The Liars' Gospel (26 page)

That morning, the conversation was brief.

“They tell me you acquitted yourself well in the battle yesterday.”

Bar-Avo has all the humility of a teenager.

“Yes,” he says. “No one can climb as well as me, no one else hit as many soldiers with the oil pots, I think those are the
most important things.”

Av-Raham smiled an amused smile.

“The most important things. Tell me, do you hate Rome?”

And there’s no question, none at all. Rome is all the things that are wrong in all the world.

“Yes.”

“Then we may find a use for you. You are the son of Mered, aren’t you?”

The mention of his father stings him. He was not a good father. Bar-Avo has not seen him for a long time.

“I’m a man now. It doesn’t matter whose son I am.”

And Av-Raham’s eyes meet those of one of the men standing beside him and they both laugh. Bar-Avo cannot read the laugh, cannot
see that it says: yes, we understand that, we have said those words ourselves when we were boys.

Bar-Avo shouts at this ring of slow, thoughtful men, “Do not ask me about my father! My father is dead! I have no father!”

And Av-Raham says, slowly, “None of us has a father.”

Bar-Avo looks around at them, trying to see if they are mocking him.

“Or at least, God is our father,” says Av-Raham, “no other father matters. You can be simply His son with us. Or mine, for
I am father to many.”

Bar-Avo squints and thinks and curls his lip.

“I will be the son of some father,” he says at last, and that is how he gets his name, which means “the son of his father,”
and no other name he has had before has ever suited him so well as this. He is this now, a man who carries his own father
with him, a nameless, invisible, intangible father.

Av-Raham, whose name means “the father to many,” laughs.

“Either way,” he says, “now you belong with us.”

And that is that.

They give him little tasks at first, and he deals with them handily. A set of daggers to be smuggled past the guards—he conceals
them under a cartful of vegetables a farmer asks him to take to market and gets paid twice for the journey, once by the farmer
and once by Av-Raham’s men. Messages to be carried. Lookout to be kept as they cut open the leather thongs holding a prized
horse belonging to the Prefect in its stable, slap its thigh and send it skittering across the plaza, where, terrified by
the smells and the noise, it falls and lames itself. Conversations to be overheard in the marketplace—there is always a use
for information carelessly dropped.

He is bored sometimes, but also paid fairly well for his trouble—so much so that he can now be the man of his home, bringing
his mother meat and bread. And when there is going to be a riot he knows it, and he is the one who can tell his friends where
to be and at what time. And he knows where the fires will be lit and where the roofs will be torn off and what can be stolen
early on because everyone will think that this saddle or that blanket or that wheel of cheese must have burned in the flames.
A long campaign of resistance and anger is nothing if not pragmatic. Young men must be found to fight, and must be rewarded
and encouraged, and people must eat.

Many days are dull—days of waiting for the fighting or for anything to happen. He does not mind the dullness. He finds himself
more patient than he’d realized. The more he thinks on it, the more he wants what Av-Raham has. That quiet command, honor
in the hearts of men. One has to wait, and work hard, and become trustworthy, before these things start to happen.

There is a day when Av-Raham shows him a map of Israel. He has never seen more than a little plan before—drawn on a table
in wine, perhaps—to show where the grain store is in relation to where they are now, or which of three roads leads to the
house of the girl he likes. This is a brushed-vellum masterpiece, kept rolled in a cloth bag and brought out ceremoniously
when the men sit discussing their affairs.

Bar-Avo has come to bring wineskins he stole from a Roman officer when he was distracted by a commotion in the marketplace,
and to receive his orders. But when he enters the small back room where these discussions are held, he cannot help staring
at the map.

“They have moved their troops here,” one of the men is saying to Av-Raham, putting a finger on the map, “so their supply lines
will have to go through the mountain pass.”

Bar-Avo sees at once what the map is. There is the sea, inked with fine blue waves. Here is the coast, here are the roads
leading in from Yaffo to Jerusalem, up to Caesarea, down to the desert. He has imagined the countryside with this eagle’s
view when he walks from place to place. And all over the map are dried black beans—from one of the sacks kept in the storeroom
which conceals the entrance to this chamber. Av-Raham sees him looking.

