“Well done.”

  We played a few more games, for the sake of the show, but by now the men had lost interest and were arguing about what they should tell people when they came home to Galilee. Shimon-the-Rock wanted silence. Yakoub told him that that was no surprise and the argument began again. Yeuda and I played the disguised eagle, the antelope in the bush, and the reversed goat. He chose them all, without hesitation. After we had swapped roles again and played a journey round Mount Gerizim, En-Gedi road, and the needle gate, his eyes began to drop and his head became heavy.

  “Enough?”

  “Enough,” he conceded with reluctant longing.

  I went to the press house and carried out the old amphora of unblended wine we had found. My oldest, long-overlooked vintage. Then I took the mug that Yeuda had last chosen, turned it upright, filled it with my own best wine and emptied it. It was rich and round, the fruit of the grapes filled my mouth, each one calling out to my tongue. Take me, for I am a better grape. When I swallowed the taste of it was like fresh plums of the finest picking and I could not believe that the wine we had made could possibly contain so rich a scent and such a stew of flavours. I wondered if Zenobia had ever tasted this wine from the far end of the press room. Next spring, she would take it down to Caesarea and allow Ariel on the Cyprus Wharf to taste a drop of it before she named her price. I drank again, and the fruit followed its path through the limbs of my body till my hands and feet shone with the sharpness of its pleasure.

  Then I leaned back against the bole of the vine-tree, gave thanks to the Almighty for his mercy and benevolence, and forced myself to consider what I must do now that the two ropes in my hand had turned out to be the same. The scar-raked face of the Syrian soldier rose before my eyes. The Service had been betrayed by our very own good friends. Why Marcus should have done this was now a mystery that Philo could try to solve. I had identified the man who had murdered our good Yehuda. I had done my duty to the Service. Whatever state of deluded bliss Thaddeus bar Ptolemai might be in now, he and his companions were guests in my house, were sleeping under my roof as a refuge from clear danger. I could not in any conscience act to avenge myself or the Service on behalf of our Yehuda. To leave the case to Philo’s judgement would be absurd. This left me with one choice, as revolting and bereft of responsibility to my wife, my people and my vines as it was possible to imagine.

  I unfastened the knife from the strap at my calf and slipped it into the folds of my vest.

  “Yeuda, you should be asleep by now.” Mistress Mariam came to us from the house. The women must have finished their meal.

  “Lord Shlomo has been teaching me his trade.”

  She looked at the mugs and the loops of string as if they might at any moment come alive and start moving of their own accord.

  “Master, you’re a good man taking us in like this, we’re in your debt, but you shouldn’t be teaching the child such things,” she said quietly. “Yehuda from Kerioth, that bad man – he was always playing that game with the child.”

  Of course he was, I thought. I taught him the game myself when he too had been a boy.

  “If he should be learning anything, he should be learning Torah.”

  “Mamma…”

  “Your father taught you Torah. You should study, for his sake. Look at your uncle Yakoub.” The young man put away his writing tablet and was at the boy’s side before he could respond.

  “Come on, sleepy Yeuda,” he said, lifting the boy into his arms. “We’ve got a long way to walk home tomorrow.”

  The child hung on to his uncle and leaned out with his free arm to embrace me.

  “Go on,” I said, “I’ll walk with you some of the way tomorrow. I promise.”

  I took a goatskin of water and a satchel of bread and cured meat and walked the perimeter of my land in darkness. Down at the bottom gate Stephanos was squatting back on his heels, staring out into the darkness, all steady attention. I squatted beside him and passed him bread and meat in silence.

  “Nothing,” he said without stirring or taking his attention from the darkness beyond. I stared until the rough outlines of rock and stone lost their form, shifting into the mass of the hills and the clouds. The darkness stared back at me.

  I walked through the upper block, trailing my fingers against the vines. To end my life in my own vineyard would be something for a man of the soil. I felt the blade against my side. To use it against myself would be difficult, agonising, messy and prolonged. Our friends had two swords. Cassiel was a trained professional who could act with speed, accuracy and competence. I had no doubt he would do so if I asked him.

