He didn’t look back at us but made straight for the Rat Gates. I felt a panic then. But somehow I just got caught up with the crowd and before I knew it I was going up, with that sick churning in my gut again, the crowd so thick around me and the passage so dim and tight that it seemed impossible to turn and make my way back. When we came up into the square it was the same, people jammed shoulder to shoulder so that I could only follow along, trying to stay close to Jesus in the hope I’d be safe with him. I saw now there were soldiers stationed all around the top of the colonnade and outside the fence as well, the whole place seeming like kindling ready to burst into flame, the people jostling and all the shouting and flaring tempers and then the soldiers standing guard with their fists on the handles of their clubs, ready to put us down at the least sign of any disturbance.

Jesus was heading straight for the temple. There was a defiance in him, and it occurred to me he probably no more belonged on that side of the fence than I did, being a bastard. I thought what Zadok or his like would do if he was discovered and it started to seem that was Jesus’s intention, to throw the thing in people’s faces. I imagined him going to stand right in the temple door and shouting, Here I am, to make people accept him, showing them the foolishness of using this rule or that to judge a man instead of the evidence of their own eyes. He had it in him, to do such a thing. But then I thought of the temple with all its workers and courts and crowds, and the speck we were in the huge construction of it, and knew the Zadoks of the place would simply have called out the temple guards then as if Jesus was nothing, and had him carted away.

In the end, the trouble that came to us was simpler than that—someone in the crowd recognized Jesus as the one who’d built the snow huts in the olive fields. In that throng that might have amounted to nothing more than a finger or two pointed at him before we moved on, except that we were stalled at the moment and there was time for people to take notice. Someone repeated the joke then that had somehow gone around about Jesus building the temple in an hour and someone else took offence, saying it was sacrilege. It took only an instant then, in that packed swarm, for an argument to start up. And it wasn’t long before people were shouting at one another, everyone at the edge of their patience at being stuck in the crowd and at the oppressive air and soldiers all around desecrating the Jews’ holy space.

Someone fell somehow in the crowd and a panic went through it, people starting to jostle and shove to try to get free until we were swaying like a wave. It seemed chaos was about to break out. Then without warning someone was howling beside me at the top of his lungs—it was Andrew. He’d started to flail, wildly, people falling back to get clear of him and his brother trying to grab hold of him to calm him. By then everyone was scrambling, trying to make sense of what was happening, and the soldiers assumed a riot had begun and leapt over the fence to put it down.

It took only a few moments for the soldiers to make their way through the crowd to us. People were in an uproar at the sight of them on the wrong side of the fence but they kept coming, swinging their clubs. I hardly knew what was happening by then. But somehow Jesus and a few of us had ended up cut off from the crowd when people had fallen back, and then one of the soldiers seemed ready to go for Andrew, and Simon knocked the man down. The soldiers were on us in an instant. I felt a blow to the head and things went dark, and then I was being dragged along with my arm wrenched up behind me and all I saw was a haze of blood and all I heard was a dull thundering. There was a whimpering beside me and I made out Aram’s voice, terrified and pleading, then heard a thud, and quiet. Finally we went through a gate and the muted roar of the temple square fell away, and I knew we were in the fortress.

My heart was pounding. It seemed this couldn’t be happening, that it didn’t make sense. But I could taste the cold stone of that fortress and feel the rough pavement under my feet and see other soldiers moving past, with their soldier’s stink and the rustle and clank of their gear. There was a flash of daylight from a courtyard but then right away we were marched into a narrow passage where the soldiers had to stoop to get along, with uneven walls of crumbling stone and a sewer smell and just the barest bit of light from lamps along the way. We seemed to be descending—right into the earth, from the looks of it, the walls getting damper and more oozing the further we went and the stink got stronger. I thought of the Rat Gates at the Temple Mount, but here the rats were real—I could smell them in the sewer air and hear them scratching and twitching ahead of us in that narrow shaft.

When we stopped we were in a space like a cave that seemed as if it had just been hollowed out of the dirt and rock. The only light was from a couple of sputtering lamps up against one wall, the smoke from them hanging in the air. It was the first time we’d stopped since the soldiers had taken us, and that I was able to look at the others—they’d taken Jesus and Aram, and the two Simons.

Jesus looked the worst of the lot, his ear bloodied and a purpling lump above his brow. But the instant he was able to look the soldiers in the face he said, in Greek, “There’s been a mistake.” For his trouble he got a blow to the back of the neck, and the rest of us got the same, to make us kneel. In all this not a word had been said to us in any language we could understand.

Two brutes who had been lurking in the shadows came towards us now carrying manacles and leg irons. They were dressed in plain sackcloth and big and ugly as beasts, with a smell to them of excrement and something worse, as if they’d started to rot. In an instant they had us shackled, joining Aram and the Rock and me in one group and Jesus and the Zealot in another, hammering the pins into place with a mallet. I thought they’d hand us back over to the soldiers then, but without a word the soldiers turned and departed the way they’d come. It came home to me then how bad things were for us—here we were at the end of nowhere at the mercy of these animals who didn’t know if we were killers or rebels or just petty thieves, so that it seemed we’d been thrown to the bottom of a pit to be forgotten.

The two got us to our feet using wooden prods with the ends sharpened to points, as if we were goats they were herding. One of them held each of us in turn while the other frisked us for purses, though the only one they found was my own, which they pocketed. Then they marched us forward to a rusting iron gate at the far end of the cave that gave onto darkness, looking like a passage into the very bowels of beyond. In the light of a lamp near the gate I noticed shapes etched into the floor with bits of bone scattered over them—we’d interrupted the two at a game of jackals and hounds.

They took us through the gate, one loping ahead with a lamp and the other prodding us from behind. The stench that hit us then stopped my breath. We were in a man-wide corridor with cells coming off it, and you could feel the excrement under your feet and see the runnels of it coming from under the wood doors of the cells and pooling in a trench that ran along the middle of the corridor. That was the only sign of anything human in the place—otherwise it was quiet as death along there, and all you could hear was maybe the faintest wheezing of breath like a wind blowing in from the other side.

The warder in front opened a cell door. I wanted Jesus to say something to give us hope, but in an instant the warder had shoved his prod hard against Jesus’s side and pushed him and the Zealot into the cell, clapping the door shut and ramming the bolt into place. We seemed lost then, with Jesus gone. Aram and the Rock and I were shoved into the next cell over, finding ourselves suddenly in total dark, tangled in a heap in our chains so that we could hardly get free of one another. The cell didn’t seem to stretch more than a few paces in any direction and we kept banging up against stone, so that we ended with our limbs all entwined and our bodies hunched against whatever piece of wall or ceiling or floor we could lean up against for support. To make matters worse, the floor was pitched towards the door, to keep the excrement running out, and was so soiled with old filth you couldn’t keep a grip on it against the slope.

