Enchantress: A Novel of Rav Hisda's Daughter, page 10
I was jolted awake some time later by a door slamming below, followed by unsteady footsteps on the stairs and occasional thuds against the walls. A quick glance out the window showed the full moon well past its height, so I judged that only a few hours remained until dawn. I lay down and sighed with relief. Abaye and Rava were home.
The jostling noises increased as the men reached the landing and then staggered on past my room. Next door, for Abaye had shared Rava’s room since Babata died, I heard someone land heavily on the bed with a grunt. Then there was silence; that is, except for Leuton’s snoring.
I felt a chill and was debating whether to close the shutters, when I sensed a presence in the doorway. I sat up and pulled on the linens to cover my breasts. As I stared at the approaching figure, he passed in front of the open window and was illuminated by the moonlight.
“Rava, you’re in the wrong room.” I tried to speak with authority. “Go back to bed.”
His words were slurred but perfectly intelligible. “I am going to bed. And I am not in the wrong room.”
EIGHT
I watched in shock as Rava, one hand on the wall to steady himself, slowly approached. At first I was too stunned to move or speak, but then I realized that I didn’t dare let him reach me while I was in bed. Firmly repudiating the inner voice that told me to open my arms to him, I clasped the linens around my naked torso and scrambled in the opposite direction.
“You think you can entice me like that . . . wearing that perfume . . . without any consequences?” Rava might be drunk, but his words still made sense.
“What about the consequences of betrothing me this way?” My heart was pounding so hard I could scarcely speak, but I had to reason with him. “Rav Yosef will have you flogged when he hears that you betrothed me with sexual relations, and that will be after he dismisses you from his beit din. Your reputation will be ruined.” To say nothing of mine.
He had no reply to this, but at least he stopped to consider it. Emboldened, I continued: “Can’t you wait a few days to betroth me properly, with a contract and banquet, and both our fathers there to witness our marriage?”
“Marriage?” His voice was shaky. “In a few days?”
“Yes.” I didn’t need to pretend enthusiasm. “Our marriage.”
“You want to marry me?”
“I have wanted to marry you since I was a child.” Of course, it would take longer than a few days to arrange our marriage, but I was certain Rava would realize as much once he was sober. “But not like this, not in such a shameful way.” I knew how much he feared being shamed.
“You truly want to marry me? This isn’t some ruse?”
I imagined kissing him as proof, but prudence overruled passion. “Why do you think I am still unmarried after all this time? I am waiting for you.”
He closed the distance between us, and I could smell the wine on his breath. “Swear it,” he demanded.
“Gladly,” I replied. “Bring me a Torah scroll in the morning, and I will swear in front of you, Abaye, any beit din you like, that I want to marry you and agree to marry you.”
Rava looked confused and suspicious, as if there must be a flaw in my argument but he couldn’t find it. “Very well,” he said finally. “I will wait until morning.”
But he made no move to leave. I stood there for what seemed like eternity, trembling and clutching the linens to me, listening to his ragged breathing. Just as I decided I would not stop him if he reached out for me, he turned and backed away.
Even then I didn’t lie down until I heard him stumble into bed next door. And the sky was just starting to lighten when I finally became calm enough for sleep to overtake me.
• • •
When I woke, it was long past dawn. I saw only females in the traklin, so I assumed Rava and Abaye were still sleeping off the night’s revelry. Leuton nonchalantly served me a bowl of porridge. If she’d overheard anything untoward in our room, she was being as discreet as ever. I was too nervous to eat more than a few bites, and the slightest noise overhead made me glance at the stairs.
That is, until Em gazed at me shrewdly and said, “If you think you’ve misplaced anything, it might be better to check now rather than to sit here worrying.”
I shook my head and resolved to keep my eyes away from the stairway until I heard men’s voices. I ate slowly, and eventually there came the unmistakable scuffling sound of footsteps.
I half-rose from my seat to greet Rava, but he ignored my presence and beckoned to a kitchen slave. “Hurry now, ispargus for your master and me. Then leave the entire jug.”
He and Abaye made quick work of their first two cups and were pouring out more of the hangover remedy when Em asked, “Did you have a pleasant evening? I hope Rav Yosef’s students didn’t cause too much trouble.”
Abaye grimaced and held his head in his hands. “Considering my headache, I must have had an excellent evening. As for the students, I have no idea how they behaved or if I even arrived at Rav Yosef’s. The last thing I recall is dining here.”
He turned to Rava for help, but Rava shrugged. “I remember even less.” My heart plummeted when he said, “I recall nothing between reading the Megillah and waking up this morning.”
No! I wanted to scream. You came to my room last night. I told you I wanted to marry you. You can’t have forgotten.
I stumbled outside as my tears began to fall, and by the time I reached the well I was sobbing. Maybe Rava didn’t remember anything because there wasn’t anything to remember. Maybe it had been a dream.
Soon Em’s warm arm was around me. “What’s the matter, dear?”
I didn’t dare tell her about the previous night, especially if I had dreamed it. “It was this time last year that my daughter died. How I miss her.” I hadn’t lied to Em. I did miss Yehudit.
