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Two Women
of Galilee
Mary Rourke

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was helped tremendously in writing this book by Rafael Luévano, my friend and the first to read each draft. No one understands the craft of storytelling better than he does.

Laura Dail, my agent, gave her unwavering support, with extraordinary warmth and courtesy. Joan Marlow Golan more than lived up to her basic rule of editing, “First, do no harm.” Her suggestions made things better. Joanna Pulcini’s early encouragement set this book in motion. Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley at Angel City Press opened doors for me all along the way and taught me how to turn a printout into a manuscript. Thank you all.

For Patti, Louis, Tom, Cliff and Jon

PROLOGUE

The twelve were with him as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities.

…Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza…and many others, who provided for them out of their own resources.

—Luke 8:1-3

The house in Nazareth is empty now. No one would presume to live there since Mary went away. They cannot risk inheriting her misfortune, a widow with a crucified son. Still, it is a sacred place. Someone has to oversee its safekeeping.

As an older woman Mary traveled to distant cities with John, the youngest of her son’s followers, watching over him like a mother. In those years it was easier to move about the empire. Claudius ruled from Rome, and for once the foreigner who controlled Judea felt kindly toward the Hebrews.

It is hard to believe, after twelve years of Nero, that such a time ever existed. Jerusalem has been under siege since Passover, and the Roman blockade makes it impossible for food to get beyond the city gates. For us, here in the north, news of the struggle comes with the caravans. The worst of it seems to reach us with the speed of an arrow. There was the man who swallowed his gold before he tried to escape the Holy City. When the soldiers caught him, they sliced him open and pulled the coins from his belly. He was still alive. He witnessed it.

Mary’s empty house was my consolation after she went away. I missed her so much that I spent hours there, alone. Imagining she was still with me, I saw things about her I had not noticed before. Her hair, once lavish and dark, had turned the silvery color of a moonstone. Her skin was still the warm shade of an almond shell, but the flash of pink that once tinted her cheeks had faded. The passing years wore her edges smooth as sea glass.

One afternoon in my daydreams she walked past me to the grain cistern, gathered dried kernels in her hands and poured them into storage sacks. She pinched the lice from the nearby bin of ripening grain. Without stopping to greet me, she lifted a clay jug from the shelf and went out toward the well, pausing long enough to look at me contentedly. I heard her whisper the prayers of blessing and I began to recite them with her. Before I met Mary, I did not know any prayers.

In her empty house I started to remember things. There was the scent of rosemary on the cooking pots and the shelf of baskets that waited to be filled with sweet cakes from her kitchen. All of what she owned was worn down with use.

Her small living quarters hardly seemed the sort of place to attract visitors at all hours, but so many came, hoping to gain her favor, that a good number had to be turned away at the gate. Looking back on those bewildering days, I still wonder—did any of us who asked for her help truly understand, or even suspect, what Mary was prepared to do for those she loved? When the time came, she would risk her life. Some might even say, her soul.

One afternoon a shower of dirt interrupted my reverie. It fell from the ceiling of Mary’s house, where the roof had worn thin. Above my head, palm fronds whistled like wind chimes in the breeze. I could see them through the holes in the ceiling. Straw poked through the plaster. I hadn’t noticed.

To restore such a ruin was my way of honoring Mary, but it was a strange ambition for a woman like me who did not know how to do housework. I, Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod Antipas’s chief steward, was raised to be mistress of an estate. I had little experience with house cleaning or other manual labor. For Mary’s sake, I learned.

From the time I made my decision, I began to rise from my bed before the sun lit the upper rooms of my house. Pulling myself from beneath cool linen sheets, I prepared for a day of repair work on Mary’s crumbling house. Loading storage baskets with jugs of wine, flasks of oil, perfume bottles, old jewelry—all items I could exchange for craftsmen’s services—I left the marble gods and colonnades of my Roman-style city of Sepphoris for the barley fields of eastern Galilee. It was like traveling backward in time.

Phineas, my driver, covered the three miles in a race against the sunrise. He had made far more perilous journeys for my sake during his long years in my service. Never once had he disappointed me. I therefore rested quietly as he jostled us toward Nazareth, past brown-faced ewes that stood in the road and stared, unaccustomed to carriages hurtling past. Not used, either, to seeing a woman like me, with clean, oval fingernails and pale skin that rarely was subjected to long hours in the sun.

