by Dara Horn
“In the Book of Kings it says it was dug by King Hezekiah.”
Rachel tried not to smirk. “That may be what my father copied, but even he knows that’s impossible. Some scribe before him just wanted to give the Judean kings the credit. My father says that the Babylonians were as good at building as the Romans, but we only built a Temple, and then palaces of words.” Her father, she recalled, had said this with tremendous pride.
Elazar was still looking at her. He said, “Your father is wrong.”
Rachel stood taller. The boy may have been a priest, but this was an insult. “My father is never wrong.”
“Of course he is, and you know it. You changed his scroll yourself.”
Rachel felt her face growing warm. Stupid, she scolded herself. Why had she put herself at this boy priest’s mercy? “Please, please don’t tell,” she repeated.
He laughed again. “It’s always worth correcting errors. In this case, your father is absolutely wrong, and I can prove it.”
Rachel folded her arms across the breasts she still wasn’t used to. This was far too long to be talking to a man, even if he was only a boy. She tried to think of how to end the conversation kindly, without simply walking away.
He saw her hesitation, and pounced. “I can show you, if you want. You’ll see, it’s something special. Something very ancient. You’ll be surprised. Actually, your father would love to see it. He’s probably one of the only people in the city who could read it, besides the priests.”
This intrigued her. “What do you mean, read it?”
Elazar smiled, but didn’t answer her question. “Here’s what you must do. Before sunset, go to the pool by the old palace, then wait by the entrance to the water tunnel. Call my name, and I’ll send a signal.”
This was outrageous. “What signal?” she asked.
He ignored her. “When the signal comes, start walking up.”
“Up?”
“Up into the tunnel.”
Rachel laughed. “I’d drown!”
“Not at this time of year. The water level is low right now. Even in the winter, it never gets higher than your legs. I promise you, it’s worth it.”
“Wouldn’t I need a lamp?”
“You don’t need a lamp. You need me.”
“Why would I need you?”
“You need me. You just don’t know it yet.”
Some of the moneychangers had closed down their booths and were turning toward them, laughing as they talked about a customer. The Temple, her father often scoffed, had become the country’s central bank. The thought entered her mind of how many people here might know her parents. The unsavoriness of how long she and the young priest had been speaking seeped into her mind once more, staining the moment like spreading ink. “I have to go now,” she told him, and turned toward the gate.
“You forgot my message,” Elazar said.
If she could have ignored him, she would have. But she knew her place. She turned back, bowed her head and put her hands before her, out of habit. As he placed the scroll in her hands, he brushed a finger across her palm. “It’s urgent,” he said, his voice almost a laugh. And then he walked away.
As she hurried through the gates and down the Temple steps, she decided to open the scroll. She untied the bit of gut string and unfurled the page, then nearly tripped down the last of the steps. The scroll was blank.
SHE KNEW SHE SHOULDN’T GO. It was time to go home, she told herself as she finished her rounds toward sunset; her mother would be back from the marketplace and would notice that Rachel hadn’t returned. But even as she told herself this, she knew it wasn’t true. Half of Rachel’s deliveries involved her standing around waiting for some householder or official or tradesman to arrive, sometimes for hours. No one would notice if she stopped by the tunnel on the way. She could even bring a bucket of cool water back to the house. Her mother would be grateful. And what would happen if she didn’t go, and the young priest told someone what her father had done? Before she knew it, her feet had taken her to the reservoir pool where the tunnel emptied.
She waited by the pool. It was late in the day. The blind and the lame water-carriers who usually crowded the pool hoping for odd jobs and small coins had already given up and left. Getting to the tunnel’s entrance was easier than she expected. She lifted her robe to just above her ankles, and waded in along the pool’s submerged stone steps. The cool water sent a ripple through her body, a feeling she didn’t recognize. As she approached the tunnel entrance, balancing herself along the step’s narrowing edge, she felt the water’s gentle current and saw her dark bare feet just below its clear surface. The rush against her ankles made her nervous. Still, she approached the tunnel entrance until she was able to wedge herself into it, her body blocking off the last of the light. It was like looking down a throat. She braced her arms against the walls of the tunnel and called, “Elazar, son of Hanania?” Her voice was larger than she was.
