The man who had been born blind reached the Jordan walking in front.
The road fell through tamarisk toward the ford. Thomas carried Micah’s cloak. Nathanael had eaten most of the bread and denied it when Thomas found the torn heel of the loaf in his hand. Yeshua walked behind them, close enough to hear, saying nothing.
Micah stopped where the road opened above the water.
Across the river, white tents stood in ordered rows between the bank and the low hills. Smoke lifted from three cookfires. A second camp spread north along the river, larger and rougher, its guy ropes bright in the afternoon sun. Men moved between the two carrying jars, reed mats, and bundles of winter brush.
Simon, whom Yeshua called the Rock, came up the bank with a new mallet through his belt.
“You took your time.”
Thomas handed him the empty bread cloth.
The Rock looked at it, then at Nathanael.
“The road was hungry,” Nathanael said.
The Rock embraced Yeshua. He took Micah by both shoulders and held him away.
“Let me see.”
Micah looked back at him.
The Rock laughed once. “That will take getting used to.”
The Rock pointed the mallet north, then south. “A man from Judea crosses at one of those two fords. I see both from my tent.” He pointed at the southern approach. “That mud keeps a hoofprint until the next rain.” At night two men watched each crossing while a third kept the cookfire low.
The Rock showed them the new ditch above the sleeping rows.
“Three hundred here,” the Rock said. “Twice that up the river if they sleep close.”
“They will,” said Joram Zebedee, James and John’s brother, passing with a coil of rope on one shoulder.
“You said eight hundred.”
“That was yesterday.”
Joram kept walking.
The ford rope ended at a willow on the east bank. Pilgrims held it through the deepest water, then released it where the stones sloped under brown current. A woman crossed with one hand around the rope and the other gripping a boy whose eyes did not follow the light. When the rope ended, she called to the bank. Two men shouted different directions. The boy put one foot down, lost the stone, and dropped to his knee.
Micah went into the water.
He caught the boy beneath the arm and found the next stone with his heel. The mother pulled from the other side. Together they brought him onto the bank.
“The rope stops,” Micah said.
The Rock looked at the willow. “The water stops.”
Micah pointed to the mud above it. “His ground does not.”
He took the coil from Joram and tied it beyond the last wet stone, through the mud and up the bank to the first tent stake. When he finished, the boy crossed the dry slope holding the rope. His mother never had to turn him by the shoulders.
The Rock drove a second stake beside the first.
By sunset three more blind pilgrims had used it.
The seventy returned on the last Friday of the year.
They came by twos from the north road and the southern ford, their sandals opened at the seams and the dust of six weeks held in the hems of their garments. Some brought believers with them. One pair came carrying a man between them in a sling made from a door cloth. Another arrived without the outer garments they had worn away from Magadan. A widow in Nain had needed them more.
Joram’s runners had brought pieces of their news ahead of them. The camp knew which towns had opened houses and which had shut gates. It knew of the child in Jotapata whose shaking had stopped under the hands of two frightened teachers. It knew that gentiles had listened in Scythopolis and that a synagogue ruler in Sepphoris had ordered the doors barred.
One spoke with both hands. Another stopped after every sentence to ask his companion if it had happened as he remembered. A third had gone into a village unable to answer three questions and returned with seven questions he could no longer put down. One of them had written the name of every house that fed him on the inside of his belt.
Yeshua returned from the hills toward evening with the Rock, James, and John. The meal waited. Nobody complained.
Abner gave the first report. He kept it short. The others did not.
They told how people had received the message without seeing Yeshua. They talked over one another until the fire needed wood twice. Two men from one pair told the same healing and argued over which of them had spoken first.
“Even the spirits obeyed us,” one said.
Yeshua raised a hand.
The fire settled behind him.
“Do not rejoice because power answered you. Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
The man lowered his face. His companion touched the back of his neck.
Then Yeshua looked around the fire at the road-worn teachers, at the women who had trained beside them, at Joram’s runners crowded behind the last row, and at the pilgrims listening from beyond the ropes.
His face opened.
The sound came out of him before anyone around the fire moved. It was laughter, full and helpless, the laugh of the carpenter over a board that had held beyond its grain. The seventy caught it. Men bent against one another. Someone struck the ground with his palm. Susanna covered her mouth and failed to stop.
