Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (13 page)
Read Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt Online
Authors: Anne Rice
Cleopas lay down beside me.
"Nothing changes," he said.
"How can you say that?" I asked. "Everywhere we go it's changing."
I wanted badly for the screams to die away. And they almost did. More flames. I was afraid of the flames.
There was a song of screams coming closer and closer. It was one woman screaming. I thought it would stop, but it didn't stop. And with it I could hear feet running, faint and then loud, stomping feet.
A man's voice rose in the dark, crying out terrible words, words I knew were hateful and mean as he flung them out, over the woman's screams.
In Greek he called the woman a harlot, he said he would kill her when he caught her, and terrible oaths came from him, terrible words I'd never heard spoken before.
Our men rose up. I rose up.
All at once the woman's steps were right near us, pounding up the slope. She was breathing hard and couldn't scream anymore. The distant fire showed nothing yet.
Cleopas rushed forward, and so did Joseph, and the other men, and I saw through the dark that they reached out for the woman as soon as she appeared, arms waving, against the fiery sky. They brought her down to the ground, and pushed her behind them into the blankets. They stood still. I heard her breathing, and her coughing and sobbing, and the
women hushing her as if she was a little child, and pulling her away.
I was on my feet, and James was right behind me.
Against the faraway flames, I saw the man rise up and stop. He was a big black shape like the rocks around us. He was drunk. I could smell the wine on him. I could see him wag his head.
In an evil voice, he called out to the woman, in vile names, names I knew only from now and then in the marketplace, and names I knew were never to be said.
Then he went quiet.
The whole night was quiet, except for his breathing, and the crunch under his feet as he tried to get his footing.
The woman let out a cry, more like a choke, as if she couldn't help it.
At that the man laughed and he headed right towards my father and my uncles, and they took hold of him. It was one big shape of darkness taking over another great lump of darkness. The night was full of soft, but loud sounds.
Off they went up the hill, all of them, and it did seem now that there were a lot of them, maybe Alphaeus' two sons, too, because it was so quick and there were so many of those sounds. I knew what the sounds were. They were beating him.
And he had stopped his cursing and raging. And from everyone else nothing except the women shushing the hurt one.
They were gone!
I don't know why I didn't move.
I started to run after them.
I heard my brother James say:
"No."
The woman sobbed softly:
"A widow alone, I tell you, alone with my servant girl, and my husband not dead two weeks, and they come down on me like locusts, I tell you. What am I to do? Where am I to go? They burnt my house. They took everything. They broke what little I had. This is the dregs, I tell you. And my son believes they fight for our freedom. I tell you, all the filth is rising, and Archelaus is in Rome, and slaves killing their masters and all the world in flames." She went on and on.
I couldn't see anything. I listened for the sounds of the men. I heard nothing. I felt my skin all over.
"What are they doing with him?" I asked James. I could barely see him. A little bit of light in his eye.
Down below, in the valley, the fire burned but its great flames were finished.
"Say nothing," he said. "Go back to your bed."
"My house," said the woman, her voice full of hurt, "my farm, my poor girl, Riba—if they caught her, she's dead. There were too many of them. She's dead, she's dead, she's dead."
The women comforted her the way they comforted us when we were sad. They made sounds, more than they spoke.
"Go back to your bed," said James again to me.
He was my older brother. I had to do what he said. And Little Salome was crying a little, half asleep.
I went to her and hushed her and kissed her. She curled her fingers around mine, and I knew she was sleeping again.
I lay awake until the men returned.
Cleopas lay beside me as before. Little Symeon and Judas were sleeping all this time as if nothing had happened. Little children like that, once they fall into deep sleep, nothing wakes them up. All was quiet. Even the women weren't making much noise.
Cleopas began to whisper in Hebrew. I could not make it out, what he said. The other men were whispering too.
The women were all talking in such low voices they might have been praying.
I prayed too.
I couldn't think of the poor girl, down there where the house was burnt. I prayed for her without thinking about her. And somehow I went to sleep.
11
WHEN I WOKE UP, I saw the blue sky and the trees before I said anything.
Nazareth in this land—of trees and fields.
I stood up, said the morning prayers with my arms outstretched.
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One,
"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."
I was happy.
Then I remembered the night.
They were just coming back from the woman's house, or so the women told me. The woman was with us, and here also came the maidservant, not dead, and with her proper veil and tunic and robe, who was crying and in the arms of Cleopas who brought her up the slope.
The woman cried out and ran to her.
The men had bundles of belongings from the house below. And a heifer also they brought up, a big slow-walking heifer with frightened eyes which they led with a rope.
They spoke Greek together, the maid and the woman, and hugged each other. When the woman talked to the other
women, she spoke our tongue. The women crowded around these two newcomers and hugged them and comforted them and kissed them.
Bruria was the name of this woman, and the servant, Riba, was like a daughter to Bruria. And Bruria was offering prayers of thanks that Riba had been spared.
Finally we joined the crowd of people on the road and headed towards Nazareth.
I learned from the talk that the bandits had taken everything that Bruria had— fine silks and plate, grain, wineskins, and whatever they could carry, and burnt out the whole place. Not even the olive groves were left unburnt. But they hadn't found what was hidden in the tunnel under the house. So Bruria had her gold now with her, all that had been left to her by her husband. And Riba had hidden in the tunnel, which the bandits didn't find.
As we walked on towards Nazareth, I learned they would now be with us, these two.
There was more news on the road, too.
Not only Jericho had been burnt but another palace of Herod, the palace at Amathace. And the Romans could not stop the Arabians from their rampaging. They were burning village after village.
But the men of last night's attack had been common drunkards, said Bruria, and so did Riba, who had barely made it to the tunnel alive, and both women were crying as we walked on.
