Testament Page 2

  As I was coming out of the far end of the market there was a commotion near the town gates. Some sort of detachment was coming into town—Romans, I thought at first, but then I recognized the standards of Herod Antipas. I made my way through the gawkers who had already lined the street to get a better view. They were a bit of a rabble, it seemed, around a dozen in all, arranged in rough formation around their captain, a bearded colossus who was the only rider. It took me a moment to see what it was that had caused such a stir: they had a prisoner in tow. He was being pulled along, virtually dragged, by a rope attached to the captain’s saddle, though because of the soldiers and the crowd I could not get a good view of him. Then a gap opened up and I saw his face and was stopped dead, for though he was badly beaten I recognized him at once as my contact.

  I did not know how to react. The truth was that nothing in my experience had prepared me for a situation of this sort, so that it seemed as if what had been merely trifling until then, playing a part, had become suddenly real. I moved to the back of the crowd to be out of the soldiers’ path, afraid some look or glance from the man might give me away. But he looked too far ruined for that. Both eyes were swelled to slits from whatever beatings he had got; one of his ears had been cut away, but crudely, so that there were still ragged bits of flesh left hanging, encrusted black with flies and dried blood. As he went past he stumbled and fell and did not get up again, so that he ended by being hauled along the street on his backside while one of the town dogs ran barking half-crazed around him and the townspeople laughed, no doubt taking him for a simple criminal.

  His name was Ezekias. He was not much more than a boy, a messenger for the court in Tiberias who had been scouted out because of his position and then recruited during a visit to Jerusalem for one of the feasts. My only dealings with him had been a short encounter in the city at the time of his recruitment and a further one in Jericho some months later—he had struck me then as young, loyal, earnest, and entirely unaware of the danger he had entered into. It seemed more and more we relied on this sort, who could be easily replaced; indeed, I myself had not been so different when I had joined.

  His use to us had been that he was often able to bring us news from the Macherus fortress, which was second only to Masada in impregnability, and with it formed the backbone of the southern defences of the Palestinian territories. We had been working to infiltrate the place for some time, in which task we had some reason to feel hope since, unlike at many of the other outposts, there was a large contingent of Jews among the company there. But there were also many Edomites, whose lands lay nearby and from whom Antipas’s father had descended, and who therefore could not be trusted. The Edomites held all the positions of command, and found every means of keeping the Jews subordinate. Yet there were one or two Jews who by dint of sheer perseverance and faultless service had got ahead, and these were the ones to whom we had directed ourselves and so gained a foothold.

  The soldiers had come to a stop in the middle of the square. There were a couple of hitching stones there, near the well; they tied the captain’s horse to one and bound Ezekias to the other with the rope he’d been dragged by, haphazardly, as if he were a sheaf of wheat they were binding. After they’d drawn up their own fill from the well, they watered the horse but left Ezekias untended, not so much out of malice, it seemed, but more as if he were something they’d lost interest in, in the oafish way of boys who tired of some creature they’d caught. Ezekias, however, seemed aware neither that water was near nor that he was being denied it, his head drooped and his body straining against the rope that bound him so that it seemed the only thing that held him upright.

  After the days of cloud and dust the clear sky now seemed an assault, the sun already beating down like a hammer. I stood there in the street but could not form a plan, felt only a general outrage as if some trick had been played on me. I could not know what Ezekias’s capture meant or who else had been implicated by it; I reasoned the soldiers knew nothing of our meeting or they would not have come into town so openly, but even that wasn’t certain. They had moved off now towards the tavern where I was staying, the tavern-keeper hurrying out to greet them, putting on his most servile of appearances, smiling and bowing and scraping and promising wine and meat, which I myself had hardly seen a trace of in my days there; and meanwhile the townspeople were still lingering uncertainly about the square, in the hope, perhaps, of some sort of violence.

  I looked to Ezekias again and thought, He must be killed, for his own sake and for the sake of those he might name, when the king’s men in Tiberias put their wits to his torture. Then once the idea had entered my head, there was no putting it out, because of its logic. All of us had heard the stories of those who’d been taken and the things that were done to them, and how sometimes, for instance, to make them name their accomplices, their children or wives were brought before them and their fingers severed one by one or their eyes gouged out. So it was not simply a matter of sparing Ezekias—my own life stood at risk if I did nothing, for surely I would be among the first he would give up, if he had not already done so.

  I had a dagger in my room that I always carried among my things. In all the time since my recruitment I had never had cause to use it; it seemed a great irony to me that its first victim would now be a member of my own cause. Thus, even as it grew clear that I must attempt the thing, it seemed a sort of joke, not the least part of which was that I would need to find the courage to slit my own throat if I was caught, or I would merely have put myself in the place of Ezekias. So I stood there in the street and did not know how to begin, and the sun grew hotter and the flies continued to cluster around Ezekias’s bloodied face. Twenty paces from him the holy man still sat beneath his tree—next to Ezekias he seemed diminished somehow, though I saw how he had watched the soldiers’ progress closely.

