Presently he tested the meat with the knife; the point ran in easily, even in the thickest part of the leg. He threw earth on the fire to deaden the heat and then carefully lifted the forked sticks and planted them again a little way away.
“The meat is ready for eating, sirs,” he said, and walked a little distance away.
“I want my knife,” said the soldier who had lent it.
Balthazar, apologising, brought it back; by this time the others had fallen upon the meat as though they were starving, and Balthazar licked his lips.
“You hungry too?* asked the knife-lender in an offhand, but good-humoured way.
“Move over, Varro. There you are.” He turned back to Balthazar and
offered him a chunk of meat from the point of the knife. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
He slept that night under the myrtle trees, and was wakened by the clatter the soldiers made as they moved off. He ran to the place where the pig had been hacked to pieces and breakfasted on the scraps of meat which still adhered to the scattered bones. The meal and a night’s rest had restored his spirits and his hope of meeting the two men was lively again. He resumed his walk, studying carefully anyone who rode a camel.
On that day he made less progress for the blisters on his feet had begun to fester. By midday the dog-bite on his wrist was troubling him, too; when he let his arm hang it throbbed like the worst kind of toothache. But he refused to be discouraged by his sores, or by his marked ill-luck in begging. He was now on one of the great highways of the world and anyone who lived beside it and had a charitable heart could have stood and given away all that he possessed in forty-eight hours; and those who carried their food with them were concerned lest their supplies should not last to the end of their journey. In three days after leaving the soldiers he ate twice, once on a half-rotten apple which a fruit-seller threw out because it might contaminate the sound ones, once on a piece of barley bread given to him by an old woman who was eating as she trudged along with a bundle of laundry on her head.
He arrived at the caravanserai at the crossroads in the dead hour of the afternoon on the seventh day. It was an imposing place, occupying the whole corner between two of the four roads that met. Just inside the yard which gave upon the wide open space where animals were stabled was a stone drinking trough, and a little girl, with one shoulder higher than the other and, he presently saw, one leg shorter than the other, was emptying a wooden bucket of water into it.
He said, “May I drink?” Finding anything to drink had also been something of a problem on the highway; people were actually selling water!
“It’s for beasts, really,” the girl said.
“I’m just going to draw another bucketful. I’ll bring you a cup, if you like.”
“This will do,” Balthazar said, cupping his hands and drinking eagerly. She limped away. He splashed the lovely, the beautiful, the free, cleansing water over his face and head. He ripped off his makeshift bandage and plunged his wrist, with its aching, festering wound, deep down into the trough. He was about to kick off his shoes, climb to the edge of the trough and ease the sores on his feet in the same way, when the girl came limping back. His thirst slaked, he looked at her more closely; she wasn’t dressed like a slave.
“Are you,” he asked, ‘the daughter of the house?” Her thin little fingers touched first the folds of her dress, worn and dirty, but in its day a dress of quality, and then the silver ornaments in her ears.
“These are for show,” she said.
“I am a slave.”
“Oh,” he said; and he was a little disappointed. She was kind, she’d offered to fetch him a cup, and a child learned its attitude from its parents, he had hoped that the father might be kindly too, and let him do a job and give him a meal.
“Could I speak to your master?”
“Not now. Not for an hour. He is asleep; or in bed with her.”
“I wanted to ask is there any job I could do to earn myself a meal.”
“A lot of people ask that. He always says “No”—except to fortunetellers. After they’ve eaten, most people like to have their fortunes told. If you can tell them,” she looked at him dubiously, ‘you would be welcome; but not otherwise.”
“I’m so hungry,” Balthazar said, ‘that to get a meal I’d become a fortuneteller.”
“I can give you something to eat. Every day we cook more than enough.”
She spoke eagerly.
“Wait there,” she said and pointed to a nook made by the house wall not running quite in line with the lower wall that enclosed the’ place where travellers’ beasts were herded.
“That,” she said, ‘is a good place. I go there when I cry.”
He went and sat down, eased off his shoes, unwound the dripping wet bandage and looked at his wound. It was worse; that dog must have had poison in his teeth! His whole wrist was puffy and hot and from the two punctured holes yellow pus was oozing, giving off an offensive
smell.The girl, and although she limped, she moved quickly, came and presented him with a wooden platter, heaped, piled with what was plainly the remainder of several main dishes.
“It doesn’t look very appetising, but it is all good,” she assured him.
“I’ve lived on it for three years.”
“It looks good to me,” Balthazar said, digging his fingers into the rice, the bits of gooseflesh and mutton, the leaves of artichokes, the cabbage. Looking at the girl he judged her to be about thirteen, so she had been here, living on left-overs for three years, she must have fallen into slavery at an earlier age than he had … or perhaps she had been born one…. “Three years,” he said, ‘you have lived here for three years?”
“Three, thirty, three hundred. I lose count of time. She’—she raised her eyes to the blank, recently whitewashed wall that jutted out above this secluded little corner—‘she marks every hour and one new wrinkle under her eye rocks the house, I,” she said, tapping her flat little chest, ‘am a slave, but sometimes I think less a slave than my master. She is very pretty and has a heart of stone.”
“Is it because of her that you come here to cry?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it is for my family in Antioch. Sometimes,” she looked away from him, ‘it is because of the things I have to do. I have to … sleep with men,” she said.
Balthazar, chewing on a gristly bit of mutton, looked at her and wondered what sort of man it could be who would wish to go to bed with her, so immature, so crooked? She sensed, and indirectly answered his question.
“In the dark,” she said, ‘when they are eager and inflamed by his promises, they use me. Afterwards they are … ashamed, and angry with themselves, and with me. Afterwards, when a pretty girl would get smiles and presents, I get curses, and blows. You see,” she said, simply, ‘she won’t have a pretty girl in the house. She uses her bed as a stick to hold over my master; it would never do for him to have another bed to go to.” She looked at him, saw comprehension and sympathy in his eyes, and went on: “She wouldn’t have another woman of any kind in the house except that she, the wife of an innkeeper, the daughter of a pig-butcher, thinks herself a lady and must be attended in her bedchamber. And it is impossible,” she said, ‘quite impossible, for anyone to work as I do, in the yard and the kitchen, and still have hands smooth enough to handle hair as it should be handled.”
Something in the way in which she had said ‘pig-butcher’ prodded Balthazar’s memory.
“You are a Jew?” he asked.
“Yes. My father is a shoemaker in Antioch; three years ago he fell ill; more than three years ago, I have been here for three years. Jews are well liked if they are thriving; when they fail to thrive they have no friends except other Jews, as poor as themselves. He owed money, not much, but some, for leather, for thread and wax, also rent for the house, and those to whom he owed came in a body and said he must sell something and pay his debt. He offered to sell his tools but they were worth little. My brother was four years old, my sister still at the breast. If my father had sold himself they would starve. So, weeping, and in great sorrow, he sold me.” She raised her chin a little.