SiWren of the Patriarchs | Page 6

now, after fewer generations than the fingers on one's hands, men stole, bought, and murdered for as many wives and female slaves as cunning, sword, and gold could get.
A good husband, if Si'Wren should one day become so blessed as to find, could be both protector and benefactor to her. She was young, and still had her whole life ahead of her. A wise woman must overlook her man's faults, and stand beside him, even help lift him up when he might otherwise perish, and Si'Wren believed in the promise of the proverb that a faithful woman who served well might hope to find such a man, together with riches, happiness, and a houseful of many offspring.
Abruptly, as she worked, there came the crack of whips and the sound of curses, and Si'Wren looked up in momentary astonishment as a team of two big oxen straining against their yokes plodded slowly past the open end flap of her tent accompanied by several dirty-looking boys and driven by two brawny slaves who presently followed the beasts into view. Truly, Si'Wren observed meekly, a woman's place was under a man's protection, for what woman could match such men in the daily toil of such backbreaking labors as this?
The oxen were dragging a stone boat. A stone boat was no boat at all, but actually a great, wheelless, wooden sled or sledge used to transport big building stones from the rock quarry, or round stones from the harvest fields where they were unearthed by the plow, to be dragged as deadweight upon a platform made with two wooden skids, and transported across the dry land to the construction site for use in the making of more stone walls and buildings.
The young slave boys walked alongside the grating and squealing runners of the stone boat with goat skin bags, ready to provide grease or water to make sludge or mud under the runners, when the sled ground to a halt sometimes and must have something extra added to unstick it. The boys also carried straw brooms for the same purpose, as well as staffs to load and unload the sledge.
One of the young boys had suffered a massively crippled hand from the carelessness of his overseers when he was ordered to apply the grease and water and insert the end of a broom more closely beneath the runners. Such boys must reach in and work the water and grease and dirt together with their brooms and fingertips, because sometimes what was poured on would merely run off as quickly again without sinking in.
The older or more experienced boys could also employ the ends of their staffs for this purpose, but when a boy was especially young or new to the job and had never seen a stone boat before, it sometimes pleased the others who had the charge of such a green and inexperienced youth, to order him into the worst labors possible, and few other boys would give the temporary loan of their sticks and staffs, lest one of them suffer a similar ghastly fate. Si'Wren had once heard an agonizing episode of high-pitched screams that began so suddenly as to jolt her right down to the very pit of her stomach. The pitiful childish screams had gradually subsided into long dismaying moans that had continued long into the night, and thus had she known that something of the sort had happened, and she spent the night praying desperately on her bed for the sufferings of the hapless young victim.
The stones comprising this particular load, broken by the stone masons into crude blocks of two and three times the weight of a man, were for the Master's garden wall, which Si'Wren must pass by every day on her way to and from the spice tent. As the two sweating drivers were helped along by the boys, many looked on disinterestedly and more than a few openly laughed and mocked at the slowness of their progress.
One onlooker shouted gleeful insults, bringing on the inevitable vile curses from the aggravated drivers.
The men kept the oxen at their yokes with cursings and whippings, as they dragged the stone boat screeching over the exposed surfaces of rocks and stones in the ground and the wooden runners scraped over them with ear-splitting squealings. Si'Wren watched also as the team made their way slowly past the spice tent and beyond, to where the stone masons labored to build the new garden wall.
Si'Wren bowed her head a little, and shut her eyes gently as she softly sang a prayer for the physical safety of the young boys. She often sang prayers during her work, swaying gently to the rhythm of her own soft sweetly-uttered syllables. It was not merely a prayer she sang always, but sometimes rather, a long-favored tribal