The Bronze Bow (14 page)

"It is no good," he told them. "She can't abide being looked at. We could never get across the town. I will have to leave her here alone while I'm working."

"Better tie her up," one man advised, keeping the width of the road between him and the house. "Kin of mine has a daughter is possessed. They've kept her on a chain all her life."

Daniel shook his head. He'd seen such people, poor raving creatures tied to trees like dogs. Before he put a rope on Leah he would stay in this house till it crumbled to pieces around them. He went back into the house and slammed the door behind him, sending a shower of dust and clay across the floor.

In the afternoon he answered a cautious knock. Just outside the door stood a vehicle so extraordinary that he stood peering out at it, not realizing what it could be. An aged carpenter who lived a short way down the road stood beside the thing, grinning.

"It's a litter," he explained. "Like those fancy Roman ladies ride around in. Lift your sister in and she'll be as snug as in her own bed. My wife sewed all our cloaks together to make the curtains. There's four men ready to carry it for you, but we'll stay out of sight till she's inside."

A lump pushed up against Daniel's throat. Once again he felt shamed. Why should they show such kindness to a stranger and an outcast?

When every neighbor had tactfully vanished from the street, Daniel inveigled Leah into taking one look through the door.

"That's the way queens travel," he told her. "The way the Queen of Sheba came to visit King Solomon. You will sit inside it and we'll pull the curtains tight around you. In no time at all we'll be at the new house."

She shook her head. He did not hurry her. He could see that her curiosity was piqued. From time to time the blue eyes slanted toward the door.

"No one can see me in there?" she asked finally.

"Not so much as your little finger."

"Do I have to go away from here, Daniel?"

"I want you to be near me when I work. Wouldn't you like that, Leah?"

After a long time she seemed to give in. She moved toward the door and stood, still terrified. Then before she could refuse again, Daniel picked her up. She hid her face against his shoulder, whimpering, but she did not scream. He lifted her gently into the little box and drew the curtains around her shuddering figure.

So Leah traveled across the village like a queen. Behind her strode Daniel, carrying the sack that held all their belongings and leading the small goat by its tether. A neighbor boy carried the loom, the only valuable thing Leah possessed.

There was so much work to do in the new house that he scarcely had time to think of the cave. Very early in the morning, before the women and girls were likely to be about, he carried the water jars to the well. This was not a man's job, nor was the sweeping or the cooking or the washing of clothes. Still, these things had to be done, after a fashion. He had learned to take care of himself in the cave, where there had been no women to wait on them. But everything was more complicated here in the village, and in addition there was Leah to provide for.

The moment the shop door was open, villagers appeared with work they had saved for Simon's return. They watched the strange young blacksmith with suspicion, waiting to see what he could do. Daniel took up the challenge. He could not deny that it was a satisfaction to step every morning into Simon's tidy shop, stocked with bars of iron and hung with rows of tongs and chisels and hammers. For five years Daniel had smelted his own ore and fashioned it with clumsy makeshift tools. He had never realized that he was learning to make up in skill what he lacked in equipment. After a little practice he discovered that he could make Simon's tools do just what he wanted them to do. The work he turned out was true and light and strong. Word went round that the new smith was a good worker, for all his fierce, unapproachable scowl.

With money in his pocket for the first time in his life, he was able to buy meat from the butcher and round flat loaves of barley bread from the baker. He did not eat as well as he had on the mountain, where meat from the farmers' flocks had been free for the plundering, but he suspected that Leah had never known such plenty.

Once the shock of the journey and the terror of the new house wore away, Leah settled down unprotestingly. She began to take pleasure in very small things, in combing her long fair hair, in arranging the row of jars along the shelf, in watching the pattern of sunbeams along the plaster wall. She reminded him of Samson, the way she did not want to let him out of her sight. Odd, he thought, how he had shaken that great black shadow only to be chained now to a little gray one, scarcely bigger than a mouse, but inescapable. Leah insisted that the door between the house and shop be left open. For hours on end she sat and watched him through the opening. When customers entered the shop she would disappear, waiting concealed in a corner till they had gone. Sometimes he suspected that she watched them too from behind the long yellow hair.

