The Liars' Gospel

Caiaphas

THEY TIE A rope around his ankle so that, if he dies, they will be able to haul him out.

People say that, a thousand years ago, under the rule of King David or King Solomon, such a precaution was not necessary. The High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies alone on Yom Kippur, perform the sacred rituals, burn the incense, sprinkle the blood, and the Holy Breath would descend and the people would be forgiven.

Even five hundred years ago, after they had had to rebuild the Temple following the exile in Babylon, there was not so much danger. Even then, under the fabled High Priest Shimon the Righteous, the thread on the horns of the goat would turn from red to white and the people would know that they were forgiven.

But not now. Now, when they send a High Priest into the Holy of Holies, they know he may not come out alive. It happens not infrequently.

The Holy of Holies, the chamber at the center of the Temple, is built on the navel of the world. It was the first piece of land created when God said, “Let the land be divided from the sea.” It is from the earth of this spot that God scooped up the dust to make Adam and Eve, the first man and woman. It is the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac, and where God stopped him and gave him a ram instead, which is how we know that the sacrifice of human life is not pleasing to Him, and that He instead desires the sweet savors of animal flesh. In the end of days, it is from this spot that the word of the Lord will radiate out like the sound of golden trumpets, so that all the nations will bow down before Him. It is the holiest place in all the world.

The whole world is arranged in concentric circles around this spot. There is the world outside the land of Israel, and within that there is the land of Israel. And within that the holy city of Jerusalem. And within that the Temple. And within the Temple the courtyard of non-Jews, and inside that the courtyard of Jewish women, and inside that, closer yet to the holiest place, the courtyard of Jewish men, and inside that the courtyard of the priests. And within that courtyard of the priests, at the heart of the Temple, the reason for the whole edifice of marble colonnades, for the city, for the country, for the world. At the heart of the Temple is this holiest place in all of creation.

The chamber of the Holy of Holies is a small perfect cube, ten cubits, by ten cubits, by ten cubits. Its walls are marble. Its entrance is covered by two curtains. A raised marble platform shows where the Ark of the Covenant used to stand before it was lost — or hidden and its hiding place forgotten — during the Exile. Other than that, the room is empty. Apart from God. This is the place where God is.

And on Yom Kippur, when God brings his face very close to the earth, when he listens and observes His people most intently, on that day the High Priest — the Cohen Gadol — walks into the chamber alone. Alone he burns the incense on the glowing coals, and scatters the blood, and falls upon the stone dumbfounded in the presence of the Lord. Alone he mumbles his prayers into the cold smooth floor and squeezes his eyes tightly shut and finds his whole body shaking. And his head is filled with the smell of the incense and the speech of God, which is so far beyond words that when God Himself describes it in the Torah He can only say that the people hear the sights and see the words, so inadequate is our language to describe the Almighty.

And often these days, the High Priest does not survive the experience.

And because the square chamber is so holy, because they themselves would die if they dared to enter it, for it is certainly forbidden to them, they pull on the rope tied to his ankle to remove the body. This is always a terrible thing. If the man dies, by this token the people know that they have not been forgiven.

It is since the Romans, of course. Since Pompey with his iron boots strode about the holy chamber. Since the wall was breached and the treasures were examined by a Roman note-taker, wiping his nose on the back of his hand as he counted the golden vessels that once were made for the hand of Moses.

And yes, it is because of the men themselves. The High Priests, who once were chosen by their fellow priests for their wisdom and holiness and the force of the spirit in them, are now servants of Caesar, picked by Pilate the Prefect for other, more practical qualities. There are men who have bought their way to becoming High Priest by gifts to Pilate.

They do not always survive.

It is this which Caiaphas carries with him every morning when he rises and scratches, and kisses the head of his sleeping wife and goes to wash and put on the robes of his office and begin the services every day. Today is ordinary, and tomorrow will be ordinary and the next day in all likelihood. But once a year he will stand in the full presence of the Almighty and see if he is worthy to survive.

He has a suspicion regarding his wife.

He has seen her in the courtyard, her hair oiled with perfume but neatly covered like any modest woman, and a jar of water under her bent arm. He has watched as she asks one of the Temple Levites, a man called Darfon, to pull down the branch of the tree so she can pluck some of the sun-warmed dates. No, she smiles, not those ones, they are not quite soft yet. She does not like the crunchy dates. She wants them from that branch, where they are dark and sweet.

The Levite, Darfon, jumps up and grabs the branch with both arms. His sleeves flap down, revealing muscular brown arms, the hair wiry and strong like a young lamb’s. She smiles, and he can see her watching the man’s arms, and his sturdy legs kicking against the ground, so she can reach her hand up bending only at the elbow and pluck a soft warm date. She plucks two. She presses one to her lips, licking the brown skin with her small pink tongue. She gives the other to Darfon. He takes it coyly, smiling at her under his eyelashes, biting into it with a small, careful, hungry bite.

Caiaphas, watching, finds himself imagining a wolf, down out of the mountains, lean and ravenous from the famine in the land. Imagines the wolf stalking his wife, bringing her to bay in a grove strewn with rocks and broken pottery. Imagines the wolf growling and leaping to rip out her throat.

Or he imagines bruises slowly spreading across her face, turning her eyes bloodshot and her neck scarlet and blue. Imagines, and his hands feel how good it would be, throwing her to the ground, because it is not that he does not love her and desire her, but a thing like this must be paid hurt for hurt.

He is not a violent man; he has sacrificed enough young bulls and yearling lambs to understand the precious delicacy of life. He is startled by the strength of his feelings, how they leap up in him like a wolf he had not known was stalking by his side, or within him, all his life.

It is high summer. Passover is long gone. The sun bakes down on the cool marble plazas of the Temple, and on the north gate, where the drovers bring in their hot and reeking sheep for the slaughter. It heats the marketplace, where the fruit sellers lazily beat palm fans to keep the flies off their wares and the donkeys’ tails twitch, raising clouds of gnats. It cooks the houses of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor, it turns the swimming ponds into warm pools of bubbling algae and frogs. In the minds of King, Governor, Prefect, soldiers, priests and farmers it raises the specter of famine, for what if the rains do not come? They always come if God wills it and why would he not will it — yet there have been years when they did not come. Jerusalem is languorous in the heat, unable to move, slow-witted but fretful. But just because Jerusalem does not move, one cannot believe she is asleep.

The Prefect, Pilate, wears a ring with a wolf’s head. The wolf is the animal of Rome, of course: in another room Pilate has his little shrine to the God-Emperor Tiberius, and above it a picture of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teat of their wolf-mother. Like the wolf, Rome hunts with a great pack. Like the wolf, she protects her own but to those outside her circle she is nothing but teeth. Pilate’s ring, on the third finger of his long bony right hand, is a great disc of amber with the wolf’s head carved into it, snarling, showing fangs. When Pilate slams his hand onto the table, the bright summer light glints off the sharp bevels and lines of the carving, making the teeth sparkle and the eye blink.

“Three months!” he shouts, and then, appearing to calm himself, although this is all for show and Caiaphas has seen it before, he repeats again more softly, “Three months.”

Caiaphas stares at a point just behind Pilate’s head, to the niche where the man has his little statue of Mars, bearing a sword. There would be a riot in the city if they knew he had brought this idol so near to the holy sanctuary. There had been a riot four years earlier when he brought a new garrison of soldiers into the city bearing their banners showing Caesar’s head. It is forbidden to bring a graven image or an idol or an image of any kind this close to the Temple.

“Are you so stupid, Caiaphas?” Pilate asks slowly. “Is it that you are stupid? Is it that you have not understood what I have asked these three months? Do I need to ask you more slowly so you can follow my request? I. Want. The. Money.”

Caiaphas licks his upper lip.

“I have tried to explain…” he begins, and he hears his own voice wheedling like a child’s and the wolf in his own throat growls at him and before he can stop himself he says, “It is forbidden. It is utterly forbidden. What you are asking is impossible.”

Pilate stares at him, and his nostrils flare and his mouth works.

He brings his hand down on the table again, so hard that the ink pot jumps and spatters.

“It is not impossible if I command it! The city of Jerusalem,” says Pilate, “is dying of thirst. There is fresh water in the mountains, there are men ready to begin construction, there is stone in the quarries. Look!” Pilate opens his hands magnanimously. “Look at your city.” Out of the window, Jerusalem bakes and shimmers. “Give me the money from the Temple so I can build the aqueduct and bring the water from the hills.”

Caiaphas wonders whether, if he angered the man enough, Pilate would pull down one of those swords from the wall and run him through. Remember, he says to himself, how vulnerable you are. Remember how swiftly the life would run out of you, like the life of a young lamb under your blade. And yet the wolf in him will not hear it.

“The money that is given to the Temple is for its use alone,” he says. “It is a sacred trust, given to us by God.”

He remembers the widows and the orphans who bring their tiny offerings to the Temple, because they know God will be pleased with their sacrifice, however small it is. They bring it freely. It is money they meant for the Temple. It is not his to give away.

“Fuck on your God!” shouts Pilate. “That Temple is piled up with gold and decorated with marble, while not a single aqueduct brings water to the south of the city.”

“They have their wells. No one suffers from thirst in Jerusalem.”

Pilate bangs his hand on the table again.

“Five hundred talents of gold! You will hardly miss it from your coffers. We could begin to quarry the stone this week!”

It is a power game, of course. Pilate could request the money from Rome, but his standing is not good enough to have any expectation of receiving it. This Caiaphas has from various spies in the orbit of the Governor of Syria, Pilate’s superior. But he wants to leave Jerusalem more like Rome than he found it. No Roman can see a city without wanting to drop an aqueduct on it, for all that the well water is clean and plentiful. And if he persuades the Temple to pay for the project, he will report in one of those dry military dispatches that the people are “beginning to understand the benefits of Roman rule.”

Caiaphas shrugs. It is a gesture calculated to irritate Pilate and he knows it.

“If you were to send the soldiers in,” he says, “I could not prevent them. My priests are not warriors.”

“Oh no,” says Pilate, “I know how this will go. You will force me to send soldiers into the Temple. And we will desecrate some sacred urn or tread in the wrong way on a holy pavement, or distress the spirit of the blessed sheep or breathe improperly in the presence of the consecrated midden heap. And then there will be another riot and I will have to call in troops from Syria to quash it and that would make them say…” He blinks and stops himself. “That would be very inconvenient. These fucking people!” He wipes the sweat beading on his brow with the sleeve of his robe. “One cannot walk from one end of the square to the other without insulting an ancient tradition of some tribe or other.”

Pilate pokes his finger at Caiaphas. “You will give me the money and tell them that your God has commanded it. Tell them you had a dream.”

Caiaphas inclines his head as if to say “an excellent idea,” or possibly, “I will try but I cannot promise,” or possibly, “You are a fool and hold on to this city by a tiny thread.” He has been ending conversations this way for months now. Appearing to concede, never quite consummating his promises.

Every morning and every evening, a lamb is sacrificed. But this is only the beginning. Every morning and every evening, incense is burned on the altar in the Holy of Holies. Every day, there is the seven-branched candelabrum to be filled with pure-pressed oil. On the Sabbath, a meal offering of flour and oil and wine. And at the new moon, two yearling bulls, a ram, seven lambs. To say nothing of the particular sacrifices during the three yearly festivals of pilgrimage, and at New Year in the autumn and Yom Kippur ten days after that. And the sin offerings brought to seek God’s forgiveness by penitents around the year. And the peace offerings. And the thanksgiving offerings, for recovery from illness or escape from danger.

“And do you think this is easy?” Annas had said to him when he was a young man. It was when Caiaphas first began to be taken notice of in the Temple and by his fellow priests. Annas was High Priest then; he had these conversations with many young men who had been taken notice of. “Let us take the incense, for example. Do you think that when the servant from the house of Avtinas comes to bring the incense that it has come from nowhere?”

Caiaphas, attempting to impress the older man, had spouted the lines he had learned.

“There are eleven spices in the incense,” he said, “frankincense and myrrh and cassia and spikenard and saffron and—”

“Listen to yourself. Stop. Understand how much is necessary for that list you spool out. Where does the saffron come from?”

Caiaphas shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “From flowers?”

“From only one flower, which grows most plentifully only in Persia. We use a sack of it every month. A good handful of saffron is the product of ten thousand flowers. A hundred handfuls in a sack. A hundred men laboring crouched over their flowers are needed to supply us with saffron alone.”

