The Liars' Gospel (27 page)

He is lucky. If he had tripped or missed his step the soldier’s downward slash with his sword would have caught him on the
back of the neck and his head would have rolled down through the window to the tiled floor beneath. Instead he manages to
lunge low, while Matan dances backward and the soldier is confused for a moment.

Bar-Avo kicks out wildly at the soldier’s knee and hits the perfect spot, at the side. There’s a gristly crunch and the soldier
trips, falls to his knees, shouts and grabs out, reaching for the back of Bar-Avo’s tunic. He has him, he’s caught him by
the tunic collar, he raises the sword in his right hand and Bar-Avo catches at the soldier’s wrist.

Bar-Avo is the weaker of the two. The soldier is behind him, pushing his arm down. Bar-Avo is trying to hold it back with
his own right arm, but he’s not strong enough and the sword is descending towards his ear, his face. And then the soldier
gives a sudden start. Matan has kicked his spine and this moment of released pressure gives Bar-Avo enough leeway. He grabs
the soldier’s wrist, pulls the sword down and back and there, into the soft part of the throat, just above the armored breastplate.

The soldier falls backward. He chokes and groans and grabs at the sword sticking out of his throat. The blood bubbles down
his front like the blood of the lamb when it is slaughtered for the sacrifice. And he dies just as easily, there on the roof
tiles, his sticky blood dripping down through the open window. They stare for a minute, startled and silent, before the shouts
from the bathhouse remind them to run, to scale the wall, to get away.

Bar-Avo had not quite meant it but had not tried to avoid it either. He feels nothing afterwards, not grief or shock or pity,
only perhaps a kind of surprise that it was so simple. And a kind of shock at himself, at his own cool capacity. He knows
something about himself now that he didn’t know before, that it will not trouble him to kill a man. He thinks: this will be
useful.

Av-Raham, when he hears, congratulates Bar-Avo in front of his men and says, “The first of many!” And Bar-Avo agrees. Yes.
The first of many.

There are reprisals. Rome does not know precisely who attacked the bathhouse and killed the soldier, and Giora somehow managed
to limp away on a broken ankle before he could be caught and questioned, so the Prefect’s men round up a few dozen young men
and give them lashes in the marketplace. They execute five or six for “stirring up unrest.” Av-Raham sends gifts of money
and promises of loyalty to the families of those young men. Rome wins nothing by this.

Bar-Avo marries soon after this, because the death has sharpened him somehow and the girls are not enough night after night.
He has not got a child on any girl yet but at some point he will, he knows, and this thought, the thought that he might have
to take a girl because he has given her a child, makes him think that it is time to marry.

He does not need to look too hard for a wife. There are a dozen girls of the right age—fifteen or sixteen—among the daughters
of Av-Raham’s friends, and they are sweet and kind and think him handsome. There is one he likes, Judith, not just for the
spread of her hips and her neat bottom, but because she seems to understand when he talks.

He has not slept with her; it is not right to do so with the daughters of these men. But once they sat together in a barn
during a rainstorm and he told her how he longed to make his mother proud, and take care of her in her old years, and at this
Judith leaned her head on his shoulder and said, “She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a son like you.”

He had kissed her on the mouth and her kiss tasted faintly of cherries, and he tried to do more but she pushed his hands away
and moved to put a little distance between them.

“You think everything will always come easily to you,” says Judith, “but one day there’ll be something you can’t get and then
what will you do?”

“I’ll have to ask your father for you instead,” he says, and she laughs.

Judith’s father, one of the zealous men, is delighted by the offer of a new son-in-law and agrees rather swiftly.

She is a good girl, and gives him six children in six years, all of whom live to be bright toddlers and then on and on. They
are four boys and two girls and Bar-Avo is surprised suddenly to be a father to many small delightful people whom Judith presents
to him each evening washed for bed, who ask him if he has apples for them, who are delighted by the gift of a shiny stone
or a piece of misshapen clay.

