“No. Take the painting and go back to Acre and the sea. I’ll stay in this until morning, then I’ll put on the gray again.” She looked at him briefly, then turned away. Beyond his shoulder she saw the scarred hillside with holes in it that seemed at a glance like the eyes and nostrils of a great skull. She shivered.
“What is it?” he asked, swiveling around to follow her line of sight. “There’s no one.”
“I know. It wasn’t that…” Her voice tailed off.
He stood closer to her, his hand on her arm. “Do you know where we are?” he said softly.
“No…” But even as she denied it, she understood. “Yes. Golgotha. The place of the crucifixion.”
“Perhaps. I know some people think it’s inside the city, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’d rather it were here, desolate with the earth and the sky. It shouldn’t have a pretty church built over it. That is to efface all it means. It had to be terrible, and alone, like this.”
“Do you think we’ll all come to such a place one day?” she asked. “Or be brought here?”
“Maybe, one day or another,” he answered.
She stood still for several moments longer. Then she turned to him. “But I must go to Sinai, and you must go to Acre. I’ll see you again in thirty-five days, or as close as I can to that.” She found it difficult to keep her voice level, the emotion in control. She wanted to leave before it broke. She glanced down to where he held his sack with the clothes and the picture. “Thank you.” She smiled briefly and turned away, climbing back up the steep incline to the road. At the top, she looked at him once and saw he was still on the same spot, still watching her, the skull of Golgotha behind him. She took a deep breath, swallowed, and started walking again.
Sixty-one
GIULIANO WATCHED UNTIL THE SLENDER, LONELY FIGURE of Anastasius disappeared into the distance, then he walked over the rough ground and climbed back up to the road, joining it farther to the south and west. Was that the true Golgotha on which they had stood? The desolation of it seeped into his bones, drowning his mind. Why hast Thou forsaken me? The cry of every human soul who looks upon despair.
Was the sad, powerful face on the wooden painting he carried really that of Mary? It didn’t matter. The passion was real. Who cared if it was this place or that place? This woman or another?
Why did the sight of Anastasius dressed as a woman trouble Giuliano so much? He not only looked so natural in the clothes, he even changed his walk and the angle of his head. The way he looked at the passing men was feminine, different. His character had changed. He was no longer the friend Giuliano had come to know so well. At least he thought he had. There were days at a time when he forgot that Anastasius was a eunuch. His sexuality, or lack of it, was of no importance. It was his courage, his gentleness, his intelligence, his quick wit and soaring imagination that mattered and made him who he was.
Now suddenly the whole issue was forced into the open. Anastasius truly was a third gender, neither male nor female. He could slip from one to the other as silk changed in the light, almost as if there were nothing innate that defined him.
But it was worse than that. It was something deeper, something within himself, that troubled him. He had found Anastasius dressed as a woman to be beautiful. He knew perfectly well that he was, if not a man, then definitely male, yet momentarily he had responded to him as if he had been female. He had felt protective and then been aware of the sharp stirrings of sexual attraction.
Giuliano was relieved that he had to go to Jaffa and there was no real question of his traveling to Sinai as well.
Yet the moment Anastasius, such a vulnerable figure, was gone, he felt strangely alone. He would soon be surrounded by people, but there was no one to whom he could speak of the burdens inside him, the guilt at having fallen so far short of being the kind of friend Anastasius needed and deserved.
Perhaps worse than that, cutting more deeply into the fabric of himself, he was not the man he himself needed to be. He had realized that perhaps he could not love, passionately or with lifelong honor and completeness, as his mother could not and his father did so unrequitedly. Perhaps the depth of that was not in him. But he had believed that friendship was another kind of love just as profound and just as precious. And he was wrong in that, too.
Had Anastasius the gentleness to forgive that? Out of the great well of his loneliness, the compassion Giuliano had seen in him so often, could he? And should he?
Sixty-two
DRESSED AS A PILGRIM ONCE MORE AND HAVING TO FORCE herself to adopt the habits and gestures of a eunuch again, Anna asked the caravan master at the Sion Gate for passage across the Negev Desert to St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. She still had a great deal of Zoe’s money, more than was necessary to pay for her passage. He haggled a few minutes, but time was short and the money she offered was good, even generous.
Anna was unused to riding a donkey, but since there was no alternative, she accepted the assistance of one of the guides. He was a dark, mild-faced man of whose language she understood only a few words, but his tone of voice was sufficiently explicit that even the camels were obedient to him.
The caravan that left the shelter of Jerusalem numbered as near as she could tell about fifteen camels, twenty donkeys, and about forty pilgrims, plus a number of camel and donkey drivers and two guides. It was apparently a small number compared with what was usual.
It was a journey that began easily as they followed the road south. The first place of any note they passed was desolate, unremarkable, until the man on the donkey beside her crossed himself and began to pray over and over again, as if warding off some evil fate. She was startled by the fear in his voice.
“Are you ill?” she asked in concern.
He made the sign of the cross in the air. “Aceldama,” he said hoarsely. “Pray, brother. Pray!”
Aceldama. Of course. The Field of Blood, where Judas slew himself. Surprisingly, it was not fear that took hold of her but a savage and overwhelming pity. Was that really a road from which there was no returning?
When they moved past Aceldama and into the ever-shifting, ever-changing desert, there was nothing left behind but an old grief.
The first night she was stiff and cold, too tired to sleep at first, and very aware of the miserable accommodations: three dirty, leaking sheds where they huddled together, trying to find enough rest to gain strength for the next day.
It was a relief to eat and drink a little and begin the day’s journey. At least it was warmer to move, even in the wind, than to lie still.
The scenery changed from black and white to faded colors, bleached by heat and cold, almost devoid of life except for miserable little tamarisk trees thick with thorns. Pale sand gave way to almost black, flat and hard, covered with little flints. Black mountains were dense and jagged in the distance. The wind roared and stung with hard little edges of sand, like myriad insects stinging. They were told quite cheerfully by the guides that at other seasons it was worse.
They were warned not to leave the caravan for any reason whatever. To stray was to invite death. One could become lost in minutes, disoriented, and perish of thirst. The wastes beyond the known path were littered with the white bones of the foolish.
At night, the sky was ink black and burned with stars so low as to seem barely out of reach. Beautiful and alien, they exerted such a profound fascination that Anna found it hard to tear her gaze away from them and remember that she must sleep if she was to survive.
Day followed day. The scenery changed, limitless horizons giving way to lines of hills. Black desert changed to pale or even white with gray lines and shadows across it.