I couldn’t have said how much time we passed in there. At one point Aram started his moaning again, but dreamily, as if he was muttering in his sleep, so that it seemed he hadn’t yet recovered from the blow he’d got. Finally he slumped up against me as if he’d drifted off, and then for the longest time we just crouched there in that stinking cell in total silence. At one point one of our gatekeepers came along and passed a little saucer of water through a portal at the bottom of our door and shone a bit of light in so we could drink, the Rock and I sharing what was there since we couldn’t wake Aram. But then hours went by, and nothing happened. It was impossible to sleep in there but also to think or talk or do anything, because every bone in you hurt and you could hardly breathe for the stink and you were as hungry and thirsty and tired as you thought you could get. But still at the bottom you had the feeling that as bad as things were, they might get worse.

Then out of the darkness I heard a voice, strange after all that silence, and it took me a moment to realize it was the Rock.

“We’ve been in here a while now,” was all he said, in that fisherman’s way, as if he was sitting at home waiting for supper to come instead of rotting there at the bottom of a hole with no hope. He was quiet again, and then he asked me where I came from. It was the first time he’d ever put a question to me. I told him about the farm and he wanted to know how many sheep we had, and did we plant barley or wheat, and did we ever go fishing on the lake. And talking that way with him, casually as if we were sitting under the stars or sharing a drink of wine, I almost forgot for a few instants where I was, and it became a little bearable to be there in that place.

By and by, without any push from me, he got to talking about himself, about his two boys and his girl and the one girl who’d died not long after she was born, and about his two boats, and the size of them, and how many fish they could hold when they were full. And then he got on to Jesus, and how Mary’s father, who he’d had a lot of business with, had come by one day and said there was a teacher he knew, and could Simon put him up. And how it had seemed to him then when he’d got to know the man that he wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met before, and when he talked you had to listen, and the things he said made you feel all of a sudden as if you’d been sleeping all of your life until he had told you, Wake up.

I’d never known the Rock to string together so many words that way, and it changed my view of him, to hear the thoughts that went on in him. But still he seemed a bit of a child, the way he’d been so taken with Jesus—seeing all the wonders that Jesus had started to do, curing lepers and chasing away devils, he and some of the others, though they’d kept it to themselves, had started to think this might be the saviour the Jews had been waiting for. It didn’t take a wise man to see the Rock’s hopes were too high—Jesus had his few hundred who followed him but from inside that cell the number seemed paltry, and even if the lot of them had banded together they couldn’t have saved him from where he sat now.

A lot of things looked different from inside that cell. There was Jesus’s god—out in the open, when you were standing in the golden glow of his temple door, you felt overwhelmed with the greatness of him. But a few hundred paces away, his temple was nothing and you were in a Roman dungeon, not at the centre of the world but just the smallest scrap at the edge of the empire. Everyone knew how the Jews had only been beaten all their years, and beaten again, back to Sargon the Great. Who, then, was their god when he’d given them only fifty acres of desert and rock for their home and let a teacher who praised him every day of his life end up locked up like a common criminal.

The Rock, though, was ready to put all the blame to Jesus now—he had made a mistake, he said, since Jesus could never be a saviour for the Jews, being a bastard. And he’d kept turning the matter over in his head and still had to think that Jesus had cheated them, and got his power not from their god but from the devils, and so had been cast down in the end.

I didn’t know what to say to him. Everything about Jesus had started to skew in my head by then, how he was always turning things around as if he wasn’t any different in the end from the Sons of Light, preying on people’s weaknesses and warping their minds to accept all his strange notions and ways. Someone like Huram would have spotted a Jesus from miles off and stayed clear—the way things had been was the way they should be, and anyone telling you differently had his eye on your freedom or your purse. But I thought of the comfort I’d taken from Jesus, and the thoughts he’d opened me up to, and how in front of my eyes he had raised a man from the dead, and it seemed a grave loss to me that I should stop believing in him now, at a time when believing in something was all I could look to for hope.

I hardly knew how I passed the time after that, or if there was any thought in my head except that I had to get out of that cell, or die. It was as if I’d been dropped into a well and was drowning there in the water and dark, hanging always just an instant from choking. Then just when I imagined I would have to smash my own skull for relief, the door opened and one of our warders was standing there. Without a word he grabbed my arm, since I was nearest the door, and dragged me into the corridor, pressing me to the wall while his partner dragged out Aram. They knocked the pin out that connected Aram to the Rock and pushed the two of us, joined at the leg, out through the gate, though we were so numbed and cramped and stiff by then we could hardly stand.

One of them led us off then through a maze of tiny passageways, each one as close and stinking and dim as the next. At the back of my mind I was hoping that any minute we’d turn a corner and be at the front gates, and our warder would just push us out into the street and say, On your way. But it seemed just as likely that they meant to kill us. I wasn’t pleased at the thought of going out with Aram—one look at him when we got to the other side, and the spirits would send the both of us off to the rankest swamps. He was fully alert now, his eyes darting with panic, and I could see the spot on the side of his skull where he’d been hit, the hair there clotted with blood.

We moved upwards at some point, to judge by the air, coming eventually to a wide corridor with doorways coming off it. Our warder jabbed us through one of these into what seemed a largish room, though the light was too dim to see into the corners. Two men sat behind a table, one bearded and narrow-eyed and thin, with the look of a trader you knew would get the better of you, and the other dwarfish and a bit humpbacked, though a standing lamp burning behind them made it hard to see them.

The bearded man grew angry at our warder for bringing us in two at a time, but the warder just shrugged him off. It took me a moment to understand what was going on with them—the fellow at the table was a Jew. I saw now the little box he had strapped to his arm, that Jews kept their prayers in, though it seemed strange for him to announce the thing that way in such a place. He told us to kneel and made us say our names, which the humpback beside him copied down on a scroll. It was the first time in my life, as far as I knew, that anyone had ever done such a thing, written down my name, and it gave me the strangest feeling, as if I’d been fixed there on that scroll for all time.

What happened next was hard to follow. The examiner didn’t make any accusations but just began to put questions to us matter-of-factly on one thing and another, where we were from and how we’d got to the city and who we were with, now and then coming back to things we’d said as if to confirm them. But each time he came back to a thing, though often it was innocent enough, he’d seem to give a small weight of suspicion to it. In Aram’s case that had the effect of tripping him up—he’d say one thing and then contradict it, lying in the way of someone who had something to hide and didn’t know what it was that would betray him.

The examiner pretended hardly to notice Aram’s mistakes. But slowly his attention shifted entirely over to him, almost as if in a friendly way, as a Jew to another. He seemed especially interested in Jesus, already aware he was among the arrested and wondering what he taught and who his followers were and so on. Aram, to his credit, called him a man of peace and said he owed him a debt for his help, and he would have done well to stop at that. But the examiner, by way of stoking Aram’s natural boastfulness, encouraged him to tell what he knew more intimately. It was here that Aram showed he was a fool—he began to relate bits of gossip then to show off his authority, the scandal Jesus had had with his women and the enemies he’d made and the like, as if he’d forgotten we were in a Roman prison. And the examiner just let Aram go on like that, with nods and half-smiles, until Aram’s tongue grew looser and his stories broader, and he made the mistake of mentioning Judas.

