The Bronze Bow - Elizabeth George Speare [46]
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