‘Someone, perhaps. A shepherd. .’ said Shim.

‘Why not a holy man?’

Shim would not aHow that possibility. He spoke from personal experience. He’d seen holy monks several times before, he explained. He’d sat with them, in temples to the north, in Greece, in other caves. He’d seen a prophet once. He’d been with men who knew their scriptures off by heart, and others who could discern the future of the world from studying the stars. Al of them looked wise and old, as dry and silvery as weathered timber. Enlightenment took time. Their beards were long and grey; their skins were lined like parchment scrolls. There was a light around them, not like light from a fire, but cold and pious, corning off their skin like phosphorescence on a fish. Such a light was the mark ofholiness and such a light, people said, could heal. It was a light he hoped to earn himself It wasn’t easy to acquire without long years of seeking it, far from the comforts and distractions of the world. It wasn’t given after forty days. It wasn’t squandered (on the likes of Musa). It wasn’t found in shepherd boys. ‘It does not climb down cliffs to hunt for eggs,’ he said. ‘You mentioned shapes and shadows when you saw something in that cave, but you did not notice any light, I think.’ He closed his eyes. He concentrated on the light to come. ‘Don’t give up hope.’ He meant that Aphas ought to hope that Shim would soon begin to glow.

‘I do hope,’ Aphas said. ‘What else is there for me but hope, and prayer? We ought to pray. As loudly as we can. Then he’ll come. He’ll come to join the prayers, if he’s a holy man.’

It was not easy to kneel in prayer on that rough, sloping ground. Marta felt she ought to help the old man, but once she had, Musa demanded help as well. She had to hold him by his wrists, and take his weight while he sat down, and then she had to pull him forwards on his knees. He held on to her hands too long. His nostrils flared when she got close to him, as if she were a meal. They rocked in prayer until there was hardly any light remaining in the sky. They asked for cures, fortunes, changes in their lives. But still there was no sign of Gaily.

‘He’s gone for good,’ said Shim. ‘I told you so.’ But Musa, Marta and Aphas would not hear ofit. Musa pushed his borrowed staffinto Shim’s back. A warning to stay quiet. It left a puckered indent in his clothes. They watched for tremors in the darkness of the cave. They heard odd sounds, thin evidence of hope. It seemed, as weil, that there were marks ofmovement that looked like lettering on the slopingrockin front ofthe key-hole entrance. Some stones had been displaced since their last visit. Perhaps by birds. Perhaps by someone sitting on the rock.

‘He’s there,’ said Musa, almost the first words that he’d spoken since they’d left the tent. ‘I’m sure of it. And we must tempt him out. A hundred prayers won’t do the job. He isn’t short of prayers. He has his own supply. But he needs food and drink or else he’ll die.’ The next time that they came, he said, they’d bring some dates and bread, and water in a bag. ‘We can tie them to some yarn and lower them on to the rock. He’ll show his face for that. Ifhe’s a man.’

The pilgrims pulled each other to their feet and stood on the promontory for one last view of the cave, like mourners, their shadows dropping out of sight. No movement on the precipice. There was no one to look at but themselves. Then not even themselves, because the light betrayed them. They had to scramble back to safer ground up slopes which had no shape or colour, through scrub which still was waiting for its moon. Meanwhile, elsewhere, in candlelight, the purple and the orange wools embraced.

18

Jesus wanted to believe that a flapping pigeon had landed in the canker thorn above his cave. Some proper company at last, out of the ark. Grey feathers and red earth, black wood. He was familiar with pigeons. They roosted underneath the beams of his father’s workshop, and lived off garden scraps and chicken feed. He knew their sounds, especially the alarm of their wings if they got trapped by cats or caught in the twig nets put down to protect the beans and peppers in the family patch. Then he’d be the first to run outside and set them free. God’s work.

From the noises that he heard, he judged his visitor to be a single bird, caged by the thorn. He recognized the sharp and frightened chirps it made, the heedless way it shook and banged its wings. Come down, he whispered to himself He hardly had the voice or faith to cali out loud. He longed to press its feathers to his face. That’s what the fast had done to him. He no longer prayed for god to come. He’d settle for the bird.

His pigeon dislodged a cloud of dry marl, which floated at the cave entrance, making speckled columns of the sloping sunlight, making temples of the air. His pigeon knocked off some of the thorn’s few silver leaves. The tree was shedding sins at Jesus’s feet. He could have put his arms out into the sun and caught a leafifhe’d had the strength and could have stopped the trembling in his hands. As it was, he did not move at all. He let the leaves make their pattern on the ground, uninterrupted. He only watched and counted them, telling fortunes from the way they fell. It would be bad luck if any leaf was touched or covered by another. And then — when bad luck was heaped up on the ground — he would outlive the fast, escape the scrub, only if the falling leaves exceeded forty. Or, every leaf was one more year of life. In that hard light, with his poor eyes, the piles of leaves looked like a hoard of silver jewellery.

Soon there were leaves enough for Jesus to escape the scrub and live another sixty years. Al he wanted now was for the pigeon to come. It was bound to be a bird from home, he told himself, a grateful pigeon sent from the Galilee to be his witness. He sat in darkness, his ankles crossed, just his toes amputated by the hard edge of the sun, and listened to the frantic beating of its wings. He waited for the pigeon to liberate itself, and fly down with its narcotic ookuroos to hunt for chaff at his. feet. There was no chaff.

Jesus rubbed his knuckles in his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping to clear his sight. The entrance to the cave appeared hard and sharp, ajagged pyramid oflight, but anything beyond was out of focus. His eyes had weakened in the gloom, and one was watery and blurred from an infection. The tears drained from his sinuses into his throat; that was the moisture he had drunk for thirteen days. His tongue was dry and stiff and silvery, a thorn leaf in his mouth, a mouth stuffed full of sin. The only sounds that he could make himself were little more than ookuroos. He and his pigeon were cousins, then, tongue-tied, inconsequential in the scrub, and insubstantial to themselves. They were soft creatures, naked, dislocated and afraid, and tired beyond the boundaries of sleep.

Jesus did sleep, though, or fainted. When he woke, the pigeon had grown larger and more threatening. There were no chirps or beating wings. What he’d mistaken as a bird now struggled with the thorn too heavily to be so small and feathery. It tugged and tore too madly at the branches. The sheer cliff-face above his head, where surely nothing larger than a single bird or bush could find any purchase, seemed to be making noises fit for a rock cat or a wolf. Bigger pieces of the marl began to fal, and cover the jewellery. The leaves seemed curses now. Sixty years in hell.

Jesus was not too tired or ill-nourished to be afraid. He closed his eyes, squeezed the bridge ofhis nose again, and concentrated. His hearing was still as sharp as reeds. He heard the bush grieving for its last few leaves, the crumbling marl, the tetchy bluster of the valley wind, his own uncushioned heart-beats. At last and in the distance, high and thin, coming from the naked air above the precipice, there was the turbulence of agitated men. Another flying donkey then?