Finally it was too warm to sit out in the sun, and he was trursty. He put a pebble in his mouth. He went back to the cave and slept again, just inside the entrance. He dreamed he was a. common fly and climbing down a crust ofbread. It broke away. He fell with crumbs ofbread between his legs. His wings weren’t any use. He fell awake. Flies on his face were feeding on the mucus of his nose and eyes and lips. There was indeed a noise of falling without wings. A few stones dropped outside his cave. A little further along the cliff a new landslip was underway. God’s footfall made its mark on earth.

The earth had quietened by the time that Jesus went outside. There was nothing on the precipice to see, but there were voices and movements on the rim above. He turned his back to Moab and looked towards the sununit of the cliffs. Dust fell on his face and hair. A pebble hit his shoulder. His company had come at last; rus guide, his god, his friend. He would not pass his quarantine alone. He waited for a face to show itself. Perhaps there was a face already; he was not sure. He thought he saw the blond hair of an angel and a face the colour of a honeycomb. He thought he heard a joyful voice call out, in a mocking echo ofhis dream, ‘Fly, fly. .’ Were they the words? There was a further fall of earth and then there was a vision that he could not understand. Its meaning was obscure and dark and troubling. A donkey seemed to come out of mid-air, falling through the sky at him. It dropped down the precipice to the right ofhis cave. It turned. It hit the rocks and bounced once more, high above the valley. Then it fell towards the silver plate. A sacrifice towards the silver plate. Its legs were wings. It seemed to have no weight, no eyes. Its head was loose like cloth, as if the bones along its neck were less substantial than the air.

11

As soon as Shim and the badu had begun to drag away the donkey’s carcass, the women — separated from the two remaining men by the customary seven steps — set to work themselves. They searched the camel panniers inside the tent for the rods and beams to assemble Miri’s loom. They laid the pieces out in order of size — the largest breast beams and shed sticks at the back, then the warp and heddle rods, and then, closest to hand, the beating hook, the stick spools, the leashes and the pegs.

Miri was glad to be distracted by something other than Musa’s pipingvoice. Her husband was sitting in his blanketed emporium, a pyramid within a tent, his flask of date spirit half consumed, his goods displayed on the mat in front of him, his stomach folding on his thighs like dough expanding into dough. He was biding his time. He knew his tenants would be tempted by the prospect — once their daytime fast had ended — of some of Miri’s fig cakes or dried fruit, some salted meat, some herby cheese. Fasting’s hungry work. He judged the old man, Aphas, would be the first to be enticed. Old men near death have no one to indulge, except themselves. Then, where Aphas had succumbed, the other three — perhaps the missing fifth as weH — would follow. They’d have to understand they could not simply plunder the free food of the scrub. This was his land, he would remind them. The birds and roots were his. They had to buy their food from him or go without until their forty days were up. They had to pay his price. He owned the water and he owned the sky. A sip, a sip, the merest sip, could not be had for nothing. He chuckled at his own audacity.

This was Musa’s quarantine. He would not fast or pray. He’d rest. His wife would milk and bake and cook; he would display the goods; his tenants would walk down from their caves each day for their supplies; and he would drink his spirits and his wine and dream of future caravans. So this detainment in the hills was working out unexpectedly well, he thought. Bad luck had almost turned to good. He had his health. He had some rent. He had some modest trade. He had some porters for the journey down to Jericho. He’d have the woman, Marta, to enjoy, if he was patient. In the meantime there was a skinny second-best at hand who would require no patience. He’d take hold of Miri’s wrists that night and press her bony little thighs into his lap. He’d close his eyes and rub the fabric ofher clothes against himself and cail her Marta underneath his breath.

Miri was as nervous as a doe. She did her best to be invisible. She could see and smell that Musa was in a skittish mood. Date spirit had revived him. His veins were full of blood and drink and mischief He was playful and expansive for the moment, but that could change. So far the spirit had only reached his heart and mouth but it would travel to his cock and fists, and then there would be danger. She would have to keep out ofhis reach once the donkey had been disposed of and these four visitors had gone back to their caves, unless she wanted to be pu^rruneUed by his hands and mouth or forced to masturbate him with a ball of wool or made to kneel.

Miri hid behind the woman Marta from Sawiya, and concentrated on the loom. She kept her face as blank and still as clay. But Marta was as open-faced and undefended as a young girl. She did not seem afraid of Musa’s eye. She touched Miri’s arm and hand and back; she was a sister for the day. She smiled to herself — and once she even laughed out loud — at the datey monologue that Musa was imposing on Aphas. The old man would have dearly loved to sleep, she saw. Instead, he had to listen to their landlord’s endless, hypnotizing tales of profits, bargains, deals, the buy-move-sell ofmerchant life, the mysteries of trade. Here was a man who knew the wider world, the land behind the middleman where everything was cheap, the hill behind the hills, the village that you reached when al the villages had ended, the sky beyond the skies where blue was silver and the air was heavier than smoke. That was where (according to Musa’s narratives that day) he’d seen deserts which made this scrub seem like paradise, where he’d survived on nothing else but camel leathers for his meat, the mist of mirages for drink, and promises for merchandise.

‘Nothing you have seen compares to what I’ve seen,’ he said to Aphas. But he was watching Marta while he spoke. He did not want to miss her bending over with the pieces of the loom. How would the fabric of her clothes spread on her back and thighs? How would her buttocks spread?

If only Musa had been talk and nothing else, Miri thought, then he might have been mistaken for a tolerable man — for there was something admirable about him, on first encounter. Everybody was agreed. When he was fuelled by drink, still good-humoured and teHing stories about the market-places of the world, the gourds and henna, ivory and olive oil, the grain and chalcedony he’d bought and sold; the carbuncles he’d traded for ambergris, the gold for slaves, the aggry beads for ostrich feathers; how he’d turned honey into salt and salt into silver, then, yes, he was captivating. ‘Like a snake,’ in Miri’s view.

She’d been captivated once herself. A short and bitter memory. She’d first encountered Musa in her father’s camp less than a year previously. He’d made her laugh. The way he looked. The words he used. The stories that he told. His self-esteem. He’d promised her that she would marry him and travel to the hems and pockets of the world. He’d show her valleys with so many flies that all the cattle had two tails. He’d take her to a land where al the chiefs had jewels so large that visitors could tether horses to them. He’d find her viHages where women gathered gold by dipping pitch-smeared feathers in their lake. They spread the gold like honey on their bread.

How gold and sweet his voice had been that night.

Now his voice was pitch for her. She’d never seen the jewels, the lakes of gold, the cattle with two tails. She’d seen the flies. She’d seen the wind-whipped camel tracks, the dusty camps, the stultifying market towns. She’d felt her husband’s fingers and his fists. What was there captivating in the life she led with him, other than his talk? How simple it would be, she thought, to earn some instant silence and some widowhood with a single blow from a loom rod. Musa’s head was round and red and tufted like a pomegranate. And it would split as easily. The man was full of pips and piss. She and Marta could drag the body to the precipice and push it off to join the little jenny on the valley floor. Two donkeys, yes. Both lame. Both dead.