Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (4 page)

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up from my mat to go to him, Joshua grabbed me by the arm and held me back.

That night I lay awake long after my parents ceased their quiet and strained coupling in the next room and the sound of Father's--and Zipporah's--snores had filled the dark house.

I didn't like the idea of leaving, even if Sepphoris wasn't as safe as Father had thought--especially now that the soldiers and tax collectors were gone.

But what disturbed me more than the thought of leaving was the crack in his voice. The brokenness of it. I didn't want to hear that in my father, whom I regarded as greater than any bandit king.

WITHIN DAYS PILGRIMS BEGAN to return from Pentecost, all telling the story: fighting in the streets. Blood in Jerusalem's gutters. Fire in the Temple so that even the marble burned. The Temple nearly destroyed.

After hearing the news, something happened to Joshua. He barely spoke, but I knew by the tight pull of his brows that there was no quiet inside his mind. When I tried to talk to him he just shook his head, as though he couldn't hear me through the din.

"Joshua," I said, shaking him. "What is it?"

His eyes darted to me, wide and wild, as though my words were a jackal in the house. "What does it mean," he said strangely, "if the Lord resides in the Temple, and the Temple burns down? Why does the Lord not defend his own house? What does it mean? Has God abandoned us?"

I didn't know what was more alarming--the line of these 23

questions, or that they came from him. Something shuddered inside me.

"But no, Judas. Don't remember I said that. It is our sin that allowed the Romans to exile us in our own land, as it allowed Israel to be exiled to Babylonia--the prophets said it. We will repent and God will restore us."

He threw his hands up over his face. As he prayed the Shema, I didn't need to see his expression to know that it was twisted beneath his fingers.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord is One . . .

But as I recited the words with him, I was shaken.

Joshua was the best boy that I knew. I could never hope to be as good or perfect as him. He would grow up to be a better man, even, than Father. If Joshua should worry about repentance, what did that mean for me? For all the rest of Israel?

The next day, Malachi, the priest who had gone up to Jerusalem with Eleazar, came to the house, his face streaked and dirty, his tunic ripped. At the sight of him Zipporah dropped a vessel of oil on the floor and fell to her knees. A great moan escaped her as though it were her very life.

"There was such a fire," Malachi cried. "Eleazar stayed back to usher as many as he could out the gate. But before he could come out, a beam from the portico crashed down on him when the balcony gave way."

After a few more days, we stopped looking for returnees from Jerusalem, and no more came.

We were forbidden from going to the city gate or the marketplace, but no one could contain the news that came next. It was practically shouted in the streets: The Jews had attacked the Romans.

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Jews attacking Romans! This was the end of Roman rule, some said. Others feared retaliation, swift and decisive, and blamed the Samaritans for joining with the Romans against us, calling them dogs and sons of whores. Varus, the Syrian governor, was gathering a new force, one man said. Soon he would return with legions of soldiers to quell every outburst in Judea, where a common cry had risen in Jerusalem: Freedom for Israel! Death to Rome.

"We're leaving," Father said a few days later. "We're going to Kerioth, to the house of your mother's sister." It was midsummer and we had been in Sepphoris just over three months. The city had swollen in population as people came from every hamlet and village to seek shelter. Everyone was afraid.

Mother pleaded with Zipporah to come with us, but she was like the tree that

grows up through the courtyard of a house and becomes a part of it. She had seemed old to me before, but in the days since Eleazer's death, she had grown ancient.

I had no roots in this place, but I did not want to leave either. The Jerusalem I had loved no longer existed. Here, my father was known as a conspirator of Judas bar Hezekiah, who called himelf king and others called Messiah. I saw the way other men nodded at him, the way they stood aside and inclined their heads.

Even as we packed our things I prayed to God to keep us here, to delay us even a little while.

That evening Judas bar Hezekiah returned to the city. The first thing he did was send for Father. By the time he came home the next afternoon, he was more haggard than I had ever seen him.

"Good," he said, looking around at the things packed and ready to leave.

"Tomorrow Judas is going out of the city again. I have promised to stay until he returns."

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"What?" Mother cried.

"Only until then. And then we will go."

He lay down on his mat and fell asleep, his arm over his eyes.

As Joshua continued to struggle with those questions only he was wise or tortured enough to ask and as Zipporah grew ever more silent, I begged God again that we would not have to leave.

I would regret that prayer the rest of my life

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3

"Come, Judas."

Mother hoisted her water jar. She had already brought around Zipporah's donkey. It was nearly the coming in of Sabbath, two days past the time that Judas bar Hezekiah was to have returned to Sepphoris.

I hated going with Mother to the spring at the bottom of the hill. This was woman's work and though I was younger than Joshua, I certainly was not a girl.

"Judas," she said again. I didn't move.

Mother sighed and glanced at my brother, who immediately got to his feet. I felt shamed by his dutiful looks, the way he got to his feet without protest, his conciliatory smile at me. His very goodness. Something broke within me.

"No, I'll go." I bounded up. I didn't want to, but I did it to best him. And I really didn't want to stay with Zipporah, who seemed less and less present in this world each day. She had taken lately to searching all the stone vessels in the house, saying she was looking for the good wine, when everyone knew that wine wasn't kept in such jars and that she was really looking for nothing.

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"You can't lift the water up onto the ass," Joshua said, getting up.

