Testament (42 page)

We set up camp. Jerubal by now had quite a following with some of Jesus’s band, and the group of them set up a tent right at the edge of the camp. I wandered around on my own for a bit, though the truth was I wanted to get close to Jesus again, still drunk with the fact that he’d known me. But then he saw me lingering near his tent and actually called me over to help with supper. I was so tongue-tied I couldn’t even answer him.

“Now I’ve got my three Simons,” he said, “like the three wise men,” an old story people told. And he gave me a nickname, Simon the Wise, which left me with the strangest feeling, like he’d claimed me.

So suddenly there I was right in the thick of things, with Jesus nearby and Jesus’s men at my elbow. Working with them I saw they weren’t so different from me in the end, like a crew of fishermen you’d meet at the Gergesa harbour. There was Simon who Jesus called the Rock, and who I knew from the Gergesa side—he was the sort who others would mock a bit, and hardly think about, but always count on in the end. Then there was his brother Andrew, who was simple, who everyone looked after like their own—he was one of the few who seemed to have any feeling for Judas, smiling like a child whenever he saw him. I’d have thought Judas wouldn’t have time for someone like him but the truth was he was gentle with the fellow and humoured him, one of the few signs I’d seen in Judas that he might actually belong with someone like Jesus.

Then there was Simon the Canaanite, who Jesus jokingly called the Zealot, nearly the same word in their dialect as a fanatical sect in Jerusalem. If there was one fellow in Jesus’s circle who made me want to run, it was the Zealot—it wasn’t that there was anything offensive in him, but that I saw in him what it was like to be part of that crowd and not be a Jew. Everyone said he was the most loyal of Jesus’s men, yet next to the others he seemed like some dog you might find in the wild and tame, loyal just because you’d brought it in. I didn’t ever want to be seen that way, as if I was some savage they’d saved, just because I had grown up hardly knowing one god from the next. The truth was, though, that Jesus didn’t treat
the Zealot any different than the rest—he didn’t condescend to him but also he didn’t go out of his way to show he was equal, and so show in that way that he wasn’t.

Mary, from Magdala, was the one you noticed among the women. I’d picked her out from the start, the first night—she was just a stick, so thin you felt sorry for her, knowing not many would have her. But I would sooner have put myself in the way of any of Jesus’s men than in hers, for all that a good wind would have knocked her down. All sorts of stories about her went through the camp, that she was the one who’d poisoned the pregnant girl we’d heard about, out of jealousy, or that she tried to put enmity between Jesus and those she didn’t like. But it was just that she wanted to possess the man—you saw that in how she never let him from her sight, and protected him, and was the one who stood guard to see he had his moment of peace. When Judas returned, it was clear she had to bite her tongue not to curse him, though she welcomed him for Jesus’s sake, even if for his sake too she might just as soon have chased him away.

When the food was ready, a group of us went around with Jesus from tent to tent ladling it out, and people lit their fires with whatever scrub wood they’d collected and the sky over the hills stretched out blood red from end to end with the setting sun, a good omen. I was afraid that when we came to Jerubal’s tent we’d find him gaming, but his little group was actually at their prayers, Jerubal right there next to the others on his knees mumbling along with them as if he knew what he was saying, though he gave me a wink when I went by.

When we got back to Jesus’s tent, Judas was waiting there.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, in that grating way of his, as if it was just him and Jesus and the rest of us didn’t matter. But Jesus, to his credit, put him off.

“You can see we’re just sitting down to supper,” he said.

It seemed Judas had been trying to get him alone since he’d arrived, without luck—if it wasn’t one of the women who got in his way, it was some work that had to be done or just that Jesus was in a foul mood, and Judas would be forced to go off again. Now he just hung there at the edge of our circle glowering like a jackal. But Jesus seemed determined not to let anything spoil our supper, not even the insult he’d had at the roadhouse at Aenon.

