The Liars' Gospel (32 page)

Yochim, dazed, blinded by the rain, deafened by the blow, lashes out with his hand, which he finds is still holding the saw,
and the guard goes down, his face raked and his eye sliced in two. He is screaming and writhing as one of the other men passes
Yochim a sword through the gate and, after a nod of confirmation, Yochim brings the point down through the guard’s throat.

The body jerks and trembles and is still. Yochim sinks to his knees for a few quiet moments while the wind whips up again
around them and the thunder roars and there are three quick flashes of lightning one after the other. Then he scrambles to
his feet again, wipes his face, leaving a long smear of bright red blood on his wet cheek, and they begin to saw again.

The bars pop free one after another. Isaac squeezes through the gap, scraping his arm on a protruding tongue of metal. Ariel
and Joseph follow him, then the others, carrying their swords now openly in their hands. They walk towards the guards’ gatehouse.
No one could see them if they looked out of that window, the rain is driving too hard and the night is too dark. They might
see a shadow moving, but it could as well be a barred cloud moving across the face of the moon.

They stand by the door of the gatehouse. Inside it is warm and dry. Isaac boldly places his ear to the door. If someone inside
opened it now, they would have his head off before any of the others could stop it. But no one opens the door. Isaac listens
for a moment and holds up three fingers. Three guards.

They burst in, swords drawn, shouting with the raging voice of the storm that batters on the Temple. They slay one man before
he has even been able to look around, a sword digging down into his neck from the top of his shoulder and dragged out again,
leaving his head toppled at an awkward angle. The other two throw down their mugs and draw weapons to fight, but the numbers
are too great.

One of them is a boy not much older than Yochim. He fights like a demon, whirling his arms and screaming and yelling. It is
Isaac, the leader of the band, who steps in and cuts him with an upward thrust as his arms are raised, coming in through the
armpit and slicing into the chest. The other man, older, in his fifties with a beard of pepper and salt, fights well and honorably.
He backs himself into a corner of the room when he sees the numbers, forcing them to come at him one at a time. He manages
to take an arm off one of the Edomeans—Haron—before they bring him down, bubbling blood from his mouth, falling to his knees
and then onto his face.

There are more deaths. Six guards in the inner gatehouse. A dozen priests asleep in their beds—they surround them in the dormitory
with raised swords and bring the blades down at the same moment so that all twelve die without waking. A man returning in
the night from the privy dies with his head half in a dream he’d had of a woman—not his wife—bearing a garland of flowers.
They give him a red necklace before he even knows who they are.

When they have taken the inner courtyard, they send for their eminent leaders—the men who are too old now to fight but will
wish to see the glorious victory. They slit the throats of two guards posted at the door to the High Priest’s house in the
Temple when one of the men goes to take a piss and the other comes to see where he went.

They think that the High Priest will have escaped into the Temple building. But he is waiting there in the upper chamber of
his small house. Perhaps he did not think it could come to this. Or perhaps, like his father, he believes so strongly in the
power of the office that he knows no harm will come to him. Who would hurt the High Priest? And perhaps he can still reason
with them. Perhaps it is not too late for peace.

It is then that Bar-Avo comes, a warm fur robe around him and four strong men by his side. They have saved this for him. He
is an old man, but still commands the respect he did in the prime of his life—Av-Raham taught him how to do that. He comes
wrapped in layers of warm clothes and with one of his men holding a hood above his head to keep him dry.

As they cross the threshold of the Temple, through the gates that are now thrown open, Bar-Avo finds himself thinking again
of that man who was crucified in his place by Pilate, half a lifetime ago. Of how certain he was that the world was coming
to an end, and how perhaps it is coming to an end, perhaps it has always been his place to make it come to pass.

They enter the chamber of Ananus. He has been the son most like his father, the one most fit to take Annas’s mantle as far
as the business of accommodating Rome goes. He has tried to keep this worthless peace, he has apologized for Rome and made
excuses for her. He has made the daily sacrifices to Rome in the holy Temple. Bar-Avo has already had his elder brother Jonathan
killed. Ananus does not know Bar-Avo’s name, but he knows whom to fear.

