Poisoned Honey

by Beatrice Gormley

  “Can they be fooled so easily?” I asked.

  “More easily than you think, my dear Mariamne. That is why I wear the moon headdress and moonbeam robes when I do readings. If I stepped into the spirit world as myself, the spirit powers would not obey me. But when they see me dressed like the goddess Isis, they tremble; they do my bidding.”

  That made sense; I remembered how grand Ramla had appeared the first time I saw her.

  After Ramla taught me the words of disguise, I left her and went to see Susannah. I found my cousin sitting cross-legged at her loom while Kanarit plucked at her robe and the baby slept fretfully in a basket nearby. Kanarit stopped bothering her mother and tried to climb into my lap, but I put her off with a kiss. “It’s too hot for cuddling. Sit by me here.”

  I chatted a few moments with Susannah, and then I began to praise the Egyptian wise woman, as I’d promised. “I feel so grateful that you introduced me to Ramla,” I said. “She’s helped me so much! And of course, she also helped you.” I nodded toward the baby’s basket.

  Susannah, shoving the shuttle through the threads, glanced at me unsmiling. “I wouldn’t say she ‘helped’ me with the baby. Surely that’s close to blasphemy. It’s the Lord who forms the child in the womb.”

  I stammered something, startled at her tone. Susannah added, “To tell the truth, I suspect Ramla is an imposter. Did I tell you that before you and the others came to my house for the readings, Ramla got me to talk quite a bit about all of you? Foolish me, I didn’t think anything of it at the time; she was very clever about seeming interested in a kindly way. But later it dawned on me that she’d learned enough to have special advice ready for each guest.”

  Ramla, an imposter? Taken aback, I tried to remember that afternoon more exactly. Surely it couldn’t be a trick that Ramla had looked into my heart?

  “And you?” Susannah went on coolly. “How has the Egyptian helped you?”

  I hesitated, afraid now that Susannah might disapprove of the magic Ramla had taught me. “She … she explained to me how to soothe myself when people are … unkind to me.”

  “Hmph,” snorted Susannah. “Maybe she should go dwell in your house, then.”

  We sat in silence for a short while. Susannah knew quite well that Eleazar would never welcome the Egyptian wise woman into his house. Finally, I patted Kanarit, stood up, and left. I felt guilty that I hadn’t carried out my part of the bargain with Ramla, although I’d tried.

  Back in Eleazar’s house, it was a day or so before I found a private moment at dawn to say the healing spell for my grandmother. In the following days, I wished I could visit Safta to make sure she was getting better, but I was afraid to defy Eleazar’s order. I looked forward to the Sabbath, when I would see my family across the synagogue.

  I didn’t forget the protection words that Ramla had given me, but I felt uneasy about using them. Whenever I found myself on the threshold of my imaginary garden, I pulled back. If I didn’t enter, I wouldn’t need protection.

  But I missed my retreat so badly! I began to dwell on the caged sparrows again. Finally, one night after Chava had been especially spiteful, and Eleazar especially brusque, I was frantic to escape.

  As soon as Eleazar was snoring, I whispered the words of power beneath my breath. “I am Queen Mariamne. Beware, any spirits who try to threaten me!”

  Immediately I felt a surge of strength. I almost laughed out loud with the pleasure of it. Why had I waited so long? “Abrasax, I enter,” I uttered, and I stepped confidently through my secret doorway. My sparrow friend lighted on my shoulder. I had a sense of many other beings present but just out of sight—no doubt waiting to serve me, like attendants in a palace.

  Early the next morning, as I tidied the bedchamber, I heard Eleazar reciting morning prayers on the roof. The air was already hot and damp, as if the lake were a cauldron of boiling water and we were living in its steam. While I listened to my husband droning, I felt a light touch on my shoulder. It’s very different from the way your abba used to pray, isn’t it? said a sympathetic voice.

  I started, turned to look behind me, and glanced around the empty room. I pinched my arm to wake myself up, in case I was dreaming. “Who’s that?”

  Come, you know me! The voice chuckled in my ear, as if some creature were sitting next to my head. I’m your old friend, Tsippor.

