She set to work. She tied the broken orange threads of wool into one long piece and wound and stretched it round the two warping rods. She lashed the rods, pregnant with their orange thread, to the breast and warp beams. She pegged one beam into the ground, using a stone as a hammer. She pulled the other beam as far away as it would go, so that the tension on the wool was unifo^, and pegged it to the ground. She carried stones into the tent and packed them round the pegs to stop them slipping. She put the leashes, the heddle rod and shed stick in place, opened up the warp threads, and checked the tightness of the wool. She tugged each thread, looking for the loosest ones which would meander through the weave if not fully stretched before the weft was started. The orange wool, unbunched, looked less garish than it had in sunlight. Perhaps her husband had been right to choose such cheerful wools.

The gap she’d opened up in the side wall of the tent gave open views across the falling scrub, towards the precipice and the distant purple hills, a lesser purple than the wool. Somewhere below and out of sight, Musa and his tenants were hunting for their miracles. What kind of self-deception were they guilty of? Would the Galilean man or boy, this godly creature who’d crept so memorably into their tent, expel the old man’s cancer, fertilize the woman’s crabby womb, make Shim’s heart as handsome as his face, expel whatever madcap spirits had taken residence inside the badu’s head, bring god down to the precipice to transform Musa, shrink him to a proper size?

Miri cupped her stomach in her hands. She knew that life did not improve through prayer or miracles. The opposite, in fact. So let them go and waste their time. She didn’t care. She only hoped their quest would take them far away and leave her there in peace al day, all year, to lose herself in woollen threads. She sat cross-legged before the loom. She rubbed the beams with her fingertips, exactly as her mother had, exactly as her daughter would. She plucked the warp. She played it like a harp. There were no orange notes as yet. It was too soon for her new mat to sing.

14

Jesus had not expected anyone to come. There would be god at hand, of course. Invisible, unprovable, perhaps, and shy to intervene. But ready to provide. If needs be, god would show Jesus how to tum the stones to bread and take his water from the clouds. Al things are possible to him that believes. And at the end ofquarantine he’d give him faith enough, ifhe so chose, to jump off the precipice instead of climbing to the top. He’d have no fear of death. The angels there would fly out of their eyries in the sky and take him by the arms back home to the Galilee. In their good care he’d not so much as strike his foot against a stone.

Jesus knew exactly what he believed where angels were concerned. He put his faith in them. They were as real to him as birds. He was no rigid sadducee. But he was not so clear on any of the other, weightier and wingless issues of the day. He’d sat cross-legged and done his best to follow the arguments held in the temple court by older men, but he could find no pleasure in debate. It was too easy to agree with every idea put to him with any feeling.

Of course a Jew should take the laws of Moses literaly. He saw the sense in that. He nodded, rapped his knuckles on the ground, a young man wise beyond his years. But should a righteous Jew reject everything not found within his laws — the immortality of souls, for instance, or the cheering prospect of messiahs — for fear of being reckoned false and being cast aside by god? He could not nod or rap at that with much sincerity because, like every fresh-faced follower of god, he harboured hopes of immortality himself, and prayed to see messiahs too. He prayed they’d come to earth to make god tangible, to mediate for god in all the conflicts of the world. But would messiahs drive the Romans out or let them stay, unharmed? Again, Jesus would not claim to have a single view. He did not like the taxes, tithes and tributes that the Romans levied in the Galilee to pay for their great marble works, their aqueducts and unremitting roads, but still he could not bring himself to hate the frightened, pink-skinned boys from far away who were the local legionnaires. He pitied them. They were not circumcized. They were not Jews. They had no covenant with god. They had no place in paradise.

Jesus had a simple view, a village view of god, that was not scholarly. He believed he was the nephew ofhis god, a god who many years before had chosen from all of the families of the world the family ofJews — not Romans, note — to be his kin. He’d rescued them from captivity and led them to a promised land, the Galilee. If god required the Romans to depart and retreat with their taxes down their roads back to the city of their birth, then he would do it al himself. He had the strength, for he was hard and muscular. His nature was not womanly. An engineer like god who kept the great machine ofstars and planets voyaging through air could have no trouble with the Romans if he chose to drive them out. The fact he did not choose to drive them out was evidence that god was not concerned with matters ofthe body. His empire was the mind and soul, the spirit not the flesh, the age to come and not the world of days. There’d be a battle, then, bitter and divine, not with the Romans but against the legions of evil. Al the demons would be killed and every sin defeated. Then God would call his family to his clearing in the fields. God would separate them, one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. Then waters would break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the burning sand would become a pool and the thirsty grounds a spring of water; the haunts ofjackal would become a swamp and the scrub would flourish with its reeds and rushes. That’s what the scriptures promised.

Jesus had sat inside his cave and looked out on to the poisonous mists rising from the sea and expected to witness in his loneliness a vision of god’s mossy paradise. He’d not expected to be disturbed by visitors. But first — with hardly one day of his quarantine endured — there’d been the tumbling donkey, then the faces on the ridge, and now this gathering of five. He sat entirely still, too scared to hide himself in prayers, and watched the timid delegation taking risks to reach a crumbling promontory a little way along the precipice. He watched the blond man — not an angel now — pointing out to his four strange companions the stony perch and the entrance to his cave. He sank back further into the darkness and looked out like a cat. They must have seen a shadow move or heard the rattle of a displaced stone, because they stayed, standing or sitting on the sloping earth and looking across at the key-shaped darkness where he hid as if they had no business in the world except to wait for him. He could not hear the words, but he could hear their voices. They were thin and querulous, like lambs. That was a slightly cheering thought. He was a cat. And they were lambs.

If they had been five shepherd boys, five camel drivers, five legionnaires, five matching anything, he might not have found their presence quite so sinister — but these five were like animals in Noah’s ark, unlikely and disturbing friends.

There was a second face already briefly familiar to Jesus from the falling of the donkey, an impish, restless figure, as brownskinned as a honeycomb, with red-black hair. There was an old man, bent and hesitant, his legs like twigs. And a woman, sitting at a distance from the men.

There was another man he recognized as well. The large man from the tent, the one whose dates and water he had taken, the almost dead man he’d abandoned only yesterday. He’d offered no more care and charity than to rub a little, borrowed water on his lips. The merest drop. He’d left the man to die without companions. But Jesus was not troubled by any guilt. He was afraid. He could remember the man’s blackened tongue, and the heat of fever. And he could still recall the eggy odours of the devil on his breath. Yet here he was, recovered, big, beyond the grave, against al probabilities. He was holding a stick or walking staff in one hand, and that — to a timid man like Jesus, lonely, inexperienced, far from home — seemed ominous. It was the twisted wood that should be thrown out or burned. It was so fractured by the distance and the heat that it seemed to curve in spirals like the demon’s baton he’d heard about from stories older than the scriptures. The sort ofstick that could strike flames into a bush, split rocks, become a snake, turn wine to water with a single touch, tum holy bread back into stone again, make brothers fight and mothers chase their sons from home. It could fly through the air into a cave and beat its cowering occupant. It was the sort of playful stick the devil used to drive good Jews away from god.