No one answered. Embarrassed, she glanced behind her, but no one was there, just the still mirror of the pool at twilight, stray cats sipping at its surface. She looked again into the dark throat of the tunnel, feeling like a fool. She thought of calling again, but then something small rippled through the water, flowing down along the dark sluice. She caught it just as it passed between her ankles: a lit oil lamp, floating on a tiny reed raft. Wonder coursed through her chilled legs as she raised the lamp and began walking into the tunnel, leaving the last dregs of daylight behind her.
INSIDE, IT WAS DIFFICULT to climb. The stone floor was worn smooth, and the current against her feet pushed her back, as if some ancient presence had come to redirect her back to safety. She gripped at the damp rough-hewn walls with her free hand, finding toeholds in the smooth stone beneath her feet, putting one cold foot in front of the other up the tunnel’s gentle slope until she had reached the point where daylight no longer streaked in at her back. The tunnel’s aperture closed behind her like an eyelid falling shut. And then she was alone inside the mountain.
Her oil lamp glowed brightly against the wet walls, her gripping hand the same color as the carved stone. The light danced on the walls as her hand trembled. But her fear ebbed as she went deeper into the tunnel, carried away with the water at her feet as she marveled at what her lamp revealed. Her father was right, she saw with her own eyes: the Babylonians were amazing builders. The water tunnel went directly into the mountain, swerving here and there, but its surfaces remained uniform, each of the thousands of chisel marks equidistant from the ones around it. She felt as though she were moving through time instead of rock. Her fingers traced the marks in the walls and she imagined the Babylonian foremen shouting their commands, measuring and marking rock as they went, whipping their slaves, cursing the Hebrew god for surrounding his holy city with solid limestone mountains. It must have taken years. She thought of the Babylonians and began humming the mournful psalm about the city’s destruction. Her voice echoed through the tunnel, and the sound startled her. She swallowed the sound, embarrassed—but then, who was here to hear her? The thought set her voice free, and the music rose high in her throat and reverberated along the water.
“Rachel, daughter of Azaria!”
She stopped singing, and nearly dropped the lamp. She lifted the lamp higher, afraid to speak again. But she didn’t need to. “I can already see your light,” the voice called. “You’re almost there.”
Almost where? The tunnel bent upward, then turned sharply to the right, and the next few steps were difficult to scale. But when she did, she saw another flame dancing in the darkness ahead of her, moving much more quickly than hers. A moment later the hand holding it emerged, and then the body. Standing before her was Elazar.
He looked different, and not only because of the dimness of the light. His linen robes were hoisted nearly to his knees, and she could see the dark hair on his legs, like a Roman soldier’s. His dirty white tunic was even dirtier than before, and he had pushed his sleeves past his elbows, which were scr
atched and scraped and surprisingly pale. But what amazed her most was his face. In his eyes was an expression she hadn’t seen on a man or boy’s face since she was a very small child: pure wonder.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said.
Rachel had never before been alone with a man, or even a boy. The awe on his face soothed her. She felt as though she were with an old friend, someone she had known since she was small, someone who, like her, was really still a child. He lifted his lamp high, and his face fell into darkness as he turned toward the tunnel’s wall. His turn away from her seemed casual, comfortable, brushing back her unnamed fears. They were two children on an adventure. “It’s here somewhere,” he said.
What was he looking for? She followed the lamp as it bobbed and swooped along the tunnel’s wall. After a moment she raised hers as well, wondering what could possibly be of interest on a rock surface inside a mountain. Once her lamp was up, she immediately saw it: a solid block of limestone implanted in the wall, engraved with words in an ancient script.
“There it is,” he said, the triumph in his voice held in by a quiet awe. “Can you read it?”