  The sparrow. I turned my head again, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a gleaming eye and a short, thick beak. “You’re supposed to stay in the garden,” I hissed. “Go back. I command you.”

  What’s the harm? chirped the voice. Don’t worry—I won’t talk to anyone but you. By the way, Eleazar doesn’t sound like he’s praying to the Lord, does he? It’s more like he’s counting the packs on his camels.

  I giggled in spite of myself. No, Eleazar’s prayers were nothing like the heartfelt prayers my father used to recite.

  Although Ramla had warned me against letting anyone out of my private garden, I decided the sparrow couldn’t hurt anything. Besides, he was good company. Throughout the day, whenever Chava made one of her slighting comments, he chirped a saucy reply in my ear.

  The next Sabbath morning, as I dressed to go to the synagogue, I opened my jewelry basket to get a bracelet. Immediately I had an uneasy feeling. Nothing was missing, but the things in the basket seemed disarranged. Or, rather, not disarranged but arranged differently. Had someone been going through my things?

  I told Chava my suspicion, watching her to see if she would react in a guilty way. Her bland expression didn’t change, and she actually answered me civilly. “I’ll speak to the serving woman,” she said. “I caught her trying on my jewelry once.”

  Later as we entered the synagogue, we passed my family, and I paused to give them a hurried greeting. My grandmother looked much the same, I thought; was she getting better? At least, she didn’t seem worse. Maybe the healing charm worked slowly.

  In the following days, I was glad for the sparrow’s company, and I quickly got to depend on it. One morning, I came down the stairs chatting out loud with Tsippor, thinking the courtyard was empty. Suddenly I realized that Chava was standing there in the shade, watching me.

  She didn’t seem disturbed, and she didn’t say anything, but the incident made me remember Ramla’s warning about letting spirits follow me into our world: They can do all kinds of mischief. Probably Ramla didn’t mean a harmless spirit like the sparrow, but maybe I needed to ask her.

  By that afternoon, I’d decided to go tell Ramla about the sparrow spirit and ask her advice. On my way to Susannah’s house, though, I kept changing my mind. What if Ramla urged me to banish the sparrow, even from my private garden? He was an old friend. These days, I didn’t have such a great crowd of friends that I could afford to lose one.

  Intent on talking to Ramla, or maybe deciding to go home without talking to her, I wasn’t expecting to talk to Susannah. She surprised me by greeting me at the gate. “Shalom, Mari,” said my cousin without smiling. Kanarit was beside her and tried to take my hand, but Susannah pulled the child back. “Go—help the women with the bread. Quick now.”

  “Shalom, Susannah.” I realized that I’d seen that troubled expression on my cousin’s face recently, and more than once. “What’s the matter?”

  “Cousin …” Susannah usually came straight out with whatever she had to say, but now she hesitated. “Has Eleazar said anything … Did you know that your husband is not satisfied with you?” She bit her lip, as if to punish it for saying something so harsh.

  “What?” I tried to laugh. “Eleazar isn’t satisfied with anything. He grumbles about the heat, the cold; the lentils undercooked, the lentils cooked mushy; his relatives bothering him with their company, his relatives never visiting him. That’s just the way he is. I’m not surprised if he complained to someone about me.”

  “Mari, listen! I’m afraid for you. Silas’s aunt told me she overheard Elder Thomas talking to her brother, another elder of the synagogue. She said that he sa
id Eleazar had asked Thomas’s advice about … about divorcing you.”

  FOURTEEN

  WORSE THAN DEATH

  My breath was taken away. In a flash, I saw that my life could be much worse than it was now. Divorce! It was better for a woman to die than to be divorced. I would be disgraced forever, like my family’s servant, Yael.

  “Silas’s aunt was worried for you,” Susannah was saying. “She thought it might not be too late, if you went to Eleazar and begged him for forgiveness. Tell him you’ll do anything to please him.”

  “But I haven’t done anything wrong!” I said with a flare of anger. “The elders wouldn’t let him divorce me for no reason at all—would they?”

  Susannah shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve heard some terrible stories.” She caught my hand. “Oh, Mari, I’m afraid it might be my fault, for introducing you to Ramla. Eleazar could claim you were practicing witchcraft with her. Silas says the assembly is considering complaints against her.”

