They stayed in Tekoa one more afternoon.
Elham had been sitting at the waystation bench watching the road southeast and thinking about the path forward, when the first three arrived. They came from the direction of the well, moving in the loose formation of children who had been doing something together and had spotted something more interesting. They stopped in front of him with the direct unselfconscious attention of children who had not yet learned to manage how they appeared to strangers.
The tallest of the three, a girl of perhaps eight, looked at the white robe. At the staff leaning against the bench. At his face. "What are you supposed to be?" she said.
"I'm a man of God," Elham said.
The second child, a boy of about ten, looked at the staff. "Is that a weapon."
"No, it belonged to someone important," Elham said. "I carry it to remember him."
"Who," the boy said.
"My father," Elham said.
The third child, a small girl of perhaps six, looked at him with her head tilted. "Where is he."
"Well, I'd like to think he's in a better palace now," Elham said.
The three of them absorbed this with the specific seriousness that children brought to information about dead fathers, which was different from the way adults received the same information.
"Tell us something," the tall girl said.
By the time four more children had arrived, three boys from the market's edge who had seen the white robe and come to investigate, and a five-year-old who had simply followed the others without particular intention, Elham had already begun. He did not stop for the arrivals. He simply continued and they found places in the semicircle that had formed around him and the story went on.
John noticed first from the well. He came back with the water and stood at the waystation's edge watching Elham at the center of seven children with the specific attentiveness of Uriel's gift turned on a prophet telling a story rather than a city's spiritual atmosphere. Yael appeared from the market with bread and the expression of someone who had missed the beginning of something and was happy to have arrived when he had. Asher came from the junction. Mara from the road's southern edge where she had been watching the approach. The cord ranged at the waystation's perimeter without displacing the children, simply present and listening, because the children were there first and the story was already running.
"There was a road," Elham said, "between two cities. Not an easy road. It went through hill country where robbers waited and travelers had no choice to use that road because the road, well, it was the road. You walked through the hills because that was the only way between here and where you needed to go."
"We know a road like that," the ten-year-old said. "South of here. My father says don't walk it alone."
"Your father is right," Elham said. "Hard roads are better walked with others. I have learned that." He looked at the semicircle. "A man was walking this road alone. The robbers found him. They took everything he had and they left him on the road badly hurt. Not dead. But too hurt to stand and too hurt to call for help."
"That's terrible," the small six-year-old said. With tears in her eyes.
"Yes," Elham said. "It was. Now, three people came down the road after him. I need you to picture each one clearly because the story turns on all three."
The children arranged themselves more attentively. The five-year-old, who had been on the edge of distraction, went still.
"The first person was a priest," Elham said. "Not an ordinary person. A man whose entire life was organized around God's law. He knew every commandment. He observed every one. He spent every day in the temple. When he came down the road he saw the hurt man lying there."
"He helped," the five-year-old said with complete confidence.
"He crossed to the other side of the road," Elham said, "and walked past."
The five-year-old looked at Elham as if he had said something physically impossible.
"He had reasons," Elham said. "He was going somewhere important. The law he followed had complications about touching injured men on roads. He was going to be late. His reasons were real. But he crossed to the other side and he walked past."
"What about the second one," the tall girl said. She had already read Elham's tone and knew what was coming. She wanted it confirmed anyway.
"A Levite," Elham said. "Also a man of the temple. He also knew the law and observed it. Also saw the hurt man on the road." He looked at her. "But, he also crossed to the other side and just walked past."
The five-year-old made a sound that was not a word. One of the boys from the market made a similar sound. The six-year-old said "that's terrible" again, with increased feeling.
"I know," Elham said. "Now. The third person."
He stopped. Let the pause do what it needed to do. Seven children and the members of the cord all still at the same moment, all waiting for the same thing.
"The third person was from a city that the hurt man's people hated," Elham said. "Not disliked. Hated. For generations. The kind of hatred that had been passed down from parent to child for so long that nobody alive remembered when it started or why. If you had asked anyone on that road who was most likely to help and who was most likely to walk past, every person would have given you the same answer. The priest would help. The Levite would help. The man from the hated city would definitely walk past."
He looked at the seven faces around him.
"The man from the hated city stopped," he said.
The five-year-old sat back as if a burden had been lifted from him personally.
"He got off his animal. He went to the hurt man. He bound his wounds with whatever he had. He put him on his animal and walked beside it all the way to the nearest inn. He paid for the man's care out of his own money and told the innkeeper that if the cost came to more than he had left, he would pay the rest when he came back through."
"Why did he do that," one of the market boys asked. Genuinely puzzled, not hostile. Trying to work out the logic of a person doing more than was required. "He didn't even know the man."
"No," Elham said. "He didn't know him at all. And the man lying there on the road, if he had been conscious enough to see who was coming he probably would have thought: not him. Anyone but him. Our people and his people have hated each other my whole life and my father's whole life and his father's before that." He looked at the boy. "And the man from the hated city looked at him anyway. Just a man on a road who needed help. And he stopped."
"But why," the boy said. Still working it out, not satisfied yet. "What made him stop when the other two didn't."