Caiaphas looked out over the Temple courtyard, where he could count easily a hundred priests hurrying about their duty. He nodded slowly.

“You are not impressed, I see. You think that a hundred men laboring in the hills of Persia are not so very much for the glory of God. Then consider. They dry those tiny threads in the sun. They bundle them into sacks — and where do the sacks come from? Someone must weave them, someone must stamp them with our seal. They put the sacks into the back of a closed wagon — and who made that wagon? Who bred those mules? The wagon is driven by a strong man, with five other men guarding it. They pass through mountains and valleys. A dried-up riverbed. A pasture of waving grass and biting gnats. They fight off bandits who attempt to steal the precious treasure. At night they take turns to sleep. Perhaps in the crossing one of their usual waterholes is empty. Perhaps one of the animals dies. They must change the route regularly or the bandits will ambush them. They must check the sacks for weevil and mold — if it rains too heavily and the saffron becomes wet, their journey is in vain. At last they arrive in Jerusalem, if we are lucky. And of all these things, do you know what is the most needful?”

“The cunning of men,” said Caiaphas wonderingly, “all the craft and skill given to them by God, to elude the bandits and to keep their cargo safe.”

Annas shook his head.

“A thousand dangers threaten. And to make the incense, we need not only the saffron threads but also those other ten fragrant ingredients: frankincense and myrrh, spikenard and fennel resin, cinnamon and ginger, cassia and balsam, distillation of rock roses and wine from Cyprus. And we need salt from Sodom, amber from Jordan, lye from Carshina. Think of the many wagons bringing them from around the world. And consider that all these go to make just the incense, and not any of the other sacred matters of the Temple. And you are correct that cunning and skill are needed to make them and bring them to us.

“But most important of all, none of this can happen if at any point along the way a war is being waged. If an army is laying siege to a city, the saffron wagon will be requisitioned. If angry defeated soldiers are wasting enemy land, the saffron will be burned. If the men who tap the trees and pluck the stems and brew the wine and mine the salt have been taken for an army, their work will go undone. To bring us all these things, that which is most needful is peace.”

Annas drew himself to his full height. He was an exceptionally tall man, over six feet. “That is the role of the Cohen Gadol. To maintain the Temple services. To maintain the peace. Nothing is more important.”

Two people come to him with a disputation. Natan the Levite shrugs apologetically as he brings them in and whispers, “I’ve tried to sort this one out myself, but the two stubborn goats insist on seeing the High Priest. If you order them both flogged I won’t blame you.”

He has a mock-rueful smile on his face as he bows his head low and leaves the room, muttering, “The Cohen Gadol, if his judgment is sufficient for you and you do not require a voice from heaven.”

They are traders in the outer courtyard of the Temple. They both sell the pure white doves that are used for the thanksgiving sacrifice brought by a woman after she has given birth and recovered safely from those many dangers.

It is holy work to sell the birds. There are three or four families who have done so for generations. They breed the birds in dovecotes just outside the city, catch them by hand — for no bone can be broken before they are sacrificed — keep them docile with a special mixture of seeds which each family guards closely.

And now this. A tall gaunt man of about fifty with a close-cropped beard and a loose skullcap stands before him. Next to him, a short woman in her sixties with sun-cured skin and a heavy gait. Caiaphas would ask each of them what the matter is, but neither of them will let him speak.

“I am but an old woman,” she says. “I have no strength left in my bones. The place nearest the entrance is fitting for me, for I cannot carry my wares across the great courtyard.”

“Pah,” he says, “pah. I suppose you have not four strong sons whom I have seen carrying your wares and your stall for you! I suppose those four strong sons did not threaten my Jossya with cudgels unless she moved her stall to the far end of the courtyard.”

“My sons would never threaten,” the woman snaps, “unless they were provoked. Isn’t it true that your daughter Jossya crept behind their stall and released the birds intended”—and here the woman sheds an impressive tear—“for the Lord’s holy table, so bringing shame on the whole house of Israel?”

“If she did it is because she knew that your family have stooped so low as to catch the birds with nets! I have seen birds dragging a broken wing on your stall, sold at a low price to farmers who know no better. I have seen them try to make their sacrifice and be turned away by the priests and come in shame to buy a good bird from me or my daughter. It is you who should be ashamed.”

“You spread these lies about my family so that people will pay your inflated prices! Everyone knows you have grown rich off the piety of the poor!”

“You have grown rich yourself, bringing shame on the holy house of the Lord!” he says.

“You have tried to steal from an old woman in her last years on the earth!” The woman has brought herself to the point of real half-hysterical tears now.

“You are a liar and a thief!” The man is so angry his face has turned pale, his nostrils flaring, the skin of his neck beginning to redden.

“Do you see how he speaks to me? In the chambers of your holy presence!”

Caiaphas continues to be silent. He watches. He waits. They are in a chamber of his house next to the Temple. Through the small half-shuttered window which looks on to the inner courtyard, he can see the sacrifices being performed. A meal cake and oil are utterly consumed. The Lord forgives the sin which prompted the sacrifice. The man and woman burn themselves out after a few more angry expostulations and before they come to physical blows.

He smiles his diplomatic smile, the guileless face he puts on to deal with common men and with the Prefect. He is all sympathy, all respect. He is sometimes amazed by the way his mouth carries on speaking and his face composes itself into such a usefully sympathetic arrangement while inside his mind he is thinking only of, for example, his wife leaning in to take the ripe date from the sticky fingers of Darfon, son of Yoav.

They reach an agreement after a time: the woman will have her stall near to the front all days of the week but Friday — a day when many people come to buy offerings — and they will both submit to stock checks by one of the Levite treasurers under Natan’s command. Outside, the sacrifices continue.

Annas comes to see him at the end of the day, as he is relaxing in his city home. He has two homes: the official residence at the Temple, which he uses during the day for his business, and this, his own house in the city, the place he had built for himself and which would still be his if he were no longer High Priest. Here he is a private man, insofar as he can be.

His daughters have put out fresh goat’s milk and bread with soft white cheese mingled with thyme leaves and good black olives from the north. They have poured the cold clear well water into an earthenware jug and flavored it with citron. The courtyard of his house is cool and still when Annas comes to visit.

Annas arrives unannounced, as he so often does, but he is welcome. He is a powerful man still, both physically and politically. He is wide in the shoulder and his arms are well muscled — when he was High Priest, it is said he could bring a fretful ox to its knees by the force of his grip. And his personality, Caiaphas thinks sometimes. Annas is a clever man with a strong will.

He became High Priest just when the old King Herod died, when his various heirs, mostly also named Herod, were squabbling and pleading with the Emperor for pieces of the kingdom. Many said that Annas bought his way into the office with bribes to the Prefect and the captains of the army, but he stayed there because he was able to broker deals between the Temple and the Prefect, between the King and the people, between heaven, it sometimes seemed, and earth. He had spies—“Not spies,” he would say, “friends”—in the courts of the Governors of Syria and Egypt, and even some said as far as Rome itself. He is no longer High Priest now — an earlier governor took that position away from him when he tried to execute a man for murder, because Rome does not allow its occupied states the privilege of executing their own criminals — but he still has as much influence as ever. He gives good counsel, and Caiaphas embraces him as a welcome guest when he arrives.

“I hear the sellers of doves have come to blows,” says Annas, chewing on an olive and spitting the pit into the bushes of the courtyard.

Caiaphas shrugs. “They have been ready to kill over the bird of peace for the past five years.”

“I also hear that you dealt with them extremely well. Both families seem to feel they have come out best from the bargain.”

Caiaphas smiles in spite of himself.

“It was no judgment of Solomon.”

“Even Solomon is remembered for only one case. Your day may yet come. Besides, it is a good training ground for you. I will not live forever and someone will have to do my work when I’m gone.”

Caiaphas is well aware that Annas says this frequently, to various men, including several of his sons. Caiaphas is some way down the list of successors. And yet it is true: it is hard to imagine who will stop the various factions in Judea from shattering apart and breaking themselves on the wheel of Rome after Annas is gone.

“You have many good years left,” says Caiaphas.

“Mmm,” says Annas. Then, staring up through the vine-laden trellis above them to the cool night sky, “Have you heard that there will be war between King Herod Antipas and the Nabateans? There’s no way to prevent it. King Aretas of Nabatea is still fuming on his throne in Petra that Herod dared to divorce his daughter. He’ll use these border scuffles as an excuse to invade the south.”

“A war? Over a dishonored daughter?”

“Men love their daughters, Caiaphas.” Annas grins, showing his teeth, and bites off a piece of bread.

Caiaphas’s wife serves them boiled whole Galilee-fish wrapped in herbs and freshly cooked flatbread, with two sauces, one of yoghurt and one spicy with cumin and hot pepper. There are aubergines stewed in olive oil and doused in hyssop and dried parsley, and roasted onions seared from the fire.

She bends this way and that as she lays out the food and gives them their plates. She is beautiful and he cannot help but watch her still, the way her robe outlines her buttocks when she stoops and the sky-blue square covering her hair slips a little as she moves. She is past forty and has given him two sons and three daughters and still he desires her. And he wishes his suspicion were not true. And he hopes that it is not. But he thinks of her eyes darting to Darfon and a fire burns in his veins.

When she has finished with the food, she comes and wraps her arms around Annas’s shoulders, leaning in close, and he kisses her on the cheek.

“Is he treating you well, my darling?” Annas says, laughing.

“Oh, father,” she says, “he’s terribly cruel and beats me every night.” She winks and smiles and they all laugh, because it is so very far from anything that could ever be true.

Caiaphas would not be High Priest if it weren’t for his wife. He knows it, the whole city of Jerusalem knows it. There is no shame in it, not really. This is how a man becomes powerful: by becoming precious to men who are already powerful, by impressing an older and wiser man with his skill and his cunning, and by marrying his daughter.

Annas was High Priest for ten years before the Prefect demanded he resign the office. But Annas’s power has not waned. He has been succeeded as High Priest by his sons, one after another, none of them for quite long enough to secure a power base for themselves. And now it is the turn of Caiaphas, his son-in-law, who has been gently shepherded through the twists and turns of office, spoken of highly to the Prefect and the other priests and to Herod Antipas, the king in the north. And by dint of diplomacy, and through Annas’s support, he has somehow clung on longer than all the others. Annas has given him special favor. Men love their daughters.

The next day, after he has finished with the morning sacrifices, there are various pieces of business to attend to. Natan the Levite arrives carrying a jar of wine from Tyre under his arm.

“From that Asher family in the north,” he says, “the people who had the trouble with bandits. They’ve offered fifteen casks in place of their tribute.”

“Is wine less likely to be stolen than grain?”

Natan shrugs, scratches his grizzled beard.

“Fewer wagons for the same value. They can protect it with a smaller number of men.”

“And keep more men to work their farm, and send fewer of their sons to make the offering at the Temple?”

Natan pours the wine into Caiaphas’s two earthenware cups, rough red pottery on the outside, smooth blue glaze inside the bowl. The wine smells good as it gushes into the cups.

They taste together. The wine is exceptional, scented with walnut, figs, and spring grass. Caiaphas rolls the good red richness around his mouth. It is the hills of the north and the deep peace of childhood.

He meets Natan’s eyes.

“Yes, then,” says Natan.

“Ask them for this in the future instead of the grain they owe.”

Natan nods. Pauses.

“And then there is the other matter.”

He looks at Natan, a little confused. Natan shifts uneasily in his chair.

“You’ll have to remind me, my friend.”

“Livan’s daughter gets married next week.”

“Ah,” says Caiaphas. “Yes.”

There is a pause. Caiaphas contemplates Livan’s daughter in his mind as he last saw her. A dark-skinned girl of fourteen, sweet small breasts under her shift, her hair caught back with a garland of flowers. She kept her eyes modestly lowered when she met him. And he thought: yes, as well this one as another, if God wills it.

“How old is she now?”

“Seventeen.”

“Yes, then she has waited for me long enough. Very well. Good. Do you have a new girl for me to meet?”

“I have her waiting in the outer room.”

“You should have told me she was there. We could have dealt with her first.”

Natan chuckles.

“It is good for her to become accustomed to waiting.”

Caiaphas laughs.

“I believe you kept her outside just for your joke.”

Natan shrugs.

“Whose daughter is she?” asks Caiaphas.

