serve our Roman masters, I promised myself that I would return home one day. That if ever I was free, I would come home.”
“How many years ago?” I asked.
“I’ve counted twelve years. Half my life lived in slavery. I was a lad of twelve when the soldiers took me from my father’s shop.”
I was silent for a time, wondering about the family who had remained behind. “Have you ever heard from them?”
“What? As in … a letter, you mean?”
“Surely you could send them a letter on one of the great merchant ships. Pay someone to carry it for you. And pledge a coin to the bearer from your family when they received word from you.”
“A letter carrier receive coin from my father? To receive word from me?” He expelled a short, bitter laugh. “My father sold me for his debt. And besides, I do not read. Neither does he read or write. Not like you Jews who teach a toddler his numbers and letters. We have no time for such nonsense where I come from. So. To answer your question, I ask you … how could I hear from them? What would I hear? ”
“I will help you send a letter. Your father owned a cooperage in the city of Verulamium, you say.”
“Aye. That he does. He’s not an old man. When he could not pay taxes, the Roman centurion came to draft my father as a smith, making weapons for the wars against the Celts in the north. Father begged them to let him stay home. They then selected my older brother, skilled with shoeing horses. Thranal is accomplished at making iron shoes. But my father knew my older brother was too valuable to lose. What was the blacksmith business without him?”
“Did they conscript him?”
“No. Father offered me and my younger brother, Oren, instead. Two strong boys. Two for one. Boys. Extra mouths for my father to feed. Worthless to my father. We would have been apprenticed out that year anyway. So. The Romans got quite a bargain. Except that Oren died the first winter. I lived on … as you can see. If you can call what I lived through living.”
“So you will go home and comfort your father in his old age.”
Patrick snorted. “He never liked me anyway. Always said I would come to no good. A worthless boy except that he could beat me and sell me. No. I will come home and show him. How, in spite of him, the great God of Israel gave me freedom and prosperity and happiness … and a wife. He will regret what he did to me.”
“Your father’s regret will make you happy?” I fixed my gaze on Patrick’s bitter face. “Are you happy here?”
He nodded once. “For the first time in my life. Samson. And Delilah. Never two kinder … They have indeed treated me like a son …”
“Then why leave?”
He blinked as if it was the first time that question had ever entered his mind. “My dream to return. It kept me alive.”
“Your dream?” I urged him to speak of it.
His eyes hardened. “My vindication. A sort of revenge. Showing my father that he sold the wrong son into bondage. Justice. Showing them—”
I held my hands out, imploring. “Patrick? What are you thinking?”
“If I don’t go, my father will die never knowing how he consigned me to twelve years of misery.”
“Before Samson dies, he longs for grandchildren to love.”
“Until now. Until this place? I never knew a moment of happiness.”
“Happiness.” I weighed the concept in my right palm. “Or vindication.” I weighed his goal in my left.
He stared at me in disbelief. Could it be that happiness was more important than revenge?
My grandfather’s Bethphage vineyard was clearly destroyed. Vines he had planted. Desolate now and unyielding to the evil house of Herod the Great who had killed him to possess our heritage.
This was justice against the House of Herod, yet the sight of the devastation gave me no pleasure. I wondered as we rode past if there would ever be another vintage from my grandfather’s estate. I considered Bikri, alone and friendless. Thirty-eight years begging for mercy and none to help him. Vindication? Revenge? It was not sweet to my eyes.
So I knew that returning home to Britannia would not ever bring peace to Patrick. “And now you have won your freedom. You left Britannia as an unloved boy with two legs and a talent for making things. You will return to your father’s shop. You will