The Book of Longings(79)

“And he’ll arrest you, too,” I said, feeling fear spread through me.

At this most unlikely moment, the crooked grin appeared on his face. He sensed my fear, and wishing to break its spell, he said, “Consider the lilies of the field. They are not anxious, yet God takes care of them. How much more will he take care of you?”





xxxi.


In the days after Jesus’s return, I disappeared into preparations for our departure. Yaltha and I washed her few paltry garments and hung them to dry on pegs in the storeroom. I beat her sleeping mat and sewed a leather cord to it so she could strap it on her back. I filled waterskins, wrapped salted fish, cheese, and dried figs in strips of clean flax, and stuffed her travel pouch full.

I re-stitched our sandals, laying down an extra piece of leather inside. Jesus fashioned new walking staffs out of olive limbs. He insisted we take only one extra tunic each. I packed two along with a small batch of medicinal herbs, then sat awhile, clutching the preventatives that kept me from pregnancy. I wondered if we would ever have a private place to lie together once we’d left here, then tucked what I could fit of the preventatives into the pouch.

I took care to help Mary as she went about her chores, if only to spend time with her. Almost half of her family was leaving—Salome, Jesus, me, and Yaltha—and though she pretended cheerfulness, her sorrow seeped through as she watched Jesus carve the staffs, trying to keep the tremble from her chin, and as she embraced Salome, blinking tears. She baked honey cakes for us. She patted my cheek, saying, “Ana. Dear Ana.”

“Take care of Delilah,” I said to her. “Keep Judith away from her.”

“I will care for your goat myself.”

Lavi asked if he could come with Jesus and me when we left, and I didn’t refuse him. “You’re a free man now,” I told him. “If you come with us, it will be as a follower of Jesus, not a servant.” He nodded, perhaps half understanding what following Jesus meant. He kept the leather bag with my hoard of coins strapped to his chest even when he slept. When Jesus had spoken to me at the cave of the need to finance his ministry, I’d determined to become his patron. The drachmae left over after paying Apion’s bribe would fund him for many months, perhaps a year. I knew, though, if he learned how I’d obtained the money, he might refuse it. What snares my falsehoods were. I would have to layer lie upon lie to find a way to keep my patronage anonymous.



* * *



? ? ?

THE DAY BEFORE we were to return to Sepphoris to meet Apion, I woke with a rolling sensation in my stomach. I could not eat.

“I fear I will never see you again,” I said to Yaltha.

We were standing beside the wall in the storeroom, where she’d drawn her charcoal calendar, and I saw she’d marked tomorrow, the sixth of Nisan, with her name and the word finished, not in Greek, but in Hebrew. She saw me staring at it. “We aren’t finished, child. Only my time here in Nazareth.”

The thought of parting from her, from Mary and Salome, had become a leviathan ache in my chest.

“We will find each other again.” She sounded assured.

“How will I know where you are? How will I get news from you?” Letters were sent by paid couriers who traveled by ship, then by foot, but I would leave soon with Jesus for an itinerant life and it seemed unlikely a letter would ever reach me.

“We’ll find each other,” she repeated. This time she only sounded cryptic.

I went about my work, unconsoled.

Near the middle of the afternoon, Yaltha and I were beneath the olive tree cutting barley stalks, when looking up, I saw Judas at the gate. I lifted my arms in greeting, as Jesus loped across the courtyard to meet him.

The two men came toward Yaltha and me like brothers, their arms draped about each other’s shoulders, yet there was something boding in Judas’s face—I saw it immediately: the tightly pulled smile, his eyes shining with dread, the deep breath he took just before he reached me.

He kissed Yaltha’s cheeks, then mine.

We sat in patches of shade and sun flecks, and when the pleasantries were over, I said, “Must you always bring troubling news?”

Judas’s effort at pretense fell away then. “I wish it were not so,” he said and looked away, delaying, and neither Jesus, nor Yaltha, nor I broke the silence. We waited.

He turned back and fixed his gaze on mine. “Ana, Antipas has ordered your arrest.”

Jesus looked at me, his face gone still, and in a moment of strangeness and disbelief, I smiled at him.

The kitchen steward and the ivory sheet. Antipas has learned of my complicity. Fear came then, blood rushing up to fill my ears, the wild galloping in my body. This cannot be.

Jesus slid closer so I could feel the solidness of him, his shoulder against mine. “Why would Antipas arrest her?” he said calmly.

“He accuses her of treachery in the escape of Phasaelis,” Judas said. “The palace steward who smuggled Ana’s warning to Phasaelis confessed its contents.”

“You are certain of this news?” Yaltha asked Judas. “Is your source reliable?”

Judas scowled at her. “I wouldn’t have alarmed you if I didn’t think it was true. Tiberias is still rife with gossip about Phasaelis. They say the soldiers who took her to Machaerus were put to death along with two of her servants, all of them accused of conspiring. And there is much talk of a warning message carried to Phasaelis on a food tray. I knew this to be Ana’s ivory tablet.”