Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (5 page)

the smaller openings carved into the interior face of the cave. Four in all, two of them still covered with stones.

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We were in a grave.

I curled in Mother's lap and squeezed my eyes shut as the light fled the day.

She held me tight as the words poured from her lips:

When the wicked advance against me to devour me, it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear.

When it was fully dark, Mother crept out of the cave. After what seemed like a very long time and I had begun to panic, crying out for her in hoarse whispers, she finally returned and drew me into her arms.

"Can we go back?" I said.

"No, my cub. The Romans have camped outside the city."

And even I, being a boy, understood: They intended to take the city and everything inside it.

That night, I promised the Lord I would never spit at my brother again, that I would be the best teacher of the law, that I would be zealous and pure all my days if only Joshua and Father--and Zipporah, too--could escape or, better yet, that this might all be a dream.

But the only dreams in those days from Jerusalem to Syria were nightmares.

I WOKE UP ALONE.

"Momma?"

I scrambled to the mouth of the cave, near-skidding out of it, desperate to be away from the dead within it.

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Mother grabbed me as I came running out and pulled me down beside her.

Below us in the valley, an entire legion had arrayed itself overnight, precise, mechanical as the Roman machine itself, exacting a new and visceral fear in me. There was a line set up near the path we had come down just the day before, and tall wooden machines I had never seen before.

And there, in front of it all: the standard, the eagle. As though it had followed us from Jerusalem.

We crouched like animals, watching the activity of the camp, looking for any sign of people coming out from the city. But there were none.

We scraped for anything to eat, digging up roots and peeling apart the fat leaves of a cactus. We had realized by then that we were not the only ones hiding in the hills; we had seen a woman creeping through the trees farther down. Mother tried to call to her, but she dared not do it loudly and the woman didn't seem to hear. At times throughout the day we heard a faint strain of prayer carried up by the hot breeze along the hill, as if it came from the air itself.

We lay on the floor of the tomb a second night, listening to the sounds of the Roman camp as the smell of their fires wafted into the hills. Occasionally we could even hear soldiers' laughter in the darkness.

It was there, in that tomb, that I had a horrible thought.

I had prayed to stay in Sepphoris. I had prayed for it, and God had granted my request.

I began to shake. In wanting to enjoy the esteem of others, I had become a satan to my family.

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Mother tried to comfort me, but her comforts could not right the horror of my wrong. It was my fault. It was all my fault.

She brought me what few seeds and roots she could find--I retched up most of them, and flies came to lap at the swelter of my vomit there on the limestone floor.

I fell asleep to the rhythmic sound of Mother's prayers, entombed in guilt. I wondered if Sheol was like this.

BLACK SMOKE WAFTED INTO the hills. We shrank back as far as we might from the nightmare swelling around the city--the screams and the fire, the intermittent, thundering crash of city walls.

Sepphoris was under siege.

I covered my ears and screwed shut my eyes in the darkness of the cave.

But I could not shut out the smell of fire.

That night I found a sharp shard of stone. Creeping to the wall, I carved, as best I could in the dark, my name.

Judas.

I carved Joshua's beside it. Hot tears streamed down my cheek.

I had wanted to be a great teacher, to sit in a seat of honor. Now I only wanted to have my father and brother back, in any obscurity we could be together.

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4

The Romans were in the forest.

The fall of axes rang out from the grove for half a day, their rhythm a dull thud in the ears. We dozed to the strike of axes, the shouts, the laughter. Always the axes. Always the laughter.

My mother and I lay curled together in the darkness of the cave until we could no longer tell waking from sleeping, nightmare from delirium.

My mother, I think, might have lain in that grave and gone directly to Sheol, were it not for me. I knew it by her eyes, dull and lifeless, staring at nothing in this world as though already fixed on the next. When she closed them, only the slow beat of her heart and the occasional sound of her breath let me know she lived.

Sometimes I thought I heard voices crying out in the darkness, reciting even, part of the Shema or a hymn. Sometimes I heard them cry out before falling into groans.

By the eighth day, the hammer-falls and ruckus of the Roman camp transformed into the machinelike grinding of a legion on the move. We lay in the stupor of hunger and dehydration as they

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passed along the west side of our hill, south into the Galilean countryside.

Finally, my mother stirred against me.

"Come," she said. Her voice was hoarse. I heard her try to swallow.

She took my hand and together we went down the hill on weak and unsteady legs. Now in the sun I saw that her hair was coated with dust, her face covered in grime, as were her clothes. She looked as though she had come out of Sheol itself. In a way, I suppose we had.

Distantly, I thought: We have missed Sabbath, which occurred our first night and next day in hiding. And then I realized: It is Sabbath again.