Em’s chin began to quiver. “Yes, losing a child is a terrible blow.” When she spoke again, her voice was businesslike. “Don’t you usually become dashtana when the moon begins to wane?”
I blew my nose in the dirt and nodded. “I should start bleeding any day now.”
“I thought so. Many women get melancholy then.” She gave me a hug. “That is what I told Rava when he asked about you.”
I sniffed back my tears. At least Rava had noticed my distress.
“I know I said that I didn’t want you to prepare any potions yourself for a year, but, considering the situation, I’ve changed my mind.” She held up a basket of date pits.
“What situation?” How astute of Em to use curiosity to help dispel my sadness.
“Soon the merchants will start arriving home for Pesach, and while many wives are eager to conceive another child, some are not.” Em’s tone passed no judgment on these women. “They will come to me for kos ikarin, which I supply to them.”
I had heard of kos ikarin, “cup of roots,” which was also called kos akarin, “cup of sterility.” But I didn’t know anyone who admitted to using it.
“You want me to make it?” I could feel my excitement rising. “It must be a simple recipe, then.”
“It is a difficult, and dangerous, procedure.” She dumped the date pits into a jar of water before leading me to the garden. “But it is best done in the spring, and it may be that next year you will be pregnant or trying to become so.”
“What do you mean dangerous?” Our goats ate date pits all the time, and it didn’t harm them or make them sterile.
“The client is endangered if it is not prepared correctly. Too weak and she will conceive and bear a deformed child, too strong and she herself will die.” There was warning in Em’s tone. “But preparing the potion is also dangerous, as the way to ascertain its potency is by taste.”
“By taste?” What was I getting into?
“Next week, when you’re dashtana, it will have no effect,” she reassured me. “Being long past childbearing, I am immune.”
“So kos ikarin merely prevents pregnancy temporarily?”
“If used judiciously, yes. But some women wish to become sterile permanently. It is a risk they take.”
We stopped in front of a raised bed filled with scraggly bushes. If it weren’t that they were the only plants growing there, I would have thought them weeds. I’d never seen them in my family’s herb garden.
“This is the important ingredient, not the date pits.”
I bent down and sniffed, but the leaves had no odor. “What is it?”
“It has no common name and apothecaries don’t sell it.” She looked at me sternly. “The fewer people who know of this, the better.”
• • •
Em started my instruction on the day my bleeding began. First I learned that although the plant in Em’s garden was the source of the roots in “cup of roots,” we would not unearth them yet. The roots for this potion had been dug up last year.
“The roots need to be harvested when they are at their plumpest, just before the east wind starts blowing.” She opened a small jar to expose a piece of shriveled root inside. “Then I cut them up and store them in closed containers so they dry out slowly, thus concentrating their strength.”
“But each root will be different,” I protested.
Em beamed at my comment. “Exactly. That is why we mix them all together into one uniform batch.”
She took down two mortar and pestle sets and placed one before each of us. “The process is best performed while the moon is waning, so with your being dashtana this week, the timing is excellent.”
We spent most of the day grinding the roots into a powder that, in both color and consistency, looked exactly like dirt. “Once you are more experienced, you won’t need to try so many,” she said. “But now it is important that you know what the proper potency tastes like.
She wet a finger and barely touched it to the root powder, so that what clung to her skin was only the size of a mustard seed. Then she put her finger to the tip of her tongue, but her expression gave no indication of what she’d tasted.
With some apprehension, I did the same—and nearly gagged. The powder tasted horrible.
“Now,” Em urged me. “While it’s still in your mouth, concentrate on the flavor. Then you can spit it out.”
We rinsed our mouths with water before trying the next sample. “It’s just as bitter as the first,” I complained.
“Try to ignore the bitterness and discern the flavor. Is it more or less intense than before?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, ashamed of my failure.
She tasted several others before picking one out for me. “This should make the comparison easier.”
She was right. I definitely tasted something besides the bitterness. By sunset, when we’d arranged the jars according to strength, I was feeling a small measure of confidence.
“That’s enough for today,” Em said. “Be sure to eat a good deal of bread tonight, no matter how odd it seems to taste. We’ll see how you do tomorrow.”
The next morning, it seemed as though I’d learned nothing the day before. I could distinguish between weak and strong batches, but subtle differences were impossible to detect. By afternoon I was so frustrated that everything began to taste the same.
Em didn’t give up. “I have an idea. I assume you are an expert on beer.”
“Maybe not as expert as Father and some of my brothers, but yes.” After all, Father and my oldest brothers were brewing beer from dates before I was born.
“Let’s try dissolving a little in some beer and see if that helps.”
Amazingly, it did. The sweet beer counteracted the bitterness sufficiently that I was eventually able to rate each batch to Em’s satisfaction.
“It may seem useless to taste so many different samples when we’re only going to mix them all together,” she said. “But you need to know the powder’s exact potency so you can mix it with the other ingredients properly.”
“You mean I have to do this with other ingredients too?”
She smiled and shook her head. “The others are not so critical.”
