The Liars' Gospel (8 page)

The day had grown overwarm and clouded, the sky off-white. The breeze faded away, the air was soft and moist as damp cloth.
A splash of rain fell onto the cream marble plaza. A heavy, ripe droplet which burst on the dusty stone. And then another
drop, and another. And as if the rain had been a signal they had agreed on long before, the men came.

Screaming, they ran. Dark-skinned and red-mouthed, letting every rasping breath go from their lungs with a cutting edge like
their metal blades. Wild shouting, anger howling, swinging their iron arms like free men whose home was overrun by vermin,
they pelted up the steps of the Hippodrome and began the slaughter. The first guards, shocked by the sudden inrush, legs trembling,
died before they had unsheathed their swords. Miryam saw one split from stomach to throat—a quiet smiling man who had unloosened
his breastplate with the hotness of the day. Another soldier went down screaming, calling to the garrison.

There were arms around her, suddenly. Strong arms around her waist and under her shoulders, lifting her up off the ground
though she kicked and wrestled, pulling her back, gripping her close, and in her confusion it was several moments before she
realized that the voice shouting in her ear, “Be still! Be still!” was her own father’s.

He ran with her, as the rain fell more strongly and the men screamed, ran back through the crowd. Charged at them with his
shoulder, held her pressed close into his chest so that she could only inch her face to the side to breathe and, with one
eye open, see glimpses of those who pushed forward. They were smiling hot, blood-grins. It was those soldiers who had taken
their land, it was this man, and this, who had stolen their harvest, their women, their God. Miryam did not see where her
father was running to, only that he was striving against the sea, pushing away from the place of blood.

When at last they came to rest and the noise was more distant, she saw at once that her father had taken two gashes, one across
his shoulder, through the fabric of his robe, and one to his ear, which was half gone, the top sliced off, and oozing dark
blood. He had collapsed, with her still grasped firmly by one of his arms, on a pile of sacks. They were in a dark room across
the courtyard from the Hippodrome. She tried to stand up, but her father pulled her back.

“Be still,” he whispered, and fell back onto the sacks.

Clasped against his chest, Miryam could feel his breathing, rapid and shallow. His grip loosened, and she crawled out from
under his arm, staying low. The shouting and the dreadful cries from the square were increasing. She saw a long trickle of
blood run down her father’s neck and, feeling with her fingers in the gloom, found a wet patch on his skull. He was still
breathing though. She put a palm in the center of his chest to reassure herself of that. Still, yes.

She looked about. They must be in a stable, probably for a priest’s family so close to the Temple. It had that clean smell
of horseflesh and dry straw. They were just beneath the window, which was shuttered, but she pressed her eye up against a
chink in the wood. Arrows were flying in the square—one thudded into the thick shutter, and she thought: what if one were
to hit my eye?—but she could not look away.

The slaughter was endless. The soldiers at the Hippodrome had lowered the metal gate to keep the attackers out. They had the
upper ground now, looking down the steps on the mass of Jews running up towards them. They fired arrows through the grille
and she saw twenty men brought down as she watched, pierced through the stomach, the chest, the groin. Near to her hiding
place a man slumped with an arrow sticking out of his thigh. He tried to pull it out and screamed. He was young, she thought,
maybe eighteen or nineteen. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He looked around for a safe place to shelter. What if
he came here? What if he opened the door and they were discovered? And if the soldiers came, what then? Another arrow found
his neck with a crunching snapping sound and he fell back, dead. God forgive her, she was grateful.

As she watched, the Jews, unable to sustain the heavy losses from the archers, fell back into the surrounding streets. The
square in front of the Hippodrome was dark with bodies, and running red—Roman blood and Jewish blood, she thought. One of
the soldiers was still moving, moaning. She wondered how long his comrades would leave him there. Her father was still breathing.
She moistened his lips from her water skin. He licked them. It was a good sign. It would be dark in two or three hours—perhaps
he would be able to move then.

