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VIRGIN

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley edition / January 1996

All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 1996 by Mary Elizabeth Murphy.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10
987654321

To my husband, without whom this book would not have been possible

Part I

Scrolls
1

Part II

Journeys
117

Part III

Miracles
199

Part IV

Assumptions
299

P
art I

After they banished me from Jerusalem, I wandered south
,
leaving
my
position
and my inheritance
behind. What need had I of money? I wished to be dead.

I tore my blue robe
with the three-striped sleeve and cast it from me. I traded it to a beggar for
the filthy, louse-infested rags on his
back. But the lice have not
bitten me. They deserted the rags as soon as I donned them.

Even the vermin will
have nothing to do
with me!

from the Glass scroll

Rockefeller Museum translation

1991

1

Israel

"Don't spare that switch, Achmed," Nabil called back
from the lead position where he played the flashlight along the slope ahead of
them. "Getting there second is as good as not getting there at all."

Achmed swatted
the donkey's flanks with greater vigor as he and his brother pulled and drove
the reluctant beast up the incline into the craggy foothills of the Judean
Wilderness. Behind him the parched land sloped away to the Dead Sea; ahead lay
the mountains, forbidding during the day, terrifying at night. Countless stars
twinkled madly in the ebon dome of the sky, and the near-full moon on high
etched the sere landscape with bleached light and Stygian shadow. The beam from
Nabil's flashlight was barely distinguishable in the moonglow.

An empty sky
now, but not long ago a dark object had screamed through the night, trailing
fire and smoke. Achmed and Nabil had leapt from their camel-hair blankets and
stumbled out of their tent into the cool night air in time to see the bright
flare of its explosive collision with the nearby hills.

Achmed
remembered his initial awe and terror. "It is the hand of Allah!"

He also
remembered Nabil's none-too-gentle shove against his shoulder.

"Goat!
It's a missile. You heard the talk around the fire
last night. The hero Saddam is sending missiles against the
Jews. Thousands of missiles. And he's killing them by the
millions.
Already
he has sent the Americans howling with their tails between their legs. Soon there
will be no more Israel and our herds will graze among our enemies' bones in the
ruins of Tel Aviv. Let's go!"

"Go
where?" Achmed cried as his older brother began pushing through the
huddled goats toward their tethered ass.

"Into the
hills!"

"Why?"
He wasn't challenging his older brother--a good Bedouin boy did not question the
eldest son of his father--he simply wanted to know.

Nabil turned
and pointed toward the jagged sawblade of rock that cut the western sky. His
face was shadowed but Achmed knew from the impatience in his voice that his
brother was wearing his habitual you're-so-stupid scowl.

"That was
a missile that just passed, a giant bullet. And what are bullets made of?"
Achmed opened his mouth to answer but Nabil wasn't waiting. "Metal! And
what do we do with any scrap metal we find?"

"We sell
it," Achmed said quickly, and suddenly he saw the reason for Nabil's
haste. "There will be
lots
of metal!" he said.

Nabil nodded.
"Tons
of it. So move those feet, camel face!"

Once again he
realized why their father placed so much trust in Nabil, and why he was glad
Nabil had been born first. Achmed doubted he could handle the responsibility of
being the eldest son--the only thing he did better than Nabil was play the
rababah,
hardly a useful skill. He hoped he was as muscular as Nabil when he reached
seventeen in three years, and prayed he'd be able to sport such a respectable
start at a beard. At times he despaired of outgrowing this reedy, ungainly
body.

And tonight was
but further proof of his unsuitability for leadership. Never would he have
thought of making profit for the family from the remnants of a spent and
exploded missile. But he could lend his back to gathering the scrap so that his
abu
could be proud of both of his sons.

And now, as they clambered up a slope that seemed ever steeper, a
thought struck him. The goats! Father had entrusted them with one of the family
herds, to take it north in search of better grazing. That herd now stood
untended and unguarded on the plain below, ready to be driven off unchallenged
by any passer-by with a larcenous heart.

