The Liars' Gospel (31 page)

He has already sidled up to the meat stall, is haggling with the vendor over the price of a pound of chicken hearts, when
someone else finds the baker is dead. It is a woman. She is screaming over the body slumped sideways against the wall, the
red flower blooming across his back.

People still remember the massacre in the public square. They know whose trick it is to conceal men with daggers in the crowd.
Bar-Avo says to himself: it is not I who have done this, but Rome, who taught me that this is the way to bring fear to the
city. The crowd begins to turn towards the baker’s body to find out what the commotion is. Now. It is time now.

“Romans!” shouts Bar-Avo. “Roman spies! They’re among us with their long daggers!”

“Yes!” shouts someone else, because people are always eager to spread bad news and to lie to augment it. “I’ve seen them in
the crowd! I saw a soldier’s knife under a cloak! They’re here! They want to kill us all!”

There is a stampede then. Stalls are overturned, hot fat spitting as it fizzles on the moist stone and makes the ground slick,
piles of good fresh bread trodden into the dirt, dogs barking and grabbing for unattended meat, apples rolling here and there,
women screaming and men taking the opportunity to grab what they can. People fall and other people tread on them, and children
are crushed up against the walls and little fingers are squashed underfoot. Bar-Avo sees a child screaming, under a teetering
pan of hot oil for frying cakes, and he snatches him up, lifting him above his head, so that he is out of reach of the crowd,
which now thinks with one mind.

That is what he has learned in his life. What a crowd thinks. How to change what a crowd thinks. How not to think like them.

He holds the child above the crowd, smiles at it as he would at any of his own children, gives it a roll he has snatched from
one of the stalls, dipped in rendered goose fat. The child munches contentedly and when the commotion has settled down the
mother finds them and takes her baby gratefully, with a smile.

By this time the market is quieter and almost empty, with just a few sobbing stallholders to count the cost. Let the people
remember, he thinks. Let them remember that they are not free. That this happened today. Just because the Romans did not do
it, the Romans could still do exactly this. They must never forget that these people are in their homeland. Whatever is necessary
to do to be rid of them must be done.

This was the special thing Pilate taught them. The cloak and dagger. Bar-Avo and his men do not often do it. But sometimes,
when things begin to seem too peaceful, when it appears that perhaps they have forgotten. People need to be reminded all the
time. Most men will simply fall asleep if you let them.

They gather more and more men to them. Not just fighters but preachers, fishermen, healers, sailors, spies in distant lands.
His men go combing the streets for people who will be sympathetic to their cause. There is a point when they are particularly
interested in healers and holy men—people listen to these men when perhaps they will not listen to a man with a sword. If
a man can heal, it is a sign that God is with him. They want God with them.

So they bring him, once, a man who worships that dead preacher, Yehoshuah, as they bring many men whom they have found preaching
in the marketplace or teaching in a quiet spot at the edge of town. The worship of Yehoshuah is a rather esoteric cult, though
not the strangest that exists, and the man seems grateful for the attention.

His name is Gidon of Yaffo and he is not far off Bar-Avo’s own age, rangy and quietly fervent, speaking as Yehoshuah did of
the end of days, which will surely come within our lifetimes. He tells how Yehoshuah died and rose again from the grave and
was seen by several people.

“Did you see it?” says Bar-Avo.

“I have seen it in my heart,” says Gidon of Yaffo.

“That is not the same thing. Did any man you would trust with your life see it?”

“I would trust them all with my life for they have seen the risen Lord.”

“But you did not know before to trust them. And if the Messiah is come,” says Bar-Avo, “why does not the lion lie down with
the lamb? Where is the great crack of doom that presages the end of the world and the final judgment of all mankind? Where
is the true king of Israel now, if he has performed this strange trick and returned from the grave? Why does he not take his
throne?”

“These things will happen,” says Gidon of Yaffo, “soon and in our days. I have heard stories from the very mouths of those
who saw miracles. Before this generation has passed away, there will be the signs and portents, the lord Messiah will return
and the Temple will run red with blood.”

