The Bronze Bow - Elizabeth George Speare [57]
"You mean you've got Samson to thank."
"Samson only did it for you. He knew you were coming all right. He j-just knows things. He's deaf, maybe, but he hears things that aren't there. Look at him sitting there s-staring at you. You'd think you were one of his gods. You think it's an accident we've had the only good meal in a week?"
Someone else, too, knew that the meal had been no accident. Glancing at Rosh, Daniel saw the small eyes, above the unkempt tangles of black beard, glittering at Samson. The dislike in them startled him. Rosh had gorged himself on the forbidden mutton, but he hadn't forgiven the one man in the camp who had dared to flout his orders.
Later still Daniel lay awake. Overhead the stars were big and close. The cool air was clean, free of the mists and taint of the town. He lay filled with meat and wine, his old comrades stretched out beside him. It was all just as he had imagined it on those endless steaming nights in the town. Yet sleep did not come. He turned over, twisting his shoulders to fit a hump in the rocky ground. In these few weeks his body had forgotten the feel of pebbles. In the same way, his mind shifted uncomfortably, trying to find a resting place.
Pictures began to form in his memory. Leah alone behind a bolted door. Joel reading aloud from the scroll. Thacia standing in the doorway of the smithy in her striped headdress. Simon looking away down the road, waiting for Daniel to accept the offer of all he owned.
Simon had chosen a different leader. Daniel thought now of the one meal he had shared with Simon's comrades. He remembered the silence as Jesus had stood to bless the meager feast, and how each one had taken less than he needed so that those outside could be fed. A closeness had seemed to draw them all together. Tonight, who but Samson had cared that he had come back?
All at once he thought of Leah's little black goat. Would some child in the village be hungry because of tonight's feast?
At the first gray glimmer he got up. Instantly Samson was awake. Daniel put a hand on his shoulder. For a moment he stood, shaken by the question that stared from the dark eyes. Then he shook his head and made his way among the sleeping figures to the top of the trail. Samson did not try to follow him.
He wished he could take the black man with him. But how could that huge figure fit into the narrow cage of his life at the smithy? Samson would alarm the villagers and terrify Leah into a corner forever. No, Samson belonged to the free life on the mountain.
Where did he himself belong?
The fire in Simon's forge had almost gone out. He raked back the ashes, blew on the coals and coaxed it back to life. Then he opened the inner door to the house. Leah looked up at him, her blue eyes as lifeless as the fire. She had not combed her hair or bothered to get herself breakfast. With irritation he saw that the water jar was empty and that he would have to stand in line at the well with the snickering women. He bent and picked up the jar, and the bars of his cage slid into place around him.
15
FROM THE MORNING when Daniel went back to hear Jesus on the shore of Capernaum, life in the village began to seem less burdensome. Though he would have been surprised if he had stopped to realize it, the long hot days of the month of Ab came to be the happiest he had ever known.
He went first because Joel had asked him to, and because he was still curious to find what it was about the preacher that had drawn first Simon and then Joel. Two days later he went back again, because he could not get the words of the carpenter out of his head. After that, nearly every morning in the week he rose before dawn and walked three miles to the city to join the little crowd that always waited at the shore. Though it meant that his shop would be late in opening, Simon encouraged his coming, and seemed glad to see him. Daniel could meet Joel and talk with him freely, and often he had the added reward of Thacia's flashing smile. Even the