We got to talking as we ate, pulling in close to the fire because the night chill was coming on, and one of the men asked Jesus about his days with John the prophet. I could see Jesus didn’t like to talk about his own life that way, but he started in, saying he’d come to John just a boy, willful and quick-tempered and full of pride, but had left him a man. There wasn’t anything in the world, Jesus said, that would keep someone like John from following what he believed. Afterwards people said he was hard and didn’t have any mercy in him but the truth was he never turned anyone away, and the only thing he asked from people was that they should be humble in front of their god.

“You have to be blessed to meet someone like that,” Jesus said. “Someone who makes you look at things differently.”

He told us then what it was like when John was taken. Though the Romans had had a hand in it, it was Herod’s men who came for him, about a hundred of them who marched down from Tiberias one day fully armed and carrying their flags out front, so you could see them coming for miles.

“When we got word of them,” Jesus said, “John called everyone together, and there were hundreds of people here then, and said, ‘Go home.’ But no one wanted to go. People said they would die for him before they went, and they would have. But John said there was no point in that. People didn’t really understand him then—they’d always been told it was important to die with courage, and be remembered that way. But John said, ‘If you die here, you might be remembered, which will be good for your own glory. But if you leave, then what I taught you will be remembered, which will be good for the glory of God.’”

Hearing the thing put that way, people finally started to go. In the end, the only ones left behind were John and the dozen or so men he’d been training to take over for him, and Jesus was one of them. Now the argument started over again, since none of them wanted to leave, and meanwhile the soldiers were getting close and no one knew, seeing how Herod was, what exactly they would do. John, looking for a way out, said half should stay, so people couldn’t say they were cowards, and half should go. And the agreement was that the ones who went had to cut their hair and take off their belts, because those were John’s sign, since there wasn’t any point in saving themselves if it was just for the sake of being captured later on.

They drew straws for the thing and Jesus picked one of the shorter ones, and had to go.

“We hated it, those of us who had to leave, but we’d given our word,” Jesus said. “So we went into the desert, each on his own, and hoped for the best. Then the next day I went into Aenon to find out what had happened and they told me John had been taken and the rest had just been butchered where they stood.”

The fire had gone low, and there was only Jesus’s voice in the dark.

“I thought of finding the others then,” he said, “but the truth was I couldn’t have looked at them, for the shame. Then I found out that some of them had gone back when the soldiers came, and been butchered as well, so that it seemed simply cowardly that I’d gone. I didn’t know if I could go on then. Here was my teacher in prison, and my friends dead, and I hadn’t done anything.”

He paused. A deep silence had settled over us, all of us hanging on Jesus’s words—this wasn’t just another story he was telling us but something that had really happened to him, and it seemed he wasn’t sure what to make of it any more than we might be. Even Judas was leaning in, and looked as if he had forgotten himself for a moment.

Jesus had wandered in the desert after that, not really knowing what he was doing or where he was going. For food he ate grubs and whatever he could find or nothing at all, and for water he learned where to dig to get little seepages of it, sucking the mud in like that just enough to stay alive. All sorts of mad thoughts were going through his head then so he didn’t know any more who he was or what he’d been up to in his life, and he started to see things the way people in the desert did, and what he saw were his friends who’d been killed sitting around him. But they refused to look at him, and the louder he shouted, the more they pretended he wasn’t there.

Finally he ended up in a town he couldn’t even have told you the name of and sat himself down in the square, thinking he would die there, people leaving little bits of food for him that he was too stunned to eat. And it happened that some of Herod’s soldiers passed through the place with a
prisoner they’d taken, and it made him sick to see them, because it all came back to him. He went up to give the prisoner some water where they’d tied him in the square while they ate, but he had died right there in the open without anyone noticing.

“I would gladly have traded places with him,” Jesus said, “but for my sake, not his, just so it could be told that I’d been killed by Herod’s men like the rest. But that was a mistake. There was a man I met there who showed me that. He said to me that if I was alive, it was so I might do some good in the world, and I saw then I’d forgotten what John had told us, that we had to carry on his word, and that I’d only been thinking of my own reputation. And this man I’d met was also the only one who offered to bury Herod’s prisoner, which was a risk because he’d been a rebel. And I took heart from that, from his example, and that was what helped me carry on.”

