Two Women Of Galilee

MIRA

And laying his hands on each one, he healed them.

 — Luke 4:38

Consumption found me, unsuspecting, on my twelfth birthday. That morning my father granted my wish and took me boating on the open sea despite the winter cold and my mother's protests. I was willful, even as a girl.

I rushed toward my fate in a dart across the water. My father's dark reed boat cut through the chilled air as he pounded a mallet on a wooden block. The oarsmen strained to keep pace. I saw my father smiling and felt proud to be so much like him.

The wind in my hair and the flutter inside me made me lurch from my place and run to chase the waves. Leaning out of the boat for a whitecap, I lost my balance and fell overboard.

It was a sea of melted snow. Two oarsmen dove to save me, and after a few minutes of reaching for oars, clinging to ropes that were hoisting us up, we were rescued. But my shivering started right away and would not stop. After I spent weeks in a dark room beneath blankets heated by warm stones, the doctor told my parents what I am sure they already knew.

All of my father's money could not buy back my health. I survived, and recovered for the most part, but in cold weather I rattled from the wet congestion that welled up inside me. If I grew agitated or afraid, it was almost impossible to breathe. For years afterward, my strength would come and go. The doctors prescribed sailing in the open air as a way to balance my humors and soothe me. This remedy helped to quiet my hacking on warm summer days, but the benefits never lasted long.

Finally, after I was married, my illness threatened to defeat me. The only way I managed to keep up with my husband's pace was by resting for long months at our home in Sepphoris. His demanding life took us there several times each year, although Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch of Galilee and my husband's superior, had moved the seat of his government from Sepphoris to Tiberias. Both cities were essential to the life of the province. Both had been rebuilt in the Roman style, during Antipas's early years in power.

He did it to please the Romans. He always imagined that if he ruled his small northern territory to their liking, one day they would place him in charge of far larger regions.

Fortunately, Antipas preferred the new capital and my husband preferred the old, in part because it kept him away from court for a good part of the year. Tiberias was exciting to Antipas. Aside from my husband's sensible urge to avoid the tetrarch as much as possible, he and I both favored Sepphoris for sentimental reasons. It is the city where I was raised and where Chuza and I first met.

During one of our seasons at home, we planned an evening at the theater with Manaen, Chuza's young colleague. I was glad to have my husband seen with the young captain of the guard. Manaen had grown up with the tetrarch, although he was nearly half his age, and was favored at court. Lately Antipas had asked my husband to teach Manaen about accounting and agriculture, essential for a young man's promotion.

I wanted to make a good impression and so commissioned a pottery vase as a memento of our evening, to impress upon Manaen that my husband approved of him. On the morning of our engagement I went to the garden to see that the glaze had fully dried in the sun.

An unexpected coolness in the air sent a chill across my shoulders, and I began to cough. As my handkerchief became speckled with blood, I felt Chuza's hands lifting me up. "Keep breathing," he said. He behaved like a general at such times."Lift your head off your chest." The rosebushes tilted sideways as Strabo, my chief gardener, and two house servants lifted me and carried me indoors."Don't call the doctor," I shouted at Chuza. "Please, just stay with me."

He followed the servants to my rooms, and once I was settled on my couch, he sat near me. When I was able to breathe quietly, he lay down beside me. He always wanted to stay very close after one of my attacks. They were among the few things in life that could frighten him.

I looked at his face, so near to mine. His hair, thick as a bear's coat, showed the first receding signs of age. His jaw had lost none of its square features. To feel his broad chest against me filled me with loneliness. We seldom touched anymore. He seemed afraid that I might shatter and break.

"Chuza," I whispered.

For a time we lay quietly together.

"Tell me about when we first met."

He answered in a low voice. "It's been seventeen years this spring." My husband always remembered anniversaries better than I did. "I was supposed to be on my way to Corinth, delivering a shipment of gold bound for Rome. But the winds had shifted and we could not sail. It was one of the first warm nights in March. I walked to the colonnade and discovered that everyone in Sepphoris had the same idea. That is when I first saw you." He kissed my nose, as he used to do when we were young and first getting to know each other.

