Highlander - Donna Lettow [27]
Avram stopped in an opening between the rocks where a door once stood. In front of him the stones marked out a tiny cubicle, hardly bigger than a closet. He entered with reverence. In one corner, set into the walls, a small clay oven, worn and eroded by time. Still, he thought he could smell bread baking…
Masada, Idumaea: 14 Nisan 3833 (A.D. 73)
“More bread?” The flat rounds of dough were still warm from the oven and filled their tiny stone room with a fresh, homey scent. Deborah reached across the tattered cloth that functioned as their table and served her husband, placing more bread next to his bowl of pottage. Avram took both her slender hands into his own and brought them to his lips, kissing them gently. His face was filled with love and the certain knowledge that he was the luckiest man in the world. He turned one of her hands in his and covered her palm with kisses. Her hands still smelled of yeast and flour, and he drank in the perfume. Then his lips moved down her hand to her delicate wrist, stopping only at the embroidered sleeve of her gown.
Deborah laughed, a silvery sound like the jangle of coins. “Does that mean ‘thank you’ by any chance?” In the sputtering lamplight that bathed their chamber in a golden glow, her eyes were burnished chestnut, and they sparkled at his touch. Her thick, black hair, free and loose only in the seclusion of their room for the delight of her husband, adorned her face as no jeweled bauble ever could.
Deborah’s whole world was the barren plateau on the heights of Masada. She’d come here when she was ten, her parents dead of fever, her brother Judah one of the fighters who helped Menahem the Galilean recapture Masada from the Romans early in the Great Revolt. In the seven years since, Jerusalem had fallen, the Great Temple destroyed, but Masada had held and Deborah had grown into a beautiful young woman within its protective walls. “Whatever you don’t eat, we’ll just have to burn before Pesach begins tomorrow.”
Avram pushed aside the bread and pottage. “Funny, I don’t feel hungry anymore.” He rose to his feet from his seat on the floor and offered Deborah a hand to stand. “Not for food, any-way,” he said with a smile, as his young wife stood before him, willing, wanting. He touched her cheek, her hair. Even now, after three months of life as man and wife, the simple act of touching her sent sparks through his body. He knelt at her feet, carefully removed her sandals, kissing the dusty tops of her feet.
Avram had been nineteen when he arrived at Masada three years before. He was a scholar and a Pharisee like his father before him, and his father before him. His whole life had revolved around the study and interpretation of the Law and the Prophets and strict adherence to the ancient traditions of the Jews. He and his parents had been trapped in Jerusalem when the Roman forces of Titus laid siege during the festival of Pesach. Every day, like the rest of the besieged city, they had scrabbled to find a little food, enough water to stay alive. In the fourth month of the siege, Avram’s mother Tamar finally succumbed to the hunger and disease that was claiming thousands each day, and died. But somehow Avram and Mordecai, his father, managed to hold on. At the end of summer, the Romans finally breached Jerusalem’s defenses and took the city.
In front of thousands of starving Jews, they burned the Great Temple to the ground, trapping hundreds inside. His father was in shock at the destruction of the Holy of Holies, but Avram managed to get him out of the city in the midst of the chaos.
They escaped to the wilderness. Mordecai, all spirit gone, had begged to be left there to die, but Avram, the scholar who had never held a bow or a sling, was determined to fight for his birthright. He herded, cajoled, and sometimes even carried his father across the wasteland until they came to Masada. There, Avram had found purpose in his life, united with his fellow Jews to reclaim their homeland. And there, Avram had found Deborah.
Avram