The examiner’s back straightened at the name. He gave a nod to the humpback to write and then his questions grew more pointed—what did this Judas look like, and where did he come from, and how did he and Jesus meet. Aram was seeming a little alarmed—he’d mentioned Judas in his same loose-tongued way, even boasting that he’d thought him a spy, and must have been frightened now at what he’d started.

“Was he with you on the journey?” the examiner asked him, and Aram said he’d left us at Jericho. When the examiner pressed him for a reason Aram couldn’t say why, but mentioned the confusion there and the searches.

It was clear Judas was known to the man. There was a new energy to him now and he seemed anxious to move on, and he rose suddenly and called a guard in from the corridor. Aram seemed as surprised as I was when he had the guard remove Aram’s shackles.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Aram said, afraid at being singled out. But the examiner said, “I’ll take care of you.”

The examiner took him away then. I had a sinking feeling, seeing them go off. Meanwhile I’d been left to the guard, who motioned me up and led me back into the castle’s maze of passageways. I was sick at the thought of going back to my cell. But suddenly the guard shoved me through a gate and into the out-of-doors, where I saw it was the dead of night, and for a moment I thought that I’d got my wish and was free, and my heart jumped to smell the air and see the stars above my head.

When my eyes adjusted, though, I saw we were in the castle’s courtyard. In the dark it looked to be just a large empty square, cold like the underside of a stone, the castle walls looming up in every direction. There was a fire in a corner, and some soldiers around it warming themselves, and then some paces away a kind of wheeled cage of the sort you might keep animals in during a spectacle, which my keeper pushed me off towards. When we got near I saw it was full of men, seeming heaped there as if someone had just driven the thing through the streets and hauled people in to fill it. They were mostly asleep, one up against the other, and there was a smell coming off them that carried in the night air, a human stink of excrement and sweat that was almost reassuring now.

Before my guard shoved me in with them he took a dipper of water from a barrel near the cage door and handed it to me. Stale as it was, I was grateful for it. Then the cage itself seemed the finest palace after the cell I’d been in—there was air blowing through and a view of the stars and those bodies to keep you warm, and I wedged myself in between two of them and settled in for sleep. I felt a bit of hope then. It seemed the first time since we’d been arrested that I could manage to clear my head. I thought how different things looked at the end of this day than they had at the beginning, and how that morning I’d been sleeping next to Jesus in our olive grove as innocent as a lamb, the way it felt now. Then I thought back to what I’d been on the farm before I’d set out, and it seemed I’d been just a child then. I’d come chasing after Jesus looking for his special kingdom, where all my troubles would be done, and instead had ended up in a Roman prison. And I had to ask who Jesus was who could lead me on such a luckless journey, and if he wasn’t the devil the Rock had said, or if there was something in all this I’d take away and understand that would make it seem worth the passage.

It seemed I’d hardly closed my eyes before it was morning. Some of the guards came around to throw water on us to wake us, then lined us up in rows in the courtyard and gave us all a scoop of water to drink and a small loaf of barley bread, the first bit of food I’d had since the morning before. We were a motley lot, I saw now, lined up there in the grey of dawn, some beggars and some in good coats, some looking like they’d been dragged from their own comfortable beds just that morning and others like they’d been holed up in that cage for weeks. I couldn’t make out Jesus or any of the others in the group. But when they started to lead us away I got a flash of a familiar face, and was just able to assure myself, before we passed back into the castle, that it was Jerubal.

I felt a thrill go through me—my first thought was that it was sure now that we’d be freed, since I’d never known any hardship that Jerubal hadn’t been able to find the way out of. But then we were back in the castle’s dark corridors and the thing didn’t seem so certain. I couldn’t get another look at him since we were being marched in a file, up a rough stairway and into a strange hall with a large room on one side, separated from us by a marble rail, and a series of barred cells on the other, which the guards put us into as we came up. There were window slits at the far end of the cells, angled narrowly into the stone, and people made for them at once, desperate for a view of the outside. I managed to get my own glimpse—we had a view right out over the temple square, the temple itself rising up almost directly in front of us. Though it was early, the square was already crowded, people starting to line up with their sheep to get them blessed for the feast. I almost envied those sheep then—at least they knew what was coming to them.

It was my good luck that among the last few they shoved into my own cell was Jerubal. “It’s Simon the Wise!” he said when he saw me, with his grin, and I thought I’d break into tears then at seeing his face. He said he was in for next to nothing, just for taking the side of a hawker in the street who the soldiers had been harassing—it looked as if they were going around picking up any beggar they could lay their hands on, to show the governor they’d squashed the plot. Half the men in our cell, he said, were the same as him, pickpockets and the like who’d been hauled into the castle and whipped until they’d confessed to being rebels. He showed me the welts on his own back but said they hadn’t got anything from him, so he thought he was safe.

“By tonight we’ll be out having our mutton like everyone else,” he said. And to hear it from him, I could almost believe it was true.

We passed a long while in that cell, the only sign of activity the sound of footsteps and chains as more prisoners, it seemed, were brought into the adjoining ones. Jerubal and I took our turns at the window—the crowd had grown vast now, separated into groups by wooden barricades, and people had started moving triple file into the temple courts to slaughter their sheep. It was an amazing spectacle, the people coming and coming and the priests, all in coloured robes now, moving back and forth to splash blood against the altar and toss bucketfuls of entrails into the fire. And the lines stretched all through the temple square, snaking around the barricades, so you saw it would just go on and on and on.

Some of the temple assistants had lined up along the ramparts of the temple courtyard and started to sing, their voices carrying above the hum of the crowd. The men in our cell got down on their knees then and started mumbling along with the words. One of the guards called for quiet, but the men kept up their singing. It must have hurt those men, to be captive here and see almost the whole of their race gathered out in the temple square. There was nothing in my life to compare to such a thing—the festivals in Hippus or Gergesa seemed only amusements next to this, an excuse for drinking, offered up to gods whose names changed each time the emperor did.

At some point there was a sudden flurry of movement on the other side of the marble rail. Slaves had come in carrying lamps and chairs and even incense pots and statues of the gods. With the light you saw the room was finer than it had seemed, with painted pictures on the walls and coloured stone on the floor. A few men in white shirts drifted into the room, checking things and looking important and yelling at the slaves, and then the corridor started to fill as well, with some of the governor’s Samaritan guards and other men, more unsavoury-looking, who came strolling past the cells peering into them as if they were picking out livestock. There were assistants along with them toting scrolls in every pocket, and I wasn’t surprised when my and Aram’s examiner showed up as well, with his humpback.

Things got confusing then. Without warning it seemed there were a hundred things going on at once, men being pulled out of the cells and scrolls being passed from the scribes to the examiners and back again or sometimes over the railing to the men in white. Then a trumpet sounded and another line of Samaritans filed in, on the far side of the railing, and behind them came the governor himself, though in a plain linen robe as if he’d just got up from his bed. The men in white bowed so low their shirts touched the floor when he came in, though the examiners were more halfhearted, as if he didn’t matter as much on their side of the rail. Meanwhile a curse went up from one of the cells at the sight of him and quickly spread to the rest, though some of the Samaritans banged their clubs against the cell bars, smashing the fingers of anyone clinging there, until people had quieted down.

