“How do you know that?” Joshua asked her.
“Just guessing. I’m sure glad that’s all over.”
Justus let his sword fall to his side with a sigh. “Go home. All of you. By order of Gaius Justus Gallicus, under-commander of the Sixth Legion, commander of the Third and Fourth Centuries, under authority of Emperor Tiberius and the Roman Empire, you are all commanded to go home and perpetrate no weird shit until I have gotten well drunk and had several days to sleep it off.”
“So you’re going to release Joseph?” Maggie asked.
“He’s at the barracks. Go get him and take him home.”
“Amen,” said Joshua.
“Semper fido,” I added in Latin.
Joshua’s little brother Judah, who was seven by then, ran around the Roman barracks screaming “Let my people go! Let my people go!” until he was hoarse. (Judah had decided early on that he was going to be Moses when he grew up, only this time Moses would get to enter the promised land—on a pony.) As it turned out, Joseph had been waiting for us at the Venus Gate. He looked a little confused, but otherwise unharmed.
“They say that a dead man spoke,” Joseph said.
Mary was ecstatic. “Yes, and walked. He pointed out his murderer, then he died again.”
“Sorry,” Joshua said, “I tried to make him live on, but he only lasted a minute.”
Joseph frowned. “Did everyone see what you did, Joshua?”
“They didn’t know it was my doing, but they saw it.”
“I distracted everyone with one of my excellent dirges,” I said.
“You can’t risk yourself like that,” Joseph said to Joshua. “It’s not the time yet.”
“If not to save my father, when?”
“I’m not your father.” Joseph smiled.
“Yes you are.” Joshua hung his head.
“But I’m not the boss of you.” Joseph’s smile widened to a grin.
“No, I guess not,” Joshua said.
“You needn’t have worried, Joseph,” I said. “If the Romans had killed you I would have taken good care of Mary and the children.”
Maggie punched me in the arm.
“Good to know,” Joseph said.
On the road to Nazareth, I got to walk with Maggie a few paces behind Joseph and his family. Maggie’s family was so distraught over what had happened to Jeremiah that they didn’t even notice she wasn’t with them.
“He’s much stronger than he was the last time,” Maggie said.
“Don’t worry, he’ll be a mess tomorrow: ‘Oh, what did I do wrong. Oh, my faith wasn’t strong enough. Oh, I am not worthy of my task.’ He’ll be impossible to be around for a week or so. We’ll be lucky if he stops praying long enough to eat.”
“You shouldn’t make fun of him. He’s trying very hard.”
“Easy for you to say, you won’t have to hang out with the village idiot until Josh gets over this.”
“But aren’t you touched by who he is? What he is?”
“What good would that do me? If I was basking in the light of his holiness all of the time, how would I take care of him? Who would do all of his lying and cheating for him? Even Josh can’t think about what he is all of the time, Maggie.”
“I think about him all of the time. I pray for him all of the time.”
“Really? Do you ever pray for me?”
“I mentioned you in my prayers, once.”
“You did? How?”
“I asked God to help you not to be such a doofus, so you could watch over Joshua.”
“You meant doofus in an attractive way, right?”
“Of course.”
Chapter 7
And the angel said, “What prophet has this written? For in this book is foretold all the events which shall come to pass in the next week in the land of Days of Our Lives and All My Children.”
And I said to the angel, “You fabulously feebleminded bundle of feathers, there’s no prophet involved. They know what is going to happen because they write it all down in advance for the actors to perform.”
“So it is written, so it shall be done,” said the angel.
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed next to Raziel. His gaze never wavered from his Soap Opera Digest. I pushed the magazine down so the angel had to look me in the face.
“Raziel, do you remember the time before mankind, the time when there were only the heavenly host and the Lord?”
“Yes, those were the best of times. Except for the war, of course. But other than that, yes, wonderful times.”
“And you angels were as strong and beautiful as divine imagination, your voices sang praise for the Lord and his glory to the ends of the universe, and yet the Lord saw fit to create us, mankind, weak, twisted, and profane, right?”
“That’s when it all started to go downhill, if you ask me,” Raziel said.
“Well, do you know why the Lord decided to create us?”
“No. Ours is not to question the Will.”
“Because you are all dumbfucks, that’s why. You’re as mindless as the machinery of the stars. Angels are just pretty insects. Days of Our Lives is a show, Raziel, a play. It’s not real, get it?”
“No.”
And he didn’t. I’ve learned that there’s a tradition in this time of telling funny stories about the stupidity of people with yellow hair. Guess where that started.
I think that we all expected everything to go back to normal after the killer was found, but it seemed that the Romans were much more concerned with the extermination of the Sicarii then they were with a single resurrection. To be fair, I have to say that resurrections weren’t that uncommon in those days. As I mentioned, we Jews were quick to get our dead into the ground, and with speed, there’s bound to be errors. Occasionally some poor soul would fall unconscious during a fever and wake to find himself being wrapped in linen and prepared for the grave. But funerals were a nice way to get the family together, and there was always a fine meal afterward, so no one really complained, except perhaps those people who didn’t wake before they were buried, and if they complained—well, I’m sure God heard them. (It paid to be a light sleeper, in my time.) So, impressed as they might have been with the walking dead, the next day the Romans began to round up suspected conspirators. The men in Maggie’s family were hauled off to Sepphoris at dawn.
No miracles would come to bring about the release of the prisoners, but neither were there any crucifixions announced in the days that followed. After two weeks had passed with no word of the fate or condition of the men, Maggie, her mother, her aunts, and her sisters went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and appealed to the Pharisees for help.
The next day, the Pharisees from Nazareth, Japhia, and Sepphoris appeared at the Roman garrison to appeal to Justus for the release of the prisoners. I don’t know what they said, or what sort of leverage they could possibly have used to move the Romans, but the following day, just after dawn, the men of Maggie’s family staggered back into our village, beaten, starving, and covered with filth, but very much alive.
There was no feast, no celebration for the return of the prisoners—we Jews walked softly for a few months to allow the Romans to settle down. Maggie seemed distant in the weeks that followed, and Josh and I never saw the smile that could make the breath catch in our throats. She seemed to be avoiding us, rushing out of the square whenever we saw her there, or on the Sabbath, staying so close to the women of her family that we couldn’t talk to her. Finally, after a month had passed, with absolutely no regard for custom or common courtesy, Joshua insisted that we skip work and dragged me by the sleeve to Maggie’s house. She was kneeling on the ground outside the door, grinding some barley with a millstone. We could see her mother moving around in the house and hear the sound of her father and older brother Simon (who was called Lazarus) working the forge next door. Maggie seemed to be lost in the rhythm of grinding the grain, so she didn’t see us approach. Joshua put his hand on her shoulder, and without looking up, she smiled.