Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (29 page)

"If you knew him, you wouldn't say this," I said, but I had no anger left, and my words sounded hollow.

"I don't need to know him to know his deeds."

"For your sake, for Mother's sake--for your children, take care, Nathan. For their sake. Do not leave them without a father."

"How soon are you leaving?" he said coldly, collected again.

I glanced at the message in his hand, desperate to know what it said. "Soon.

Now."

He went out without saying goodbye. Mother cried after him, her hand to her heart as though the earth had rent open before her.

"Please, Judas. Does this teacher need you as we do?"

I wanted to comfort her, but there was nothing left to say. I had chosen my master over them already. Whatever his fate, whatever he was--madman or Messiah--I would live or die with him.

It was this thought that propelled me out of the house that night. Through the streets, my sandals slapping against the worn stone that had survived war and the shedding of a multitude of lives. He was of questioned birth. By the law, he was a blasphemer. A breaker of the Sabbath. I did not understand his cryptic sayings. Why, even as he talked of freedom, he talked of death.

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But none of that mattered.

Even as the voice within me screamed that I dare not ignore the fact that the priests and Pharisees wanted to kill him, I knew I would not trade him even for the law.

Or for Israel herself.

I loved him. I loved him.

I lurched through the city, out the gate--there to the cave, where I knew they would be.

I threw my arms around Jesus as he rose upon seeing me--this master who

had been so broken with his own grief, for whom I had tried to be so strong.

"Hail, Master," I said, choking. My knees buckled and I sagged in his arms, weeping.

No, he did not need me. But I desperately needed him.

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The Jerusalem we left was no longer the place I had known, the shining city of Zion. It had always been filled with capricious mobs and Romans, with radical students and the insurmountable wealth of the Temple, with Pharisees pursuing the law of God with the exacting edge of a knife. I had always known this, but until now never understood what it meant to be the object of such righteous hate. Her streets ran now with murder, and when I dreamt of the Temple, it was not of the golden facade, but of the sacrificial blood that poured from her gutters.

Our last night in Bethany, I sat in the house of the sisters Mary and Martha, and listened to my master teach. I sat beside Mary as though we were both men in the synagogue or students in the porticoes. It did not seem amazing to me anymore to do this. I pretended that we were no longer a group of disciples following their uncertain master, but all that existed in this world.

Like Lot and his daughters, thinking they were the only survivors in the world at the burning of Gomorrah, leaving the city for a place where the former order held no more sway.

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And like Lot at the burning of Gomorrah, none of this was how I had hoped it would be. Jerusalem was as good as a mass of burning embers to me and what had I taken away?

We hadn't gone far north before a group of Pharisees caught up to us in their fine linen robes. I braced myself with what little reserve I had left, but these Pharisees had not come from Jerusalem, but Perea, east of the Jordan.

"We've come to tell you that you have to leave here. Leave and go someplace else. Herod wants to kill you."

They would kill him in Jerusalem. They would kill him in Perea or Galilee.

Now where were we to go?

That evening, we camped near Bethany by the waters of the Jordan River where this had all begun.

"Please, Master," I said a few nights later. "Come away from here, where you will be safe."

"Judas," he said, his eyes filled with the injury I could not understand. "Don't you believe that there is work here I must do?"

Months ago, I might have cried out: But you are not doing it!

But tonight I only said: "Can you not do it in Philip's territory? Why must it be here, always in the place of danger, with men who would kill you? Don't you know that I love you, that I can't bear the thought of you in danger? Please, come away."

"Judas--"

"Please." I felt my vision swimming with tears. "I don't care what you do.

Please, will you come away from this danger and live."

He lowered his head and I knew I had disappointed and hurt him.

Desperation rose up in me and I swiped at my eyes, no longer caring how womanish it looked.

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"Judas, no one lights a lamp to put it under a bowl. It is put on a stand so that those who come can see the light."

"Yes, but there are those who are coming to extinguish it!"

He blinked at me. "Do you still think I've come to bring peace?"

I covered my face. What was the use of reasoning with a madman?

"Judas, we are almost to the end of this journey. We are almost there. Trust what I do and say."

"I have trusted. I have. I do," I said, with bone weariness.

"HE IS NOT IN his right mind," I said to Simon that night when we could talk alone. Our master's brother had intimated the same thing long before and we had defended him. But now I wondered if we should have listened.

Simon was quiet.

"Are you well?" I said.

"We could leave," he said. "We could go to Gamala. If you truly want to serve this cause, there are men there who knew Judas bar Hezekiah and follow the sons of his loins."