One by one, then, men were dragged out of their cells to face the governor. If they’d made a confession—and you’d see a scroll being handed over to one of the men in white—they’d hardly have a chance to so much as say their names before they were dragged away again, though they might be so bloodied and blue that it was clear the thing had been beaten out of them. More than a dozen were taken away like that. Most of them seemed people who had just been taken off the street, the way Jerubal had said, one whose indictment said he was just a baker in the lower city, another a tanner. And the whole time there was a babble of talk going on, the examiners speaking Aramaic and the men in white Greek and the prisoners crying out when they were convicted and the soldiers shouting for quiet.

When they’d finished with those who had confessed they moved on to the ones who’d been betrayed. Now the charge sheet was just the statement of some witness who didn’t even appear, and each of them read almost exactly the same, how so and so had conspired against the Romans and had consorted with certain men—and there was a shifting group of names that was given—who were known to be rebels. After three or four men had been dispensed with in this way, Aram’s examiner moved to the front and Jesus was brought out from one of the cells.

It looked as if he’d passed a hard time, his face swollen and black and his coats in tatters, lines of blood showing where he must have been flogged. It seemed an obscenity to see him reduced like that, so that I could hardly bear to look at him. But still he cut a figure, standing there in front of the governor straight-backed and not afraid to look him in the eye. One of the men in white asked for his name and he gave it as Jesus of Galilee. Then he said straight out, speaking directly to the governor, “You’re either a fool, if you believe what you’ve heard here is the truth, or a scoundrel, if you’re only pretending to.”

There was an uproar from the cells at this, because Jesus was the first one who’d had the courage to speak his mind. One of the Samaritans hit him with his club, but the shouts only grew louder then. Jesus in all this simply stood there and said nothing, though the blood oozed from his lip where he’d been hit.

We all thought the governor would simply have him carted away. But he had taken on a bitter sort of smile as if to say he would indulge the man, to show he couldn’t be bested by a Jew. He looked to one of the men in white and said to him in Greek, “Ask the man what he means to say by the truth.”

But Jesus answered back, in Greek as well, “Don’t ask for something you can’t understand.”

The governor’s smile faded then.

“What do you mean to say by that?” he snapped. But Jesus wouldn’t answer him.

The governor was furious. He called the examiner up at once then to read the charges. But the examiner looked uneasy—instead of reading out the same charge as the rest, he said the man’s only crime, from what he could learn, was that he had associated with a certain Judas of Keriot, a suspected rebel.

“Isn’t that crime enough?” the governor said to him.

“We could get no confession,” the examiner said. “They say he teaches peace.”

“Do you defend him because you’re a Jew?”

The governor didn’t wait then for the examiner to present evidence but turned at once to Jesus.

“The charge is treason,” he said. “How do you answer it?”

But still Jesus stood there and wouldn’t say a word.

Everyone had gone silent, waiting to see what would happen. The silence had the effect of making the governor look more of a fool—there was nothing he could do to make Jesus bend to him.

Finally, almost spitting the thing out, the governor said, “Take him!” and one of the guards led him off.

There was another uproar from the cells at this, and the Samaritans banged their clubs against the bars again. The governor sat there pretending to take no notice—he’d made his decision, and his word was the law. If he was nervous at what Jesus had said, that the trial was a farce, he wouldn’t show it.

It was just as the din was dying away that Jerubal said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “If it’s the truth the governor’s after, the truth is he’s an ass.”

Everyone broke into laughter then. But the governor wouldn’t be made a laughingstock again—in an instant, white-faced with anger, he had Jerubal hauled out from our cell and brought before him.

“Say your name!” he said to him.

Jerubal, though, without even pausing, said, “Jesus of Galilee.”

There was more laughter, but muted now—it seemed he was going too far. It was clear the governor was almost ready to have him run through on the spot for his insolence. One of the men in white said to Jerubal this wasn’t a joke, and to say his name if he valued his life. But Jerubal, as calm as still water, said again, “It’s Jesus of Galilee.”

Who knew what was going on in Jerubal’s head then, to be so brazen when there couldn’t be any good in it for him. For a moment it seemed no one on the Roman side quite knew what to make of him, even the Samaritans standing dumb, not sure if they should strike him or let him be. The governor, exasperated, finally said to him, “Fool, do you want to die?” But Jerubal just stood there and didn’t answer him.

The governor scowled then as if he’d lost his appetite for the whole affair. But finally he gave the smallest nod and the guards took Jerubal away.

We all fell quiet at that, stunned somehow at the way the thing had soured. Even the governor was put off—he got up from his chair now and ordered his slaves to clear the room.

“What about the rest?” one of the men in white asked, and the governor said, “Just flog them and let them go.” And he gathered his robe and left the room, so that his Samaritans had to scramble to follow.

For a moment it was as if he’d sucked all the air out of the room along with him. No one was sure what to do, not the examiners or the men in white or the guards who were left behind, and those of us in the cells couldn’t say if we’d heard right and would be freed or were just going to be left to rot there. But finally someone gave an order and the cells were opened and we were marched back down to the courtyard, where we were lined up in front of a whipping post to wait for our forty lashes, under a sky too cloudy to tell the time of day.

I was in a daze by then, hardly certain what was what, and it was a while before I noticed that the Rock and the Zealot were ahead of me in the line. I managed to catch the Rock’s eye but he turned as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. The Zealot had that stare animals got when they’d been caged too long, clouded as though their will had died. He was about the only one who didn’t flinch when they whipped him, taking his strokes as if he deserved them.

Afterwards they made us wait in a corner of the courtyard before letting us go. I’d never been flogged before and felt as if my back was on fire. I went to the Simons but for the longest time we just stood there together without speaking. The Rock looked ashamed now at what he’d said to me about Jesus in our cell.

“Maybe they’ll let another group out later on,” he said finally, as if he hadn’t understood yet what Jesus was probably in for. But the Zealot seemed to know better, his eye catching mine then with the black look of no hope.

The truth was neither of them had followed the trial well, not speaking much Greek. They hadn’t gathered it was Aram who’d betrayed Jesus and assumed it was Judas, since his was the name they’d made out during the charges—I ought to have set them straight then but didn’t want to admit I’d knelt there beside Aram while he’d sealed Jesus’s fate, and hadn’t done anything. There was no sign of Aram in that courtyard—it looked as if he’d been the one, in the end, that they’d just taken to the gate and let go.

I kept turning over in my mind what had happened to Jerubal. Here was a man who knew every trick for saving his skin, yet he’d just stood there on his pride as if he hardly cared for his life. It turned out it hadn’t been for nothing—what they’d done, he and Jesus together, had probably saved the rest of us. It was as if they’d planned it, to offer themselves as the victims. But it seemed too much to imagine that Jerubal could think in that way, or that something of Jesus had come off on him until he had reached the point where he’d said, This is the cup I won’t swallow.