Daniel was concerned that she was idle all day long. He urged her to work at the loom, but though she was willing she had no notion where to procure the thread. Her grandmother had brought her thread and taken away the finished cloth; that was all she knew. One morning, however, a man called at the shop, not with a tool to be mended, but with skeins of fine linen. He was the servant of a wealthy widow in Chorazin, who, it appeared, had bought all the cloth that Leah had woven. Daniel had assumed that charitable people had bought Leah's work out of pity. He was astonished to learn that this woman knew or cared nothing about his sister and desired the cloth for its fine quality. The servant was much relieved to have tracked down the weaver. Daniel set up the loom in the corner, so that sitting before it Leah could see through the open door into his shop. Then he watched with amazement as she threaded it with expert fingers.

One morning when business was slack, Daniel discovered a measure of wheat flour on Simon's shelf and decided to try his hand at bread-making. He lighted a fire in the clay oven outside the door, measured out a little pile of the flour, stirred in some water, and began to pat the lumpy mixture into a flat cake, trying to remember how his mother had once done it. Absorbed in the work, he was startled when two small hands suddenly thrust themselves into the mixture. "That's not the way," Leah said softly. She patted the lump on a flat stone, rolled it deftly with a flat roller which she took from the shelf, and handed him the thin circle of dough, ready to plaster against the wall of the oven. It gave off a delicious fragrance as it baked, and came from the oven crusty and satisfying. After that they made their own bread together and saved the money that had gone to the baker. She taught him how to save a bit of dough for leavening for the next day's baking.

An even greater surprise was to come. Behind the house Simon had planted a small plot of vegetables, enough to supply his own solitary table. Through the luxuriant tangle of weeds which had sprouted untended, Daniel had glimpsed the shiny green of a cucumber, and one evening after he had closed his shop, he went out to clear away the weeds and see what else might be hiding there. He had worked for some time, liking the feel of the green plants and the smell of the earth, when he heard a soft footstep behind him, and suddenly Leah knelt beside him, thrusting her hands into the green leaves as she had thrust them into the dough.

"Don't, Daniel," she said, "you are pulling up all the carrots!"

He watched her, almost afraid to speak.

"See," she showed him, "these red leaves are beets, and these are onions. All the rest are weeds."

After that Leah spent many of the daylight hours in the garden, hidden by the high surrounding wall. Her pale cheeks took on a faint golden tinge. Blowing up his fire in the shop, Daniel pondered. Without the faintest idea what had really gone on in that dim shuttered house behind the cheesemakers, he had taken for granted that Leah had lost her wits on the terrible night of her childhood. Was he any better, he thought now with shame, than the neighbors who would have tied her with ropes? Nor could he blame his grandmother. She had been grief-stricken and worked to the bone, terrified by the child's screaming spells, afraid to trust her with any household tasks. Now he saw that Leah remembered accurately almost everything she had watched her grandmother do. Praise be, she could take over most of the work of the house from now on, and he would feel more like a man.

Yet as the days went by he saw that he had been too quickly encouraged. The weaving progressed at snail's pace. The slightest effort exhausted the girl. She was often fretful, complaining of the horrid men who came into the shop and demanding that he lock the door against them. He could not get it through her head that he had a business to carry on. At a moment when she seemed most contented, a knock at the door, a shout in the distance, the most trivial sound could reduce her to utter helplessness, and it might be hours or even days before she would so much as pick up a spoon. On other days she swept out the house, combed her hair, and sat passing the shuttle through the threads for hours. Daniel gave up trying to understand her and accepted her, as he had accepted Samson, as a burden he was doomed to carry.

