Secret Magdalene (19 page)

“Come closer, John,” he says, and as ever his voice is low, and it does not seem to travel, yet I hear him clearly. I move closer, make a place for myself near him, and I listen.

“Here before me is all my mind rails against, and here sleeps all my heart longs for, and yet I must come as a thief in the night.” There is so much of sweet Addai in his face that I am as hard struck by fresh grief for my old friend, as I am struck by a tender green love for this new friend. I begin to see that Yeshu might be a friend, though I do not yet see what kind of a friend. But even as I feel this, I see the Sicarii who stood by Peter as Peter killed another.

Jude moves up behind us. “It is time, Yeshu. Tell us what we do now.”

Yeshu tells us. I look from face to face. Is no one as horrified as I? Oh, Salome, each day I learn what it is to be a man. If I were the Mariamne of long ago, I should live now in comfort in Bethany, likely a rich man’s wife and the mother of children. If I were the Mariamne of only hours ago, in this very moment I should lie in my tent, safe and bored and fretful with discontent. How easy a thing is discontent. How undemanding. But I am John the Less. I am seen as a man, and I will do what must be done. I will prepare myself for what I have chosen to do by what I have chosen to be; though I do it in quiet fear.

As one, we move down the hillside, following Seth who takes us away from the tombs and into a field of flax and thence into the first of the olive groves. Not I, but the others do this as a great beast of the night would do this, with grace and assurance and a calm acceptance that once begun, a thing must continue to its appointed end—there will be no turning back. I would be like this. I would be as a leopard by night, and to this end, I begin by pretending I am like this. Swiftly and silently, we drop down to the Kidron Road, and then, as if we are no more than travelers late on our weary way, we openly enter the city by the Gihon Spring Gate. The customs station is unmanned. There are no guards, either Roman soldiers or Temple police. Perhaps this is so because no one would expect that having made his escape, neither John, nor any of John’s people, would return.

We are now inside the first of the city walls. Before us, and to our left, is the northernmost Pool Tower where the sweet waters of the Gihon Spring are stored against drought or siege. Following Seth, it is to the foot of this tower we now quickly climb. We disturb nothing, wake no one. No dog rises up to growl warning, no roosting hen flaps away in loud alarm. At the tower, we pause as Seth pauses, waiting here for one long breathless moment. Then Seth is moving again. As before, he walks as one who has nothing to fear from those who frown on those out and about at night. We cross over side streets, always keeping in full view of any who might see us. We turn up this narrow passageway or that, and it is not long before I have no idea where we are. All I know is that we do not go toward Father’s closed house and that we have passed through the second inner wall of the city. I know the ground under us rises, that we must be near the hippodrome, and that we climb north toward Herod’s Temple. By and by, we come to a new wall, one unfamiliar to me. It is not tall enough to be the south wall of the Temple platform, yet it is a very fine wall indeed. Seth makes his way directly to a door in this wall, takes a large key from his bag, and unlocks it; as the door swings open into gloom, he slips inside. After him go I, then Simeon, then Yeshu, then Jude. Yeshu would go last, but this Jude would never allow.

Seth lights a small golden lamp set in a carved niche in the inner wall, and now all around us appears, shadowed and silent and huge, a great hall of finest ashlar stone. “Welcome,” says he, and the word echoes throughout the vastness, “to the palace of the Queen of Adiabene, Helen of the Assyrians.”

I would stand and I would stare, but we spend no more time in this unfinished palace than we did among the tombs overlooking the city. Enough to get our bearings, enough to know Helen herself is not here, enough to know that Seth is at home between these new walls as he is in the wilderness, as he was in the Great Library at Alexandria, enough to wonder at this or at that shining hall or courtyard or bath or private chamber as we hurry past it. And certainly enough to know that there is yet no roof; above us shine the stars that map our hope and our wonder.

Throughout the night, there are men in Helen’s employ who guard her palace, and as we pass them, all nod at Seth, the second son of Helen. In a matter of moments we come to the north wall of the palace of Queen Helen, a wall that is entirely completed. Seth tells us this wall abuts on the very wall that encloses the courtyard below the Temple’s southern Huldah Gates. Here we find one last door. Once again Seth retrieves a key from his bag and once again a door opens into deepest gloom.