“They are the Romans,” he says, pointing out the beans, “here is the garrison”—a cluster of beans near Jerusalem—“and here
are the outposts”—all around the countryside. “We keep watch on where they go and what they do, so we know when new supplies
will be dispatched to them and when they will be isolated.”

“So you can decide when to strike,” says Bar-Avo wonderingly.

“These are guesses really. Merely that. Our information is often out of date. But we try to steal from them when we can. There
is nothing sweeter,” Av-Raham says, smiling, his little potbelly shifting against the table as he leans forward, “than killing
a Roman soldier with his own sword.”

Bar-Avo smiles too. He has imagined himself a killer before, like all boys. Has swished a sword and imagined running someone
through with it. He has taken lambs to offer at the Temple and seen the life go out of them and understood how simple and
how important the thing is.

“How many of them will we kill before they leave?”

Av-Raham looks into Bar-Avo’s eyes, then takes his left hand by the wrist, palm up. He plucks a bean delicately from the table
and places it in Bar-Avo’s palm.

“This is how we proceed now. One by one. But with God’s help…”

Av-Raham sweeps the beans off the parchment with the back of his hand. It takes two sweeps, three, to clear them all.

“That is what we must do. Every one of them out. No peace until every single one of them is swept away.”

“We’ll drive them into the sea,” says Bar-Avo, looking at the beans on the floor.

Av-Raham pulls Bar-Avo towards him, so Bar-Avo can smell the older man’s scent of onions and spice and the cloves he chews.
Av-Raham holds him at the back of the neck and kisses the top of his head.

“With a thousand boys like you,” he says, “we will do it.”

He is trusted, as time goes on, with bigger things. He is taught where the caches of swords are, and how to grease and wrap
them so that they will not rust in their long months underground. He learns the different ways to set a fire in a building
so that it will take with little kindling and without time to waste. He learns the names of the important men up and down
the land. Av-Raham even has one of the old men teach him to read, though Bar-Avo always does so slowly and hesitatingly, for
this is a skill necessary to a revolution.

It is entirely true that some of these skills are dull and he has to be convinced that learning them is necessary. But then
there is the day when he first kills a man. That is not a boring day.

There was no reason for this to be the day, though he knew the day would come and that it would be a moment like this. He
is nearing twenty now and commands a handful of men of a similar age or a bit younger. They make mischief, steal things where
they can, riot and destroy property, telling themselves every time that, piece by piece, they are pulling Rome off their land.

Today it will be the baths. Rome has not built a grand bathhouse in Jerusalem as she does in many of her conquered cities,
but there is a small pool, one story only, near to the dormitories for the soldiers stationed in Jerusalem. The soldiers bathe
there and that is enough to make it worthy of attack. And it’s used by some of the people in the town, those for whom the
traditional ritual baths are insufficiently Roman, those who want to show their loyalty to the occupying power. Traitors,
therefore, in their treacherous waters.

Bar-Avo and his friends have decided on a plan. There are open windows in the roof of the baths, and the building is next
to several houses, one owned by a man who owes a great deal to Av-Raham and has been persuaded to let them use the window
which leads out onto the curved bathhouse roof. Four of them go: Ya’ir, Giora, Matan and Bar-Avo himself. They shin down the
wall from the window, each of them carrying a leather bag over his shoulder, each of them suppressing laughter.

Through the windows in the roof, they look down on the Romans at their bath.

They are hilarious, strutting about, each man naked as a child, caring nothing for their modesty, their decency, their honor.

“Look at that!” whispers Giora, the youngest.

He’s pointing out the men being oiled by slaves. One in particular, a man in his fifties with a soldier’s physique, has two
male slaves working on his back, rubbing thick drops of yellow olive oil into his skin.

“I’ve never had a woman work so hard on me as that,” mutters Ya’ir.

The man whose back is being oiled lets out a little moan of pleasure and the boys on the roof collapse in laughter.

“Neither has he!” says Ya’ir. “He’s never touched a woman in his life, look at him!”

