Shelter of the Most High

by Connilyn Cossette

  Together with Chana, her small but persistent shadow, she headed toward the large press at the center of the grove where our collected baskets of fruit would be smashed beneath an enormous flat stone to produce fragrant, golden olive oil.

  Since the day I’d realized Eitan had made the crutch for Prezi, I’d become increasingly drawn to him, and bit by bit my trepidation about his motives had lessened. Normally he kept a comfortable distance from me, our brief interactions always taking place in the presence of his friends or family. But today he’d seemed to be testing my invisible boundaries, staying close by as we harvested, working the same tree, and gradually drawing me into conversation. Enduring my ineptitude with his language with admirable patience, he offered a word whenever I stumbled, only the barest hint of humor in his eyes as he repeated words slow enough for me to emulate and never laughing outright whenever I mangled the pronunciation.

  It had become a game of sorts, watching him with his family and straining to overhear his conversations at meals without detection, but all too often our gazes managed to entwine, invariably causing my cheeks to heat as I glanced away. Yet during the times I did manage to observe him without getting caught, I’d discovered Eitan to be intelligent, unshakably loyal, extraordinarily skilled with his hands, and always the first to laugh at the antics of his younger siblings—not to mention I’d memorized his every well-formed feature from afar. Watching him wrestle with Nadir yesterday had been a test in keeping my rebellious eyes from tracing the bare chest that had grown ever wider the longer he trained with Baz. Even the sound of his low voice jumbled my thoughts and heated my blood.

  Sometimes, however, I glimpsed an underlying sadness behind his changeable hazel eyes, some inexplicable hurt that called my name and connected with my own grief-laden soul. At times the impulse to comfort him was so strong, I had to turn away before I embarrassed myself by giving in to the desire to go to him, wrap my arms about his waist, and lay my head against his strong shoulder.

  A squeal from Abra two rows away broke into my thoughts. “Ima! Malakhi is throwing olives at me!” The accused grinned down at her from his perch among the branches, blatantly unrepentant.

  Although I could not hear Moriyah’s quiet admonition to her most trying child, Malakhi’s mischievous smile faltered, and he called down a reluctant apology. Yet the moment his mother’s attention was directed back to her task, two more olives struck the back of his twin sister’s head. Accepting that the assault was inevitable, Abra flounced away, but not before sticking her tongue out at the gray-eyed rascal in the tree.

  Eitan chuckled. “Now you know why there are more than a few strands of silver in my mother’s black hair.”

  I raised my brows, reaching for another clump of ripe olives. “And none from you?”

  The grin he turned on me was nearly as impish as Malakhi’s. “Oh, it was I who inspired the first of them to appear.”

  “As a child you were—?” Frowning, I fumbled for the correct word. “You not obey rules?”

  “Disobedient?”

  “Yes. This.”

  He shrugged, the corners of his lips twitching. “I was . . . active. Never still. Always exploring, taking risks, and acting on impulse—which of course gave her no small amount of angst and frustrated Darek to no end.”

  “I was same. To explore water was the thing I love most.” A sigh escaped as I closed my eyes, grasping at the tendrils of memories that were becoming more and more clouded as days passed. I could barely even remember the smell of the ocean or the sensation of sun-warmed waves caressing my skin.

  “You miss the sea,” he said, the words low with understanding. “You long for your home, don’t you?”

  I nodded, his empathetic gaze causing my throat to swell and my eyes to sting. “But my family is gone. All are dead in my village.”

  He moved a step closer but then stopped, as if compelled to comfort me but worried that I might dash away as I always had before when he approached me. But instead of being a cause for fear now, somehow his nearness smoothed the serrated edges of those blood-tinged memories.

  “Last night I have dream,” I whispered. “But the words were not Sicani. Only Hebrew.” The vision had been such a strange mixture of my village and Kedesh, the thick walls of the city towering over the beach and our cozy round hut opening into the busy marketplace. But the closer I came to awakening, the murkier the images of my island became, as if my new home had swallowed up the old. The faces of my loved ones were already more mist than memory.

