by Tracy Groot
“Fair enough. One thing at a time.” Whatever she meant by it, Annika left it. “How long will you stay in Caesarea?”
“As long as it takes me to find her.”
“You are sure your father’s cousin still lives there?”
“Yes. Simon and Joses visited Thomas on the trip to sell the benches. He lives across the commonyard from a famous mosaicist. I should like to visit his workroom. I have a talent for mosaics, you know.” She brushed the crumbs from her palm to her plate.
“Child?”
Jorah looked up.
Annika looked at her long. “You do a good thing. A hard thing. To tell a mother her son is dead . . . I am proud of you, Jorah ben Joseph.”
Jorah hoped her smile did not look fake. Annika would not be proud if she knew the real reason she was going to see the woman.
“Oh. I nearly forgot.” Annika got up and went to her bedroom in the back of the house. When she returned she was folding a long cloth, a narrow linen tablecloth. “I made this for Rivkah. Please take it to her for me.”
Rivkah? But of course. Nathanael’s mother. It was hard to think of her with a name. She who gave him birth . . . she who gave him scars.
“Annika.” Jorah hesitated. “Did you know of Nathanael’s scars?”
Surprise, then wariness came into Annika’s face. “What scars?” she said sharply.
“When Abi and I wrapped Nathanael’s body for burial, we found—” She squeezed her eyes shut. Orange peel fragrance. Flower petals. “There were—scars on his thigh. Old ones. From childhood.” She clenched her teeth. Grains of sand. A mosaic. “Nathanael told James his mother did it. To let the evil out.”
When Jorah looked at Annika, she found she had aged again. She was looking out the window, chin in her hand, tears brimming. “Six different shades of ugly, all of us,” she murmured, and a tear dropped away. “He wanted to tell me. He tried to tell me, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would have shamed her more than him.” She sniffed. “Poor thing.”
Through her own tears, Jorah suddenly smiled. “He would have never let anyone call him a poor thing.”
“I wasn’t talking about Nathanael.” Annika wearily pressed her fingers against her eyes.
The smile dropped. “Why is she a poor thing?”
“She hated herself, not Nathanael.” Annika wiped her nose with a fold of her tunic. “Oh, Jorah, what we are capable of. God have mercy on us.”
Jorah could only stare, then look away. Annika could say what she wanted, but she had seen the scars with her own eyes. God would not have mercy on that. Never that.
He’s dead now, Jorah would tell Nathanael’s mother. She knew exactly what tone she would use. She had rehearsed it several times, whispering to a fingerprint of sand. I know what you did. I’ve seen the scars. And now your son is dead. You never deserved him, and now he’s dead.
It was the only thing to give true comfort. The only thing to help her breathe. At the times when the grief would consume her, when she would suffocate and go mad, she would think on these words and allow them to calm her.
She owed it to Nathanael if only to raise a voice against an old, horrific deed. If only to not allow it to go unnoticed. It was God’s justice, after all. God knew what Rivkah had done, and he would expose it through Jorah. It was Jorah’s mitzvah, her responsibility to Nathanael’s memory.
Calmness came, like wine warming her blood, and she actually smiled at Annika.
Annika smiled back, if uncertainly.
Yes, Jorah would go and tell a woman that her son was dead. Let those words score that heart as she had scored Nathanael’s leg. Let her take those words to her grave, as Nathanael took the scars to his.
Experience history like never before with more great fiction from
Tracy Groot
“We are rebels, are we not? Then let us rebel against what is not us.”
Their dangerous plan could change the tides of war.
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