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manner of a Greek than a Jew, finding recourse for his arguments in logic rather than scripture; thus I wasn’t surprised to learn that as a child he had lived in Alexandria.
    I couldn’t quite gather what it was that had brought him to Tyre and wondered if the reason wasn’t so different from my own, having heard that the matter of Yohanan had not yet been settled. But it wasn’t entirely unknown for Jews to proselytize in that region, so he might merely have come in search of converts. Also, as I learned, he had been there only a matter of weeks, and planned to return the following day to Kefar Nahum in Galilee, where it seemed he was now based. I made some comment half in jest then of how I would gladly be rid of Tyre as well, and he said I was welcome to travel with him if I wished. But I could not tell if the invitation was made casually or in earnest.
    I asked the group if they wanted to put up at the inn for the night. But Kephas, who was clearly wary of me, said, “We sleep in the open. We have no money with us.”
    This seemed a point of honour with him. I remembered Yeshua’s rejection of the coin I had offered in En Melakh.
    “Then how do you eat?”
    “The Lord provides,” Kephas said.
    I was tempted to ask if it was the Lord who was paying for his supper, but said only, “You will stay as my guests, of course,” so they could not refuse me.
    Our meeting might have ended there with Yeshua and me going our separate ways the next day if not for an occurrence later that evening that considerably sharpened my interest in him. A Phoenician woman from the countryside appeared at the inn in search of him, having somehow managed to track him down; and she had along with her a daughter whom she held literally leashed to her by a cord tied around the girl’s waist and who looked like some wild animal she had captured, dirtied and dishevelled, her face covered in scratches andscabs. The girl’s hands were bound in rags that she was constantly gnawing at to free herself, all the while emitting long howls and moans, eerie and guttural, that seemed to border on speech without quite becoming it.
    I had stayed down in the parlour after supper and was one of the first to speak to the woman when she showed up in the courtyard. She said word of Yeshua’s power had reached her after he had passed through a village near hers the previous day and cured a child there, and she had brought her own daughter in the hope he might cure her as well. The rags, she said, were to keep the girl, who had several times tried to take her own life, from doing any further injury to herself.
    I was surprised to learn that Yeshua enjoyed this renown as a healer. A boy was sent up to his room to fetch him and a few minutes later he appeared in the courtyard with his men. A curious and almost comic thing happened then: at the sight of Kephas, the girl, who despite her rantings had appeared relatively harmless until that moment, suddenly lunged at the poor man and began hitting at him with her rag-covered fists. It took both Yaqob and Yohanan to pull her off him.
    The mother, by this point, was practically prostrate with apology.
    “Master, please,” she said, nearly incoherent, “master.”
    Yeshua had wisely been holding himself back a bit from the fray. But now he came forward to put a hand on the girl’s forehead. The gesture seemed to calm her.
    “Bring her into the sitting room,” he said.
    His men sat her on a bench in the parlour. She was still mumbling in her indecipherable speech but seemed to have retreated into herself, staring out glassy-eyed as if entirelyunaware of us or her surroundings. At Yeshua’s instructions the servant boy brought a basin of water and a cloth, and Yeshua proceeded to dab at the grime on the girl’s face and at the streaks of dried blood from her scratches. I remembered how he had tended to Ezekias in this way, how he had made him seem human again; and somehow he managed to work this same effect now