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pressing wool against their limbs or their bellies to staunch the
bleeding. Feverish faces in the candlelight—all these men and women waiting for
death and for what nightmare might come after. A few of the unbitten stood
solitary or sat against the wall, their heads down. None of them would ever
sleep well again, ever trust the night again or the strength of their doors. A
few looked his way, but Zebadyah lowered his eyes. He had hidden during the
night while they suffered. He hadn’t known the dead would come. He had hidden
from the living . The Romans. But he hadn’t been
here—that was the accusation he believed he’d see if he faced them. He hadn’t
been here. He, their priest.
    He
realized Yakob was speaking to him. Perhaps had been for a
while. His son’s words rushed toward him from some distance like a flash
flood down a river channel.
    “—never got in the synagogue. It was Bar
Nahemyah, father. He held the door against them during the night, and the
corpses piled about his feet.”
    He
glanced up at his son, whose face was drawn. He tried to understand. Bar
Nahemyah—but he was only a youth, hardly older than Yohanna.
    “Then
he took some of the others and left. Yohanna and I stayed because people
started bringing their wounded here, and they needed water and help.”
    “Have
to find them,” Zebadyah muttered, rising to his feet.
    Yakob
caught his arm to steady him, but he shrugged away his son’s grip and the look
he turned on his son must have been grim and desperate and near madness, for
Yakob stepped back quickly.
    “The
old altar,” Zebadyah rasped. “Past the grain caches, between
the tanner’s house and the ruin of the old wall. That
one. Burn an olah there, while I find Yonah.”
    “We
have no goats, no doves, father,” Yakob said hesitantly. The altar hadn’t been
used since the days of the Makkaba; instead, Zebadyah went to Yerushalayim once
a year to atone for the sins of the town, buying a goat to sacrifice from the
market in the great city.
    He
muttered, “Perhaps God will accept a few fish. This one
time.”
    He
bent quickly to grip Yesse’s shoulder and whisper, “My sons will look after
you.” Breathing raggedly, Yesse didn’t open his eyes, and after a few beats of
his heart Zebadyah left him and staggered toward the door of the synagogue.
    He
stumbled on through the death-reek of the town, seeking his brother Yonah. He
stepped through the broken doors of houses and peered into emptied, unlit rooms
with bloodstained walls. At the door of one house he heard low growls and he
ducked away quickly, shaking.
    He
even strode out among the legionaries’ tents beyond the north end of the town,
but searching there he found at first only dead Romans and dead women and
corpses whose heads had been split by Roman blades. Too many of the bodies were
known to him. He saw Asher lying dead across the body of his wife, where he had
perhaps died defending her from either the living or the dead. He saw
Nahemyah’s two sisters, their bellies torn open, entrails spilled messily about
them where the dead had feasted. Their eyes glassy with
death. But Zebadyah noticed one of the women’s fingers twitching. He
gasped and hurried by.
    Nowhere
did he see Yonah, or Yonah’s wife or his son. Yet it was unthinkable to him
that Yonah had perished. Yonah the iron-hearted, Yonah the furious. He recalled
the rage in his brother’s eyes that autumn as he cast the tax collector the
Romans had sent into a house at the edge of town, a house empty except for the
corpse that had wandered inside and been trapped. The man had shrieked and
pounded on the door from the dark interior, and Yonah had not flinched, though
Zebadyah’s own palms had gone slick with sweat. He tried to remember that tax
collector’s name, and in a moment it came to him: Matityahu, a Hebrew from the
Greek city of Many Birds to the west.
    Reaching
the end of the Roman tents and finding still no sign of his kin, Zebadyah
glanced back