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turning one way and then the other, making no other sound but the slap of his palms against his stricken face.
    A few people had surrounded a cross near the end of the vulgar passage, two women and an old man, trying to take down a body. Every so often one of the women let out a terrible wail. Whenever she did, an answering whimper came from one of the stakes nearby. The man on it was still alive.
    37
    And then Mother stopped. Her back was poker-straight. When I lifted my head to look up at her, her expression was terrible and void.
    I followed the line of her vision to a form I did not recognize. A body turned into a single contortion of agony, the legs broken at perverse angles.
    This time Mother spun me away, hard, her fingers digging into my shoulder

    as she doubled over, retching.
    I pulled free of her, ran back--and then skidded to my knees in the stony dirt.
    I knew that face, twisted toward the sky.
    Father.
    A horrible sound filled my ears. Only when my mother clasped me to her at last, smothering it, did I realize it had come from me. I wailed and thrashed and tore my hair--not because it was proper to do, but because I could do nothing else.
    I wanted to go to him, cling to him, but I was as horrified as I was desperate for him. Gone was the serenity of that embrace, of the skin smelling of sun, the beard, even when it smelled of fire. He was covered in gore and flies.
    Mother gripped me by the shoulders.
    "Do not see your father's nakedness," she said, her voice hoarse.
    I tried to tear my gaze away but couldn't until she pulled me hard against her, burying my face against the stained linen of her tunic.
    There at my father's feet, I died. My name was written in the grave already.
    Though we had crawled from its mouth just an hour before, a part of me, I knew, would never emerge.
    38
    THE CITY WALLS WERE broken into black and craggy teeth. This was no longer Sepphoris. These were the smoldering remains of Gomorrah.
    Past the rubble of the city gates, bodies littered the street, swarming with flies. One of them, an old man still clutching his staff.
    We covered our noses with the fronts of our tunics, and I struggled to keep up as Mother's step quickened past the debris of houses and storefronts, past the smoldering remains of what had been the synagogue. We stumbled past upturned carts, broken pottery, toppled buildings. Above us, the fort that had presided over the entire hill had crumbled in one spot, the limestone blackened all along the face.
    Once we reached the residential area, we ran.
    At the burnt lintel to Eleazar's house, mother gestured me back.
    "Stay here," she said, her face already turned toward the dark front room. It smelled like smoke. Smoke, and something else. She covered her nose and picked her way into the darkness.
    I waited, heard her gasp and stifle a cry somewhere inside.
    "Momma?" I cried into the silence. "Momma?"
    I fled into the house and nearly tripped over a blackened form on the ground.
    Zipporah. I recognized her only by her singed hair and feet--the only part of her that had not burned.
    I backed away, choking at the sight as much as the smell. I could hear Mother moving in the lower level, her broken cries of "Joshua! Joshua!"
    echoing up along the stair.
    I held very still, looking around at the charred remains of Eleazar's house, at this nightmare version that had replaced the home I'd known.
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    When Mother returned to the front room her face was streaked with tears and grime. She blinked at me as though only just remembering I was there, and then took me by the hand.
    I don't know how many houses we went into after that. Each of them told the same tale: fire, looting. Everywhere we went, Mother called Joshua's name.
    By the time we had made our way halfway through the residential quarter, she was screaming it.
    We saw a few others coming into the area, stumbling their way through the streets in a daze. But when Mother cried out, "Where are the rest?" their gazes fell away