“That last,” mutters Bar-Avo to Isaac, the man who brought Gidon of Yaffo to him, “will surely happen, for we will make it
happen. Fellow,” he asks, raising his voice, “will you take arms with us to fight the Roman scum?”

Gidon shakes his head. “We do not fight for this broken land and this corrupt people. When our Lord returns he will cleanse
the earth himself.”

“Then you are of no use to me,” says Bar-Avo, and sends him on his way.

Isaac says to him, “Romans as well as Jews are taking on this teaching.”

Bar-Avo shrugs.

“I have heard it preached in synagogues in Egypt and in Syria. Slaves and women like it, for they say that they encourage
all to join in, with no exceptions.”

“Tell me again,” says Bar-Avo, “when there are as many temples to Yehoshuah as there are to Mithras or to Isis.”

“It might happen,” says Isaac stubbornly. “My grandfather said he remembered his grandfather telling him of when only a few
men worshipped Mithras. There were not always such temples. Gods rise and fall—”

“As the angels on Jacob’s ladder, yes, I know. And only our God rises above them all and lives forever. And what good will
it do if you are right and the dead man Yehoshuah becomes a god?”

Isaac blinks.

“He was a Jew, Yehoshuah. If he were…not like Mithras or Ba’al, but if his worship were even as widespread as the cult of
Juno—”

“Juno!”

“All right, Robigus then. Even Robigus, the god of crop blight, if he were even as loved as that…a Jew…might not the Empire
soften towards us?”

Bar-Avo looks at him. What a kindhearted boy he is. How did he get to be so simple, in a world this hard?

Bar-Avo speaks very quietly and low and very slowly.

“Rome hates us,” he says. “We are their conquered people and we are dust under their feet.”

“But if—”

“Listen. If they want something from us, they will take it. They will not stop hating us. They will find a way to say that
the thing they want was never ours to begin with.”

Isaac looks at him with those trusting cow eyes.

“Do you think that when they send our good oil to Rome they say, ‘This is oil pressed by Jews’? They say, ‘This is oil brought
from the far reaches of the Empire by the might of Rome.’ If Yehoshuah ends by being loved in Rome they will find a way to
use him against us.”

Bar-Avo puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“You fight bravely,” he says, “and you love peace. I know it is hard to understand. We want to find a way towards peace. But
the only way is the sword. If we do not drive them out, one way or another they will crush us.”

And Isaac is still looking uncertainly towards the man who preached long after Bar-Avo has gone.

And then it comes time for him to do what perhaps he had always been destined to do. If we believe that God has seen all things
before they come to pass, that every woman is destined to bear the children she does, and every betrayer is bound to betray
and every peacekeeper intended by God to attempt to keep the peace, perhaps too a warmonger is destined for that purpose by
the good Lord who made him.

On the hillsides the mothers weep for their fallen sons. In the marketplace men preach curious doctrines and strange new ideas
to fit with these uncertain times. In the Temple, Annas the former High Priest and father and father-in-law of High Priests,
dies quietly without having secured the lasting peace he longed for. He dies knowing that war may come again at any minute,
and that the streets of Jerusalem are no less bloody than when the Empire first breached the Temple wall. His sons gather
to mourn him and one of the youngest among them, Ananus, becomes High Priest in his stead.

And it is morning and it is evening. And it is one hundred and thirty years since Rome first breached Jerusalem and still
she squats over the city, enforcing her will, enslaving the people. And something must be done. Something more extreme.

It is clear to all that they are on the verge of open war with Rome. There have been scuffles, Romans have been thrown out
of the city and are pressing their way back in. Some urge war and some urge peace. Ananus, the new High Priest, makes a speech
in the center of Jerusalem. It is a good speech and a merciful one, calling upon the people not even yet to despair, for they
may still come to some good accommodation with Rome and there need not be war. He calls on them to think of the values of
their forefathers, and the love which they feel for peace. Annas, his father, would have been proud of his son for giving
this speech and the people are moved by it.

