I lay down on the far bank, opposite the synagogue. The birds had begun, and as always I'd missed the exact moment. It was a game I played, trying to hear the very first of the birds, the birds that knew the sun was coming when no one else did.
I could see the big thick palm trees around the synagogue emerging from the clump of shapeless shadows. Palms could grow in a drought. Palms didn't care if the dust coated every branch. Palms went on as if made for all seasons.
The cold was outside me. I think my beating heart kept me warm. Then the first light seeped up over the distant bluff, and I picked up the fresh robe, and slipped it over my head. So good, this, this luxuriously clean cloth, this fresh-smelling cloth.
I lay back down again and my thoughts drifted. I felt the breeze before I heard the trees sigh with it.
Far up the hill was an old olive grove to which I loved to go at times to be alone. I thought of it now. How good it would be to lie in that soft bed of dead leaf and sleep the day away.
But there was no chance of it, not now with the tasks that had to be done, and with the village charged with new worries and new talk over a new Roman Governor come to Judea, who, until he settled in as every other Governor had done, would trouble the land from one end to the other.
The land. When I say the land, I mean Judea and Galilee as well. I mean the Holy Land, the Land of Israel, the Land of God. It was no matter that this man didn't govern us. He governed Judea and the Holy City where the Temple stood, and so he might as well have been our King instead of Herod Antipas. They worked together, these two, Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, and this new man, Pontius Pilate, whom men feared, and beyond Jordan Herod Philip ruled and worked with them as well. And so the land had been carved up for a long, long time, and Antipas and Philip we knew, but Pontius Pilate we didn't know and the reports were already evil.
What could a carpenter in Nazareth do about it? Nothing, but when there was no rain, when men were restive and angry and full of fear, when people spoke of the curse of Heaven on the withering grass, and Roman slights, and an anxious Emperor gone into exile in mourning for a son poisoned, when all the world seemed filled with the pressure to put one's shoulder to it and push, well, in such a time, I didn't go off to the grove of trees to sleep the day away.
It was getting light.
A figure broke from the dark shapes of the houses of the village, hurrying downhill towards me, one hand upraised.
My brother James. Older brother - son of Joseph and Joseph's first wife who died before Joseph married my mother. No mistaking James, for his long hair, knotted at the back of his neck and streaming down his back, and his narrow anxious shoulders and the speed with which he came, James the Nazirite, James, the captain of our band of workers, James, who now in Joseph's old age was head of the family.
He stopped at the far side of the little spring, mostly a broad swatch of dry stones now with the glittering ribbon of water gurgling through the center of it, and I could plainly make out his face as he stared at me.
He stepped on one big stone after another as he came across the creek to me. I had sat up and now I climbed to my feet, a common enough courtesy for my older brother.
"What are you doing out here?" he demanded. "What's the matter with you? Why do you always worry me?"
I didn't say anything.
He threw up his hands and looked to the trees and the fields for an explanation.
"When will you take a wife?" he asked. "No, don't stop me, don't put up your hand to me to silence me. I will not be silenced. When will you take a wife? Are you wed to this miserable creek, to this cold water? What will you do when it runs dry, and it will this year, you know."
I laughed under my breath.
He went right on.
"There are two men as old as you in this town who've never married. One is crippled. The other's an idiot, and everyone knows this."
He was right. I was past thirty and not married.
"How many times have we talked about this, James?" I asked.
It was a beautiful thing to watch the growing light, to see the color coming to the palms clustered around the synagogue. I thought I heard shouting in the distance. But perhaps it was just the usual noises of a town tearing off its blankets.
"Tell me what's really eating at you this morning?" I asked. I picked up the wet robe from the stream and spread it out on the grass where it would dry. "Every year you come to look more like your father," I said, "but you never have your father's face really. You never have his peace of mind."
"I was born worried," he confessed with a shrug. He was looking anxiously towards the village. "Do you hear that?"
"I hear something," I said.
"This is the worst dry spell we've ever had," he said, glancing up at the sky. "And cold as it is, it's not cold enough. You know the cisterns are almost empty. The mikvah's almost empty. And you, you are a constant worry to me, Yeshua, a constant worry. You come out here in the dark to the creek. You go off to that grove where no one dares to go. . . ."
"They're wrong about that grove," I said. "Those old stones mean nothing." That was a village superstition, that something pagan and dreadful had once taken place in that grove. But it was the mere ruins of an old olive press in there, stones that went way back to the years before Nazareth had been Nazareth. "I tell you this once a year, don't I? But I don't want to worry you, James."
Chapter Two
I EXPECTED JAMES TO CONTINUE.
But he'd gone quiet, staring in the direction of the village.
People were shouting, a lot of people.
I ran my fingers through my hair to smooth it, and turned and looked.
As the full light of day came down, I saw a great cluster of them at the top of the hill, men and boys tumbling and pushing at one another, the whole throng moving slowly downhill towards us.
Out of the melee, the Rabbi emerged, old Jacimus, and, with him, his young nephew Jason. I could see the Rabbi was trying to stop the crowd, but he was swept towards the foot of the hill, towards the synagogue, as the crowd came on, like a frantic herd, until they stopped in the clearing before the palm trees.
As we stood on the slope across the stream we could see them clearly.
Out of their midst, they forced two young boys - Yitra bar Nahom, and beside him the brother of Silent Hannah, the one we all called simply the Orphan.
The Rabbi ran up the stone steps to the roof of the synagogue.
I moved forward, but James held me back harshly.
"Stay out of this," he said.
Rabbi Jacimus' words rang out over the noise of the stream and the grumbling of the crowd.