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surely his house must crumble if he did not look to it. But Yeshua, cutting to the heart of the matter, said, “I’m sure he has servants enough to tend to his house if he doesn’t,” which indeed proved prescient, for it wasn’t long afterwards that we began to hear how Sejanus had wormed his way into power, managing things with greater brutality and rigour than ever Tiberius had.
    At one point Yeshua asked after my own schooling and I was quick to mention Ephesus, as if I was anxious not to seem to him some mere Pharisee, who had read nothing outside of the scriptures.
    “So we’re both Greeks, then,” he said to me, joking. Yet the truth was that even in Ephesus my father had sent me only to the Jews of our own quarter, since he himself had been raised in the Negeb and was hardly worldly. What larger education I had got then had come mainly from scrounging the occasional text from the market and from wandering thestreets, and it had always seemed to me that our little quarter was like some island we lived on, the tiny realm of the familiar, hemmed in on every side by the great, dark swell of the unknown.
    I asked him if he had ever seen Ephesus and he said once, in passing, before he had joined Yohanan.
    “It seemed to me there were many wonders there,” he said.
    But in fact it still pained me to speak of the place since my parents’ death there.
    “Surely there were more in Alexandria.”
    He laughed at that.
    “Maybe so. But not every wonder is a boon.”
    Before we retired I finally put it to him that I might take up his offer to share the road. I was afraid he might surmise I was merely using him for my own ends and take offence. But if he was troubled by the notion of travelling with someone he had by now surely gathered to be a rebel, he did not show it.
    “Of course you’re welcome with us, as I told you,” he said, and seemed sincere in this.
    So it was set that I would leave with him and his men the following day. I asked the innkeeper to pass on word to my Tyrian colleagues that I had gone, but I did not imagine that I would be missed.
    We set out the next morning not long after dawn, travelling cross country towards the frontier at Gush Halav, though it meant a hard trek over the mountains. There was only the odd village along the road, rough assemblages of stone shacks with perhaps some pasture nearby or some rocky patches of field carved out of the forest; the rest was dark cypresswoods for as far as the eye could see, forbidding and without interest. Despite the sun the air was cool because of the hills and because of a wind that blew against us the entire day, so that it seemed the distance we travelled was doubled and the slope we rose against twice as steep. As the road was deserted except for the occasional villager who tried to sell us some bit of handiwork or food, we were left to our own company, which however suited me well.
    Yeshua, no doubt sensing the uneasiness of his men at having me included among them, seemed therefore to throw us together, for much of the journey walking some paces ahead of us and out of hearing so that we were forced to make our way with one another. For their part, his men, after the first awkwardness, made a genuine effort to integrate me into their party, and regaled me with stories—some of them, however, utterly fantastical—of the great works that Yeshua had already wrought in Galilee. (Later, of course, I would hear them recount in these same exaggerated tones the story of Yeshua’s treatment of the young girl in Tyre.) Even Kephas, in the end, maintained the strictest civility, passing his flask first to me whenever we stopped to drink and in the evening, when we set up camp at the side of the road, carefully portioning out the bits of food he had in his pack—I, assuming we would be having our supper in Gush Halav, had neither brought my own provisions nor purchased any along the way—so that everything was perfectly equitable.
    In amidst the