Lazarus is Dead by Richard Beard

appeared before a dawn council of Sanhedrin priests. Cassius has spies almost everywhere, but not yet in the Sanhedrin itself, and he suspects they were plotting, talking about Jesus and the Romans.
    Since that meeting Lazarus has been spending money on sacrifices, sending in many pairs of sheep from Bethany. This is unusual behaviour for him. The animals could be a way of covertly delivering messages, but Cassius hasn’t worked out how the system might function.
    Either that, or the sacrifices are part of a broader ploy. Lazarus wants people to believe he’s genuinely ill (thirty-two years old, regular walker, never a day sick in his life—the Roman informers have asked around), but Cassius is not so easily deceived. He senses there is some kind of plan in action, a longer-term design he can’t quite decipher, and he is not entirely displeased. At some point in this scheme Jesus will come to Jerusalem. Cassius will be waiting, and he will take this chance to get noticed in Rome.
    He needs to place a spy close to Lazarus.
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    Absalom examines his younger friend, first one arm then the other.
    â€˜You have a rash,’ he says. ‘But it could be worse. You’re not dying.’
    Absalom sighs for his departed mother. He still can’t understand why she had to die, any more than he can conceive of an all-seeing god who creates bacterial parasites.
    â€˜You’re unclean,’ he says. ‘You need to purify yourself.’
    Medically, the cleansing procedure described in the Book of Leviticus remains sound. Lazarus must wash his clothes and his bedding and not leave his house for seven days except for ritual immersion in the village bath.
    He wraps himself in a blanket and shambles across the square. For a few seconds the fury of the sun blinds him. It is high summer, with unforgiving sunshine day after day, but slowly the village buildings emerge from the light. A Roman patrol rests and drinks by the well, the soldiers hazed and floating in the heat. Lazarus shivers and heads for the
mikveh
, a carved pool inside a cave below the village.
    He feels his way into the gloom, drops his blanket. Water drips and echoes. Steps are cut into the rocks, and the tepid water soothes his ankles, his shins, his knees, slaps against his thighs. There is a raised shelf to his left for the inflow, and to his right a flat overspill. The water is always gently moving, slowly refreshing itself from a higher source.
    Lazarus walks to the far wall, swishing the water with his thighs and hands. He turns and lowers himself onto the smooth stone floor, the water reaching his chin. He breathes out, setting off a skin of ripples, works his arms one way and then the other, checks himself over. The rash spreads down both inner arms, it discolours the top of his legs and his feet. He flexes his toes and fingers. The water eases the itching.
    He can see his ribs. Is he getting thinner?
    Lazarus loves his body. He does not want it to perish.
    He stretches out, rests his head on the ledge behind him. He pictures Lydia naked.
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    This is not so much a question of why, as why not?
    Few men admit to visiting prostitutes but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, either the women or their clients.
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
lists two prostitutes, fifteen whores and forty-two harlots. There are more harlots in the bible than tax collectors, more whores than doctors.
    Lazarus is unmarried. He lives in Bethany with his sisters, but is frequently away on work in Jerusalem. He is making decisions in an era before the influence of Christianity—good men are not yet finding their goodness by striving to imitate Jesus—and paying for sex escapes the sanction of divine punishment. Or so Lazarus believes. It must do, or he’d have fallen ill long before now.
    If anything, he feels blessed. Jerusalem is a city of eighty thousand souls, and the traffic in slaves and soldiers brings in every