“It is now,” he says, “that we go under the courtyard. This tunnel system was ordered by Helen and built by Addai, and I know it well. But once it joins the old tunnels under the Temple Mount itself, it must be a matter of trust that I will find a way through.”

“You will lead and we will follow,” says Yeshu. “This night is our night.”

With that, Seth shines his lamp into the first tunnel. And then he is gone, swallowed by the gloom on the other side of the door. Before he goes too far, we follow.

Again and again it seems he loses his way; this is more than the tunnels under the settlement, more than the tunnels that rise up into the settlement cliffs. The hills upon which Jerusalem sleeps are as shot through with tunnels as the surface is shot through with streets. Like the wilderness, there is a world under Jerusalem, and it is dim and chill and secret—whose world is this? I lose myself in thoughts of Alexandria, for just as under the Temple there is another temple, so too under Alexandria there is another Alexandria. Beneath her streets and temples and palaces and parks and gymnasia and quarters of this people or that, is a city of vaulted cisterns and canals and columned halls stretching away endlessly, story upon story of them. Under Alexandria flow the floodwaters of the Nile, forever whispering and chuckling in the dark. Here, there is also the sound of running water—we have come to the Pool of the Lark, the black water brought out of the hills around Jerusalem. We go deeper and deeper, only to rise again, and then for a time we climb, only to plunge down once more. There is a timeless moment we pass through a tunnel so narrow we must walk in single file, and there is a time we pass through one in which we must bend to half our height. More than once we seem in no tunnel at all, but in a vast cave of shifting echoes. Some of the tunnels are arched, and some are no more than cuttings in the stone, and then, once more, we climb, and we continue to climb until, finally, Seth hesitates, pauses, walks back a pace or two, and then stops to shine his lamp on a wall of stone. “Blessed be,” I hear him whisper in infinite relief. In this wall there is a door I can but faintly make out. To this door, Seth has no key, but then the door has no lock. It is no more than a thick slab of wood.

At a gesture from Yeshu, Simeon and Jude, being the largest of us, push at it until it swings back with a terrible protest of ancient wood against even more ancient stone.

“When we go through this door,” says Seth, “we will be under the Fortress of Antonia itself.” Taking the lamp from his hand, Yeshu steps forward into the opening as Seth finishes what he would say, “From here on, I do not know the way.”

“Be at peace,” says Yeshu, “we will do what we have come to do.”

I think, We must be gone from Jerusalem while it is yet dark, and not one of us knows the way from here? I look at Jude and at Simeon. In neither face—lit from below by lamplight, their beards are enormous, like flaming trees—is there anything but undaunted resolution. I look at Seth; he waits for Yeshu to do whatever it is we will do next. I look at Yeshu. His eyes shine; he claps Jude on his broad back. “Come, Jude, if we do not know the way, any way we choose could be the right way.” Then he is off into the last of the tunnels, which seem older by far than those through which we have come. We must run to keep up with him.

Our tunnel branches into three tunnels, each dug through bedrock: two lead down, one leads up. Without hesitation, Yeshu chooses that which leads up. In time, we come to a chamber, dank and cold, in which there are stone steps carved into the stone wall. These steps lead up to a door in the chamber’s ceiling. From the state of the steps, scattered with grit and the debris of ages, no one has been here for a long time. But perhaps there is an armed guard standing beyond the door even now, waiting for anyone foolish enough to push himself through? Or perhaps, long ago, a weight has been placed against it, a stone as big as the wilderness kiln? Or perhaps this door is long forgotten. For without doubt, these tunnels and these steps have been here much longer than Rome herself.

Staring at the door, Seth says, “It was only a stonecutter’s rumor, a rumor of rumors.”

