Very well. Think now what we will need. Pots. Water vessel. Tinder. Knife..."
They passed over the isthmus onto the Rock before the middle hour, with Akiba ahead carrying Isa, and Peter behind, and all heavily loaded. By the goat track along the lower western slopes a pack of wolves bayed around and tried to attack Akiba but fled before Peter's sword. From the Lover of God's gully they crossed to the east side, going close by Rachel's Secret, and then turned north, as though to continue the circuit of the Rock. Here Akiba led slowly down the steep slope, Isa asleep on his right hip. After a careful, almost vertical descent, they stood on a tiny sandy beach. Starlight gleamed on wet rocks, and small waves regularly washed their feet. "It's up there," Akiba muttered, "pulled up into the cave."
