really wish Nathaniel dead. I only wanted him removed from my life.
The tablet was no bigger than the palm of my hand. Its smallness forced me to shrink my letters, which caused the fervency inside them to strain at the ink.
Let the powers above look with disfavor upon my betrothal. Visit a pestilence upon it. Let it be broken by whatever means God chooses. Unbind me from Nathaniel ben Hananiah. May it be so.
I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn.
xvii.
I went in search of Lavi, hoping we might slip away quietly and return to the cave, but Mother had taken him off to the market. Posting myself on the balcony, I waited for their return.
When I was a child, I sometimes woke from sleep knowing things before they occurred: Judas will take me to the aqueduct; Shipra will roast a lamb; Mother will suffer a headache; Father will bring me ink dyes from the palace; my tutor will be late. Shortly before Yaltha arrived, I woke certain that a stranger would come into our lives. These glimmers would manifest as I clambered up from the dregs of sleep. Before I opened my eyes, they were there, silent and pure and clear, like pieces of blown glass, and I would wait to see if they would happen. They always happened.
Sometimes my pre-sights were not about events, but snatches of an image that floated behind my eyes. Once, a shofar appeared and that same day we heard it being blown to announce the Festival of Weeks.
I wasn’t granted these mysteries often, and with the exception of Yaltha’s arrival and the appearance of the ink dyes, they were revelations of the most mundane and useless kind. Why would I need to be informed of the meal Shipra cooked, or the delay of my tutor, or that a ram horn would be blown? There had been no presentiment of my incantation bowl or my betrothal. I’d had no hint of Jesus, the burning of my writings, or the cave.
For nearly a year I’d been free of these premonitions, and happily so, but as I waited there on the balcony, an image appeared in my mind with vividness: a tongue, pink and grotesque. I shook my head to clear it away. Another inane visage, I told myself, but the strangeness of it disturbed me.
When finally Mother returned, she looked flushed and excited. She sent Lavi to the storeroom lugging a basket of vegetables, then swept past me into her quarters.
I caught up with Lavi in the courtyard. “Mother is out of sorts.”
He studied the ground, his hands, the crescents of dirt beneath his nails.
“Lavi?”
“We came upon the girl who visits you.”
“Tabitha? What about her?”
“Please do not make me speak of it. Not to you. Please.” He took several steps backward, gauging my response, then fled.
I hurried to Mother’s room, fearing she would turn me away, but she allowed me in. She was white-faced.
“Lavi said you saw Tabitha. Has something happened?”
She strode to her storage chest, the one into which Tabitha and I had pried, and for one irrational moment I wondered if Mother had simply discovered our interloping.
She said, “I can’t see how to avoid telling you. You will learn of it anyway. The city is already brimming with talk. Her poor father—”
“Please. Just tell me.”
“I came upon Tabitha on the street near the synagogue. She was making a terrible commotion, wailing and tearing at her hair, crying out that one of Herod’s soldiers had forced her to lie with him.”
I tried to comprehend. Forced her to lie . . .
“Tabitha was raped?” came a voice from behind us, and I turned to see Yaltha standing in the open doorway.
“Must you use the vulgar term?” Mother said. She looked implacable standing there, arms crossed, morning shadows blossoming around her shoulders. Was this what mattered to