  “Witchcraft! The assembly!” The Jewish leaders in Magdala tolerated minor kinds of magic, like telling fortunes or casting healing charms. But practicing witchcraft was a serious crime. “Does Ramla know this?” I took a step toward Ramla’s apartment.

  Susannah pulled me back. “Don’t. I’m going to talk to her myself. Silas says we have to tell Ramla to leave our compound. You’re in enough trouble, Mari. You’d better go home.”

  I walked back to Eleazar’s house with my scarf pulled well over my forehead, brooding about the one divorced woman I knew: Yael. Although she’d come from a respectable family, after her divorce she was lucky that my father had hired her as a servant. A divorced woman was more likely to end up in the brothels down by the docks.

  It’s true, little sister, chirped a voice from my shoulder. Right now you may be unhappily married, but at least you can show your face in the market without shame.

  Yes, now I could greet my cousin as one married woman to another. If Eleazar divorced me, no one would respect me, not even my own family.

  But if Eleazar was thinking of divorcing me, why hadn’t I heard anything about it? Something was going on behind my back. Or … maybe it was going on in front of my eyes, but I’d been blind to it.

  Now that I thought of it, Chava had been observing me closely recently. There was the time she’d seen me come down the stairs chatting with my invisible sparrow. Maybe there were other times, too. Had she reported them to Eleazar?

  And was Chava the one, after all, who’d been pawing through my jewelry basket? I went over each bracelet and earring in my mind, wondering if there was something about one of those pieces that could be criticized.

  At Eleazar’s house, Chava and the other women were doing handwork and chatting in the upper room since it was too hot in the courtyard. I murmured the usual greeting and sat down. They returned the greeting, but then the group was silent. I caught Hiram’s wife looking sideways at me. The half-witted girl, on the other hand, stared openly at me until her mother nudged her and spoke sharply. What had they been saying about me just now?

  When the light from the high windows softened to late afternoon, the women gathered their handwork and left to prepare their evening meals. I went into the bedchamber I shared with Eleazar. In this sweltering weather, his bed, as well as Chava’s couch and the servants’ sleeping mats, had been moved to the cooler rooftop. It was my task to put the bedcover away each morning lest the sunlight fade its colors, and put it back at the end of each day.

  I carried the folded coverlet up to the roof and spread it over Eleazar’s bed. Look under the mattress, chirped a voice in my ear.

  “Be quiet, sparrow!” As soon as I spoke, I was afraid, and I glanced around to make sure no one had heard me.

  You’d better look under the mattress, he sang.

  I reached under the mattress. “There’s nothing there but the packet of herbs Safta gave me.”

  The packet, chirped Tsippor. Take a close look.

  I pulled out the packet of coarse linen. It was heavier than I’d expected. I held it up to the light. The stitches closing the packet were not in Safta’s style, or Safta’s thread. Cutting the stitches with a small knife, I dug a pottery figure out of the dried herbs.

  It was a woman in ornate dress except for her naked torso, clustered with breasts like grapes. My heartbeat sped up. This was an image of the goddess Artemis of Ephesus, like the figurines I’d seen in the market.

  My first thought was to get rid of the nasty thing. Lunging at the railing, I flung the pottery figure over the rooftops as far as I could. Then I wondered who’d hidden it. Could it have been Eleazar? Surely not, a respectable member of the Jewish assembly! But maybe he was desperate for a son to replace the one he’d lost. I hadn’t become pregnant yet, and Artemis was a fertility goddess.

  Down in the courtyard, the gate opened and the servant said, “Shalom, master.” Eleazar was home already, and I hadn’t filled the basin to wash his feet. I hurried down the stairs.

  Sweating and panting, Eleazar sank heavily onto a bench. Even in the shade, the black paving stones of the courtyard seemed to breathe heat like the inside of an oven.

  Chava sat down beside Eleazar and kissed his hand. “Welcome home, Father-in-law. I’m afraid you’ve overexerted yourself in this heat.”

  Eleazar grunted and waved his other hand. “I had to consult with Elder Thomas again, and Elder Thomas lives at the top of the city, so I had to exert myself. I’ll soon be in my grave—not that it matters.”