She heard cheering from the street outside. Were the Romans celebrating their victory? But the noise intensified. Not a cheering.
A rising again of the raging voices. The clash of arms. She put her eye to the shutter a second time. From the roofs of nearby
houses, the Jews had raised ladders and ropes, and had hoisted themselves to the upper levels of the colonnade. From there,
they had the upper ground and were throwing down rocks, bricks pulled from the structure itself. There were boys with their
slingshots, hurling down missiles—the more the Roman soldiers looked up, the greater the danger to them. She saw one man smashed
in the mouth with a brick, his upper lip gone, his teeth out and the whole center of his face pouring blood and gouts of flesh.
The Romans tried to fight back at first—they sent their arrows upwards and even pulled some of the men down bodily, and set
on them with swords, cleaving their limbs and heads from their torsos.

But the advantage of holding the higher ground was too great. The Romans withdrew, sheltering in the back of the colonnade.
The center of the Hippodrome, Miryam could see, was piled with the bodies of the fallen. There was a great cheering from the
Jews on top of the Hippodrome, a victory cry. Miryam could not see what the Romans were doing. The Jews atop the colonnade
could not see either.

She turned back to her father. His lips were moving. She wet the sleeve of her dress in her water skin and dripped a few drops
into his mouth. He swallowed. The stable was dark and cool. She leaned close to his lips.

He was whispering, “Run, Miryam, run to your uncle Elihu’s house. Run now.”

She looked outside again. The square was quiet. She saw a weeping woman walking at the edge find a particular corpse and kneel,
cradling a head in her arms. If she were to run, this would be the time for it. But if she ran, and soldiers retreating from
the Hippodrome found her father here, they would kill him. At least if she were here, a young girl, she could plead for him.
She could not leave.

“The danger has passed, father,” she said, “the square is quiet. Rest, and when you are able to walk we will go together.”

“Run,” he kept saying, “run now.”

His fingers and his legs were cold. He was shivering. Crawling on the floor, she brought more sacks and covered him. The shivering
diminished. He moved onto his side and began to breathe more slowly and evenly. He was sleeping—a true sleep, not a faint.

There was a sound from the square like the sound of trees being felled. A great cracking sound. She wondered if the Romans
had brought battering rams. There was a low, rumbling roar, like the sea heard from far off. She put her eye to the shutter
again.

The Romans had set the Hippodrome on fire. The bottom part of the structure was stone, but the upper floors and galleries,
the parts where the Jews had climbed, were wood. And the wood was crackling flame, like the altar of the Temple, like the
smell of the burning sacrifices, the wood was on fire.

She saw that a great host of men had retreated to the very roof of the Hippodrome, where the clay tiles were not yet aflame.
But there was no way down. The ladders had burned and no building was near enough the Hippodrome to jump. They were going
to burn to death there, on the flat roof of the building. Some of the men were clinging to each other and some were on their
knees praying and some were shaking and tearing their clothes and hair. She saw one man take five paces back from the edge
of the roof and run forward, as if trying to jump to the next, but it was too far and he fell to the stone floor and did not
move again.

There were others who joined him soon enough, jumping from the roof to escape a death by flames. She saw some as the fire
crept up the wooden structure draw their swords and fall on them. And some did not jump and did not take a blade to end their
lives but waited or tried to climb down through the flames and their cries were the loudest and most anguished of all. She
had heard it said that a man who died as a martyr to Rome would be rewarded by heaven. The growling, unquenchable fire sent
bright sparks up to the skies and she remembered how the life of a lamb goes back to its maker while the flesh remains here
on earth, but the cries were so loud that after a time she could not think of anything else.

The square between the stables and the Hippodrome was stone and marble. The flames did not extend across them. She watched
through the night, ready to drag her father behind her if he could not move himself and the flames jumped to the buildings
nearby. But they did not. The soldiers had made a neat job of it. And the rain, coming and going, helped a little. The fire
burned out while it was still night, leaving just blackened stumps of wood poking up into the sky from the stone base. Before
dawn the next morning, Miryam shook her father until he woke and, stumbling, dizzy, crawling sometimes, he came with her to
the house of his brother Elihu.