  My gaze was drawn to Moriyah as she worked nearby, with little Tirzah strapped to her back and Abra crouched beside her, scooping olives into a basket as she contentedly prattled away at her ima.

  “I wake feeling sadness.” I laid my hand in the center of my chest, where pain still lingered like a bruise that refused to fade. “Like I lose my mother over again.”

  Although I did not look back at him, I sensed him moving nearer, silently closing the gap between us until I could feel his warmth at my shoulder. “I am so very sorry about your family, Sofea. I wish I could remake the past for you. Save them. Prevent you from enduring such horrors. But I hope . . . I pray that you will be content here. With my family.” His tone dropped to an intimate rumble that scrambled my senses. “And with me.”

  Had I misunderstood the underlying current beneath his words? Did they offer the promise of something more, or was he simply concerned about whether I’d settled into my new life in Kedesh?

  But before I gathered the courage to look up at him and respond to his sweet words of comfort, I saw Moriyah’s body suddenly go stiff, the woven basket slipping from her fingers and spraying olives as it landed on its side. Her attention seemed to be locked on something at the far end of the row, near the white stones that marked the boundary line of the city.

  Alarmed, I moved toward her, but Eitan was faster, one of his paces matching two of mine. He reached for his mother with long arms, his body shielding her from whatever it was that had made the woman he revered go pale with obvious terror.

  “What is it, Ima? What do you see?” he demanded, all his earlier softness pushed aside in favor of commanding vehemence as Moriyah continued to stare through the silver-green lane of trees toward the empty horizon.

  Her bleak response, although incomprehensible to me, nevertheless caused a shiver of fear to trail down my back.

  “Raviv.” She clutched at his tunic, her knuckles going white as she looked up at her son. “Raviv was there. Watching me.”

  C

  HAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Four large braziers had been set alight in the inn’s courtyard, each occupying a corner with flickering firelight to buffer against the chill of the evening.

  People were crowded into Moriyah’s courtyard tonight to celebrate the olive harvest, with nearly as many gathered on the rooftop. Everyone huddled in groups on the ground: eating, talking, laughing. I hung off to the side and leaned against one of the cedar pillars beneath the shadow of the eaves, knowing that even were I to sit among those gathered here, I would still miss one out of every three words shared between them.

  Since Moriyah’s strange encounter yesterday, after which Eitan insisted on rushing all of us back to the inn and then promptly disappeared for the rest of the day, I could not push away the unease that followed me home from the olive grove.

  When I asked Moriyah about who the man was, the only thing she would tell me was that he was someone who held a grudge against their family. But from the way she and Eitan had reacted to the mysterious stranger, and the way she hedged when I pressed for more information, I was convinced there was something sinister to the story—something that these people did not want me to know.

  Therefore, although the persistent nightmares I’d endured during the first months in Kedesh had faded with time, this morning I’d awoken shaking, my pillow wet with tears, and in the clutches of dread that refused to retreat, even with the sun.

  I’d considered b
ringing up the unsettling incident with Prezi but was loath to upset her. After the festival of Shavuot, she’d begun emerging from her self-made prison regularly, but it had taken weeks for her to begin smiling again and for the light to come back into her dark brown eyes. I could not chance undoing the miracle of my cousin returning from the dead.

  She had found her place next to Moriyah at the table tonight, a spot she’d come to occupy on a regular basis these past months. Oddly enough, the more agile Prezi became with the help of the crutch Eitan had made, the more she latched on to his mother. Now every morning she woke with the sun, eager to help prepare the daily bread, and content to hobble around after Moriyah, serving guests.

  She’d even befriended Yoram, the little man who shadowed Eitan much of the time, her endless patience with his mangled speech and constant questions earning his adoration. When he wasn’t at the foundry watching Eitan, he was usually following her around chattering half-intelligible stories that even Prezi, who was more proficient in Hebrew than I was, could not possibly understand fully.

