The old Jew spoke for all of them. He thought, perhaps, there’d been a fifth when they were walking to the hills the day before. It might have been a boy, a woman or a man. He could not tell. His eyesight was not good. The figure was too far away. Quite tall. It might have been a shepherd even. But there were only four of them who’d come to carry out devotions in these caves. ‘My name is Aphas. From Jerusalem. .’ he began.

‘And you?’ Musa said, ignoring Aphas from Jerusalem. He pointed with his chin at Marta. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To pray and fast. Like them,’ she said. ‘For quarantine. .’ ‘Why fast? What will you gain from it?’

She shook her head. She didn’t want to say. She smiled and shrugged and blushed. Musa watched her breasts and shoulders lift. She might be Miri’s age, perhaps, but she was tall and generous, he thought. She was the kind ofwoman Musa would have twenty ofwhen he was rich. She’d move a donkey without arguing. She wouldn’t make a bother of her pregnancy. He wet his lips and smiled at her. ‘Where is the other one?’ he asked. ‘The water thief?’

‘Not us,’ the old man interrupted. ‘We have our own.’ He pointed to the pit in the ground behind his back.

‘What’s there?’ asked Musa, indicating his own grave with, again, the slightest movement of his chin. Miri stepped back, out ofMusa’s sight. She put her hand up to her mouth. Would anybody say, ‘That’s where your wife spent yesterday. She dug that grave for you’? Miri pinched her lips between her fingers.

‘Our water cistern,’ Aphas said. ‘It was already here. . For god provides.’

Already there? Musa was inspired. His mind was as quick and direct as his body was clumsy. He could see a trading opportunity at once, and a fast solution to the problems ofhis unsought delay in the wilderness. Here was an opening for him. God provides, indeed. He looked from face to face to satisfy himself that none of them could be the Galilean and that none of them were worldly or local enough to spot his lie. And then: ‘It’s there because I put it there,’ he said. ‘My land. My water.’ He pointed to the rows ofcaves up in the cliff. ‘My caves.’

Miri took her hand away from her mouth. She had to smile. Her husband was the demon of the mat. She listened with her mouth open while he recounted how he had dug that hole himself, with some help from his wife. He turned his head as best he could and closed an eye at her. She should keep quiet.

It was hard work, he said. The ground was full of stones: ‘My wife is pregnant. Look at her. She’s not as young as me. She isn’t fit to dig a hole in mud let alone in stones. She isn’t big enough to even lift a stone. She broke her fingernails. Show them your hands.’ Miri did as she was told. ‘Hard work,’ he said again. He wasn’t at this point quite sure why he and Miri had dug the hole. He needed time to think, and this he gained by making Miri show her damaged fingernails to each of them. By the time she’d come back to his shoulder he had found the next verse to his song. ‘My little donkey died,’ he said. She was diseased. It was a cruel kindness to end her misery. She was an animal he’d owned since he was a boy. She was his sister. ‘That pit. .’ (the slightest movement of the chin again) ‘. . was to be her grave.’ He couldn’t let a donkey rot, out in the open, not a donkey so much loved, he said. She would attract wolves, or leopards. He didn’t have to tell them how dangerous that was. For everyone. What, then, should he do now? Put the donkey in the grave and bury her under stones, as he had planned? Or let his hard work come to nothing for the sake of a drop of water, and some strangers? He closed his eyes and hummed to himself as if even Solomon would be taxed by such a choice. Here was a further opportunity to think of ways of turning these four into profit.

‘.And then, of course, there is the other matter, too,’ he said at last. The matter of the caves. Accommodation is not free, he explained. They wouldn’t caH in at an inn and expect to eat and sleep for nothing. That was not di^tified or rational. This was not common land, and traveHers would have to pay a tribute of some kind. A token tribute. Nothing large. A gesture only. ‘A sip, a sip, the merest sip,’ he said, and liked the sound of it. They did not have to pay, of course. They could choose to move elsewhere. Aid that was free. They might imagine they could stay and not pay rent. ‘You can imagine, too, how sad I’d be if you decided that,’ he said. ‘And how my hundred burly cousins in these hills might feel justified to come with sticks and tum you out. I only have to belch round here for there to be a storm. Your choice.’ He’d give them till midday to make up their minds.

While the badu concentrated on his hair, the other two men debated what they could do about the water and the caves and Musa’s uncouth cousins. It looked as if their quarantine was doomed. Musa entwined his fingers in his lap and closed his eyes. He made himself too large and placid to defy. His world was such a shapely place. He had the sweetest, simplest plan. He’d stick around until he’d shaken all their pockets out. It wouldn’t take him forty days. He’d have his fingers on the spiralled staff, the silver bracelets, the old man’s purse, the hidden coins in the cloak, in less than ten. He’d have his fingers on the woman’s breasts, as well, if only he could bide his time. She was worth the forty days, and more. He liked her fabrics and her cloths. Her textiles made his penis twitch. His eyes were not entirely shut. He looked at Marta through his lashes. He liked the way she lifted up her tunic hem, and ran the fabric through her fingers like a set of beads.

Marta knew that Musa was watching her. He was as subtle as a hungry dog. Her husband, Thaniel, was a jewel compared to him. She would not want to be married to a man like that; his little wife was hardly better than a slave. But Marta was jealous of Miri, nevertheless. The woman was enslaved perhaps, but sinewy and spirited. . and pregnant. Here was the person that Marta would like to be herself, the one that took her place in dreams, whose warp hung heavy on the weft. Marta had held Miri briefly by the hand when she had come to show her broken fingernails. Their touching skins could not have been more different, the one as full and oily as an olive, the other parchmenty. Marta longed to put her hand on Miri’s stomach and feel the wing-beats of her child. Would that be parchmenty as well? If only babies were contagious, like a fever … If only she could pass her hands through flesh and cup the child inside her palms … If only Miri would agree to seU. .

Marta pulled up the little bag tied into the material of her tunic top, and felt its weight of coins. She could pay. She could pay for Miri’s baby, if only four months could be compressed into the forty days and there was a child for sale. She was prepared to pay for water and for rent, as well, so long as Miri was around. In fact, it was a comfort in someways to pay, because it guaranteed she would not starve or freeze to death, and it would buy her access to Musa’s little slave. She let the bag drop down again on its drawstring, into the warmth and darkness of her clothes. It made the slightest bulge, and made her blush, because she knew that Musa watched the dropping bag and that his eyes had traveUed with it underneath the folds of cloth. She pulled her hair veil down across her face and waited for the old man and Shim, the honey-top, to finish their negotiations and make their bid to Musa.

Musa often claimed that seeing inside the heads ofhis adversaries was, for him, as easy as judging melons by their skins. He knew when they were sweet and ripe. He knew if they held any juice, and where and when to squeeze. He knew when they were cavernous and dry. It was an easy game to play. He was the champion. Hejudged and squeezed his clients in the marketplace, and knew, before they even knew themselves, how much they’d offer as their initial bid as well as what they’d end up paying as the final price. They nearly always gave the game away. Their fingers moved, and speHed out twos and threes and fours. They smiled too much or met his eyes too levelly if they were cheating him. Their breathing changed if they were feeling pressurized. There was a whole vocabulary of casual coughs, finger-tapping, tongues on teeth, false frowns, which told the emperor of trade ifhis suppliers or his buyers were underbidding, backing off, or ready for the deal.