Refiner's Fire Read Online Free PDF

steamed over the electric blue Mediterranean, stacks trailing a constant unraveling cloud of steam. The music was good for the workers, the children, the fighters, the crew, and, some said, even the chickens. Although they did not dance, they seemed to lay a great number of eggs, and as maritime chickens usually veer toward the unproductive, this was seen as a good omen—even by the rabbis, who would normally have cautioned against such divining. But the times were not normal.
    There were about a hundred and twenty of the very old, the sick, and small children. The group captains zealously overdrilled their charges by herding them into the lifeboats and marching them from one area of the ship to another perhaps a dozen times a day. Levy closed his eyes to this, letting the frail be driven, until they dispatched from their number a delegation demanding more consideration. He cut the drills by half, but only because he was convinced that entering the lifeboats was by then instilled into their natures.
    A hundred, mainly women and merchants, were neither fighters nor engineers. They tended the animals, inventoried and rationed provisions, cooked, mended, watched the children, kept things in supply, and, most importantly, were an extraordinarily adept cottage industrial force. For instance, the wicker furniture was torn apart and rewoven into shields. It took the housewives only three days to create one hundred light and sturdy shields of various sizes, fashioned with strips of rawhide and sisal rope. Similarly, they finished the same number of lethal fighting sticks, turned on an improvised lathe, in less than a week. They sewed canvas garrison belts into which weapons were to slip. In battle, they were to serve as powder monkeys and medical auxiliaries. These one hundred worked very hard and were to be seen in only apparent disorganization laboring at a score or more of tasks.
    Two doctors and seven nurses established fore and aft sickbays and took care of the ailing. Except for a few, those who had not been well quickly regained their health. After the seasickness wore off it became obvious that fresh air, decent food, sun, activity, music, and the promise of a place to settle were good medicine for the heat-oppressed souls and their thick ledgers of real and imaginary complaints. The decay of Brindisi and its garbage-filled harbor, where it was not unusual to find the corpse of a dead horse lapping against a quay, was replaced by long glimpses of chalk-white islands floating in a summer sea. Sweet pines and lemon trees grew on quiet terraced slopes. Resources of summer began to act upon shattered lives. At night after work, as the sea rolled and winds swept by, they felt satisfaction and equanimity.
    Of twenty crew members, including Levy and Avigdor, ten worked below on the engines. The combat section sent regular shifts to relieve the stokers and help with heavy work. Eight deck hands took care of the rest—more than enough, since no one was interested in long-term maintenance: the ship was to be rammed against a beach south of Haifa. The deck hands climbed up and down the masts, supervised drills, and did watches on the bridge. Levy spoke through several translators. The newsletters also were multilingual, and the entertainer wrote jokes for them, sweetening the directives at Levy’s command. Before dinner this same entertainer read the news in Swedish and Italian, and played scratchy opera discs over the public address system. Items of news were broadcast between the scenes of the operas—Madame Butterfly seemed most upset at the building boom in California.
    Among those not classified in any major categories were three brothers who had been circus acrobats, two professional cocoa-tasters, and half a dozen rabbis who made the ship quite holy even though in many cases they were dealing with hardened atheists. Several refused the census and did not come to the bridge when summoned. When finally brought to