There are six or seven men being rubbed with oil in a similar way.

Bar-Avo says, “My mum does that with the lamb before she roasts it.”

“Let’s see if they bring out the herbs!” says Ya’ir, and they start laughing again.

“We brought our own herbs, remember?” says Bar-Avo, indicating the leather bag on Ya’ir’s back, and Ya’ir’s face cracks into
a grin.

They position themselves at four different downward-facing windows. It will be important, for maximum impact, to start at
the back and work forwards. Giora is over the window the farthest away from the exit from the baths. Beneath him are the hot
steamy rooms where men are exercising to cause the sweat to run from their pores before they go to be oiled. They are all
naked, jogging on the spot or punching at imaginary enemies. Giora pulls the bag from his back and hefts its sloppy weight
in his hands. The contents are runny. He undoes the leather draw cord holding it closed just a little and gets a whiff of
the contents. He screws up his face. They have each come with a bagful of liquid animal feces. They have mixed it with water
and let it rot in a barrel for a couple of days just to enhance the effect.

Giora leans his body half over the window, lowers the hand holding the bag down and then, holding on to its handle, begins
to whirl it round and round and round.

The rotten, liquid, soupy feces splatter in wide arcs across the roomful of naked men. The stench is appalling. The stuff
is sticky and smells of vomit and disease.

It splashes onto the bodies of all those naked men, across their pink scraped torsos and in their hair, and one man, a young
soldier, looking in an unlucky direction, gets it across his face and in his mouth and eyes. He starts and then begins to
retch as he realizes what it is.

They run, of course they do. They make for the room with the plunge bath, which is next in line and where Bar-Avo is waiting
with another thick full bag. He had found some dog’s vomit to put into his, mixed with the shit. As the men start running
through the building away from the whirling stench, Bar-Avo begins to empty his bag too, swinging it to make a splatter of
filth, and then on, as they run in disgusted confusion, two of the men already vomiting, Matan empties his bag, and one of
them, looking up to see where the pollution is coming from, takes some full in the face. They barely need Ya’ir’s bag, so
much destruction has already been wrought in the place, but he empties it anyway, into the plunge pool, where some of them
had leapt, attempting to wash themselves.

The boys are laughing as they drop the bags through the windows and can’t help staying to watch for perhaps a little longer
than they should, as the men desperately try to clean themselves, and one of them knocks over a huge tub of oil, which spills
slick and green across the tiled floor. Another man comically slips and falls in the oil—it’s too good, like players performing
just for them—and manages to tip more of it over himself and, struggling to get up, pulls another man covered in brown slime
down on top of himself. There’s a sharp snap as another one falls, and his arm is twisted awkwardly where he tried to break
his fall—he’s evidently broken a bone and this is the funniest thing of all. Ya’ir rolls on his back laughing and Giora shouts
through the window, “Go back to Rome!”

They are of course watching too intently. They do not notice that a man has scaled the back wall with a ladder until it is
too late and he is almost on them. He is not covered in oil or shit. He is a soldier in his full uniform, one of the men stationed
outside in case of an attack on the bathhouses. They do not notice anything until Giora starts to shout and Bar-Avo turns
his head from observing the men covered in oil trying to stand up and sees this soldier, his eyes like gleaming stones, his
teeth bared, raising Giora above his head only to hurl him through the window down onto the floor below. There is a loud crack
as Giora lands and Bar-Avo cannot see if he’s moving, has no time to see.

The soldier draws his sword and the three of them, Bar-Avo, Ya’ir, Matan, scramble to their feet and back away across the
roof. They are unarmed. The soldier roars and lunges. Ya’ir almost loses his footing on the edge of one of the windows and
Bar-Avo pulls him back by the waist of his tunic. Taking his advantage, the soldier slashes at Ya’ir, brings his sword back
red. Ya’ir screams, frightened, intense, like a child. The soldier’s taken a great slice of flesh out of Ya’ir’s raised arm
and seeing this brings such rage to Bar-Avo that he surges forward, not thinking of himself, only of his anger and finding
a place to sheathe it.