We paused halfway down the hill. Where the grove of pines had stood, there were now mostly stumps.

My mother moved woodenly, the smooth, girlish step that had never ceased to cause men and women alike to watch her, gone.

We came to the bottom of the hill.

The road was lined on both sides with crosses.

Mother's knees buckled and she stumbled, yanking me nearly to the ground.

Her breath came like a serrated knife. Her hand was crushing mine, shaking all the way up her arm so that it seemed her shoulders had seized up.

A keen escaped my lips and I sagged but she jerked me upright, with what strength I don't know.

We walked onto the road. Through the gruesome corridor, past the bodies of ten. Twenty. Fifty. I lost count.

I had seen the crucified from a distance in Jerusalem--nearly every day someone went to hang on a tree for something. It was the 36

Roman execution reserved for noncitizens, devised specifically to be as lengthy, painful, and humiliating as possible. They crucified them naked and we always took care not to look at them, at the crude shame of them suffering their way to Sheol.

But now I stared at the bodies wracked in such gruesome display, every one of them a signpost to Roman power, a warning to anyone who had not submitted himself to the cross of Roman occupation in life.

The air was saturated with blood and excrement, rank with bodies already decaying in the stifling afternoon heat. Some of them stared down at us with flat eyes as though having realized upon the moment of death that the next life was not what they expected. The mask of that horror remained on their faces like the shed scales of a lizard, a thing bearing only the imprint of the life that once wore it. Ravens came and went with a flap of dark wings, settling on the corpses to jab at their faces. No calls, no cawing. Just the flutter of wings and intermittent silence as they pecked at wounds and genitals, lips and eyeballs.

I became aware of the dazed milling of others like us, of their cries in the putrid air. Farther ahead, a woman had all but collapsed at the foot of one of the crosses. Another man, standing in the middle of the road in the rough tunic of a peasant, clasped his head, turning one way and then the other, making no other sound but the slap of his palms against his stricken face.

A few people had surrounded a cross near the end of the vulgar passage, two women and an old man, trying to take down a body. Every so often one of the women let out a terrible wail. Whenever she did, an answering whimper came from one of the stakes nearby. The man on it was still alive.

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And then Mother stopped. Her back was poker-straight. When I lifted my head to look up at her, her expression was terrible and void.

I followed the line of her vision to a form I did not recognize. A body turned into a single contortion of agony, the legs broken at perverse angles.

This time Mother spun me away, hard, her fingers digging into my shoulder

as she doubled over, retching.

I pulled free of her, ran back--and then skidded to my knees in the stony dirt.

I knew that face, twisted toward the sky.

Father.

A horrible sound filled my ears. Only when my mother clasped me to her at last, smothering it, did I realize it had come from me. I wailed and thrashed and tore my hair--not because it was proper to do, but because I could do nothing else.

I wanted to go to him, cling to him, but I was as horrified as I was desperate for him. Gone was the serenity of that embrace, of the skin smelling of sun, the beard, even when it smelled of fire. He was covered in gore and flies.

Mother gripped me by the shoulders.

"Do not see your father's nakedness," she said, her voice hoarse.

I tried to tear my gaze away but couldn't until she pulled me hard against her, burying my face against the stained linen of her tunic.

There at my father's feet, I died. My name was written in the grave already.

Though we had crawled from its mouth just an hour before, a part of me, I knew, would never emerge.

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THE CITY WALLS WERE broken into black and craggy teeth. This was no longer Sepphoris. These were the smoldering remains of Gomorrah.

Past the rubble of the city gates, bodies littered the street, swarming with flies. One of them, an old man still clutching his staff.

We covered our noses with the fronts of our tunics, and I struggled to keep up as Mother's step quickened past the debris of houses and storefronts, past the smoldering remains of what had been the synagogue. We stumbled past upturned carts, broken pottery, toppled buildings. Above us, the fort that had presided over the entire hill had crumbled in one spot, the limestone blackened all along the face.

Once we reached the residential area, we ran.

At the burnt lintel to Eleazar's house, mother gestured me back.

"Stay here," she said, her face already turned toward the dark front room. It smelled like smoke. Smoke, and something else. She covered her nose and picked her way into the darkness.

I waited, heard her gasp and stifle a cry somewhere inside.

"Momma?" I cried into the silence. "Momma?"

I fled into the house and nearly tripped over a blackened form on the ground.

Zipporah. I recognized her only by her singed hair and feet--the only part of her that had not burned.

I backed away, choking at the sight as much as the smell. I could hear Mother moving in the lower level, her broken cries of "Joshua! Joshua!"