Testament (43 page)

I must have screamed then, though I didn’t know it, because in an instant the lid was off the basket and Huram was staring down at me. He went hard as stone then, realizing I’d seen everything.

I was spattered in blood that had come through the weave of the basket.

“Go out and wash yourself,” Huram said, angry, as if I were to blame. And when I went out I didn’t even dare to look around in the courtyard, at what my father looked like, or my mother, lying dead.

Huram spent the rest of the day and into the night getting rid of the bodies, though I couldn’t have told you what he did with them, our mother and father any more than the rest, because the whole time he made me stay in the stable. By the next morning, when he finally let me back into the house, I could hardly tell that anything had gone on in the place except for a spot of dried blood here or there. It was as if the whole thing had never happened, and the truth was that the time went by and not a word of the thing was ever breathed between us, not of our mother or of a single circumstance of what had gone on that day.

It was from then that things were never right between
me and Huram. And the more time that passed the worse they got, because I’d started to say to myself that what he did to our mother was no better than what he’d have done to an animal, or just that she hadn’t been worth anything in his eyes, being a woman. But I knew it wasn’t like that—I couldn’t have said what it was like, except that I’d understood, in a way, what Huram had done, and that made it worse. Lying there under the stars now I tried to tell myself that maybe all those horrible things had been part of some plan, the way my mother used to say that there was a plan for each of us, and that somehow that made them right. But I knew I was just fooling myself, and that there wasn’t a thing that was any good about what had happened back then, and even lying there thinking back on it now almost made me want to take a knife to myself, because of the waste of it.

I woke up the next morning stiff with cold out there in the open, the stars still shining over my head and just a lick of daylight skimming the hills. The rest of the camp was quiet so I went over to one of the caves nearby to relieve myself, wanting to get out of the cold. But while I was there I heard voices, so close they might have been right behind me. It was a trick of the caves—someone was talking in another one nearby and somehow the sound was getting tunnelled into my own.

It took me an instant before I realized who it was—Judas and Jesus. So Judas had finally got Jesus alone. At first all I could gather from what Judas was saying was that he didn’t want Jesus to go into Jerusalem, and that he was already risking his life telling Jesus the little he had.

But Jesus answered him, “From what you’ve told me, I only see greater reason to go, so there’ll be at least a few of us who’ll be on the side of peace instead of blood.”

“Then you’ll just be killed along with everyone else,” Judas said, sounding angry now. “From your story last night, I’d have thought you’d want to stay alive.”

“Not if it means letting other people get killed.”

“You didn’t seem to mind in the case of John,” Judas said, but from the silence that followed it was clear he regretted saying it.

A tiredness had come into Judas’s voice when he spoke again.

“I had to betray all my oaths to tell you what I did. Don’t let it be for nothing.”

“It wasn’t for nothing if you did what you thought was right,” Jesus said.

An instant later I saw Jesus walking back to the camp, and then Judas following several paces behind him. I didn’t know what to make of any of this. But Jesus was already going around the camp rousing people to start up our march again. I made my way back to Jerubal’s tent and told him what I’d heard in the cave, starting to think by now that it might be time to heed the signs, given all the things that had gone wrong for us so far on our journey. But Jerubal said it was nothing to fret about—there wasn’t a festival that went by in Jerusalem that one group or another didn’t plan some sort of mayhem, though the Romans always smelled things out and squashed them before they ever got started. Jesus, at any rate, seemed only more set on his path, hurrying us along as if we were his little soldiers. It wasn’t for me to gainsay him—I’d thrown in my lot now, for better or ill.

