“Shhh!” Nathan’s shaky voice sounded in her ear.

“Why did you sneak up on me like that?” Mara yelped, finding her brother’s ear and giving it a yank. “I thought you were ahead of me.”

“Ow!” Nathan cried. “Let go of my ear! Can’t you take a joke?”

“A joke? I’ll tell you a joke. You’re a joke!” Mara was furious. The water that swirled around her ankles wasn’t going to cool her down either.

“Calm down, Sis. The rabbis teach that a cool head and a sense of humor go together. You’ll need that when you’re queen.”

Mara snorted.

“Queens don’t snort,” said Nathan. “They hire servants to snort for them.”

She yanked his other ear.

“Ow! Cut it out! Do you want me to go around with elephant ears because you couldn’t control your yanking?”

Mara giggled nervously. That she couldn’t control.

“What do you think they’ve found up there?” Nathan asked. He didn’t have to wait long for the answer.

“Is everything okay back there?” Karis called out.

“Fine,” answered Mara. “It’s just my stinky brother acting like his usual stinky self.”

“Well, screams aren’t a good idea right now,” Karis called out in a shaky voice. She hesitated and then added, “We don’t seem to be the only ones down here.”

Mara’s heart hammered. With Nathan shadowing her every step, she made her way to the head of the line.

They had reached the big chamber as Karis had promised. At one end was the tunnel through which they’d just entered. At the other end, the passage left the big chamber and immediately branched into three separate tunnels. The place where they joined formed a wide floor slanted on the sides like the bottom of a bowl. Two of the tunnels produced slow streams of water. A small torrent rushed downhill toward them from the third, but the slanted sides rose above the water and formed a low shelf. As long as they stood on the shelf, they remained dry.

Karis was bending over something on the dry part of the floor. Then she stood up and stepped back. The others looked. It was a long arrow, hand-drawn in white chalk, pointing to the right-hand chamber.

“It isn’t yours, is it?” Mara questioned, her voice dry and barely more than a whisper. “You didn’t draw it, did you?”

Karis shook her head but didn’t say anything. Nathan peered around Mara and gulped. His face went pale as if he were staring at a poisonous snake set to strike. “They’re hunting for us!”

“They’re not hunting for us,” Karis tried to reassure him. “But if they find us, we’re in big trouble, no matter why they’re down here.”

“Look there,” Akbar said as he pointed. A set of nearly dry footprints along the shelf disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel to the right from which water rushed.

“Don’t tell us that’s the way we have to go,” Sarah whispered.

Karis nodded and held a finger to her lips in warning.

“Looks like you’ve gotten us trapped underground with the enemy!” Mara whispered furiously.

Karis held the lamp high and looked Mara in the eye. “We don’t even know it’s them,” she said quietly. “But if it is Saul and his men, they don’t know these tunnels like I know these tunnels. That’s why they had to mark the main branch so they wouldn’t get lost. The other two tunnels dead-end at pools for collecting rainwater. Would you rather still be on that roof scared as rabbits waiting to be grabbed?”

“No, I’d much rather be stuck in a dark, smelly underground tunnel scared as rabbits waiting to be grabbed!” Mara shivered with fear and cold.

“Have a little faith and follow me,” ordered Karis as she started back a short distance along the way they’d come. She dropped flat on her belly. There was a low opening at the bottom of the wall easily missed in the dim light. Only a very little water leaked from it. She wriggled through.

For a minute the others heard nothing. Mara was about to turn around and go back when the lamp showed at the opening. A hand slid out from under the wall and motioned for them to follow.

Feeling as if she were going down, down, down to the center of the earth, Mara hesitated. Now that they were in the tunnels, they needed Karis to get them out. And they needed someplace where they could hide without Saul’s men stumbling over them. If they ever saw the sun again, Mara would tell the girl from Caesarea just what she thought of her getting them all buried alive. But for now, she knew she had no choice.

Fuming, Mara helped the young ones crawl after Karis. She tried to make a quiet game of it so they wouldn’t be so afraid. She murmured, “Little fish, little fish, swimming up the stream; slippery rocks, slippery rocks, we are all one team . . .” Like minnows, the youngest kids flopped and wiggled one by one into the opening and vanished from sight.

“I should have finished that grape fight while I had the chance!” Obadiah grunted as he made his tight way through the hole.

“Shhh!” Mara hissed —but quickly stopped when the echo in the tunnel sounded louder than the original shush. It took some shoving from the others, but Obadiah finally made it with a groan and a relieved “Oof!”

Sarah followed and then Akbar. When it was Nathan’s turn, he put his mouth close to Mara’s ear. “Queen Mara, promise me that in your kingdom you’ll have wide doors and high ceilings!”

Mara, the last through, crawled a short distance and then was helped into a large, square room with sides that looked sixty feet high. The walls were slimy and crumbling but thick enough that the kids could talk quietly without fear of attracting outside attention. A dim light filtered down from somewhere at the top of the walls. Karis walked over to four oil-soaked torches hung from the walls and lit them with the flame from the lamp. Then she blew out the little lamp to conserve oil.

The smoky light from the torches was welcome, though it showed just how bare their hideout was.

Nathan looked around and made a shivery sound. He pulled on Mara’s arm. “This place isn’t much better than a tomb!”

Karis frowned at them. “This would not be a good time to complain about the hideout. You have to admit, we’re out of sight. It’s a forgotten rain storage well that’s been sealed over at the top. If we keep our voices down, nobody will know we’re in here.”

Mara gave Karis her best “What now?” look.

Karis turned her back. “Let’s catch our breath. Give me time to think.” She plopped herself down against the wall, released her hair from the pins that had kept it in the pitiful little bun that Mara disliked, and closed her eyes. Absentmindedly, she chewed on a strand of hair.

