Desired The Untold Story of Samson and D - By Ginger Garrett Page 0,2

you think of Father?”

“You should choose your words carefully, Astra. One would think you were being disrespectful.” The idea that we were permitted to form an opinion of him was sacrilege.

“I’m not. I feel sorry for him.”

I lowered my voice into a rasping whisper. Astra had to learn caution. “There is no reason on earth to pity him.”

“You’re wrong. He was born into a modest family of modest means, and he has done no better himself. Mother never gave him an heir. Even Mother, his one chance at prosperity, left him no better off than when she married him. He is doomed.”

I was shocked by her boldness. “What an awful thing to say. We will be better for him than ten sons.”

“How? Name one way he will benefit from us.”

“Our bride price. We might fetch a high price.”

“For a rug merchant’s daughter? He buys his rugs from the trade caravans and then sells them at market. He owns neither the loom nor the slave who weaves. He is only as rich as his next trade, and we both know that is not speaking of much.”

“There are the olives.”

Besides the plot of wheat we owned, which barely gave enough wheat for our own stomachs, we had a small grove of olive trees. They, too, yielded enough for our family and no more. She huffed in disgust at my suggestion.

I turned my back to her, but I was not angry. I was convicted. It was just like Astra to reveal the truth without even trying. I was so miserably selfish. Ever since I had gotten my first monthly bleed seven months ago, I had become obsessed with my next stage of life.

“I do feel sorry that he has no heir,” I offered. “But even if we’re not rich and can offer no lands or wells or camels, we are good workers. Men like hardworking wives.”

But all I could really think of, secretly, was the grief I must soon face. When I was given away, Father would lose a daughter, but I would lose my whole family, my constant comforts, the peace of the familiar. Who would comfort Astra in the middle of the night when I was gone? Who would shield her from the plainer girls with critical tongues? I would have a new mother, too, a new set of parents to win over. I would have to please my husband, and his mother, and his father, and perhaps too his siblings and business partners and neighbors. All my energy would go toward pleasing others. And if I did it well, my only reward would be their expectations that I continue. I served my family vigorously, but I loved them, so the burden was soft. I did not know what I would feel for my husband and his family. Plus, I wasn’t beautiful. Men were always nicer to beautiful girls.

My monthly bleeding came at a price. Money would exchange hands to secure my marriage, but my debt would never be cancelled. I would be in a new home, with a new mother-in-law who would squeeze my breasts to see if milk had come in, who would know when I bled and watch what I ate. I would lie under a man I did not know and had not chosen, and tend to some rotting old woman while my own mother walked into her white years all alone.

Faced with these same fears, Astra thought only to be sorry for Father. She worried over him, while I worried over myself. I kept my back to her while I struggled to stop the shaming tears that began to well in my eyes.

“Amara! Come here!”

I sat up and took a deep breath. Astra was at the edge of the roof, peering into the streets. Restless as she was, she had finished with our conversation long before I had even begun to process it.

“Look!” she said, pointing to the street below. “It’s that Hebrew we heard of!”

I peered around her, down the street, and saw an enormous beast lumbering down the lane, all alone. He was a strange enough sight as he was, but because he was alone, he looked even odder. No one came to the festival alone, not even the Hebrews, who always traveled in great noisy clumps. The Hebrews hated us because this land was ours. They hated us for our wealth, and our iron, and our power, because they wanted it all for themselves.

But he was alone, with no friends or companions. He