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with the girl. From out of that demonic visage of grime and blood there emerged suddenly a child, an innocent. He ran his cloth over her hair as well, bringing it back to rough order; then he began to unwrap her hands. All the while the girl grew increasingly placid, until her ramblings had died down to a whisper.
    “Bring her something to eat,” Yeshua said, after he had her hands free, and when a bowl of soup was brought out she set into it like someone famished.
    From a pouch on his belt Yeshua pulled out some bits of herb and told the girl’s mother to make a brew from it to help calm the girl if she should suffer another attack.
    “Is it a demon, master?” the woman asked.
    “The girl is pregnant. When you find who’s responsible, you’ll have your demon.”
    The woman was instantly silenced by this, as were we all—the girl was no more than nine or ten. But it was immediately clear that Yeshua was right, both from the woman’s guilty silence and from the small bulge in the girl’s dress that grew obvious now that our attention had been drawn to it.
    The girl was quietly licking her bowl to get the dregs of the soup.
    “Take her home and look after her,” Yeshua said.
    There had been nothing miraculous in any of this, yet the whole incident affected me deeply. The vision of that younggirl’s face, called back, it seemed, from some precipice as if indeed by a kind of magic, had seared itself into my mind. I had seen instances of this kind of possession before, if that was what it could be called, and also “cures” of varying degrees of success (on more than one occasion staged, I was sure, to win over a credulous audience). But while usually these cases were handled with all manner of obfuscation and subterfuge, with chants and potions and charms or countless animal sacrifices that usually ended up on the doctor’s supper table without any appreciable benefit to the patient, Yeshua had held true throughout to the plainest and simplest of observations and gestures, and in so doing had brought about an improvement that, if not permanent, had at least the great virtue of being honest. That he had taken the trouble of examining the girl’s condition from the point of view of physical causes already set him apart from the usual run of physicians and healers, who leapt at once to the mystical in order to cover their own lack of understanding.
    Afterwards I held Yeshua back on the pretext of speaking to him of his education, which he told me he’d received during his time in Alexandria. But in fact a notion had taken hold of me: I had begun to think of his earlier offer to join him. I reasoned to myself that he would provide cover for my return to our own territories, even if at bottom he wasn’t much less a fugitive than I was; and also that in Galilee I could move freely, being unknown there. I had it in mind, or so I said to myself, that I might look to building our movement there, since as far as I knew we had no strength in the region. But the truth was simply that I was drawn to Yeshua. I had seen something in him, the mark of a leader, and was loath to let him slip from me.
    We sat talking there for an hour or more, long after his men had returned to their room. As he presented himself, it seemed he was merely an itinerant teacher of the sort that was common enough even in Judea, with a little following there in the Galilee that supported him. Yet he did not much resemble the teachers I had known when I’d studied in Jerusalem, whose minds were like windowless rooms circumscribed on every side by the law, while Yeshua’s was curious and quick. The innkeeper had joined us and brought wine, which Yeshua did not abstain from, and soon we were drawn into political arguments and to talk of the emperor Tiberius and his strange retreat to the isle of Capri, where it was said he indulged every lust and gave no thought to the affairs of state. The innkeeper saw hopes for our independence in this, saying