Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (19 page)

Messiah.

Peter and I pressed close to our master as they swarmed around us. As I pushed against the most aggressive of them, I managed one glance toward the Seat of Moses.

Empty.

I did not need imagination or intelligence, or an inkling of anything other than basic law, to know that their case had been satisfied.

They had gone to determine how to seize him.

We must move quickly.

We left that evening by boat for Capernaum. I knew that the teachers of the law had gone to conspire against my master. But why did he provoke them so--and why rise to the bait? Would it be so

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hard to say to the man with the withered hand, "Come join us. Rest. Eat.

Tomorrow you may be whole?" But he lived for the moment.

The last time I had asked him about the kingdom, he had said it was here, now. I had wanted to shout: "Then where is it? The corrupt High Priest is still in the Temple, and the Romans in the fortress, and the Herods on their thrones. When is that kingdom to be gone and the new one come at last?"

But my master would not say. He spoke in riddles. He was a riddle himself.

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17

"Judas."

I opened my eyes to find myself staring into the face of Jesus.

"Come with me."

I got to my feet, put on my sandals and drew up my mantle. Peter was already in the front room with Andrew. James and John waited outside with Matthew and Simon. A moment later, Jude and Nathanel and Philip of Bethsaida came with Thomas, the smaller James, and another man also named Judas. These last had come from the house of Zebedee, to which James' and John's houses were attached.

We followed him out of town beneath the first tinge of dawn, a couple of stray dogs at our heels. They followed us as they did most mornings, stopping just beyond the city wall to stare as though waiting already for our return. The crowds were stil sleeping, put up in guesthouses or with whoever would take them in, or curled up in their mantles in market stalls and stables, nestled in the straw against the chill. In the waning darkness I could make out fresh snow on Mount Hermon. I drew my mantle closer around my neck and longed for the warmth of lamb and lentil stew.

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"He's been out here all night, as far as I can tell," Peter murmured to me.

Out in this cold? And come back to get us and come out again?

We gathered on a hillside where there was an olive press set back in a cave, and went in out of the wind.

When the last echo of the Shema had faded from the walls of the cave, Jesus said, "I have gathered the twelve of you to myself. You will face great opposition because of me. Because of me people will hate you. Families will be divided and they wil not understand what you do. You wil give up everything to be with me."

His voice broke. We looked at one another. Waited. Jesus covered his face with his hands.

"Teacher," I said, tentatively, feeling that I spoke for all of us. "When is the coming kingdom? How will it occur? How can we serve you to that end if we do not know this? Meanwhile, there are others who are going out to see about your ruin for the things you say!"

"Don't you understand?" he said, turning on me with such a look as though I had cut him. "It is here! Now!"

I glanced around. Was I the only one who saw both the opposition and opportunity before us? What was wrong with him that he seemed more interested in healing the sick and telling stories?

He clasped me by the shoulder and said, "Listen . . ." and began to tell the story of a rich man who gave a great banquet, and about how all the guests had excuses not to attend so that he sent his servant out into the streets and alleys of the town to bring in the poor, the crippled, and the blind instead.

We all looked at one another. We had all thrown livelihoods and reputations aside for this man. What was there for any of us, but to see this through?

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Did he not see the danger of the Pharisees, conspiring against him? The Sons would expect a report soon. The Sons, whom I realized I must win to our cause rather than the other way around. I already knew Jesus would not abide by their rules, could not be tamed. But how could I win their support for this Messiah when so many of them were surely Pharisees like Zadok himself?

These were deadly games!

That night, the demons returned, exhuming the memories of my father and brother, my wife and son, smearing my conscience like a stain.

At last I shoved up from my mat, took up my mantle, and, wrapping it around me, went out of the house. Down near the breakwaters, the boats were gone from their moorings--the fishermen out for the night. I stared out at the lake, trying to spot the light of their lamps in an effort to distract myself, having learned that they would be there if I only looked, standing out in the moonlit air above the water.

There! There was one. I drew a slow breath. Now that my eyes were adjusted, I imagined I could even see, faintly, the cast of a heavy net, could hear the slap of it on the water before the stone sinkers pulled it down.

"Judas."

I started at the sound of my name, but not at the familiarity of the voice. Now I saw him, his mantle drawn close, sitting atop a low wall near the dock.

He had been there, right before me, all this time.

"Teacher," I said, my voice inexplicably thick. "Forgive me--"

"Judas."

"I couldn't sleep," I said, feeling emotion rise up like strange panic within me.

"I came out to clear my head. I couldn't stop--"

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I felt, more than heard, him step away from the wall. His hands on my shoulders, his arms wrapping hard around me. Felt the keen rise up in my chest, tight and stifled.

"I just--"

I was a boy, missing his brother. I was a child, looking on the broken body of his father. I was a young man, knowing that my new brother existed out of my mother's shame, and only because she had wanted to feed me.

I was held in those Galilean laborer's arms, covered in shame. My knees buckled and I slipped down like a sack of grain in those arms.

