Temple Boys (20 page)

Then Flea saw Shim.

He was standing in the shadows at the back of the courtyard, but the sudden flare of a nearby torch lit up his weak, handsome face. It had lines that had not been there the day before and he was looking around as if nothing quite made sense.

Flea made his way toward him. “Satisfied now?” he sneered. His voice felt harsh. “Come to check the job's been done?”

“I…” Shim's mouth opened and he tried to lick his lips. “That's not … why I … came here.” A particularly brutal snap of the whip made him wince. “Is it quite necessary…?”

“No!” Flea said. “It's not necessary. It's not necessary at all. That's what Jude was trying to show you.”

Shim pursed his lips. “Jude didn't understand what was at stake. Jude didn't understand what … was needed.”

“Jude loved Yesh and wanted this not to happen. Tell me what you want to happen. Tell me what the secret is.”

“Secret?”

“That's what's happening here. The Romans think Yesh has a power and they're trying to whip it out of him. Jude knew that. Jude wanted to stop it.”

“Jude did not understand greatness. Where is Jude now? At least I've come to bear witness. To accept what we have done. Yesh will die outside the city. He will be sacrificed by strangers out in the world. Now the whole world is his Temple. To show how proud—”

That was too much for Flea. “Proud! You're proud of this? Hey!” he called out. “This is one of Yeshua's followers! He loved Yesh so much he wanted this to happen! Here! This one here!”

Shim paled as people turned to look at him. He shook his head and backed away, hands out. “Don't listen to that brat! What would I be doing here if I was one of his followers?”

“He feels guilty,” Flea shouted. “That's why he's here!”

“I don't know anything.”

The damage done, Flea ran back to Yesh. Guards tried to stop him but the Results Man waved him through. His face was spattered with blood and he looked tense. “Will he talk to you? He won't … He won't talk to me! He just won't
talk
!” The word exploded from his mouth.

Yesh had collapsed now, held up only by his wrists, which were tied to the whipping post. Strips of his back were hanging down like saddle straps. His face was a color beyond white, beyond anything. He smelled like a butcher's block.

Flea knelt.

“Tell him your secret,” he said. “Please! You can't have meant this to happen. Not like this! Tell him and he'll let you go. Your back will get better. You could heal it yourself, or tell someone else how to.”

When Yeshua opened his eyes, he looked scared. “Don't…” He licked his cracked lips.

“Don't what?”

“Tempt me.” He tried to swallow. “Don't leave me.”

The Results Man was there immediately. “What did he say? I saw his lips move.” He gnawed at one of his nails. They were bitten down to the quick.

“He asked me not to tempt him. Then he asked me to stay.” Flea looked into the Results Man's eyes. They looked strained and his mouth was pulled into an odd shape. “You thought he'd crack by now,” he said.

“I don't understand it. Why hasn't he done something? He's meant to have powers. That's meant to be the point. I push him and I push and … he tells me.”

A soldier, crested, cloaked, clean-shaven, muscled his way through the crowd.

“Governor wants his report.”

“Not yet. We're not ready.”

“Governor was led to understand that you'd have something by now.”

“Well I don't. Yet.”

“Yet isn't good enough. He's to be executed—that's the sentence, and it's got to be done now if he's going to die in time.”

“In time for what?” The Results Man looked panicked.

“This feast means he has to be dead by midday and in the ground before sunset, so local customs can be properly respected. That means commencing the execution now and you reporting your findings to the governor.”

“Rome can't be worried about local customs. Do you know what's at stake?”

“Tell it to the governor. You're coming with me.” The soldier's hand strayed toward his sword hilt.

The Results Man turned to Flea. “Stay with him. If you want your friends to live, you'd better tell me what happens. What he says as he dies. You're my witness. Make this mess mean something.”

Flea looked up. Dawn.

The sky was lemon-juice gray streaked with pomegranate red. It matched Yesh's skin.

The whole sky was Yesh's skin.

His body was a temple as high as the sky and as broad as the world.

