A Bed of Spices (30 page)

There in the mean little hut in a village deserted but for himself and the young girl, he stayed for two months to regain his strength. When he left, he took her with him and settled her with a widow he had met in another village.

Now, as he rode up to his father’s house, he stared at it with new eyes. A lifetime had he lived these past months. The youth who had been beaten for his passion was dead. A man, weary and thin, rode home in his place.

It was nearly time for the evening meal, and through the glittering swirl of snow, Solomon looked to the upper windows. A smell of chicken and garlic reached him. He dismounted and rounded the house to the back entrance of the courtyard.

He surprised Raizel and Hershel stealing kisses in the soft twilight. It brought a smile to his lips. “Hershel,” he said, “has she not learned to nag you yet?”

They turned in shock. “Solomon!”

Hershel reached him first and hugged him with burly arms, then held him back to examine his face. “You have been ill.”

Solomon shrugged.

Raizel ran for the others, calling out the news of his return. His mother and brothers crowded down, hugging him, kissing his cheeks. In their eyes, he saw that he still did not look himself.

Then there was Jacob, standing in the doorway, his lips pressed together in some powerful emotion. Solomon stepped away from his mother.

“Papa,” he said—and stood there, overcome. Only his father knew the truth of the many sorrows of Solomon’s life these past months. Only Jacob knew.

Solomon was at once unutterably exhausted. He swayed, feeling the old sick hollowness flood through him.

His father took his arm firmly and waved the others away. “Leave him. He is weary from his journey. Let’s all go in, eat, and let him rest. Tomorrow you may ask your questions.”

For several days, Solomon gave himself up to luxury. Asher moved to another room, and Solomon slept alone and uncrowded in his chamber, on a bed covered with clean linen and scented with herbs. He slept there deep and long, and rose each morning a little stronger. He ate of good, wholesome food prepared under his mother’s precise direction, and drank good Rhenish wine.

It was only after his physical needs had been attended that he began to notice the pall over his father’s house. In the evenings, there was a low buzz of muttered conversation, and visitors in and out. The women stayed clear of the men but exchanged worried glances with one another.

At first, Solomon ignored it, but as he regained his strength, he began to understand the fear stalking the lews. They feared for their lives.

And yet, it was still several days before he roused himself enough to care.

One afternoon he sat in the solar, warming his feet by the fire, a robe draped around his shoulders to stave off the chill of winter howling beyond the window. He ate an apple from the summer stores. It was mealy but still sweet and he looked at it as he chewed, amazed at the beauty of the brownish-red skin, dotted with dark spots, in contrast to the pale meat. He bit again and looked again. So small a thing, an apple—and yet so large. He closed his eyes and ate it slowly.

His father came in and dropped into his massive chair, piled with soft embroidered cushions. Solomon smiled. “You still make me think of a king, Papa.”

Jacob chuckled. “You said that when you were a little boy.”

“I remember.”

Settling himself more comfortably, Jacob tugged off his shoes and stretched his toes toward the orange fire. “You did not have much to eat out there,” he said, eyeing the core of the apple at which Solomon still sucked. “There are more apples. Let me call a servant for another.”

Lazily, Solomon tossed the core toward the hearth and watched as it hissed in the flames. He shook his head. “No, Papa. ‘Tis only greed now.”

“You are feeling better?”

Solomon nodded.

“Good.”

They sat for a while in silence.

Jacob made a noise in his throat after a time. “I would hear of your journey, if you would tell it.”

Slowly, Solomon gathered his thoughts. He had known this moment would come. “When I rode through the gates here,” he said to begin, “I could not believe how unchanged it was. It is not that way in other places.”

“So we have heard.”

“There is no tale as grim as the truth.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I thought I had seen the worst at Montpellier—there were none left there. It was terrible. And it seemed, once the stories of the burnings of the Jews began to come, not a safe place to be. So I left there.”

And so he told his tale of wandering, told of the violence and stench and madness that seemed to follow the plague like a demon sibling.

Pacing, he shook his head. “God’s world has order, does it not? What I saw was chaos—and no sense to who would live or die. A whole village dead with only the town drunk still alive?” He spread his hands. “Why?”

