Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers Page B

to build a library to house his tablets of clay and to set up his royal observatory to plot the planets and the stars. And perhaps, too, he wished to play ‘new broom’ and define his differences from the war-loving Sennacherib.
    â€˜I told him you were a little crazy, Uncle,’ my nephew obligingly explained. ‘You can return to your home but you must undertake to live by Assyrian law. When in Assyria, remember…?’ and he smiled in that provoking way the young have when they are in a position to patronise one who has once played the taws on their backside.
    Our home had nothing left in it but the bare stone it was made of but it seemed to me a haven after the cave I had been sharing with the ravens and the vermin. It was the feast of Pentecost when I returned. The Rib had got together a great spread to celebrate, which she was anxious my sister’s boy share with us. But the lad was chary of being seen to be too thick with a subversive like me—I didn’tblame him for that: we each have our own field to harrow—and claimed some prior engagement. So I said to my son, Tobias,
‘
Go out and find some poor person and bring him here in your cousin’s place—we should share our good fortune with those less fortunate.’
    I caught the Rib casting her eyes up to the sky at this but she held her tongue, out of deference to my recent homecoming. She was about to light the candles in preparation for the feast when my son ran in to say that he had seen the dead body of one of our tribe laid out on the city walls.
    His mother made a kind of noise at the back of her mouth and then sat saying nothing, but looking the way women do when they have an opinion they are not going to express openly. I don’t know what they think those pointed stares are if not opinions deprived of words? But the Rib knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop me because when I got up ready to go out she dropped at once to her knees. To some it might have looked like piety; only I knew it was her way of making a reproach!
    The man had been strangled. I remember the body now as if it were yesterday: a thin man, in a dirty striped tunic, with a face like a wolf—the long features purple and grey from suffocation. I dragged him by his two scrawny arms through the streets and lugged the body up to our upper room, which didn’t find favour with the Rib either—she was proud of that room where the few remaining bits or her dowry-linen were stored and the use of it to house a corpse was about as far from her wishes as you could reach to.After sundown I carried the corpse to a spot by the city wall which is rarely visited, which is why the wild dogs like it.
    The corpse was stiffening and the limbs would not go easily into the grave I had scraped out of the ground so I was afraid I would have to break one of the arms. It comes to me in dreams at times, that unyielding arm. The clay was so hard and unforgiving a part of me longed to leave the wretched thing there to the dogs and the broad-winged carrion birds which hover over the city for carnage. But I thought of the exile and how my tribe had neglected the ways of the Lord: I had determined to dedicate my life to doing what was right.
    When I returned home the neighbours had got wind of what I had been up to and made it apparent that they wanted nothing to do with me. My person was a reproach to them and, worried they might pick up my dangerous taint and get into trouble with the authorities, they had to ensure their own safety with distance. I was polluted from corpse-handling anyway, so I sat out by myself awhile.
    To tell you the truth it wasn’t merely the grave-pollution which kept me away from the house: I didn’t want to go in and face the Rib. I knew she feared the neighbors’ talk—after all it had led before to the threat of death—and I knew it would be tears—and after the tears the accusations. This wasn’t