landed at my feet. I was my mother’s safeguard. I was born to protect her from being cast out.
* * *
? ? ?
NOW MOTHER WALKED behind my father holding herself erect, her chin high, looking neither right nor left. In the sunlight, her golden coat seemed lit with a hundred flames. The air shone brighter around her than the rest of us, filled with haughtiness and beauty and the scent of sandalwood. Searching the crowded streets once more for Yaltha, then Judas, I began to repeat my secret prayer, moving my lips but making no sound. Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it . . .
The words calmed me as the city flowed past, magnificent structures that awed me each time I ventured out. Antipas had filled Sepphoris with imposing public buildings, a royal treasury, frescoed basilicas, a bathhouse, sewers, roofed sidewalks, and paved streets laid out in perfect Roman grids. Large villas like Father’s were common throughout the city, and Antipas’s palace was as rich as any kingly residence. He’d been reconstructing the city since Rome razed it all those years ago when Judas lost his parents, and what had risen from the ashes was a wealthy metropolis that rivaled any but Jerusalem.
Lately, Antipas had begun construction on a Roman amphitheater on the northern slope of the city that would seat four thousand people. Father himself had come up with the idea as a way for Antipas to impress the emperor Tiberius. Judas said it was just another way to shove Rome down our throats. Father, however, wasn’t finished with his scheming. He advised Antipas to mint his own coins, but break from Roman custom by leaving off his image and replacing it with a menorah. The ingenious gesture gave Antipas the appearance of reverencing the same Mosaic law I’d broken earlier that morning. The people called Herod Antipas the Fox, but my father was the slyer one.
Was I like him, as Judas had implied?
As the market came into sight, the crowd thickened. We plowed past clusters of men—members of court, scribes, government officials, and priests. Children hauled sheaves of herbs, barley, and wheat, armloads of onions, doves in stick cages. Women bore wares on their heads with bewildering steadiness—jars of oil, baskets of late-harvest olives, bolts of cloth, stone pitchers, even three-legged tables, whatever they could sell, all the while greeting one another, “Shelama, shelama.” I never saw these women without envy for how they came and went freely without the bondage of a chaperone. Surely peasantry was not all bad.
Inside the basilica, the commotion intensified along with the airless heat. I began to sweat inside my elaborate coat. I swept my eyes over the cavernous room, over row after row of stalls and market carts. There was an odor of sweat, charcoal, skewered meat, and the putrid salted fish from Magdala. I pushed the back of my hand to my nostrils to lessen the stench and felt the soldier who’d tromped behind us nudge me forward.
Up ahead, my mother stopped midway along a row of stalls that sold goods from the silk route—Chinese paper, silks, and spices. She idly inspected an azure cloth while my father continued on to the row’s end, where he lingered, his eyes roaming the multitudes.
From the moment we’d set out, I’d feared we were walking toward something calamitous, sensing it not only in the oddness of our expedition, but in the minute movements of my parents’ faces, and yet here was my mother serenely shopping for silk and my father patiently watching the crowd. Had she come to trade after all? My breath left me in a rush of relief.
I didn’t notice the small man who approached my father, not until the crowd parted a bit and I saw him stride forward and greet Father with a bow. He was clothed in an expensive coat of deep purple and a towering cone-shaped hat, perhaps the tallest hat my eyes had ever beheld, which drew attention to his exceptionally short stature.
My mother laid down the sheath of azure. Looking back, she waved me forward.
“Who is Father’s companion?” I asked, reaching her side.
“He is Nathaniel ben Hananiah, your father’s acquaintance.”