No. I could not. A betrothal had to be publicly formalized, but did it have to be a spectacle? This bore signs of my mother’s scheming.
I’d never been inside the palace where my father went each day to give the tetrarch advice and record his letters and edicts, but Mother had once attended a banquet there with Father, albeit confined to a separate women’s meal. It had been followed by weeks of obsessive talk about what she’d seen. Roman baths, monkeys chained in the courtyard, fire dancers, platters of roasted ostrich, and most alluring of all, Herod Antipas’s young wife, Phasaelis, a Nabataean princess with a crown of shining black hair that reached the floor. Sitting on her banquet couch, the princess had wrapped locks of her hair about her arms like snakes and entertained the women by undulating her arms. So Mother said.
“When will this take place?” I asked.
“The nineteenth of Marcheshvan.”
“But that is . . . that is only a month away.”
“I know,” she said. “I cannot think how I’ll manage it.” She returned to her place beside Father. “It falls on me, of course, to purchase gifts for the tetrarch and Nathaniel’s family and to accumulate your bridal goods. You will need new tunics, coats, and sandals. I’ll need to purchase hair ornaments, powders, glassware, pottery—I cannot have you arriving at Nathaniel’s house with tattered belongings . . .” On she yattered.
I felt myself swept like a twig into a coursing river. I cast a drowning look at Yaltha.
xiii.
One morning, while Tabitha and I nibbled honey cakes, Yaltha entranced us with an Egyptian story, a tale about Osiris, who was murdered and dismembered, then reassembled and resurrected by the Goddess Isis. She left out no grisly detail. Tabitha was so awed by the telling, she began to wheeze a little. I nodded at her as if to say, My aunt knows everything.
“Did this really happen?” Tabitha asked.
“No, dear,” Yaltha said. “It’s not meant to be a factual story, but it’s still true.”
“I don’t see how,” Tabitha said. I wasn’t sure I did either.
“I mean that the story can happen inside us,” Yaltha said. “Think of it—the life you’re living can be torn apart like Osiris’s and a new one pieced together. Some part of you might die and a new self will rise up to take its place.”
Tabitha scrunched her face.
Yaltha said, “Right now you are a girl in your father’s house, but soon that life will die and a new one will be born—that of a wife.” She turned her gaze on me. “Do not leave it to fate. You must be the one who does the resurrecting. You must be Isis re-creating Osiris.”
My aunt nodded at me, and I understood. If my life must be torn apart by this betrothal, then I must try to reassemble it according to my own design.
That night I lay on my bed determined to become free of my betrothal by a divorce before the marriage ritual ever occurred. It would be difficult, nearly impossible. A woman couldn’t appeal for a divorce unless her husband refused his conjugal duties after marriage—and if he refused those, I would consider myself the most blessed woman in Galilee, perhaps in the entire Roman Empire. Oh, but a man . . . he could divorce a woman before or after the marriage for practically anything. Nathaniel could divorce me if I went blind or lame or exhibited afflictions of the skin. He could do so for infertility, lack of modesty, disobedience, or other so-called repulsions. Well, I would not go blind or lame for the man, but I would gladly offer up any of the other reasons. If they failed, I would reverse Tabitha’s song and be a seeing girl who pretended to be blind. Even such small and ridiculous plots comforted me.
It was while slipping over the edge of sleep that a worrisome thought came to me. If I should be so fortunate as to goad Nathaniel to divorce me before the marriage, a second betrothal would be improbable—a divorced woman was more or less unmarriageable. I’d thought this would be a blissful state, but since seeing the