“Hodia.”

Caiaphas nods slowly, impressed. Hodia is a wealthy man, whose generous gifts to the Temple have already secured him a certain amount of political power.

“He has three sons, Hodia, yes?”

Natan smiles. “And he is a Cohen.” Hodia is a member of the priestly class. His sons would be candidates for high priestly office, perhaps even High Priest. “I’m sure he would be delighted to be so close to you.”

“Well, bring the girl in.”

This girl is different to the last. Hodia’s daughter is round-cheeked, with skin burnished like bronze, black hair and bright black, searching eyes. She does not keep her gaze modestly cast down. Her body is already that of a woman, with broad hips and full breasts. She is sixteen.

Typically these girls remain silent unless he speaks to them, but she speaks before he has a chance to address her.

“Sir,” she says, a small smile at the corners of her mouth, “is your wife in good health?”

He laughs, without intending to.

“Very good health. Should I apologize?”

“Are you that much of a prize?”

And he and Natan are both laughing.

“I see you’ve had the thing fully explained to you.”

“Perfectly.”

It is not a complex matter. The High Priest — the Cohen Gadol — must be married. It is not optional. He alone goes into the holy sanctuary on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the year. The entire people wait for his sign that they have been forgiven by God. And to atone for the sins of the whole house of Israel, he must be a whole man: he must not be crippled, he must not be unusually ugly, he must not be deaf or blind, he must not be unmarried. To expect an unmarried man to carry that burden of sin would be as foolish as expecting it of a child, or a woman.

This raises a problem, of course. For what if the wife of the Cohen Gadol should chance to die on the eve of Yom Kippur? Then there would be no High Priest able to intercede with God on behalf of the people. So there must be another girl waiting, just in case. She may never be needed. But it is as well to have chosen her in advance. There is, of course, another Cohen waiting to take his place if he himself dies. The needs of the people go on, though men die and other men rise to take their place.

This girl is attractive, with her sauce and her talk. He thinks it would be good to lie with her, to make her gasp and teach her how to please and be pleased. The wife of a Cohen Gadol must, of course, be a virgin. It is not that his own wife is displeasing to him physically or that he longs for another woman, but one must consider the thing properly. If it happened, there would be no time for doubts, and it would seem ill for him to divorce her very quickly.

“You understand that you must be beyond suspicion? For this next year?”

She wriggles her shoulders in a way which reminds him how very young she is — as young as his wife was when he married her. Her shoulders say that she is uncomfortable with the question, but her smile is bold. Her mother or grandmother must have told her all she needs to know.

“I understand,” she says, and her pink tongue licks her dark upper lip. “I shall remain precisely as I am now, and consort only with old women, and discuss only housework with them. For this next year.”

And there is something about the way she speaks that makes him wonder. It is interesting. They would not have brought her to him if there were a shred of doubt about her chastity — to do so would risk the whole of the house of Israel. And yet.

Natan leads her out of the room, closing the door behind her and waiting for her steps to recede before he grins and says, “Well? Don’t tell me I haven’t found a good one for you.”

“Yes, she’ll do very well. Only…”

Natan raises an eyebrow. Waits.

“Only are you certain of her innocence? She had a way about her which—”

“No young man has ever even held her hand. Hodia has another priest waiting for her when your year is up. She knows she has to keep herself pure. Don’t mistake what your cock knows for what her cunt knows.”

Caiaphas laughs, in spite of himself.

“She’ll do very well,” he says.

“And may your wife remain in perfect health until she reaches one hundred and twenty,” says Natan, grinning.

“Amen.”

He tries to reason it out to himself. He is not a stupid man or an uneducated one. His father, a Cohen as well of course, for the thing passes from father to son, had owned a string of vineyards and olive presses in the east, enough to pay for the best possible education for his son. His father had an idea that the boy might be material for a Cohen Gadol, so he had him learn Latin and Greek as fluently as his own Hebrew and Aramaic, and brought a tutor from Antioch. So he’s read Greek philosophy and Roman military history, as well as the texts of his own people. He knows the value of reason.

He says to himself: why would his wife do such a thing? He says to himself: it would be death to her. And yet he cannot reason it himself. One needs a friend for such conversations. He waits until an evening a little later, when he and Natan have finished their business, when the lamb of the evening has been slaughtered, when the day cools and the night blows gently across the hills of Jerusalem.

“Did you ever…” He looks at Natan. He had been intending to ask the question in one way but finds now that he cannot. Natan’s wife is buxom, loving, several years older than him; the man can never have suspected her. “Did you ever know a man who had a suspicion about his wife?”

Natan’s usual merriness instantly sobers.

“Kef,” he says, “your wife? Do you think your wife…”

Caiaphas finds that his practiced High Priest smile, the liar’s smile, comes quickly and naturally to his lips.

“By the enemies of God, no,” he says. “No, no. I heard a story from one of the other priests,” and he can tell that Natan is already trying to calculate which of the other priests it could be and whether he is lying and what this might mean for the smooth running of the Temple, but he must talk to someone and if Natan guesses, so be it. “I heard a story that one of them suspected his wife of adultery. Did you ever know a man who thought so?”

Natan leans back in his chair. He scratches at his beard.

“All women look at other men,” he says at last, “it’s natural. Means that there’s still juice in them. The day a woman says she never notices another man is the day you know she doesn’t want to fuck you anymore.”

Caiaphas breathes out through his nose.

“Looking is one thing,” he says, “I’m talking about something else.”

Natan puts his cup down, leans forward, hands on his knees.

“What are you talking about?” he says. “Your wife is the most sensible woman alive.” He reaches his hand forward and clasps Caiaphas’s knee briefly. “Even if she did pick you for a husband.”

Caiaphas finds he is laughing. It is the politician’s laugh, the one he is surprised to find seems so convincing when it does not touch him at all on the inside.

“Tell me about Darfon, son of Yoav,” he says quickly.

“Oh,” says Natan, “is that all this is? The man’s a flirt, Kef, an unconscionable, foolish flirt and you’re not the first one to notice. I’ve been thinking for a long time I should send him north, to work at one of the record-keeping houses and get him out of our business here. Let him show off his muscles to the girls of the house of Zebulun and find himself a wife.”

“But I—”

“He will be away from here within two weeks.”

He watches her the next day, privately, quietly, while she dresses in a simple night-blue shift and arranges her hair with two gold pins. His mind vacillates between suspicion and finding himself ridiculous. She would not be so foolish. She would not be so cruel. The simple fact that he fears it means it must be impossible.

It is entirely forbidden for any man to lie with a wife who has been unfaithful to him. For any man, but especially for the High Priest. It is not only undesirable. It is not only that he may divorce her if he wishes. It is forbidden. If she has been unfaithful, he must know it and he must divorce her.

Every part of him will go into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. No part of him may have touched an impure vessel.

He must know. So he arranges things. He waits for a time when he knows that Natan the Levite, the man he trusts, will be busy with the tribute from the tribe of Gad. He calls another Levite, a man who does not know him.

He says, with his liar’s smoothness, “My wife asked me to send one of these casks of wine home.” He motions to two of the barrels from Asher in the corner of his chamber. “Will you have one of your men do it?” A pause, just long enough so that it will seem as if the idea has only just occurred to him. “Oh,” he says, “why not send that man Darfon? He is strong, and my wife wanted someone to cut a low-trailing branch from the cherry tree in our garden.”

Caiaphas is a wolf, cunning and perpetually hungry.

He gives them a little time. He does not follow Darfon closely in the street. He hangs back and tarries at a market stall, examining jars of oil while he counts the moments in his mind. This would be the time when Darfon arrives at Caiaphas’s home unexpectedly. This would be how long it would take his wife to send the servants out on errands. This would be the moment they are alone. Now. It is now. His hands shake as he places a small jar of oil back on the stall and his feet begin to walk.

He pauses before his own front door, thinking suddenly whether he would not rather go back to the Temple. It is the memory of the Holy of Holies that urges him on, the memory that soon he will be summoned back to that tiny chamber at the heart of everything and called on to answer for the whole of the people.

The house is very quiet. The small fountain in the courtyard trickles into the pool beneath. His daughters’ bedrooms have already been neatly swept by the maidservants. His own bedroom, the large one that looks out onto the courtyard, is still and silent. Some of his wife’s hair is caught in the silver-backed hairbrush on her table. In the bronze mirror, his reflection walks past, creeping like a thief.

It is so quiet here, away from the bustling street, that he can hear the birdsong.

He ascends the wooden stairs at the side of the house leading to the upper floor where the servants sleep. Although it is his home, months can go past without his needing to visit these rooms. Some furniture is stored here, a few pieces he inherited from his grandfather. There are four tiny rooms with small windows and sleeping benches for the slaves, and two larger ones with better beds for the housekeeper and the cook.

He fingers the blankets on one of the beds. Remembers how, when his children were young, he would often find them up here, playing in the dust. The slaves and the servants were kind to them. There is an ointment in an earthenware pot by one bed. He smells it and wrinkles his nose. Some foul-smelling cure for rheumatism or spottiness no doubt.

In a box under one of the beds, he finds a letter in Greek — he had no idea that his cook could read Greek — it is a love letter from a man in Crete, promising to come soon and take her away, calling her his duck, his sweet fruit, his fresh pomegranate. As he reads, his emotions are mixed: irritation that some Cretan will take his cook away, anxiety that he might somehow be discovered reading this letter, even though the house is empty, and a kind of wonder at the secret chamber at the center of every human heart whose contents are unguessable from the outside.

Even the slaves have their tiny arrangements of possessions. A talisman against coughing. A bone comb. A half-completed carving of a tree on a piece of olive wood. When they are released — and a Hebrew slave must be freed after seven years of service — he supposes they will take these things with them, back into whatever life they came from.

He is so involved in the examination of these artifacts that he half forgets why he came to the house in the middle of the afternoon at all. Until he hears his wife laughing.

It is a short laugh, a breathless one. It is coming from outside. Peering through the tiny window above the housekeeper’s bed, he looks without seeing for a while: only the fountain, the vines growing up the trellises, the bushes and the fruit trees already beginning to drop their harvest on the red stone tiles. And then, craning, he sees them.

They are in the gardener’s enclosure, screened off behind the main garden so that it can only be seen from above. He never goes in there: it is where the gardener stores his tools in a wooden box, where the plants which are not ready to come out are grown and tended. He does not even know how to get in: he thinks he has seen the latched gate in the fence at the back of the house but is not sure.

There, in that screened-off place, his wife is sitting in Darfon’s lap. She is wriggling, pretending to try to escape. Another bubble of laughter rises from her lips. Darfon plucks a ripe plum from the tree whose branches bend low over the garden and puts it to her lips. She bites it. The juice dribbles down her chin. Darfon meets her eyes, questioningly. She becomes very still. He puts his tongue to her neck and laps at the juice on her chin, her throat, lower. Her eyes are closed. She leans back into his arms.

Caiaphas turns away from the window then. His heart is sick and his body is angry and the wolf inside him stalks and prowls and says to him: go down now and strip her clothes from her body and parade her through the street like the harlot she is. And the lamb inside him says: speak to her, be merciful, warn her, for you have seen nothing yet that damns her absolutely. The little room full of the center of another person’s presence says: every person must have their secret place.

And the wolf says: look again. And he says: no. And the wolf says: look again. You know what you will see. It will make your blood hot and then there will be none of this skulking in shadows. Look again, it says, and find all the courage you need.

But when he turns back to the window, his wife is smoothing off her dress and arranging her hair with the two gold pins. And Darfon is in another part of the garden, lopping down the low branch with a saw.

A man may have more than one wife, but a wife may have only one husband. And this means that if a man should chance to desire or know a woman other than his wife, he may simply take her as a new wife and all will be well. But a woman must cleave only to her husband; this is the law of God. Therefore it is right for a man to keep watch over his wife, to ensure that she is not allowed to stray. He has, after all, purchased her from her father by a deed of contract, and he must be free of all doubt concerning the purity of his possession.

There is a thing a man can do, if he has a suspicion regarding his wife. It is scrupulously fair. It is written in the Torah and so we know that it is good and just. A man who suspects that his wife has lain with another man must go to the priests — or to another priest — and declare that the breath of jealousy has entered him. And then they bring the wife and make a little offering to God: some barley flour. This is to begin, to ask God to enter into the thing they will do next.