The Rock stood at the edge of the light with the mallet still through his belt.
The next morning the camp expected another celebration.
Yeshua took the seventy apart.
By midday the laughter had left their faces. He warned them about pride, about mistaking what passed through their hands for what belonged to them. Then he sent them to rest.
On Tuesday, January third, Abner assembled them again.
The Rock arrived carrying two tablets.
“I have the towns divided by distance,” he said. “If we keep six pairs here and rotate the rest through the nearest stations, every man can return within eight days.”
Abner studied the tablets.
“They are not returning.”
The Rock waited.
“The roads south flood.”
“Then they will cross before the rain.”
“There are more people in this camp every day.”
“There are fifty towns without it.”
The Rock looked past him. The seventy stood in pairs along the river. Beyond them, the enlarged women’s corps fastened medicine packets and rolled spare cloth into their bags. The Rock’s wife moved down the line checking knots. Mary of Magdala retied a younger woman’s sandal, pulled once on the strap, and sent her back to her partner.
“Who brings their reports?” the Rock asked.
“Joram’s runners know the roads.”
“Who corrects the teaching?”
“You may visit them.”
“Who decides when they come back?”
Abner gave him the tablets.
“No one.”
The Rock held them while Abner called the first pair.
The seventy went out along the east road two by two. The women followed toward the larger towns. Behind them pilgrims were still coming up out of the river on the new guide rope.
By evening the teaching ground was empty.
The Rock erased six names from the first tablet. He stopped, wet the whole face of the clay, and smoothed it with his palm.
The apostles went out after them.
They rode or walked out from Pella with Yeshua, two or three at a time, sleeping in the houses the seventy had entered before them. They found meetings in courtyards, storehouses, olive sheds, and one abandoned dyer’s room that left everyone’s feet blue.
At Amathus, ten lepers waited beyond the road.
Nine were Jews. The tenth was a Samaritan. They shared a strip of shade, a water skin, and the distance clean men required them to keep.
Simon Zelotes saw the Samaritan and moved to the far side of the road.
The ten called together.
“Master. Have mercy on us.”
Yeshua stopped.
Simon Zelotes touched his sleeve. “There is a Samaritan with them. Pass by.”
Yeshua looked at the ten. “And if he loves God as well as the others?”
“Cleanse them and you will find out.”
“Then you will, Simon.”
Yeshua went close enough to see their faces.
“Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
The men looked at one another. Nothing had changed. One of the Jews lifted his wrapped hand.
“Now?”
“Go.”
The first man turned. The others followed, the Samaritan last. They went along the wall toward the south gate.
The apostles entered Amathus.
They found two of the seventy teaching in a courtyard behind the synagogue. A baker had given them the space. His ovens backed against the wall, and every sentence came through the smell of hot barley. The Rock stood behind the listeners while two men he had trained answered an elder’s objection without looking to him.
A cry rose in the street.
The Samaritan came through the doorway at a run.
The cloth had fallen from his face. New skin showed across his cheek and jaw, pale where the sun had not touched it. He searched the courtyard, saw Yeshua near the ovens, and went down among the flour baskets.
The man tried to speak. Breath broke the words.
Yeshua looked at the apostles, and last at Simon Zelotes.
“Were there not ten?”
Simon Zelotes lowered his eyes.
The Samaritan pressed his forehead to the dust.
“Get up,” Yeshua said. “Go your way. Your faith has made you whole.”
The man rose. He put both hands against Yeshua’s forearms, then released them and backed through the doorway with his eyes on Yeshua’s face.
That night the Rock counted blankets in the guest room. There were fourteen blankets and fifteen men. He laid his own blanket over two boys from Philadelphia and slept against the door.
At dawn, Micah found him there.
“I heard you come in,” the Rock said.
“You were asleep.”
“I heard you before.”
Micah stepped over him and opened the door. The sky above the eastern roofs was paling.
Yeshua stood in the street alone.
He faced south, where the road left Amathus and ran along the river toward Jericho, Bethany, and the city beyond.
The Rock came to the doorway with the tablet under his arm.
Micah looked from Yeshua’s feet to his face.
Yeshua’s feet were still.
The road was already in his face.
Micah went down into the street and stood beside him.