I was unclean. How could he embrace me? How could he kiss me and greet me as he did, or bear my greeting in return?

I wanted to tell him that I was afraid. That I was so afraid. That I was desperate for something that even in my learning I did not know to name.

That I was fearful for him, that he could not do or be all that he said. That I had not received the hunger in Simon's eyes or the love in the Magdalene's and, what's more, wasn't certain that I could. That I envied Peter his simplicity, and even Thomas his frowns, because he seemed to struggle only with disbelief, which was the least of the demons that rode me like the sins of the atonement goat, running for Azazel.

Beyond all that, I was worried that my bowels, so very familiar to me in behavior, would begin to lurch, and I would shame myself even further.

But most of all, I wanted to tell him that I would stay, because I had nowhere else to be, no other thing or person in this world to cling to, and no other answers but what he might give me. That I prayed he could give me the answers I sought, because if he could not, then I did not know that they could be found in this world.

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All that I had carried within me like a diseased cistern cracked and spilled out. I had thought myself spent, empty, and that there was nothing else he could say, in mercy or in belittlement, to me to cause me to excise any of it more. I was wrong.

"Judas," he said. "I wil not leave you."

I covered my face and wept.

Finally, when I thought I must have been there for hours, and realized that somehow I had come down on the hard pebbled ground, and was bent over against his shoulder, when I imagined that I saw the faintest light again on the lake, and beyond it, the barest trace of light in the sky, he spoke again.

"Come with me where I am going."

"I--I will remain with you." If you can have me. If you can stand my shame.

The words, too thick, mangled in my throat.

"There is so much upon you. Come. I will show you even greater things than you have seen."

We got up together, me staggering on leaden feet, stiff from the cold. But the turmoil, the panic, the roiling questions, at least, were gone. Unanswered, but gone. All, except one.

"What were you doing here, when I disturbed you?" I sniffled like a child, wiped at my nose.

His smile was simple. "I was waiting for you."

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18

They came from Tyre and the Decapolis. They came as pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Always, there were pilgrims. All with one word on their lips:

Messiah.

Our numbers grew. I was nervous because I knew Herod's spies were everywhere. The Pharisees already conspired against us; soon Herod would come for my master as surely as he had for John. We were running out of time.

But I was also elated, because that meant soon the day would come. Jesus would have to proclaim himself--by Passover, I was certain. The holiday I had learned to fear and then even to loathe, I would have cause to love once more.

And so these days were precious because I knew they were numbered. For now, my master was mine in rare and quiet moments. But soon I must share him with the world.

Rain came with the winter, turning the Galilean countryside green after the scorched gold of summer and autumn. The first

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anemones speckled the hills like droplets of blood and yellow flowers carpeted the valleys.

All this time, John remained a prisoner of Herod and I had heard nothing of Levi. I asked after him when I could, but heard nothing so that I began to think he had been killed in the arrest.

We went west, to Cana. I feared Jesus would take us to Sepphoris, but he never showed any desire for the city an hour's walk from his hometown. I had long since given up trying to discern the logic of each city that we visited--or passed by. It only mattered to me that with each stop news of him increased . . . along with the growing multitude.

Meanwhile, the whispers became a roar across the country as more and more came to look on my master in dread amazement.

Messiah.

A week after the Feast of Dedication, we returned to Capernaum. And a day after that, I laid eyes on Levi.

He came to us at Peter's house just before dusk and ate for nearly an hour straight, scooping lentils and bread and olives up all at once with dirty fingers and blackened nails.

I hardly recognized him, shrunken nearly to the skeleton that my master had been the first time I had seen him. His eyes were wild in his head. His hair was long and tangled with bits of grass and twigs. Every so often he paused to scratch at it, or at one of his ears, flinching, as though from invisible insects, or from the very air itself.

"We hide near Macherus. Sometimes one of us is allowed to go in and speak to John, and when we find or are given food, sometimes we're allowed to take it to him," his companion, a man named Gidon, said. I saw the way their eyes darted this way and that, wondered how they had placated the guards.

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I didn't ask.

Levi, for his part, hardly looked at me and only greeted Simon with the barest of nods, but glanced often at Jesus with an emotion I could not discern. I wanted to take him aside, to speak privately with him, but it was as if the history between us never existed.

"What does John say?" Jesus said. "How is he?"

"He is alive, though I fear he will never leave that place," Gidon said before he looked at his plate as though it were suddenly an alien thing.

"Are you the one?" Levi said abruptly to Jesus, strange hardness in his gaze. "He sent us to ask you. You, his cousin. Are you the one? Are you? Or should we expect someone else?"

"John baptized our master himself!" I said, trying to see in Levi the man I had known. "He called him the lamb of God! How can he now ask if this is the one?" How dare they question it?

All this time there had been people at the door, peering in through the windows. As we were speaking, a woman came with a piece of woolen cloth and laid it in the hands of Peter's wife as we were sitting there.