Jesus shook his head. ‘I want only water.’
‘Only water…!’ the man said, peering at him with more intensity. ‘Are you a prophet? Yesterday I heard tell from a holy man of a prophet in these parts. So help me God! He was described to seem just like you! Many don’t trust prophets, they think them mad people, one foot in heaven and the other in hell…but I believe it a good thing to know a prophet who can speak to God.’
The man gave him some water, which Jesus drank with gratitude. After that he looked at the man and said, ‘I thank you for the water…but I am not a prophet.’
‘What a shame!’ The man’s spirit drooped. He took a thoughtful gulp of his soup. ‘If you were a prophet,’ he continued, ‘I would ask you to speak to God on my behalf…on account of the paths my soul has taken.’
Jesus was directed to an apparition that loomed large and red over the man. ‘What are these paths? I have seen you before, a thousand years ago. You were different then!’
The man grew fearful. ‘What do you see? Oh, dear God of Abraham, what do you see? Is it the Devil sitting on my shoulders? Is it?’ He shuddered and moaned, and shuddered again. ‘Would you send it away? It hounds me. I have given up everything, and yet it follows me! I admit that I was never a pious man. My heart was always bent on acquiring riches and high honours and I thought that I was of greater value than others. One day I had a terrible dream. I saw what had made me rich. It was not I, myself, it was a black angel with huge red wings, and I was terrified because I knew that it was the devil! I took to my heels to escape him, abandoning everything, and I have been going about for a long time, fleeing from what sits on my own shoulders.’ When he said this, his eyes clouded with tears and he seemed to be lost in a vision of his own wretchedness.
‘I have seen this spirit that hounds you before,’ Jesus said to him, ‘at the pagan altars…it is the spirit of pride and arrogance!’
‘Yes…yes…!’ the man said with eyes wide. ‘Pride and arrogance! Exactly! That is my weakness!’
Jesus could not help him, he could not help anyone, not yet…something was waiting for him in the river and he had to go. He stood then and with a heart full of sorrow, left the man in his misery.
He walked day after day, with the sun’s fingers on his brow and spent the nights huddled, trembling from cold, with his teeth chattering and only the robe his stepmother had made for him wrapped around him. On the morning of the twelfth day, when the fire-ball came out of its rocky bed he was up again, walking, and came upon the disfigured shape of a man sitting beneath a solitary tree.
Already the world was a furnace and he knew he must have shade, but as he neared the tree the man sitting there raised his head and Jesus saw that his skin was covered in pustules that were leaking with suppurations, that his nose was a hole in his face and that the lids over his eyes were gone missing, giving him the look of a living cadaver. The leper tried in vain to cover his malignancies with a hand eaten and ravaged.
‘Go away!’ he said to Jesus. ‘I am foul! Hurry! Don’t come near, for the path I walk is not your path, my son. I beg you to leave while you can…!’
Jesus sat near the man and wiped his brow with a sleeve. ‘It is hot,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes, it is hot, but please, save yourself! Must I take upon my soul your death on top of everything else I have to bear?’
Jesus heard snakes hissing behind rocks and when he looked at the leper he saw blue wings and a cold eye. He had seen this eye before in the faces of those Temple priests. The eye looked at him while its wings enfolded the man.
‘Tell me,’ Jesus said to him, ‘where has the path your soul has taken, led you? I know you, I saw you thousands of years ago, but you are now changed, you are come down to earth!’
The leper was terrified. He sucked in a breath through the purple edged crater that was his mouth, and from within this cavern he emitted a strangled voice, ‘Do you see it? Oh the misery! Where is the Messiah? When will he come to release me from this dreadful thing that claws into my flesh? He came so gradually, you know. At first I thought he was the Archangel Gabriel and I adored him, but I soon realised that he was another…I realised he was the angel of death! Death itself gnaws at my bones and feeds on my flesh…look at me! Me, a learned rabbi, a powerful man in the synagogue! Now I am defiled and no one will have me near them, and I have to walk alone in desolate places like this, scarcely able to beg for what scraps people will give me at their doors.
‘When you came I was waiting for death to tear me to pieces with his jaws…I have waited! But he wants to torture me more.’ He began weeping then into his ulcerated hands.