22

It would have been the perfect night for Musa’s death, if he’d been truly ill or ifsome god, fooled by the noise that Musa made, had decided that the time had come to put an end to him. The sky was mourners’ black. No stars. Nor hardly any moon. What little light there was was muffled in the stacks of mist, which made the outline of the hills seem less solid even than the clouds. A passing world, but heavens everlasting. The earth was insubstantial and the sky was hard.

On such a night, death could have crept in unobserved, rubbed its fingers over Musa’s eyes and passed his heavy soul up into the heavens without betraying its stem work by casting any shadows in the scrub. Ifhe’d cried out, ‘It touches me,’ in those few moments when the vapours of his life were pressed out of his flesh and mixed in with the clouds, no one would have come to cling on to his chubby toes and plead, ‘This man is merchandise that can’t be touched. We will not let you take this man from us/

The badu was awake aH night, it’s true, but he would not come to Musa’s aid. He would not and he could not hear the vapours and the flesh divide. Marta was only dozing, possibly, but she was meek and sensible enough to stay inside her own cave for the night, whatever noises she could hear. Musa might call for help from his small family, as he had done before, ‘Miri, Miri. Come to me, quick, and save me from. .’ A dying man could reasonably expect his wife to battle for his life. But Miri was too far away to care that he was calling. She and the old man, Aphas, were sleeping better than they’d slept for many days, out ofhearing, in the tent, and for the moment unconcerned about her husband’s fate, except in dreams.

Only Shim, far out on the promontory, cross-legged, transcended by the darkness and his own alarm, was sifting every sound he heard. A tumbling stone. The dry bronchitis ofa stirring wind. A roosting bird. He was the only one of them to hear the nudging and the cussing of the clouds as death and its grey carriage went voyaging across the night. If he prayed at al at hearing it, he only prayed that death would stop at Musa’s cave and not descend on Shim. Let Musa die, he thought. His time is overdue. The world will be a better place ifMusa’s life is short. But I have value in the world, and work to do, and there are still ten days of quarantine to serve. My time’s not come.

Yet Shim would not deceive himself for long. His view was Greek, of course. Death wouldn’t intervene to make the world a better place. He’d be a fool to think it would. Death is a servant sent to the market with a list, and far too dull to have discretions of its own. And death is economical, as well. It only barters for the unprotected and the weak, because they’re cheap and easy to obtain. Death wouldn’t tire itselfwith Musa, not yet. He was too young and strong and irredeemable for death. He was too large. He would refuse to die, however ill he’d seemed, however tightly he had held his sides and writhed in pain. There was not much chance that Musa would be dead by the morning. He’d be alive. Shim knew it in his bones, though he hoped otherwise. What if that illness was a sham, a trick, to carry out some deathly, stem work of his own?

No, death would not grapple with Musa when there were easy pickings such as Aphas, old and cancerous, to choose instead. Or Miri, even, weakened by her child. So many pregnant women died before their time. Death liked the price of them. They were a bargain, at two lives in one. Or Shim himself. He was not well prepared to struggle for his soul. He felt so weak and undefended in the night; no roof, no courage for protection. Death could easily help itself to him, drop its talons on his shoulders like an owl and lift him from the rocks. Or else, more likely, death would come out to the promontory not as an owl but in Musa’s shape to seize him by his ankles and bring its fifty fists down on his head. Why else had Musa sent him there to pass the night alone, so cleverly, except to separate him from the rest and murder him? No one would know ifhe were dead. Musa would only have to roll the body off the precipice — no need for volunteers to drag it to the edge — and go back to the cave to resume his illness. He could tell his neighbours that Shim had had enough of fasting and had fled. Or Shim had tumbled in the dark. Or Shim had achieved such deep tranquillity that he’d transformed himself into a stone.

So, for the first part of the night, Shim cowered on the promontory, expecting Musa to arrive and making shapes of Musa from the darkness. Musa, silent. Musa, huge. Musa, running on his toes, with flames and serpents at his fingertips. Death with Musa riding on its back. Musa, black and swift, invisible. Shim had never known a night so dark and still and full ofpossibilities. But he was not terrified for long. He heard the cussing and the nudging of the clouds diminish. His fear diminished, too. The sky grew quieter for a while. Resting, and digesting. If death had come, Shim thought, then it had passed him by. But he was sure that someone else had died, close by. He smelt it in the air. What would he find when he went back to join his neighbours in the morning? Was Musa safe? Were Marta and the badu spared? Had death sniffed round the tent where Aphas and Miri were sleeping, and taken both their lives or one?

It was almost midnight when the lightning came to pierce the clouds and let the avalanche of thunder-claps come tumbling to the earth. The sky was only threatening. A mummer’s show of strength. It meant no harm. The rain and the scrub had reached an understanding when the world was made to let each other live their lives as much as possible in peace. The clouds came down to sniff the hills, to scratch their bellies on the thorns and rest their weight on this warm land before the weary battles of the night. They could not help spillingjust a drop or two, enough to make the tent reverberate and Shim to wonder whether he should fl.ee back to his cave at once or — better — join the others in the tent, if any of them had survived.

But these clouds were only passing through. They would mostly take their waters north across Sawiya and Jerusalem into Samaria, and to the Galilee. They’d rather wet the leaves of oaks and terebinths than waste themselves on thorns; they’d rather wash the dust off myrtles, brooms and asphodels. Before dawn the first raindrops would kick up Galilean soil on to beans and onion sets in deep-ploughed fields, and splash the red-black earth from summer barley roots. Jesus’s brothers would bring the chickens in and lie awake while the rain beat down on their flat roofs and broke up the lime marl which they had laid across the planks and joists and reeds, to keep their rooms rainproof Someone would have to use the cylinder of stone when it was light to roll the marl back into place. Not me, they thought. It’s not my tum. Not me.

But in the scrub, the native marl stayed almost dry. The clouds and lightning moved away, banging on their shields. The sky grew soft with moonlight once again, and then sharp with stars. And with the stars, the wind came in, glad to range around the empty forum of the sky; a gladiator, looking for a fight. It was an angry wind. See me, it cried. I’ve chased the clouds away. The thunder and the lightning have run off. I’ve stripped the night ofany warmth it had. There’s nothing I can’t do to you.

This wind had no agreement with the scrub. They were old enemies. The scrub exposed its rocks and ridges to blunt and bruise the wind. And in return, the wind picked up the dust and thorns and threw the loose stuff of the scrub about, and tore the dead wood from the trees like some mad boy. But on this night the wind was not prepared to settle for dead wood. It pitched itselfagainst the scrub. The brittle trees could not withstand the wind at all. A tree can only bend so much, and then it snaps or comes up with its roots.