Just a Girl by Jackie French

Author:Jackie French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The first autumn rain came that night, soft as baby hair. The air was still fuzzy with drizzle the next morning, and Caius’s tunic was wet when he hobbled in from his new sleeping cave to join us for breakfast.

We should plough the barley field now the ground has softened, I thought automatically. If we wait too long before sowing and ploughing, the heavy rain would wash the soil away unless it was covered in new barley shoots. But we had no ox, and the Romans had taken our donkeys and the plough. A girl, a child, an old woman and a young man with a bad leg couldn’t plough a field. The land must lie fallow. Maybe some of the fallen grain would grow.

‘We need to gather more wood,’ I said to Rabba, ‘before the winter rain sets in. We’ll need a good fire all day and night soon.’

Or Sawtha Rabba will, I thought. The damp of the cave had already given her a cough. Damp wood would make a smoky fire that would make her cough worse.

We ate parched barley mixed with chopped almonds, dates, raisins and fresh goat’s cheese with herbs for our breakfast, then I went outside and hung the rest of last night’s goat’s-milk curds in a clean cloth on a branch under an overhang to set into more cheese.

It was as if I had stepped from one life into another, each with its own routines.

Every day I tethered the goat somewhere new, usually near an overhang where she could shelter when it rained. They were only showers still, not the heavy rains of midwinter. Whenever there was a sunny day, we picked grass to dry for hay and stored it in an overhang well out of flood reach. We stored firewood there too.

Caius helped as much as he was able. His knee healed, but he still needed his stick. I thought it still pained him too. He did most of the jobs about the cave now — the women’s jobs, like grinding and baking, storing the cheeses in oil, even washing the cheesecloths and sheepskins in a mix of wood-ash lye. He didn’t seem to mind.

Sometimes I thought he accepted the jobs so he could spend more time with Rabba, in case she spoke about the Christians in Jerusalem or his messiah’s mother. But Rabba wouldn’t speak of Jerusalem again. If the loss of Jerusalem hurt me, who had only heard of it in stories, what must it be like for Rabba, when the heart of her life had been spent there?

At first I picked olives to preserve in wood-ash water, but after a few weeks, I left them for the birds. We had amphorae full of olives, enough for years. A few melons grew, not ripe nor very sweet, but still good. A cucumber ripened enough for me to scrape out the seeds to dry and plant next summer. I managed to pick a few pomegranates too, for they don’t ripen all

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