by Misty Moncur
One of them, the one I had just stabbed in the gut with my tanning knife, had grabbed me and dragged me back to the clearing near the tannery, where many men had begun to gather, some holding struggling girls or women whose bruises were already showing.
My eyes shot around to the other captives in the clearing. I knew all of them. Some were tied. Some were gagged and staring at me with terrified eyes. A child began screaming for her mother.
Something in that cry set me off. Like Keturah, who had joined Helaman’s army when she was just fifteen and gone away to war, I wanted to fight anyone who sought to steal my people’s freedom. But Keturah fought for peace, and I was more interested in fighting for justice.
I kept a tanning knife strapped around my waist, but when the man had grabbed me, I hadn’t been able to get to it. I had wanted to slash at him, to wound him and make him sorry he had ever left his Lamanite lands, to make him sorry he had ever touched me. It wasn’t really a practical place to keep the knife, but it felt secure and reassuring tied there.
While I had been tied up and marched through the trees, I realized that being unable to reach my knife had been a piece of luck. I hadn’t used the knife, so they hadn’t known I carried it. And while they slept, I had been able to slip it out and cut through my bonds.
Zeke and Jarom were talking in low tones ahead of us, but Zeke turned around after a while and focused on me in the darkness.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m perfectly fine,” I said.
Jarom turned back too, and I saw him roll his eyes at my snippy comment before he turned them to take a long hard look at Kenai, probably, I thought, to determine how he was holding up.
Jarom had been through all the battles with Kenai, even up through the most recent they had fought under Moroni’s command in Nephihah, and I knew he worried about him—like he thought Kenai would do something reckless or dangerous at any moment, maybe harm himself or someone else. Since they had been home, I had seen Jarom surreptitiously watching Kenai. And secretly, I thought this watchfulness was the reason Jarom had gone with Kenai to Nephihah instead of coming home. I only wondered why it hadn’t been Zeke who went with him.
Zeke turned to Keturah then, and by his dismissive glance, I knew she was the reason he hadn’t gone with Kenai. She had to be. I didn’t know it then, but in the days that followed, I noticed a rift between Zeke and Kenai. How could Zeke be friends with the brother of the woman who had rejected him?
Zeke looked her over briefly and just turned forward again like it wasn’t his duty to ask after her welfare, like it wasn’t his privilege to know she was okay, like he wasn’t her intended husband.
Before the war, he would have demanded to know whether or not she was okay, babied and coddled her until she stomped off offended and mad at him. But something had happened between them. Earlier that night at his homecoming celebration, Zeke had announced to both our families that he would not pursue Keturah’s hand in a betrothal. He said they had come to the decision mutually, but Keturah had let him face everyone alone—she hadn’t even dared to show up.
This is what I had gone to the tannery to think over while I stretched and worked my hides. I produced the softest hides in Melek, even Father couldn’t make them as soft, and everyone wanted them. But that night, my work was only an excuse to get away and think.
Zeke and Keturah had been basically promised to one another since childhood. Everyone, themselves included, had expected them to marry. And one day, today, Zeke just announced that they weren’t going to.
It was so unfair.
I had to do everything my parents said, so why didn’t Zeke?
It wasn’t that I felt Keturah should have to marry my brother if she didn’t want to. I was heartily against that. But she was supposed to want to. All the other girls in the village wanted to. She was refusing him just because she could. She was spoiled and selfish and heartless, and most importantly, she got everything her way, and I never did.
Except, well, there was the tannery.
When Zeke and Jarom had left for the war with Helaman’s army, I had only been eight years old. But the next day Father said, “Isabel, I could use your help at the tannery.”
I sat in our yard milking the goats that long ago morning. I had to milk, Sachemai, and to make matters worse, I now had to milk Mui, Keturah’s goat, while she was away with the army. I liked that her family had entrusted me with this responsibility, but I hated milking the goats.
“Steady now,” I said to Sachemai as I patted her side. But she wasn’t steady, or I wasn’t, and what milk I had gotten went everywhere.
Chloe giggled.
I ground my teeth. I sat and stared at the mess and the stupid goat that was now cropping the grasses at the edge of the yard.
I might have started to cry if Father hadn’t come from the hut then, surveyed the scene, and decided he had too much work to accomplish alone.
That one moment, that one statement from him had changed my life.
Or at least it had changed my chores. After that day, Sarai and Chloe cared for and milked the goats, and I went with Father to the tannery.
It turned out that he actually did need my help at the tannery. He had too many orders he couldn’t fill without help, because he had given almost every scrap of leather he had to the militia for scabbards, tents, legging pants and kilts, satchels and so forth.
It smelled at the tannery—that was my first impression. And I was sure I smelled of dead animal carcass when I went home that evening because Father and my brothers always did. Zeke had always gone immediately to bathe in the creek, even when it was cold, because he hated the smell of it. Secretly, I thought he didn’t want Keturah to smell it on him. Father and Jarom had never seemed to care quite as much. We girls and Mother made a lot of soap, an extra chore, all because Zeke wanted to impress Keturah.