  I came at last to his watch station. He had seen nothing. I gave him some dried fruit and slices of kid and waited until he had eaten.

  “Cassiel, my friend.”

  “Boss?”

  “When we have seen our friends safely on their way tomorrow, before you go back to Jerusalem, there is something that I want you to do for me.”

  We sat and stared out into the darkness, down into the great bowl of the vineyard and beyond, across the hills towards the lowlands and the Western Sea. At last Cassiel spoke.

  “Boss?”

  “I said there’s something—”

  “Out there. Look.” His arm dragged a curve across the unseen horizon. “Do you see?”

  I peered out.

  “My eyes are old.”

  “Down there. Lights. Moving.”

  I strained again. Deep in the lower darkness I saw a distant speck of fire that was not starlight.

  “Joppa Road,” I said. “Or further off.”

  “It’s moving.” And then, “It’s gone.”

  I stood up. “Come and tell me if anything changes.” He thanked me for the food. “I’ll come when Kesil the Hunter leaves heaven and watch for you.” I left him the water-skin and walked back up through the rows of vines to my farmhouse. Looking up, I saw that Zenobia had set two lamps in the high window of our chamber.

  The men were stirring now, beginning to gather their waterskins and their satchels, shuffling towards the press house where they would spend the night. On their faces once more was the look of utter defeat, of grief and the burden of despair that they had worn when I first saw them in the room at the carpenters’ synagogue. The return to Galilee weighed upon them, the shuffling back to the narrow villages and the families they had left behind. What could they tell their people of what they had seen and experienced in Jerusalem, of the disaster to which their master and teacher had led them?

  Inside the press house, the men spread out in the space between the first tank and the new amphorae. An eye winked in the darkness and from somewhere close to my feet I heard Yakoub whisper.

  “The master: do you remember? He always came round and locked up the boatyard, last thing. Made sure we were all safe in the night.”

  From the deeper darkness, a voice told him to be quiet and to sleep.

  “All right. All right. Peace.”

  I closed the press house door and returned, at last, to my house. The boy was sleeping on the bench by Abigail’s hearth. There was no sign of the women. I lit a lamp and mounted the stairs to the upper floor. Then I heard Zenobia’s voice, mixed with soft laughter and the voice of the old woman coming from our chamber. And I opened the door.

  Zenobia sat before the great burnished sheet of copper, her hair stretched out to her side. It shone in the dim light of the oil lamps placed around the polished metal. Mother Mariam was combing it out for her with the brush of ivory and antelope hair that Zenobia had bought in Caesarea. The old woman’s movements were quick, but gentle and precise and did not snag. Abigail was watching her actions with the attention of a student. The boy’s mother sat beside Zenobia, examining her cosmetics, jewellery and brushes.

  “Your wife has the most beautiful hair, master,” the old woman said to me. “I’ve not handled hair as beautiful as this since I was a young woman in Egypt. She is very lucky, your Zenobia.”

  “Mother Mariam has been showing Abi how to do this. She knows so much. Learned it all in Egypt.”

  Mother Mariam’s face softened. The look of concentration passed as she put down the brush, and let Zenobia’s hair shimmer and cascade through her hands.

  “When we were in Egypt,” she said, “and my Yussuf died, I had to bring up my boys alone. I found work with a hairdresser in the rich part of Byblos, not far from the little Temple our people have there. You know it? Yes, of course. I swept the floor and collected the cuttings.” She turned to Zenobia, “After a few months the mistress showed me how to wash and how to cut. Soon I was her second girl and she let me build up my own list of regulars.” Zenobia nodded in agreement. “You know? By the time the boys were five, I had women from all over Byblos coming to me. Of course, it could not last.”

  “What happened, mother?”

  “After a time, when things changed again in Judea, we were told that we could go home if we wished to. I so wanted to see my Nazareth again, our street, and the olive tree by our workshop. I so wanted to go back.” She looked down and her hands ceased moving through Zenobia’s hair.

