Musa looked into the tent. No unexpected shadows there. He searched for someone moving in the scrub. He hoped and feared to see the man again. He’d settle any debts. He’d pay the reckoning, if it was reasonable. Together they had travelled to the long black ridge and looked beyond into the ochre plains of death. Be well again. Be well.

So that’s how Miri found him when she came. She had to stumble in the darkness for a lamp to see exactly what misfortunes had occurred. There was no body in the tent, and that was frightening. It didn’t take her long to find the donkey and her husband. The corpse’s smell was bad, and there were scrub dogs already gathered near the tent, hungry for the meat. Her husband’s head was resting on the donkey’s leg, and they were black with drying blood. At first she thought they both were dead. But no such luck. His chest was rising. He snored. His tongue was pink and healthy on his lips, not black from fever any more. It was a curse; it was a miracle. So much for death’s discrimination. It had claimed the donkey, not the man.

Musa was woken by the lamplight. He wasn’t feverish. He looked at Miri, her dirty hands, her bloody knees, her tearful eyes. ‘Hah, so you returned,’ he said. Andjust as well. He pointed at his bloody handiwork. But Musa’s anger had been squandered on the donkey. He was relieved to see his wife. It showed. How could he manage on his own? It had been the oddest day, and he was tired. He did not know if he should celebrate or grieve. He pulled her fiercely by her arms, a tender, punishing embrace, and made her tell him everything that had happened, what his uncles had prescribed, what their plans for him had been. ‘Where were you, then?’ he asked finally. ‘Look at your hair.’ What could she say? That she had run away from him? That she had dug his grave, and passed the afternoon quite comfortably inside? She couldn’t speak. She was in shock, and trembling. Her liberation had been too short. At last she said, with what he might have taken to be tears of worry and concern, that she had thought that he was going to die.

‘Well, you were wrong. A spirit came and brought me back. But not with any help from you,’ he said accusingly, though he released the hard grip on her arm and dropped his hand into her lap. ‘I saw his face.’

‘What face?’

‘Somebody’s face. The fever’s face? I don’t remember seeing yours.’

‘I couldn’t lure the fever out,’ she said. ‘I sang for you. Al night. It’s true. I did. .’ Musa tilted his heavy chin at her, to let her know he hadn’t heard her sing. ‘. . I climbed the scarp to look for roots. To make a poultice. But. .’ (she opened up her hands to show her broken nails) ‘. . I dug for nothing. The earth was hard. It’s stones. .’

She gabbled on, but did not listen to herself. God damn the spirit that has brought you back, she thought. Her wrist was still smarting from the fierceness of his grip. His hand was pressing into her and she was shrinking and retreating from his fingers. He was unsteady still. And ungainly as ever. He could not quite succeed — not yet, at least — in turning Miri on her back. But he was lucky with his lips, no longer dry and caustic. He pressed his kisses on her face. That was the trading profit of her day.

It had been an afternoon of hope, at least. She’d raised her hands into the unresisting air. The sky was soft for her. But now the sky became a hard and bruising dish again. Miri was reduced to one of scrubland’s night-time residents, its seven people and its goats, its caves, its tent, its partial hospitality beneath the thinnest moon of spring. She was unwidowed and unfreed, the mistress of unwelcome lips, the keeper of a wasted grave.

8

The four newcomers to the valley caves did not sleep weH. They were bruised and battered. Their feet were sore. Their legs were stiff. They had been punished by the journey and should have dropped to sleep as readily as dogs. But the lodgings were too cold for sleep. Their scrubland host had celebrated the new moon and the onset of spring by calling up for them a wind which was old and wintry and mean. At first it was too quick and muscular to idle in the contours of the scarp or nose into the creases and the dens. It hurried past. But later in the night — just when they thought that they might sleep — the wind became invasive. A watery haze, distilled from the daytime’s rising valley heat and turned gelid in the dark, had made the wind heavier and more sinuous. It came into the caves, shouldered out the skulking pockets of warm air, and put an end to everybody’s sleep.

So there was at least a unity of damp and sleeplessness inside the caves, for these four travellers. What could they do, except slap out the cold? Or hug their knees? Or stamp their feet? Or blow into their hands, and wonder if they had the fortitude — or foolishness — to last for thirty-nine more nights like this? A fire would help, of course. But the old man’s roots and branches had not caught alight. He’d evidently lost his adolescent luck with flint and kindling. His luck was creaky like his bones. So he and his unseen companions had to spend the night as cold and stiff and unignited as the fire.

They al knew darkness weli enough. Who hasn’t lain awake at night with nothing brighter than a cloud-hung star to add its feeble touch of light to looming shapes inside the room? Who hasn’t cried out for a lamp? But this was darkness unrelieved — for starlight, no matter ifit’s moistened by the air, is never sinuous, unlike the wind. It will not curve and bend its way in to a cave. There was a blinding lack oflight inside. They could not even see a hand held up before their faces. They could not see the demons and the serpents and the dancing bones. But they could hear them al too well. What better way to pass the time, and put the worry of the cold to one side, than by contemplating something worse than cold: sounds without shapes?

If someone coughed in their damp comer, then for the other three that was the certain presence ofhyenas. If another — fearful of hyenas — whispered to himself for comfort, then his voice for al the rest became the soft conspiracy of thieves. A yawn became a stifled cry for help. A sneeze, the whooping of a ghost. The wind set bushes rattling: an owl browsed in the scrub: cave beetles, amplified by their raised wings, rehearsed their murders and their rapes.

The woman was not as sleepless as the other three, perhaps because she was protected from the wind by the few bushes outside the cave. Her name was Marta. She’d been married for nine years to Thaniel, the landowner of Sawiya by Jerusalem. His second wife. She was — a phrase she’d heard too often in the song -

The Mother of a threadbare womb,

Her warp hung weftless on the loom.

Though she was over thirty years of age, she had no children yet, despite her husband’s nightly efforts, and her experiments with all the recommended charms and herbs to aid fertility. She’d sacrificed a dozen pigeons with the local priest. She’d rubbed honey on a marrow, sent money to Jerusalem, worn copper body charms, endured — she could not see how this would help

— her husband’s semen in her mouth. She’d worn balsam leaves underneath her clothes for weeks on end until she rustled like parchment. She’d eaten only green fruit (and paid the price). She’d starved herself. She’d gorged. Now she was plump and getting plumper, not to satisfy her husband, but because a flat stomach was intolerable. A larger one and bigger breasts might bring good luck, she thought. Provide the dovecote, and the doves wil come.

None ofithad worked, ofcourse. Her warp remained without its weft. A hundred times and more, she’d done her best to fend off with prayers and lies the monthly rebuff of her periods. Now she only had till harvest to conceive. Then, her husband said, he would divorce her. The law aUowed him to. The law demanded that he should, in fact. After ten years of barrenness a man could take another wife. ‘You don’t cast seed on sour land, ’ he said. He had a right to heirs. It was a woman’s religious duty to provide and bring up children. He’d had to divorce his first wife, because she’d failed to conceive. Marta had failed as well. So Thaniel would have to turn her out and look elsewhere. Of course it was regrettable and harsh, he said, but he could hardly blame himself. Not twice. He’d marry ’Lisha’s daughter. She was young. Her father owned some land adjacent to his own. The prospect was a cheerful one. And sensible.