And that brought me back around to being upset with them both. All that soap making for nothing!
The sun was dawning and the light was increasing. I glanced around. We had come quite a ways while my mind had been wandering. At the pace we were traveling, we would be home in the village in a quarter of an hour. I had thought the younger children might hold us back, but they were all understandably eager to get home.
Keturah moved ahead to talk to Muloki. She slugged him in the arm and he laughed heartily.
My brothers still walked side by side ahead of me, but they weren’t doing much talking. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but it seemed there was a rift between them too, possibly bigger than the one between Zeke and Kenai. When Zeke had arrived home in the village, he had exchanged a hard look with Jarom, even while Mother embraced him. They seemed to have studiously ignored each other since then except in Mother’s presence, and then they acted normal, even joking with each other like the best of friends. But if I was any judge, they weren’t.
Most of the other captives travelled at the front of the group led by the man called Jashon and his brother, who Keturah was even now staring at as she walked beside Muloki and tried to appear interested in what he was saying to her.
I watched her closely for a time. How was it that she had gained her freedom, earned her freedom from marriage, and yet she clearly pined after this strange warrior when she was supposed to be pining after my brother?
“You think she’s crazy,” Kenai broke into my thoughts.
“Oh,” I said, surprised. He had noticed I was staring at his sister. I blushed at the thought of him noticing anything about me. “No…I…”
“He’s asked for her hand, you know,” he said over my pathetic stammering. He put a finger to his lips. “It is a secret. She doesn’t know yet.”
“Oh,” I said again. I looked back to her. “Will she accept, do you think?”
“Without a doubt,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. Micah has already done so on her behalf.”
This sparked my temper. It didn’t matter? Micah had already accepted on her behalf? I di
d not think women should be given in marriage, as was the custom. I thought a woman should give herself.
“That is absolute nonsense! It is so infuriatingly belittling when men—”
Kenai broke in with a chuckle, the first I had heard from him in the weeks since he had been home.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, annoyed.
“Those were a lot of big words for a little girl like you.”
My jaw went slack, and then I stuck out a foot and tripped him.
He stumbled and looked back first in confusion and then in amusement to where I had stopped and drawn my knife, ready for a fight.
I was a little girl, but how dare he call me one!
He chuckled again, low in his chest. “Put that knife away, or I’ll take it from you,” he warned calmly. And I might have, except that he added with what looked like a deliberate smirk, “That knife is not a play thing like your dolls.”
Oh how I wanted to hurt him in that moment. I didn’t move, but not because I didn’t want to. I was holding my ground. I would never cut him with the knife, but after what had just happened, after being bound and abducted, I felt safer holding it. I would never use it on him, but I wanted to make a point. I was not little. I was not helpless.
“Come on now,” he said. “Put it away.”
By now, the others were a distance ahead of us and no one, it appeared, had noticed we were missing. Some rescue mission, I thought as I watched my brothers move on down the road with the others.
Why couldn’t my brothers be as protective of me as Keturah’s were of her?
Not that I would particularly want that.
And of course they thought Kenai was protecting me. They knew I did not need protection from Kenai.
Suddenly, I was on my back in the dirt, staring up into Kenai’s face and he had taken my knife from me.
“I warned you,” he said quietly.
“Give me my knife back,” I said with irritation.
He smiled. “You’re not old enough to play with this knife.”
I struggled, trying to get up, trying to retrieve my knife from his hand where he held it just out of my reach.
Kenai forced me to stop wiggling by allowing more of the weight from his chest to rest on me. My panic must have shown in my face because he went very still and then quickly withdrew until he knelt up on his heels at my side. I didn’t move, and he stared down at me.
“Sorry, Isabel,” he said uncomfortably and handed me my blade with the hilt extended toward me. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He glanced up ahead, got to his feet, and offered me a hand. I grudgingly took it.
When I was standing, I put my knife into its scabbard, which I had tied around my waist after the fighting had stopped—this time on the outside of my sarong. I sent him a disgusted look, but I said, “It’s okay. You’re trained to act.”
“Yeah, trained to act,” he said under his breath. “Come on.” And he started off after the others.
I walked after him for a few steps and then caught up and walked beside him, still wondering what had happened.
When the group ahead of us walked into the village, Kenai and I heard the relieved cheer go up. Nobody noticed we walked in together minutes behind everyone else.
Kenai put a light hand on my back and led me to where Zeke and Jarom stood surveying the many reunions. He punched Jarom in the arm—a kind of wordless greeting they used, and perhaps, that morning, it was a transferring of responsibility for me. He didn’t look at or speak to me, and I tried not to watch him as he joined his younger brother, Darius, and they made their way home together through the crowd. But I failed.
Zeke stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at me. “I thought I was done with strong-willed women,” he said.
It wasn’t a compliment.