Jesus wanted to make Jericho by nightfall, and we had to do a quick march to get past the halfway point before the sun got too hot. I hung at the back with Jerubal but at one point Jesus caught sight of me and called me up with his own little circle. I was too pleased with that to do anything more than just slip in quietly there with his other men. I was starting to feel almost at home with them now, as if I might actually belong with them, half-scoundrel that I was—it wasn’t like Jesus, in any event, to keep a man out simply for being a scoundrel. There was one fellow in the camp, by the name of Aram, who had actually tried to ransom Jesus’s followers to a bandit chief, and Jesus had forgiven him in the end and let him stay with the rest. You didn’t see much of him, though—he’d get his food, and dart his eyes around like a thief, then steal back to whatever corner it was he’d come out of.

Judas was seeming even more of a mystery now. He’d delivered his poison, and logic would have said he’d be on his way, given the danger to him, from what I’d understood, of returning to Jerusalem. But instead, like some cur, he was sticking with us, skulking along as if in the end he wasn’t any different from the others, and just wanted Jesus to love him. When we joined up with the main road, where the traffic was fairly heavy with the other pilgrims going along, he kept looking around him as if he expected the knife any moment, so that my heart almost went to him. Something happened then, when we stopped to rest once, that surprised me—Judas had sat to massage his blistered feet when Mary came, though with a face like a mourner’s, and offered to rub oil on them. Judas could hardly look at her then for his embarrassment. But still he nodded and she knelt in front of him,
and it was the strangest thing then, watching how gently she rubbed his sores and knowing it cost her to do it.

The sun was beating down on us by then, and with every step we took the air got drier and the land more gravelly and bare until there wasn’t anything to look at but the stones and the white hills and maybe a thorn bush here or there and a buzzard or two in the sky. For all the traffic along the road, it seemed even ten thousand of us couldn’t have made an impression on that rubbly wilderness. Already from a long way off, though, you could see the walls of Jericho in the valley up ahead, surrounded by palm and balsam fields because of the springs there. It made the journey easier to see that oasis of green waiting ahead for us. At noon we put up at a roadhouse to wait out the heat and then around mid-afternoon set out on the final leg to Jericho, making for the ford at Bethabara so we could cross back over the Jordan into Judea.

When we reached the customs-house at the river, though, the soldiers there, without any explanation, made us all line up at the side of the road and then came along and searched us one by one, even the women, and went through every bit of our baggage. Judas, just standing there with the rest of us, had turned to stone, whether from anger or fear I couldn’t have said. But when the soldiers came to him they took his dagger, a fine thing with a gilded handle covered in jewels. He seemed ready to make an argument, the blood rising in him, but in the end he just swallowed his words. The soldiers dumped the knife into a burlap sack they carried where they’d put a few others and told him he could collect it back when he returned from his pilgrimage. But you knew he would never see the thing again.

When they’d gone through the line of us they let us cross the ford. From there, we pushed on for Jericho, reaching it after dark, and only to find it crawling with soldiers as well. We had to line up outside the city gates and go through another search. It was clear by now what had happened—the Romans had got wind of whatever plot was afoot, as Jerubal had said they would. Judas must have come to the same conclusion because he had a bit of a wildness in his eye, like an animal that didn’t know which way to turn. I noticed he wouldn’t let Jesus out of his sight now, as if he had to protect him. But Jesus himself only seemed to get calmer the more chaotic things got around him.

When our group had been passed we were herded off for the night to a camp the soldiers had set up just outside the walls, since the roadhouse was filled. In the dark we could hardly see what we were doing, tripping over people because the place was swarming as well, everyone trying to stake out their bit of ground for their tents. We had to fight to get a corner for ourselves, and then it was mainly just rubble and rock, so that it didn’t look like a very good night ahead for us.

Our spirits improved after we’d all settled and the food had started going around. Seeing that everyone was looked after, Jesus said he wanted to see a friend of his in town who’d taken care of him after he’d come out of the desert. Simon the Rock arranged for a little group to go with him, and I noticed that Judas just pushed in to join them as if it was taken for granted. So I did the same, knotted up with the sense that something was going to happen, on account of the soldiers.