  “So we came home at last. There are no fine women in a place like Nazareth. None in Cana neither. No-one in our Nazareth ever needs their hair cutting. Not even the synagogue president’s wife. So I went and opened a shop in Sepphoris. That was after we’d got my late husband’s workshop back from the Herodians who had stolen it from us. They’re vultures, those people. Preying upon widows and taking bread from orphans. My second husband, my Yussuf’s brother Alphaeus, he had to go to the Temple archives and pay them to trace the descent of my sons to prove that they were my Yussuf’s boys, before the court would even let us plead for his workshop to be given back. And then that lawyer lied about it. They lied about everything, the Herodians. They’re foxes and vultures. So my Yeshua would have a trade like his father. And my Yehuda too. All so that my boys would have trades, and their families would not have to starve like the peasants do.”

  “Mother Mariam…” The younger Mariam put her hand upon the older woman’s arm. “It’s over, long ago, all that. And it’s late. We should rest.” She placed the brushes and the cosmetics back upon the table with her maimed fishwife’s hands.

  “Keep it,” Zenobia told her. “The pot of kohl – it’s best Peran. None better north of Arabia.” The younger woman looked at the gift with horror and regret.

  “I cannot,” she said. “My man is dead.”

  The old woman became agitated again, and a blankness passed over her face.

  “And my Yeshua. Where is he? Where is my boy? Why can I not see him? Why can I not? We have done all this for him. For my Yeshua.”

  “And we have a long journey over the hills tomorrow, mother. And we will be back in Nazareth soon. I promise you, mother, soon. We will be home, and it will all be over, all this.”

  She lifted the older woman up by the arms and my Zenobia came to assist her, holding the mother’s elbow and whispering to her as they walked with care and painful slowness to the door. The old woman was weeping silently as they went, her head bowed. How would they carry her across the hills and down to the valley tomorrow? I would give them the donkey, and send Stephanos with the cart.

  Zenobia led them down the steps to the room at the back of the house. When she returned to our chamber, she closed the door behind her and stood for a moment, her hands upon the clasp. Then she breathed in and opened her arms to me.

  “Solomon ben Eleazar,” she said. “My old goat. Come home to us.” I took her hand and she drew me to her against the door. Her breath was hot on my cheek. “Come to me, my love. Come inside. Come in to me.”

  Her eyes were huge, her lips full and smiling, in just the way they had been when she first looked at me in her room at Lady Esther’s, when we sat together so close and listened to the girl in the next room, long ago.

  “Do you know what she told me, the younger one?” she whispered, and her breath was wet on my ear. “She and her carpenter husband had kept away from each other since their child was born. Look at the age of the boy. She purified herself after he was born but that carpenter of hers had other ideas. He told her that they had to prepare themselves. Prepare themselves for what? Look what happened to him. In the end, he never came home to his woman, did he? Well, that’s no good, is it? This is the only life we have, here and now. Come to me, my love.”

  Her voice trembled, and she smiled as she drew her fingers down my cheek.

  “You may kiss me,” she said.

  I moved towards her and we embraced.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes—”

  At that moment a hammering of blows sounded upon the door behind us. Two blows. A moment’s silence. Then three more.

  Judean Hills

  6th day of the week,

  6th hour of darkness

  Stephanos stood at the door.

  “Torches,” he said. “Down below the bottom field. Coming this way.”

  “Wake the guests. Get them out of the press house and ready to go up the hill.”

  Zenobia gripped my arm. “You bring work home from Jerusalem with you. And this is what happens.”

  “Get the women and the child ready. Put the old woman on the donkey. Untether the beast, put a rope on it and bring it round. As quietly as you can. We leave in silence.”

  I went to our bed and took out the bag of Tyrian gold and silver I kept beneath it. When I looked back at Zenobia she was stuffing the Isis brooch, the antelope brush, her gold earrings and the great necklace into a leather pouch.

  “Come on.”

  Downstairs, the child was stirring, sleepy and confused. Mistress Mariam was speaking to him, pulling at his sleeves and holding his chin. She looked up at me as I passed, terror on her face.

  Outside, the followers were making far too much noise as they stumbled from the press house. Cassiel appeared from among the vines.