They take holy water from the sacred well in the Temple and mix into it a tiny pinch of dust from the floor of the holiest enclosure in the Temple. And finally they write the curse against adultery, containing the holy four-letter name of God on a piece of paper. And they put the paper in the water until the ink dissolves. And this holiest of holy water, this water which contains the unspeakable name of God, this they make her drink.

And then two things may happen. If she is guilty, if she has lain with another man, then the waters will be bitter waters. They will cause her belly to swell, and her ripe thighs to wither, and in the fullness of many days she will die.

But if she is innocent she will conceive a child.

It can be observed how merciful and humane a law this is, for when the breath of jealousy enters a man he may be tempted to beat his wife, or even kill her. But in this way it can be ensured that no sin taints him, even though his wife may be mired in her sin.

Caiaphas could call his wife to be scrutinized by this ceremony. But it would not be a simple matter. If she died of it, he would have killed Annas’s daughter, and Annas is a powerful man. And if she lived, he would have disgraced Annas’s daughter. And Annas is a powerful man. And men love their daughters.

There is another interview with Pilate the following day. The wolf’s head amber ring glints and the man foams and expostulates and makes it very clear that if he does not have his money for the aqueduct he will have to look for a new High Priest, one who is more accommodating to his needs.

Annas has another son waiting to take the office. And would not that be in some ways easier? Caiaphas is willing to give up over this. Temple money cannot be used to build a civic amenity. What next? Send the priests to work the land? Melt down the golden cups and silver trumpets as Roman coins? They could give all the money for the sacred incense to the poor, but before long there would be no Temple at all this way. Not to mention that he would not be able to remain Cohen Gadol anyway if he allowed Pilate the money. He will have to enter the Holy of Holies again this year, as every year. God will see what he has done.

Annas does not agree.

They drink wine in the evening while the house is sleeping and the wild creatures are calling on the hills of Jerusalem. Caiaphas has not spoken to his wife this day, they have not lain together. He is trying to decide what to do. This conversation must be had in any case: it is more serious than matters of the family.

Annas says, “Give him the money.”

Caiaphas sloshes the wine in his cup. Annas is playing some long and difficult game. Caiaphas cannot see to the end of it. And he is afraid. Playing a game with Rome is like teasing a wolf, tickling its jowls and expecting not to lose a hand.

“Should I lie to the other priests? Have it done in the dead of night? There is that mute slave, Umman. I could send him to do it.”

“No,” says Annas, “do it in broad daylight. Have ten priests take the money to him through the Temple at noon. Use that…what’s his name, Egozi, the one who can never keep his mouth shut, to lead them.”

“But,” he says, “the honor of the Temple. Once it is known, the people will revile me for a traitor.”

“Not as much,” says Annas, “as they’ll revile Pilate.”

Annas looks to the left, out through the pillars of the courtyard, towards the Temple Mount and the star-filled sky above it.

“His standing with the Governor of Syria grows daily worse and worse,” says Annas. “And we need to be rid of him. He’ll find a way to get his money. But if we do it this way…”

“The people will be angry,” says Caiaphas.

“He will not be able to stand against them,” says Annas.

He drains his cup to the dregs. From the thin line of trees marking the start of the mountains comes a single howl, then another, and another.

There is a matter of which Caiaphas never thinks. Not that he has decided not to think of it, but it simply does not cross his mind, as a thousand thousand small matters connected to the business of the Temple never occur to him again once they are concluded.

However, his memory is good. If one were to ask him, he would be able to recall how they sourced new bulls that year when the fourteen sacred bulls destined for the altar all died of a cattle plague only hours before the festival. If Annas requested the information, Caiaphas would be able to explain why, six years ago, the tribute from the tribe of Re’uven had been especially high. And if anyone inquired — but why would anyone inquire? — he would remember a madman they handed to the Prefect for Roman justice.

He saw him only three times, and each time the man seemed less impressive than the previous occasion.

The first time he saw the man, he was a genuine inconvenience. Caiaphas had been studying an ancient text on one of the papyri he had bought from an Egyptian trader. It was a Greek text, a fascinating account of the workings of the human body. His eyes became tired with the close work, and he looked up, through the window of his reading chamber, at the bustling outer courtyard, alive with the people who make the holy necessities for the Temple and those who buy them. There was a madman in the courtyard, with a gang of thugs.

The man was whirling his arms wildly, shouting without cease, and there was white spittle in his beard and his mouth was red and sore like the mouth of a man who is lost in the desert and dried up with thirst.

Caiaphas could not make out the matter of his shouts, only certain phrases reached him: “my father’s house!” “a holy house!” “evildoers!”

His rants were screams, his voice cracked as he bellowed. He was a pantomime of pain, an ill man surrounded by a phalanx of serious, stone-faced men with broad shoulders and thick walking staffs.

The ranting was not unusual. The temple brought out such people, particularly now, close to a festival. Only the previous week a woman had attempted to strip naked in the courtyard, declaring that she was the daughter of Caesar and that all the men must fuck her in turn to make the new king of Rome and Jerusalem. Caiaphas had had to send for his wife’s maidservants to subdue her.

There would be priests already in the courtyard to lead this man out as kindly as they could. If necessary he would send his personal servants to help them. He stood up, leaned against the window, the soft grainy plaster damp under his fingertips.

The man was overturning tables. Raging like a child. He put both his arms under the planks-on-blocks of the man selling holy oil and hurled them wildly. A hundred tiny ceramic jars shattered on the marble flags. Oil pressed from olives in the mountains to the north and brought here by mule cart over five days’ perilous journeying dribbled into the cracks between the stones. The owner of the stall, a straggle-haired fellow of fifty, was struggling to reach the man, fighting against the flint-eyed followers who held him back. All around the courtyard they were holding men back while their leader went from stall to stall pulling down carefully pinned curtains and throwing over piles of clay pots and soft flour cakes, like a Roman soldier bent on destruction.

Caiaphas was shouting for his manservant even as he watched the unholy ruin the man was making of all the sacred appurtenances. The slave came swiftly, watched for only a moment before muttering, “I will tell the priests,” and hurrying away.

A wave of tremendous irritation broke over Caiaphas like a fine sweat as he watched the man. It was this that he struggled against day after day — wanton demolition. As if they had built the holy Temple of the Lord out of mud and straw and every day the rains came and he had to renew its walls. So many hands were trying to pull it down, so few holding it up. It was against this that he made his daily visits and spoke to his spies and counselors, to hold the place solid against the rain. And this?

The man was overturning the tables full of coins which the poor people had brought to pay for their sacrifices. Hard enough to come by coin outside the cities. Any piece with the head of any king would be taken, that was the pride of the Temple. No one would be turned away for lack of a particular currency. And because the marketplace was here, the priests could oversee the prices to ensure that the peasants were charged fairly, that everyone, rich and poor, men and women, could offer a sacrifice. One might have to wait, but everyone would be seen. It was organized and sensible, and these are the highest and best forms of kindness.

The metal showered like hail and rang like hooves on the flagstones as the stallholders wailed and the children ran eagerly, stuffing their fists with coins. And Caiaphas thought: this? Is it possible that any sane man would prefer this to peace and quiet conversation and each man conducting his business with good humor? Only a man who had never feared for his own life or the lives of his children.

They chased him out of the courtyard in the end, and the young priests set the tables to rights. Caiaphas heard a few complaints that afternoon, and announced at nightfall that the Temple would make good the stallholders’ losses out of its own coffers, for it was not right that men should go hungry because of one madman’s actions. And this meant of course that several men who had lost nothing claimed to be ruined, and he set a trusted Levite treasurer to sorting the true claims from the false.

And then many days passed. There was a rising in the east and a spate of murders of soldiers and Roman citizens by bandits in the west. From the north came murmurs of a bad harvest, and from the south they heard there was another plague in Egypt. The eldest son of the house of Avtinas, the incense-makers, came to tell him that the wine they had received from Cyprus was of inferior quality — it had been delayed coming from the coast by the bandits and had spoiled in the casks. This lawlessness must cease. The young man was wealthy, his whole family one of the richest in Jerusalem; he spoke disdainfully, and the silk robe slung casually over his shoulders, its hem trailing in the dust, could have bought a dozen barrels of good wine, or a dozen men to guard the wagons. But he was right.

He discussed the matter with Annas, who had spoken to the Prefect. Rome was unhappy. It was time, again, to round up the troublemakers and rabble leaders and make an example of them. The Romans had captured a man called only Bar-Avo — a typically insolent pseudonym meaning “the son of his father”—who, with his band of men, had been torching Roman houses and disrupting their convoys for months.

It would look well if they could also produce a dissenter or two. They would find some of those twitching, raving men who proclaimed themselves the scourge of Rome, flog them in the public square, and be able to tell Pilate that they, too, were defending the honor of the Emperor. As if the Emperor were a fearful woman. The conversation was uncomfortable, as these conversations always were.

Annas placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “To keep the peace.”

And Caiaphas grunted in assent.

It was a lucky thing that, among the crazed preachers and the careless plotters, a man Iehuda came to them saying that he knew where they could find Yehoshuah, who he said was the one who had tipped over the stalls in the courtyard that day.

When they brought him, Caiaphas assembled an informal court in one of the rooms of his Temple house. It was only days before Passover. He managed to gather eight men: enough to try a simple case like this. There were a few witnesses willing to speak against the man. This was normal. Any trial would bring a group of people eager to gain favor with the Temple. Everyone in Jerusalem knew about the waste of money and goods and the disruption to the sacred services on the day that this Yehoshuah had thrown over the tables.

“He said he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days,” said the man with lumps on his face.

“He said that the end of days is coming,” said another, and none of these things seemed hard to believe to Caiaphas. He had seen the man raving. He was another of those, and whether he fomented rebellion against Rome or not, a man who spoke against the peace, who whipped people up, who destroyed property, was not likely to be let alone.

The witnesses began to shout over one another. Ugly, angry calls. Yehoshuah had spoken against the Temple. They had heard him call himself the Messiah, the rightful king — this was a very serious charge. Under Rome, there is no king but the Emperor and those whom it pleases the Emperor to set on little thrones for a time.

Caiaphas, seated at a long wooden table with four men to his left and four to his right, had the witnesses ushered back, then called one of the Levites to bring Yehoshuah forward. The man had been held at the back of the room while the testimonies were heard. Now he stood before them, seemingly calm, his face sunburnt. They sat him in a chair before the judges. Caiaphas stood up. The hubbub from the back subsided a little. He made his voice loud but low, a trick he had mastered during the endless prayers and services to give his words gravitas without exhausting his throat.

“Yehoshuah of Natzaret,” he said, “we need an answer from you. You’ve heard what the witnesses have said. If it’s not true, if they’re lying, just tell us.”

There was general nodding from the men around the table, an encouragement to behave reasonably. It was surprising how often even a raver, when faced with the calm interrogation of a court, found his wits long enough to deny the most serious charges, which gave them the necessary leeway. For blasphemy, the sentence is generally only a few lashes. There are ways to make an offense less severe in the eyes of the law. That is the purpose of the court — not to condemn but to make the most peaceful accommodation between the person before them and the community which surrounds them.

The sages tell us that a Sanhedrin which kills only one man every seventy years has wrought enough harm to be scorned with the name “a Bloody Court.”

But this madman said nothing. A small smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. And he said nothing in his own defense and he did nothing to show that he understood the charges, and the only movement was his foot twitching under his robe, and Caiaphas thought: this man is entirely mad, but it may still be possible to save him.

He said, “You know what the most serious charge is. Do you say that you are the Messiah, the expected rightful king of Israel?”

And if he had only remained silent, they could have said: he is a madman struck dumb. They would have assigned him lashes in the marketplace, because one cannot condemn a man to death on hearsay alone if the evidence is contradictory in the least particular, and these witnesses’ stories contradicted each other wildly. If he had only remained silent, the case would have fallen.

Instead, with that eerie smile and his eyes affixed on Caiaphas, Yehoshuah said, “I am the expected king. And very soon you will see me sitting at the right hand of Yahaveh. We are going to descend to earth on the glowing clouds from heaven.”

He spoke the sacred name of God, the name which is spoken only by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies on the most sacred day of the year. He spoke it as if it were the name of some casual friend.

