Free Lazarus is Dead by Richard Beard Page A

cleansing on his lack of sincerity. He has given up Lydia, almost entirely.
    Yet he still feels ugly and weak and smells like a one-man plague. Mary can barely speak without mentioning Jesus, and Lazarus torments himself by remembering the past. He wonders whether there was anything of importance he missed at the time, all those years ago in Nazareth. Jesus has extraordinary powers, and Lazarus had noticed nothing.
    He doesn’t think so. The proof is there in what happened to Amos, but the past can’t be changed. Unlike the future, which can be whatever he is determined to make of it.
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    Yanav the Healer travels with a dog called Ezekiel and a brown, one-eyed donkey. He is welcomed in Bethany like news from the desert or the arrival of cut-price eggs. He is an event. The idle gawp at the donkey, at the brass rings in its ears and the clatter strapped to the yellow leather tent on its back.
    The healer is a small bearded man with no visible neck. His clothes are good quality but travel-stained, and he has a wary look as if there’s danger in fully opening his eyes. His face is often turned at an angle to his body, but the eye furthest away is the one to watch. The nearer eye sees, but the one at a distance does the thinking.
    We can’t know this for sure. We do, however, know what a healer of the time, like Yanav, would have been carrying in the panniers and flagons jumbled across the back of his donkey.
    Foliage from a willow tree, and the dried sap of opium poppies. He has a jar of milk deliberately exposed to the sun. Olive oil, oil squeezed from fish livers, salt, and a box of maggots kept separate from the leeches which travel on the other side of the donkey, next to a bag of locusts. A flask of honey, a pouch of earth scooped from the centre of a termites’ nest, sharp thorns, chalk, flat stones, and a stoppered vial of ‘Greek potion’ which is his own urine mixed with dill.
    He also carries astrological charts and a sheath of peacock feathers, but these are just for show.
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    Mary notes the arrival of the healer and the next day she leaves the village before dawn. She is Lazarus’s sister and has similar notions about heroism, though he and Martha have never bothered to notice. Martha is the oldest and Lazarus is a man. They underestimate her, but with the help of Jesus she alone can save her ailing brother.
    She believes this to be true, and in her mind it is already so. Jesus will heal Lazarus if Mary of Bethany demonstrates sufficient faith.
    She also believes, quite sincerely, that Martha will feel no anxiety about where her sister is or when she’s coming back. Mary believes she will come to no harm on the Bethany road, nor after that as a young, attractive woman alone in the empty wastes between Jerusalem and the lake in Galilee. Her faith will keep her safe, and with the aid of kindly strangers she’ll arrive in Cana by tomorrow at dusk.
    Mary prays for the sick at the Bethesda pool, but passes them by. She prays for the beggars who jostle her in the clamour of Jerusalem. She will not be deterred, because she recognises the blisters in her brother’s mouth. She knows smallpox. The consumptive cough she has also heard before, and tended to the dying with similar malarial fevers. If she does nothing, Lazarus will die.
    At the Damascus Gate a military checkpoint slows her progress, but she joins the queue to leave the city. Waiting, too, may be part of the celestial plan.
    The soldiers block her path. The northern road is dangerous for an unaccompanied woman. Besides, she has no business outside the city. She is carrying nothing she can sell in the desert.
    â€˜I wouldn’t say that,’ but before the soldiers can start she turns and doubles back, believing god must mean her to leave the city by another route.
    By the time she reaches Herod’s Gate, Cassius is already there.
    â€˜You are Mary, the sister of Lazarus.’
    She glances over her