I’d already set my mind to what I would do the moment they let me out of the gates of that castle, which was to leave the city and head for home. That was the plan I’d made when I’d been in my cell with Aram and the Rock, thinking back then to what the flowers would be smelling like on the farm, and how the barley would be coming up for harvest, and to the son there who was mine, even if I couldn’t claim him. And I could see that as bad as things had been for me there, they’d since gotten a hundred times worse, and it was seeming the wisest advice to give a man that he stay home and tend to his own business.

Didn’t it happen, though, just when I could taste freedom on my lips, the lot of us standing there in the courtyard not even minding the whipping we’d got as long as they let us go, that one of the captains gave an order and a few soldiers came around and started picking men out of the group. I could see they were going for younger ones so I hunched myself and put my head down. But sure enough one of them grabbed me and pulled me out, and then we were made to stand there, the six of us they’d picked, while the rest of the group was led off towards the gates. Simon the Rock could hardly bring himself to look back at me for the shame of leaving me there, and then when the gates opened up and I saw the rooftops of the city, and the holiday banners hanging from windows and the smoke coming up from people’s fires, it brought tears to my eyes. But we got just that smallest glimpse of the outside before the group had gone and the gates were closed again, leaving us stranded there with our guards.

We were put back in the cage. We tried to find out from the soldiers why we’d been kept behind, but they pretended not to understand us. Night was coming on and they brought some stew around for our supper, with actually a bit of meat in it, or at least some gristle and bone. But all I could think was how Jerubal had said we’d be having our mutton by then. I got to speaking a bit with one of the other men in the group and he said most of those who’d been sent down would probably get sold off as slaves, and end up in Rome or the like. That made me feel better—I thought Jerubal would be in his element in Rome and would wind up at the emperor’s house, or instantly find the way to be freed.

The group of us didn’t talk much—for one thing you never knew who might be a spy, and then the others saw I wasn’t a Jew and kept their distance after that. But with some of those men you could see the soldiers hadn’t made a mistake in bringing them in—they had a look in their eyes as if they were ready to slit a Roman’s throat the first chance they got. It was probably just good luck for them that they hadn’t come up in front of the governor. One of them, not much more than my own age, with just a wisp of beard like a goat, had that air that sent the cold up you, and I could see the others were a little afraid of him, and were watching what they said as much on his account as on mine.

I didn’t sleep much, because of the whipping. Well into the night I could hear the feast going on on the other side of the walls, a thin echo of music and singing and talk that gave me an ache. In the morning we got some food again and then they took us into a storehouse off the courtyard, full of manacles and stocks and a big pile of raw timbers, some longer and some short. They made us carry a stack of these into the yard, half a dozen of each, and then we just sat in the courtyard waiting, one of the guards watching over us. I didn’t have any notion what was happening but I’d noticed the others were looking grim. I asked one about the timbers; he looked at me as if I’d just crawled from my mother’s womb.

“They’re crosses,” he said, his voice dead.

It was dreary out, grey and clammy and damp. Then while we sat there a drizzle started up, and our guard let us move against the wall to keep dry. Not long afterwards they brought a line of prisoners out into the yard, chained up in a row, and my heart sank when I saw Jesus was there, and then a couple of men behind him, Jerubal.

I could hardly believe what I was seeing—these were the ones they meant to crucify. In the rain the whole lot had a miserable sameness to them as if they deserved to be together, wretched and battered and worn down. There were seven of them, all from the trial—two looked like genuine thugs and two others were Galileans and one a foreigner, so that it seemed they’d picked this set so as not to raise people’s sympathies, only their fear. Even Jesus, put in with that pack, didn’t look much of a Jew, fine-boned and fair the way he was, and with Jerubal added in you had the sense it was only outsiders and renegades who wanted revolt, and not upstanding Jews. The group of them had been washed a bit to get the blood off them so you couldn’t tell how badly they’d been treated. But still they made an ugly sight, and half of them with a dead, crazed look in their eyes as if they were too stunned even to understand what was happening to them.

They were taken to the whipping post and unshackled and stripped to be scourged. What we’d had the day before was nothing next to what these got, the whip split to a dozen strands tipped with nails, each lash taking flesh with it. But it made it better for them, in the end—the scourging started them dying, to shorten the time that they hung. I thought Jerubal would be flayed to the bone but he seemed to hold up as well as the rest, though naked like that in the rain he looked as rickety and frail as an old man.

They let them put their shirts back on afterwards, so as not to give offense when they marched through the streets, then shackled them again and hung placards around their necks stating their crimes, though I couldn’t read them. Afterwards they brought the group of them over to the timbers. I was still by the wall nearby, and from up close I could see the whipping had taken more out of Jerubal than I’d been able to tell from a distance. Then he caught sight of me and I hardly knew what to do—I almost wanted to turn away, to save him the shame of being seen like that. But he actually winked at me then and gave me a bit of a grin, as if to say, he had a plan.

With their irons on, all the group could manage to carry were their own crossbeams. It was why we others had been held back—to carry the uprights. They’d made a mistake in the numbers, though, and only planned for six, and the captain of the guards, who looked nervous and green, shouted to his men to recruit another helper from the streets. There wasn’t any question of the soldiers helping out—they thought it a curse to carry the crosses. In the end they managed to round up a foreigner for the thing, an Egyptian who was promised a denarius for his trouble, and after he’d hauled two more timbers from the storehouse everyone took up their load in the rain, and we started out.

The soldiers had lined themselves up on either side of us like a wall, riding the prisoners hard to keep them moving. Another row of soldiers stood at the bottom of the steps that came down from the fortress gates, so that as we came out to the street we seemed an army moving in. In that crowd I hardly noticed at first that Jesus’s two brothers were standing off to the side with one of the women from Jesus’s troupe, Salome. They caught sight of Jesus in the line, but I couldn’t read what was in their faces then, confusion or horror or simple incomprehension. Almost at once one of the brothers hurried off with Salome, but the other followed behind us, keeping a distance as if unsure what his place was.

A crooked avenue rose from the castle stairs into the bazaar, and we started along it in the rain. It went up in steps, with grooves cut into them for the merchants to move their carts, and it was a job for that gang to get along them, chained and weighed down as they were and the pavement slick with wet. The shops along there were closed since it was still a holy time for the Jews, but when the word went around of the prisoners coming through, people started to poke their heads out of their doorways or over their rooftops. From an alley we went past someone spit at one of the soldiers, then disappeared before anyone could grab him. But mostly we moved along in an eerie peacefulness, because of the hush of the rain and the sleep still in people’s eyes and the sight of us passing through with our battalion of soldiers and our line of men heading for death.

With the soldiers flanking us there wasn’t room for people to follow alongside. But soon enough a tail had started to form behind us, mainly of boys at first but then others. Jesus’s brother was keeping pace but still hanging back, falling in behind the rest. Then after a while I noticed the second brother had joined up with him again along with another who looked older. This one looked clearly broken, chafing like a tethered animal at the back of the crowd as if he might surge forward at any moment to get Jesus free.