Judith, sensible as she is, does not ask questions about where he goes during the day or who he sees or what they tell him.
She knows where they keep the daggers, wrapped in leather in the roof, and knows to keep the children from them. She knows
what food to give him to take if he suddenly says that he will be away for a few days, and who to ask if he’s away for longer
than he said. She is very calm if he happens to give her a message to tuck into the baby’s wrappings and pass to a man selling
saltfish at the market.

His job, in these days, is to gather followers. A movement of revolution needs an army and each man must be recruited individually.

He travels to Acre, and then to Galilee, and talks to the strong men who are gathering their fishing nets in from the great
lake. Their arms are knotted with muscles. Their thighs are bunched like tree trunks. Their bodies are meaty like bulls’.
These are men who can thrust with a sword or a spear and pierce straight through another man’s body so that the point sees
daylight on the other side. It is men like these that he wants. This is how to secure power, he sees. Work hard, be loyal
to those who have much help to give you, but secure your own followers too. A day will come when Rome is gone. But before
that, he will slowly become stronger and more powerful.

“Come and follow me,” he says to the fishermen, “follow me and free the country from tyranny.”

“We cannot follow you,” they say, “we have hauls of fish to pull in and families to feed.”

And he says, “Is not God the Master of all?”

And they say, “Yes.”

And he says, “Then will not God provide for His children, if they will only follow Him?”

And one of them, more curious than the others perhaps, says, “How shall we follow?”

And at that Bar-Avo gives them instruction. How they will become trusted friends of those who are zealous for the Lord. How
they will listen for the code words that will show that the speaker is a true messenger from Bar-Avo. Such a messenger will
tell them that he has “God alone as leader and master.” God alone. He says it again, and he knows how it feels to hear. No
disgusting Emperor steeped in seamy sin upon his golden throne. No Roman army. No Prefect laying waste to good men’s lives
upon his whims. God alone, he says to them, as leader and master.

“What of the priests?” says one, and Bar-Avo knows by this question that he has them.

“The priests connive with the Prefect and Rome and wheedle for their own fortunes. Haven’t you heard how rich the High Priest’s
family is? Where do you think that money is from? It’s stolen from the Temple. And it’s blood money paid by Rome for our lives.”

And they believe, because they have heard the stories.

“God alone,” he says, “leader and master of all. None but God. God alone.”

They repeat it after him.

And when he walks on to the next village and the next most of the men stay, but giving him their word that he can call on
them. And one or two—young men, men without families or men who long for the fight—walk with him. Strong fighting bodies,
and he has them practicing their dagger thrusts in the evening and fashioning arrowheads. When he comes back to Jerusalem
after three months’ walking, he has a score of men built like muscled oxen with him and another twenty times that number who
have promised their right arms to the cause. He will not need them yet. But they will all come to Jerusalem to sacrifice for
the festivals of pilgrimage, and then suddenly he will have an army.

“There is a logic to battles,” says Av-Raham, welcoming him back with a great feast and a calf spit-roasted over a fire of
old olive wood. “There is a way to sense when the city is ready for war.”

All his friends are there: Matan and Ya’ir, and Giora, who broke his ankle in the fall from the roof and walks with a limp
now but is still useful to the cause. Bar-Avo’s own mother has pride of place by the fire and his brothers and sisters with
her, because now he is a man of some influence. It pleases him to see his family’s hands shiny with grease from the calf slaughtered
in his honor. His wife is here too, her body newly strange and enticing to him after so many months away, and their children
filled to the brim with meat and dozing like a half-dozen little puppies draped across her lap. And Av-Raham and the elder
men, who look at him with new respect now. They sent several men out to recruit but none has come back with such good news
as he.

“I can feel it is coming now,” says Av-Raham. “It will not be long. A year or half a year. Have you heard about the holy men
each claiming to be the Messiah? This is a sure sign that the time is near. And the people who follow them? They will come
to us.”

