was a fluttering moth, a hapless girl. My skirmish yielded nothing but jeers and laughter. He snatched the sheet of ivory from my coat and lifted it over his head. A roar erupted.
“She is a thief, a blasphemer, and a fornicator!” Chuza cried. “What would you do with her?”
“Stone her!” someone cried.
The chant began, the dark prayer. Stone her. Stone her.
I shut my eyes against the dazzling blur of anger. Their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw. They seemed to be not a multitude of persons, but a single creature, a behemoth feeding off their combined fury. They would stone me for all the wrongs ever done to them. They would stone me for God.
Most often victims were dragged to a cliff outside the city and thrown off before being pelted, which lessened the laborious effort of having to throw so many stones—it was in some way more merciful, at least quicker—but I saw I would not be accorded that lenience. Men and women and children plucked stones from the ground. These stones, God’s most bountiful gift to Galilee. Some rushed into the building site, where the stones were larger and more deadly. I heard the sizzle of a rock fly over my head and fall behind me.
Then the commotion and noise slowed, elongating, receding to some distant pinnacle, and in that strange slackening of time, I no longer cared to fight. I felt myself bending to my fate. I ached for the life I would never live, but I yearned even more to escape it.
I sank onto the ground, making myself as small as I could, my arms and legs tucked beneath my chest and belly, my forehead pressed to the ground. I fashioned myself into a walnut shell. I would be broken apart and God could have the meat.
A stone struck my hip in a sunburst of pain. Another fell beside my ear. I heard the stomp of sandals running toward me, then a voice glittering with indignation. “Cease your violence! Would you stone her on the word of this man?”
The mob quieted, and I dared to raise my head. Jesus stood before them, his back to me. I stared at the bones in his shoulders. The way his hands were drawn into fists. How he’d planted himself between me and the stones.
Chuza, though, was more fox than Father, more jackal than Antipas. He diverted the rabble from Jesus’s question. “She had the ivory. You saw it for yourself.”
I felt life returning to me. “I did not steal it. It was a gift!” I exclaimed, getting to my feet.
Jesus’s voice boomed. “I ask you again, who is this accuser whose word you take so easily?” When no one spoke, Jesus shouted even louder, “Answer me!”
Knowing that anyone associated with Herod Antipas would be suspect to them, I called out, “He is Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas,” which brought an eruption of mutterings.
Someone shouted at Chuza, “Are you Herod Antipas’s sycophant?”
“Do not ask who I am,” Chuza cried. “Ask who this man is. Who is he to speak for her? He has no standing here. Only her father, husband, or brother can speak for her. Is he one of these?”
Jesus turned and looked at me, and I saw his anger in the set of his jaw. “I am Jesus ben Joseph,” he said, turning back to them. “I am neither father, brother, nor husband to her, but I will soon be her betrothed. I can testify she is no thief, or blasphemer, or fornicator.”
My heart caught. I looked at him in confusion and strained to understand if what he’d just declared was his true intention or a shrewd means to save me. I could not tell. I remembered him in the cave, how he’d shared my breakfast, how he’d come to stand beside me when I’d poured out my shame, all that we’d made known to each other.
There was a lull as the crowd deliberated whether to believe Jesus’s witness over Chuza’s. Jesus was one of them, and he’d pledged himself to be my upholder. Chuza was the minion of their despised tetrarch.