Bar-Avo does not hear the speech but he hears word of it from a dozen different men. Well. So much blood spilled and yet still
the thing is not done. How quickly people forget the taste of freedom, swapping it for this easy comfortable thing they call
peace. Sleep is peaceful. Death is peaceful. Freedom is life and wakefulness.

He feels a kind of contempt for the people of the land these days. He is fighting for them, but apparently they do not understand
why or feel gratitude. He has to lead them by the hand through every part of the journey and still they can be swayed off
course by any mildly effective rhetorician in the public square.

Well, sacrifices must be made. For the good of the people, sacrifices must be made.

There is a storm the night they invade the Temple. It’s not a coincidence. The Temple is guarded by thick walls, by strong
men. There are barred gates which are lowered at night to keep the treasures inside safe while the men sleep. The whole city
of Jerusalem is a great guard to the Temple also. If they had tried to take the Temple on a dark quiet night, the moment one
man saw them he would have shouted the halloo to the city and Jerusalem would have defended her greatest treasure and dearest
joy.

So when the storm blows up, they know God Himself is signaling to them that it is time. When it comes louder and louder, when
the thunder begins to roll across the sky in almost ceaseless peals and the rain lashes down and the wind screams, then they
know that God has given them the cover they need. No one will hear them now, and no shouts of alarm from the Temple will reach
the city. They gather their tools and their weapons and they run through the rain up the hill to the place where God lives.

Up on the hill, although they do not know it, Ananus has looked out at the approaching storm and taken a message from it too.
God is saying, in words as clear as fire, that no one will stir from their houses this night. The rain has given them a night
of peace, while the thunder is His voice shouting His presence over the land. They are safe, they are well.

“Tell your men to sleep,” he says to the Levite head of the guards. “Leave a few men to stand watch, but let the rest of them
sleep tonight.”

And Ananus takes to his own warm bed in the Temple enclosure, sends word to his wife in the city that all will be well this
night, gives his prayers to God for a good night and that his soul will be returned to him in the morning when he awakes.
He plugs his ears up with soft wool to drown out the noise of the storm, pulls his pillow under his head and sleeps.

At the gates of the outer courtyard of the Temple, Bar-Avo’s men gather. They are sodden already. The driving rain which the
wind sweeps in all directions has poured on them like buckets emptied over their heads and flung at their bodies. This is
not the gentle rain of blessing. It is the rain of anger, of the God who knows that His terrible will is to be done this night
and who is already full of rage at those who dare to carry out His plan.

There are ten of them at this gate. There will be others elsewhere. Even with the protection of the storm, the work must be
done as quickly as possible. Bar-Avo is not here yet—this is work for young men. The team at the gate is headed by Isaac,
who will one day distinguish himself gloriously in battle but today is simply extremely competent, directing the men to cut
through the five iron bars of the main gate.

They bring out their saws. There is no other way. The saws shriek, metal biting metal. It could not have been done on any
other night—a single howling cut would have wakened a dozen men from the deepest slumber.

The rain drives and they are soaked through and dripping and their fingers slip. One man makes a deep cut in his own hand
with the serrated saw blade, filled with flakes of rust and iron from the gate. They wrap it up and continue to work. A lone
guard makes his solitary round of the ramparts at the top of the Temple wall. They press themselves into the shadows as he
passes. Soon enough, one bar is free, then another, then another.

The skinniest of them presses himself through the gap and they can work the saw two-handed, so it goes faster. The fourth
bar is out when a guard dozing in the outer courtyard thinks he sees something hazily, through the rain, moving at the gate.
He is a large man, fat and tall, carrying a stout belly proudly before him and a stout club by his side. As he sees the men
at the gate he shouts back behind him and breaks into a heavy run.

There is not enough space for the others to get through yet. The skinniest of the men at the gate—his name is Yochim—freezes,
his shirt and cloak plastered to his skin by the rain. He is shuddering. The guard grabs him by his clothes, hurls him against
the gate, shouting and calling through the storm, but the thunder crushes his words. He bellows again for the other guards,
as he picks up Yochim and then roars into the boy’s ear, “Where are the others? Where are your fucking friends?”