Rahab, The Prostitute
She'll commit treason to help strangers.
The night she takes her place in history starts the same as any, laden with smoke and spice and and dance and men with golden hands, and ends with her facing two desperate fugitives with stalwart eyes offering her the choice of a lifetime.
~.~
Rahab hadn't always been a prostitute. It had been due to circumstance – which, even so, doesn't completely justify the choice – beneath that, she was a woman as good as any, fiercely loving of her family, equally loving of secrets. Flighty. Noncommittal. What set her apart, probably, was that she had a streak so good that while she'll never promise anything, she'll commit treason to help strangers breaching their territories.
She remembers the coarse flax she'd been drying on the rooftops and takes them there, hides them, protects them with an infantry of lies and a few coquettish looks. The soldiers take to the river, in the direction where she points them, on the scent of a trail that had never been strewn.
~.~
When Rahab was young, her parents had been frightened of how painfully intelligent she'd shown herself to be, calculating sums and reading people. She'd saved her father from many a tenuous barter, in a way that was rude and invasive for a girl, in that era. Her father had told her to stop it. She'd persisted. Her mother clapped both hands to Rahab's face and said, with resigned finality, "It's useless, Rahab. There's nothing you can do." It was quick and clean, like the snapping of wrists. Rahab never tried to negotiate after that.
~.~
She can't sleep for a silent scream in her head. She knows who the men sleeping on the rooftop are. Rumors had abound in the marketplace and in the streets: God's people. Crossers of the Red Sea. Survivors of the plagues of mighty Egypt. She realizes immediately she'll never be granted another chance. She goes up to the roof and fiddles with her hands, suddenly awkward with them, makes a gesture as if asking how to exact a promise.
"Ask what you may," One of them says, surprisingly kind.
"Swear to me that you will show kindness to my family and all who belong to me because I have shown you kindness." All who belong to me, is an unnatural phrase on her lips, but she'll save all she can. The men exchange looks she can easily read, and assent. They give her a cord the color of blood to hang out her window. Come morning, she sends them on their way and they leave without a backwards glance.
~.~
She hangs the scarlet cord, holds to that covenant – a paltry solace, a pittance, for a girl of a people God didn't choose - and is given due respite when the walls of the city fall and the Isrealites invade.