Closer to the town, field boys pelted my cab with rotten olives. Phineas growled like a wolf planning an attack, which kept them at their distance. His smooth eunuch’s cheeks and shining head were set proudly on thick shoulders and massive arms. He was powerfully made and commanded respect.

As we entered through the Nazareth town gate, the screech of iron hinges never failed to disturb Mary’s neighbors. They stumbled from their two-room houses or shallow caves to see who had entered. Their mistrusting expressions asked what a rich woman was doing in their part of the province. I had no easy answer. Besides, the smell of sheep on their rough tunics stiffened my nose. I avoided conversation.

It was on one such morning’s drive that I decided to write about Mary. At first I thought that my own stormy existence had no place in her story. My failing health, the intrigues at Herod Antipas’s court and the resulting troubles in my marriage did not seem to reveal anything about Mary’s ways.

I soon realized that she had guided me through the most intimate events in my life, down to my current situation. There is nothing but to tell our stories as one.

We were cousins. I only discovered it when I was a grown woman and went to see Mary for the first time. I needed her assistance. I was dying and she had a son, a healer who cured desperate cases. I wanted her to arrange a private meeting for me.

My illness had plagued me from childhood. Consumption was part of the Romans’ legacy to the East. Caesar’s armies carried it with them as they advanced, conquering everything in their path.

My family considered my ailment to be part of the price Judea paid for progress. Stone paved highways and international trade had made my relatives wealthy. Roman sympathizers from long before I was born, they did not consider the life of one daughter too exorbitant a tax on their fortune.

I, however, was not prepared to die for commerce. After many attempts at a complete cure, including one unbearable summer at a health resort near the Dead Sea, my soggy insides refused to dry out.

As my last hope, I turned to Mary. I was prepared to reward her handsomely. I have always been a woman of means.

CHAPTER ONE

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 blackbird’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 manservant, 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.

I was so disturbed by my near encounter in Sepphoris that I looked forward to returning to Tiberias. Chuza and I left for the capital several days after my ordeal. One of our first nights, my husband and I attended a birthday party for Herod Antipas. It was an effort to get dressed, knowing what a show of false gaiety the evening would require. I tossed aside six pairs of earrings before settling on gold hoops. They looked as ostentatious as the others, but time demanded that I make a choice.

“Are you ready?” Chuza called from the atrium. I could picture him, rapping his fingers against the wall. A quick glance in my mirror restored my confidence. I smiled at my rolling brown hair that was wrapped, just so, around a headband as slim as a new moon.

“Coming,” I answered in a pretended rush.

He smiled as I walked toward him with a swish of frothy drapery. My dress was copied after the statute of Venus in Antipas’s garden. Chuza’s attentions lifted the clouds that had settled above me.

We walked the stone pathway to Antipas’s palace. It was a lesson in the labors that support a royal life. Eight solid gold lanterns shaped like papyrus blossoms lit our way. Egyptian imports, I could tell by the blocky shapes. A team of craftsmen had taken at least six weeks to complete the set. Crossing the mosaic carpet of blue-tipped pheasants in the reception area, I guessed the number of workers needed to install the floor; one to engineer it, as many as nine to lay it in, for a period of not less than two months.

On the way through the house a servant who knew us well allowed us a side trip to the dining room. Antipas had flamboyant tastes and liked his guests to compliment him. I wanted to be prepared.

The room was transformed under a gauzy tent that fluttered from the ceiling. Trapeze bars hovered above the dining couches, hinting at the night’s entertainment. I felt my skin tingle in revolt. I could already guess what had been planned.

Chuza led me away, tripping over a dancing monkey as we left the room. The chattering creature screamed at us and chased us down the hall past murals of Bacchus and his tipsy friends, their faces buried in their goblets. My husband kept a protective arm around me, sensing, as I had, what the tent and decor implied. Rome’s most famous transvestite, Flavia, was to be the special guest of the evening. My husband did not approve of parties meant for the officers’ club. Not when women were present.

