Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (22 page)

The thought of water did not sit well with me. I was weary to the bone, wanting nothing but to collapse on the floor of Peter's house.

"He can sleep in peace on the boat," Peter said. "And the night air on the lake will revive the rest of us."

I did not want to be revived. I wanted only to lie down and hear nothing of the clamor I had heard for the last three days. But I said none of this as Peter and John went ahead to arrange for boats and to fetch food from the house.

Galilean fishermen, I had learned, were superstitious about the lake and its weather. I had seen them look to the sky and utter a prayer as though it were an incantation on numerous occasions.

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Now as the two of them went on ahead, I noted that James was murmuring under his breath and looking to the east.

"What. What is it?"

But then the crowd was coming up toward us, some of them shouting, a few of them singing.

"Hurry," I said.

Jesus was staggering by the time we came to the promenade along the shore and got him into the boat.

I saw, just once, Peter's worried glance back toward Capernaum, as though he feared it might not be there when we returned. And then we were setting out onto the lake.

Without the constant harassment of the people jostling for a chance to see Jesus, to ask for a blessing or healing or the answer to a question, the night seemed filled with strange and sudden relief and eerie stillness both. As James, John, Matthew, and Thomas took the oars leaving Peter and Andrew to work the sails, I realized it was indeed a beautiful dusk.

Jesus all but collapsed beneath the stern deck, a ballast bag under his head.

As the boat sailed out past the breakwater onto the lake proper, he barely moved. Had I not known better, I would have been alarmed to see him so still, his sandaled feet swaying just slightly with each undulation of the water.

He lay as one dead.

I turned away from the sight.

I leaned back against the side of the boat, lulled by the slip of the oars into the water, and eventually found my eyelids pulled down as though with the stone weights of the fishermen's nets.

A brief sense that I was floating . . .

The mismatched boards of the boat hit me hard, knocking the breath out of me.

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Shouts. I pushed up against the floor of the boat, my hands nearly elbow-deep in water. Rain pelted my face like icy daggers. Someone was bellowing orders. Above me, Peter and Andrew hauled in the sail against a churning sky.

"James!" John said. He was diving across the boat to fall on the rudder, adding his weight to Andrew's or I wouldn't have heard him at all, the storm swallowing the shouts of the others like a maw. The sail whipped loose, one of the ties lashing Matthew across the face so that he reeled back against the side of the boat and almost went over. Across from me, Nathanel clung to the side of the boat with both arms as it lurched and spun sideways like a twig. Lightning lit Peter's stricken face, and the look of his expression turned my veins to ice.

"Teacher!" Peter was shouting, trying to get hold of the sail. A black wall of water loomed before us and the stern went up against it, climbing until the boat nearly stood on end. James threw himself against Jesus, still sleeping, one arm thrown over the ballast bag. "Teacher!"

I leaned low, clutching the edge of the boat as a second giant wave rose up from the lake like a watery Goliath. For a moment I felt the panic of one drowning. I lowered my head and gulped for breath.

Tonight I die.

All I could think was that I had not been to the mikva. I had not cleansed myself all these last several days. I had not said the Shema tonight. I had done none of these things. I had flouted the authority of the priests and my face was known as renegade to the Pharisees.

I would die alongside my teacher and master, my hoped-for Messiah. The crowds along the lake would eventual y disperse, and John would rot in Herod's fortress as Roman soldiers looked on

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during the Feast of Dedication. Perhaps the true sons of Judas bar Hezekiah would come rushing from the hills, only to be cut down by the legions.

I clawed rain from my face, tried to pray. Felt Nathanel grab on to me, clasped him with shaking hands. Together we would go to a watery Sheol.

And all I could think was: This wasn't supposed to happen. It wasn't supposed to end like this. The masses, the signs, the inexplicable moments of sight. It would all amount to nothing.

The boat pitched, the stern of it jerking up out of the water. In a flash of lightning I saw the sandaled feet of Jesus, flagging against the floor of the boat, loosely in the water like the body of a dead man. Had he drowned, then, there beneath the stern? Had he departed from us silently, without even a word of farewell? Soon we would all be fortunate to float like that on any water here.

I told myself to let go, to lunge forward and seize him by the legs. Then the boat jinked sideways, throwing us all backward. For a horrifying instant, I thought we would capsize.

I opened my mouth to cry out to him, only to be smashed in the face with a crashing wave that slapped my ears and sent my head ringing.

It was John who fell down over us, grabbing me by the arm when I nearly went over the side. "Master! Save us!"

It was a horrid sound, that scream. I would remember it the rest of my life.

I covered my face, trying to shield my eyes. Against the dark, I saw him, the pale of his tunic in the sluicing blackness, rising up. In my deafness, I heard him when I should not have against the screeching gale: Be still.

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The words had not been shouted to the furious wind or issued to the sky, but spoken as though directly to my heart.

The boat fell to wild rocking as the waves subsided into hillocks. My hair and beard were plastered to my head and face as the roiling sky turned away like the long and tangled tresses of a woman spinning on her heel, departing to the east, the way she had come. Below, against the shore, the lights of Capernaum and Heptapegon glimmered in the twilight.

In the silence, twelve men stared at one another, dread-sick and drenched, faces and hair and beards dripping with soft music into the pool of water

within the boat.

What would have happened had John not cried out at last? Had he not been able to wake him?

Beyond the distant hulk of Mount Tabor, the last of a ruddy sunset stained the western sky.

