Sunrise on the Mediterranean (65 page)

Shana’s small hands were quick. Dadua’s sister shook her head sadly, her eyes glittering with tears. “Her maidenhood is gone,”
she said. “I will tell Dadua.”

“What is the penalty?” I asked. I was fairly certain who had done this, who had defiled this poor child.

Everyone looked at me blankly. “Uri’a’s guilty, of this I would swear. I told you how he was looking at her earlier.” I looked
around the room. “Is there a prison? Will he be flogged?”

Avgay’el frowned at me. “At times I forget you are Pelesti, Klo-ee. There is no punishment. They will be wed.”

“He raped her? Now he’ll get to marry her so he can rape her at will?”

Dadua’s wife shrugged. “It is the least elegant way to get a bride,
nachon—”

“What are the other ways?” I asked, still outraged.

“Seduction or purchase,” she answered. “How did your husband get you?”

“He asked me.”

They gasped. “He didn’t pay for you? He didn’t seduce you so that you were bound to him?”

“
Lo
. And he certainly didn’t rape me!” I looked down at the sleeping mushroom. “She is just a child! Now she will have to endure
this behavior forever!”

“This is good for her,” Shana said stoically. “Not the experience—it would have been better had he used soft words and gentle
touches—but she is a slave. He has treated her as a freedwoman. Now she will be the wife of a
gibori
. She will have her own slaves, a home, clothing, children.
Ach
, it is a blessing!”

I was going to be ill. “A rape is a blessing?” I gasped out.

“Batsheva was no one,” Shana said.

I knew that “t” and “th” were interchangeable in this
alefbet
. As were “b” and “v.” Presto-chango and omigod, I had been grinding grain with Bathsheba? Surely not
the
Bathsheba? This scrawny, bucktoothed girl couldn’t be Bathsheba of biblical fame? Mother of Solomon, the world’s wisest man?

“Now she will be a mother, with fine, strong sons.”

Why not, Chloe?
I looked down at the mushroom— Bathsheba—and realized her days of being no one were rapidly drawing to a close. Didn’t David
kill her husband to get at her? Suddenly that murder seemed more justifiable.

The perpetrator was already married to her according to the law; now it was a matter of the formalities. Since ’Sheva was
a slave, Dadua served as her father. Shana donned a headcloth to approach the king on ’Sheva’s behalf.

We covered up her sleeping body, then dispersed.

I staggered through the rain, thinking about God’s proclamation that misused creativity was the root of evil actions, the
ultimate reason the “earthlings” were destroyed. Yet this kind of imagination was the only thing that allowed a person to
grasp the idea of a god, especially an invisible one.

I really
was
going to become a Hindu.

C
HEFTU OPENED THE DOOR
, sensed immediately that something was wrong. There was no welcoming fire, no smell of something burning, no cheery greeting.
It was cold, dark, and in the quiet he heard her tears.

He ran through the house to the balcony. Chloe was seated with her back against the wall, sobbing. He crouched beside her.
“Chloe? Beloved?”

She immediately jerked upright, wiping her face. “It’s this late? I’m sorry, I—”

She made to get up, but she was speaking English, so he knew she was extremely upset. He pressed her still, his hand on her
shoulder. Her face was splotched, her nose running, her eyes bloodshot. He sat beside her, hissing a little as the cold rain
touched his body. He needed to change his linen tunics for wool to survive a Jerusalem winter.

He kissed the back of her hand and waited. She stared out the window, onto the brown hillside. “Why are we here?”

Cheftu shrugged. “It is where the lintels brought us?” She sniffed, rubbing her nose with her hand. “God, what I wouldn’t
give for Kleenex!”

He didn’t know what a “kleenex” was, but he had a makeshift handkerchief. She thanked him and blew her nose.

“We are here, but nothing has changed. I think we probably messed up history, because we kept the people who had done this
stuff before from doing it this time.”

