“There are no women among John’s disciples—you saw this, as I did.”
“But you of all people . . . you would not exclude me.”
“No, I would take you if I could.” He raked his fingers through his beard. “But this is John’s movement. The reasons that prophets have no female disciples—”
Incensed, I cut him off. “I’ve heard these reasons tenfold. Traipsing about the countryside exposes us to dangers and hardships. We cause dissension among the men. We are temptations. We are distractions.” My anger swelled, and I was glad for it. It drove away my hurt. “It’s thought we’re too weak to face danger and hardship. But do we not give birth? Do we not work day and night? Are we not ordered about and silenced? What are robbers and rainstorms compared to these things?”
He said, “Little Thunder, I’m on your side. I was going to say, the reasons that prophets have no female disciples are flawed reasons.”
“Yet you will follow John anyway.”
“How else can we hope to alter this wrong? I will do what I can to convince him. Give me time. I’ll come back for you in the winter, or early spring before Passover.”
I looked at him. I’d held the world too close and it had slipped from my arms.
xxvi.
Jesus returned me to Nazareth as he had said he would, and there, with unnecessary haste, he bid us farewell. Those first terrible weeks of his absence, I remained in my room. I didn’t care to witness his mother crying with bitterness or hear the exclamations and questions his brothers and their wives hurled at me. Was Jesus struck on the head? Is he possessed? Does he mean to follow a madman and leave us to ourselves?
I imagined my husband alone in some dust pit in the Judean wilderness fending off wild boars and lions. Did he have food and water? Did he wrestle with angels like Jacob? Would he come back for me? Was he even alive?
I had no strength for chores. What did it matter if the olives weren’t pressed or the lamp wicks went untrimmed? I took meals in my room, abetted by Yaltha.
I came out of my seclusion only at night and prowled about the courtyard like one of the mice. Worried for me, Yaltha moved her sleeping mat to my room and brought me hot wine spiked with bits of myrrh and passionflower to help me sleep, the same brew she’d given Shipra long ago when Mother had locked me in my room. The draft had sent Shipra into an unshakable sleep, but it did little more than dull my senses.
One morning I found I could not force myself from my pallet, nor swallow my fruit and cheese. Yaltha felt my brow for fever, and finding nothing, bent to my ear and whispered, “Enough, child. You’ve grieved enough. I understand he has abandoned you, but must you abandon yourself?”
Soon after, Salome appeared in my doorway with news that she would be wed in the spring. James had signed a betrothal contract with a man in Cana, someone who was an utter stranger to her.
“Oh, sister, I’m sorry,” I said.
“It isn’t a sorrow to me,” she replied. “The bride price will help keep our family fed, especially with Jesus . . .”
“Gone,” I said for her.
“James says my new husband will be kind to me. The man does not mind that I’m a widow. He’s a widower himself, having lost two wives to childbirth.” She made an effort to smile. “I must weave some bridal clothes. Will you help me?”
It was the thinnest of ploys, obviously meant to lure me back to my duties and to life itself, for who in her right mind would ask me to help with spinning and weaving—even ten-year-old Sarah could do it better. Somehow, though, her tactic worked. I heard myself say, “I’ll help you, of course I will.”
I went to my chest of cedar and dug out the copper mirror, the last possession of value I owned. “Here,” I said, placing the mirror in her hands. It caught the sun that slanted through the window, a flash of ginger