At this Annas let out a short involuntary breath. And Jonathan, one of the oldest and wisest men on the council, threw up his hands, and Micah, younger and less circumspect, muttered too loudly, “Now he speaks?” The men on the court exchanged glances. Caiaphas looked at Yehoshuah. He had gone back to that strange unsettling silence. He was rocking back and forth very slightly on his chair.

Caiaphas had the feeling that the man had been waiting for many years for this day, for this hour, when he would say this ridiculous thing to the court and force their hands.

He stood up again. He took a knife from the table, where it stood next to the bread and cheese and wine his wife had laid out for them. He pierced the bottom of his robe and pulled the knife through to the hem. Then he took both sides of the cut cloth and pulled them apart. With a shredding sound and a scatter of fibers in the air, he ripped the garment halfway to the waist. The others around the table nodded, knowing that ripping one’s clothes, the sign of deepest mourning, is the only proper response to hearing the true name of God spoken in the wrong place and at the wrong time. The power of the name is strong enough to kill, though it grieves the hearers beyond measure.

He said, and he found his voice hoarse despite himself, “If this is what you say, then we have no need for witnesses.”

And the verdict was made. And they tried another two men that evening and found them guilty of more minor blasphemy, and sentenced them to the usual punishment — forty lashes, the final lash withheld in case they had miscounted. And he heard that Rome had taken a couple of thieves and intended to execute them too, because Rome never served up her mercy in portions more generous than a thin dribble.

They might have found a way to save the man even yet. To take a son from his mother and a man from his friends is an evil thing. They could have left him in that locked stable by the Temple for a week or two, until their own memories had faded a little, until if they had asked each other, “What exactly did he say?” they might have contradicted one another and so proved false witnesses. There are ways to save a man from judgment. But it was the festival of Passover and the streets were thronged with people and the Romans feared that another rebellion might be rising in the city.

And so Pilate summoned Caiaphas in the morning. He stood by a table covered in scrolls of messages and vellum maps, and a soldier standing quietly to one side, with his sword hanging at his belt. Pilate always greeted him in some similar way, so that he should never forget the power the Prefect represented.

“I hear,” he said, “that you have a man found guilty of blasphemy.”

Who had told him? Some spy among the witnesses, no doubt. One must never lie to Rome.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is a sin against Rome, you know. Against the sacred cult of Tiberius the Emperor. And it is a crime punishable by death according to your laws, is it not?”

Again Rome, whose currency is death, can never hear equivocation. Others are weak for not dealing death, weak for seeking to avoid it. Rome’s daily business is death, her nightly amusement is the death match. Death is cheap and easy among them.

“Usually, yes.”

“But of course you cannot enact this sentence.”

Death is the gift Rome reserves for itself. The people it occupies cannot pass their own sentences of execution.

“No, we cannot,” said Caiaphas.

“Give him to me,” said Pilate.

This was not a request, and to refuse it would have meant death as surely as God smote the Egyptians at the Red Sea. If Rome wants something, Rome will have it.

And he surrendered, as if the waters of the sea were closing over his head.

“Yes,” he said.

He had the man brought up to him first of all, to tell him that they were handing him over to Rome. Yehoshuah did not respond, though he must have known what it meant. His head wobbled a little on his neck. His eyes almost closed and then jerked open. There was a bruise on his face: very probably someone had kicked him or hit him while he was imprisoned in the stable. It is impossible to root out this kind of mindless cruelty; with so many people coming and going in the Temple, it could have been anyone. He swayed. The man was ill, it was obvious. Caiaphas felt ashamed. Before they came into the iron embrace of Rome, they would have found a way to save his life. When the soldiers escorted Yehoshuah away, Caiaphas found himself staring at a door that had closed on him for a long time.

Annas told him later that they had crucified the man along with a few others, and in some piece of public theater, had released the rebel Bar-Avo — a mistake on Pilate’s part probably, but Bar-Avo was the more popular man. Perhaps Pilate knew he could recapture Bar-Avo, or thought that he could trust the man to keep the peace out of gratitude. Perhaps he was genuinely offended by this Yehoshuah’s claim to be a god: Pilate has always thought that Rome would be pleased if he pressed the cult of Tiberius upon the people. In this as in so much else, he is mistaken: Annas has it on good authority that Tiberius is a little embarrassed by the whole business of worship, and refuses to allow many temples to be built to him.

Caiaphas, thinking guiltily of the man’s cracked lips and wild rolling eyes — and fearing, after Annas had set him thinking on it, that his tomb might become a meeting place for rebels — sent two slaves to bury the body honestly in an unmarked Jewish grave. But by the time they arrived, the corpse had already been stolen, they said, probably by his friends or family, for who else would have taken the trouble? A pity. The whole thing had been a foolish waste of life.

And if anyone were to suggest to Caiaphas that this little episode, this regrettable but unavoidable matter, were the Holy of Holies of his life, the tiny chamber at the center of his heart which is somehow larger than the whole edifice which surrounds it, he would frown, and half smile, and attempt to be polite, and think afterwards that he had not understood the joke. If this is a secret chamber, it is entirely empty.

It does not come from nowhere. A city does not catch fire in an instant. It has been months and years. It has been the taxes and the tribute. It has been the way the Romans look at the Jews, the little taunts, the kicked-over fruit stalls and shoulder bumps as they pass. It has been the sons and daughters who look at Rome and say to their family and to themselves, “Why can’t we live like that?” And the girls paint their faces and show too much of their thighs. And the boys shave off their bristles and go to the gymnasium to exercise naked. It has been the friends of these boys and girls, seeing them become strangers and collaborators.

It was Pilate bringing the legions with their idolatrous banners into the city when his predecessor knew well enough not to do that. It was Pilate’s way of administering justice: swift, merciless, unpredictable. It was the fear that grew in the city so that no mother could see her son leave in the evening without fearing where he was going and whether he would return.

These things rise and rise and no one stops them. And the city is full of angry men.

And the city bakes in the sun. And the city is dried up by the sun. And the city is as dry as a tinderbox.

Pilate sends word again that he will have the Temple money. Caiaphas has ten priests go down into the storerooms to bring up the gold. He picks them at random, but this is all it needs. They walk through the burning-hot marble plaza at noon with their boxes of gold, saying, “Make way, make way, these chests are bound for Prefect Pilate.”

And the curled cedar shavings are smoking in the sun. And the flint is struck. And the spark flies off.

They wait until dark. Through the roasting day, people go about their business with stiff bodies and dark waiting eyes. By the fifth hour of the afternoon the shops close up their shutters and the mothers bring their children in, and somewhere the young men are waiting but no one can see them, not yet.

In the evening, the second daily sacrifice. Every morning and every evening, a new lamb. To remind us that we must die. Caiaphas can see it in the men who come to the offering.

One of them mutters as they leave, “Stay home tonight, Cohen.”

The others look and nod, to see that he has understood.

They wait until dark, and past dark. Into the night, they wait, standing on street corners, their cloaks pulled up around their faces. And the soldiers know something is wrong, but the garrison at Jerusalem is small and they are just standing, and they cannot arrest people for standing, and besides where would they put so many men?

One of them begins to shout. It is the old call.

“David!” he shouts. “For David, King of the Jews!”

They take it up and throw it between them. “For David!” “For David!”

Like a wolf pack taking up a howl.

Their pockets are full of stones. One of them throws a stone at the shield of the small tangle of Roman men standing at the gates of their storehouse. It bounces off the shield with a dull thwack of stone on wood and tumbles clattering to the ground.

And then the sky begins to rain stones.

And the tiny smoldering spark on the cedar shaving bursts all at once into huge and beautiful and all-engulfing flames.

The riot goes on through the night. They set the grain store on fire, the one the Romans keep as supplies for their garrison. A thousand days’ worth of wheat for a hundred men burns with the sweet smell of roasting and then the black scent of wasted wood and the death of summers past. The flames leap to the stable and the horses begin to scream in terror, kicking at the doors of their stalls, but the doors are built to withstand precisely this. Someone gets one of the stable doors open and the animals stampede through the streets, rolling their eyes and rearing and foaming, but not all of them are saved and their screams grow louder and soon there is the smell of blackened flesh, and death is always the same, whatever set the events in motion that led to it. Death and destruction are always just the same.

There is a glory in it, for the young men whose blood is up and whose limbs ache for battle and for the sweet exhaustion of the hunt. Most of them are young indeed, twelve or thirteen, or fourteen or fifteen, and they yearn for a fight. There is a delight in it, because these Romans have taken their land and laid their people low and desecrated their holy places and it is good to see them suffer.

But in the morning the streets are full of broken pots and the smell of burning in the air and the market traders are afraid to set up their little stalls and the people look at each other with downcast eyes. And Caiaphas thinks: this?

They begin to gather in the afternoon, at the Prefect’s palace. They are spent now, tired now, but there are so many of them and they keep coming. All the people of Jerusalem are here, shouting out that the Temple money is holy, that the Prefect must not use it for this watercourse, that he must abandon his plans. It is not that they object to having an aqueduct, but this way of trampling down the things that are most sacred to them is abhorrent. He has not tried to understand them. They must make him understand.

The crowd grows a little ugly, in their chanting and their jeers.

“Pila-ate. Your mother was an ass and your father was a donkey.”

“No one wants you in Syria, and they hate you back in Rome, just leave us alone and crawl back home.”

The crowd is thick, full of men and women who have brought bread and water and intend to spend the day protesting. Men seem to have come from outside the city, for many of those standing quietly in the crowd, faces shaded from the sun by the hoods of their light robes, are newcomers. There are no soldiers.

A wise man, perhaps, would have let them shout themselves out, encircled them with quiet armed men and, at dusk, had them escorted from the plaza. But Pilate has too much pride for peace, that is his disaster. He leaves it until the late afternoon to address the crowd, when they are hot and thirsty after many hours, at their most irritable. He shouts down from the balcony words that are, perhaps, meant to recall Cicero, addressing an angry mob with enough vivid clarity to calm and soothe them.

But of course Pilate is no Cicero; his words are not those of the great orator, and his delivery is weedy and thin. And the language is a problem: he begins to speak in Greek and is immediately shouted down. He has Aramaic enough to try it again, but this is perhaps a mistake.

“People of Jerusalem!” he shouts, and his accent is wrong, and he puts the stress on the second syllable — ru — and not at the end, where it belongs. “I have heard your voices!” And this is wrong too, because it sounds like a mockery of God’s words telling the Children of Israel in Egypt that he has heard their cries. But nothing that Pilate says in this tongue can work. His accent proves he is not one of them and can never understand.

“Let me be clear. I seek only”—he hesitates, searching for words—“to make your lives better, to bring you comfort and relief.”

“Fuck off home, then!” shouts one wag in the crowd, and a laugh ripples through the square.

Pilate flushes, the pink coursing up his face across his bald skull. His hand grips the marble balustrade in front of him. If the crowd were not buoyed up by their sense of invincible oneness, they would understand that they should be afraid.

“People of Jerusalem, Rome bears great love for you!”

“Shame, ’cos we fucking hate her!”

Another ripple of laughter. Can any man bear to be laughed at? Pilate’s knuckles are white against the marble. If it were possible, his fingers would have crushed it to powder.

“It is time for you to disperse. Rome simply wants”—he coughs, as if he is being strangled—“Rome simply wants to improve the streets of your beautiful city.”

“The streets belong to us!” someone shouts, and the crowd take it up as a chant. “The streets belong to us! The streets belong to us!”

And Pilate’s face has gone from red to white, and his nostrils flare and his eyes widen and his whole posture stiffens.

“You are common criminals,” he says, though he does not speak loudly enough for his words to reach across the crowd, “and you deserve all that is coming to you. If you are old enough to riot, you are old enough to face the consequences.” And Pontius Pilate, who has never suffered, who has never lived under occupation, who has never been trapped by soldiers or known what it is to see those things in which you believe trampled by an overwhelming force, raises his right arm high and brings it down on the balustrade three times.

The signal is understood.

All over the square, quiet men mingling with the crowd throw back the hoods of their simple traveling cloaks and uncover their faces. And pull out their daggers.

The crowd is unarmed. It is angry and it has hurled insults, but it is not violent. They do not even have stones to throw.

The first people die before anyone has even understood what is happening. While Pilate watches grim-faced from the balustrade, five hundred plainclothes soldiers among the crowd of ten thousand unsheathe their knives. Pull the nearest man to them by the shoulder. Lean in close. Cut through his neck so that he dies without a sound. All around the square men fall to their knees gasping, clutching at mortal wounds. Or crumple to the floor. Or try to cry out and are silenced by a swift swipe to the throat.