  Something about Yoram reminded me of a baby Prezi’s mother had given birth to last year—same wide forehead, tiny eyes, and jutting tongue. Within a few months my father determined the child an abomination and ordered it to be left on the rocks. I shivered off the memory of Jamara’s blank, red-rimmed eyes as that baby was taken from her hands on the beach and the way she folded into the sand like a tent without poles. It had done no good to cry for such a thing. As chief priest of our people, my father’s rule was bestowed by the gods. His word was law.

  A low, all-too-familiar voice spoke behind me, the sound curling around me like the embrace of a sun-warmed tidal pool. “Your cousin seems to have taken to my mother.”

  “She is kind to Prezi,” I said, not turning around and hoping Eitan would not detect the underlying envy in my words. My cousin had been spending so much time with Moriyah over the last couple of days, preparing for this feast, that she and I had barely spoken more than a few words before crawling into bed each night.

  “My mother’s wings are wide. She does not turn anyone away from their shelter. Much like Yahweh.”

  To shift away from talk of his invisible god, I decided to press for answers about the man in the olive grove. I turned to face Eitan but regretted it immediately. He was entirely too close, his long body leaning against my pillar, and I was forced to look up to meet his gaze. “Who is this Raviv?”

  He watched me for a few silent moments, his hazel eyes reflecting the light from the brazier nearby and traveling over my face at excruciating length. Schooling my features to minimize the reaction his nearness caused, I lifted my brows. A demand that he answer my question.

  His lips dipped into a tense frown. “Darek’s brother.”

  “Your uncle? Why be afraid of him?”

  The frown tightened even more. “Darek is not my father.”

  I had noticed that Eitan’s rangy build was very different from Darek’s and that his lighter skin and eye color set him apart from Moriyah’s Egyptian looks. I’d also noticed the respectful but unmistakable distance between the two men.

  “Moriyah took me as her son eleven years ago and married Darek a few months later. My parents died of a fever when I was five years old. I lived with an uncle, a half-brother of my mother’s, until I was nine.” A twitch at the corner of his tightly clenched mouth told me that such an arrangement was anything but pleasant.

  My hand went to my chest again, that familiar knot of pain surging to life. This must be why I’d felt such inexplicable kinship with Eitan from the beginning. He too had lost his family.

  “I am sorry.” My compassion came out on a whisper, and I longed for more Hebrew words to offer, words that might soothe a small measure of the hurt in him, just as he had done for me in the olive grove.

  “I wish I could remember them better,” he said, a pinch forming between his brows. “Their faces have all but disappeared from my memory. But I do remember my mother singing me to sleep, running her fingers through my hair. . . .” He gazed into the distance over my shoulder, likely caught up in a haze of memories that I understood all too well. I still remembered my own mother’s face, but her voice, her smell, the sensation of her touch were gone, and without a doubt her image would soon follow.

  When he spoke again, his voice was deeper, more tender. “Although I wish you had not endured the loss of your own family, I am glad that Darek brought you to Kedesh. I am glad you are here, Sofea.”

  His accent curved around my name, lending it fresh beauty and a sense of intimacy that I knew I should not desire. But even so, I nearly asked him to say it again so I could watch his lips form the word. As if he’d deciphered my renegade thoughts, he lifted his hand to capture a ringlet of my hair between his fingers and repeated my name. Softer. Slower.

  All of me went still. Because we stood in the shadows with my back toward the gathering, no one would have seen the subtle move, but surely my echoing heartbeats were drowning out the conversations taking place all around the courtyard.

  Caught between the instinct to pull away from the moment and the overwhelming urge to lean into him, I simply stared back at him, paralyzed. For months I’d been drawn to him, since Shavuot at least, or perhaps even since the day I’d watched him let his sisters play with his hair. Humor tugged at my mouth as I thought of his dogged determination to ignore their antics and keep his eyes trained on the far wall of the courtyard.

