The Japanese Girl (31 page)

But Grandfather Jacka, a rich man by the standards of the country and the time, bought a handsome little farm with land running down to the Helford River, and there I was born, and there he lived out a pleasant, useful, quiet and agreeable life for another thirty-six years. And never a stranger would pass the door but what Jacka must tell of how he came to be there and how he had risked so much over a fight in Carson City, Nevada at the turn of the century.

And when it came to my turn, from that fight, thirty-six years later, I inherited three hundred pounds.

They picked us up about three on the Monday near the Fish Gate. I'm usually the one to run into trouble, but this time it was Gestas's doing. The four soldiers were about their normal duty fetching a political prisoner from Tekoa, some poor devil with a bee in his bonnet and not one of our crowd at all; so much unrest they had their hands full and would have missed us entirely but for Gestas.

We'd barely escaped the night before when they'd come down the narrow street from both sides and trapped our gathering. I'd been on the sill making my speech, and they saw me and came for me, hacking a way through the men and women who got in their way. I'd jumped through the window behind and just got clear, but Gestas had got a spear jab in his thigh that had been paining and festering all today, and maybe that tried his temper. Anyway, as these four soldiers went past he spat, and the wind was blowing and the spittle fetched up on the sandal of the officer; and somehow in no time they'd recognized us and we had a fight on our hands.

Even then, with Dysmas with us, we should have got away, because no one handles a knife better than he does, but at the very worst moment when one of the soldiers was lying skewered on the road with his own spear and another had his tunic ripped up and showing red, what should come round the city wall but a half maniple of the Twelfth Legion escorting one of their high officials back from some country visit.

Had there been people around I could still have melted away amongst them the way I'd done so often before. But this being normal
sexta
time, the few who watched watched from behind the safety of shuttered windows, and soon I was rolling in the dust with the other two.

I'll say this for Rome: they'd have been justified in killing us out of hand; but their damned soldiers have discipline. They knocked us about till there wasn't much life left in any of us, but then we were hauled up and dragged through the dust to Fort Antonia and thrown into one of the deepest dungeons, there to lick our wounds and to contemplate our fate.

Well, there isn't much to contemplate if you've sinned against the Occupying Power. Maybe you'll get a trial, but who defends you against the grievous wounding of a Roman legionary? No one can bring home to you the guilt of the half-dozen you've done to death in the dark; but one wounding is enough. Maybe you'll get a trial, maybe not: the end is the same. You just have to pray that it'll be quick – though you know that it won't.

Gestas took it the worst of us. He knew it was his fault we were lying chained here in the dark. But Gestas was always the tetchy one: up and down like a beetle in a pond; full of fire one minute, despair the next. Not to be trusted. In a war of liberation there are never enough to trust. You have to rely on the others to make up the numbers: the dreamers, the self-seekers, the rash, the boastful, the envious, the shouters who melt away at the first check.

Dysmas was not of these. A big slow fellow – slow except with a knife – slow-thinking, but once he'd made up his mind … You wouldn't get a complaint out of him now as we lay in the dark and our wounds throbbed and our bellies emptied and our chins sprouted new beard. Not a leader, he would never be a leader, but a splendid second man: a stay, a support, a comfort even in the darkest hour.

And this was the darkest hour. If I died – as now seemed certain – there was no one else to carry on. I could have wept – and once in the dark did weep – that our fine plans had all come to nothing because of such an idle and foolish gesture. Spittle on the wind. Maybe this was what all men's hopes and ambitions came to.

There was one hope, but it was not much of one. The Passover was near, and it was the custom of Rome to try to put itself on good terms with our people by allowing a free pardon for one prisoner – one Jewish prisoner among the many languishing in these rat-ridden cells. I knew I was much the most valuable prisoner they had – that is, valuable to our sacred cause – but I wondered whether, if a demand was loud enough for my release, whether the Procurator – come from Caesarea for the feast – would accede to it. I had been a hard one to catch, and if set free might give much more trouble. Yet a promise was a promise, and almost certainly many would ask for me.

Then, if that happened, if it really did happen, could I accept it and leave Dysmas and Gestas to a felon's death? If I got the chance it would be my duty to take it, but it wouldn't be an easy choice.

They fed us during those hard days, with foul bread full of weevils, and stale water and an occasional bowl of soup. It just kept us alive. There were ten in one cell, and little room to move. It was hard to count the days because no true light fell in the dungeon. But if you were awake you could just hear the trumpets each morning, and every three hours through the night.

So three days passed, and it was Thursday, the fourteenth of Nizan, and the Passover was near and I thought all was lost. By now many people from outlying districts would be flooding into the city for the feast, and my followers would be diluted and maybe even if they did cry out for mercy for me, their cries would be drowned in the cries of others. No question but Pilate would have my guts if he could – and who was to stop him?