  The company had been too large to fit in the tavern-keeper’s courtyard so he’d had his sons set up awnings in front of the porch and lay out carpets there. When the group had finally settled itself he sent Adah out, arms bared, to serve the wine, with the predictable result that the soldiers, lethargic and dull until then, grew suddenly animated, slipping their hands on poor Adah’s backside as she passed and laughing at her frightened retreat from them. While their attention was thus diverted I made my way past them in order to get to my room. Only the tavern-keeper showed any particular awareness of me as I went in, catching my eye dismissively as if to say he was sorry, he had more important matters than me to attend to at the moment.

  I got the knife from my things. I had a scabbard for it but had never been in the habit of wearing it. Strapping it on now I felt like a child dressing up for a game of assassin. It made a bulge beneath my cloak when I had it in place that I imagined would make my intentions plain to anyone who laid eyes on me.

  I went through my sack then, since I did not think I would be returning to my room. But other than a bit of cheese and stale bread from the trip down from Jerusalem there were only some underthings and a dirtied shirt, which I left there.

  Stepping out to the porch from the courtyard, I ran full into Adah as she was hurrying in. The force of the collision sent the jug she was carrying smashing against the ground and sent Adah herself sprawling backwards practically into the laps of the soldiers, who at once were in an uproar, half-drunk by now and pleased beyond reckoning at the mishap.

  “I’m sorry,” Adah stammered, “I’m sorry,” scrambling to collect up the broken jug before fleeing back into the courtyard.

  The soldiers, meanwhile, had now decided that they must make me their good friend and pulled me down to join them at their libations, with that brutal jocularity soldiers had, that you knew could turn against you at the slightest whim. I was worried they would ask me my business—I had put it out to the tavern-keeper that I was expecting some traders from Nabatea—and would catch me out in some mistake, since I did not know very well the movements of the traders in those parts. But they did not seem to have much interes
t in anything outside their own crude humour. I saw now that there wasn’t a Jew among them—they were mainly Syrians, it seemed, except for the captain, who was clearly an Edomite.

  Because my cloak had fallen open one of the soldiers noticed my dagger, which had a jewelled handle. He was one of the younger ones, whose provenance I could not make out, since he spoke neither Aramaic nor even Greek very well. Without asking my leave he pulled the knife from its sheath and then with a grin made as if to stab me with it, the whole company bursting into laughter when I started back. He then pulled out his own knife, which had a curved blade and a handle of tooled leather, and offered it in exchange. I was afraid this was some custom of his that I would be forced to honour.

  “It was my father’s,” I said of my own, which was the truth and which seemed to satisfy him, since he returned the thing to me.

  With each moment I sat there, it seemed increasingly farfetched that I should carry my plan through; and indeed there was that part of me that was happy I had been compelled to stop there. The thing was simple enough—I lacked the courage. Or perhaps for a moment I did not see the point, of Ezekias’s death or my own, the useless pile of bones we would amount to.

  I asked as casually as I could manage after their prisoner.

  “We always carry a Jew to draw off the dogs,” the captain said, his first words to me.

  The soldiers at once broke into laughter, not bothering to restrain themselves in the least on my account, so that I felt sickened to have sat down amongst them. I started to rise but one of them held me back, clapping an aggressive arm around me, until I thought I must draw my dagger then and there. In the meanwhile, however, the captain’s attention had been drawn to the square. I looked out to see that a small crowd had gathered there near Ezekias—it seemed the holy man, while the soldiers had been busy with me, had gone to the well to get a scoop of water to bring over to him, and people had gathered around now to see if he would get away with the thing.

  The captain had one of his men out there in an instant, who snatched the scoop away and sent the water spilling, in the process practically knocking the holy man over. Some of the crowd jeered him at that, for it was one thing to torture a prisoner but another to slight a Jewish holy man; and then someone, it wasn’t clear who, threw a stone at him. The soldier drew his cutlass then and it seemed for a moment that there would be a riot, which however would have suited me very well. But the captain at once roused his men and hurried them out into the square, where they stood with their hands on their swords until the crowd had backed off.

  In all this I had quietly made my way back to the edge of the market, still awaiting a chance if one should present itself. But in a moment it grew clear that my plan had been truly foiled now, for the captain had apparently had enough of the place and had begun rounding up his men to resume their march. He sent one of the soldiers back to pay the tavernkeeper, lest he lodge a complaint and the Romans bar Antipas from their roads; some of the others prepared his horse. But when they went to loose Ezekias from his post, he simply slumped to the ground and did not move.

  The captain squatted down to him and held a hand out to feel for his breath. After a moment he stood and kicked the slumped body over angrily, then for good measure pulled out his cutlass and stuck it into Ezekias’s side. A trickle of blood seeped up through the wound.

  “Leave him,” the captain said, and abandoned him there by the hitching post.

  The captain wasted no time now in taking up his march again, and in a matter of minutes he and his men were already out the gates. I stood there in the square and could not believe the way the thing had ended, nor could I say if it showed the Lord’s mercy or his spite.

  The crowd around Ezekias had grown again but no one dared to touch him, fearing who knew what defilement. There were mumbles of confusion, then the question of what should be done with the body; I cut off debate by undertaking to look after it. Of the entire crowd the only one who came forward to offer to help was the holy man.

