Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (28 page)

He's a Galilean. A Nazarene. What messiah comes from Nazareth?"

I saw Simon through the gathered crowd, caught his eye, but did not move toward him.

Through the afternoon, we stayed like that, our vigilance never relaxing. At one point, I looked across the court and saw the form of Zadok. He had paused to glance in my direction, but if he saw me through the horde of pilgrims, he did not acknowledge it.

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That day we walked out of the Temple, free men. I didn't know if I had Zadok or God to thank for that.

The next day he stirred up the pilgrims and Pharisees in the Temple like a hornets' nest. But when some came to seize him, others moved to keep them from doing so.

The Pharisees came to challenge him every day now--many of them men I recognized. I had seen them like this before: intent as vultures, about to cast a teacher out, to argue him into a corner from which he could not escape, to pass judgment on him by the evidence of his own words. They had ammunition enough to call for his death, and yet they came day after day, bringing others with them.

Again, I begged our master to leave the Temple.

The last day of the Feast, I glanced up from the gathered crowd--larger each day--in time to see several Temple guards coming toward us.

I had prayed so many months now for the day that we would stand in the Temple like this and Jesus would make himself known as the son of David--

as the coming One. But now I prayed for the very opposite thing. Unless he would enact a miracle--throw himself down from the height of the Temple itself and be miraculously unhurt, or cause the sun to go out as had the prophets of old--they would not believe him. And I knew he would do neither.

So when I saw the soldiers, I braced myself.

But when they came, they stopped to listen, and as the sweat trickled down my spine, they stood there just like the rest of those who had come, pausing once or twice to murmur between themselves. At last, I could stand it no more and made to move toward them, but Simon put out his hand and stopped me. When Jesus was done, they went away.

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Now I had seen every sign there was to see.

Each day that passed like this contained the longest moments and hours of my life. I stayed with him constantly. Only on the going out of the third day, after I had seen Jesus safely to a cave in Gethsemane where he liked to pray before returning to the house of Mary and Martha, did I finally go home.

My mother did not get up from her mat when I arrived. But I knew with a glance that she was not ill. No, something more grave had passed.

My brother appeared in the front room, sunken-eyed and thin as I had ever seen him.

"What's happened?" I said, at which my mother covered her face with her veil. My brother came at me, railing.

"I heard you were in the city! Did you think once to come directly to us? No.

You stayed with your precious teacher, the blasphemer, didn't you? All the while you have been out defending your Messiah, did you think to ask once what has happened here? No! Of course you haven't!"

I looked from one to the other. My first thought was for the children. But then I saw the face of little Hannah peering around the way from the next room.

"Where's Joses?" I said suddenly.

On her pallet, my mother began to weep.

"He is here," Nathan said, the blunt anger draining out of him with each word. "He is out in the courtyard. He spends all day there, and won't come in unless I force him. He will not speak . . ." He laid his forearm over his forehead and I thought for a moment that he might weep, too.

And then I realized the one person still missing: Rebecca.

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"Nathan, where's your wife?"

"We have needed you and where have you been?"

"Brother!"

He covered his eyes and even when I shook him it was several moments before he opened his mouth, twisted and ugly, and said, "She went out for water, later than usual. Hannah had been ill and Mother was ill, and she had not been able to go sooner. It was late in the day that she went to the spring.

And the streets were crowded with the huts of the coming Feast . . ."

He drew in a breath.

"And?" But I already knew I didn't want to hear what he would say.

"The soldiers of Pilate were in the city for the Feast, and the men of one of the watches saw her--"

On the pallet, my mother's weeping had become a soft keen.

"She came home so late. Her face--"

I stared.

"Tell me they didn't kill her."

"Oh, they didn't. Not directly." He bared his teeth like an animal.

Rage. Indignation as I had never felt it. It boiled up inside me.

"She clung to me when I would have gone out to death after them. I was crazed. But she begged me. And she was so broken, bleeding . . . I was prepared to go to the elders, to the Temple, the synagogue. I was prepared to go to Nicodemus. She begged me not to. She begged me. Do you understand? For the sake of her honor."

I was shaking.

"Where were you?" His expression had shattered to a thousand pieces--and my heart with it.

Tears streamed down his cheeks, sputtered on his lips. In that 238

instant, he was not a full-grown man and a father, but the boy I had left to the bullies of Kerioth before going back to defend him in guilt.

Where were you?

Then, as now, I had been chasing messiahs.

I wanted to say I would never leave again--no, that I would take him with me.

That I would never see him defenseless again, that somehow this was my fault.

"We found her in the mikva," he said, all the anger, all the emotion stripped from his voice like flesh from a corpse's skull.

I covered my face. Staggered back against the wall.

I was overcome with horror--for Rebecca, whom I, too, had loved. But most of all, for Nathan. Because I heard it in his voice: the cry, the pain that even he had not been enough to keep her in this life.

