Harvest of Rubies (21 page)

I hadn’t many coins left after having discharged my debts to the queen. I gave a few to the young man.

“Gobry, use this during your search if you need to. Try to save what you can. When you return, I want you to buy the necessary materials to fix your grandfather’s cottage if Lord Darius should refuse to do it. The damp is seeping in and I worry for him once autumn arrives. Do you think you can manage?”

He bent low at the waist. “My lady is most kind.”

“One last favor. I don’t want your grandfather to know where the money came from. He is a proud man.”

Waiting on Gobry’s return proved hard for me. I had squeezed as many secrets out of Teispes’s scrolls as they had to give. My ankle was too sore to allow for extensive activity. I felt useless.

“Are you going to mope the day away again?” Pari asked as she gathered my sheets for laundering.

“Leave me be.”

“Why don’t you talk about it? It will make you feel better.”

I groaned. “Go away.”

“I don’t think so.”

I gave a humorless laugh. My servant was unhappy with my choices and disregarded my commands on a regular basis. My husband’s dog was dissatisfied with my performance as a mistress since I had become lame and sedentary. My gardener disapproved of my attitude toward my husband. My cook didn’t think my manners grand enough. The Lord was surely disappointed by the fact that I had barely spared a passing thought for Him. I pleased nobody including myself. “What a life,” I
mumbled under my breath. I hadn’t thought Pari could hear me, but she had sharp ears, that girl.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“There’s no point to it. I accomplish nothing. I help no one. I am a great big waste.”

“Help no one? Are you serious? What have you done but help since you got out of your bed?”

“What have I actually achieved? Nothing. Just riled up that crooked steward.”

“My lady, you’ve cared for us, which is the most important thing anyone can do for another. You showed interest in what we needed. You made us feel worthwhile by taking notice. Even if nothing comes of your efforts, we’ve still been cheered by your concern.”

I shook my head and waved her words away. She ignored me, which was an irritating habit she had formed of late.

“Do you remember the willow tree that Bardia showed you? Remember what he said about it: that the master didn’t love it because of its usefulness, but because of what it was.
It touches the soul, that’s all
, he said.”

“What of it?”

“You’re like that tree, my lady. It’s not what you produce or achieve that makes you lovely. It’s who you are. Your kindness, your caring. The way you consider everyone’s well-being, even a dog’s. The way you make us laugh. The way you get on your knees and clean the home of a servant. The way you face a bully like Teispes without letting fear stop you.

“The sharp mind that teases mysteries out of parchment is only a small part of you. In this house, I have seen so much more of what you are. And my lady, I tell you, you are our willow. We all rest in your shade.”

She turned around with an abrupt move and began to
shake the sheets with furious motion. To my amazement, I saw that she was crying. I rose from my couch and approached her, not knowing what to do or say. She noticed me lingering near and dropped the sheets. Without warning I found myself enveloped in a fierce hug. This was so far out of the realm of my experience that at first I did not know what to do. Then I raised a wooden arm and patted her on the shoulder once or twice.

She laughed and stepped back. “You’ll have to learn to hug better than that, my lady.”

I laughed too, freed in some inexplicable way from my dark thoughts. In the background of my mind was planted the inconceivable idea that my very presence—not what I could do or how I might serve—but my mere being might be a joy to another.

T
hat night I dreamt that I still worked for the queen. She burst into my office and screamed, “You aren’t satisfactory. Leave at once.” I had no time to explain or beg. Palace guards stripped me of my clothes and I stood before everyone naked and mortified. Then I was turned out of the palace.

I burst into consciousness with a racing heart, covered in perspiration. I buried my face in the pillow. O God, when would this wound be healed?

Two days later my ankle had improved enough to take a long walk in search of Bardia. He was in the vineyards, a hilly stretch of land situated just outside the estate gardens, beyond the eastern gate. It took us an hour to find him; Caspian chased every rabbit and bird on the way. He terrorized them so thoroughly
that I doubt they dared return to that part of the land for a week.

Bardia threw us a cheery wave as soon as he caught sight of us.

“What are you doing?” I cried as I saw the mountain of branches at his feet. He had cut back the vine until there was nothing but a few skinny scraps of bark and puny leaves left. The unpruned plants seemed healthy and robust in comparison.

“Pruning.” I found neither the economy of his speech nor the remarkable calm with which he continued cutting reassuring.

Half of me thought that a man grown on the land knew his job better than a scrivener of letters like me. The other half thought plain common sense could see that the head gardener was going too far. He was ruining the vine. The common sense half of my brain won.

“Bardia, stop!” I demanded. “You’ll kill it.”

The busy fingers went still. “Kill it, my lady?”

“There’s barely anything left rooted in the ground.”

He gave a wheezing chuckle. “That’s what pruning means.”

“It means that you destroy the vine?” I tried to gentle my voice, but it still came out with an edge.