They stayed in her uncle’s house then seventeen days, not daring to leave even to find food or to hear the news of what had
passed in Jerusalem. They had the well, and wheat flour and dried fruit enough to live on, and her father grew stronger every
day. He and her uncle agreed they must not go into the country—the Romans would be looking for anyone who fled Jerusalem,
guilty or innocent. Anyone trying to leave the city would be branded a criminal and a traitor. Especially a man with fresh
wounds showing.

When at last her father was well enough to attempt the long journey, and Elihu had made inquiries about the best time to attempt
the gates and the best lies to tell there, they left. They went in the early morning. The soldiers at the Double Gate asked
them what business they had and Miryam replied, as her father and uncle had schooled her, that they were citizens of Jerusalem,
and she was betrothed to a boy from the north and they must attend the wedding or the dowry would be lost. The soldiers joshed
among themselves and made bawdy jokes to her about her wedding night. She cast her eyes down and, tiring of the game at last,
they let them go. It was only then that she saw what was to be seen.

Along the roads to Jerusalem, the Romans had erected wooden frames—two planks crossed, one over the other, a long upright
and short crosspiece—making a shape like the letter
zayin.
There were thousands. They lined the road on either side as far as she could see, down the hill and curving around. And to
each frame, they had nailed a man.

The day was warm. The sun was bright as if it knew not what it shone on. As if the Lord God Almighty, the Infinite One, He
Who is Everywhere had forgotten this place.

There was the smell of blood. And the buzzing sound of flies. They gathered at the soft places—the ears, the nose, the eyes.
And the beating wings and low tearing rip of the vultures and the crows. The blood had trickled down the frames, had pooled
at the bases, had dried in brown drips. And there was the stench of rotting flesh, like a taste in her mouth. And there was
the sound.

They walked along the rocky path. The men nearest the city had been nailed up first. They were already dead, their bodies
contorted, their faces and flesh already eaten away by the carrion birds. As they went farther from the city, though, they
came to the more recently captured rebels. These men had been there three days, four, five at most. It was they who were making
the sound.

The soldiers, she knew, were still watching from the parapets of the walls of Jerusalem. No man could be cut down until the
Prefect gave leave, and these men would rot here and the flesh would be eaten from their bones by the birds and the swarming
things of the air. For all that, those who still had tongues in their heads pleaded for mercy, for a sponge to their brows
or a swift sword to their throats. They cried for their mothers, she remembers. This was where she learned that all dying
men call out for a mother. No matter what they said or thought before.

“Do not look up,” her father whispered to her, “do not stop, do not hesitate. Look down. Walk on.”

So she walked through the valley beshaded by the screaming trees.

This was the message of Rome to the people of Israel.

There are things which are too painful to think of. And she tries, she struggles constantly not to think of it. But she cannot
make a day pass without remembering those men calling for their mothers. She knows what a man calls out when he is nailed
to a crossbeam. She should have forced him to come home.

He sits on a rock a little way from her house. The wind brings news that summer will come soon.

She watches his sitting. This boy who is so very alive.

“Were you there,” she says, “in the uprising in Yaffo? Were you one of the rebels with the pretender king? Was your hand injured
before you ever came here, injured in the fighting?”

He says, “I was there.”

“Following another master, Gidon? Another king of the Jews?”

He shrugs. Says what she has known to be true for a long time.

“They killed my family. My mother, my brothers, my father, my cousins and uncles. For a long time I followed anyone who promised
to destroy them.”

She nods. They are silent for a long while.

“I am different now,” he says. “I did not lie that God told me to seek you out. It was after the rising in Yaffo, after we
had been defeated, I was sleeping in the mountains waiting for spring and in a dream a voice as clear as a sword told me to
come and find you.”