And then there begins to be screaming. There are men in this crowd who burned the grain store, who killed the horses, who threw the stones, this is true. But the soldiers do not differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. There are women who fall to the ground with bleeding wounds to the stomach. A young man who had stood quietly at the front of the crowd, calling for peace and dignity, is set upon by two of the soldiers, who plunge their daggers into his chest in unison and withdraw them bloody as the young man’s heart struggles and ceases.

The people try to run, but those quiet men with their blades…well, they are human too and have suffered daily abuse from the people whose land they occupy and they are angry. Many of them are not even Roman: they are auxiliary troops brought in from the local population in Caesarea, or Samaritans brought in from north of Jerusalem. They bear Rome no more special loyalty than do the Jews. If Pilate thought he could control this once it began he was wrong. He does not have the common touch and has never sought to understand the people he governs, either the Jews or his own soldiers. He makes some other signal, a hand waving in the air, but no one is looking.

The soldiers block the exits to the square and begin to advance, forming a net around the unarmed protesters. Some people escape through the buildings and up onto the roofs. Some manage to barge through the guards at the exits, using the bodies of the dead as shields. Some soldiers have died now — only a handful compared to the three hundred, four hundred Jews dead or bleeding out under the Prefect’s balcony, but enough that some of the Jews have managed to arm themselves with daggers from the corpses. They make a desperate run at the soldiers at the southern end of the square, where the line is weakest. At first the charge seems to succeed. Five soldiers fall, blood fountaining off them like water pouring from a broken aqueduct.

The people run screaming still in all directions, but when they see the gap in the line they begin to stream through it, making for home or for safety, carrying their injured and their children away from the place of carnage. But the line closes up again and it takes two more attempts and another fifty people dead on the blood-slick stinking floor before the soldiers give in and let them run weeping from the place.

When it is done, there are four hundred or so soldiers in the long brown robes that made them indistinguishable from the Jews panting in the sun. And six hundred bodies on the floor around them, so that the place is heaped with corpses. And the sun beats down, drying out the blood to a sticky film. And the flies settle on the bodies. And the soldiers go to wash and congratulate each other, because what else can they do now? The deed has been done and so it must have been mighty. And Pilate stands alone on his balcony and looks at the field of conquest and perhaps he wonders if this is how great Caesar feels after a battle and why it does not feel more glorious. He had read The Gallic Wars at school and had expected something different.

In the evening the women come weeping to take back their dead, and wash the bodies and bury them according to their custom. Great Pilate sits alone before his little statue of the God-Emperor Tiberius and utters a prayer of thanksgiving, for he is a pious man in this way and believes what he has been taught, that the mightiest man in Rome becomes its god. And in the courtyard outside Caiaphas’s house, Annas and Caiaphas sit together in silence, drinking wine and listening to the wailing ululations from every part of the city.

“No one said he could possibly plan this,” says Annas after a long time.

“Did you expect he would lie down like a yearling lamb? He is a wolf, son of wolves.”

“I thought…” and Annas is broken. He has rarely miscalculated. “I thought there would be a riot. And he would burn down some houses and crucify some of the rebels, but the riot would show that he had not the love of the city and Rome would take him back.”

There is a woman screaming and screaming in the night, she will not cease. The screams never waver from complete shock, as if she were discovering an insupportable tragedy over and over again.

“And what now? Will Rome summon him back for this?”

Annas shakes his head and his eyes are great and wide and staring. Caiaphas sees the tears begin, but says nothing.

“I do not know,” says Annas. “I have sent swift messengers to Syria and to Egypt and surely they cannot leave him here now, but I do not know. No one in his own house told him not to do this. Perhaps he even took advice from Rome. I don’t know what it will take to get rid of him. I do not know…” He pauses. “I do not know whether God meant me to do what I have done.”

And the screams go up again, through the night that smells of blood.

Days pass and no word comes from Rome or from the Syrian Governor, and Pilate sits in the Prefect’s seat yet. The people bury their dead and Pilate decides that, all said and done, perhaps he will not have that aqueduct after all. Most of the money is returned to the Temple: most, but not all. And even though this is done with the greatest ceremony and loud announcements, no one seems to take particular notice of it.

Six of the priests died in the riots and Caiaphas speaks with their families. He doesn’t have to do it. Natan the Levite tells him that he can arrange it himself, but still Caiaphas has those conversations. When they realize, after two days, that Elikan, a young priest of eighteen, is the one whose hacked-up body some of the Temple men dragged from the plaza because it was dressed in priestly robes, Caiaphas himself walks down the hill to visit Elikan’s older brother and tell him.

It is a sorry job. When they see him coming across the orchard, the brother’s wife starts to wail in a thin, reedy tone. Nonetheless, the brother, a stern man in his forties, does not believe it until Caiaphas has said the words.

The brother holds his breath, when Caiaphas says, “I have come with bad news for you,” and pauses, and says, “You will have heard that there was fighting in the square in front of the Prefect’s house. Some priests were caught up in it, we do not know how,” and the brother is still holding his breath when Caiaphas says, “Elikan is dead. We knew him by the scar on his leg from the dog bite when he was a boy.”

And the brother lets his breath out in a single violent puff, as if someone has punched him, and says, “I told him not to go near that dog, but he swore he could tame it.”

Caiaphas stays with them from the ninth hour of the morning until the third hour of the afternoon, and when he goes they beg him to take a little food with him for the walk and a skin of water, but he refuses.

“It was not your fault,” says the brother’s wife, who seems, when she has finished weeping, quite reasonable and kind. “No one could keep Elikan from excitement, not even the discipline of the priests.”

But as he walks back up the hill towards the gleaming white marble Temple he thinks: it was my fault, who else’s fault could it be?

He does not lie with his wife at all for several weeks. And this, suddenly, is not abnormal or to be remarked on. Some people are drawn together at such times, driven to press their bodies against one another to remind themselves that their blood still courses and their loins still flame. But many find they do not have enough of themselves to spare, for a while. That the piling up of corpses has turned them inward, and no one can say that one response is natural and right and the other is not.

But nonetheless, the other matter does not leave his mind. They cannot send Darfon away for a time now, there is too much turmoil in the streets and in the land of Israel. He has Natan the Levite give the man constant duties, forbid him ever to leave the Temple enclosure.

And one afternoon Hodia’s daughter comes to see him. She who, if some terrible illness or accident were to kill his wife, would become his wife. She who is therefore, in some sense, already his.

She looks shaken, as all the people in Jerusalem look shaken now. He finds these days that when he passes a man in the marketplace he has only to hear a snippet of conversation—“Liata has not seen her son since…,” “They say he brought them in from Egypt so that…,” “I heard that Bar-Avo’s men plan to…”—to know exactly what subject they are talking about. There is only one topic on the lips of Jerusalem. Only one thought, refracted through thousands of minds and hearts. There is a look on the faces of the people, a look of quiet uncomprehending shock, like the face of a man who has lost his father. Such a look is on the face of Hodia’s daughter.

She says, and her voice is very calm and measured and low, “Tell me how this happened.”

He shrugs and he says, “All Jerusalem knows as much as I know.”

She shakes her head, her gentle curls stirring, the scent of her perfumes rising.

“There are a hundred different rumors. I’ve heard that the priests let Pilate take the money because he bribed them with the Temple gold. And I’ve heard that Rome sanctioned it. And I’ve heard that it wasn’t really about the money at all but revenge for an assassination plot. Which of those things are true?”

It is unusual for a woman to ask a question like this. Of a man who is not her husband, of someone she scarcely knows. But they stand in an unusual relationship to one another. He supposes she has as much right to know what kind of husband he might be as he has to ask himself and others what kind of wife she would make. And times like this change things. People meet each other’s eyes differently in the streets. Strangers swap remarks or theories about the terrible events. Something has broken down in Jerusalem. And she is right in thinking that he might know more than the gossips on the street.

“No,” he says, “it was nothing so complex. Pilate demanded his money and we gave it to him. And word got out”—he leaves a hole here, a lacuna unfilled, hoping she will not notice it—“and we thought it would pass with a little disturbance.” She is looking at him with such shining eyes of trust. “But Pilate is not a good man,” he says.

“He is a Roman.”

“There are better Romans and worse,” he says, “don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. There have been prefects we’ve been able to come to an arrangement with, who’ve tried to learn how things are here, to bend with us as we bend to them. Pilate is not like that.”

She nods. “He put Caesar’s head on the coins. My brothers said that was an offense against God.”

He runs a hand across his hair. She moves fractionally closer to him. He notices it. They are sitting in chairs next to each other. The door is slightly open, though. She moves her chair closer to his.

“People are too swift to find offense against God,” he says, “and too slow to recognize the truth of our situation. Look.”

He stands up and walks to the window. She follows and stands close to him. A little closer than he had expected.

He points out of the window, past the Temple courtyards. She leans in close to see where his finger is pointing. It is the red-roofed Roman building facing towards the Temple, its eyes always open, its lookout always manned.

“The garrison,” she says. “I know. I see it every day.”

“But do you know what it means?” he says.

“It means that soldiers walk among us. That strangers tread our sacred streets.”

“It means,” he says, and his hand is touching her arm, because he suddenly wants to make her really understand what he is saying, “it means that none of us is free. Each of us is shackled, I as much as you. If we destroyed the garrison they would send a legion, and if we destroyed them they would send four, and if we fight it can only end with the sacking of Jerusalem. Rome couldn’t ever lose that fight, you know, never.” He finds his wheedling politician’s smile creeping across his mouth and he stops it, pursing his lips, making his face stop lying for him. “We are trapped. All of us. No matter how high or how low, we must make accommodation with what they demand of us. I am as trapped as you.”

Her fingers find the back of his hand. She is very warm, and he realizes how cold he is.

“Is there nothing but duty?” she says. “Nothing at all but that?”

He glances behind him. The door of the room is closed now. When did that happen? He does not take his hand away.

He shakes his head. “Not for me. Not if we are to keep Rome from our door.”

“Nothing at all?” she asks again, and her voice is very low, and her face very sad and serious as she looks up at him from behind her lashes.

Is it possible she is a virgin? With the way she looks at him and the way she is dressed? It is possible, he knows it is. Some girls bloom like this at even twelve or thirteen: knowing, without understanding what it is they know. Watching for an effect.

Making himself examine it, he realizes she is dressed so modestly, it is impossible to fault her. A pair of loose white trousers, showing nothing of her legs. Apart from that slice of bare foot slipped into her leather shoes, visible when the trousers move just so. The brown, bare, warm skin. The tunic is loose also, seemly, white with a pale blue woven belt at the waist.

And yet when she stands, the daughter of Hodia, her black hair around her shoulders and her dark skin next to her white clothes, he can detect, somehow, the shape of her breasts under this modest garment. When she stretches her shoulders, pulling her arms back, he can see the nipples outlined for a moment against the fabric, as hard as dried beans and ringed by the raised zone of bumps he could read with his fingertips like words carved into stone.

And then he cannot help himself any longer. He pulls her towards him by her arm and she utters a little squeak but does not struggle, acquiesces softly and warmly, and he places his hand between her legs, cupping her where she is so hot, she is a furnace and he had forgotten what young girls are like, giving off so much heat.

She begins to move against his hand. This is overwhelming.

He pulls at her tunic, releasing a breast, and the excitement of feeling that warm softness and seeing the dark bruise-colored nipple makes him hold his breath before he descends on her with his mouth.

She is soft and she is warm and she is wet and she is hard. She smells of cloves and rain.

If he fucked her and did not marry her, she would be forbidden to any other priest of the Temple. This would be a terrible disgrace. She is the daughter of a wealthy man of the priestly class. She is expected to marry a priest. And he cannot marry her while he and his wife are yet married, for the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest above all, may truly have only one wife.

He stops short of entering her, and is astonished at himself, at his own maturity and composure, at the way that he almost, almost, straining towards her, almost does so but then remembers and pulls back. He finds that what he wanted after all was to consume that body, not to be consumed by it. That his desire had been to feel out every part of her, to see the gentle undulations of her soft belly and the way her breasts fall back when she lies down, and to hear her pant and cry out, and it would not have been right to go further, he knew that before he began. They may still have a wedding night. It is not entirely impossible.

