That night, Mary prayed on her knees to the heathen god her husband worshiped, hoping He could help her where her own childhood gods had failed. It was wrong to go to him; she was married now, no longer free to conduct herself like a child, unknowing and uncaring of the hurt she caused in others lives.

And Joseph loved her. Not in the blazing passionate way that she loved Gabriel but she knew from the glances that he gave her that Joseph felt something more than the brotherly affection she felt towards him.

Which made what she was doing- and what she had discovered this morning- even more unfair to him. But then marrying him had been unfair in the first place, Mary considered as she flung her shawl about her shoulders and headed out into the moonlit night, thinking back on the circumstances of that marriage.

It had been a scheme, a last-ditch effort to be able to go to Nazareth and tell the object of her childhood obsession how she really felt about him.

How as a child she had snatched time away from chores to watch him swim naked, not knowing, in those days before puberty what the meaning behind the heat that rose to her belly each time she did so.

How, when she had reached puberty and with it with it a deeper understanding of her feelings towards him, he was betrothed to Rebecka, the red-haired, pale skinned merchant’s daughter visiting from far-off Nazareth and her chance was lost.

How, she had waited out the long sleepless nights in her parents house, conducting rituals to ensure Rebecka’s death knowing that with it, he would be free once more to return and she could marry him.

How, when the rituals had not succeeded and she all but given up hope, Joseph had come from Nazareth, a sign that the gods had not forsaken her.

Her parents had not been sad to see her go, Mary reflected as she hurried along the cobblestone streets to the well. Probably they wrelievedived that a man had finally been able to make her see the error of her ways and turn her away from the path that led to spinsterhood. She snickered at the irony in that thought.

She rounded another corner and the well stood before her, a haphazard construction of stone bricks rising above the ground with a bucket rocking gently in wind above it. The bench beside it was empty of even the casual hat he left there to tell her he had passed by.

He hadn’t come tonight. Her heart sank within her chest. Joseph would be back tomorrow, she would not have the time to tell him the great news with her husband around. The wind began to pick up, great howling gusts that whipped her dress tighter against her legs. Drawing her shawl tighter around her, she headed back for home, her steps leaden with disappointment.

The next day she found out he was dead.

“Kicked in the head by a mule,” a boy informed her at the market, “Never woke up again. Died shortly before the moon rose.”

“A pity,” he added after a moment, perhaps seeing her distraught face. “Master says he was a most regular supplier of the beasts.” Mary agreed with him that it was indeed a great pity, and was surprised by how her voice sounded so steady.

She left the market early that day, not dallying to talk with the other wives as was her habit.

Gabriel was dead.

She managed to keep the flood of tears at bay until she was in the privacy of her own house. There surrounded by blank clay walls that were uncaring of her tears like she had been uncaring of Joseph’s feelings she plunged into a well of grief and despair and anger at Gabriel for leaving her.

What was she going to do now? How was she going to tell Joseph? He had never laid a hand on her- she couldn’t pass it off as his- but then what was she to do?

Over and over her thoughts ran in a twisting circle until finally she settled on a solution. It was perhaps not that plausible and would require a large amount of acting ability, but given Joseph’s fervent belief in that heathen god of his, it just might work.

It helped that she had been crying for most of the day- by the time Joseph returned home in the late afternoon hours, it was not necessary to supply fresh tears; her eyes were red enough.

She rstartlementment in Joseph’s brown eyes as she flung himself into his arms the moment he opened the door but after one look at her face he wrapped his arms tighter around her.

“What happened?” He asked of her in low reassuring tones and though fresh tears were not needed Mary found herself shedding them into his chest anyway, for the foreknowledge of what her words would do to him. Would do to both of them, if he believed her.

“It was so terrible, so beautiful and so terrible,” she sobbed into his chest. One larcallousedused hand left her back and began to stroke her hair.

“What was?” Her husband asked calmly.

She tilted her head back so that she could look into his eyes, so that he would believe her next words.

“An angel.” She told him, remembering suddenly the word he used to describe the messengers of his god. “It-he appeared and told me that I would bear your god’s child.”

“His name was Gabriel,” she added, deciding at the last moment to put a bit of truth into the lie. Gabriel would like to be referred to as a messenger of a god, she decided, wrapped in the shelter of her husband’s arms.

He might even find it funny.

Her lie complete, she allowed herself to be soothed by Joseph’s touch, wondering only in passing what kind of impact her alleged god-born child would have on the world.