He had come in out of the desert, people said—from the look of him, his blistered face and the way his skin hung from his bones, he’d passed a good while there. He had set himself up now just off the square, squatting in the shade of an old fig tree; I had a good view of him from the porch of the tavern I’d put up in across the way. Some of the townspeople, no doubt taking him for a holy man, dropped bits of food in front of him from time to time, which he accepted with a nod of his head but more often than not couldn’t seem to bring himself to stomach, letting them sit there in the dirt for the flies to collect on or the dogs to snatch away. Though the town lay on the Roman side of the frontier, the soldiers of Herod Antipas often passed that way when they travelled up from his southern territories. At the time, I was awaiting an informant we had among Herod’s men on his way back to the court from the Macherus fortress. The holy man had appeared perhaps the third day of my wait, simply there beneath the fig tree when I awoke; from the joyless look of him I thought he might have been cast out from one of the desert cults, the way they did sometimes if some bit of food should touch your hand before you’d washed it or if you missed some pause or half-word in your prayers.