  With a playful scowl, he lowered his chin. “What is that look for?”

  “Why did you stand so still in the courtyard that day?”

  His laugh was not much more than a whisper, but it reverberated inside my bones.

  “I lost a wager,” he said, twirling his finger into my ringlet in a way that somehow seemed both absentminded and quite intentional. “So Baz decided to teach me a lesson about being still.”

  “And this is problem for you? Being still?”

  “Perhaps.” He smirked, and then his voice lowered. “But I’ve been practicing patience for a long while now.”

  “Oh? You wait for what thing?”

  He leaned forward, forcing me to tilt my head farther back to look up at him. “This. For you to be able to speak my language. So I could say the things I want to say.”

  “What things you want to say, Eitan?”

  He hummed, low and deep. “I love the way you say that, with that little loop on the end of my name.”

  With my own thoughts from before mirrored so clearly, I nearly forgot what I’d asked him, but then I repeated my question. “What things you need say?”

  “Everything.” Did I imagine the quaver in his voice?

  What was this? Why did this man draw me in like the relentless pull of the tides? I’d vowed from the beginning that I wanted nothing of Eitan’s interest, but at this moment I wanted nothing more than to live at the center of it. Although my instincts still screamed danger, I no longer cared. So I allowed a smile to curve on my mouth and held his gaze for one breath. Three breaths. Five long, beautiful breaths.

  With another resonant hum that bordered on a groan, he let his hazel eyes dip to my mouth. “I’ve been waiting so long for that smile to turn my way.”

  A shofar sounded from the direction of the city gates, barging into the moment and making me acutely aware that Eitan and I had not been alone in this courtyard, burrowed together in the shadows. I turned my head to search out the meaning of the ram’s call and my gaze collided with Nadir’s. He stood next to the flickering brazier, a cup in his hand, his eyes on us.

  Guilt assailed me. I’d been aware of Nadir’s interest in me for a long while now, and he’d been nothing but kind since that first interaction months ago on the roof. But whatever had been simmering between Eitan and me had boiled over tonight. And from the pained look he was now giving us, Nadir knew it too. Feeling helpless, I lifted a palm in greeting, wishing I could wipe the hurt from his face.

  With a wince, he brought the cup to hi
s lips and tilted his head back, draining the contents. Then he turned and walked out of the courtyard. I looked up at Eitan, wondering if he’d seen Nadir’s reaction, but his eyes were instead on Darek and Baz near the center of the gathering. The men stood with bearded chins tilted to the side, as if working to discern the pattern of shofar blasts, which were even now being repeated.

  Eitan said nothing as he slipped around me, out of the shadows, and toward them. After conferring together briefly, the three men followed in Nadir’s footsteps and left the courtyard, leaving the large gathering of guests to stand around, speaking in low, confused tones. Some wore expressions of shock, and others seemed wholly disinterested in whatever situation was happening at the gates.

  I made my way to Prezi’s side and asked if she knew what was happening. “Someone is at the gates,” she said. “Asking for refuge.”

  Was Kedesh under the threat of attack? Was this why Eitan had been training so hard over the last months?

  After a few tense minutes, Darek appeared again and pulled Moriyah aside, their expressions troubled as he conferred with her for a moment before linking his hand in hers to lead her out of the courtyard. Surely Darek would not drag his wife into danger. My fear that an enemy was outside the gates ebbed away, replaced by building curiosity. Heeding its call, I took a step to follow.

  Guessing my intentions, Prezi gripped my wrist with a warning to stay put, but I twisted away with a little shrug and a grin, knowing she could not keep up with me on her lame leg, then sped out of the courtyard, through the large main room, and into the night-shrouded street.

  The inn was not far from the city gates, a location that provided weary travelers with a comfortable place to sleep. Passing through the wide-open inner gates, I noticed that the enormous outer gates had been closed and locked, leaving the receiving area safeguarded from whomever was on the other side of those thick cedar barriers.