The two lamps flickered side by side as Rachel moved a step closer to Elazar, straining to see the carvings.
“It’s in the old script,” he said, “from the time of the First Kingdom. In the Temple they teach us how to read it, even though no one uses it anymore.”
He paused, and turned toward her.
“I knew you could read,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen you on the steps before, checking the scrolls the priests send out with you. You always open them after you leave the courtyard, behind the water basins. I’ve been watching you for weeks. And not just because you’re beautiful.”
Rachel had been looking at the inscription, but now she stared at Elazar, silent and stunned.
“At first I couldn’t believe you were really reading. But then I started waiting for you, watching you read. You never noticed me. You just stood in the corner facing the wall, with your lips moving. It was like you were praying.” He blinked at the oil lamp’s smoke. “Three days I watched you before I understood it. You were doing the same thing I do when I come here. I saw you and knew I was seeing a free person.”
Wonder lapped at Rachel’s feet. The tunnel seemed too narrow, its walls constricting like tightened lungs. Elazar turned the lamp back toward the inscription. “Can you read the old script too?”
She swallowed before speaking, relieved at the distraction. “Just a few letters,” she said, pointing to the first word. “There’s a hey, and there’s a nun.”
Elazar’s face glowed. “You’re right,” he told her, his voice gilded with a childish joy. “The first few words are hard to see, but then there’s the hey and nun. I’ll read it to you. It says, ‘The tunnel was completed today. And this is the story of the tunnel. When the axes were against each other and when three cubits were left to cut, the men on one side heard the voice of a man on the other side, and each man called to his counterpart, for there was a cleft in the rock on the right and on the left. And on the day the tunnel was finished, the stonecutters struck each man toward his counterpart, axe against axe, and water flowed from the source to the pool for one thousand two hundred cubits, and one hundred cubits was the height over the head of the stonecutters.’ ” He paused. “That’s all,” he said, then paused again, a gap in time filled with rushing water at her ankles. “That means we’re a hundred cubits below the ground.”
She felt his eyes on her as she marveled, tracing the words with her fingers. “It’s in the old script,” she repeated, like an imbecile. “But that means—”
“That means this tunnel is eight hundred years old, not six hundred. And it was dug by King Hezekiah, just like your father copied, even though he didn’t believe it was true. Your father was wrong.”
She tried to laugh. “Not for the first time,” she said.
“I promise I won’t tell,” Elazar grinned. “I really don’t want him to kill you.”
He lowered his lamp and rested it on a tiny ledge below the carved stone, so that he and the stone both fell into shadow. In an instant the flame expired, transformed into a tiny curl of damp smoke. Then he bowed before her, breathed a smooth puff of air, and blew her lamp out.
For a moment she stood alone in a void, a sliver of girl stuck in the world’s dark throat. Cold water rushed between her feet as she groped for the damp stone walls. She opened her mouth, prepared to gulp down darkness. Instead warm lips pressed against hers, moist and sudden and alive and marvelous, her back against the cold carved stone as ropy hands slid over her wet robes and water streamed over their bare feet. She trembled as he paused, his lips still against hers, holding her steady, holding his breath. They held still, alive inside a void. Then they laughed and laughed like happy children as they fumbled down together toward the pool, released into a starlit night, each knowing as they parted in that doomed city that nothing lasts forever, and each praying that it would never, ever end.
CHAPTER
5
TO ANNUL A VOW
. . .
