The Bronze Bow - Elizabeth George Speare [47]
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.