He lies with her in the stillness of the hot afternoon on the floor of his chamber.

He says, “You were really never with any man before?”

She shakes her head gently, the sweat glistening on her cheek.

“Never a man,” she says.

Hmm, he thinks. Then: oh.

“Oh,” he says. It is the secret dream of the priests when they see the women’s enclosure and the curtained-off places where the women go. He allows this thought to grow in his mind, relishing the way it almost overwhelms his control. Almost, but not quite. If he wanted, if he were willing to relinquish certain other things, he could have this woman, she could be his wife. It is not impossible for a High Priest to divorce, just, in his case, unwise.

A thought occurs to him.

“Tell me,” he says, “I do not know your name.”

Her smile is mocking.

“You have never thought to ask one of your many servants and advisers?”

He shakes his head.

“What would you have called me on our wedding night? ‘Hodia’s daughter’?”

He reaches a hand to her soft breast again.

“Beloved,” he says, “I would have called you beloved, as in the Song of Solomon. And kissed you with kisses of the mouth, for you are sweeter than wine.”

She does not seem displeased by this, but there is a thinking mind behind those dark eyes.

“Did you ever love a woman without noticing whose daughter she was?”

He looks at her, while his hand kneads at her breast and the desire rises in him again, pleasingly.

“No,” he says. “Did you ever love a man without noticing his power?”

“Never a man,” she says. And try as he might, he never gets more of the story than that from her.

She leaves before it is time for the evening service. Though he is sad to see her put away her dark and comely body, he knows that it must be so.

At the door, she pauses and says, “Batsheni.”

He frowns.

“My name,” she says.

“Ah.” It is not a respectful name for a woman like this. “I think I would rather call you ‘beloved.’”

“Nonetheless,” she says, “Batsheni is my name. ‘Second daughter.’ In case my father ever forgot which order we came in, I suppose. The boys are called ‘God will make me strong,’ ‘God will enrich me,’ ‘God approves my right hand’ and so on.”

She closes the door softly as she leaves and the scent of her oils still hangs sweet in the room.

And that evening, when he visits the sanctuary, the chamber next to the Holy of Holies, for solitary prayer, he bends down and picks up a pinch of dust from the floor. He folds it into a scrap of linen and tucks it into his waistband. He keeps it safe.

Every morning and every evening, a yearling lamb makes sweet savors for the Lord — the perpetual daily sacrifice. And after that, between the many sacrifices brought by the people for sins and to make peace, to give thanks to the Lord for saving their life, in between all that at some point, every day, Caiaphas makes the offering on behalf of Rome. Every day, he sacrifices a pure white-fleeced lamb for the glory of the Emperor far beyond the Great Sea.

It is a compromise. For Rome has found it cannot operate in Judea in the same way that it franchises out its business to all its many other conquered states. There is an accepted routine which has worked well in these many other nations.

“Congratulations,” says Rome, after its armies have torn down the defending walls and set alight the pointed fences and killed the fathers and husbands and sons and brothers who had gone out that morning painted with war paint and screaming battle cries, “hearty congratulations to you, for you are now part of the Roman Empire. We will defend you against barbarians and bring you roads and aqueducts and various other civic amenities. In exchange you will give us tribute and we will take some of your people as slaves and exhibit your king and your precious objects in a triumph in Rome.”

“Yes,” say the conquered people, barely able to draw their eyes away from the smoldering heaps of men and animals and timber and stone, “that seems…yes.”

“Very good. And one other thing,” says Rome, “tell me, what is your local god here?”

“Why,” mumble the people, “we worship the Great Bull of the Mountain,” or it might be the Heron King, or Almighty Ba’al along with the Sea God Yam, or Mother Isis and her son, who dies and is born again each year.

“How charming,” says Rome, “we worship our current Emperor, Tiberius, and various members of his family, both those living and those forever alive, for they have conquered death. Here are their statues. Place them in your Temple and worship them as you do your Great Bull. That will be all.”

“Yes,” say the conquered people, as the stench of burning enters their nostrils and their eyes begin to water.

This approach, so helpful in tying conquered peoples into Rome in all other places, was surprisingly ineffective in Judea. It was because of the particular laws of the people: not to make an image of their one God, not to accept that His powers could be divided into separate entities, not to create any statue even of their most revered prophets or to allow any such emblem to be placed within their Temple. No man, say the Jews, can become a god and that is an end of it.

They attempted it, early on. Just a little statue of, let us say, the Blessed Augustus. Just one, here in an outer courtyard. The battles were so long and so bloody that even the Romans became sickened by the slaughter necessary to keep that little figure in its place. These people would rather die, each one of them, even the children, than give up the sanctity of their holy places. It is an unusual and puzzling level of dedication to a god who cannot be seen or touched or felt.

But Rome is nothing if not flexible. Within limits. Annas, who was High Priest at the time, suggested a way around so many difficulties.

“We cannot worship your God-Emperor,” he explained sadly to the Prefect, “the people will not tolerate it. But we can dedicate some of our worship to him.”

And Rome sighed and said, “Very well.”

So, instead of the forbidden statue in a courtyard, there is this. Caiaphas slaughters a lamb every day, just one sacrifice among many, but this one dedicated to the health and well-being of the Emperor Tiberius, whose reach stretches even to this distant province.

And there are those who call him a traitor for this. In general, the young priests are so eager to perform Temple services that they race to compete for them, or draw lotteries to see who will get the honor. But not for this sacrifice. They go to it grudgingly, having to be summoned repeatedly. Even the lambs do not behave, bucking and bleating and kicking out.

But what can one do? One lamb among so many, to keep Rome happy. But, say the mutterers, nothing can keep her happy. But we must try to keep her happy. This is my task, he says to himself as he brings the knife towards the lamb, this is my duty, this is how we keep the Temple standing and the services being offered. This, this, only this.

In the private predawn light when the household is sleeping, Caiaphas takes a horn of ink and a quill and a strip of vellum cut from the end of a letter he had written to save it for another occasion. He dips the sharpened feather into the rich black ink. Holds it so that the bead of excess liquid drips back into the horn. Tamps it against the silver-rimmed edge so that his first stroke on the vellum will be clean and clear.

He holds the parchment still with his left hand and begins to write with his right. It is the words of the curse against adultery. “If you are defiled by a man who is not your husband, the Lord shall make you a curse and a watchword among your people. And the bitter waters of the curse shall go into your bowel and make your belly swell and your thighs wither.”

He takes particular care over one of the words. The short horizontal line of the yud with its tiny tail at the right, like a tadpole. Then the house-like structure of the letter hei: a solid horizontal line held up by a long vertical coming down on the right, and a small vertical line inside, as if it were sheltering from the rain. Then a vav, proud and tall, like a yud grown to manhood. Then the final hei. The pen scratches on the parchment. The black ink runs minutely into imperfections in the vellum. It is done. There is the name of God.

He waits and watches for the ink to dry. It seems wrong to leave the paper. He has turned it into one of the holiest things on earth. So he just waits, as the ink soaks in and changes color slightly. He blows on it a little. It does not take very long. The sun is just peeping over the horizon when it is done. The ink is dry. He holds the vellum in his hand. This thing is so holy now that, if it were to become worn or tattered, it must be buried in a grave, like the body of one whose soul is departed.

He places the ink horn and the quill back on their appointed shelf. He goes to the well in the courtyard of his house. He fills a small slender-necked jug with water. He sits beneath the vines and fruit trees as the birds begin to call out with joy for the start of a new day.

He looks at the parchment for a long time, taking in the letters. The curse which cannot harm unless harm has already been done. The name of God. An impossible tense of the verb “to be,” which suggests somehow at the same time something which is and was, something which has been and will be. It is entirely forbidden to destroy this name once it is written. Except for one sacred purpose.

Without thinking too hard, at last, he plunges the paper into the water. Waves it to and fro. Watches as the letters dissolve until there is nothing on the paper at all. The name of God is now in the water. The curse is in the water. They are bitter waters. He takes from his belt the folded-over piece of linen he keeps with him always. He retrieves from it the pinch of dust he took from the outer sanctuary. Drops it into the water. Shakes the jug to dissolve it.

He brings an empty wineskin from the kitchen — the servants are just beginning to rise, he can hear them moving slowly upstairs. He pours the holy water into the skin. Holds it close to his beating heart, as if he can feel the name of God inside it. It is done.

A week goes past with no disturbance. Then two, then three. Shops and market stalls begin to reopen. The barber in the road next to Caiaphas’s city house sings one morning in the late summer as he used to do. The maker of pots produces a new design of interlocking wheat sheaves, very pretty. No one fulminates in the market square or passes seditious notes from one hand to another. It is like the silence after a thunderclap.

It has been a little while since Annas came to visit. He comes now cheerfully, as if that moment of self-doubt is entirely expunged from his mind. He bears scrolls of parchment with some good news. The harvest in the north is successful. And Pilate has received a sharp note from Syria about the massacre in the square.

“They have warned him that if this continues he will be recalled,” says Annas, as his daughter pours for them the wine of the evening.

And the daughter, Caiaphas’s wife, looks up suddenly and says, “If this continues? So you are saying we will have to have another massacre before he can be sent home?”

If she were another man’s daughter, or merely Caiaphas’s wife, Annas would have raged at her. Caiaphas has seen his rages: terrifying and cold when they arrive, and sudden. Caiaphas prepares himself for the onslaught, feels the muscles of his shoulders tensing and his thighs bunching and his heart beginning to race.

But there is no rage. She has taken the fire out of him with a few words. As a man’s daughter can, sometimes, if she knows him well.

Annas stares off into the distance. His face crumples. He looks older suddenly than he did. He is becoming elderly, he is nearing sixty.

“Yes,” he says, his voice deep and rumbling. “Yes, I think we will have to have another massacre before they recall him. I think that is what will happen.” He looks at her. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

She raises her eyebrows. “I wanted to know that you knew it.”

She brings another wooden chair from the covered part of the garden and sits with them. She sits closer to Caiaphas than to her father. She covers Caiaphas’s hand with hers and squeezes it. There is a reason that he married her. Not just because of who her father is, but also because of who she is for being his daughter. He did see her, when he agreed to marry her. He could not see through her skin, but he did see something.

“You’ve put Caiaphas in a hideous position,” she says, “I suppose you know that.”

“Is it my fault?” starts Annas, and then, “No, you are right. In the southern kingdom they’ve already sent word that they want you removed, Caiaphas. They have their own man for the job.” He shrugs and chuckles. “He wouldn’t be any improvement, let me tell you.”

“Removing you solves nothing,” she says to Caiaphas, “I think Pilate will trust you a little more after all this. Because it ended so badly, because he lost control of his own men. He thinks you’re in it together now. Despised by your own side. Neither of you wanting to admit how it happened.”

Annas nods slowly. “He thinks you miscalculated. Good.”

Caipahas wants to point out the obvious thing, but cannot. For fear.

His wife says it instead. “He doesn’t know it was you, father, who miscalculated.”

Annas shrugs his shoulders. “Let him think he has a friend. You can play that part, can’t you, Caiaphas?”

Caiaphas, whose special gift is to lie so well he does not even notice himself doing it, says, “Everyone thinks I am their friend.”

The next day, he takes his wife on a long walk in the hills.

“Come,” he says, “while the countryside is safe and the bandits are quiet. Let us walk in the quiet of the hills and today another priest will perform the daily sacrifices.”

She looks at him oddly. For he is speaking oddly. And it is an odd request. But they used to do so when they were newly married. He brings wine with them, and a little dry bread and hard cheese. And skins of water, including one which he is very particular to keep separate from the rest.

The hills are stepped and dotted with cypress and twisted olive trees. The earth is red and yellow, and the path is dry. Lizards sit basking on rocks, blinking as they approach, too lazy to move. Their feet become dirty from the dust, but it is good to walk and walk, as if their bodies could outpace their minds. They talk of the children and the family.

He finds a shady place for them to sit. His wife is smiling now, puzzled, as if she did not know him. He does not know himself.

He passes her some of the bread and the cheese. They eat. They drink the wine. They are softened by the sun.

He says, and he had not known he would begin like this, “I have seen you with Darfon the Levite.”

Her whole body stiffens. Like the turning of the crowd when Pilate raised his hand and gave his signal and the soldiers showed themselves. He has revealed the traitor in her midst.

“I do not know who that is,” she says slowly and at last.

