John Masters by The Rock

that?" she said. "Partridges are good eating."
    "Because ... he began and stopped. Why should he explain to her that this kind of redlegged partridge was sacred to him? Here on his Rock was the only place on the northern side of the sea that he had ever seen one. Other birds he loved to hunt with bow and arrow and sling, but this one, never.
    "It is of no importance," she said, tossing her head. "Lead on." He was a boorish half-Iberian, half-Phoenician sailor, wholly beneath her notice.
    "You throw well for a woman," he said. "And swim, you say? Perhaps you should have been born a man."
    She sniffed angrily. They came to a patch of forest, and Pendril said, "Up there is a great cave and a shrine to Hercules."
    "What does it look like?" she asked, interested in spite of herself.
    "I have never entered," he said.
    "What are you afraid of?" she asked. "There is but one God, Jehovah.... Shall I escort you in?" she mocked.
    "No, no," he said sullenly. "The gods of this Rock are not to be blasphemed." He led down past the forest and around the skirt of the mountain where a path ran a hundred feet above the sea. Looking past his broad back she saw the sandy curve of a beach and, a mile away, white houses and the mouth of a river, heavy trees on each bank. She ran into him, for he had stopped without warning.
    "What is it?" she asked.
    "Nothing," he said and strode on.
    "It must be something," she snapped. "What were you staring at?"
    "The land," he said shortly. "Here, this corner of Alube, where the sand meets the Rock. On this slope, looking west across the bay at the mountains there, where the sun sets. This is where I want to build my house. I have wanted to all my life."
    "Why do you not build it, then?"
    "The Rock belongs to Astarte, and her priestess will not permit me."
    She did not laugh, for he spoke seriously; and she knew, in her own religion, that YHWH kept a close grip on his own.
    They came to the town, and Pendril said, "This is Carteia. A small place, but some of us would not trade it for Carthage itself.... Here is the inn. It is clean, and the host is not a robber."
    "Where are you going?" she asked in sudden fear of being left alone in this strange place under the frowning Rock.
    "To attend to my business," he said. "I will return here before dusk, when the rites begin."
    He turned his back and strode away up the river front. The host of the inn came out, bowing courteously, and showed Tamar to a small room. Soon she went out to explore the town. It was a place of many smells, of fresh fish and oysters rotting in the dye works, of cooking spices, oil, garlic, seaweed, and the sea. The river slid by, blue-green and fresh, and she saw many fish in it. The air was clean, and birds sang in the woods at the edge of the river. Fishing boats big and small passed in from the sea, and the Rock stood as a sentinel over their comings and goings. Along the docks she saw great blue-backed tunny strung on hooks and men cutting them up and women rubbing salt into the flesh. One woman wore a silver brooch with the open Torah represented upon it, so Tamar asked, "Are you from Judea?"
    The woman rested, her hands on her hips. "Yes. From Jerusalem."
    "I, too," she said eagerly. "My father was a priest. The Babylonians killed him and all the family except an uncle, who took me to Carthage."
    "You were lucky," the woman said. "You must have been only a child. You had nothing to lose. Some of us ... everything."
    "There are more here?"
    "About twenty," the woman said. "We all work today because most of the heathen do not, since this is their great feast of the year.... Did I not see you walking into the town with Pendril?" She nodded, and the woman continued. "Are you his woman?"
    "God forbid," she snapped.
    The woman looked at her strangely. "There are some who would agree with you," she said, "but most would not. Only, he will have nothing to do with any except the temple girls. We thought a foreign woman had caught him at last." She