‘I’ll have a son within ten months,’ he told his wife. ‘And, Marta, wipe your face and show some dignity. What use are tears? You’d better pray for miracles. . Come on. You will have had ten years to prove yourself, and that is fair. .’

‘I’ll pray,’ she said.

‘Pray all you want.’

Marta took him at his word. She would do everything she could. So, despite the priest’s objections that her plans were wilful and unbecoming, she had walked into the wilderness to fast by day and pray for miracles by night.

Now she was sitting upright inside the cave, her back pressed against the least damp wall, and watching the entrance for dawn’s first smudge of grey. She was more tired than scared-and though she, like her neighbours, turned the clatter of each tumbling stone, displaced by nothing more ominous than dew, into a devil or a snake, she could not stop her chin from dropping on her chest from time to time. Her sleeping dreams were less alarming than her waking ones, and so it felt to her that she did not fall asleep but rather fell awake into the nightmare of the cave, alone. She woke inside a womb, a grave, a catacomb. But she was calm. These forty days could not be worse than the alternative — a life without a child, a husband or a home.

She despised the man, of course, and had taken hardly any pleasure in the marriage for at least eight of their nine or so years together. In that she was the same as many of the women in Sawiya. Marriage was a bumpy ride for them, though ‘Better ride than walk,’ they said, ‘even if the ride is on a donkey.’ Their husbands were an irritation, of course. But husbands were amusing, too. At least, they were amusing when they were out of sight. Their vanities and tempers could bejoked about among women friends at the ovens or the well. Grumbling and laughing at their curdy husbands made the bread rise and the yoghurt set. But Marta could not find the comedy in Thaniel. He’d made her and his first wife barren, she was sure, with his dry heart and sparking tongue. They were like millstones without oil. But — Marta was an optimist — she still believed that everything would be a joy if she could have his child. She pressed her eyes shut with her forefinger and her thumb, her little finger resting on the corner of her lips, and she prayed that she could leave her infertility behind in this dark, barren place, where it belonged. She prayed for forty days and nights of ripening, that she’d be fruitful, that she’d multiply. Then she prayed that dawn would break the habits ofeternity: Let it arrive early for once, and drive the night away.

Pray as she might, however, she could not entirely shut the noises out. She was certain when she stopped and listened hard that there was something, or someone, in the bushes just below her cave. She heard the small sounds that someone makes when he — of course, it had to be a he — is standing still and breathing through his nose. The snuffles, rustling ofclothes, the lubrications ofthe tongue and mouth ofsomeone waiting for her in the dark. One ofher three new neighbours, perhaps? She had not thought of them as dangerous, though no man was trustworthy when a woman was alone, no matter who he was. She stopped her praying, and tried to breathe as gently as she could. There was more rustling, and then the someone seemed to shake a piece ofcloth. It sounded like her husband flapping out the dust when he was taking off his clothes. The old man, then? The blond? The badu with the hennaed hair? Which one was naked at her cave?

Marta’s measured breathing and her stillness made her drowsy. She tried to stay awake by concentrating on the sounds outside but, finally, she could not stop herself Her chin went down on to her chest. She fell asleep.

Thank heavens for the charity of dreams. When Marta woke and heard again the scurrying below her cave, the naked man had been dismissed from her mind’s eye. She listened to the noises more critically. They were too light and birdlike to be threatening. A man would make more weighty sounds. He wouldn’t have the patience to stay so quiet and still. A woman then? A bird? Gazelles? The answer was obvious: it had to be the little straw-boned woman with the untied hair who’d evidently dug and taken up residence in a grave-like pit amongst the poppies; the peeping, rodent face, half-buried in the ground, and looking out across the scrub with moist and fearful eyes. Marta could have clapped her hands with pleasure and relief. She had forgotten that there was a fourth companion for the night. Might she still be hiding in her grave?

Now Marta had a reason to go outside. There was a friend at hand, a mad one possibly, but one that was too smaH to do her any harm. Women should seek each other out. She made her way towards the entrance, steadying herself with both hands against the cave wall, and stepped into the damp earth and the bushes at the foot of the cliff. She was surprised how sombre it was, and how blustery the wind had become. Surprised because she’d always thought that country skies at night would be much brighter than the smothered skies of villages. But the night was beautiful, nevertheless, more beautiful than any night that she had known at Sawiya, possibly because Sawiya was in the basement of the hills. This scrubland was the roof. From where she stood, the moon was level with her eyes. It was the thinnest melon slice, hardbacked, translucent, colourless. Its rind was resting on the black horizon, hardly bright enough to tinge the sky. But to her left, beyond the valley and its sea, the peaks and shoulders of Moab were boasting rosy epaulettes of light. The morning was approaching.

Marta walked towards the grave. She could hear the new friend scrabbling inside. There were flapping gasps of breath, like landed fish in nets.

‘It’s all right,’ she called, a reassurance for them both. ‘It’s me. The woman yesterday.’

But of course there was no other woman in the grave. There hadn’t been since dusk. Miri was with Musa in their tent, and reunited by the blanket on their bed, her narrow, knuckled backbone pressed against his hip. Instead there was a shuffling and contented darkness in the hole. Here were the small, wet sounds that Marta had heard before. She couldn’t place the sounds — they were too moist and feathery to be a woman, no matter how tiny.

She stepped too close. She knocked a loose stone in. That’s all it took. There was a startled screech and then a gust offl.apping, muscled wind as the pit made instant shapes from shadows and flung its contents in the air. It sounded like a hundred husbands shaking out their clothes. Damp bodies hurtled from the grave into the night, as headlong and as vengeful as demons hurled out of a nightmare and driven forwards by the seven winds of hell.

Marta screamed loudly enough for her new neighbours to hear, and to hear the echo, too. She dropped heavily on to her knees. Her face was wetly, fi^ly struck a dozen times. Her chest and shoulders took six or seven blows. She was assaulted by wings and beaks and smells. Then — almost before her scream had ended — they were gone, crying curses at her as they fled. She did not know what birds they were at first. She was too shaken. Her heart was beating faster than their wings. One of the birds had snagged its claws inside the loose weave of her cloak, and was hanging at her thigh, upside down, thrashing and spiralling. Marta, her panic equalling the bird’s, beat at it but could not knock it away. Once she had caught her breath again and steadied herself, she held its wings and feet and pulled it free. Her hands were shaking. It was a heavy, barrel-breasted bird, with a mottled throat and muddy-coloured underwings. A scrub fowl of some kind. She knelt on the cold ground for a few moments, panting, warming her hands in the bird’s breast feathers. She would not let it go. This was a gift. The evening meal, to mark the end of her first day of fasting. She held its feathers to her cheeks and lips for a few moments. It was softer than any cloth. But she understood this was no time or place for childishness. She broke its wings to stop it struggling. She ought, she knew, to slaughter it according to the rules by draining out the blood. But there wasn’t any knife — or priest — to hand. Instead, she put her thumb against its neck and snapped its vertebrae.