Late one afternoon Daniel looked up to see a legionary standing in the doorway. He had almost forgotten Simon's warning, but even as his hammer arm stiffened he remembered and laid down the hammer on the stone. He did not spit, but there were other ways of showing his contempt. He bent over his work, absorbed in it, sanding over and over an imaginary flaw on the surface of the smooth metal. Finally, in his own good time, he raised his head. He saw that he had made his point. The soldier's face had flushed an angry red, but he said nothing. Doubtless he too was under orders to preserve the peace.

"My horse has a broken bridle ring," the soldier said, in stilted, reasonably good Aramaic.

Daniel reached for the thing as though it were a scorpion. "It will take some time," he muttered. "Come for it tomorrow."

"I need it at once," the Roman answered. "I will wait for it now."

Daniel studied him, trying to assess how much delay the man would tolerate. Then, with a shrug, he set to work. The sooner the job was done the sooner his shop would be rid of the man.

The soldier did not sit down on the bench by the door as ordinary customers did. He hesitated, through pride—Daniel would not admit that it might be decency—waiting to be asked. Let him rot away on his feet, Daniel thought. He would get no such invitation in this shop. Turning his back, Daniel seized the bellows and blew up the fire.

When he straightened again, the Roman was pulling off his helmet, revealing crisp fair hair. He wiped the back of his hand across his wet forehead where the metal had left an uncomfortable-looking crease. With a shock Daniel saw that he was very young, certainly no older than Joel. The beardless cheeks and chin scarcely needed a razor. His skin was white, mottled and peeling from exposure to the sun, so that he could not have seen service long under Galilean skies. The eyes that stared back at Daniel were a clear bright blue. He looked as though he might be about to speak and Daniel turned his back and resumed his work.

He took a ridiculously long time for the simple job. When finally he turned again, the soldier still stood, looking hot and uncomfortable, swinging the bronze helmet from one hand. He was no longer looking at the anvil, and Daniel, swinging to follow that intense blue gaze, suddenly stiffened with horror. The door to Simon's house stood open. Leah, who had surely not known the man was there, was coming through the little rear door from the garden, her hands full of green lettuce. The long golden hair streamed around her shoulders, lighted up all around her head from the sunlight behind her. Her eyes, blue as the ketzah blossoms, were empty with surprise.

Before she could shrink back, with one lunge, Danielslammed the door between them. Murderous hate boiled up in him. How dare the man look at his sister? The very touch of his eyes had defiled her, as surely as though he had touched her with his hand. Daniel was quivering as he handed over the bridle ring. It took every ounce of his will not to hurl the coin back into that blond face.

That night he began again to think of the mountain.

L
ATE ONE AFTERNOON
a village boy came into the shop with a scythe to be mended. He had a bonv, weathertoughened face under a shock of straight black hair, a defiant, touchy alertness, and a blackened eye that roused Daniel's curiosity. As Daniel examined the blade, the boy paced the length of the smithy floor.

"Sit down," Daniel suggested, jerking an elbow toward the bench near the door. The boy, unable to sit for more than a moment, resumed his nervous pacing. Daniel set to work, blowing the waning fire with the bellows, heating and pounding straight the blade, then applying the sandstone to the nicks that the pebbly land had left. From time to time he glanced at the boy. Daniel seldom had words to spare for his customers. He did the work they required of him and took their money, not caring that he had a reputation for being surly. Today, for the first time, he was prompted to speak. For one thing, the boy was about his own age, and for another, he looked like a fighter. When he could make himself heard, Daniel attempted a joke.

"Must have been quite a scrap you were in."

There was no answering grin, but Daniel tried again. "What did you give him in return?"

There was a pause. Then, "What could I?" the boy burst out. "There were five of them."

Daniel's eyebrows lifted. He bent over his work.

"My own friends!" Bitterness rasped through the boy's voice. "Waited and jumped on me coming home from the field last night."

"Why?"

"Because my father has gone to work for Shomer the tax collector."

No wonder the boy looked defiant. It was a contemptible business for a Jew to hire himself out to collect the taxes the Romans did not stoop to collect for themselves. "There are better ways of earning a living,"

Daniel observed.