If Yeshu or the others wonder at their entire plan being based on rumor, no one mentions it. It has been a gamble to come here, and it will be a bigger gamble to climb the steps. We climb the steps. Jude goes first, for Jude will always go first, or go last, whatever is needed to protect Yeshu. Then Yeshu, then me, and then Seth, and finally Simeon. All have drawn their knives, so I draw my knife, which feels heavy and strange in my hand. If I had to, could I use it? I do not know. Seth has left the lighted lamp on the floor of the chamber below us, so that as we climb the light grows dimmer and dimmer. Up here, the dark tastes of rust and mold and fear. I hear the sound the door makes as Jude presses his shoulder against it. I am sure everyone in the entire Fortress of Antonia hears this sound; more than a protest of wood and stone and the dead weight of years, it is a shrill drawn-out complaint. And then Yeshu is moving up, which must mean that Jude is moving up, so that I climb the next step as well, and the next, and here we are, through the door and crouched in what must be the lowest, and most terrible dungeon in the most terrible place I can imagine. There is a faint light far ahead of us, and by it I see there is nothing here but stone and filth. I crouch because a man cannot stand here. The stone ceiling brushes the top of my head. And if I crouch, how must the others contort themselves? There are no arches or vaults or ornaments of any kind, and the floor is nothing but the scraped stone of the mountain itself littered with rubble. The air is old and unmoving and cold, and it will never be other than cold. Holding up the low ceiling, which is, no doubt, the floor of the story above us, whatever grim place that might be, are crudely chiseled pillars, so many they make a thick and dreadful forest of stone.

Stooped and silent, Yeshu starts toward the light.

We leap over a rivulet of vile-smelling filth running along the floor. Everywhere we avoid middens of broken pottery and refuse, twice become confused by the trees of stone, but finally Yeshu and Jude come to the source of the light. It turns out to be no more than a torch fixed to a pillar and, below the pillar and the torch, a rough wooden stool. Someone has recently sat on this stool, and judging by the wooden platter of bread and olives they could return any moment.

We have come also to a low wall of large, fitted stones, and in this wall there are doors to a dozen cells that are as much like the tombs in the City of the Dead of Alexandria as they are like cells. My stomach roils to see them; the ache in my arm returns. Each small door is bound with straps of iron, and in each is a barred opening. All have heavy locks, though I see no key.

Holding the torch he has taken from its place on the pillar, Yeshu is at the first of them, peering into the opening. He moves to the second. Then to the third. At this, there comes a faint cry, and before Seth can stop me, I rush to this third cell, press my face against the bars, gagging from the stink. Against the far wall, Addai lies among refuse. He is thrown on the stones as the carcass of a dog or a murderer would be thrown. His hair and his beard are matted with blood and with vomit. What have they done to his face? What have they done to his hands? How could any man hurt such a one as Addai?

No matter that he is broken and bloodied, no matter that he soils himself, this is Addai, and I call to him, and would touch him, and give him what is mine to give, and I will not be stopped.

He hears me! And hearing me, tries to pull himself up from the floor of his cell, and I can see how painful this is, and I can see how hard it is, for Addai is a strong man, and he does not show effort, but he cannot seem to rise. He lifts his bloodied head and there! He sees me! He smiles! Addai’s is a smile that can warm even here, even here, and I smile back, demented with love. But still, he seems unable to rise.

“We are come, Addai,” I call to him, my voice low and frantic. “We are come.”

Why is it he cannot rise up? And then I see.
Eloi!
They have broken his arms. They have broken his fingers. A master stone carver, an artist, and his hands are destroyed. Oh Isis! I turn to cry out that Addai of Shechem, who harms no one, has been cruelly used, but behind me, I hear Jude hiss us all to silence. The guard is returning. On the instant, I drop away from the barred window, move more quickly than I have ever moved into the shadow of a pillar. As does Seth and Jude and the cousin from Galilee. Before he too slips into shadow, Yeshu has only the space of a breath to replace the torch.

A moment later comes the guard, only one, for who would need more for cells that are deep in the earth under Jerusalem? One is enough for such a lost and hopeless place. It is Jude who is closest to the man, nothing more than a thin-faced, long-nosed Roman soldier, young and obviously ill tempered, as who would not be to find himself stuck on a stool in a place like this? And it is Jude who reaches round from behind the man to clasp him in a fierce and silent embrace. Stiff with shock, I watch as Jude cuts off the soldier’s wind, and when the youth goes limp in his arms, Simeon is also upon him, binding him with cord, stuffing his mouth with cloth. This is all done so quietly and so quickly, I am half appalled and half thrilled. Jude has done this before; Simeon has done this before—have they not been Sicarii for a very long time? Immediately, Yeshu kneels over the tightly bound soldier to find the key, and I put away my horror at such efficiency as he unlocks the cell in which Addai is caged, and I am inside and I am holding him so soon as I possibly can.