true. We would, though, never see each other again.
The moon was at its ebb, no more than a faint, curving crust of light. As we followed the path into the Hinnom Valley, Tabitha began to hum, unable to hide her joy. She had tied her lyre onto her back, where its curled arms peeked over her shoulders like a pair of wings. The happiness of home-going was in me, too, but it was lodged beside my sorrow. This was the land of my husband and my daughter. Their bones would always be here. Every step away from them was a pain in my heart.
Walking along Jerusalem’s eastern wall, I begged the darkness to last until we passed the Roman hill where Jesus had died, but the light broke just as we approached, a sudden, harrowing brightness. I let myself take one last glimpse of Golgotha. Then I turned my gaze toward the hillsides in the distance where Jesus was buried, where the women would come soon to wrap him in sweet spices.
LAKE MAREOTIS, EGYPT
30–60 CE
i.
Tabitha and I found Yaltha in the garden, bent over a row of spindly plants. Absorbed in her work, she didn’t notice us. She smeared her fingers across her tunic, leaving two trails of dirt, an act that filled me with inexplicable gladness. She was fifty-nine now, but she looked almost youthful kneeling in the sunlight among all these green-growing things, and I felt a surge of relief. She was still here.
“Aunt!” I called.
Seeing me, and then Tabitha, running toward her through the barley plants, she opened her mouth and dropped back onto her heels. I heard her exclaim in typical fashion, “Shit of a donkey!”
I tugged Yaltha to her feet and hugged her to me. “I thought I would never see you again.”
“Nor I, you,” she said. “Yet here you are after only a few weeks away.” Her face was a jumble of elation and confusion. “And look who you’ve brought with you.”
As she embraced Tabitha, a shout came from behind us, higher on the slope. “Ana? Ana. Is that you?” Looking back toward the cliffs, I saw Diodora racing down the path with a basket jostling in her arms, and I knew she’d been up there collecting motherwort. She reached us breathless, her hair sprung from her scarf into a riotous fan around her face. She swung me about, sending the spiky-leaved herbs flying.
When I introduced her to Tabitha, she said a priceless thing that Tabitha would remember all her life: “Ana has told me of your bravery.” Tabitha said nothing in response, which I imagined Diodora perceived as shyness, but I knew her silence was about the severed tongue in her mouth, her fear of sounding senseless.
Tabitha helped Diodora gather the spilled herbs, and all the while, Yaltha waited to ask the question, the one I dreaded. I looked out across the hillside, searching for the roof of the library.
“What has brought you back, child?” Yaltha said. Her face looked grave and stony. She’d already guessed the reason.
“Jesus is dead,” I said, feeling how my voice wanted to splinter apart. “They crucified him.”
Diodora let out a cry that I felt inside my own throat. Yaltha took my hand. “Come with me,” she said.
She led us to a little knoll not far from the garden, where we sat beside a cluster of brush pines that had been sculpted into outlandish shapes by the wind. “Tell us what happened,” Yaltha said.
I was weary from travel—we’d trekked for two and a half days from Bethany to Joppa, sailed another six to Alexandria, then jostled for hours in a donkey-pulled wagon that Lavi had hired—but I told the story, I told them everything, and like before with the women in Bethany, it took some of the brightness from my pain.
When the story was spent, we fell silent. Far down the escarpment I could just make out a slice of blue lake. Nearby, one of my goats was bleating in the animal shed.
“It was a relief to see that Haran’s soldiers are no longer encamped on the road,” I said.
“They disbanded not long after you left,” Yaltha said. “It happened