When he sees who is there, his body tenses. He begins to shake. His lips become pale. He tries to call out for the guards,
then stops himself, saying, “No, no, they’re dead already, aren’t they? Dead, for you have killed them, haven’t you? Yes,
I know you have.”

Bar-Avo hits him across the face. It is not a hard blow. But no one has struck the High Priest in quite some time, probably
since he was a little boy. He turns very white. Does he begin to understand now the seriousness of his situation?

“What do you want?” says Ananus.

Bar-Avo smiles. “Just to talk, High Priest. For now, only to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to a man like you.”

Bar-Avo strikes him again. It is like a game between them. Bar-Avo’s composure does not alter as he hits the High Priest,
or as he sits back in his chair and says, “Very well, then. I shall say a few things to you.”

He reminds himself suddenly of another interview, where he was the one standing, and his interlocutor was sitting just so,
composed, behind a desk. Is he Pilate now? Is any man with enough swords at his disposal Pilate?

They have the usual dance.

Bar-Avo requests information about the strongholds of the city, about the weapons in the Temple. Ananus refuses to answer.

Bar-Avo flatters, suggesting that the High Priest has a great deal of influence with the people and that a speech from him
could convince them to fight against the Romans.

“If every man in this nation took up swords against them,” says Bar-Avo, “they could not stand against us. United, we cannot
be defeated.”

“You will kill us all like this,” says Ananus. “You and your fucking faction, you and your army of ten thousand men—don’t
you know there are fifty thousand who serve the Temple? Don’t you think they’re more important than you? Them alone. Not even
beginning to count all the others.”

“Traitors,” says Bar-Avo, “collaborators. Rome would control Jerusalem for ten thousand years if they had their way. The land
must be free. The people thirst for freedom!”

“The people don’t care!” Ananus is shouting now. “They support you because you bring them bread and water and willow bark
for their fevers.”

“It’s more than you do.”

Ananus inclines his head, a little.

“We distribute bread also. And we give them a place to talk with the Lord. Most people…listen, ordinary people”—and Ananus
has never sounded more patrician than now—“out of a thousand men, do you know what nine hundred and ninety want? A good price
for their crops, a good husband for their daughter, good rain in its season and good sun in its time. They don’t care who
rules. They don’t care about who controls holy Jerusalem as long as they can still go to their Temple and worship in peace.
Most people want us to find a way to live peacefully with Rome.”

“Rome who slaughtered their sons? Rome who raped their daughters?”

“Even so. There will be more daughters and more sons, thank God. And shall they also be sacrificed to fight an unwinnable
war?”

“We shall win,” says Bar-Avo, “for God is with us.”

Ananus shakes his head. He is so old now, though his eyes are still sharp and his mind is not clouded. Once he had been as
tall and as strong as his father. The best of the brothers, people said, the best of the five of them, with those muscles
in his shoulders like hard knots of old rope. But the power in his mind is not in his body now. He could not fight these men
off.

“God is with the victor,” he says, “that is all God has ever done. Listen”—he places his hand palm down on the table, as if
he concealed a trick underneath it—“it is not too late to make your peace. People remember my father. The men who were his
friends are my friends now. I have a great deal of influence. I could speak on your behalf. Perhaps some arrangement can even
be brokered. Your forces are strongest in the east, are they not? Perhaps we can make an agreement with the Roman captains
in the east to give you some control of that region—”

Bar-Avo slams the heel of his hand onto the table.

“We do not negotiate,” says Bar-Avo, “with the occupying force. The whole of the land is ours.”

Ananus will not give up. No one who longs for peace can ever give up. Not even now, with the knife on the table before him.

“There will come a better day than this,” he says, “there will come a better way. God has promised us this land. Don’t you
think it’s for Him to fulfill His promises in the time and in the way He sees fit?”

The storm whips up again and around Ananus’s little chamber the wind moans and the great gouts of rain like the blood of the
lamb scattered to the four corners of the altar splatter in through the open window and the thunder crashes and the lightning
cracks because God is angry with the land though Ananus does not know how he could have done differently.