In the garden, Antipas stood beside his wife, Herodias, who leaned possessively against him. My eyes went directly to the imperial ring he wore, the one he used for sealing Roman documents. It seemed an intentional show of his authority. His thinning brown hair was crowned with a laurel wreath. I’d never seen him act a closer imitation of a Caesar. Ambition rose off him like an unattractive odor. He was fiftysix years old that night and noticeably eager to secure a higher position in Caesar’s inner circle.

“Joanna, you’re here at last,” he said, a bit too familiar. Chuza ignored it. He was accustomed to Antipas’s awkward attempts as a ladies’ man.

“My Lord Tetrarch.” I gave him an inflated title.

He embraced Chuza like a favorite brother. Antipas had so few real friends that he made more of trusted colleagues than was appropriate.

I listened quietly, until he chose to speak to me. “Tell me the news of my kingdom,” he said, leaning toward me. “I know everything about how to rule Galilee but never enough about the people I govern.” He moved slightly away from his wife to suggest that I was at liberty to be frank. “She’s not interested in such matters,” he said, casting a glance toward her.

Their marriage was a complicated arrangement. Her grandfather was Antipas’s father, Herod the Great. She abandoned her first husband for Antipas and he put aside a perfectly acceptable wife. It was a messy display, ripe for gossip. Herodias wanted a more powerful husband than the one she had. Antipas simply wanted everything that he did not already own. His incestuous marriage to Herodias infuriated the Hebrews in his court, although he was one of them in name at least. The fact is, his family converted. He would never be fully a Hebrew, as his mother was a Samaritan woman. He had ignored the marriage laws just as he did all the others that got in his way.

I took a small silver rabbit from my pocket, a lucky charm from my afternoon shopping, and showed it to Antipas. He and I had one thing in common. Magic excited us. It was a faithless woman’s answer to divine intervention.

“There is a new man in Galilee,” I said. “Everyone is talking about him.”

“His name, tell me his name.”

“Jesus, from Nazareth.”

“Who?” His voice cracked. Competition made him wild.

“He is the center of attention.”

“What does he do?” Antipas rubbed the lucky rabbit in the palm of his hand.

“He heals the sick.” I told the story of Zorah, the cripple.

“And what about you, Joanna?” Antipas turned on me with syrupy concern. “Did the healer from Nazareth cure you?” The words pricked. I forced myself to clear my throat. It was enough to send him away.

After dinner, the lamps were turned down. I could hear the acrobats enter. When they were in their places the torches were lit. Clowns as tall as camels hobbled around the room on wooden stilts. An Ethiopian in a red turban tossed streamers from the back of an elephant. I caught one and tied it around my wrist. From across the room, where the men were seated, I noticed Chuza watching me from the corners of his eyes. I could read his testy expression. He had not approved of my telling Antipas about my day with the wonder-worker, which could only upset the jealous tetrarch.

By the time Flavia rolled onto the trapeze bar, some of the men in the room had been drinking for three hours. They started howling as the performer’s golden hair swung over their tables, flitting across their faces. Flavia’s painted lips and the black kohl outlining his eyes made him a freakish version of a woman.

He was supple as kelp, twisting into knots, rolling into a ball. Not once did he miss a coin purse tossed his way. It became a game, and like children we got overly excited as we played. A fight broke out. Wine from a flying cup sprayed the side of my face. Chuza stood up abruptly, came and took my arm. “We’re leaving,” he said. My husband hardly spoke to Antipas on our way out. The tetrarch was pressed against his wife’s thick neck and waved us off.

At times the excesses of court life grated against Chuza’s soul. Antipas’s party was such a time. When we were safely home and settled, my husband came to my room as he sometimes did when he needed consolation. He held me in his arms until his tense body relaxed and grew heavy and his grip loosened. I felt him sleeping and soon, too, I began to drift off.

I found myself thinking about the day I first saw Jesus. The idea came to me then, effortless as the best plans do. “I must go to meet his mother,” I said out loud in the dark.

Chuza would not like it. “Joanna,” he would say, “don’t test the gods.” He didn’t believe in healers. Only women and fools listened to any of them.