The Bronze Bow - Elizabeth George Speare [89]
By the next morning he saw that she was very ill. The physician, loath at first to come, looked down at her and shook his head. There was too little blood in that thin body already, he said, laying aside the bottle of leeches. He left a concoction of rue and departed, with a resigned shrug of his shoulders and a gentle pity in the wise eyes behind their wrinkled lids.
"I cannot work today. My sister has the fever," Daniel told a customer, and bolted the shop door as the man backed away. Word must have gone quickly through the village, because no other customer came to trouble him.
He sat beside Leah's mat, bewildered. One by one they had all left him, everyone who had touched his life. Rosh. Samson. Joel. Thacia. Simon. Jesus. Now Leah was slipping away. With Leah's death he would be altogether free. But freedom seemed suddenly a terror of emptiness, and he had nothing to fill it but hatred. Leah too, he thought dully, must be avenged.
In the stillness the words came back to him. Can you repay love with vengeance? Leah had loved him, with a simple trustful heart, as Samson had loved him. But vengeance was all he had to give. It was better than nothing.
Leah, like Samson, had perishedbythe sword he had meant for Rome. And like Samson she would not leave a single person on earth save himself who would know or care. Then he remembered that this was not true. Thacia would care. Sometime during the day he became convinced that Thacia should know. There was nothing that she could do for Leah now, but he knew that she would care.
How could he let her know? He remembered the message that Simon had sent him almost a year ago. Rummaging in his shop, he found a bit of broken pottery and scratched with a nail the same message Simon had sent: Leah is dying.
Joktan sat outside the shop, halfheartedly filing down a set of nails. He had no more than glimpsed the girl who lay dying, but the heaviness inside the house seeped through the door and made him uneasy. He was glad enough for an errand to do. Daniel gave him the directions to the house of Hezron in Capernaum and told him to leave the message with the porter at the door.
Joktan did not return. Three times a day Daniel went to the village well to get water, using it recklessly to bathe Leah's hands and face. He came and went with his head bent, looking at no one, speaking to no one. On the second day, as he came slowly back along the street, he saw the Roman soldier Marcus standing before his house. He stood still, his legs suddenly weak. A red mist blurred his vision. His arms trembled till he could scarcely hold the water jug. Here, in this one hated figure, was concentrated all the misery of his life. With all the strength of his being he wanted to hurl himself at the Roman boy, to feel the throat between his hands, to hear the life gasping out. But something held him back. He could not kill the Roman while Leah lay dying inside the house. It would have to wait.
Marcus stepped forward, to stand between him and the door, and Daniel was forced to stop. He could not prevent the soldier from speaking to him, but he turned his face away. When, against his will, he had to see why no words came, he saw the boy's face was contorted in an effort to speak.
"I have heard that your sister is ill," he stammered. "How does she today?"
Daniel spat on the ground. He charged forward so fiercely that Marcus involuntarily stepped out of the way and let him enter his house. On the doorstep Daniel turned. "What is it to you if another Jew is dying?" he snarled.
On the third day of Joktan's absence, Daniel came back from the well slowly, his limbs dragging with weariness, heavy with dread that Leah's anguished breathing might have stopped while he was gone. He took no notice of the soldier who stood across the road as he had stood for the past two days. Every hour that the boy had off duty he spent simply standing there in the blazing sunshine, with his eyes on the house. This time, however, Daniel saw that the Roman was crossing the road and waiting for him, as he had before,