He has lived his whole life under the words of his father, the same words the whole family lived by: keep the peace, keep
the Temple working, keep the sacrifices which allow us to speak to God every day. It is he who has oiled the relationship
between the new governor and the Temple, who has maintained his father’s old relationships with Syria and Egypt, with informants
in Rome and along the coast. Every man must choose what to dedicate his life to and he has chosen this: only peace. Not justice,
because peace and justice are enemies. Not vengeance, not loyalty, not pride, not family, not friends, not—on occasion—dignity.
Only ever peace, which demands the full load of a man’s life. But his life has not been enough.

He is calling out loudly for his guards as they approach, although he knows his guards are dead, although the wind whips his
words away and the thunder drowns them out.

Bar-Avo touches the spot on the man’s forehead, between the eyes, but it does not calm him. He places a restraining hand on
the forehead and their eyes meet.

“I dedicate your death to God,” says Bar-Avo.

“You condemn all of us to bloody war,” says Ananus.

“Rather everlasting war,” says Bar-Avo, “rather everlasting flight and battle and flight again, than surrender now.”

And he remembers the crowd shouting, “Barabbas! Barabbas! Barabbas!”

There is that Roman game called “one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which.” If that game had fallen out the other
way round, he would not be here now to complete this task, and that other man, Yehoshuah, would have continued his own curious
work. And everything would have been different. But the world continues as it is and it is not given to us to see the contrary
outcome. And Bar-Avo does not play that Roman game. It is he who decides who will live and who will die.

Ananus begins to say, “You are wrong,” but he does not complete the sentence.

And Bar-Avo puts the knife to Ananus’s throat and bleeds him like a lamb.

THERE IS A
way to break a city, if a city needs to be broken. It is not a magnificent spectacle. It is no swift victory with an easy
triumph to be taken in Rome before proceeding to greater glory in other lands. The people will be so ruined that they will
have little worth even as slaves. The treasures of the city may be destroyed before you can parade them in glory. Nonetheless,
sometimes there is no other way.

First, encircle the city with a great host of men—this kind of victory is expensive, also. One should attempt it only on a
city, like Jerusalem, which has rebelled so flagrantly and with the spilling of such a quantity of Roman blood that no other
option is available.

The people of Jerusalem had killed the High Priest whom Rome had set over them. They had appointed their own High Priests
and minted their own currency and made every appearance of becoming again a sovereign nation with her capital in Jerusalem.
Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, was dispatched to deal with Jerusalem, along with four legions—that is, twenty-four
thousand men—and in addition double that number of auxiliaries.

The honor of Rome must be preserved. Once Rome owns a city, that city cannot simply declare that it is free. It has to be
retaken with such force that the news will echo around the world. Titus, the son of the Emperor, therefore, with a force of
seventy-two thousand men.

Second, see that no man can leave or come into the city. Even if the city is encircled by men, you must take care to guard
the high mountain passes and the places that seem impassable. It is these people’s native land. They know its secret passageways.

Allow no food in, no wagons delivering grain, no fresh-pressed oil from the northern olive groves. Take those wagons to feed
your own soldiers with. It will be a slow process. Stocks take a long time to run down. Hunger takes a long time to build.
Be sure to keep your soldiers occupied, well fed and entertained. You would not want them to think of mutiny. Remind them
often of the treasure that awaits them inside the holy city.

Then it is wise to build a high wall around the city. It will be your sentry if your lookouts are overwhelmed by attackers.
Hunger makes men desperate and mad. They say that during the siege of Jerusalem women stole food from their children, men
killed each other over a handful of barley. Stop up the watercourses into the city. The siege of Jerusalem lasted from March
to August, the hottest months of the year. When hunger comes, it is without mercy. They say that men ate the dead. They say
that a woman’s house was found by the smell of roasting flesh and they discovered that she had cooked her baby in an oven
and was eating its leg daintily.

If you are lucky, wise heads will prevail, urging surrender on the people before destruction comes. The zealots of Jerusalem
had killed their wisest heads. Men attempting to desert were killed. Some flung themselves off the walls, preferring to die
quickly rather than suffer the agonizing slow torture of starvation.

Your soldiers will be bored. Allow them their head a little, to release their energies. Soldiers building the platforms which
would allow them, in time, to scale the walls of Jerusalem used to enjoy showing their food to the starving prisoners of the
city. They allowed the sweet scent of roasted lamb to drift across the walls, so that every person in the city looked hungrily
at every other one. Titus, a wise leader, also gave his soldiers captured escapees from the city to crucify in a variety of
amusing positions. This one upside down. That one as if dancing. Another two nailed together as if locked in an embrace. Such
simple entertainment will occupy them usefully.