"Maybe we could go meet with them in secret," I suggested. "Join our forces together--"

Simon was already shaking his head. "Open your eyes, Judas! Do you think the Sons of the Teacher will wait on a man like our master? They see only a man who won't raise the muster he's capable of. Who shuns the violent ways they crave. Who won't tell them to kill Romans or to not pay their taxes."

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"We can't leave him," I said.

He glanced down. "I have left all to follow him. But he's bent on his own death. He will bring about ours. That's what he meant when he said to take up our crosses." His brow wrinkled when he looked up at me again. "Are we ready for that?"

Several people came down from Galilee. More a few days later and more the next, including several bandits. They might be any landless men or day-laborers except that I saw the feral look in their eyes and, on occasion, the flash of one of their swords.

Jesus healed everyone they brought to him. His teaching took on a tone of greater urgency, as one who is rushing to say all that he must in too short a time. And his parables turned strange.

"I'm telling you, don't be afraid of those who kill the body. Be afraid of the one who, after you're dead, can throw you to the fires of Hinnom. Fear him."

Peter, who had been sitting near me, turned his head and whispered, "What

is he talking about?"

I shook my head, because I didn't know. But it didn't matter; the crowd increased. Within a week, it had doubled.

The throng was returning.

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We took up our camp and went into Jericho. It was two months until Passover. There, in the city, was a woman with a bent back. It was the Sabbath but Jesus healed her anyway.

But this time was different. When the synagogue leaders began to rail at him, Jesus shouted, "You hypocrites! Doesn't each of you untie your donkey or ox on the Sabbath and lead it out to water? Shouldn't this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound so many years by the Accuser, be set free on the Sabbath day?"

The people were cheering. I couldn't believe my ears.

"I've come to bring fire on the earth," he said, "And how I wish it were already kindled!"

I saw how the bandits with us received this with gleaming eyes and knew their thoughts immediately: Surely what he spoke of was nothing less than war.

It was too early after our flight from Jerusalem. I dare not lay claim to my hope. But that day I felt the return of something I had not felt in a very long time. Love, I had felt for Jesus now for a long while. Fear and confusion, I had felt for him. Need, I had felt for him, too.

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But that day, I felt pride.

In Cypros, my master told stories of banquets thrown not for the rich but for the poor. Those men I knew to be bandits among our group approved. They approved, too, when a few days later my master said, "Suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won't he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?"

When he was not teaching, he seemed to gather silence around him as one gathers stores before a storm, or strength, as though shoring himself up. He prayed often through the entire night until dawn, so that he looked gaunt by day. Andrew and Peter and James and I often went with him to protect him, often falling asleep to the sound of his murmured words, often waking to find he had gone on farther without us.

The day that Talmon, servant of Martha and Mary, arrived at our camp, Jesus was talking again about the kingdom of heaven--not that it was leaven or a pearl, but that people would be eating and drinking as in the days before the flood destroyed them all.

"Teacher!" Talmon all but collapsed in the arms of my master as though he had run all this way. "Please! Lazarus, whom you love, is sick. Come quickly--they fear he will die."

Jesus, holding the man by the arms, cried out. I knew the look in his eyes and was afraid he might leave with him that very moment. But it was Peter who issued the caution.

"Please, Teacher," he urged. "You dare not travel so near Jerusalem. You barely left with your life last time!"

"Please!" Talmon said. "He is dying. He won't live long!"

I looked from the desperate slave to my master. We all knew and loved Lazarus. But we loved our master more.

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"It is for God's glory," Jesus said, slowly letting go of the servant. "So that the son of God may be glorified." I thought then that he said it to comfort himself, that he said it because he knew he could not return and live, and therefore could not--dare not--go. He took a step back, saying again, "It is for God's glory." And though his words spoke reassurance, his expression was deeply troubled.

"Please, Teacher, hurry!" Talmon cried.

But Jesus let Talmon go, telling Andrew to get him something to eat. And then my master went off for a little while, pulling his shawl up over his head.

He was gone through the day and into the evening--so long that Talmon began to pull at his hair and beg Peter and Andrew to please go after him and make him come.

"Don't fear," Peter said. "Our master has healed from afar many times. It might be even now that Lazarus is well again."

But I had seen the look on Jesus' face. He was tortured as one who all but stands by the bedside of one dying.

Would he truly not heal Lazarus and leave his slave to kill himself with worry? It was nothing for him to say only "He is healed right now--go home."

He healed any person who came to him even on the Sabbath. Would he not heal his friend? I did not understand him!