That night I did not return to my master, to the hospitality of Mary and Martha in Bethany, intent instead on keeping a watchful eye on my family.

I thought often of the mikva, wanted nothing more than to use it. But I could not bring myself to do it for the image of Rebecca floating in it, her dark hair

an inky fan in the living water.

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28

The slave of Ananias bar Nebedeus, one of the Sadducees, was murdered in the market. He was stabbed in the middle of a crowd, and no one knew who had done it.

Except for Simon and me. His single glance said: It is the Sons. It could only be them.

We feared for our master every hour that he was within the city gates, and feared, too, that murder of Ananias' slave would be somehow put upon him. I had no more currency left in the way of leverage or influence by which to protect him. Every day, I had prepared for his arrest. Every day, we begged him to leave, but he would hear none of it.

Meanwhile, his teachings became increasingly contentious and explosive.

"I am going away and you will look for me and you will die in your sin," he said one day in the porticoes.

Simon and I turned away. How much more could he push? How much more could they take?

Could we take?

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I had thought that the Temple authorities had not wanted to cause a stir during the Feast when so many others would be there to see it--including Pilate and Herod themselves. But the Feast was now over and Jesus had begun to gather such a following that they dared not cause an uproar right in the Temple.

The multitude was forming again.

But this was not the adoring multitude of before. Each day it grew in size and vitriol. Each day the words of my teacher were met with greater and greater

reaction as Jesus became his most incendiary yet.

They called him a Samaritan, demon-possessed.

And then the last day he went too far.

Jesus cried out, the vein in his forehead bulging: "Before Abraham was, I Am!"

I Am. The very name of God.

A chill ran down my spine and up over my arms. Several of those men who had been listening crossed the courtyard to a pile of stones where the stoa was still--endlessly--under repair.

The law dictated I should stone him myself.

Love dictated something else.

"Master," I said, pleading.

"Please!" Peter said.

Impossibly, we escaped with our lives.

That night, when he said we would return in the morning to Galilee, I should have fallen down in relief. Except by then I didn't know if it would matter.

Nowhere was safe anymore.

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WHEN I WENT HOME my mother cried out at the look on my face.

"You're leaving?"

I was silent.

"You are the elder son!"

I wasn't always. I wasn't supposed to be.

Nathan came into the room, a piece of parchment crumpled tight in his hand.

Scriptures, I assumed, to comfort himself in his grief.

"So you will follow him into the hills," he said. "You disappear with this would-be Messiah, this blasphemer who no one wants to fol ow? You fol ow him into obscurity!"

"You don't know--"

"Oh, I've heard about everything your great teacher is doing--he called himself the One, the equal of God! He deserves to be killed! He will get you killed with him. Do you think he will care whether you follow him to Sheol?

No. Because he is no messiah but a madman and a devil."

"You will not speak of my teacher that way!" I roared, my fists clenched, shaking.

Across the room my mother cried, "Judas! Nathan!"

"Oh, but it isn't a messiah you care so much about--it never was that for you.

You only care that he's made you believe he loves you."

I was across the room in a flash, slamming him against the wall.

He laughed in my face.

"Of course you defend him to me. What else should I expect? Be done with your charades, brother--" He shoved me away, and I felt the younger strength of him and my own age in a way I never had before.

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I staggered back, distantly aware of the cries of my mother to stop, her shouts and stern words, which had long ceased to have any effect on either of us.

There was something on the floor. The parchment he had been holding. I blinked.

He bent but I got to it first, spinning away with it in my hands. I was a boy again, taking away his things, but this was no boy's game.

This was no scripture.

It was a coded message. I stared at it until Nathan tore it from my fingers, the first real hint of fear in his eyes.

He had joined the Sons?

A thousand questions spun in my mind. Had they recruited him to spite me?

Because of my absence?

"Brother . . . tell me you haven't joined these men."

"You will not dictate to me!"

"You don't know what you are meddling with," I said. "You have no idea the extent of the thing you have touched."

"Who are you to me? I am not even your brother." There were tears in his eyes, prisms of rage. "I know the reason you were ashamed of me. I have known it always. I have always known why you despise me. Well, I release you! Leave and let me be."

"No. You are my brother. The fault is mine. It has always been mine."

"No, it isn't. And I don't even think I can blame you for hating me." He pushed angry tears away from his cheek. Across the room my mother was weeping, and my heart went out to her most of all.

"I don't hate you," I said. "And I only blame myself."

He looked up then, his teeth gritted together. "Do you know who you should blame? You should blame the Romans that did this

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to us. To your father. If not for them, you would have Joshua, rather than some bastard replacement. Rather than some would-be Messiah. You would have your father. It is he you have loved and missed all these years, and I have always known it."

"Nathan! Judas!" Mother cried again, as much in upset as in fear, I knew.

These were not things to be voiced aloud.

"Leave your so-called Messiah." Tears were streaming down his face. "He will not strike the eagle down for you. Leave him, Judas! You've been deceived. He will only get you killed."