"Because he looked at the man on the road and saw a man on the road," Elham said. "Not an enemy. Not a problem. Not a complication. A person who was hurt and needed someone to stop." He paused. "That was the whole reason."
The boy stared at him. "That's it."
"That's it."
"He didn't have a bigger reason than that."
"He didn't need one," Elham said. "Someone needed help. He was there. He stopped. That was sufficient."
Three of the children started talking at once, the market boys resuming the argument about whether the priest had made the right decision, the six-year-old telling the five-year-old loudly that the man from the hated city was the good one, the ten-year-old cutting through all of it with: "So which one was the neighbor."
Elham looked at the semicircle. "You tell me."
"The one who stopped," the tall girl said. Immediately. She had known since the second person walked past.
"Yes," Elham said. "Not the one who knew the law best. Not the one who had the most obvious obligation to help. The one who stopped." He looked at all of them. "That is what a neighbor is. Not the person from the right city. The person who stopped when someone needed them to."
The semicircle was quiet for a moment. Then several things happened simultaneously, two of the market boys started arguing about whether the priest had made the right decision given the law's complications, the six-year-old began explaining to the five-year-old that the man from the hated city was the good one in increasingly emphatic terms as if the five-year-old had missed this crucial point, and the ten-year-old asked Elham whether the man from the hated city ever came back through and paid the rest.
"The story doesn't say," Elham said.
"Do you think he did," the ten-year-old said.
"Yes," Elham said. "I think he did. I think a man who stopped in the first place is the kind of man who came back."
The five-year-old, satisfied with the six-year-old's explanation and with the general resolution of events, stood up and walked toward the well without ceremony, apparently having received everything the afternoon had for him. The market boys' argument about the law moved away from the bench in the direction of the water trough. The six-year-old followed the five-year-old. The ten-year-old went after the market boys to continue the argument.
The tall girl stayed.
She looked at Elham with the serious concentrated expression of someone who had been thinking during the whole of the story and had arrived at the question she actually wanted to ask. "The man from the wrong city," she said. "Are you him. On your road."
Elham looked at her. The direct eight-year-old question that went straight to the thing adults never asked directly. He pressed his hand to his chest. The warmth was steady.
"I am trying to be," he said. "I have not always been. But I am trying."
She nodded once, satisfied with the honesty of it and waved goodbye. Then she went to find the others.
· · ·
John came and sat beside him after the children were gone.
He did not speak immediately. That was John, sitting with what he had observed until it had been fully observed, which sometimes took a while. Elham waited. He had learned on the road that John's silences after significant things were worth waiting for.
"You told it well," John said finally.
"I have been thinking about it since Gibeah," Elham said. "I crossed to the other side of the road in Gibeah for six weeks. I was the priest. I had reasons."
"Yes," John said. "And then you stopped."
"Eventually."
"The story does not say how long the man from the hated city stood there before he stopped," John said. "Only that he stopped." He looked at the road southeast. The cord. All five of us. None of us were the ones the world would have picked, yet here we were.
"The wrong city," Elham said.
"Every one of us," He paused. "Nobody would have looked at the five of us and said: those are the right people."
"And yet," Elham said.
"And yet," John said. "Here we are. On the road. Pointing southeast. The warmth pointing. Two more ahead somewhere." He looked at Elham. "You understood something about the story that I did not tell you."
"What," Elham said.
"The man from the hated city did not stop because he had calculated that the stopping would produce a good outcome," John said. "He did not stop because he had been sent. He did not stop because the road required it of him. He stopped because there was a man who needed help and he was present." He looked at Elham. "Gabriel's commission does not say find the people best suited for the seven vessels. It says go and find the seven. The finding is the commission. The suitability is the road's work, not the vessel's." He paused. "You have been worrying since Gibeah about whether you are the right person for this."
"Stop," John said. Simply. The flat direct economy that was John at his most certain. "You are on the road. Gabriel chose you for a reason. That is sufficient. The man from the hated city did not ask whether he was the right person to help. He stopped. That was the whole of it."
Elham pressed his hand to his chest. The warmth was steady. Pointing southeast. Patient as it had always been patient.
The following morning they left Tekoa through the southern gate.
The girl was there. She looked at the cord, the white robe and the glowing sword and shield, the bow and the old man with the road in his face, without fear and without awe. The direct unselfconscious attention of someone who had received something the afternoon before and was now looking at the full context of where it came from.
Elham glanced at her as he passed. She met his eyes.
"The wrong city," she said.
"All of us," Elham replied, not breaking stride.
She stood and watched them go until the road bent and Tekoa swallowed them from sight. Yael looked back once and saw her still there, small against the morning.
He turned to Elham.
"She understood."
"Seems like it."
"She's eight."
John's voice came from behind them.
"Children often do. They have not yet learned all the reasons people give for crossing to the other side of the road."
The cord walked southeast.
The hill country of Judah unfolded around them in long ridges of stone and grass. The road stretched ahead beneath a clean sky. The morning was warm. The light pointed onward. Everything felt ordinary, and everything felt right.
Two more strands were waiting.