My spirit leapt. “Judas!” He caught the rope as my hands let go of it in surprise. “So it’s you who has been watching me.”
“Yes, all the way from your house.” I reached to embrace him, but he stepped back. “Not here. We shouldn’t bring notice to ourselves.”
His face had turned thin, leather brown, tough as a goat hide. A white scar in the shape of a scorpion tail hooked under his right eye. He looked as if the world had bitten into him and, finding him too gristly, spit him back. As he pulled up my pot from the well, I glimpsed the dagger tucked in his girdle, the way he cut his eyes left and right and over his shoulder.
“Come with me,” he said, and strode off with the pot.
I pulled up the hood on my cloak and hurried behind him. “Where are we going?”
He turned toward the most crowded section of Nazareth, where the houses were pressed together amid a maze of narrow alleys, and stepped into a passageway between two courtyards, empty except for three men. There, amid the fragrance of donkeys, piss, and fermenting figs, he lifted me up and spun me around. “You look well.”
I eyed the men.
“They are with me,” he said.
“Your Zealot friends?”
He nodded. “There are forty of us living in the hills. We do our part to rid Israel of Roman pigs and sympathizers.” He grinned and gave a little bow.
“That sounds . . .” I hesitated.
“Dangerous?”
“I was going to say impractical.”
He laughed. “I see you still speak your mind.”
“I’m sure you and your Zealots are an enormous thorn in Rome’s side. But it’s a thorn, Judas. It’s no match for their might.”
“You’d be surprised how much they fear us. We’re good at inciting revolt, and there’s nothing Rome dreads more than an uprising. Best of all, it’s the surest way to get rid of Herod Antipas. If he cannot keep the peace, Rome will replace him.” He paused, fidgety, looking back toward the alley entrance. “There’s a century of eighty soldiers assigned to capture us, and yet in all these years not one of us has been caught. Some have been killed, but never caught.”
“So, my brother is infamous.” I gave him a good-natured shove. “Of course, here in Nazareth I’ve heard nothing of you.”
He smiled. “Regrettably, my glory seems confined to the cities. Sepphoris, Tiberias, Caesarea.”
“But Judas, look at you,” I said, turning serious. “You’re hunted, sleeping in caves, committing acts of defiance that could get you killed. Have you never wanted to give it up for a wife and children?”
“But I have a wife—Esther. She lives with four other Zealot wives in a house in Nain. It’s overfilled with children, three of whom are mine.” He beamed. “Two boys, Joshua and Jonathan, and a girl, Ana.”
Hearing of his children, I thought of my Susanna and felt the knife cut that came every time her memory appeared. I decided not to speak of her. Feigning brightness, I said, “Three children—I hope to meet them one day.”
He let out a sigh, and I heard the pining in it. “I haven’t seen Esther in many months.”
“Nor has she seen you.” I wished to remind him she was the one left behind.
There was a clattering of horse hooves and men’s voices, and Judas’s hand went instinctively to the hilt of his dagger. He drew us deeper into the alley.
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked.
“Lavi. He keeps me informed of many things.”
So, my faithful friend had become his spy. I said, “You disappeared from my life, and now you appear—there must be a reason.”
He frowned into the slanted light and the scorpion tail lifted on the ridge of his cheek as if poised to sting. “I have grim news, sister. I’ve come to tell you our mother is dead.”
I didn’t make a sound. I became a piece of cloud, looking down, seeing things as birds see them, aloof and small.