Adara by Beatrice Gormley

Author:Beatrice Gormley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2002-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Adara, the Slave

I am a slave. I am a slave. During the next few weeks, these words seemed to beat in my head all the time, as loud as the song of General Naaman’s victory procession. I did not try to speak to Lady Doronit again, and she seemed to have forgotten about me. She was very busy these days, overseeing the arrangement of the braziers and other new furnishings and instructing the woodworkers who came to build the ivory-inlaid bed.

General Naaman’s household did not need another slave girl, as her ladyship had said, but that did not mean I would not work. It meant that the other slaves gave me their dullest, most unpleasant chores. As I emptied slop jars into the gutter outside the gate or scrubbed Raiza’s washing, I thought over what must have happened in the days after the battle. Yanir had told my family of my boast, and they had searched the hidden passageway to the well.

I imagined Dov lifting his torch above the steps leading down the side of the well. He would have found shards of the pottery dish, perhaps the dead coal. B’rinna would remember that it was the same dish I had taken. Father and the rest would think they knew what had happened to me — I had come upon the well suddenly and stumbled in. As indeed I almost had.

So I did not exist, in anyone’s mind, except in Damascus — and here I was nothing but a slave. I must be very careful what I said and did. I must not displease Aharon or Raiza or even Sima, let alone Lady Doronit. As Sima had warned me, I could be sold into a far worse setting.

Still, I did not entirely give up hope. For now my family thought I was dead in Ramoth-Gilead instead of alive in Damascus, but that could change. Sooner or later, I told myself, the camel-driver who had brought my father’s tribute would return to Ramoth-Gilead. Since everyone in the town gossiped about everything, especially anything remarkable that a stranger might say, my father would hear of the slave girl in Damascus who claimed to be the daughter of Calev ben Oved. Then he might guess what had actually become of me.

Washing dirty tunics in the courtyard stream, I imagined how it would be when Father appeared to ransom me. It could happen at any moment, even now while I was scrubbing someone’s undergarment. My father would enter the courtyard and say, “Adara, my beloved daughter! They have made you do the laundry? Oh, my little dove!”

Tenderly Father would wrap me in a rich robe. He would fling a bag of silver at the steward as he led me off. And we would journey back down the King’s Way, only this time I would ride on a donkey.

I told myself this story over and over. Each time, I had an instant of joy in which I was again Adara, daughter of landowner Calev ben Oved.

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