Salome had come back as well, with two other women in veils against the rain—Mary and Jesus’s mother. It was strange to see them together like that. They looked like mother and daughter, both small and dark and with eyes that burned into you, the same wildness in them then as they searched the line to make out Jesus there, hoping against hope it wasn’t true. When they picked him out, his mother’s eyes went dead and she turned away, but Mary’s only got wilder. It was the different way they saw him, as a woman and a mother. I thought of his mother outside the Rat Gates, and the look in her eyes when she’d seen Jesus with his followers and his dirty coat, and knew she must blame herself now since she’d made him what he was.

We were getting tired with our loads, which seemed heavier by the instant in that rain, so I was sure my back was about to break. For the prisoners it was worse, after the flogging they’d got, the backs of their shirts just a wash of blood. Then just as we were coming to where the street jogged around towards one of the city gates, Jerubal slipped and fell, crumpling like a sapling under the weight of his beam. For an instant I thought he’d planned it, that it was part of some scheme. But right away the soldiers were on him to get up and I saw it was real, because the minute he tried to right himself he fell again in a heap, screaming with the pain.

Jesus was chained behind him and in the confusion managed to drop his beam and crouch to him before the soldiers could stop him.

“His leg’s broken,” he said, feeling around the bone there. The captain looked as if he didn’t know what to do, and Jesus said, “I can help him.”

The street had widened there near the gate and a crowd had been able to form around us, watching. The captain, not wanting to appear an animal in front of it, gave a nod to Jesus and had his men undo his and Jerubal’s irons. Jesus called for a stick from the crowd and someone passed him a walking stick, which he broke in half. Then he started to shift the bone around gently with his hands while Jerubal, hardly seeming to feel the movement, sat there on the wet pavement. After massaging the thing for a few moments like that, Jesus tore a strip off his own shirt and used it to tie the two halves of the stick to Jerubal’s leg as a splint.

The crowd had fallen quiet, watching Jesus work there in the rain. He hadn’t done any miracle, maybe just what any doctor would do, but still they could see there was something in him, that he wasn’t what they’d expect in someone condemned. I saw his mother looking on, still at the back of the crowd, and how she watched him as if she was seeing him for the first time. Likely she hadn’t known anything of him but the stories people told, and so had been afraid he’d become a delinquent or worse. But now she saw him with Jerubal, not just the skill he had but the dignity.

Jesus helped Jerubal up and called for another walking stick from the crowd, which someone passed in, and Jerubal managed to limp forward a bit with it. But he looked helpless now. Seeing him seemed to bring home to me suddenly that all this was real, that Jesus and Jerubal were headed for the cross and no trick or plan would save them. It was a solace that they had each other, at least—I saw that Jesus was stronger than Jerubal and Jerubal needed him, that Jerubal had stepped beyond what he could manage but Jesus was ready for this, as if all his life had prepared him for it.

There wasn’t any thought of getting Jerubal’s crossbeam onto his shoulders again, and the captain of the guard was looking more and more distraught at how the march was going. His eye went down the line of those of us in back and quickly settled on me.

“Tie it to his upright,” he said to his men, and they scrambled then to join Jerubal’s beam to my own. We started up again but looking less impressive now than when we’d set out, the soldiers churlish at the setbacks and the steady downpour and the imposing line of fetters and chains that had joined the prisoners broken now where Jerubal had been unshackled and was hobbling along on his cane.

We passed through the gate. There was a bit of a hill there rising up beneath the city wall where they did the executions, just an outcropping of mealy rock with the yellowed look of old bone, ringed round at the base with a stone fence and completely bare except for a couple of bushes and withered trees. Off to one side, closed off behind its own low wall, was a small graveyard with a few humps of tomb carved into the chalky stone where the convicts were put after they’d died. There were a few soldiers on the hill carving out holes for the uprights, or more likely clearing old ones, since you could see the place was already riddled with holes from the regular killing the Romans probably did there.

We were marched in through a small gate in the stone fence, half the soldiers staying behind to keep watch over the crowd and the other half staying with the prisoners. The hill didn’t rise up more than forty paces, but still it was hard getting up it because of the slick of dirt that covered the stone, slippery as ice in the rain. I was sweating with the effort but at the same time chilled to the bone, and so numbed I could hardly feel my legs. When we got to the top and the captain told us to drop our loads I couldn’t bend enough to get free of mine, and one of the soldiers had to lift it off me.

The prisoners had been unshackled and lined up in a row facing out towards the crowd, the wall of the city rising up wet and grey behind them. They looked ready for death, rain-drenched and hobbled by their march and their shirts still dripping blood from their flogging. But Jesus hadn’t lost that look of being apart. I overheard one of the Galileans then, looking already as pale as death, confess to Jesus that he was a murderer, and that he could see what a thing he’d done to take a life, now that his own was being taken. But Jesus said, “If you’ve understood that, you’re already forgiven,” which seemed to comfort the fellow.

Those were the last words I heard Jesus speak, because our group was herded away, now that our work was done. Before we were led off the hill one of the soldiers came with a bag of coins—it seemed we were all entitled to payment for our efforts. The Jews refused it to a man, not even deigning so much as to say a word but just shaking their heads. But the soldier just shrugged them off and offered to split the lot between me and the Egyptian. I had to think then—I hadn’t a penny to my name, all my coin pinched by the warders in the castle. In the end I took just the denarius that was due to me, and let the Egyptian have the rest.

I saw now that the crowd looking on was not as large as it had seemed in those narrow streets—there were a few hundred in all, and half of them just urchins. It didn’t seem much when I thought of the crowds I’d seen lined up in the temple square to kill their lambs, the thousands and the tens of thousands of them, so that it made what was happening here appear insignificant and small. But just beyond where we were was the camp the Romans had laid out for the pilgrims, and people had started filtering in from it despite the rain to see what was happening. It was in amidst them that I made out Simon the Rock, drifting in hunched and alone towards the wall at the bottom of the hill and looking as lost as I’d ever seen a man.

I went over to him. I hardly knew what to say to him and just stood there, and he looked at me with such a blank stare that he might never have laid eyes on me before.

I asked what had happened to the Zealot.

“He went off,” was all he said, and I imagined him drinking himself half to death, or worse.

It turned out most of our group had fled at the news of Jesus’s arrest, even among Jesus’s inner circle, and those who had stayed Simon had sent home. It was just the two of us left and the women, somewhere in the crowd.

The rain hadn’t let up. On the hill, four soldiers had set to work on the crosses with Roman efficiency, chiselling niches into the beams to lock them together and binding them with rope and nails. Then they laid them out in a row, each to its hole, to ready them for their load.

They brought the prisoners over one by one, since it was just the same four soldiers who were doing the work, two to hold the men in place and two with hammers. One of the Galileans went first, and he just took up his position on the wood on his own, with a quietness that chilled you. The soldiers took his measure, so a peg could be fastened to the upright to rest his weight on, and then his arms were stretched out along the crossbeam with a soldier holding each and the spikes were nailed in at the wrists. The first blow was the one that got a scream but it was also the easiest, since it was only flesh to pass through. Then there were just the grunts of swallowed pain and the thump of the nails sinking into the wood.