A tunnel under a house. I had never seen a tunnel under a house.
"There is no King, there is no peace," said Bruria, who was the daughter of Hezekiah, son of Caleb, and she told off all the names of her family going back, and the names of her husband's family.
Even the men listened to her. There were nods and murmurs at this name and that name. The men didn't look at her, or at the maidservant, but they walked close to the women, and they were quiet, and they listened.
"Judas bar Ezekias—he's the rebel," the woman said. "Old Herod had him in prison. But he didn't execute him, which he should have done. Now he's stirring up the young men. He's set up court in Sepphoris. He's raided the armory there. He rules from there, but the Romans are already on the march from Syria. I weep for Sepphoris. All those who don't want to die should flee from Sepphoris."
Now I knew the name of the city, Sepphoris. I knew that was where my mother had been born, that her father Joachim had been a scribe, and his wife, Anna, my grandmother, had been born there, too. They had come to Nazareth only when my mother had been betrothed to Joseph, who with his brothers lived in the house of Old Sarah and Old Justus, who were kindred of my mother and Joachim and Anna, as well as Joseph, too. Part of the house had been given over to Joachim and Anna and my mother, as it was a big house which had in it many rooms for families to live on one large courtyard, and it was there that they lived until they went to Bethlehem where I was born.
When I thought about it, it came clear to me that I didn't know parts of the story. I did know that Joseph and my mother had been married in Bethany, in the house of Elizabeth and Zechariah, and that house was near to Jerusalem. But Elizabeth and her son John didn't live there now.
No, they had gone into hiding, as my cousin Elizabeth had told us.
And when I thought of this, all the questions came back to me.
But I was too eager to see Nazareth to think of all this just now. It hurt too much to think of all this. And the land around me was so beautiful. I knew that word from the Psalms and when I looked at this land I knew what the word meant.
Old Sarah and Old Justus were waiting in Nazareth. We'd written to them. We'd told them we were coming home. Old Sarah was the aunt of my grandmother Anna. And the aunt of one of Joseph's people, but I couldn't trace it all back.
The land was greener and greener as we moved on. And when there came a light rain we didn't even stop.
We'd listened to her letters many times, and she thought to name all of the children when she wrote to us, and she knew by now we were coming home.
The men were not talking much, but Bruria and Riba talked on and on, and the men listened, or so I thought. Finally Bruria said she would confess her worst sorrow. She couldn't keep it inside. Bruria's son had run off to join the rebels in Sepphoris! His name was Caleb, and Caleb might as well be dead, said Bruria. She had no hope of seeing him again.
The men said nothing. They only nodded.
"Who would bother with Nazareth?" Cleopas said under his breath.
"It will be good," said Joseph. "I know it."
And the sun moved high in the sky. And the clouds were clean and like the sails of ships, and there were women in the fields.
We'd been walking up and up into the hills for a long time when we came to a small village that was broken down and empty. The grass was high. The roofs had fallen in. People had gone from here a long time ago. Nothing was burnt. Most of the people on the road walked on.
But all our kindred stopped here.
Cleopas and Joseph led us past the broken buildings.
We found a small spring coming out of the rock, and water filling a big basin surrounded by heavy, leafy trees. It was a beautiful thing to behold.
We made a camp, and my mother said we'd stay the night and go on to Nazareth in the morning.
The men went alone to the spring to bathe, and the women brought fresh robes for them. We waited. Then the women took all of us little ones, and we bathed and dressed the same. The women had a tunic and robe, each, for Bruria and Riba.
The water had been cold, but everyone had laughed and had fun, and the clean clothes smelled good. They even smelled like Egypt.
"Why can't we go on to Nazareth?" I asked. "It's early in the day."
"The men want to rest," said my mother. "And it looks like rain again. If it rains we'll go into the old buildings. If not, we stay here."
The men were not themselves. I hadn't thought much about it until now. But they had been quiet all day.
With all the troubles, we changed every day. And we had to make do with what we found. But this time the men were different. Even Cleopas was quiet. He sat with his back to the bark of a tree, looking out over the hills, and he didn't seem to see the people passing down on the road, going on to Galilee. But when I looked to Joseph as I always did at such times, he was steady. He had taken out a little book to read, a bound book with cut pages, and he was whispering to himself. The letters in the book were Greek.
"What is it?" I asked him.
"Samuel," he answered. "About David," he said.
I listened as he read. David had been fighting, and he
wanted a drink of water from the well of his enemies, and when the water was brought to him, David couldn't drink it, because men had put themselves in great danger to get the water. Men might have died in the getting of it for David.
Joseph got up after he was finished, and told Cleopas to come with him.
The women and the children were all gathered around Bruria and Riba, and they talked on and on of the many things that had happened in the country.
Joseph and Cleopas, and Alphaeus, and his two sons, and James—they all asked for Bruria to come and talk to them.
They went off towards a grove of trees that were moving in the wind in a way I liked to watch.
Their voices were small but I could hear some of it.
"No, but you lost your farm. No, but you .. . And everything that you owned..."
"I tell you, you have a right..." Its ransom.
Ransom.
And the woman with her hands up, shaking her head, left them. "I will not!" she called out.
They all came back and lay down, and became quiet again. Joseph was thinking. He was worried. Then he became steady.
People passed on the road without even seeing us. Horsemen passed.
And after the meal, when everyone slept, I thought about the man in the darkness, the drunken man.
I knew they'd killed him. But I didn't say so to myself. I just knew it. And I knew why they'd killed him. I knew what he meant to do to the woman. And I knew that the men had washed and put on new garments according to the Law, and they wouldn't be clean until sundown. That's why they didn't go on to Nazareth on this day. They wanted to be clean to go home.
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