Judith Slays Holofernes, Pt XI

Manessah is dead.

Yesterday afternoon he was supervising the men in the field as they bound up the sheaves of barley.  They had just moved on to the law row when he collapsed, his body wracked with seizures. By the time a priest could be fetched he had lost all consciousness, and his skin was alarmingly hot and dry to the touch.  The field servants rushed him back to the house and placed him in the shade, where the house servants poured cool water over him, and the priests prayed, but to no avail. He did not regain his senses, and this morning as the sun broke the horizon, he died.

I know the specific moment of Manessah’s death because my Potential did not leave his side the entire night, and I did not leave her side.  Perhaps I should have given her privacy for her grief-stricken vigil, but I felt… responsible.

She sat in silence for a long time after his last shallow breath, staring at the lifeless hand she held in her own as the room grew gradually brighter.  I could hear the priests’ chanting through the walls, and wondered how long she would have before someone came to check on him. I wondered if it was my place to try and move her from his side.  But before I could make up my mind she stirred.

Her hands did not release his, but she looked up at me, eyes harrowed with pain.

“Did you do this?” she whispered, and I flinched.

“My lady-” but she cut me off with a sharp gesture before I could answer.

“No.  Don’t.”  She turned her face back to his, smoothed her thumb over his now colorless cheekbones.  “I am not ready to hear the truth, whatever it may be. I do not know what I can or cannot believe in this moment, except that the God of gods is good, and whatever happens is by His will alone.”  She was silent again for a long moment, and my heart twisted inside my chest. How could she believe her God would allow this- direct this, even- and still call him good?

“I am too small to understand the pattern of the infinite,” she said, as though answering my unspoken question.  “I am too small to even understand my place within it. All I can do is have faith. And I do have faith.”

She looked up at me again, and this time there was a fire in her eyes.

“I have faith that the God of gods takes vengeance for his people where it is needed, so that we may be free to turn our minds to greater things.  My husband Manessah is dead. I am a widow, beholden now to no earthly master. I will lead our household in a mourning period of thirty days. And then you will begin my training.”