exactly as Skepsis predicted: Haran was quickly informed that you’d returned to your husband in Galilee and that I’d taken the vows to remain among the Therapeutae for life. Shortly after that, the outpost was abandoned.”
Returned to your husband in Galilee. The words were like little cleavers.
I noticed Tabitha open and close her fists, as if coaxing the bravery Diodora had spoken about. Then she spoke for the first time. “Ana said the outpost would likely be deserted, but Lavi would not take chances. He insisted we wait in the closest village while he rode on alone to be certain. Only then did he return for us.” She spoke slowly, molding the sounds in her mouth.
As she’d spoken, though, a new concern had clamored at me. “Won’t Lucian inform Haran I’m back?” I asked Yaltha.
Yaltha pressed her lips together and pondered this for the first time herself. “You’re right about Lucian. He will most certainly inform Haran you’re back. But even if Haran decides once again to seek our arrests, he would have a hard time convincing the soldiers to return. Before you left, there were rumors of their discontent. They’d grown weary searching passersby and receiving little pay for it. And Haran is bound to resist doling out more of his money to them.” She laid her hand on my knee. “I think his revenge will go no further. But either way, we’re safe here with the Therapeutae. We can wait to venture beyond the gatehouse after Haran dies. The man is older than me. He can’t live forever.” A wicked grin formed on Yaltha’s face. “We could always write a death curse for him.”
“I’m very good at composing them,” said Tabitha, who may or may not have grasped our lack of seriousness.
“I took the vows,” Yaltha said. “I’m one of them for life now.”
I would never have expected this. She’d spent so much of her life rootless, exiled to places not of her choosing. Now she chose. “Oh, Aunt, I’m glad for you.”
“I took them, too,” said Diodora.
I said, “I will do so as well.”
“And I,” said Tabitha.
Yaltha smiled at her. “Tabitha, dear, in order to take the vows, you’ll need to be here for more than five minutes.”
Tabitha laughed. “Next week, then,” she said.
We rose finally to walk down the hill to find Skepsis and inform her of our return, but we paused first, listening to a bell clang in the distance. Wind was pouring down the cliffs, bringing the smell of the sea, and the air glowed with the saffron light that came sometimes on cloudless days. I remember this small interlude as if it were a sacred occasion, for I looked at the three of them poised before the brush pines and I saw that we had somehow shaped ourselves into a family.
ii.
In the middle of the afternoon, twenty-two months, one week, and a day after Jesus’s death, rain thundered onto the library roof, waking me from a strange and unintended sleep. My head felt full and fuzzy, like it was stuffed with heaps of newly shorn wool. Lifting my cheek from my writing desk, I looked about—where was I? Gaius, who’d once nailed me into a coffin, had recently built a second room onto the library so I would have a scriptorium and space for cubicles to hold the library’s scrolls, but in those first muddled seconds of waking, I didn’t recognize the new surroundings. I felt a flicker of panic inside, and then of course, my whereabouts in the world returned.
Later, I would think of my old friend Thaddeus, who’d slept every day in the scriptorium in Haran’s house, practically curled up on top of his desk, napping out of boredom and for a time from Yaltha’s spiked beer. I, however, could only blame my somnolence on the passion that had driven me to work late into the night for weeks making copies of my codices. Two copies for the library and another that could be disseminated.
I pushed the bench back from my desk and shook my head, trying to clear the drowsy aftereffect, but the cobwebs clung to me. As I’d slept, the room had darkened and chilled, and I pulled Jesus’s cloak around