Do not underestimate your enemy, however. The Jews were cunning. They dug tunnels under the wall surrounding them and hollowed
out the earth under the soldiers’ platforms, propping them up with timber. When the works were complete, they sent men in
with bitumen torches to set the timber struts on fire and the first the Romans knew of the whole operation was when their
platforms suddenly collapsed into the tunnels and pure flames burst through the ground and consumed them utterly. This lengthened
the siege considerably.

Do not be concerned about setbacks, however. Hunger will eventually destroy the people. In Jerusalem, after a few months,
they ate even the sacred wheat set aside for the Holy of Holies, and the sacred oil for the holy lamps. When they asked people
to swear they had not a handful of barley, they used the very name of their God, Yahaveh, as the binding seal of the oath,
that same name which had been so sacred to them that any who uttered it was put to death. Very few men, it turns out, love
God more than they love their own aching hungry belly. They will sink to such degradation of themselves that you will scarcely
believe it possible.

As time goes on, more and more people will attempt to desert the city. Use them where you can—for information, or to take
as slaves. Do not hesitate to kill them if they seem useless.

Batter the walls, of course, night and day. Attempt to lever out stones. Build up your platforms again. There will come a
time to invade. You will be fighting against weakened, sickly, hungry men. You will prevail, for Rome always prevails. This
is the whole of the law.

There is nothing new under the sun, says Solomon, son of David, that selfsame David who stormed the walls of Jerusalem and
took her from the Jebusites, who perhaps themselves had taken her from someone else.

So it goes the same way. The battering of the walls had not ceased for six days and six nights. The inexorable platforms rose
level with the city walls and the commander, Titus, had them test the ground under the struts with long blades ceaselessly.
The people in the city knew the end was coming.

They were different then from the way they had been one hundred and thirty years earlier, when Pompey first let a stone tumble
from the wall in the glittering air. The services in the Temple continued, but what did they have to sacrifice? They had eaten
the sacred oil and the sacred grain. There were no lambs left to slaughter. The priests circled the sanctuary with pale skin
and dark hungry eyes and a gnawing sense within them that God was angry and His wrath could not be quenched.

Titus knew that the wall would fall the day he stood in the morning on the highest platform and addressed the citizens of
Jerusalem. The stench of the place rose to his nostrils even as his generals helped him up the wooden structure. There were
rotting bodies in Jerusalem, unburied. It was silent, apart from the birds circling overhead. He spoke loudly. The dark-eyed
people on the ramparts could hear him.

“People of Jerusalem,” he said, “you Jews have been in constant rebellion since Pompey first conquered you. Not just rebellion—open
war with Rome. And why did you think you had any hope at all?

“Did you think you’d win because of your numbers? A tiny proportion of the Roman armies has been strong enough to defeat you.
Did you think you’d win because of the loyalty of your allies? We are in the empire of Rome and no nation would support you
over us. Did you think you’d win because you’re so muscular and strong? Even the Germans are our slaves. Did you think you’d
win because of your strong walls? There are no walls stronger than the ocean that encircles Britain and yet they kneel down
and worship our swords.

“No. Do you know why you thought you’d win? It was because we were kind to you. We gave you too much. We crowned your own
people as kings, we let you observe your religious laws, we even let you take collections for your Temple. We treated you
well, and you have taken our kindness as a sign of weakness.

“Jews, surrender now. We will kill only the men and take the women and children as slaves. Surrender now or understand what
it means for Rome to be unkind.”

Titus is even now regretting the generosity of Pompey when he stood in his sandals in the Holy of Holies and said, “Let them
keep their ritual, why not? They have fought bravely.” Pompey should have crushed them, and then Titus would not have had
to undertake this long and boring siege.

The people of Jerusalem sent back a message that if he would only let them leave, they would depart, every man, woman and
child, into the desert and leave the empty city to Titus. Titus angrily replied that they should understand their position:
they had been conquered, they could not bargain. He prepared his troops for the final assault.