 

41

On the top of the Skull,
a row of square holes had been chiseled into the rock in front of a rickety guardhouse. A stack of timbers stood nearby. Nailings usually took place at sunup and the soldiers who did it were always drunk.

Crosses didn't kill people. They let people kill themselves with the most pain and the least supervision. They were economical. The upright of a cross was just tall enough to hold the victim's feet off the ground, the crosspiece just wide enough to spread his arms, the wood just thick enough to take three huge nails, one for the feet and two for the wrists.

Try to reduce the pressure on your wrists by pushing upward and your feet pressed down on the nail that went through them. Relax the knees and the nails in your wrists tore flesh and tendons and ground on the bones. As your knees weakened, you slumped farther and farther down so your arms rose in a V shape and squeezed the air from your lungs. In the end, at the end, it wasn't the cross that killed you. It was your weight as the earth called your body home.

Two other men were due to die that day. They dropped their beams at the top of the hill, fetched the uprights from a stack behind the shed, then dropped the beam into a notch and watched the soldiers lash it into place. The first of them was wrestled to the ground and his right wrist was nailed to the crosspiece, then his left wrist; then his legs were held crossed at the ankles and a single nail was hammered through them. He resisted sluggishly—relatives had bribed the Imps to drug his last meal with poppy—but he began to wail as the soldiers lifted the cross and he screamed when its foot slammed into the square hole cut into the ground and held him vertical. The second man begged the soldiers to knock him out then screamed all the way through the process.

Flea closed his eyes when it was Yesh's turn and blessed him for his silence. He huddled behind a nearby boulder, holding his knees and rocking from side to side. He was hollow and numb, as if he had no feelings left. The world was swirling around him. He wanted to join it, get whisked away like a snowflake, but he was too tired and too weak. Behind him he could hear the dying men groan, but it meant nothing to him. Nothing at all.

He was woken by women's voices. They came from below. He screwed his eyes tight shut and waited for them to reach the top of the hill. They fell silent, then one of them screamed, another moaned, and a third began shouting at the guards.

Flea continued to feel detached from it all until hands grabbed him and shook him.

“The child's in shock, Mari. Leave him be.”

“But the guard said he came here with Yeshua. He must have seen. He must know what happened.”

“He's an idiot. Look, he's drooling.”

Flea opened his eyes. Every color but gray had fled. The sky was gray, the western hills were gray, the city was gray, the stony hill was gray.

There was a face very close to his. He looked past it to the crosses. On Yesh's left-hand side was a thin man who looked half-starved.
Must be a sneak thief,
Flea thought.
No visitors.

On his right-hand side was a big man, dragged out by a ballooning white belly.
Tax collector,
Flea thought. His family looked exhausted and inconvenienced.

Flea looked at the person who had lifted him. A woman, tall and beautiful, with tawny hair, full lips, and big gray eyes. He wiped the dribble from his chin and giggled. The woman dropped him as if he were toxic.

He got to his feet, swayed, and said, “I apologize.” For some reason he felt drunk, but that was better than feeling nothing. With the tall woman was another with the weather-beaten face of a villager, frizzy bangs escaping from her headscarf. Behind her was an older woman with a wrinkled face, who was gazing at Flea with deep-set eyes that seemed familiar. They were the same as Yesh's, he realized. The old woman must be Yesh's mother. That woke him up.

Flea tried to stand up straight and met the eyes of the beautiful woman, who apparently didn't like him.

“Go on, say it,” she snapped. “If he's a magician, why can't he magic himself off the cross?” She looked around. “And where are the others? Where are his friends? His followers? Where's his brother?”

“Only Jude was there when the Imps got him. The others must've run away when they heard the soldiers,” Flea told her.

She gave him a sharp look. “You were there?”

“I'm a friend of Jude. We were trying to stop this.”

“And where is Jude? He said we were all going to meet up! He promised us. We thought we'd be eating with Yesh tonight. It's the Great Feast. Families should be together.”

“You're his family?”