The soldiers worked their way along the line like that, thundering away with their hammers as if building some infernal machine. They showed the same efficiency they had in putting the crosses together, attaching the peg and then hammering the wrists down, in unison, and then doing the feet, one over the other, with hardly a breath in between to break their rhythm. But the more they went along the more steeped they were in blood, despite the rain and a rag they carried to wipe themselves, so that it was like a dream to watch them, where suddenly some normal, innocent thing turned into a horror. And all this, too, like the flogging, was a kindness to the men, since it helped them to die, instead of leaving them to hang alive for days while their limbs turned green and their eyes were plucked by the birds. It seemed the Romans had devised the perfect way to kill a man, with such a mix of cruelty and kindness you couldn’t fault them either way.

After the first Galilean it was his companion who was up, then Jesus and Jerubal. Jesus wasn’t any different than the rest, crying out with the pain—he was made of flesh like them, which was what such treatment reduced you to, just skin and blood and bone and the ache of them. It was strange to see him that way, as if all of his notions, all of his sayings and his stories, counted for nothing now, and it was only his animal nature that mattered.

Because of his leg Jerubal had to be laid out by the soldiers, who took him by the arms and leaned him back to the ground. I had to look away then, though I couldn’t miss the howl of pain when they did his legs. That was the sound that stayed with me during the rest, like a wind blowing through.

It was only when the four had finished the last man that they started setting the crosses upright, two of them lifting at the crossbeam and the other two guiding the base and then heaping dirt around to secure it. The crosses went into their holes with a thump, so you were afraid the men would tear free. But there was just their cough of pain at the jolt and then they hung in eerie suspension, their feet only a few spans above the ground so it seemed that with the smallest effort they might step down from there, and walk away.

Then they were lined up on their crosses in the rain, with the grey wall of the city behind them and, above that, the black sky. Jerubal’s face was already set in what looked like the rictus of death from the pain, so that there seemed hardly a trace left in him of the grinning man I’d met in Gergesa. I wanted to think now it wasn’t so fanciful that he’d done the thing on purpose, to save some of the rest of us—it didn’t make much sense, otherwise. Maybe he’d been Jesus’s miracle, won over by him in the end like a character from one of Jesus’s stories. But it was just as likely he’d made a mistake, and had never reckoned he’d be killed.

Simon and I stood there a long while after that, staring up at the hill. Eventually the crowd started to thin and I made out not far from us, hardly a hundred paces away, Jesus’s brothers, and the women. I hadn’t picked them out since before we’d passed through the city gate. Even now, the rain had reduced them to the same mud and grey as the rest of the crowd, so that it took a moment to notice the different air that came off them. They had shuffled into two groups as if someone had sorted them, the three brothers in one, the eldest like a bulwark in the middle of them, the three women in the other. I noticed now that the mother had an arm around Mary, the two joined under the mother’s cloak as if they’d been brought to the same level, helpless like children who’d been left behind. It didn’t seem to matter any more how differently they’d seen Jesus—it had come to the same thing, in the end, that neither had got what they’d wanted from him, and now they’d lost him.

A silence seemed to hang over the group of them, as conspicuous as if it was itself a sound. I thought of the funerals I’d seen in Baal-Sarga, with the keeners who were paid to mourn, and their wailing seemed a quiet thing next to this, just the drone of the rain and then nothing.

There wasn’t much to see on the crosses after the first agony had passed and the men had settled into the bearable misery of it. Still, you couldn’t take your eyes away, looking for the twitch of a limb or a heave of breath, any smallest sign of life. Jesus’s mother was the same, and Mary beside her—you thought they’d turn away, that the pain of watching would be too great, but they stood there with their eyes fixed on Jesus as if to take in every bitter drop of his dying.

“I ought to have stood by him,” Simon said. It was a long time since he’d spoken. “It was what he taught us.”

I thought to say, Then you’d be there alongside him. But it seemed that was his point, that he’d rather be up there on the hill than watching from below.

Jerubal, on account of his leg, was the first to die. I could sense the moment it happened, though it was a while that he’d been hanging limp—one instant it was Jerubal on the cross, clinging to his last breath, and then just dead flesh. Jesus died not long afterwards. The rest hung on though it looked to be getting towards nightfall, when they’d have to be taken down, to respect Jewish law. The soldiers went around with a club then to smash their legs, so they’d slump and suffocate. It didn’t take long after that. Even before the last one had gone, the soldiers had started lowering the crosses to cart away the dead, prying their limbs from the wood with an iron wedge and then carrying them over to the graveyard nearby and heaping them all together into one of the tombs.

Mary came over to us then, her face so emptied it cut to your bone.

“We’re undone,” she said, and just fell to her knees in the mud. Simon tried to gather her up and ended by awkwardly embracing her, hulking and large against her tiny frame.

“We always came to understand the hardest things with him,” he said. “Maybe even this we’ll come to understand.”

They stood like that, Mary clinging to him, until Simon grew uneasy and said there was nothing to be done, and they should leave for home.

He looked to me to ask if I’d join them but his eyes said the opposite, wary of all I knew.

“I’ll manage on my own,” was all I said, and the truth was I only wanted to be alone then, and on my way.

They left me there and walked over to Jesus’s family, and then the group of them set off together without looking back, Simon and the older brother big-shouldered and tall in the middle of them but seeming reduced now, like mountains worn away.

The rain had stopped by then and the crowd had mostly gone, thinned down just to straggling groups of passersby coming and going from the pilgrim camp. I ought to have gone myself, but instead I just stood there watching the soldiers as they took the last of the men away. They propped the crosses haphazardly back into their holes to stand a little ominous and askew there at the top of the hill, to be left to rot, I supposed, or scavenged by someone low enough to make use of them. Finally darkness came on but I kept by my place, at the back of my head thinking that when the soldiers left I might get into the tomb where they’d put the dead and maybe clean Jerubal a bit and lay him out properly for the other side, since it seemed to fall to me to be the one to mourn him.

To make myself less conspicuous I moved off to a little hillock near the city gate, from where I had a good view, and huddled beneath some trees there. But I could see they’d left a couple of guards at the entrance to the graveyard, who were warming their hands over a fire they’d made as if they were settling in for a long stay. I supposed they didn’t want anyone claiming the bodies, which belonged to the Romans. But still I couldn’t bring myself just to be on my way.

I’d noticed a small group that was lingering in the field beneath the hill. The family of one of the other men, I imagined, with maybe the same idea as I’d had about getting into the tomb. Sure enough, as soon as the other soldiers had gone and it was just the two watching over the dead, I saw the group move off towards the graveyard and go up to the guards. There was a conversation then, though I couldn’t hear it, while the soldiers, who looked Syrian, kept peering one way and the other over their shoulders to see if they were being watched. Then they hunched away from the fire towards the dark with one of the group, growing secretive and strange, and I knew what was happening—silver was changing hands. From the smoothness of the exchange I guessed that this was probably the usual way, for those who knew how things worked—you paid your fee, and got through.