The Jews say that at this precise moment a tiny beetle flew into Titus’s ear and laid an egg which grew into a grub. And they
say that over time that grub bored into his brain and lived there as a full-grown beetle, eating more and more of the matter
of his head every year so that the pain and the sensation of being battered from the inside were utterly intolerable to him
and when he died and they opened his head they found that the beetle had grown to the size of a bird. But no commentators
other than the Jews mention this, so one may doubt the accuracy of these reports.

And the first stone fell, brought down by the battering engines. The soldiers swarmed into the city and began to kill, for
they had waited a long time and many of their fellows had been killed by Jewish missiles and Jewish fire across those many
months. Titus was no Pompey, and this siege had been no swift and well-managed affair. In any case, the purpose was not to
secure the city for the good of Rome but to punish. To send a message.

The soldiers pulled down the buildings stone from stone. They slew anyone they met. They set fires in the colonnades of the
Temple and the other public buildings, so that the silver and gold covering the timbers melted into shining puddles on the
floor of the great plaza.

And they came at last to the Holy of Holies in the very heart of the Temple, where, they had been promised, the richest prizes
of gold would be. They stopped then, amazed. Not just by the precious metals but by the workmanship, the rich decoration on
every surface, the finely turned candelabrum, the beautiful silver trumpets whose metal was as thin as a blade of grass. Jerusalem’s
riches were here, indeed, her most precious things entirely inward.

The soldiers milled around the outer sanctuary, collecting the golden goblets and ewers. And one man, seeing the veil across
the inner sanctuary ripped away and the space within revealed, jumped up on his friend’s back to get a better view. And yes,
the strange little sanctuary was empty. And, laughing, he pulled a burning timber from the hand of his friend and positioned
himself just so and pulled back his arm, straining at the shoulder, and threw it like a javelin into the holiest place in
the world.

The old wood and the dry cloth caught fire almost at once. And in the whole of Jerusalem there was a wailing, keening cry
as of a woman who has woken in the morning to find her child dead.

There were other brutalities. The Romans set fire to one of the remaining colonnades of the outer court even though six thousand
women and children were sheltering there, having been told by a false prophet that God had promised him that this place alone
would be spared. The corpses were piled up so high on the altar of the Temple that blood flowed in a constant river down the
steps.

They set fire to all the large buildings of the city: the council chamber, the tax office, the citadel, the palaces, the dwelling
places of men of high rank, even the building that had once been the Prefect’s home. By the eighth day of the August moon
those who still lived woke to see the dawn bloodred, for the whole city was on fire.

The fires burned for days. And when they finally burned themselves out, the soldiers went through the city and if any stone
was sitting on top of any other they pulled them down. Except for one wall, the Western Wall of the outer courtyard of the
Temple, which had remained standing and which it pleased Titus to leave in place to show what a mighty feat he had accomplished
by destroying this city.

Titus took his troops back to Rome and there he celebrated a great triumph, parading through the streets of the city the holy
vessels he had won in battle from the Temple in razed Jerusalem. They constructed a triumphal arch of marble depicting the
spoils of war, Titus’s Arch, which stands in Rome to this day, just west of the Colosseum. And they minted a special commemorative
coin in honor of the victory: Judea Capta, it read, Judea is captured. They struck more and more of them, for twenty-five
years. And all across the Empire, from Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Turkey, when men paid for a loaf of bread or a side
of pork or a turn at the whore, they paid with a coin showing a Jew bound with his hands behind his back or a woman weeping
under a Judean date palm.

Time continued, of course. The Jews did not cease to rebel, nor did the Romans cease to smite them. The Emperor Hadrian, crushing
a rebellion sixty-five years later and attempting to forestall another, renamed the city and forbade the Jews from entering
it at all. His soldiers brought in new populations to Judea and chased the Jews out into other lands, to arrive in Antioch
or Syria or Gaul or Kush or Rome herself and mourn their Temple and conduct their little rites of remembrance.

And in time, a new god rose in Rome. A small cult, grown slowly mighty. And although one might say: this was the triumph of
the Jews, this Jew-god risen to a high place in Roman esteem, nonetheless by the time he arrived there he was no longer a
Jew at all, quite the reverse in a sense.