  “How can you say such a thing, Father-in-law? If you left us, my suffering would know no bounds.” Lifting his fringed robe from his shoulders, Chava folded it reverently. “I’ll bring a fresh tunic.”

  I knelt in front of my husband to untie his sandals. The paving stones scorched my knees through my robe. I washed the grime from his feet, dried them with a towel, and carried the basin away.

  Meanwhile, Chava returned with the clean tunic and helped Eleazar change. “I’ve been wondering, Father-in-law,” I heard her say. “You must have good reasons for allowing magic to be practiced within your walls.”

  About to pour the dirty water into the alley, I paused at the gate. Why was Chava hinting about magic? Did she know about the Artemis figurine hidden under the mattress? If Eleazar had put it there, how would he explain that to her?

  “Eh?” Eleazar sounded annoyed, not guilty. “What are you talking about—that my brother’s wife casts little charms to prevent gray hair? It’s too hot for your gossip and women’s squabbles!”

  “I’m only thinking of you, Father-in-law, and your standing in the assembly,” Chava said in a hurt voice. “Maybe the elders wouldn’t consider a heathen Egyptian amulet as real magic.”

  Eleazar scowled. “Amulet? What amulet?”

  “The amulet in your wife’s jewelry basket.” Chava’s voice sank to a whisper, but I understood her words perfectly well.

  And suddenly I understood her plan. I turned and stared across the courtyard at her.

  “Look in her basket for yourself, if you don’t believe me,” Chava went on.

  Eleazar puffed his lips out impatiently. But he said, “Very well, bring the basket. Wife,” he called to me, “come here.”

  “If anything’s in my basket, it’s because Chava put it there!” I protested. But Eleazar beckoned without answering. I crossed the courtyard again, still holding the basin of dirty water. Meanwhile, Chava hurried up the stairs and returned with my jewelry basket. “Look under the lining, Father-in-law,” she urged.

  “Don’t you see what she’s doing?” I exclaimed. “How would she know what to find, unless she put it there herself?”

  Paying no attention to me, Eleazar lifted the lid of the basket. He pulled the cloth lining away from the basket and picked up a beetle the size of an apricot half. It wasn’t a real insect—this beetle was carved in polished green stone.

  Eleazar’s jaw dropped, showing his yellow lower teeth. He looked as frightened as he did angry, and I
was glad in spite of the trouble I was in. He shook the amulet at me. “What is this unclean thing you have brought into my household?”

  “Ask her that question!” I snapped.

  Then my hands, acting by themselves, tilted the basin. They flung the gray water in Chava’s face, drenching her head and shoulders. I let out a horrified giggle.

  “Are you possessed?” Eleazar shouted at me.

  Chava, sputtering and wiping her face with her shawl, shot me a look of hatred. She said, “Father-in-law, I fear she is possessed. I didn’t want to worry you, but this isn’t the first time she’s attacked me.”

  The lie struck me speechless, or so I thought. “It won’t be the last time, you snake-woman!” The words seemed to chirp in my ear, but by the expressions on Eleazar’s and Chava’s faces, I knew that I’d spoken them myself.

  In a panic, I seized my jewelry basket and ran up the stairs to the roof. I cowered against the railing, my heart pounding so hard that it seemed to push me away from the plaster with each beat. What would Eleazar do to me now?

  Down in the courtyard, Chava’s voice went on. “You see, Father-in-law? I’m worried for the honor of your house. As I told you, I’ve noticed other signs. Often she seems to be absent in spirit, or communing with unseen beings. She stares into the air and talks when no one is there.”

  “This is not the kind of wife I bargained for,” Eleazar agreed. After a moment’s pause, he said, “Elder Thomas advised against putting her aside, although I have the right. But he might change his mind if he saw this”—he must mean the scarab—“and knew of her uncontrolled behavior.”

  “There are families with more suitable girls,” said Chava.

  “But ai!” sighed Eleazar. “What a lot of trouble! And her uncle and brother would be angry. Not that they have any right, after all I’ve done for them. Besides, they’d have to hold their tongues if they wanted to keep the sardine business in Tiberias.”