I spun on him and spat at his feet. "I can too! And I'd rather go with Mother than stay here with you!"

I didn't mean it. I was jealous that he had been included so much in Father's business while I remained behind. I was hurt by his preoccupied absence even when he sat beside me. I even felt betrayed by the strange depression that seemed to have seized him, so that in some ways he seemed closer to Zipporah than he did to me.

I will never forget Joshua's look in that moment, sad and downcast. Because I knew that he missed our times together, too, and that this separation between the world of the boy and that of the young man was hard on him.

His shoulders drooped and for an instant he looked like only a boy, betrayed by his best friend.

Outside in the narrow alley, Mother said, "You will apologize to your brother when we get back." I nodded, miserable.

After we passed the city gate, no longer manned by true soldiers but rough-looking men who watched Mother so openly that I pressed closer against her side, I began to look for interesting stones along the path. On occasion one might find a shard of Roman glass or even a small coin washed up by a recent rain. If I found one, I would use it to make my peace with Joshua. I should not have spit at him. I had seen a boy do it once and had been fascinated and horrified by what a terrible person he must be to have done such a thing.

I did not want to be a terrible person.

Somewhere in the distance, flute song rose on the breeze. I used to hear it on my way to the synagogue coming from somewhere farther down the hill, or from one of the hills nearby. I wondered, as I had before, who it belonged to.

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We came nearly to the bottom of the hill path--I could see the spring from here, the girls like graceful willows bent over it with their water jars.

That's when I noticed the flute song had stopped.

Mother halted. She must have noticed it, too. She squinted in the direction of the northern fields where some of the farmers had their small houses. I could barely make them out; they were obscured by a dusty haze that seemed to have risen out of nowhere.

A crescendo of rumbling thunder to the north.

I looked up at Mother at the same time that a barrage of shouts rang out over the valley, high from the city gate.

"Romans!"

I had seen soldiers all my life. But there was something about that cry that put me in a fear I had never known.

Mother grabbed me by the arm.

Screams. Alarm from the gatehouse. The crash of breaking pottery as girls abandoned their water jars. They came running up the path, clawing hems away from feet made clumsy by fear, a few of them dragging their animals with them. Mother pulled me back against the hillside.

An older woman had been picking her way down the path behind us and now lay pressed against the hillside beside me. But when Mother jerked me up by the wrist and made to follow the river of others fleeing uphill, she grabbed Mother by the shoulder and me by the arm.

"Don't go back!" she said. "They're going to their deaths! Don't go back.

Run!" She was unbearably strong, and I remember in the confusion thinking that she was hurting me.

"My son is in the city. My husband," Mother cried, trying to pry 29

free, but the woman held her fast. She let go of my arm instead and pointed north along the valley. Now I saw them, coming through the fields as blood wells over the edge of a cut. I knew the crimson of those shields.

Romans. Thousands of them. Soldiers on horseback and infantry carrying javelins and wearing swords. The earth shuddered beneath them, spewing dust in their wake.

"Return to the city and you go to your death. Run! And pray your son and husband escape to join you!"

My mother grabbed me by the arm, but then hesitated.

"Go!" the woman shouted. And then her lips pulled back from her teeth so far that the gape of her mouth seemed unnaturally long when she screamed,

"RUN!"

My mother seized me up though I was by then too big for her to carry properly and tore down the path, jarring me with every step, the beating of her feet against the ground sounding inside my skull. She skidded, nearly went down, and then reaching the bottom of the hill, she ran. South, away from the incoming legion, toward the hills.

She fell once, dropping me, nearly landing on top of me. Her breath came in great, wheezing gasps. Her veil slipped down her hair. And then she yanked me up by the arm and we ran, legs churning against the grass, stumbling over stones and shrub. I looked back to see if the old woman was following, if she were able, impossibly, to keep up with us. But there was no sign of the woman--only the Romans filling the northern valley, once the drying brown of summer barley, now swelling with red.

The caves of the southern hills were shallow, some of them barely pocks in the limestone. I knew this place. Hadn't Joshua and I explored this very hill before? It had seemed very far away at the

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time, and yet Mother and I had reached it in a few desperate heartbeats.

We crept through trees and crawled inside the mouth of the deepest cave we found. My mother's arms came around me then, and I heard the thudding of her heart--a heart that should never beat in fear.

I wondered where Father was, if he had run home or hurried to the gate and down the path to shout for us. If Joshua, stuck with crazy old Zipporah, had learned what was happening and knew to hide.

"What about Father? Joshua? How wil they find us?"

Mother shook her head, squeezed shut her eyes. She was saying something, and I thought at first it was to me, but then I realized she was praying, rocking with each word.

Eventually her rocking stopped, though her whispered prayer seemed to continue for an hour.

Beyond the cave the valley was full of sounds: the jingle of tack and equipment, the shouts of soldiers as a legion set up camp.

After some time, her prayers died to nothing though I could still feel the frantic beat of her heart through her chest, indistinguishable from the pounding in my own ears.

"What about Father and Joshua?" I whispered again, the sound too loud inside this stone space.

"I don't know," she said, her eyes wide, staring at nothing. She reminded me in that moment of Zipporah, and somehow that frightened me most of all.

The sun slanted across the entrance of the cave. Sabbath was coming. We moved farther back against the limestone wall. That's when I finally noticed