• • •
By the end of the week, we’d ground all the roots and mixed their powders together. Em had me weigh out one zuz’s weight of Alexandrian gum, plus the same weight of alum and turmeric. “It should be same weight,” she said, “not the same volume.”
“Now what?” I hoped this wasn’t going to be as complicated as some of Em’s other potions.
“Now we await the clients, who know to come as the moon wanes after Purim,” she replied. “Each potion is prepared individually, depending on the woman’s size.”
“A larger dose for a heavy woman and a smaller dose for a petite one?” I asked.
“Indeed.” She nodded with approval. “For those who merely want to delay the next child, we mix everything into a cup of beer. For those who are content with the number of children they have, or for whom more pregnancies would be dangerous, we give it in a cup of date-pit water.”
“How do they take it?”
“A mouthful before they lie with their husbands and another mouthful the next morning. Of course, I advise them to use a mokh as well, but some husbands don’t like that.”
“So they take the potion in secret?” I carefully kept any judgment out of my voice. Women were not commanded to procreate, nor did they require any man’s permission to avoid it. Still, it was shocking to imagine a wife deceiving her husband this way if he wanted more children and she didn’t.
“We are healers,” Em replied firmly. “It is not our place to decide if our patients’ motives are sufficiently worthy.”
• • •
Em had assured me that my reputation would spread as a consequence of casting Dakya and Chatoi’s love spell, but I was unprepared for how soon that happened. The day after I immersed, I was so inundated with clients that every propitious hour until Pesach was soon scheduled for inscribing amulets or installing incantation bowls. It wasn’t that I needed the money. My normal charasheta income more than paid for my room and board at Em’s, and as an apprentice I neither paid for my training nor was paid for assisting her. These fees would go to the community charity fund.
On the twenty-fifth of Adar, when the entire day was auspicious, I stayed up late and wrote amulets by lamplight. I was still working when Em interrupted me, and from her distressed expression, I could see she had bad news to impart.
“I didn’t want to disturb you, but a messenger arrived—”
I jumped up and faced her. “From Sura? Has something happened to my son, my parents?”
“Nothing has happened to your family, at least nothing I know of.” She spoke quickly, either to get the bad news over with or to prevent me from interrupting again. “The messenger was from Machoza, from Rava’s brother Seoram. Their father is very ill. Rava and Abaye left almost immediately.”
I was stunned. “Abaye went too?” was all I could say.
“He said Rava was such a great support when Babata died that he must return the service.”
• • •
On Shabbat afternoon, Homa intrigued me with an invitation to walk with her, wearing not my Shabbat finery, but an outfit I wouldn’t mind getting dirty.
“I’m going to take you somewhere in Pumbedita you’ve never been before,” she said, tantalizing me further.
We walked toward the southwest, the ramparts looming before us, until we were winding our way through a jumble of large stones and other debris from ruined fortifications. I was watching my steps so carefully that I was surprised when we abruptly reached the city wall.
Homa smiled and beckoned me forward, disappearing into a dark opening that looked like a gap in a row of cracked teeth. “Wait a little and your eyes will adjust,” she called out as I followed her inside.
Dim illumination came from a series of slits in the outer wall, likely designed for archers. I climbed up a staircase, wide enough in places for two to walk abreast and nearly blocked elsewhere, until I glimpsed a shaft of sunlight ahead. I exited onto the heights, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the brightness. Homa was standing on her toes at the wall’s edge, gazing into the distance.
I was just tall enough to see over the top. “Ha-Elohim,” I whispered in awe.
From our perch, I could see Heaven only knows how many parasangs. To the south, the Euphrates River wiggled its way through the land like a long blue snake. Off in the distance to the west, a vast desert lay beyond the cultivated fields. People and animals were barely perceptible.
“If you look carefully”—Homa pointed to the east—“you can make out the Tigris River. Look for the boats moving on it.”
“Homa, this is incredible.”
“My brothers discovered it after an earthquake. It took us over a year to clear our way up the stairs. You can’t even tell there’s an opening unless you look carefully—stop!” she commanded as I moved to get a better view. “Stay on this side of the tower, where the guards can’t see us.”
Heart pounding, I raced back to the stairway. “What if they come this way?”
“They almost never do. Threats come from the north or west, so they spend their time on those ramparts,” she explained.
Careful to stay out of sight, I made my way back to the edge.
“Hisdadukh.” Her voice was serious. “I brought you up here because I wanted to talk to you in private and get your advice.”
“What about?” This place was certainly private.
“Abaye has asked to marry me. After three festivals have passed since Babata’s death, of course.” She turned away from the view to face me, and I saw fear in her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You should marry him. Abaye is not only a great scholar but a kind and humble man.”
“I know he is, and how pleasant it would be to marry him, but Abaye carries Eli’s curse.” Her expression was anguished. “I do not want to be widowed again.”
“I understand your apprehension, but who knows how long any of us will live?”
“That is true,” she said slowly.
“Abaye’s uncle delayed the curse’s effect with Torah study, so Abaye could do the same. If not, at least you will share some happy years with him and may be blessed with more children.”
