Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (23 page)

Jesus crouched before the possessed man.

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"Master!" I found my voice. The demoniac would lunge for him, would throttle him or jab out my master's eyes.

Jesus pushed James' hands away as the larger man tried to pull him back.

He leaned forward, looked into the man's eyes as one peers through a window.

"Go."

So softly.

I didn't hear at first the gust that started behind us. And then it blew, raising my hair against the wind, causing my mantle to flap, and James' to come flying off completely. The man fell back as one trampled beneath a wagon, pinned to the ground. The air was far too chill for so sunny a morning, the air too filled with unnatural shadow. The man twisted back along the grass and screamed.

Above us, the hills continued to churn. Screaming--from the wind, the man . . . the pigs. High above, the herd roiled like the sea. Shouts from the swineherds, the one barely leaping out of the way of an onslaught of animals, coming straight for him. No, not for him, but for the edge of the hill.

And then they were barreling past him, a flood of grotesque and swollen animals, running down the hill, the earth shaking even here.

Down, down they came as a deluge of flesh rushing from a cliff. The ground did not slope gently into the water as it did where we had put in with the boat, but dropped in a raw scarp toward the water. The pigs dropped with it, disappearing from view. Faster and faster they came, like the face of a mountain sliding into the sea. Below, the water had become a swarm.

Within minutes they had all rushed over the edge and into the water. One moment more and the water was still.

The hill above was eerily silent, the smell of freshly turned earth 193

carrying to us on the breeze, a wide swath of it churned in their wake. Below, the lake lapped against the shore, and the rocking of the boat began to subside.

There was not a single pig in sight.

The swineherds, silhouetted against a beautiful morning sky, stood hands to heads. And I understood that the entire wealth of the city--an entire city's livelihood--had just disappeared completely.

I fell to my knees.

After Jesus had lifted the naked man from the ground, taken off his own mantle and covered him . . . after he had told the man to return to his people--

the swineherds had begun to shout, and to run toward town, no doubt to bring others to kill us--I picked something up off the ground: the manacle, fallen from the man's wrist during the ordeal.

It was split open, twisted at an angle that no man but a blacksmith with a hot forge could have bent it. But there it was, broken open, as though it could not, dare not, stay shut.

The voice of Levi was silenced within me. I looked at this man, this teacher to whom I had pledged myself, unconventional as he was, with renewed awe. I understood the meaning of this sign very well.

What were Romans but pagans and pigs and demons in the land of Israel?

Didn't the famed Tenth Legion bear as its standard--a thing in itself against God's law--a wild pig?

He could not have spoken more clearly had he said it. Had he screamed it.

By this one act alone I knew that this man would drive the demon pigs of Rome from the hills of this land, and that Israel would at last be free.

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By spring, we would advance on Jerusalem. Within a few years we might advance on Rome. Anything was possible to me then.

I determined then to enjoy these last days and weeks as one enjoys the last hours before Passover, having prepared and brought in relatives and made the arrangements for the lamb and the feasting space and food, when he can finally sit down and remember the feast itself at last.

My heart soared. Messiah. The one sent of God. I had not waited, or suffered, or hoped, or lost in vain.

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22

They came to us on the Sabbath, having broken it to bring us the news. But they need not have spoken; by their haggard faces alone, we knew.

John was dead.

One of his disciples, a man named Dael, fell down at Jesus' feet and wept.

"Herod has cut off his head. We've just come from burying him."

For once, Jesus did not have ready comfort to give another. He reeled away.

His hands covered his face. Andrew, across the room, cried out. He had been John's disciple once.

I could not imagine it, the charismatic wild man of the Jordan, silenced even in this way. But of course he had to be. Herod would not--could not--afford to let him live. He had spat in Herod's face, and so Herod had relieved John of his head.

I remembered the night I had met with Zadok, and how he had waved away John's name as though he were already dead.

Now fear seized me by the throat.

Jesus was the cousin of John, so alike at first that they even preached the same words in the beginning and had often been

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mistaken for one another until Jesus had grown more rampant than his wild cousin, and his cousin had been caged.

If John was a dead man, it was only a matter of time until my master was, too.

But Jesus didn't seem to be thinking of any of this. He lurched outside, tearing his hair. A terrible, grief-stricken cry came from the courtyard a moment later.

Dael looked up from the ground, his face streaked with tears, dirt. "There are men with me--nearly twenty. Others, who would not break the Sabbath, will soon come."

"Twenty? But there were so many!"

He shook his head. "The rest have fled. In these last days there were less and less of us as they realized they followed a condemned man." He wiped at his nose and then fell forward on his hands again.

"Where is Levi?" I demanded.

"He's gone. I don't know where. He left us in the middle of the night."