Mara found a partially dry spot and sat down, her back against the wall. Her gown was ruined. She thought of the hours her mother had put into the stitching. Her heart ached for home and her parents. She tried not to imagine what might be happening to them.

She heard a stirring of wings high above and thought she saw a shadow cross in front of a weak beam of light.

“Pigeons?” she asked hopefully.

“Bats,” Karis replied, not opening her eyes.

Nathan clamped a hand tight over his sister’s mouth.

After what seemed like hours, the little ones started crying quietly.

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m cold.”

“I feel sick.”

“Can you take me to my mama now?”

“We’re lost. When are we going to get out of here?”

The grumbling continued. Mara watched Karis for signs of life, but the girl sat apart from the others in stony silence, eyes closed. Was she thinking or sleeping?

Mara forced a cough. And another. And a third. But Karis, if she was conscious, didn’t budge an eyelash.

“Maybe she’s turned to salt,” Nathan whispered.

“Maybe your brain has turned to mush,” Mara said.

“My cloak sure has. Mother spent hours making this, and it only took minutes to ruin. Look at that.” Nathan fingered the ragged edges of a large tear. “A hole you could drive a chariot through. Even if we make it out of here in one piece, I’m doomed.”

“With a capital D,” Mara agreed.

Her brother frowned. “We’ve got to do something.”

“What would you suggest, O Wise One?”

Nathan huffed. “All I know is that if you ever get to be the queen, you’re going to have to lead better than this.”

The warning on Mara’s face brought the conversation to a halt.

Some children whimpered for their mothers. Others slept. One of Sarah’s little sisters pretended to hold a doll and sing to it. The silence lasted barely five minutes.

“Mara?”

“What, Nathan?”

“If you tell me the tooter rhyme, I’ll tell you a joke.”

Mara sighed. “I thought you learned serious, important things at synagogue school.”

“Jokes are what I learn going to and from synagogue school,” Nathan announced. “Please? I’m bored stiff. Two flute tooters tooted on a teeter-tooter . . .”

Mara stopped him. “Don’t. You’ll only mess it up like you always do. It goes like this: A tooter who tooted a flute tried to tutor two tutors to toot. Said the two to the tooter, ‘Is it harder to toot or to tutor two tutors to toot?’”

Nathan laughed, stifling his snickers with both hands. No matter how many times he heard the rhyme, it always made him smile. Mara felt pleased to take his mind off their situation, even if just for a moment. “Your turn,” she said warily.

He wore the silly grin he always did when telling dumb jokes.

Mara sighed. She was trapped.

“What belongs to you, but other people use it more than you do?”

“I give up.”

“Your name.”

“That’s not a joke. It’s a riddle.”

“Okay, okay. Here’s one. Why do bees hum?”

“I give up. Why?”

“Because they don’t remember the words.”

The little kids moved closer. Nathan had an audience.

“You give up too quickly,” he told his sister. “This time you have to think about it.”

“I thought you said you’d tell me a joke, as in one joke.”

“It would have been just one if you’d answered it right. Are you listening?”

Mara sighed again, as only one who was waiting to be queen could. “One more,” she said, “then you’re done.”

“Okay. A turtle, a lion, a camel, a bear, a pig, a frog, two mice, and a snake all got under one tent. How many got wet?”

Mara pretended to think about her answer a long time before saying, “Nine.”

Nathan rolled his eyes. “Wrong.”

“How many, then?”

“None. It wasn’t raining.”

“That wasn’t funny.”

“They thought it was.” Nathan pointed to the three children about them who were giggling.

“Their combined ages add up to eight. What do you expect?”

“Okay, I’ll keep telling jokes until you find one you think is funny,” Nathan said.

“Sorry, little brother, people don’t live that long. But I will leave you with something funny just so you’ll know what a real joke sounds like. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Amana.”

“Amana who?”

“Amana bad mood, so no more stupid jokes!”

As Mara got up to talk with Karis, she saw Nathan point to her and heard him whisper to the little kids loud enough for her to hear, “When she’s queen, she’ll have to pay people to laugh at her lame jokes. But when I’m rabbi, people will write down everything I say!”

At first, Mara just slid down beside Karis and said nothing. The minutes dragged on. Nathan soon ran out of jokes, and the complaining started again.

“My leg hurts.”

“My scarf is torn and I’ll get in trouble.”

“You are in trouble!”

“I’m really hungry now!”

“Why are we just sitting here doing nothing?”

“I want to look for my parents.”

“No, we should stay put and let our parents find us.”

“They sure won’t look for us here.”

“What’s that in the corner? Is it a rat?”

The children whined for someone to do something. Akbar grabbed Obadiah’s slingshot, loaded it with a hard bit of the crumbling wall, and started cautiously toward a small, dark shape in the far corner. Ten feet away, he suddenly leaped forward and landed on the shape, stomping on it twice for good measure. He reached down, picked it up, and waved it in the air. “One of Obadiah’s sandals,” he said disgustedly.

“Obie!” Mara scolded. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Obadiah shrugged and grinned. “I was going to, but we had to see how Fearless Akbar the Hunter would save us from my sandal.”

Akbar shot him a dirty look. Obadiah stuck out his hand for the slingshot. Akbar tossed it to him. “Let’s get out of the city and hide in one of the villages,” he said angrily. “I’m tired of this.”

Sarah objected. “As long as we’re right here, they don’t know where we are.”

Mara nodded. “I agree. It’s probably still too dangerous to go out yet.”

“But how will we know when it’s safe to go out?” Sarah asked.

The whole time, Karis had kept her eyes closed and hadn’t budged. But now she jumped to her feet and surprised Mara with a big smile. “I know how we’ll find out.”

“How?” asked Mara.

“We’ll spy!”