Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) Read online

  RACHEL

  &

  LEAH

  RACHEL

  & LEAH

  WOMEN OF GENESIS

  ORSON

  SCOTT

  CARD

  © 2004 Orson Scott Card

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  Visit us at shadowmountain.com

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Card, Orson Scott.

  Women of Genesis : Rachel and Leah / Orson Scott Card.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57008-996-5 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  1. Bible. O.T. Genesis—History of Biblical events—Fiction. 2. Rachel (Biblical matriarch)—Fiction. 3. Leah (Biblical matriarch)—Fiction.

  4. Women in the Bible—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.A655W66 2004

  813′.54—dc22

  2004008688

  * * *

  Printed in the United States of America 72076

  Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, UT

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Robert and D’Ann

  By traveling together,

  you’re always already home

  CONTENTS

  I. LEAH’S EYES

  II. THE GIRL WHO COULD SEE

  III. FATHERLESS CHILD

  IV. TENDER EYES

  V. BARGAINS

  VI. HOLY BOOKS

  VII. BROTHERS

  VIII. JEALOUSY

  IX. SEVEN YEARS

  X. WARNINGS

  XI. WEDDINGS

  XII. WIVES

  AFTERWORD

  PART I

  LEAH’S

  EYES

  CHAPTER 1

  Bilhah was not born a slave. Her father was a free man, the son of a free man. He had skill, too. His fingers could fly over the pots of tile and find just the right color and he’d know just what size and shape it needed to be and he could tap just so on the tile and the right piece would chip off and he’d set it in the mortar.

  It all looked like dots of color to Bilhah, watching him as a little girl. But when the day’s work was done and he picked her up and carried her away, she’d look back over his shoulder and all the little bits of colored tile would suddenly be something. A horse, a lion, two men fighting, a beautiful woman, all made out of little bits of tile that had looked like nothing at all up close.

  It was a miracle, to Bilhah. Her father worked miracles every day, for hours and hours, working too close to see the picture he was making, and yet it was always there, he never made a mistake. He was the best at such work in all of Byblos, Bilhah heard a man say that once, and she believed it.

  Best in Byblos. And if that was so, then he must be best in all the world, because didn’t the ships come over the sea from Egypt and all the islands? Why would they come to Byblos except that Byblos had the best of everything?

  Mama wasn’t born a free woman like Papa. She was a slave in a rich man’s house. And a young one, when Papa met her—she told Bilhah the story many times. “I so young that nobody laying a hand on me yet, but your papa, he come to the house of my master and my master say, You make a picture here, you make a picture there, how much you want me to pay? And your papa he say, I just want one thing. I want that little Hittite girl you got there. And my master he say, She too young. And papa say, You give me her, I set her free, and she get old enough, I marry with her. And then he do his most beautiful work, and I think I see my own face in it three time, and when he finish, my old master come to him and say, Well you take her, because you give her to me three time in these pictures, so I give you one, I make a profit. And your papa take me away and put me in his mama house and he say, This girl be my wife some day, you teach her, Mama. And his mama teach me like she my own mama, and now I talk fine like this and I a free woman, and you grow up free all your life.”

  That was the promise of Bilhah’s childhood. Then Mama died giving birth to a baby boy who died the next day, and that’s when Bilhah started going to her father’s work with him. Every day, learning more and more how to help him, and then at home, they cooked together and ate together, and she talked about everything and he answered her questions, and he often told her, “Someday, my beautiful girl, all the boys in Byblos will come to me saying, I don’t want a picture, I want that little girl of yours, and I’ll say, You can’t have her, she’s my little girl forever.”

  “I’ll be big then, Papa.”

  “Always my little girl, no matter how big you get,” he said.

  And then one day the king’s men rode hard through the market and a man pulled his heavily loaded donkey out of the way, not seeing that Bilhah and her father were beside the animal. Bilhah tried to dodge out of the way, but she bumped into the wall of a house and the donkey bumped her from the other side and she couldn’t find a way past the donkey’s legs because it was stamping and snorting. And then she felt her father pulling her away, yelling at the donkey man. Then the donkey lurched again and Papa stopped yelling and after a couple of minutes his fingers let go of her and when the donkey moved away from the wall, Papa fell down.

  The donkey man never saw what he did. Papa lay there dead in the street and people stepped over him while Bilhah cried, until finally along came a man who knew them. He was a man that Papa had once taught to work the tile, but he had no talent for it and now he made harnesses for animals. But he still knew Papa and he said to Bilhah, “Can you hold to my robe while I carry your papa back to the house?”

  Of course she could. She was eleven years old, she wasn’t a baby anymore! Couldn’t he see that? She wasn’t crying like a little lost baby, she was crying because her papa was dead saving her from the stupid donkey, crushed and broken against a wall by the donkey’s load. Wasn’t that a good cause to cry?