They drink wine and eat meat. Their moment is at hand.

There are terrible rumors across the land of Israel, stories so shocking that they must be passed from person to person as
quickly as possible.

Some say that the Prefect is demanding that the Temple give up its holy money, donated for the glory of God, to build some
kind of latrine. Some say that the priests have agreed to it and that the gold will be transferred under cover of darkness.
This news alone is enough to provoke angry shouts in the street, insults flung at soldiers, stones and wine jugs thrown from
upper windows at them as they pass in the street.

Bar-Avo leads a raid on a caravan bringing wine to a wealthy Roman merchant. It is for actions like this that the Romans call
them bandits and murderers, but that is to misunderstand: they are freedom fighters. They kill the guards who resist them
and let those who run go free. Inside the wagons they find not only wine but chests of gold and letters for half the most
powerful men in Jerusalem and Caesarea. The letters confirm that the Prefect, Pilate, is weak and has been demanding additional
resources from Syria. The money goes to shore up their support in the west and the south. Bar-Avo’s esteem increases tenfold
with this find.

Now, suddenly, he is the one to whom men come for advice. Av-Raham is still a leader, a man of much influence, but Bar-Avo
is the rising star. They come to tell him about a preacher who slaughtered a cat outside the Temple to represent the sacrilege
done there every day by sacrificing for the Romans, and one who has been making cures and who upset the tables in the Temple.
They tell him about small risings and pockets of resistance. He is the one who decides what punishment should be meted out
to men found to have been too generous to the Romans.

What does it take to make a man follow you? Not love. For love a man will mourn you and bury you when you are dead, but not
follow you into battle. For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is
in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.

A few days before Passover the city is ready.

All of Bar-Avo’s four hundred men are coming to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festival. His provocateurs do not even have
to make up stories, just remind people of what has already happened. They say, “Remember the Hippodrome?” and even men who
were not born when it happened have heard the stories and see in their imaginations the great structure set aflame and thousands
of men crucified up and down all the roads to the capital.

He holds a great feast just before Passover in a place where they’ve made camp with their allies, to the west of the city.
They roast lambs upon great fires and sing songs and call down curses on the head of every Roman. He lays out his plans to
the men—how it will be when we take control of the city, who will take which of the gates, who will storm the high places
and David’s Tower. He is foolhardy, perhaps, because he cannot see every figure lurking at the edge of the crowd or ask where
they have come from and what their name is. He holds up the bread and the wine at the meal and says, “Just as we eat this
bread and drink this wine, so we will devour the armies of Rome and drink sweet victory!” And there are great cheers.

Shortly after dawn, when the birds are still calling out and the sky is streaked with pink-tinged clouds, he wakes with his
wife next to him, soft and sweet-smelling, and thinks for a moment, why did I wake so suddenly, and then he hears the cry
again. Loud and low and afraid: “Soldiers!”

They are coming from three sides. There is little time to do anything. He and Judith knew this day might come, that is why
only the baby is with them, strapped to her body. The other children are safe with his mother. Judith kisses him hard, white
with determination and anxiety, and runs to the horse. She is away and clear of the reach of arrows before he joins his men
for the battle.

Someone must have given away their position, it is the only explanation. Someone sold them out for a handful of silver. As
the soldiers close in, Bar-Avo looks at the faces of his men. One of them, with his guilty expression, will show himself a
traitor. Not his dear friends, surely not, not Ya’ir, not Matan, not Giora? He watches them, while his men fight with the
soldiers and he fights alongside the rest, even though he knows they will lose. He watches for men who seem to be hanging
back in the fight—one of them knows he will not get his money if Bar-Avo is freed—and at last he thinks he spots who it is,
though his heart breaks open. Ya’ir. Open-faced, strong and handsome, and the one he loved the best of all. Ya’ir is the one
hanging back. Ya’ir is the one who, he remembers, took care to embrace him last night at the banquet and address him by name
even though they all knew not to do so.