“It is the will of our Maker,” Jacob said, ever steadfast in his faith.

Solomon pursed his lips. This he had heard, over and over, but he would not offend his father. “Per haps,” he said wearily. “Is it then God’s will that so many die?”

Jacob lifted his brows.

“Papa, I had this plague. The boils and fever and—” He laced his fingers together. “It is a great puzzle why I am now alive. As a student of medicine, I long to know what secret is locked in this body to make it so.”

“Hmmm.” it was the only answer Jacob made when Solomon spoke of medicine. It indicated interest and ignorance at once.

Solomon sighed. “This has been puzzling me since before I came back in the summer. Why do some fall ill while others do not?” He paced toward the door, then back, thinking. “In the village where I did finally fall prey to the pestilence, there were none alive but the girl who nursed me. One cat wandered through. That was all. The bodies were piled in the square, waiting for someone to bury them.”

Jacob muttered something under his breath.

Solomon touched his chin, caught once more in the puzzle. “Then I, too, fell ill after so long when I was well. Why did I get sick then? Was it breathing the air in that foul place? And if that is so, why did this girl not die, too?”

“This girl… she tended you?”

Solomon nodded. “Yes, and well. I could not travel for two months—I was too weak. She found us food and water and kept us both alive.”

“May God’s blessing always be upon her,” Jacob said in a rough voice.

In surprise, Solomon looked up to see how white his father’s face had gone. “Ah, Papa, I am sorry. I do not mean to trouble you. I am only puzzled over these things. I wish to know the answer, so perhaps there can be some order in the chaos—perhaps there is some answer to this plague, and if I am alert, I can see what to do.”

Jacob lowered his eyes. He said nothing for long moments. Then he lifted his head. “When your letter came, telling us how Montpellier looked, I was afraid for you. When we did not hear for so long, I feared you were dead. I should not have sent you back there.”

Solomon had gained some knowledge of guilt and regret these past months. He touched his father’s shoulder. “It was God’s will,” he said. “And here I am, home again, and growing stronger.”

Gently, Jacob covered Solomon’s hand with his own. “I am sorry for your troubles,
beneleh
.”

As if the words made her flesh, Solomon felt Rica all around him, smelling of lavender, her golden hair trailing over his arms, soft as silk. It was not a vision or a dream—he felt her. And with the vision came familiar grief and guilt, commingled until he was nearly as mad with it as he had been with passion.

He swallowed hard and turned away to hide his eyes. In a moment, the feeling faded to coals once more. “I led us from what you wished to say, Papa.”

Jacob drew a long breath. “Ten days ago, the good citizens of Basle took the Jews from their homes and burned them in a wooden house on an island in the Rhine.”

Solomon closed his eyes. So it was in Carcassonne and Narbonne, and in fear-mad villages and towns throughout the Continent. But Basle was close by, less than two days’ journey by horse. “Has there been trouble here?”

“Not so much. But there are things.” Jacob shook his head. “I cannot name them exactly.”

“We should go, Papa. Leave now before there is more terror.”

“I have spent my life building a legacy for my sons,” he said stubbornly. “Do you think I will abandon all?”

“Papa, think!” Solomon said.

A voice from the doorway broke into the conversation. “You see? Even your precious Solomon agrees, Papa,” Asher said. “It will not matter if we are all dragged from our homes who gets what you built.”

Jacob looked from one to the other, his chin jutting out like a shell of granite. “I will think on it,” he said, then shifted forward, grabbing the table with its chess pieces arranged on it. “Who will play?”

Asher shook his head, his mouth pinched tight. “You can’t make it go away if you don’t look, Papa,” he said, and flung up his hands. “You try, Solomon. None of the rest of us can get through to him!”

With a chuckle he could not suppress, Solomon turned back to his father. “So, King Jacob has spoken, eh?”

For a moment, Jacob struggled with a scowl. He gave up and gave his son a reluctant grin. “I will think on it. Now, come. Play.”

They arranged the pieces, whose long shadows were cast on the ceiling by the warming fire. From the kitchen came the sounds of women chattering together as they cooked, and one of them began to sing in a sweet high voice. A healing sound.