"Come. You will follow our master now," I said. "It is the Sabbath. Come, eat and rest."

I did not feel any of the reassurance in my voice.

That night I thought back over every word I had uttered about the coming kingdom, everything I had ever said or repeated of John's or Jesus' that might be considered seditious against either Herod or Rome.

I wondered what Zadok and the Sons might say about the things I had spoken. They themselves would never have spoken such things, preferring to wait until the moment that another put his neck out there to do it for them, so that they might only rise up at the last minute.

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Cowards. Cowards, all of them.

And I was a coward, too. Because the more that I told myself that I had said nothing seditious, I knew it for a lie meant to cleanse me of guilt. I had gone from town to town spreading word of a kingdom not of Rome. I had rejoiced at the swelling hundreds and thousands that had come to accompany our travels, envisioning an army. No matter how I tried to reason with myself, I knew the truth: Following my master had put me soundly outside the safety of the law. One of any number of hundreds might identify me as having preached his message, acting in his name.

My lot was inexorably tied to his.

I did not want to die as a bandit in the hills, or as my father upon a cross. I had already given--and lost--too much for the cause of freedom.

But my master was not another Judas bar Hezekiah or even John the Baptizer.

He was the Messiah. And if not him, then no one. So now we must move, and quickly.

BUT WE DID NOT move quickly.

Jesus' charisma began to flag. He became thin and drawn. He went to the hills at the going out of day and did not return sometimes until dawn. The pall of death seemed to hang over him as though it were he who wore the shroud, and not John in the grave.

In the middle of the night, many from the throng began to sneak away. The next night, and the next, more disappeared.

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I began to reconcile myself to the fact that we would not march on the Holy City at Passover.

I consoled myself by saying that Jesus was like David. And like David, he must hide out before moving to claim his place as king. He was of the line of David. This story had been enacted before. I told myself this, again and again.

Until the whispers began in the back of my mind.

You could leave. I could leave now, and return home. I could collect my mother and family and go south. To Kerioth, perhaps. Or to Alexandria. I could study under disciples of Philo or another great teacher. The Sons of the Teacher knew all they needed to know by now. Surely they no longer needed me.

You wanted to be a scholar once.

But no scholar could do the things Jesus did. I had seen my teacher perform deeds only the greatest prophets might.

None of them was Jesus.

And so there it was: I could no more go back than I could put back the many months that I had spent following my master.

I went out with him in the morning and evening when he would allow me. I held him at night when I heard him weeping. I feared. I prayed.

"Do you love me, Judas?" Jesus asked one early morning. We had been out all night, praying in the hills.

"With all my heart," I said, tired and worn, desperate for him to return to us.

To life once more.

To me.

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23

A merchant brought me the coded letter:

I was recently summoned to an inquiry about this Jesus. I called him a man of questioned birth and no consequence. But he is quickly becoming known as seditious by those in power, and a blasphemer. One cannot be a Messiah and commit blasphemy. Already there are those who call for his death.

Tell me: is our brother, Simon the Zealot, among you still?

That night when I knew Simon to be alone, I went and flung him to the ground.

He looked up at me with surprise in his eyes--which only ignited the fire in mine.

"What's the meaning of this?" he shouted.

I threw the letter at him, picked it up again and, leaning down, held it before him. "Do you read what this says? You, who I counted a brother! Why did you never tell me you were one of the Sons?"

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He glanced at it, not touching it, his eyes scanning the coded message, putting it together, reading it, getting to the last line.

"I stopped responding to them after Tabernacles," he said dully.

Tabernacles. When he had joined us in leaving the city, to my surprise.

I clasped my head, the message still in my fingers. "All this time we could have been in this together! All this time, I might have had a confidant and not been alone in it!"

"No. They wanted your reports to check against mine. They would have played us off one another--don't you see? They're doing it now. I should never have brought you into this!"

I grew very still. "What do you mean 'brought me into this'?"

"Who do you think told Levi to come fetch you? Who do you think recommended you to Zadok?"

I stared.

"I saw the passion in you for the coming kingdom," he said. "You covered it well but I saw it, dormant all these years--before it flared to life after Susanna's death."

I took a step back.

"And so I brought you in, not meaning to stay with you or to leave after Tabernacles with you. With him. But once we had returned to Jerusalem . . . I was ruined by then for the man I now call Master. I can't go back to Jerusalem or that life. I never will. I'm ruined for all but him. He's set something free in me. That is what has mattered most, even above the freedom of Israel. Hate me if you like, but that is the truth. That is how I knew I could no longer be a part of the Sons of the Teacher. That teacher. And now, whatever fate you work with them for our master, I will share in its outcome, but not its shaping."