“I don’t know,” he said. “They went out into the snow. They told everyone the same story. I don’t know where they went. I never saw them again. They went back to their flocks. They had to go back.” He looked at me. In the moonlight I could see he was better now. “But don’t you see, your mother was happy. A sign had been given. She went to sleep with you tucked near her.”

“And Joseph?”

“Call him Father.”

“And Father?”

“He was as he always is, listening, and saying nothing. And when all the people in the stable questioned him, he gave them no answers. The people came one by one and knelt down to look at you, and they prayed, and they went away, back into the corners and under their blankets. The next day we found a new lodging. Everyone in the town knew about this. People kept coming to the door, asking to see you. Old men came, hobbling on their sticks. The other boys in the town knew. But we weren’t going to stay there long, Joseph said. Only long enough for you to be circumcised and the sacrifice to be made at the Temple. And the magi from the East, they came to that house. If it hadn’t been for the magi going to Herod—.”

He stopped and turned.

“The magi going to Herod? What happened?”

But he couldn’t say any more.

It was Joseph walking slowly up the slope.

I knew him in the dark by his walk. He stopped a little way away.

“You’ve been gone too long,” he said. “Come back now. I don’t want you this far from the camp.”

He waited for us.

“I love you, my brother,” I said in Hebrew.

“I love you, my brother,” he said. “I will never hate you again. Never. I will never envy you. Envy is a terrible thing, a terrible sin. I will love you.”

Joseph walked ahead.

“I love you, my brother,” James said again, “and I love you, whoever you are.”

Whoever I am! Christ the Lord… had never told Herod.

He put his arm around me. And I put my arm around him.

Now I knew as we walked back that I could not let Joseph know that James had told me these things. Joseph would never have wanted it. Joseph’s way was to talk about nothing. Joseph’s way was to go from day to day.

But I had to know the rest of this story! And if my brother could hate me all these years for this, if the Rabbi could stop me at the door of the school over questions to do with who I was, I had to know!

Were these strange happenings the reason we had gone to Egypt? No, it couldn’t have been that way.

Even if the whole town of Bethlehem was talking about this, we could have gone to another town. We could have gone back to Nazareth. But what about the angel who appeared to my mother?

We had kindred here—in Bethany. And they weren’t all chief priests who were rich. Why, Elizabeth had been here. Why hadn’t we gone to her? But then Herod’s men had killed Zechariah! Had Zechariah died because of these stories! Stories of a child born who was Christ the Lord! Oh, if only I could remember more of what Elizabeth had told us on that terrible day last year, after the bandits had raided the village, about Zechariah being killed in the Temple.

Oh, how long would it be before I knew these things!

Later that night, as I lay on my blanket, I closed my eyes and prayed.

All the many lines of the Prophets drifted through my mind. I knew the Kings of Israel had been the Lord’s anointed, but they had not been heralded by angels. No, they had not been born of a woman who had never been with a man.

Finally I couldn’t think any longer. The struggle was too much.

I looked at the stars, and tried to see the hosts singing in the Heavens. I prayed for the angels to come to me as they would to anyone on the Earth.

A great sweetness came over me, a quiet in my heart. I thought to myself, All this World is the Temple of the Lord. All the Creation is his Temple.

And what we have built on the far hill is only a small place, a place through which we show our love for the Lord who has made everything. Father in Heaven, help me. When I slipped into sleep, a great song opened up, and when I woke, for a moment I didn’t know where I was, and the dream was like a veil of gold being pulled away from me.

I was all right. It was early morning. The stars were still there.

Chapter 23

I wasn’t a child anymore. According to the custom, a boy assumes the yoke of the Law when he’s twelve, but that didn’t matter. I wasn’t a child. I knew it when I watched the other children that morning at play.

I knew it when we joined the pilgrims going to the Temple.

It was the same press as the day before, with hours passing in the singing, and the slow moving before we could reach the baths where we plunged naked into the cold water, and then put on the fresh garments we had brought in our bundles with us.

At last, we were in the tunnel moving upwards toward the Great Court. Here the voices of those who disputed echoed off the walls, and at times sounded angry, but I wasn’t frightened anymore.

My mind was on the unfinished story that James had told.

Finally, the stream of singing pilgrims, full of the voices of all the world, poured out into the Court of the Temple and the clear sky was a welcome sight overhead. There was a spreading out, a freedom to take deep breaths, but we were soon in another crush to purchase the birds for our sacrifice. For James wanted to make a sin offering. And I soon realized this was why we had come.

For what sin James wanted to make this sacrifice I didn’t know. Or I did know. But what did it matter to me? Cleopas said that I should see it, and that’s why he had brought me along.

It wasn’t until tomorrow that we would receive the first sprinkling of purification.

Now this puzzled me.

“How is it we’ll go into the Sanctuary for the sacrifice if we haven’t received the purification?” I asked.

“You know we are purified,” said Cleopas. “We were purified before we left Nazareth in the mikvah. We bathed this morning in the stream beside the house of Caiaphas. We’ve just bathed in the bath. We go through the sprinkling because of Passover. It’s the full purification in order to cleanse us if we’ve contracted any uncleanness of which we don’t know.” He shrugged. “And it’s the custom. But there’s no reason for James to wait. James is good. We’re going into the Sanctuary now.”

“Let the Greek Jews go through the purification before they enter,” said my uncle Alphaeus who was with us. “All the Jews from other lands.”

Joseph said nothing. He had his hand on James’s shoulder as he guided him and us through the crowd.

Before we could purchase the birds, which were all selected as perfect for the Lord, we had to change our money for the proper shekels received by the Temple.

And above the busy tables of the money changers under the colonnade, I could see the burnt roof in either direction, and the men working on it, sweating under the sun, as they scraped and cleaned the stones that were left, and some fitting in new stones with mortar. I knew that job well.

But never had I seen such a great building, and I couldn’t even see the end of the colonnade to the right or to the left of me. The capitals of the columns were beautiful, and a great deal of the gold work had been restored.

Voices grew angry in front of me. Men and women were disputing with the money changers. Cleopas was impatient.

“What is the point of their arguing?” he said in Greek to me. “Listen to them. Don’t they know these people are robbers?” He used the same word in Greek that we all used for the robbers who lived in the hills, the rebels who’d come down and taken Sepphoris and brought the Romans out after them.

In our first visit, bloodshed had stopped us from ever getting this far. And now as we came up to the tables ourselves, it was a din of voices.