“I could take you to the Temple,” he says, “and bare your breasts in front of the high altar and accuse you of adultery. I could put that shame on you.”

She says, “You would not dare to do it.”

He shrugs. “I have never known you at all, I think,” he says. “You were only ever Annas’s daughter to me, and perhaps I was only ever a man suitable to be High Priest to you.”

She looks at him, her eyes dark and angry.

“If I were a man,” she says, “I would be High Priest and make a better job of it than my brothers.”

He gives a little nod to show that he agrees. This is not the matter at hand, though.

“I could divorce you,” he says, “but it would bring shame to the children and we want Ayelet to be married next year.”

“I did not lie with him,” she says.

And he shows her the wineskin of bitter waters. And tells her what it is. She starts to laugh.

“At your foresight,” she says when he asks. “At the plans you have made when Jerusalem was burning around you and men were slain in the streets.”

“It is the same thing,” he says. “It is all part of the same thing. All the different lies, and the plans, and the men we give them.”

“Yes, I know,” she says, shaking her head. “Do you think I have not heard all this before from my father? I know how it is. To keep the Temple standing, we do this and this and this, and—” She breaks off. Stretches her arms behind her so that he is reminded for a moment of Hodia’s daughter.

She snatches the wineskin from his hands. Looks into his eyes.

She says, “My father told me about applying this curse to women suspected of adultery. He said that often they never had to drink the water at all. That women who were guilty would start to weep and shake when they saw the bitter waters and confess. And those who were innocent would drink it down without fear.”

She says, “I swear I am no adulteress and may all the curses of heaven fall on me if I am.”

She meets his gaze as she drinks and drinks, gulping it down, some water spilling over her chin, drinking it all until the wineskin is empty and she takes it from her mouth and her mouth is full of water. She does not look away from him as she takes the last gulp. She wipes her mouth and chin with her forearm. She throws the wineskin at his feet.

They walk back to Jerusalem together, not talking. She does not help him when he stumbles. He does not give her an arm over the high stone wall of a farm. The silence between them is as thick as woolen fleece. But still they walk together. For there is a presence howling and prowling on these hills and, if they separated, they would become prey for the wolves.

Nothing is settled forever. Every peace is temporary.

The dove sellers come before him again, this time one with a blackened eye and another with a tooth missing.

It is a man in his forties who brandishes the tooth like a nugget of gold.

“Do you see what they’ve done to me? Do you see? Those mongrels, those monsters, that pack of dogs!”

This time he bans several of the men from the Temple courtyards altogether, and tells them to make reparations for the disturbances amounting to more than a talent of gold in total. It cannot go on like this, and yet there is no other way for it to go on.

The brother of Eliken — the eighteen-year-old priest who died in the riot in the plaza — comes to visit him. His name is Shlomo, the brother, he had not thought to ask that before, or perhaps he had forgotten the name. Shlomo’s wife has given him four living sons, thank God, and the eldest is now approaching thirteen, when it will be time to begin his Temple service. The son belongs to the Temple, as do all male children in the family of the priests.

“Perhaps,” says Shlomo, “you would be prepared to meet the boy? To offer him some guidance? He remembers his uncle Elikan with great fondness.”

And Caiaphas knows what Shlomo is asking.

“Is he with you?”

Shlomo brings the boy in. He is gangly and nervous, with a voice on the edge of breaking which wavers from high to low pitch within a single sentence. He does not speak much.

“What is your name?” says Caiaphas, trying to be kind.

“Ovadya-Elikan,” says the boy.

“He took on the name himself, after his uncle died,” says Shlomo proudly.

“Come to see me Ovadya-Elikan,” says Caiaphas, “when you begin your service. And we’ll make sure you get to know everyone in the Temple.”

Shlomo is grateful. He himself serves his turns at the Temple offices but has never had a friend in such a high position before. Much good may it do him, thinks Caiaphas.

Natan the Levite tells him that Darfon, son of Yoav, will set out this very afternoon for the north, where his strong arms will be of the greatest use in loading barrels of wine and oil onto carts and his cunning brain will be most welcome in figuring the accounts. Caiaphas feels a certain relief at that, but then at once his mind starts to seek out whom his wife might turn to now, in Darfon’s absence. He cannot send every man in Jerusalem to the north.

“And Pilate wants to see you,” says Natan. “No,” he continues, before Caiaphas can ask the question, “he didn’t say why and I didn’t ask.”

They look at each other. Every peace is temporary.

Pilate is full of himself. The rebellion has been quashed; Rome surely sent disapproving words merely to placate their own guilty consciences. But he has acted strongly and rightly. This is how a Roman man behaves.

He greets Caiaphas warmly. There is no soldier standing guard today.

“Can you sense the mood in the city, Caiaphas?” he asks. “They have felt the touch of my power. They know who is their master now, and they have given up all resistance like obedient slaves.”

Or like clever slaves, who will heal their wounds and gather their resources before beginning to plan the next rebellion.

“Yes,” says Caiaphas, “you have shown them what you are willing to do.”

“They cannot help but respect it, Caiaphas! Like a woman, they long to be governed.”

Like a woman. Yes, exactly like a woman. Who has labored and survived, who has raised a child. Similarly fearless of pain, careless of self in protection of something greater than herself.

“I think I will bring the golden images of Tiberius back from Caesarea. He is their lord and high master, he is their god and rightful king. They should kneel before his statue and kiss his feet.”

“Exactly as you say, Prefect.”

“This is not a bad country, you know. A few rotten apples in the barrel, but mostly decent hardworking families. They will be grateful to me for rooting out those bad elements. I will turn around the lives of those families. With this rioting on the streets, your society has become morally degenerate, but I will repair it!”

A memory skitters across Caiaphas’s mind, as if he has heard a speech before delivered with the same shining eyes, the same absolute self-assurance. But the memory is gone before he can recall the dingy robes and the glowing clouds of heaven.

“Certainly you are right, Prefect,” he says, “but I do not know if the people of Jerusalem deserve your love. Look at how they rebelled: not only against you but against me! Lavish your praise rather on Caesarea, on the Decapolis, on the loyal regions.”

“Come, come,” says Pilate, “you’re letting your injured pride get the better of you. And yet you are right…perhaps this city is not yet worthy of the statues of Tiberius, their God-Emperor.”

The conversation continues. This, here, is the work of Caiaphas’s life. This.

There are only two outcomes to the ritual for a man who has a suspicion about his wife. She must drink the bitter waters. And if she is guilty the curse will fall upon her and she will die. And if she is innocent she will conceive a child. And if neither of these things happens?

Caiaphas’s wife does not die. She does not talk to him any longer except about matters connected to the family and the running of the house. She sits and comments on his conversations with Annas and gives her opinion. Her belly does not swell and her thighs do not wither.

But nor does she conceive a child. How could she, indeed, since he does not lie with her for several months? He waits, and no sickness falls upon her and no child grows in her womb. In the end, without conversation, he begins to lie with her again in the nights. If she conceives a child, then at least he will know, he thinks, as he plows her again and again. She does not resist him. It is fierce between them now, as it never was when they lied and pretended to love one another.

There is another option. The rabbis tell us that if a woman has studied Torah in great detail, the merit of her learning may delay the enactment of the curse on her body. Her knowledge is a shield, keeping her husband’s will from blighting her. If a woman is learned enough, the curse against adultery may never kill her. This is why it is vitally important never to teach a woman Torah.

Caiaphas doubts whether Annas bore these strictures in mind when deciding upon his daughter’s education. She does not conceive a child. She does not die. He reminds himself that he did not perform the ritual entirely properly: that she should have made a meal offering at the Temple first, that it should have been done in front of several priests. Nonetheless. She drank the bitter waters willingly, having accepted the curse on herself. Perhaps Annas taught her a great deal of Torah. But perhaps there is another reason.

Something has gone now. The presence of God that howled like a whirlwind, that spat blood and fire upon the Egyptians, that stalked by the side of the Children of Israel through the desert, protecting and terrifying in equal measure, that is gone. There was a time when every man saw God face-to-face at Mount Sinai, there was a time when His wonders were as clear as the edicts of Rome and when His might toppled mountains and destroyed nations. There was a time when He raged for us and nothing could stand before Him.

But not now. Not since that first stone tumbled from the wall and Jerusalem was breached. We must have done something wrong, for that almighty righteous power to have withdrawn itself, to have become so small that it sits, alone, in the Holy of Holies inside the Temple, and does not bestir itself to protect us even from faceless men following their leader’s orders. The only explanation is that we did something terribly wrong.

Natan the Levite comes to inform him that, all being well, Hodia’s daughter will be betrothed after Yom Kippur is over. She is older than the previous girl, it is not right to make her wait much longer. They have found a good man for her — he names a man over twenty years her senior who is thought much of in the Temple. Caiaphas holds the man in his mind, trying to recall him exactly.

“Itamar? That dried-up husk?”

The man is nearing forty and has never married, nor ever shown much interest in women. Caiaphas cannot imagine that Hodia’s daughter will take much delight in the marriage, though it will cement a solid bond of loyalty for her father, for Itamar is the brother and cousin of important men.

Natan nods his head slowly with a rueful smile. “I know. A girl like that. So…” Natan moves his hands unconsciously, as if imagining squeezing her breasts.

“Ah, well. It will happen only if my wife should chance not to die,” he says, with that practiced smile.

Natan the Levite laughs. “Yes, only if the faint possibility comes to pass that your young and healthy wife does not die.”

She will not die. Someone has done something terribly wrong, but he does not know who.

Later, in the autumn, it is Yom Kippur again. He is sequestered for seven days. He fasts and prays. On the day of Yom Kippur itself he, like all the Jews, does not eat or drink even water from sunset to sunset, so that they may pray for forgiveness of their sins. He dons his golden robes for part of the ceremony. He sacrifices the bull. And then he wears the pure white linen garments, for it is time for him to go into the Holy of Holies, to risk death in order to secure the Lord’s forgiveness for His people.

He balances the shovel with the glowing coals on its blade in his armpit and on the crook of his elbow. He plunges both his hands into the basin of incense, bringing out two thick, sticky handfuls. He walks slowly — the body moves more slowly when it has taken no food or water — towards the Holy of Holies, the place where he will meet God. Two of his priests, with eyes averted, draw back the curtain.

He enters the room. The curtains close behind him. The only light is the dull red glow of the coals. He relaxes the grip of his shoulder muscles, placing the shovel on the raised platform where the Ark of the Covenant once stood.

Perhaps it was different when those holy items were here: not only the Ark, but also the stone tablets on which the Lord had written the laws in letters of fire, the jeweled breastplate whose stones illuminated to give messages from the Lord, a jar of the manna which fell in the wilderness, still miraculously fresh and delicious after so many centuries. We know that these things were here because our tradition is clear on the matter. It was so, but somehow the things were lost when the Babylonians invaded the country and burned the Temple and took our people into slavery more than five hundred years ago. This generation — obsessed with wealth and status — does not, perhaps, merit the miracles vouchsafed to our ancestors. So perhaps it was different then. It must be that it was different.

He drops the incense onto the shovel. The room becomes full of the scent of the burning resins and gums and spices at once, a thick choking heady multilayered aroma. He breathes through his nose. He kneels. He prays, using the words he has learned by heart, words of the psalms of David, who found favor in the eyes of the Lord. He begs the Lord for His forgiveness for His people, he gives his service faithfully and holds the love of the Lord in his heart. This is the moment for which the whole edifice was constructed: not just the holiest place but the priests and their courtyard, the men and their sacrifices, the women and their prayers, the Temple herself. And not just the Temple, but the whole holy city of Jerusalem. And not just Jerusalem but the whole of the land of Israel. For this moment here, when he will speak to God face-to-face.

And it is true that other men have died in this place, that their fellow priests have had to pull them out by the rope that is even now tied around his own ankle. But he does not know what has killed them. He prays here until the incense smoke has filled the whole chamber. And his heart yearns to the Lord, as it does when he prays to Him every day, and his mind is full of the love of the Lord. But there is no crackling light, no sounds that are also shapes and colors, no miracle and no mystery. No force pushes him to the floor, no voice rebounds in his head. He prays, and that is all.

And when the room has filled with the thickly scented smoke, he pulls back the curtain and leaves the empty chamber. And the people rejoice, for he has returned from death to life and so they know that God has forgiven their sins. And his own experience of the moments is entirely irrelevant.