Achmed turned
and gazed back down the slope. The Dead Sea gleamed in the moonlight like a
strip of hammered silver, shadowed on the far side by the mountains of Jordan
and outlined on the near by the black, shore-hugging ribbon of Highway 90. No
lights moved on the highway.
Their herd was safely huddled in a dry basin kilometers
from the road. He realized his fears were groundless. Who would be wandering
about the Judean Wilderness in the dead of night? The only thing moving here
was
Hamsin,
the desert wind.

As he returned
to the climb, a question popped into his mind.

"Nabil,"
he called. "Why has this missile landed here instead of in Tel Aviv?"

"Probably
one of the Israelis hit it with a lucky shot and knocked it off course."

Of course,
Achmed thought. Why didn't I think of that? Nabil always had an answer.

Achmed followed
his brother up the steepening incline of the dry wadi, so steep at times that
he had to heave his shoulder against the donkey's hindquarters to assist the
beast up the slope. Eventually they came to a ribbed outcrop of stone that
towered over them. In the daytime this rock would have looked sandy red and yellow.
Now in the moonlight it glowed goatsmilk white, streaked with the stark shadows
of its crevices.

"What do
we do now?" Achmed said.

Nabil looked
around, then up, then ranged left and right along the face of the rock as if he
expected to find a path into the cliffside.

"I don't
know. There must be a way around this. The missile crashed atop it. We must
find a way up."

"Maybe it
crashed on the other side," Achmed said. "I couldn't tell from where
we stood. Could you?"

Achmed saw his
brother shake his shadowed head. "I'm sure it crashed atop this cliff.
Almost
sure. Maybe if we travel around it we'll find a way up."

To the left
looked no more promising than the right, but something in Achmed drew him
leftward.

"That
way," he said, surprised by the certainty in his voice as he pointed
south.

Nabil stared at
him a moment, then shrugged and turned south.

"As good a
way to start as any."

The going got
rougher. No path here, no sign that man or beast had ever traveled this route.
Their sandals
and the donkey's hooves slipped on the loose shale that littered their way. The
jagged edges angled up, cutting Achmed's feet and ankles.

After
struggling along for a few hundred feet, Nabil turned and stopped the donkey.

"This
isn't going anywhere," he said. "We'll turn back and try the other
way."

"We've
come so far already," Achmed said. "Just a little farther. Let's see
what's around that bend before we turn back."

"All
right," Nabil said. "To the bend and no more."

They struggled
farther along the narrow path, and as they were slithering past a jagged rib in
the cliff wall, Nabil called back from the lead.

"You were
right! It ends here. We can get past it here!"

As Achmed
followed the donkey around the rib, he saw that the far side was just as steep
as the near, with no gully or ravine to allow them passage to the top. And
worse, the landing edge of the outcrop was topped by an overhang of stone that
would have daunted them even had there been a way to climb the face.

Achmed saw that
they had entered the mouth of a deep canyon. Beyond the outcrop a broad dry
wadi swept down from the upper reaches of the range; half a dozen feet above
that, a small, raised field. And beyond the field stood
another sheer-faced cliff even more forbidding than the one
they had just skirted.

Nabil stood in
the moonlight, head back, hands on hips, staring at the cliff face.
"There's no way up," he said.

Achmed's voice
choked on his disappointment. He could only nod. He'd been so sure . . .

Something stung
his nostrils. He blinked his suddenly watery eyes. He couldn't see it but he
could smell it. Smoke . . . riding the breeze that wafted down the wadi.
"Nabil . . . ?"

But his brother
had smelled it too. "Achmed! Follow! Quickly!"

They drove the
donkey up the gentler slope of the dry riverbed. As they neared the small field
the smoke became thicker. Another hundred feet and Achmed spotted the flames.

"It's here!" Nabil cried. "It crashed here!"
They dragged and pushed the donkey up the far bank of the wadi and stopped at
the top to stare at the tiny field that ran across the base of the canyon
mouth. Stunted fig trees reached their twisted branches heavenward at regular
intervals across its narrow span. A few of them were burning. Dozens of tiny
grass fires crawled along the field's smooth surface.