The Book of Longings(74)

I let out a breath. Phasaelis was safe with her father.

“I should like to have seen Antipas when he returned from Rome with his new wife and found his old one gone,” Yaltha said.

“They say he raged and tore his robe and overturned furniture in Phasaelis’s quarters.” I hadn’t known Lavi to talk so freely. I’d thought him quiet, cautious, diffident, but then we’d never sat and spoken as equals. How little I really knew him.

“The soldiers who escorted Phasaelis to Machaerus have been imprisoned. Her servants were tortured, including the steward who delivered your message.”

A huge cresting wave began in my chest—a rush of sorrow over the fate of the steward and the soldiers, followed by a stab of remorse for my part in their suffering, but mostly fear, crushing fear. “Did the steward tell his tormentors about my message?” I asked. “My name was signed to it.”

“I cannot say what he confessed. I was unable to speak with him.”

“Does he read Greek?” Yaltha asked. She was sitting very rigid, her face as grave as I’d ever seen it. When Lavi didn’t answer immediately, she snapped, “Does he or doesn’t he?”

“He reads a little . . . perhaps more than a little. When I first asked him to deliver the message, he studied it, complaining it was too dangerous.”

The room receded before rushing back at me. He would have been able to tell Antipas everything, and with the aid of torture, perhaps he did. “The poor man was right, wasn’t he?” I said. “It was too dangerous. I’m sorry for him.”

“Some say it was Antipas’s new wife, Herodias, who demanded the punishments to the soldiers and servants,” Lavi said. “Now she constantly goads her husband to arrest John the Immerser.”

“She wants John put in prison?” I said.

“The Immerser continues to attack both Antipas and Herodias,” Lavi said. “He preaches that her marriage is incestuous because she’s Antipas’s niece and the wife of his brother. He goes about saying it’s not a marriage at all, because as a woman, she had no standing to divorce her husband, Philip.”

Rain pattered, then crashed on the roof. This ruinous disaster had started with my father’s plot to make Herod Antipas king. He’d persuaded Antipas to divorce Phasaelis and marry Herodias, and in doing so, he’d set a perilous chain of events in motion: my warning message to Phasaelis, the prophet’s condemnations, and now Antipas and Herodias’s retribution. It was like a stone that strikes against another stone that causes the entire mountain to fall.



* * *



? ? ?

JAMES GAVE PERMISSION for Lavi to sleep on the roof. By then, the sky had dried, but the rains started again before dawn with torrents that dissolved the moon into thin, pale streaks. Awakened by the din, I hurried to the doorway and glimpsed Lavi’s blurred figure skittering down the ladder and taking shelter beneath the workshop roof. It brought back the memory of him holding the canopy of thatched palm over my head on the day I’d met Jesus at the cave.

When the downpour turned into a dribble, I warmed a cup of milk for Lavi on the oven fire. Approaching the workshop with it, I heard voices—Yaltha was there.

“When Judas was last here,” she said, “he brought news that upon Matthias’s death, my brother in Alexandria would send an envoy to Sepphoris to sell his house and its possessions. What do you know about this?”

I halted abruptly to listen and the milk spilled over the side of the cup. Why had she sought out Lavi privately to ask this? Worry welled in me, some old, augured feeling.

Lavi said, “Before I fled Tiberias, I learned that a man named Apion had been dispatched from Alexandria to conclude the sale of the house. It is likely he is in Sepphoris already.”

She is not being idly curious. She means to return to Alexandria with Haran’s envoy. She will go in search of Chaya.

So. It was not I who would leave her, as I’d thought, but she who would leave me.

When I stepped into view, she didn’t meet my gaze, but I’d read her face already. I handed Lavi the milk. The sky slunk low, grayness sticking to everything.

I said, “When were you going to tell me about your plans to return to Egypt?”

Her sigh floated through the wet cold. “I would’ve told you, but it was too soon to speak of it. It was not yet time.”

“And now? Is it time now?” Sensing tension, Lavi skulked against the door of the workshop, his face retreating into the dark oval of his hood.

“Time is passing, Ana. Chaya still calls to me in my dreams. She wants to be found—I feel it in my bones. If I don’t seize this chance to return, I won’t have another.”

“You meant to leave, and yet you kept it from me.”

“Why should I burden you with my desire to leave when I saw no way to act upon it? Early last fall, when you learned Haran would send an emissary, it came to me that I might travel back to Alexandria with him, but I didn’t know it might truly be possible until now.” Her eyes filled with anguish. “Child, aren’t you planning to leave Nazareth yourself? Each day you watch for Jesus, hoping he’ll come for you. I cannot remain here without you. I’ve lost one daughter; now it will be two.”

Remorseful, I held her face with my hands. The soft, drooping wrinkles. The candlewax skin. “I don’t blame you for seeking your daughter. I’m upset we’ll be separated, that’s all. If Chaya calls to you, of course you must go.”