Some time around the ninth century, or perhaps centuries before that, someone—perhaps a poet, or a scholar, or a lawmaker, or a genius—came up with a way to absolve people of their vows to God. Not to absolve vows between people: there was no way out of those, other than the popular tactic of becoming a weasel or a worm. No, this solution was strictly for the kind of vows one made in absolute desperation, when catastrophe or stupidity or some other smallness of the imagination had made life unbearable, when one needed to break the laws of the universe and saw no other way but to sign over a first-born child or a first-true-love or one’s ability to enjoy being alive. The solution, this genius understood, was not to break the vows after they were made, for then there could be no vows at all. The solution was to break the vows before they were made: to protect people, as any good contract should, from the consequences of their own stupidity, by preventing them from making vows to God to begin with. And so the formula was enacted: “All our vows—prohibitions, oaths, consecrations, or equivalent terms that we may vow, swear, consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves—from this Day of Atonement until the next Day of Atonement (may it come upon us for good), may hereby be regarded as null and void, idle and invalid, not final and not binding. These vows are not vows, these promises are not promises.” Or in other words: Forgive us, God, for we are alive, and despite what we tell our children about how to be alive, we still have no idea what we are doing, and likely never will.
One can see the appeal. A ceremony grew around it: scrolls of the law held aloft, a convening of at least three men to represent a panel of judges, the hour appointed just on the cusp of twilight before the Eve of Atonement fell, the melody long and loud and aching and repeated, and of course, the standing presence of every person in the nation, to the extent that even today, in the most nonbelieving American suburbs where hardly a soul has ever spent a split second considering whether any of this is real, thousands upon thousands flock to otherwise empty synagogues for no reason other than to gather at that moment and recite the genius’s words. But only Rachel and Elazar understand the power of the vow.
RACHEL’S PARENTS HAD MADE VOWS, of course, before this forgotten genius lived: Please, God, give me sons, and I will bring double the number of sacrifices. Please, God, bring my daughter a worthy husband, and her firstborn son will serve a year in the holy house. Elazar’s parents made vows too, of course, especially his father: Please, God, protect your holy house, and I will pay any tax to the Romans, whether gold or blood. But Rachel made no vows as she began climbing up into the tunnel every few days at twilight. She only prayed: Please, God, let him hold me just a bit longer. Please, let no one find us. Please, let my father and mother never guess where I’ve gone. Please, let the wool and vinegar work this time. Please, let me not be pregnant. But she never offered anything to God in exchange. Instead, she lit a lamp deep within the earth, shocked each t
ime by how the world was filled beneath its surface with secret joy.
Then came her mother’s discovery, the rumor that made its way back about Rachel’s too-frequent exchanges with the young priest at the outer court—and then the beating, and the silences. Her mother wouldn’t tell her father what she had heard, out of bottomless shame, so Rachel could still sometimes run to the tunnel, evading her mother’s spies around the city. But then Zakkai arrived, and everything changed.
Zakkai came from Tekoa, a few days’ journey to the south. He was the eighth of his father’s children, and by that time the family olive groves had been so subdivided, and his oldest brother had swindled so many local merchants, that his depleted father had to send Zakkai off to Jerusalem to learn a trade. That was how he ended up living in Rachel’s father’s house, indentured as an apprentice to the master scribe.
Zakkai was young and thin, with a scraggly black beard, dark eyes, knobby wrists and a visible lump in his neck that quivered when he spoke. He was short, hairy and loud, reciting verses in a perfect chant as he copied scroll after scroll. He was supposed to simply copy, Rachel knew, an extra pair of eyes and hands to speed her father’s work. But Zakkai never just copied. Instead he asked questions, many questions.
“In this verse about the urim and tumim, the oracle in the high priest’s breastplate, the Greek translation calls them ‘light’ and ‘truth,’ ” he would say to Rachel’s father, with far more knowledge than he needed to copy the text. “But wouldn’t ‘cursed’ and ‘innocent’ make more sense, for an oracle? If you just repeat the letter reysh in urim, then it’s a curse. What do you think, master? Is it a light, or a curse?”
“Find the other places it appears and see,” her father muttered, still writing. “If it fits, change it.”
“But then you’d have to change the actual oracles in the Temple too,” Zakkai said. His voice was always too loud. “How can you be sure if—”
“Don’t change it, then,” her father would spit. Then he would hand Rachel a stack of scrolls and send her out, still trying to shut Zakkai up as Rachel made for the door.