“This is his mother. Matta and I … we're friends.” She nodded to the woman with the weather-beaten face.

The crosses were so low and Mari was so tall that her head was on the same level as Yesh's. His head was down on his chest and the circlet of thorns had slipped down across one eye, but the other was open. Flea could not imagine anybody suffering that damage and living. He couldn't imagine anybody suffering that much damage at all.

Matta reached out a hand to stroke Yesh's cheek, but jerked it back as the guard shouted a warning.

The guard marched over, grabbed Yesh's cheeks to force his mouth open, and peered inside. “I said, no touching. You'd be surprised what people do—try and slip 'em all kinds of poison. Mind you, this one won't last long and, between you and me, we've been told to finish 'em off early today so the … er, correct procedures can be undertaken before your holy day.”

“Correct procedures?” Mari asked.

“Burial and suchlike before your rest day. It's a respect thing.”

“You call this respect?” Mari's voice would have frozen Temple oil.

The guard pursed his lips. “Look, lady, I don't know what it's called. I just follow orders, and I know that we have to tiptoe around your people's rules at the present time to avoid so much as a whiff of trouble. I thought it was doing you a favor, but if you don't appreciate it, well, that's as much as I've come to expect.”

He sniffed and stumped off. Mari clasped her head, and it looked to Flea like she was screaming silently until she managed to force out the words, “How could they? How could they? We don't even know where to bury him. How did it end like this? He was going to shine for all of us. He was our hope.”

Flea looked at her ravaged face and suddenly two thoughts fitted together like two hands meeting.

“He thinks his death is your hope.” The simple words seemed to burn away the puzzlement and confusion of the night before so that more of a new truth was revealed. No, not new. It had always been there, it was just that Flea had not been able to see it. “It wasn't just that he wanted to die. He thought—”

“What? He wanted to die?” Mari looked at Flea as if he had slapped her.

“He set it all up. I even know where his tomb is. It was all arranged. Every detail.”

And now that the fog of confusion had been burned away, the truth had shape. It was all so clear that Flea could walk around it, see it, feel its shape and horror.

“Arranged?” Mari said again.

Flea spoke slowly. “Yesh wants to change the world. He thinks he needs to die to make that happen, but we've got to stop it. The Romans know what's going on. They think they can borrow his power … I don't know how but I just know they want a bit of it. He can't die. He mustn't die!”

“Are you insane?” Mari said. “Of course he mustn't die.”

“No, no! He wants to die and the Romans want him to die and his followers want him to die but he mustn't, because if he does—”

“Quiet!”
The cry came from Matta. “He's trying to talk! The Master is talking!”

They crowded round the cross, hands behind their backs so the guard could not object. Yesh had managed to lift his head. His eyes, black and soft as plums, moved from side to side until they came to rest on Flea. His lips moved. “Find Jude. Tell him I'm … sorry. Tell the others they must forgive him. He was … part of the story.”

Memories from the night before, sharp and dark and bitter, suddenly rushed into Flea's mind and he was overcome with rage. “He was right!” he shouted. “Don't you understand? He was right and you were wrong! I wish I hadn't met you. I wish you'd left us alone because things weren't great then,
but they weren't as bad as this
!”

Yeshua's back arched as if he were trying to tear himself off the cross but all he did was open the wounds in his wrists and ankles. Blood began to drip and his head collapsed back onto his chest.

Then Flea felt his anger leave as suddenly as it had arrived. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean … Please don't die. Please, don't use your power to change anything. Use it to live. Cure yourself. I'm begging you. Please.” He got his fingers around the square head of the nail that pierced Yesh's ankles and tried to pull it free.

“Oi. Get away from that prisoner!” The guard grabbed a short stabbing spear and waddled toward them. “It's time, anyway.”

“Please. Please,” Flea begged Yeshua. “You don't understand. You don't see.” He felt tearful and hated it, because now more than ever he needed to explain, but his throat felt blocked and his eyes felt blind. Hands took him and held him.