Jarom smirked, but I disregarded both of them, put my chin in the air and set off for home, where I could see Mother on her toes trying to spot us. Father stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders looking just as anxious.
I felt Zeke and Jarom fall in on both sides of me as I wove through the crowds of people, but I didn’t look at either one of them. I thought it would be best if I just ignored them, but halfway home I thought why not? So I slipped my foot out and tripped Zeke. When he stumbled, Jarom laughed. But while he was preoccupied laughing at Zeke, I tripped Jarom too, and then I ran ahead of them into my Mother’s arms. By the time my brothers reached home, tired and annoyed, I was safely ensconced in my Father’s protective embrace.
No. Not protective. Father could protect me from spiders or the rain or perhaps a wild boar, but he could not protect me from Lamanites, or really from men in general. Because of an oath he made long ago, he could not protect me from what had happened that night.
I thought of the man who had come courting Cana long ago—long before Micah, Keturah’s oldest brother, had come home from the war to ask Father for her hand. Zareth had seemed so nice at first, but when Father had seen his true nature once in the city, something he would not even discuss with us, he had flatly refused to let the man have any contact with Cana, or any of us girls for that matter.
I guessed there were ways he could protect me, I thought as I looked up at him.
But I wasn’t so dumb as to think that parents could protect their children from everything.
Take Kenai, for instance. He was alive and healthy and whole, but something had gotten the best of him, and no amount of his mother’s faith had been able to stop it from happening. Everyone said so behind his back, though I knew nobody meant to be unkind. They wanted to help him, but nobody knew how. I wanted to help him too.
I looked back over my shoulder as I stepped from Father’s arms. Darius and Kenai were talking to their mother, Leah, just a few paces away. They both glanced at me, and I looked away embarrassed.
Zeke and Jarom’s bratty little sister—that’s what they saw.
“Isabel, you need to take someone with you when you go to the tannery,” Zeke said to me. “Keturah took someone with her everywhere during the war, and it always kept her safe.”
“And Keturah’s supposed to be my model of behavior?” I asked skeptically. If I remembered anything about my brother, I remembered that. He hated the way Keturah acted. Loved her. Hated her actions.
He sighed.
“Besides,” I said, “I remember a raid that happened right here in this village. Home is not necessarily safe either. Face it, you wasted six years of your life and it’s no safer here than it was before you left.”
“Isabel!” exclaimed my mother.
I just gave everyone a scowl and walked into the hut.
“How long has she been like this?” I heard Zeke ask in a low voice. “But as much as I hate to admit it, she is right. Wickedness abounds, even here in Melek.”
“She shouldn’t resist our protection,” added Jarom.
A fine time to get protective, I thought as I remembered Kenai’s chest pressing down on mine, his eyes searching for something in my face, his sudden movement away when he found it.
Chloe’s voice brought me out of my memory. She was talking to someone in the yard. Going to the side door, I listened. It was Keturah. She was going alone into the woods.
I didn’t know what Zeke was talking about. Keturah hadn’t been accompanied by a guard everywhere she went. Not Keturah. She had been home from the war for over a year and here at home I never saw her with anybody. Not even other women, let alone guards, unless you counted Muloki, but even that had stopped now that Melia had come to live in the village. The whole idea was ridiculous. Improbable. Impossible. I wondered why Zeke would even dream up something so preposterous. Did he want to be the one to accompany me everywhere? That was a laugh.
I gathered up all the things I would need for the work day—my lunch, my tools. I didn’t like to leave my tools at the tannery unattended overnight. Father had given them to me. They were mine, and I didn’t want to lose them. The previous night had been a fine example
that even in the land of Melek we were not without crime.
The people of Ammon were good people, but they were not above succumbing to temptation. And lately, in the past few years, many refugees from all different kinds of foreign places had been arriving in Melek for the asylum our Nephite government offered here. And we had to just accept them and all their different customs, even different religious beliefs and value systems.
Hence, I carried my tools with me.
When I stepped into the courtyard ready to go to work my whole family stopped talking and stared at me. After a moment, Mother offered everyone breakfast, which no one accepted.
Chloe was at work milking the goat. Why shouldn’t I go to work?
Well, of course I knew why. I had been kidnapped from the tannery not twelve hours ago. I had been awake and traveling all night. But it was daylight now, and I wouldn’t be alone. Besides, did they think I could go to sleep after stabbing a man—a Lamanite!—with my knife?
I felt my knife tied securely to my waist, and I squeezed my eyes shut so I would not cry. I was not going to sit around all day sucking my thumb and looking to be coddled.
About the Author
Misty Moncur wanted to be Indiana Jones when she grew up. Instead she became an author and has her adventures at home. In her jammies. With her imagination. And pens that she keeps running dry.
Misty lives near a very salty lake in Utah with her husband and two children, where they cuddle up in the evenings and read their Kindles. Well, she does anyway.
Connect with Misty on her Website.