“Stuff?” he repeated, confused. “Beloved, you must speak clearly when you choose English. What stuff?”

“Jersualem. The Ark. Bathsheba.”

So she had heard. Uri’a the Hittite would marry Bathsheba. At some point the Bible said that David would see her bathing,
then after a night of passion she would be found pregnant. Attempts would be made to lure Uri’a into bed with his own wife,
but they would fail.

David would arrange for Yoav to get Uri’a killed in battle.

The king would marry his paramour.

N’tan, the
tzadik
, would disguise the story and tell it to the king, asking for his judgment. David would grow furious, claim that the man
in the story deserved punishment. Then N’tan would utter the phrase that became his legacy: “You are that man.”

Bathsheba and David’s first child would die. They would have another, who would be Solomon.

Everything was happening, just as Holy Writ said. Not as Cheftu had imagined these Bible stories would be enacted, but it
followed the very words.

The very words an Egyptian scribe in the Israelite court reported.

“What about that ‘stuff’?”

“Why are we here?” she said, looking at him. “This history is already in place. We weren’t needed. This was pointless!”

He looked into the sky, wondering how
le bon Dieu
, if indeed he dwelt in the sky, felt about her comment. “Shall we start with Jerusalem?” he said.

Chloe shrugged. “Sure.” She blew her nose again. “It was invaded. We know that.”

“You know this from history?” he asked.

She nodded.

“How do you know that you weren’t the essential piece to this invasion?”

“Jersalem was invaded by David. You’re saying I’ve always been a part of this history?” Her voice sounded tinged with hysteria.

The concept was staggering, he had to admit. Then again, it made sense in a circular sort of way. “Now look: You talk of destiny,
a path that God has made for you.”

“You sound like Avga’el when you speak Hebrew,” she commented.

He glanced at her and continued speaking. “Then you talk of history, of a path you know was carved.” He shrugged. “It follows
that perhaps you have always been in this history; perhaps being part of the invasion is your destiny.”

“And being a writer of the Bible is yours?”

Cheftu realized that if the one statement were to be true, then the other might be as well. So history was fabricated by the
future? It didn’t follow Greek, linear thinking, the thought processes of Europeans or, he guessed, Americans. But it had
the Byzantine twists of the East, the legacy of the labyrinth, in its reasoning.

It had imagination. It was a creative way to weave history. Was it possible that scores of people were traveling from one
time to another? Did people from beyond Chloe’s future travel to beyond the past he and Chloe were aware of?

Perhaps they were not as unique as he’d thought? “If what you are saying is anywhere close to being the truth, then if I weren’t
here …” She trailed off, shaking her head. The rains, which had slackened, started heavily again. “The idea is staggering:
no Jerusalem for the Jews? or the Christians? or the Muslims?” She was mumbling to herself. “No Middle East peace knot, but
no monotheism, either?” She looked at him. “If there were no Jerusalem, where would the Temple be built? Where would Christ
be crucified? Where would Mohammed return to earth?”

Cheftu shrugged. It seemed a ridiculous idea, all of this history perched on one ivory set of shoulders. “Yoav picked you.”

“Why? Why me?”

“He obviously knows more of your military experience than I.”

“No, he didn’t. No one knows of my military experience.”

“Will you tell me?” Cheftu heard the hope in his tone. He’d been curious for years, but she never spoke of her modern life.
In fact, he knew more of who she’d been from RaEm’s comments than from her own. Did she know how amazing she was to him?

“Sure, why not?” Still speaking English, so she was yet upset.

“How did you serve?” he asked. “Officer in the air force, the USAF.”

Cheftu shook his head in amazement. “A military that flies,
mon Dieu
, what wonder! Tell me from the beginning.”

“I started high school early because I’d skipped around so many schools. Which meant I started university early. By the time
I graduated, I was only twenty years old. My plan was to do a stint, maybe five or ten years, in the air force as an officer.”

“Why?”