  “The lights, boss,” he said.

  “Show me.”

  Stephanos led us to the outcrop at the high end of the home block. Below us, a line of torches danced in the night air. Then the movement stopped, but the lights still flickered. Whoever they were, they had a purpose. It was deep night, but they were not entrenched and posting pickets. I looked down into the darkness and listened to my own heart beat slowly. After what seemed far too long a time to be standing, exposed and motionless on the rocks, with the men and women unguided and chaotic behind us, a new line of lights emerged, somewhat to the right of the first line.

  “Boss?”

  “There’s a tel down there where the wild goats gather in the evening. They’ve gone round the back of it on the mountain path. We had a leopard down there last winter.”

  “We dealt with it,” Stephanos said. “It was old, and sick.”

  “How far?” Cassiel asked.

  “Down there? Five thousand paces.”

  “Master, we should go. They’ll be at the bottom gate soon.”

  At the farmhouse the followers were staring out into the night, without purpose. Only Zenobia and Mistress Mariam were struggling to get the old woman up on the donkey. Mother Mariam was oblivious, unable to help herself, and stared vacantly at my wife while leaning over as if about to slide from the beast. The old woman was repeating, over and over in a rasping whisper: “Yussuf, help me. Where is my Yussuf? He will help me. My Yussuf will help. Where is he?” Zenobia tried to calm the beast, but it kept stepping away from her. The men did nothing.

  Without a word, Stephanos took control of the beast, looped a lead-rein round its jaws to silence it, steadied it with his free hand and pulled it round.

  The old woman stared at us. Her eyes were caves. She leaned forward and grasped my hand. “Are you my Yussuf?”

  “No, mother.” Zenobia said, holding her arm steady. “He’s still my husband.”

  “My boy,” she went on, “You will take me to find our Yeshua? We will find him, won’t we? You will know where to find him.”

  “Mother.” Yehuda-the-Twin gently untangled her hands from my arm and placed them on the beast’s neck. “We must go.” She looked away without a word, her eyes still cavernous, and at last the donkey moved.

  The followers picked up their satchels, their goatskins and their staffs and began to shuffle forwards. Zenobia tugged at the donkey’s halter, her hand closed upon its nostrils to damp the sounds of its snuffling, and she encouraged Mistress Mariam and little Yeuda to follow. Stephanos walked ahead.

  “The goat-track to the ridge,” I told him. “And keep them quiet.”

  I stood at the upper gate and counted them as they moved past me. Shimon-the-Rock trudged in silence, head down. Yakoub and Yehonatan glared, their eyes full of fear. Bar Ptolemai was cheerfully oblivious. At last, they were all out and on the mountain. Finally, Phillipos came down from his post. I looked down into the darkness, at the blocks of vines that were coming into bud and whose grapes would, in the months of Elul and Tishrei, give us our vintage. Below us the lights moved up to the lower gate.

  “Let’s go.”

  That we found our way to the ridge at all was thanks entirely to Stephanos’ skill. To follow from below a trail as slight as the one that rose to the scarp above us without losing your way is challenge enough in daylight. To do so by night, with a train of slow-witted, sleep-confused followers unfamiliar with the terrain, and an enemy at your heels, is the deed of a man. The air cooled to a thin mantle of mist that chilled me and cut into my lungs as I laboured upwards. We were still moving far too slowly. Every footfall, every breath or rough snag of clothing upon branch tumbled down the slopes below like the clatter of falling rocks. I spoke no words, and hoped that whatever noises the carriers of those lights were themselves making would envelope them in ignorance of our flight.

  Above us, the darkness itself vanished into vacancy. The stars were gone. The hillside was gone. The followers, the donkey with the old woman, the mother and the child, all had vanished. And my Zenobia too. The mist enshrouded the hillside of the spring night, settling its damp into the deepest crevices below and vanishing into the air above our heads. I looked back. The farmhouse had vanished. But I could still see the line of lights dimly, at a distance that was impossible to guess. There were two lines now, and both of them still moving: one to our left, the other to our right.

 

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