The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [60]
I turned to the children who teased him, warning that if they continued to do so they would bring demons into their midst. “Run!” I shouted, and the rude name-callers scattered like seeds, giggling and hurrying away.
The slave nodded to thank me in his halting manner, but I shook my head to stop him.
“I couldn’t stand to hear their voices. That was all.” I said this so he wouldn’t dare to assume his comfort was my concern. “I sent them away for my sake, not yours.”
I had often caught him staring at me as we worked side by side. Now I knotted my scarf more tightly. I had come to believe he could speak our language perfectly if he desired to do so. He seemed to be aware of all that was said, although when anyone asked him a question he shrugged and muttered something in his own rough vocabulary, pretending to be as ignorant of ours as the doves were. And then one day, not long after I had chased off the rude children, as we were working beneath some fig trees spreading out manure, he suddenly spoke to me.
“You hair is like fire,” he said.
He spoke our language strangely, the words frozen, cautious, yet he clearly knew it well, and perhaps had learned it before he’d been captured. Conscripts in the Roman army walked beside soldiers from many lands and found ways to communicate. This pronouncement about my hair, however, was not what I expected. I laughed despite myself. “Be careful,” I said. “You could get burned.”
After a silence is broken, there is often a torrent of speech. The Man from the North now told me that where he came from many of the women had red hair. Before he was conscripted by the Roman Legion, he had never been beyond the borders of his village, which contained perhaps two hundred residents, most of them his own kinsmen. His land was so cold that snow and ice lasted much of the year, the sky dark even during the day. For a brief time of the year, his world would become green, not as the desert blooms in clutches, in a mild haze, but in a curtain of deep, shuddering green, with grass as tall as olive trees and forests so wide it would take a month to find your way across.
The hotter our world became, the more I yearned to hear of his. We sat shaded by the fig trees in the blazing heat, unaware that the sun struck the earth so brutally. I listened, refreshed, to hear that in his land there were lakes as blue as lapis where the fish were the size of men. Warriors tattooed themselves with black ink and fought as fiercely as wolves; in combat they held shields that were stronger than anything we had, a metal that could not be broken with lances or axes. Such men could go an entire moon without sleeping so that they might keep watch over their women and their flocks, the sheep with hair so long it touched the earth, the goats the color of snow with eyes that were yellow orbs. If an enemy came up behind a warrior from this northland, he would quickly be slain with a single strike upon his throat.
“If all this is true, then why are you a slave?”
It was an insult to make such a remark to a man who had once been a warrior and then a soldier for the legion and was now the lowly slave of women. He might have taken offense, but he merely shrugged.
“Why are you?” he said simply.
I laughed. “I’m not.”
The Man from the North’s expression made it clear he disagreed.
“I’m not,” I insisted.
He gazed at me sadly. “You will be. I saw it in my own land.”
The Romans had captured his country, then had offered a way out of starvation for those who’d been conquered. The Man from the North had stood with his brothers and chosen to live. He was taken across the Cold Sea and brought to Rome before being sent out with the legion for Judea. While in Rome, he had seen miraculous things, baths where there was hot and cold running water, houses in which women and boys could be had for a small price, shops that sold monstrous creatures—elephants and eels and huge fish with lances attached to their heads. He had been to the Colosseum with the throngs who pushed