Chuza did call his doctors soon enough. They advised me to stay home,rest and spend time in the sun.Sun to brown my arms like a farmer's wife, home to starve me of the latest gossip.

My husband sent to Antioch for his brother, Cyrus, one of the finest doctors in their native city. Within hours of his arrival I was lying in my bed, hugging a beaker of some gritty concoction of his, trying everything I knew to avoid the smoldering prod he held near me. Cyrus believed that cauterizing was the best treatment for my ailment.

He seemed to think he could roast my congestion to a powder. I let him try. It may have helped. I did seem to improve for a time, but I had learned not to trust my reprieves. There was no reason to expect a cure.

Several days later, after a few glasses of the herbal brew that was part of Cyrus's treatment, I felt surprisingly healthy. Octavia, my maidservant, who sat with me in my rooms that morning, paused from her mending to make a suggestion. She could see that I was stronger than I had been in some time.

"There is a caravan from the East passing through town," she said. Her eyebrows spread across her forehead, dark as a black-bird's wings. Arched in that way, they warned me that Octavia had plans for us. It was pointless to argue, she was as confident about her opinions as anyone. She had not been born to be a servant — it was only her father's gambling that had ruined her future. He sold her to pay off his debts.

We set out to hunt for peppercorns and perhaps a jewelry box covered with tiny mirrors like the one Antipas's wife, Herodias, owned. By early afternoon we were walking along the alleys between the stalls in Sepphoris. Silvery cranes squawked at us from their cages, the bitter scent of leather wafted from the sandal maker's shop, sacks of black tea opened to my touch and I rolled the crisp leaves between my fingers.

At first the rumbling behind me sounded like exotic drumming. Caravans are filled with foreign music. But the sound grew louder and moved closer until I realized it was the noise of the crowd. People were stampeding behind a man with spindle legs who tottered through the alley. He was old, but he moved like a baby taking his first steps. I had seen him before; it took me a moment to place him. The crippled beggar, we had passed him at the city gate. Somehow, he was walking toward me. A mob crushed around him. "Zorah is cured!" they shrieked. "The healer from Nazareth saved him."

Octavia broke through the crowd and pulled me away from the stalls.

"Where are we going?" I asked, but I could not hear above the roar. Past the tiny yellow flowers that framed the main road, Octavia led and I followed. When we reached a grassy hillside, I looked down at the crowd shambling onto the slope below us like wounded animals. The stronger carried the maimed on their backs. It was as if half the world were coming there to die.

I recognized one woman. She had recently been healed, I'd been told. We all know one another's business in the Galilee. For eight years this woman was possessed by demons. She often lapsed into fits and fell on the ground, her body rigid as a corpse.

She wore a fine woolen cloak colored by the most expensive shellfish dye. Our paths rarely crossed. She was a devout Jew. "Good woman," she called to me. "Jesus can help you, he helped me."

I looked into her eyes and saw no pain in them. She was cured of her illness. I could tell by the way she walked, upright and strong rather than bent in anticipation.She pointed my way down the hill toward the healer. We approached him, and he turned as if he heard someone calling his name. He looked directly at me.

From a distance all I could see was his dark hair and his long, narrow features. There was such compassion in his manner that I could not take my eyes from him.

I went a few steps closer for a better view. His hair curled as gently as a baby's. His lips were longer than any I'd ever noticed. His eyes were as dark as the pool where Narcissus first discovered his own beauty. I knew that this man would listen to me and understand.

Something held me back. It was too sudden — I was not sure what might happen if I got close to him. What if he refused me in front of all those people? What if I was the unlucky one who got worse, not better, because of him?

Pulling away, I rushed toward the road, shouting for my man-servant, Phineas. He found me quickly and led me to my litter. I hid there with the curtains drawn shut and ordered Octavia to walk very close by until we were well outside the city. He would have healed me that very day, I am certain. If only I had trusted him. The heart is a timid hunter when it does not yet know what it seeks.

Excerpted from Two Women Of Galileeby Mary Rourke Copyright © 2006 by Mary Rourke. Excerpted by permission.
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