She chuckled. “Someone from my family had always been in the military. In the English branch of my family we’ve fought since
Cromwell. I’d grown up hearing about the War Between the States from the American side. My father had served in Vietnam. It
was tradition, it was important to me.”

“But you are a woman.”

“You noticed?” she said teasingly.

Cheftu kissed her hand. “A little.” He winked. “Did that not present problems for you?”

“Of course it did, but I didn’t care. The more difficult it became, the more determined I became. I felt like my family’s
honor was on my shoulders.”

“Did they support you?”

“You must be joking. My father was livid, Mimi cried, and my mother tore up an entire rose garden in her fury. Only my siblings
supported me, understood.” Chloe linked her fingers with his. “I was the last of us to declare my filial freedom. So … I did
the training.”

She looked away, her gaze seeing some other world.

“I was in Te—the same state where my grandmother was.”

“Mimi?”

“She would have loved the way you say that, with the accent on the second
mi.”
She smiled at him, her green eyes dark with pain but fighting through it. “You’re so French.”

Cheftu kissed her hand. “
Oui, madame.
Continue?”

“At the last minute, before finals week, I had a chance to go see her. It was a Friday afternoon; the leaves were changing
with the seasons. I let myself into her house. It was a big Victorian, with a wraparound porch.” She wet her lips. “Mimi was
sitting in the living room, in the dark, crying.” Cheftu reached over and squeezed her hand, fighting to understand through
her
américain
accent. “She had just heard from her doctor. She had cancer.”

“Mon Dieu,”
he whispered, aching for her. Cancer—that unknowable, unconquerable illness that took so many, for no reason. Even in Chloe’s
time it was the same? An ultimate evil?

“Well, I was finishing my last semester of university. I’d been on a temporary assignment for the air force, close by. Mimi
did chemotherapy, she tried, she tried… . But after a year, when I’d been on active duty, it was obvious she could no longer
take care of herself. My father couldn’t come home, my mom had come back sporadically, but …” She sighed. “I went to my commanding
officer. I told him that Mimi didn’t have long and I wanted to be with her. So we made a deal.” She glanced up, smiled. “I
haven’t bartered often, I’m lousy at it, but for this I fought with every tool I had.”

“What was your arrangement?”

“I would leave active duty, go into a temporary retirement, but continue reservist assignments. Which meant that out of the
month, I was active for a week and active for a whole other month out of the year.” She shrugged. “Most of my skills were
computer based anyway.”

“Com-puu-ter?” This was a new technology—fortunately he knew that from RaEm. Exactly what it meant, he did not know. However,
from RaEm’s comments it was recreating the world in much the same way movable type had.

“New technology, yep,” she said, still speaking English. “For this deal, I would serve twice my original time as a reservist,
minus what I’d already served as active duty. Eight years.” She groaned. “Don’t ask how RaEm affected that part of my life.
You don’t want to know. In a way, I feel guilty. I mean, it is my name on those documents, my reputation. My poor father …”

It was complete darkness and cold. Winter was seeping into the stone. Chloe snuggled close to him, sharing her woolen cloak.
“Do you think we will ever return to our home times?” she asked. “Do you think we are doomed to wander history? Well, not
doomed like a bad thing… . ”

“Doomed can be a good thing?” he asked, teasing. “Destined, maybe.”

He twined a strand of her copper hair around his brown finger. “Would that be such a bad life,
chérie?”

“No. Of course not. It would be thrilling, it would be exciting. Provided we survive it.”

“Is that not true for every day, in any time?” he asked. “Is anything ever certain?”

“But what about when we’re old? I mean, even Indiana Jones retired after a while.”

Cheftu sat up, cross-legged. “Who is this Indiana Jones? You mention him from time to time. Was he a mentor of yours?”

She giggled. “There are some gaps we will never bridge,
chérie,”
she said. In French. Cheftu felt his concern fading a little; she was feeling better.