Highlander - Donna Lettow [28]
The body lit and shadowed by the oil lamps was no longer that of a boyish scholar. Three years of hard work on the rock had tempered it. Sinews defined his calves and forearms; muscles rippled down his firm belly; the dark tendrils of his hair curled to touch powerful shoulders. A boy had come to Masada wanting to play war with the Romans. Now, despite the Romans, a man hoped to start a family there. He bent low and gathered his wife in his arms. As she reached out to kiss him, he carried her to his bed.
Avram and Deborah had been betrothed for a year before their marriage, a year of waiting, of dreaming what might be. Neither Deborah’s brother nor Avram’s father had consented to the engagement at first, both men firm in their belief that the times were too unsettled, their situation too precarious for marriage. The young couple and the love they shared grudgingly won them over. But soon after the betrothal, the Romans came with their siege walls and their engines of war, trapping the fighters and their families on the mesa top. They all watched in horror as their enslaved Jewish brothers, once their friends and neighbors back in poor Jerusalem, built the earthwork ramp that slowly crept up the mountainside toward them. Preparations for the wedding had helped keep their minds, especially those of the women of Masada, from dwelling on the encroaching danger.
They wed in borrowed finery, Deborah wearing a simple gown and veil she’d covered with intricate needlework in the year of their betrothal. There was no dowry, no bride-price, no elaborate procession on horseback. But all of the nearly one thousand residents of the rock were gathered when Avram met his bride beneath the canopy in the courtyard of Herod’s palace. The feast afterward lasted until dawn, the musicians playing and the revelers singing as loud as they could, to make sure the Romans far below them had no doubt there was celebration, not fear, on Masada.
During the dancing and merriment, a group of men including Deborah’s brother Judah and Eleazar, the commander of Masada, had escorted Avram to the tiny stone chamber built into the double wall surrounding the fortress that would be his and Deborah’s new home. No longer would he live in the bachelor’s barracks with his father. Amid last-minute advice and lewd jokes, his drunken friends departed, leaving him alone in front of the wooden door. Suddenly, he felt very nervous. With sweating palms, he pushed it open.
On a pile of mats and skins that nearly filled the room, Deborah waited for him. She was arrayed in nothing but gold and gems, collected from a dozen women. They had anointed her body with oils so that her dusky skin glowed with a marble-like luster and had painted her face with rouges and powders. It was said that the wise King Solomon had had a thousand wives—Avram knew not one in that thousand could compare with his Deborah.
He stood in the doorway for some time, speechless, simply staring at the vision of beauty that was his new wife. Deborah looked to her new husband, waiting for a sign, a word, something to indicate that he was pleased. Neither of them moved.
Finally, when she knew if the silence went on much longer she was going to scream, Deborah spoke. “Avram, my love,” she began, “would you mind closing the door? I’d rather the neighbors weren’t watching.”
His trance broken, Avram looked out at the open corridor, then at Deborah, and they both started to laugh. Avram shut the door, still laughing, so great was his relief. He sat on the bed of skins and embraced his closest friend, this woman who was now his wife.
Their marriage bed had been tentative,