Next to me, Thomas murmured through lips still faintly blue, "How can it be that the winds and waves obey him? Who can do that? What kind of man does that? No man, no man." He fell into the whispered words of the Shema after that, saying them again and again. I wiped my face with an arm that ached when it moved, so tightly had I clutched the side of the boat. I bowed my head, still trying to steady my breath, to will the shaking from my limbs.

The Pharisees had asked for a sign. But he had given it, instead, to us.

WHEN WE CAME TO the other side of the lake, we bailed out the boat, wet and shivering as James started the boat's small cook 188 fire. The flames danced without bending even once, untouched by wind.

I closed my eyes, thinking myself too exhausted to stay awake, but unable to surrender to sleep. I went back again and again to the sight of Jesus standing up in the boat, speaking words that I should not have been able to hear to a wind that should not have obeyed.

I must have slept eventually because before long I became aware of birdsong and the rocking of the boat--of Andrew leaning over the fire to feed it twigs and grass and dung. It was morning and my clothes were not dry, but stuck to me with the same consistency as that mostly dry dung, moldered and rank against my skin.

I vaguely remembered that we had pulled the boat up onto a sandy stretch of shore. We had crossed over and tied up here to the pier--where? And then I realized: We had come to the eastern side of the lake, to the territory of the Gerasenes, a part of the Decapolis.

Several of the others were ashore with Jesus. But next to me, Simon refused to get out of the boat, sending his morning stream directly into the lake.

"The people here are worse than Samaritans. That isn't sheep dung burning on the fire there, but pig."

Why had they gotten out? The only advantage of this place was that it put us outside Herod's territory, but I wasn't sure what was better--the impurity of a pagan land, or moving about beneath the eyes of Herod's spies.

And yet there was my master, walking toward the hills. Would he pray the Shema here, in this pagan place?

West of us, where the hills jutted up sharply, the ground seemed 189

to move. But then I saw that it was not the ground at all, but animals grazing, not so very far off, the color of stones or earth or--

Pigs. Perhaps a hundred of them, or more.

As a boy, I had seen them for sale in the marketplace of Scythopolis. They had fascinated me then, but they disgusted me now if only for the memory of that place and the shame that had come to us there.

I went after the others, hungry and short-tempered, anxious about my master's purpose. Surely he did not mean to preach here? The town was far inland and we had little coin to spend. And what would the pagans do--take us in? Feed us? Welcome us to their tables to eat their pork and drink out of their impure earthen vessels?

Ahead I could see a short basalt scarp on the next hill, and the pockmarks on the rugged face of it--some of them too obviously closed. Too carefully closed, with stones.

Graves.

"Master!" I shouted. "Master!" I called again. But this time a strange gust sounded from higher up as though in reply.

Peter faltered, looked back at me. The sound came again, but this time I saw that it was not the wind.

It was a man, running down the hill, hurling himself down from it, dirty and screaming.

My first thought was that he was a bandit. But then I saw that he was completely naked.

The scream came again, his mouth a gaping hole in his face.

He was not only running, but running as I had seen a horse charge once. His ragged hair flew out behind him, and his arms were wide at his side like wings, keeping him aloft so that it seemed impossible for him to stumble.

Something dangled like a manacle

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from his wrist. His gaze was locked on the small group in front of me, and the look on his face was that of no man I had ever seen.

Malice. Hard and rabid beneath his eyelids, as his tongue flicked out over the lower lip of his open mouth.

It was the stare of the deranged. A murderer's gaze.

He was flying toward them, the lean muscles of his thighs corded beneath the skin as he went straight at one man in particular: Jesus.

I thought, He will kill him.

I had my knife out, was running toward them, but I was still twenty paces behind them, too far away.

"Peter!" I shouted. "Your sword!"

His fist was already closed round the hilt, but Jesus held his hand out toward him and the sword never came free of its scabbard. I yelled again as the madman closed the distance between them, a boat's length away, mere paces--

He fell hard to the ground, as though flung down by an unseen hand.

Peter and John both leapt back as one, nearly knocking into me as James threw his arm out before our master. But Jesus had pushed him aside in a way I did not know a man James' size could be pushed away.

"What do you want with me, son of the Most High God?" the man said.

His voice was the sound of stones grinding together. There was a gummy froth at the corner of his mouth. Naked and bloodied, he clawed his way forward and pitched back onto the ground, his back arching off of it as he said again: "Son of the Most High!"

Son of the Most High?

The man was mad.

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"Master," I said, but it only came out as a whisper. There was a dark light in his eyes that I had not seen in the eyes of any other before.

Jesus said, as though he were any other man who had come to him from the multitudes camping even now outside Capernaum, "What is your name?"

"Our name is Legion," he said with an awful smile. He rose up and landed on the ground again, not so much as one falls down, but as one is flung down. There was fresh blood on his face, coming from his lip, out of his mouth.

"Stop! Do not throw us into the abyss!"

Us?

A chill crept up my spine.

This man was not mad.

Several bees had begun to buzz in a nearby broom brush. At this, the man went wild, batting at invisible insects around him. It was a moment before I realized that there were, in fact, no bees at all this early in the season, and that the buzzing had come, somehow, from him.

He cocked his head to the side at what seemed an unnatural angle as though straining to hear some one, some thing we could not see. Jesus took a step toward him and he flung out his arm toward the high hill and cried,

"Do not torture us. Send us into pigs. Let us go there!"

Above us, the pigs were a sea of swine, churning on the hill as the waters had on the lake just last evening. In the distance, the figure of a man standing off to the side of the herd stopped, seemed to stare, and then point at us. Now I saw there was a second man with him.