City of Sorcerers by David Hambling

Author:David Hambling [Hambling, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-22T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 39: Rachel

Her name was not Rachel. Giving one’s name to a stranger was dangerous, and she knew to protect herself. So Rachel was just a convenient cover.

The Maker had allowed Adam to name all the animals. That gave him power over them, the first lesson of naming. She had given an alias after the nomads had rescued her from the Unclean, along with the others who became handmaidens. It felt right to have a new name in this new place. Rachel had been an aunt’s name, and she had always liked it. It meant “ewe,” as in a sacrificial victim.

Rachel had lost the right to her original name. As she had lost everything else in the living world.

Rachel had always been a clever girl. Everyone knew it, including Rachel herself. Sometimes they called her “clever girl.” Sometimes it was praise, and sometimes it was a taunt.

“You should not be cleverer than the boys at school,” her mother warned her. “You should be quiet sometimes.”

“But I am cleverer than them,” said Rachel with a seven-year-old’s confidence.

“But you mustn’t let them know that,” said her mother.

“Why not?”

“Don’t question me! You’ll understand when you’re older,” said her mother. “Now stop talking and wash the vegetables – properly this time. Surely you’re clever enough to do that.”

Rachel did not get on well with her mother. Her father was more tolerant but looked at her with slight puzzlement, as though not quite believing how he could have such a girl as a daughter. As she grew older, he was able to answer fewer and fewer of her questions.

“You are very studious, girl,” said her teacher.

“Yes,” said Rachel, looking up from the scroll which, under close supervision, she was perusing.

“You help your mother, you work in the fields, you pray, and you never miss school,” said the teacher, mumbling into his beard. “But you should not forget to play a little also. There is a season for everything, you know, as the prophet tells us.”

“Koholet, Ecclesiastes, third chapter,” said Rachel. “But I don’t want to play. It’s stupid.”

“Ah, you may think that now, but there will be no time for playing later on,” he said kindly. “You can play now – ‘childhood is a garden of roses,’ after all – later, there will be no roses, but you can always study, even when you are as old as me.”

Reluctantly, Rachel allowed herself to be shooed out. But instead of playing with the other children, she scratched letters and symbols in the dust.

Rachel was a village prodigy, but it was a bad place to be a precocious child. She did not learn to hide her intellect, exactly, but she began to appreciate how little it meant to anyone else.

When Rachel became a woman at the age of twelve, she celebrated as everyone else did. Nothing was said, but that night, she was woken by two robed strangers, a man and a woman. They radiated solemn tranquillity, and she was not scared.

“Come with us,” said the woman and spoke Rachel’s name.

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