  “I can manage it,” I said, given his state. But he had already moved to take Ezekias’s feet.

  We carried him out through the gates. The holy man proved surprisingly agile, keeping up a brisk pace without complaint. We were silent until we were a little way beyond the town, but then we needed to discuss how best the body could be disposed of. It would take a day’s work to dig a hole in the rock-hard earth outside the town there. But I could not bear the thought of simply burying Ezekias beneath a pile of stones like a common criminal.

  “There are some caves in the hills,” the holy man said. “Not far.”

  But it was two miles or more of barren plain before the hills began, and the sun still climbing.

  “You’ll be all right?” I said.

  “If not, there are caves enough for all of us.”

  It was past mid-morning before we reached the hills. The sun was relentless; beneath it the landscape looked utterly transformed from the previous days, stark and deathly and unreal. Ezekias’s body was sending up a terrible stink—from the slit in his side, mainly, though it seemed also that he had soiled himself at some point.

  It took all our effort to make our way up the scree of the first hills. But the holy man knew his way around, leading us to a small promontory beneath which were sheltered a few natural caves. A bit of careful manoeuvring got us down to one of them and we set Ezekias’s body inside. The holy man pulled a waterskin from under his shirt then, and wetting his sleeve he wiped some of the grime and blood from Ezekias’s face. It was only now that I allowed myself to truly look at it, so mangled, though it had once been quite handsome. The jaw looked broken, perhaps the nose as well; the hair was matted with blood where his ear had been severed. But under the holy man’s ministrations the face began to look human again.

  “You knew him?” the holy man said.

  “No.” But it bothered me to lie to him, nor did he seem to believe me.

  When we had laid the body out and wrapped my cloak around it as a shroud, we set about closing up the mouth of the cave, heaping rubble down from the slope above it and scrounging what rocks we could from the hillside. The work took an hour or more, in a heat that was like a wall bearing down on us. Afterwards we sat on the ledge that came out from the cave and drank what remained of the holy man’s water. From where we sat we had a view of the Jordan plain, with the palms of Jericho to the north and the intimation of the Salt Sea to the southeast. En Melakh, directly ahead of us, looked almost indistinguishable from the rubbled plain it rose out of—it was a town that defied logic, sitting nearly undefended like that at the frontier, with its houses of unbaked mud that a few good rains would wash to nothing. If it were ever abandoned, the desert would have erased every trace of it inside of a year.

  “Will you spend the night in the town again?” I said.

  “I think I’ll go on to Jericho.”

  We sat talking, in the tired, laconic way that came of our fatigue and of the gravity of the task we had shared. His name was Yehoshua; when I asked him what had brought him to En Melakh, he told me, with surprising frankness, that he had been an acolyte of the prophet Yohanan, whose camp had been nearby. It was not two months then since Yohanan had been arrested, by Herod Antipas, though everyone knew it was the Romans who had put him up to it.

  “We heard Yohanan’s acolytes had been killed,” I said.

  “Not all of them.” Though he wouldn’t look at me when he said this.

  Things were clearer now: he had shaved his head to hide from the soldiers, since it was a mark of Yohanan and his men that they went unshorn. So we were both of us outlaws, it seemed, joined in that way if no other. In fact our movement had followed Yohanan’s arrest closely, to see if we could find the way to turn his supporters to us; but in the end we had found them too leaderless and fanatical and dispersed. In my own view the Romans had been wrong to see in Yohanan a political threat, for all the numbers he drew—rather he had been a boon to them, by diverting to mysticism th
ose who might otherwise have put their energies to burning Roman garrisons.

  With the mention of Yohanan, Yehoshua’s mood had turned—it weighed on him, as I guessed, to have deserted him. He seemed tired to me, and embittered, like someone at the end of a road.

  “If you left him it was to save your life,” I said, “so that you might put it to good use.” But the words sounded empty—I was not some wise man to tell him such a thing, nor even, it seemed, more certain of myself.

  He didn’t take offence, however, but made light of the thing, saying, “He’s better off than the man in the cave, at least.”

  It was Yehoshua, before we set out, who said a prayer for poor Ezekias, asking the Lord to look to him. Then, where the hills gave way to the chalky plain again, we took our leave of each other. He handed me the shawl he’d been given in En Melakh, and which he’d been using as his headgear, and asked me if I might return it to its owner. I could not say why it so moved me that he should make this request of me.

  “I’ll find her,” I said.

  I watched him as he melted into the barrens, not imagining I should see him again but feeling still bound to him, because he had shared with me the contamination of Ezekias’s death. I thought of the story of the priest who saw a dying man by the road and passed him by, for fear of uncleanness—at least that was not the school that Yohanan had raised him in. It was to prepare God’s way that Yohanan taught, as I’d heard it, though his acolyte seemed to have lost his own. No doubt his courage had failed when the soldiers had come and he’d run; yet I could not say I would not have done the same. He had already disappeared in the haze off the desert when I turned back towards En Melakh. A wind had come up by then and the dust was rising. By the time I reached the town it had blocked the sun again.