His eyes searched mine. “Hear me to the end before you judge.”
“All right, I’ll hear you to the end.” What he would say would change everything—I knew this indelibly.
“After I’d been with John for two months, he came to me one morning and said he believed God had sent me, that I, too, was God’s chosen. Soon after, I began to baptize and preach alongside him. Eventually he moved north to Aenon, where he could slip easily into Decapolis out of Antipas’s reach. But he wanted to reach the whole country and he asked me to remain in the south to preach his message of repentance. A small number of the disciples stayed with me—Simon, Andrew, Philip, Nathanael, and Judas. Multitudes came—you cannot imagine the crowds. People began to say John and I were the two Messiahs.” He drew a deep breath and I felt it blow warm on my face.
I could see where he was leading, and I didn’t know if I wished to follow. He’d brought me here to the place of our beginnings, but only later would I think of the snake biting its tail, how the beginning becomes the end that becomes the beginning.
“The movement spread like floodwaters,” he said. “Now, though, with John in prison, it has been silenced. I cannot let it die.”
“You mean to take it up on your own?” I said. “It will become your movement now?”
“I’ll go forth in my own way. My vision differs from John’s. His mission was to prepare the way for God to throw off Roman rule and establish his government on earth. I hope for this, too, but my mission is to bring God’s kingdom into the hearts of people. The masses came to John, but I will go to them. I’ll not baptize them as he did, but I’ll eat and drink with them. I’ll exalt the lowly and the outcast. I’ll preach God’s nearness. I’ll preach love.”
He’d first told me of his vision of God’s kingdom here in this cave . . . the feast of compassion where everyone was welcome. “God has surely chosen you,” I told him, and I knew it to be true.
He pressed his forehead to mine and left it there. I think of it still, those moments, that leaning upon each other, the tent our lives made together. Then he rose and walked a few paces. I watched him standing there, bladelike, resolute, and felt overcome by it all. There would be no turning back.
He said, “After Salome’s wedding in Cana, I will announce myself at the synagogue in Nazareth, then Judas and I will go to Capernaum. Simon, Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael are waiting for me there, and I know of others who may join us—the sons of Zebedee, a tax collector named Matthew.”
I stood. “I will come with you, too. Where you go, I will go.” I meant those words, but they sounded strangely ill-fated in my ears and I could not account for it.
“You may come, Ana. I have no qualms about women joining us. All are welcome. But there will be difficulties—traveling from village to village with nowhere to lay our heads. We have no patrons or money with which to feed and clothe ourselves. And it will be dangerous. My preaching will set the priests and Pharisees against me. Already there are those who say I’m the new John who’ll rally resistance to Rome. This will certainly reach the ears of Antipas’s spies. He will see me as a messiah who stirs revolution just as he did John.”
“And he’ll arrest you, too,” I said, feeling fear spread through me.
At this most unlikely moment, the crooked grin appeared on his face. He sensed my fear, and wishing to break its spell, he said, “Consider the lilies of the field. They are not anxious, yet God takes care of them. How much more will he take care of you?”
xxxi.
In the days after Jesus’s return, I disappeared into preparations for our departure. Yaltha and I washed her few paltry garments and hung them to dry on pegs in the storeroom. I beat her sleeping mat and sewed a leather cord to it so she could strap it