“There is a girl I want you to meet, Solomon,” he said, moving a pawn. “She is the daughter of a merchant in Mainz… I would much like the alliance.”

Solomon grinned. “Papa, I have been home only a few days and already you will marry me off?”

“Just see her for me, eh?”

It was little enough to ask. And in truth, Solomon had formed no plan for his future. Perhaps a wife, at last, was what he needed. Children, a home. Peace.

There were worse things.

He inclined his head. “All right. I will see her.”

Her name was Hilde. She stood in the courtyard of the temple, and Solomon knew at once why his father wished him to see her. Just see her. She was beautiful, even more than Asher’s wife, Raizel, with eyes rich as an evening sky. On her mouth was a trembling, unawakened passion. She moved her body with grace; a body, he noted with a wry twist of his lips, that any man would be pleased to claim.

He glanced at Jacob, who chuckled. Solomon raised an eyebrow in capitulation. She was worth seeing.

But when they later spoke in his father’s house, Solomon found nothing in him stirring. Not even a mild twinge of passion. He found her simple conversation boring, her gentle voice annoying. The longer they spoke, the less he liked her and the reaction set up a strange disquiet within him. As politely as he was able, he excused himself from the gathering and, taking his cloak from the hook, went out to walk.

It was snowing again, but it wasn’t cold. No wind blew, and the thick, fat flakes drifted down to cover imperfections with a gentle white hand. He made his way through the twisting streets toward the west gate of the city and walked along the river.

This was the first time he had left the city since his return. It was oddly freeing to be out and feel the crisp air in his lungs. The cold eased the constricting bands he felt strangling him as he spoke to the pretty young girl his father wished him to marry.

Bitterly, he kicked at a stone in his path. He still could not look at a woman—any woman—without thinking first of Rica. He knew he could not be with another, not yet.

The all-too-familiar bleakness descended over him, that cloying hopelessness and guilt that had so dogged him these past months. How long until he recovered? And was it only the woman he missed, or had the heady, dangerous time ruined him? Would he end up a sick old lecher, seeking out dangerous affairs for their thrill? The idea repulsed him.

Balefully he stared at the castle on the hill. As if to underscore his mood, the monks sang out their afternoon prayers, the lilting and solemn sound Rica had so loved. How often she had clutched his hand over it, her eyes lifting toward something unseen. “Listen!”

Sharp grief ripped through him. He wanted to cover his ears to shut out the sound. He began to run. His strength was still small, and he was forced to stop after only a little way, but it was far enough that he outpaced the prayers.

He paused against a tree to rest. His breath came from his mouth in clouds on the frosty air, and snowflakes cooled his heated cheeks. In a minute, he was better and straightened.

Out of the snow came a girl with a dog. His heart jolted painfully, and he stared, transfixed as she moved closer, unaware of him. His limbs trembled so violently he reached for a crotch of the tree to brace himself.

Rica.

He would know the straight, swaying gait in a crowd of thousands, a crisp yet sensual walk, like the woman herself. From below her hood fell a streamer of blond hair.

He could not move, nor breathe. The dog barked sharply. Solomon still stared. The girl lifted her head, looking around in fear.

From the shelter of the tree, he stepped forward. “Rica,” he said, and his voice was as ragged as the coat of a beggar.

She clutched her chest and stared across the distance that separated them. For a brief, fleeting second, Solomon glimpsed a ripple of bright emotion in the beautiful face.

Then it was gone. With a vacuous smile, the girl said in a light voice, “Are you not Helga’s student?” Without waiting for an answer, she moved her head slowly side to side. “You must have been away. My sister was killed by thieves these many months past.”

Fresh horror washed through him, and with a plummeting despair, Solomon saw it was not Rica at all.

Rica was dead. Gone from him forever. Feeling hollow, he turned away. He would marry this girl his father wished for him, and go away to Mainz.

At least there, he might find peace again. If he did not find some soon, he would go mad.

Rica watched the
figure retreat, seeing the despair and sorrow in his shoulders, in his defeated walk. She wanted to cry out in love and forgiveness,
Wait
!