But when we passed through the Jericho gates, all the confusion and noise from the searches and the crowds
dropped away and we found ourselves on a beautiful paved street lined with torchlight and fine palaces. It turned out the place was more a retreat than a town—in the time of Herod the Great it was only his cronies who were even allowed there, and now it was mainly Romans who stayed in the town and the richer Jews from Jerusalem, who had their winter houses there. We all wondered who Jesus could know in such a place, and if it was the fellow he’d talked about the night before who’d helped him carry on after John was killed. But Jesus said, no, that was another man, although this one did almost as much for him.

I’d noticed that Judas’s ears had pricked up at the subject. I’d started to suspect by now who the man who’d helped Jesus might have been, putting things together and thinking of the look that had passed between Jesus and Judas around the fire the night before, and how Judas had bolted off. At the time I’d thought he was angry but it wasn’t that—he’d been ashamed. Jesus had been saying to him, see what you meant to me once, though it was clear that at some point they’d fallen out, and hadn’t found the way to come together again. You couldn’t imagine two men more different than Judas and Jesus, one a rebel and the other for peace, one rude and hardly willing to give you the time of day and the other one taking in every beggar who came by, but still you could see they were connected, even more than if they’d been alike. At the same time you knew it had to end badly between them, because they were both of them so stubborn and set on their path, Jesus even more than Judas.

The house we finally stopped at turned out to be one of the nicer ones, with a big pool out front and palm trees all around. Three or four fellows came to the gate straightaway
to take our coats and wash our feet, and then the owner himself came out and his face lit up the instant he saw Jesus.

“Get some supper ready for my friends,” he told his men.

I’d never been in a house like that—I’d thought only kings or princes lived that way, with servants everywhere and where everything looked as if it had been washed down and polished just an instant before. I wouldn’t have thought Jesus would want to be caught in that sort of place, but he was calling our host, whose name was Zacchaeus, his good friend, and didn’t seem to mind his servants looking after us or the wine they brought out while we were waiting for supper. Along with the wine the servants had brought crushed olives and bread and dried dates and figs wrapped in some kind of salted meat, and I could see Jesus’s men were a little awkward at helping themselves, maybe because we were sitting in a beautiful courtyard with palm trees around us and jasmine and good food and wine while the rest of the group was back at our dreary camp with their same old smoked fish and stale bread. But Zacchaeus managed to put them at ease with his courteousness and his talk. Only Judas couldn’t seem to settle, with a look as if Jesus had come here exactly to spite him, taking the time to feast with his rich friend despite Judas’s warning and the soldiers at the gates.

I could see that everything about the place was irritating Judas, the carpets we were on, the bits of coloured stone in the floor, the glass bottles the wine had come in, which were as clear as air.

“I see your wine comes from the Romans,” Judas said, barely taking the trouble not to be rude about the thing. But Zacchaeus answered politely, “I get my wine from them and my wages but not what I believe.”

Judas looked down with his scowl as if this was just what he’d expected. But Zacchaeus pretended not to notice. He had started to tell us how he and Jesus had met—Jesus had been begging food at the Jericho gates when Zacchaeus had seen him, all skin and bones the way he was then, and invited him home, afraid he wouldn’t survive past sunset. They got to talking then, and it was the next morning before they stopped.

“I thought I was doing a good deed for a beggar,” Zacchaeus said. “But it turned out I was the beggar, since I only gave him food but he gave me wisdom.”

When supper was ready we went into a large room with couches all around and a big table in the middle piled high with every imaginable thing, fruit and roasted meat and big bowls of honey and nuts. Judas looked even more disgruntled now than before, pretending it was the extravagance of the food that upset him though it was probably Zacchaeus’s story, and his remembering back to when he himself had met Jesus and how things had gone wrong since then. He stood to the side now though Zacchaeus had invited us all to sit, and only at the last minute did he finally take his place on one of the couches, but right at the edge of things. Zacchaeus was telling us about his work—he ran one of the balsam farms outside the city, that the Romans used for the juice that came from the trees, which was good for medicines and perfumes.