my head about God. I’d been taught God was a figure similar to humans, only vastly more powerful, which failed to comfort me because people could be so utterly disappointing. It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.
Jesus gazed toward the sky as if to judge the hour, and in the hush of that moment, in my exhilaration of being near him, of conversing with him about divine immensities, I said, “Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”
His laugh rose and fell and rose again, and I told myself I could love him for that alone.
“I would like to hear further how we might set God free,” he said. “But I must be on my way. I work now at the amphitheater.”
“No longer in the quarry?”
“No; I’m glad to be in the open air. I hew stones into blocks that will serve as seats. Perhaps one day you’ll attend the theater and sit on a stone I myself have chiseled and fitted.”
We’d found our alikeness, our bond, but his words, though meant kindly, reminded me of how we were divided—he was the one who hewed the stone; I was the one who sat on it.
I watched him fasten his tool belt. He hadn’t asked me why I’d come here—perhaps he thought it would be prying, or he assumed I was simply walking in the hills as I’d claimed before—but I wished now to tell him. Nothing hidden.
“I’m a scribe,” I said. The audacity of the claim momentarily stalled my breath. “Since I was eight, my father has allowed me to study and write, but when I was betrothed, the privilege was taken from me and my scrolls were burned. I salvaged what I could of them, and buried them in this cave. I came this morning to dig them up.”
“I could tell you were different from other women. It wasn’t very difficult.” He looked back at my digging tool balanced on the rock. “I’ll help you.”
“No,” I said quickly. I wanted to do it alone. I wasn’t ready for him to see my writings, my bowl, or the curse I’d written. “You mustn’t tarry. I’ll dig them up myself. I spoke of them because I wish you to know and understand me.”
He offered me a parting smile and strode off toward the balsams.
Finding the spot where my treasure was buried, I drove the tool into the hard-packed dirt.
xxxii.
Eight days later, Herod Antipas summoned me to the palace to view the completed mosaic. I’d sworn never to return and begged to be excused, but Father refused my pleas. I feared defying him too strongly—I couldn’t risk ruining my newfound freedom. Already I’d made a fine new ink and, working through the mornings and sometimes at night, I’d completed my narratives of the women in the Scriptures who’d been raped. I’d bound them together with Tabitha’s story. I named them “The Tales of Terror.”
At midafternoon, my father accompanied me to the palace, making an uncommon effort at appeasement. Did I find the papyri he’d brought me to my liking? Was I pleased to have Phasaelis as a friend in the palace? Was I aware that while Herod Antipas was thought to be ruthless, he was kindly to those loyal to him?
I began to hear a noise in my head, a voice of warning. Something was not quite right.
* * *
? ? ?
ANTIPAS, PHASAELIS, AND MY FATHER gazed at the mosaic as if it had been dropped from heaven. I could barely bring myself to look at it. The tiny tiles replicated my face with near perfection. They shimmered in the dimness of the frigidarium, the lips seeming to part, the eyes blinking, a deception, a trick of light. I watched them watching it—Herod Antipas leering, his eyes hungry and salivating, and Phasaelis, too crafty not to see his lust. My father had placed himself