He stopped, and it was clear he’d finished. He was looking right at Judas then, though with an expression I couldn’t make out, and Judas grimaced and averted his eyes and then suddenly got up from the fire as if someone had kicked him and went off into the dark. None of us knew what to make of that. Jesus looked as if he was ready to take back whatever offence he’d given, but Judas didn’t return.

My head was full by then. Not wanting to make a nuisance of myself I quietly slipped off and made my way back to Jerubal’s tent to get some sleep. But Jerubal had a game going, so I just draped my coat over my shoulders and made a little place for myself under the stars. As it turned out, my head was spinning so much with all that had happened to me in the past few days that I couldn’t sleep. It seemed the
strangest thing to me, that I should be lying there in Jesus’s camp under that riot of desert stars when a few days before I’d been safe in my bed on the farm.

I started thinking then about the farm and my life there, and for the first time in years, it felt, I thought of my parents, though it seemed I had only the one memory of them now, which was the day of their deaths. The bandits who’d come then were after the horses we had at the time, though what they left behind was far worse than what they took.

I was just five then. My mother and I were in the courtyard when my father ran in with his eyes lit up like I’d never seen them. Without a word he grabbed me and put me into a basket where we kept our lentils. “Don’t move,” he said, and put the lid on, though I could see through the weave. He barely had time to turn around again before someone came running in after him with a broadsword in his hand and raised it over him. Then the sword came down and there was a splash of blood and everything turned strange, because there was blood everywhere and my mother was screaming and it seemed the end of things had come.

Another man had come in. All I could see from the basket was my father’s back where he’d fallen, and the blood. My mother must have been screaming still, but it was as if I couldn’t hear her. Then things happened very quickly again. There were the two men, big and dirty as animals, and one of them threw my mother to the ground and the other got on top of her. I couldn’t understand what was happening then, what kind of crazed game this was. I would even have got out of the basket, since I had it in my mind it was because I was in there that everything seemed strange, and that I shouldn’t be hiding, and should call Huram. But then
I saw my mother’s face, and there was an instant when her eyes went to me in the basket, wild, and told me, stay put.

My mother was a beautiful woman. It wasn’t only me who thought that, who was her son—everyone said so, even after, that she was as dark-haired and dark-eyed as a Damascene princess, though she was just a poor farmworker’s girl from Baal-Sarga. But watching her with those men, first the one and then the other on top of her, it was as if everything that was pretty in her was wiped out. They hit her a few times, to make her screaming stop—after that it looked as if her jaw had snapped, and the only sound that came from her was a broken moan like nothing I’d ever heard.

I couldn’t have said how much time passed but suddenly Huram was there. He was holding a sword and was already covered in blood—later I found out he’d fought one of the others outside, and killed him. He was only fourteen then, but large, and strong as a bear. It took him only an instant to see what was going on, and even before the two men had noticed him, he’d lifted his sword and brought it down on the head of the one who was standing, watching the other. There was a spray of blood, and the man fell. But Huram didn’t stop—he swung at the other, who was still on his knees, and cut into his back. The man tried to turn then but a fury had taken hold of Huram, who hacked at him again and again until you could hardly see for the blood. Then the man fell forward and our mother groaned underneath him, and Huram, maddened, kicked and pawed at the mass of cut flesh he had turned him into until he had cleared him off her.

There was a moment then when Huram’s eyes went to my mother’s and she turned away, just wheezing there, quietly and horribly. I had a sick feeling then. I saw Huram look
to our father lying dead on the ground and then to our mother again, with her ripped clothes and the blood on her and her face crooked and broken. And at that instant it was as if I could feel the tumble of Huram’s thoughts in my own head, how they were churning, pushing him to what he could hardly bring himself to think. Then he raised his sword, with my mother staring up at him with a look that was half fear and half pleading for the thing, and he brought the blade down.