A.D. 30(74)

But before I could, he held out an open hand. There was no rebuke in his soft eyes, only acceptance and understanding. So I placed my hand in his, aware that mine was trembling. His fingers, warm and strong, gently closed about my hand.

A surge of heat spread up my arm and swallowed my mind, and with it came a low hum, like a breeze softly moaning through a window. Perhaps it was only the blood rushing through my head, but I suddenly felt as though I could not breathe.

“Do not allow fear to bind you up, dear one,” he said. Immediately tears sprang to my eyes. “You will only lose what you already have. Accept what is given now.”

I had until then thought shame to be my greatest burden, but the moment he said “fear,” I knew the truth. For fear had followed me all my life. Though I masked myself in my role as a woman, my heart trembled always. I was lost in fear.

Fear of not being worthy. Fear of being outcast. Fear of failing my father and all of the Kalb.

Fear of being worthless.

Tears rolled down my cheeks, an overflow of the courage poured into me by his words. I meant to respond with gratitude, but my throat would not speak.

Before I could collect myself, he turned to Saba. Then he released my hand and looked at Phasa, who could not tear her eyes from him.

“When you hear of the coming wrath, you must pay it mind and flee.”

She offered him a shallow nod, though surely as lost as a fox at sea.

Yeshua turned from us and sighed. “Now I must retire, my friends. The day is late and many will come tomorrow.”

With that he walked to the short hallway that led to the door, and only there turned.

“Judah.”

“Yes, master.”

“Seek first the kingdom of God. All else will be added.”

“Yes, master. I will. I swear it by the heavens themselves, I swear it!”

“Only a yes or a no will do.”

Judah hesitated. “Yes.”

Yeshua offered him one final nod, turned, and left the house.

More than I saw him vanish from our sight, I could feel his presence leave the room.

“You see what I mean,” Nicodemus said when the silence grew thick.

And I did, I thought. I saw.


I SAW all that night and all the next morning with the eyes of my heart.

Phasa and I were given room in a far part of Levi’s house and there lay in the darkness, left to our thoughts. I held Yeshua’s face in my mind, as if he were yet gazing across the table with those haunting, kind eyes that swallowed my soul and brought me such comfort.

I saw why Peter and Andrew and Levi had left their tasks to follow him. I saw why Nicodemus, an esteemed member of the Sanhedrin, had sought him out and risked so much to meet him yet again in Galilee.

I saw why Judah had been obsessed with meeting this mystic, whose powers were beyond comprehension.

“What could he have meant?” Phasa asked as we lay in the dark.

“About being hunted by the fox?”

“Yes.”

I had meant to leave the love-sick Herod to his own misery, for matters of marriage among royals weren’t mine in which to meddle. But emboldened by Yeshua, I felt no compulsion to hide what I knew.

“Herod is in love with another woman,” I said.

“This is not a revelation.”

“Did you feel his presence, Phasa? Did you feel Yeshua’s power?”

She was silent for only a moment.

“He seems to know what cannot be known. So I ask again, what must I flee?”

“I think Herod intends to take another wife. He seems consumed by his need to be loved as he would love.”

“Another? My father would never have it!”

“So, then, perhaps danger awaits.”

“Did Yeshua not say that you too were in danger?”

My mind returned to our first meeting, in the courtyard. Two queens sit out in the open, he’d said. And yet the fox who hunts you is not so far away.

I could not understand how or why Herod would hunt me. Only if I fled, but I had no intention of doing so. Perhaps then Saman bin Shariqat and the Thamud had pursued me after all and were now close. Or what if my brother, Maliku, had been sent to destroy me? But they would not hunt Phasa as well.

Who was this fox?

“Yes,” I said. But we spoke of the warning no more that night.

The next morning hundreds came to the hillside beyond Capernaum like ants traveling to the mound for food.

Yeshua’s food was the same he’d offered me, not bread for the belly, but sustenance for the soul.

His words from the previous evening came to me all through the day. Do not allow fear to bind you up, dear one. You will only lose what you already have. Accept what is given now.

Now I was on a mission to save my father and restore honor to the Kalb. I, a woman who brought no shame to this teacher of such repute.