Sighing, the old man laid his short knife on the ground. “The vine doesn’t have enough nourishment to feed all these branches. In two springs, the plant may be bigger, but most of its clusters of grapes won’t even ripen. And the ones that do will be scraggly and of poor quality.”

I pointed to the ground. “Perhaps if you fed them better, they could handle the growth. The soil looks quite bad here.” I don’t know why I was so harsh. I knew Bardia hadn’t enough assistance. How was he supposed to feed this grapevine? He had done what he could.

Bardia didn’t seem offended by my outburst. With calm he
said, “Yes, it’s very poor soil. But this is what the vine needs, my lady.”

“The vine needs bad soil?” I raised my eyebrows. “You just said that it doesn’t have enough nourishment.”

He seemed to consider his answer for a few silent moments and I thought I had finally caused him to see reason. Instead he beckoned me to stand beside him. We were near the top of a slope and he pointed below us. “What do you see, my lady?”

I shielded my eyes against the sun. “A vineyard,” I said with a shrug.

“Not any vineyard, but one of the best in Persia. The king himself asks for the wine from this land each year. My lord owns many vineyards, but none produces wine that compares with this one. Its crop is small, but excellent.

“Could it bear more fruit if we fed the land richly? Possibly. But then it wouldn’t taste the same.” He bent down and picked a handful of rocky soil to show me. “This is the secret of the vine. This poor soil, and this sun and this slope.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, beginning to remember that he had exquisite skill and years of experience. With a wince I realized that I had been making a fool of myself trying to correct a man with more knowledge in his back tooth than I had in my whole being.

He gave me a gentle smile, as if he could sense my dawning discomfort and had no interest in gloating. “Let me share with you the riddle of the vine, mistress.

“The vine needs to
suffer
. Going down into this earth-fighting to survive among the stones, among the lime rock—this is what gives it its aroma. Its taste. Its unique character. These grapes will create a wine few other vineyards can compare with not because their life was easy, but because they had to struggle to survive.”

I grew still. “The vine
needs
to suffer?”

“To be at its best, it needs to suffer, yes. And fight.”

“I’m sorry for it, then. No creature should have to bear pain.”

“Pain is part of this life. No one can escape suffering. Not the vine, nor we humans, as you well know, my lady. But what if we are like the vine and that affliction only makes us better?”

Bardia was right in one thing; harsh struggle was the order of life. The world I lived in was no Eden; I did not need faith to teach me that. The evidence of my eyes was more than enough. This world by its very nature was full of the bitter brew of sorrow. Had I not drunk of that cup since my childhood? Had I not lost a beloved mother? Had I not known the detachment of a father who could not love me? Had I not, even when I found a calling that fed my soul, spent nights and days in the grip of fear lest I should fail? Had I not lost the very thing I held on to so tightly? Had I not found myself in a barren marriage? Had I not become trapped in the grip of a treacherous man who sought even now to destroy me?

I bent to grab a branch Bardia had recently cut and discarded. It was still green and fresh looking, but in the hot sun, cut off from its stem, it would shrivel and die in a matter of hours. I studied the jaunty, wide leaves and said, “It’s bad enough that these poor plants have to battle the very ground they’re rooted in. Do you have to add to the vine’s pain by cutting off its branches, Bardia?”

Bardia picked up his short knife again and examined it with silent intensity. In the sun, the blade glinted like a shaft of starlight. “Consider my lady, I’m the gardener and I know what the vine needs in order to thrive. You only see the stripping, but I cut the vine in order to restore it. I take away from it to enrich it. You hold in your hand a withering branch and
that’s all you see now, but I know that I have given the vine a more abundant life.”

Without his knowing it, Bardia’s words found a rare target in my heart. As a Jew I believed in one God—one Lord over heaven and earth. One Creator with perfect power. And this God, in a metaphor that Bardia could have no knowledge of, sometimes referred to Himself as a gardener and to Israel as His vineyard.

Two things stole my breath as Bardia taught me the riddle of the vine. First, that suffering improved the character of the vine’s fruit. Perfect ease and comfort would only ruin it. If my life were anything akin to the vine, then these calamities I bore need not ruin me. They could very well be my redemption.

Second, come the right season, Bardia, the expert gardener, Bardia, the tender caretaker, Bardia, the one on whom these plants depended in order to survive, slashed and hacked into the vine. He added to its suffering. He stripped it until, from my vantage point at least, there was hardly any life left. Yet the vine needed this implacable care. Bardia had claimed that he cut the vine in order to restore it; he took away from it to enrich it.

I knew that he was selective in what he called the vine’s suffering. He would not allow pests to brutalize the plants, for example, or let weeds anywhere near them. Though he was shorthanded, I had seen no sign of a weevil or beetle near the crop. He knew what to destroy, what to improve, what to protect.