  The friend picked up Papa’s body and carried him back to their little house, Bilhah clinging to his robe the whole way. She watched as the man laid Papa on the bed and covered him so gently. “What will happen now?” she asked him.

  She meant, What will happen to Papa. But he answered her as if she meant, What will happen to me. “I know your father has a cousin who works for a man in Haran.”

  “But Haran is far from the sea, and Uncle No isn’t a free man. He ran into debt and when he couldn’t pay, he sold himself and now he’s a servant.”

  “I know,” said the man.

  “If I go live with him, then I won’t be the daughter of a free man, I’ll be in the house of a servant and I’ll have to be a servant, too.”

  “That’s if you’re lucky,” said the man. “What if the master says, No, we’ve got no room for a little girl like this”?

  Only then did Bilhah realize that with no father, with no mother, she would belong to a stranger, and become what that stranger was. A cousin she had never met, but only heard Papa and Mama talk about years ago, clucking their tongues and tugging at their clothing to show their grief for the poor man, who sold himself into slavery to pay his debts. And now she would have to share his lot.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the friend. “You don’t know, Bilhah, but in this city a girl like you, with no family, your life would be terrible and short.”

  “You be my family,” she said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m only a harness maker, and no kin of yours.”

  “Marry me,” said Bilhah. “Like my father married my mother, and then waited for her to grow up. Papa says I look li
ke Mama, I’ll grow up to be beautiful like her.”

  “I can’t,” said the man.

  “Look,” she said, and ran to the corner of the workroom and pulled and pulled at the big basket of tile chips until the man finally helped her move it, and then dug in the floor under the spot where it had been until she found all of Papa’s money, the precious coins that he always told her would be her dowry.

  “Here,” she said. “My dowry. You take it and marry me and let me stay in Byblos. Don’t make me go be a slave among herdsmen!”

  “No,” said the man. “No, that money isn’t for your husband—a beautiful girl like you, men will someday pay a bride price for you, and not a small one. That money is your own, to take into your marriage so your husband will never have power over you.”

  “No one will pay a bride price for a servant girl.”

  “They will for you,” the man said. “But let me take these four coins, to pay for the burying of your father. Two for the land where he will lie, one for the man who digs the grave, and one for the priest of Ba’al who will send him on his way to God.”

  “Then take only three,” said Bilhah. “Papa did not serve Ba’al.”

  The man shook his head. “But the people who tend the graves do,” he said, “and if the grave is not watched over by Ba’al, then soon his body will be taken out and the space sold again to someone else.”

  Bilhah had not known there was anyone in the world evil enough to do such a thing. But she saw in his face that he wasn’t lying. “Four, then,” she said. “Or five. For two priests.”

  “One is enough,” he said. “And don’t show this to anyone else. This hiding place, this dowry.”

  That night, neighbor women and the wives of some of Papa’s friends took turns keeping vigil and keening over Papa’s body, and at dawn the other tile workers, some who had been young men when Papa was young, and some who had learned from him after he became a master, carried him to the grave and laid him in it and Papa’s friend gave a coin to the digger and then he and Bilhah stayed to watch him fill the grave with dry dirt.

  Bilhah piled stones at her father’s head, like putting a seal on a letter as the scribes did in the market. She memorized how the stones were, so she would know if they had been moved, if the body had been taken. And she looked long and hard at the digger, who nodded as if to say, I see that you will remember your father’s gravestones, and I will make sure no one disturbs this place.

  By noon the friend had her sitting on the back of a donkey. “The man who owns this beast, he gave me the use of her for three days, and I’ll give him the harness work for free, so it costs me nothing.”

  “It costs you the time making the harness,” said Bilhah, who understood perfectly well the sacrifice he was making. “That and the cost of the leather and brass, too.”

  “All that I know of hard work and honorableness, I learned from your father,” he said. “Taking care that you are cared for, that is how I discharge my debt to that good man.”

  And at those words, Bilhah wept quietly on the donkey’s back as the man led them out of the east gate of Byblos and took her on the dry, winding road up into the hills. She looked back again and again, watching as Byblos first grew very large, and then grew smaller and smaller, until there came a time when she could not see the city for the dazzle of sunlight from the sea beyond it.

  Then even the sea was gone. She was surrounded by scrub oak and the occasional cypress tree, and the dust of the road clogged her nose and made mud of the tears on her cheeks.

  Twice, chariots of the king’s men came clattering along the road, once going up, once going down, raising a fearsome dust and forcing everyone off the road as they passed.

  But when she complained, her protector only laughed at her. “It is because of those soldiers that we can travel like this, just you and me and a donkey. If no soldiers came by, then there would be brigands after us—they used to live in these hills thicker than lions—and soon I’d be dead and the donkey and you would both belong to them until they saw fit to sell you.”

  Bilhah shuddered at the thought.