Things had happened quickly after that. A couple of the men from the group rolled aside the stone in front of the tomb, and took a brand from one of the soldiers and went in. I thought they’d just come to prepare their man and be off, but an instant later they came out of the tomb with him slumped over their shoulders. I caught only that glimpse of them before the whole group crept off into the shadows, jumping the fence at the back of the graveyard and disappearing with their load into the dark. Meanwhile the soldiers just quietly rolled the gravestone back to its place, looked over their shoulders again, and returned to their fire.

All this left me a little breathless, because of the daring of it. I was happy about the thing on Jerubal’s account—it was the sort of conniving that would have pleased him. But there was no thought of my doing the same on his own behalf, with the lowly denarius I had in my purse. Instead I went into the city and bought some supper in the streets, finally getting my mutton, which I ate sitting on the steps of the bazaar that I’d climbed up that morning, and in the end I even managed to find a bed for myself in an inn near the Dung Gate, sharing a tiny room with half a dozen sweating men, though I slept like the dead. Then in the morning, I bought up a few provisions with what I had left of my money, and set out. And except to eat and to sleep I didn’t stop until I was back home again on the farm, and in my own bed.

Quite a bit of time has passed now since all that. Huram, when I came home, just looked me up and down as if I’d only been to market, and had kept him waiting for supper because I was late, and in fact the truth of it was, though it almost passed belief, that less than a fortnight had gone by since I’d left. But things were different between us afterwards, and he had more respect, and I saw how he’d pause an instant before telling me a thing so as to put it more as to a brother than to a slave. With Moriah it happened that not three months after I’d come back she ran off taking her son, and was never heard from, and Huram, to my surprise, didn’t lift a finger to go after her, nor did her name or even the boy’s ever so much as cross his lips. So it turned out that I was the one to give us an heir again, marrying a girl from Baal-Sarga who already had a child in her that I’d put there. When it came, and was a boy, I named it Huram, though I couldn’t have told you why except that it seemed the proper thing.

Jesus’s troupe I never had much to do with again. On the way home I’d passed through Capernaum and found out that most of them were just staying quiet after what had happened, confused by it all and afraid they’d be next. But Jesus’s brother Jacob had come back with them, interested in finding out what Jesus had had to say, and he and the Rock more or less took over things and kept the inner circle together. When a few months had gone by and the Romans hadn’t come after them, they started banding together some of his old followers on their side of the lake to keep up his teaching. In all of this, Jesus’s bastardy never seemed to have come out—maybe that was the difficult thing, as much as the crucifixion, that the Rock had had to come to understand. It wasn’t for me to say he did anything wrong not to let out the truth, when often enough it happened that a truth of that sort, that didn’t mean anything, stood in the way of one that did.

Nowadays rumours still come across the lake about that band, and how they get stranger by the day so that soon they’ll be worse than the Sons of Light. It was probably the shock of Jesus’s death that started twisting them, and that they had to strain to make sense of the thing, and that in time, with someone like Jesus, things got distorted. Now for every little thing he did when he was alive some story gets put in its place, and if he’d lanced somebody’s boil it turned out he’d saved a whole town, and if there were fifty in a place who’d followed him, now it was five hundred. Then there was the story that went around that the morning after Jesus was killed, Mary and Salome went to the grave and his body was gone. That might have had to do with the group who had come to the tomb for their relation, and somehow the story had got skewed, or maybe it had happened that the group had taken Jesus’s body by mistake. But eventually it got told that he’d risen from the dead and walked out of the place, and there were people enough to come along then to say they’d met him on the road afterwards looking as fit as you or me.

For all I know, it might have happened that way—wasn’t I there myself when Jesus brought Elazar back, who’d been dead as stone. The truth was it wouldn’t have surprised me to run into him one day on the road, and even less if who should be with him but old Jerubal, working some wile and grinning his grin. I used to imagine sometimes that he and Jesus had had the whole thing worked out between them from the start, the broken leg and then pretending to die and then those fellows who had come by afterwards to the tomb, their own confederates, it turned out, who’d come to spirit them away. And I’d see them setting off down the road and stopping for a bit in Capernaum to pull a little joke there on Jesus’s troupe about his rising from the dead before they headed off together to the ends of the earth.

It won’t be long, of course, before everyone has forgotten the man, or remembers only the trouble he had with his women or how he died a criminal or that he was a bastard, which sooner or later is sure to get out. But however things get remembered, you can be certain it won’t be how they actually were, since one man will change a bit of this to suit his fancy, and one a bit of that, and another will spice it to make a better story of it. And by and by the truth of the thing will get clouded, and he’ll be simply a yarn you tell to your children. And something will be lost then because he was a man of wisdom, the more so when even someone like me, who when I met him didn’t know more than when the crops came up and how many sheep it took to buy a bride, had come to understand something of him in the end.

It happened that I was in Gergesa once and heard someone in the market speak of a trip he’d made down the King’s Highway to the southern sea, through the land of the Nabateans with their great hidden city and on through the long stretch of the desert you had to cross full of bandits and wanderers with their camels and tents. Then finally you came to the sea, which was bordered by mountains so rocky and bare you’d think the gods themselves had deserted the place. You could go for days there, the man said, without meeting a soul, and all you saw was red rock to the one side of you and the grey of the sea to the other. But if you walked out from the shore, and put your face just underneath the water’s surface, it would astound you what you saw there, because a whole other world was going on under that greyness, as rich as the one above it was lacking, with coloured fish of every sort and where even the rocks were of colours that beggared the mind and of shapes such as you wouldn’t imagine in nature or the world.

Normally I wouldn’t have given a story of the sort much credit, since you heard all kinds of things in the market, and hadn’t I been guilty of the occasional tale myself. But I remembered the vision that Jesus had told us about after he’d raised Elazar. And for a moment it was as if some curtain had been pushed aside in my head and I had a glimpse of something I understood but couldn’t have put into words, like some beautiful thing, so beautiful it took your breath away, that you saw for an instant through a gateway or door, then was gone.

I suppose Jesus was like that for me, something I saw as if in the twinkling of an eye. It was just the week or so that I was with him, in the end, and what was that but half a breath in the middle of all the years of my life. But still when I look out at the fields now or at the sheep grazing on the bit of pasture that overlooks the lake, a sort of haze seems to come off things that wasn’t there before, as if I’m expecting something good to come along at any minute, though I couldn’t tell you what it is. And though I’m happy enough to be at home, I’ll never see the likes of the times I had then, for better and worse, when it seemed that every good and ill that could come to a man, and every wonder and devilry, had passed in front of me. I often think of the night with Elazar, and seeing him rise up—for the longest time I thought that was the greatest wonder you could do, to bring a man back from the dead, since as pleasant as things might be on the other side, still I reckoned I’d rather be alive and kicking for as long as I could on this one. But now I think of the light Elazar saw in his dream, that was beckoning to him at the mouth of his cave from what place he didn’t know, and wonder what further realm there might be that we see nothing of, and that seems to call for me there in the glow that comes off the fields.