and beside it my age, twenty-four. Then I noticed something I’d not seen before. Today was the twelfth of Tishri and next to it she’d recorded the name of her lost daughter, Chaya. Today was the anniversary of Chaya’s birth. She, too, was twenty-four.
I gazed down at my aunt, watching her eyes move behind her closed lids—was she dreaming? At that moment a ray of light broke through a crack in the roof thatch, falling on her shoulder and spilling across the earthen floor to my feet.
My eyes beheld it with curiosity. A cord of light, connecting us. I saw it as a sign of the promise we’d made to each other when I was fourteen, that we would always be joined like Naomi and Ruth—where I would go, she would go; my people would be her people. But as I stood there watching, the beam of light faded, then vanished in the morning brightness.
I knelt down and kissed my aunt’s forehead. Her eyes opened.
“I’m going with Jesus.”
She lifted her hand in blessing. “May Sophia watch over you and keep you,” she said, her voice groggy with sleep.
“And you as well. Now return to your dream.” I left her quickly.
In the courtyard, Jesus was bidding Mary and Salome goodbye. “When will you return?” his mother asked.
“I cannot say for certain—two weeks, perhaps three.”
I looked back toward the storeroom and I was filled with dread. I told myself Yaltha was well for her age and free of sickness. I told myself that if Jesus decided to follow John the Immerser and took me with him, he would take her, too; he would not separate us. I told myself the beam of light that connected us could not be broken.
xxiv.
It took several days to reach the village of Aenon, where we traded my brass comb for chickpeas, apricots, flatbread, and wine, restoring our empty pouches. There, we crossed into Peraea and traveled along the left bank of the Jordan. Each morning Jesus woke early and went off a short distance to pray alone, and I would lie in the green smells with day breaking over me and mutter praises to Sophia. Then I would rise, my legs snarled with cramps, my stomach panged with hunger, blisters on my heels—oh, but the world was large and mysterious and I was far from home, journeying with my beloved.
On the sixth day, we came upon John the Immerser on the pebbly banks of the river, not far from the Dead Sea. The multitude was so great, he had climbed onto a crop of stone and was shouting as he preached. Behind him, apart from the crowd, stood a band of men, twelve or fourteen of them, whom I guessed to be his disciples. Two of them seemed oddly familiar to me.
Though Jesus had prepared me for John’s appearance, I was nonetheless startled at the sight. He was barefoot and thin as thread, his black beard bouncing around on his chest and his hair swinging at his shoulders in matted coils. Strangest of all, he wore a camel-hair sackcloth, a thick, wooly garb tied at his waist that barely reached the middle of his thigh. The spectacle made me laugh, not with ridicule but with appreciation for the outlandishness of him, at the realization one could dress like this and still be adulated as one of God’s chosen.
We picked our way along the edge of the assembly, drawing as close to him as we could. It was late in the day and clouds had piled up over the limestone hills, cooling the air. Little fires burned here and there along the shore and we drew near one of them, warming our hands as we listened.
John was urging the throng to turn away from money and greed. “What good will your coins do now? The ax of judgment is ready to strike the root of the tree. The kingdom of God is at hand.”
I watched Jesus. How he feasted on the prophet’s words—his eyes gleaming, furrows of concentration on his face, the quick breath in his chest.
I thought John’s talk about the apocalypse would never end—it unnerved me—but eventually he turned his fiery tongue to Herod Antipas, assailing him