  Not long afterward, though, she realized that, going to live in a servant’s care, she was entering slavery as surely as if brigands had taken her. The only benefit was that there would probably be less suffering along the way. And, of course, she had her dowry, tied up in a cloth and carried over her friend’s shoulder because, as he explained, what if the donkey runs away or is stolen or falls off a cliff? Should he take your dowry with him when he goes?

  They slept at a little inn where once again, apparently, the man had done harness work and there was no mention of paying. They had a good meal of lentils and carrots and old goat in a stew, and her friend slept at her feet with his knife in his hand, lest some rough traveler think that she was unprotected.

  It was only two hours farther to Padan-aram, where her cousin’s master camped. They did not pass the town of Haran—it lay on the other side of Padan-aram, said her friend. “But you will have plenty of chances to see it, I’m sure,” he said.

  The camp was not as bad as she had feared. Only a few of the dwellings were tents. The rest were houses of stone, along with pens for animals and stone-and-stick sheds for storing this and that. A much more permanent place than she had thought a “camp” would be, though it was nothing at all like the crowded, busy streets of Byblos.

  They were seen coming in. A man walked out to greet them—only one man, which her friend said was a good sign. “They’re peaceful people here,” he said. “That bodes well for you.”

  Her friend explained why they had come, as Bilhah modestly kept her eyes averted from the stranger.

  And within a few minutes, she had met her cousin Noam (who, she quickly learned, did not like being called “Uncle No”), and then met the great man, Noam’s master, called Laban.

  “Have you any skills?” asked Laban.

  “I can mix the mortar as well as ever my father could,” she said.

  Laban smiled. “Nothing here is made with mortar, child. Can you spin? Can you weave?”

  “I can learn anything that needs hands to do it,” she said.

  “A girl who can’t spin,” said Cousin Noam, shaking his head.

  It made her heart sink with despair. They won’t want me, she thought.

  “The girl’s a good one,” said her friend. “She learned everything very quickly. She can cook. She can learn.”

  Bilhah kept wondering when the man would bring out her dowry. But after a while she realized why he had not yet done so. He wanted them to take her first for her own sake, or at least out of cousinly duty.

  It soon became clear that while the master, Laban, was not averse to taking her, Cousin Noam himself was reluctant.

  Until at last the cloth was unrolled and the coins exposed on the rug between them.

  Cousin Noam shook his head. “This is her dowry. I’m not going to marry her! What good does this money do me?”

  Bilhah saw how Laban’s gaze grew dark, his eyes more heavy-lidded. “Why is it,” he asked, “that you measure your cousin by how much of her money is yours, and I measure her by her usefulness to the camp?”

  It was her friend the harness maker who answered first. “It’s because both of you are blind, not to see the beauty and goodness of this child.”

  Cousin Noam whirled on him with a rebuke on his lips, but he was stopped by Lord Laban’s burst of laughter. “You are a brave man!” he said, still gasping from the laugh. “And a true friend to your friend’s child.” Laban reached down and took five coins from the pile on the cloth and offered them to the harness maker. “Her father would want you to take this, for the days of work you have lost, and for your loyalty to her.”

  The harness maker took the coins, but then laid them all back down on the cloth. “I will gladly take a meal from your hospitality, my lord,” he said. “But from her dowry I will not take even the flakes of gold that cling to the cloth.”

  Laban nodded
again, and smiled. “We have good harness men here,” he said, “or I’d offer you work.”

  “And I’d do the work gladly,” said her friend, “because your animals are so well cared-for, and for taking in the daughter of my friend.”

  “Oh, I’m not taking her in,” said Laban. “She’s a free girl, though she’s under the care of my servant Noam. He will take her in, and he will guard her dowry.”

  Cousin Noam nodded gravely. “She is now my daughter, and I am now her father.”

  Though he was nothing like her father, Bilhah understood that his words were the covenant, and she answered alike. “Like my own father I will obey and serve you, sir,” she said. “I am your dutiful daughter now, and I put my dowry into your safekeeping.”

  The cloth was rolled up again, and instead of going into the harness maker’s bag, it was tucked into the belt that cinched the loose robe around Cousin Noam’s waist.

  They ate in midafternoon, and after much thanking and honoring and blessing and promising all kinds of future kindnesses, her father’s friend led the donkey away, heading back to the inn to spend a second night.

  Cousin Noam introduced her to several people, warning her sternly that each adult had much to teach her as long as she was not ungrateful and served well. To each of them Bilhah bowed the way her father had always bowed to the men he worked for, and because they laughed a little she knew she was not supposed to do that; but the laughter was kind, she knew that it was not seen as a fault in her, and so she persisted. Someday someone would teach her what a free girl was supposed to do, if not to bow like a picture-tile man.

  And that night she went to sleep inside a house made snug by tight walls and warmed by the bodies of four other girls, most of them younger than her.

  In the morning, when she woke, Cousin Noam was gone. The dowry was too much temptation for him. It meant freedom, because with that money he could go far enough to escape the vengeance of Lord Laban.