[LOG — ALTITUDE 340M — LIGHT LEVEL RISING]
"You are the salt of the earth."
The drone's camera, hunting exposure against a climbing sun, is doing exactly what he is talking about without knowing it. Too much light and the faces wash out. Too little and the detail drowns in shadow.
Salt that keeps its savor gets tasted. Salt that loses it gets thrown out, trampled underfoot — and half this hillside knows what trampled feels like; that is why they climbed before dawn. What none of them know yet is that the savor has a Savior, and he is standing on their own hill, using the ground under everyone's feet as the metaphor:
"A city on a hill cannot be hidden."
He says it standing on a hill, to people sitting on a hill, about a city on a hill — and if that is not the oldest trick in the book, then nothing is. The crowd does not laugh, but something loosens. Somebody near the boy catches the joke a beat before their neighbor does and smiles the small private smile of the found.
"No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl. They put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house."
The boy's mother hears that one all the way down. Every time she has told her son to be quieter, smaller, less — she does not repent of it out loud. She just stops, starting now, and only the wind and the lens log the second the decision gets made.
At the base of the slope, three travelers stand deciding. Not locals — you can tell by the dust pattern on their sandals, days of road instead of one morning's climb. They came chasing a rumor that changed shape twice before it reached them, and they are weighing whether to climb or turn back before whatever this is asks something of them.
One starts up.
The other two follow a half-second later — not because they decided, but because being left alone at the bottom of a hill like this one suddenly feels like the wrong kind of exposed.
Then his voice changes. Not louder. Sharper.
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets."
The man in the patched cloak looks up for the first time.
[END LOG — NEXT: OVERWRITE]