Worth Is Not Cheap

A novella set in Antioch in ad 72, forty years after the events it describes.

Tobiah is an old man now, living in a Greek quarter among refugees from a ruined Jerusalem. He has spent his life telling people what he saw there. One evening his grandson asks him for the part the telling never covers — not what it meant, but what happened, and whether he knew the man he watched die.

So Tobiah begins at the beginning: a paved court in the morning heat, his father beside him in white linen, and a crowd of people he could name. The story runs from that court to a dry cistern, a road out of the city, and a fire in Antioch.