Great Lion of God by Taylor Caldwell Page A

should know of their lascivious beauty and their adulteries, and so he gave Aristo a glance of umbrage. But Aristo was studying the pretty girl—child with pleasure.
    “I think so also,” he replied.
    “Shameless,” said Saul. “Your knees have been bitten by mosquitoes, unbecoming for a girl. They are also dirty. Have you been crawling in mud, my sister?”
    “Do I ask you where you go so secretly in the mornings, when it is hardly dawn?” asked the maiden, reaching for a bunch of grapes.
    Saul, to Aristo’s surprise, colored deeply, and even his pink ears turned red. Sephorah laughed at him. “It must be to visit a girl, a shepherdess, perhaps, or a goose girl, or a herder of goats,” she said. She shook a finger at him, a slender finger running with juices. “Shameless, indeed. You steal from the house when it is hardly light, and only I see you and put my pillow over my face to muffle my laughter. What damsel is it, sweet brother?”
    Aristo studied his pupil with amusement, for Saul’s coloring was deepening moment by moment and his face seemed to be swelling. The Greek took pity on him. Saul was incapable of lying, and a question would be answered by the truth and it was obvious that he was dreading such a question. So Aristo said, “It is quite common for a youth Saul’s age, full of dreams and fantasies and strange longings, to go out to view the dawn alone, and to meditate.”
    Sephorah, herself, thought this was probably true of her brother, but she continued to tease him. “One morning I shall surely follow you,” she said, “and discover the dryad in the bulrushes.”
    “You are thinking of Moses,” said Saul, and his voice was a little thick. “And cease this talk of dryads and nymphs, and wash yourself and array yourself more modestly.”
    “Old man,” said Sephorah and ran off, singing, her white legs flashing in the sun.
    “A divine maiden,” said Aristo. “A veritable Atalanta.”
    Saul shrugged. “She is but a chit,” he said. “She has a tongue like an asp.”
    They sat in silence, aware of what had not been said, and when they looked at each other again it was as if they had made a compact between them, a compact of honor, Saul smiled. “I love her dearly,” he said, “though she has no mind and is only a girl.”
    They heard Sephorah’s airy singing near the pond, a blithe light song that was no prayer of invocation but came from her child’s heart and her joy in Me. Nevertheless, Aristo was taken by melancholy, as if a precious interlude was coming to an end and would never be known in just this fashion again. He imagined that a beautiful statue had turned and had shown another face, and it was a more somber one.
    The distant mountains were already wearing thin rings of snow and now, as the sun sank the wind freshened and the awnings bellied like sails. Saul, almost under his breath, began to chant that mournful and sorrowful song which Aristo knew presaged the coming Jewish High Holidays, and the solemn Day of Atonement when Jews repent their sins, ask for forgiveness and promise penance. Aristo thought, “Their Deity is their own, and thank the gods that they keep Him!”
    Saul’s faint chanting suddenly seemed ominous to the Greek. He did not speak when Saul rose and, with bent head, returned to the house. Aristo watched him go, and something dusky and premonitory but unknowable passed like a harsh wing over his mind. To him, it was an omen.

    Saul had become disconcertingly aware he had truly reached manhood a few months before this autumn day in the garden, which was two months before his fifteenth birthday.
    As the Jews had an earthy and realistic approach to life—though greatly employing symbols they almost never used euphemisms as men allegedly used fig leaves—Saul had been duly taught the uses, meanings and duties inherent in sexuality from the earliest childhood. His father would have used a more delicate approach than did old Reb Isaac, who thought