On the Thursday night – no, it must have been some time on the Friday morning – two new prisoners were thrown in. I can't remember what their offence had been, but they had both been burned in the hand, and the moans of one of them filled the cell. The other was more a man of my own heart, and when the bleeding had stopped he tied up his branded hand and told us the latest news. It seemed that Jesus Bar-Joseph was in trouble.

Of course I'd met this fellow a half-dozen times, and twice had been in argument with him – a religious visionary who had come into prominence this last year or so. It was queer, but sometime we'd been mistaken for each other. We had almost the same name, for my name is Jesus Bar-Abbas, and we were of an age and not unlike in looks – at least in colouring and build, though his eyes are lighter than mine. At one time I'd hoped greatly that he would help our cause against the oppressors: indeed, I'd have been willing to stand down as leader in favour of him. I'm not all that much one for religion myself, but you can't over-value it as a means of raising the fervour of an oppressed people, and you had only to go to one of his meetings to see that he left me far behind – indeed anyone I had ever seen far, far behind – as a rabble-rouser. I swear that man – if any – could have thrown out the Roman from our land; but when I went to see him that first time he was a great disappointment.

True, he spoke me fair enough, but everything he said had a double meaning to it, and he turned away the sharp spears of my questions with shifty answers. When I charged him with the need to conquer these Roman devils and cast them for ever out of Jerusalem, he said it was necessary first to conquer our own souls and to cast out the devils within ourselves. When I spoke with contempt of the weakling collaborator Herod and told him I could make him, Jesus, king of all Judea, he said that his kingdom was not of this earth. I thought him sly and a bit of a windbag, and wondered at the time if he was planning to lead his own revolt without me.

I pressed the branded man for more news of this arrest but he had little more to say. It was only by chance, as he himself was being brought in by two soldiers, that he had seen this other procession coming through the town, some twenty strong, led not by Romans but by our own Temple Guard. Twenty men to arrest one man, the prisoner said scornfully; but I knew it wasn't quite like that. The holy man had a great following, and if they had turned nasty, no Temple Guard would have stood a chance. And, for that matter, Jesus Bar-Joseph had a reputation for fireworks himself. Some people said he only had to raise his hand and the heavens thundered.

Well he was caught now – like me, and God help him. The collaborators and the slimy Sadducees had got him. They'd be glad we were both under lock and key. There was no leader of revolt left comparable to him and me – no one else with the
brains
. One by one we had been picked off: caught by the Romans or betrayed by our own folk: John the Nazarite, Simon of Tekoa, Peter of Bethany: they were all dead. After us there was no one.

So the great cause came to an end. I could
not
believe it. Other young Zealots would arise. Perhaps not yet, but soon, to carry the torch of liberty, to fight, not to talk or to preach or to pray, but to fight to the death, as
we
had fought to the death, by foul means if fair were denied us, by the dagger in the back and the poisoned arrow and the thread around the throat – one by one we would pick them off, these vile, forever-damned oppressors, until in the end
they
tired,
they
wearied of the slaughter, and some emperor in far-off Rome decided that enough was enough and drew his legions away to do more profitable and more useful things. This was the end for which any patriotic Jew ought to be willing to die – and for which I very soon, tomorrow or the next day, certainly would die.

There were two or three ways they might choose to dispose of me, but one, the most likely, was the one I dreaded most.

It was a long time that night. There was scarcely room for us all to lie down, and the cold stench of the enclosed place and the groans of the branded men made sleep hard to come by. It was likely to be my last night on earth; certainly it was my last night of hope, for if I wasn't released today, then death was as sure as the next sunset.

So it was with a sinking belly that I heard from one of the gaolers about eight in the morning that Jesus Bar-Joseph had been turned over to the Prosecutor. I couldn't at first think what the Sanhedrin was playing at, invoking Roman Law where its own could run, but whatever the reason I saw my own chance of survival going down the drain. A brilliant fanatic, preaching his doctrines of spiritual purity and that stuff, would be exactly the sort of man Pilate could earn a little cheap popularity by setting at liberty – and do no harm to his own interests. Not the man of action like me. Not the true rebel. And all his set – all Jesus Bar-Joseph's set – would raise merry Hell to get him the pardon.

I wondered what had happened to my lot, whether they were trying to organize something or whether they were at sixes and sevens. I was a popular figure, of course, not only with my own followers but with many ordinary folk, particularly the young ones; but there were quite a few who wouldn't break their hearts if I was hung on a piece of wood on Golgotha. The trouble with a movement like ours – founded as it partly is on terror – is that its sword always has two edges: one to cut down the oppressor, one to discipline the toadies and the faint-hearts in your own folk. So you have enmities both ways.

Down in the cell you could hear nothing and learn nothing, you waited quaking for the next step; and when it came – a while later – it was four guards, and I knew my hour had come. We were called out by name – first me and then Dysmas and Gestas – and we were shouldered together blinking into the startlingly bright light of the shadowed stone passage outside, and then we shuffled along, first along a tunnel, our chains clanking, then up a flight of steps into a tiny courtyard, with the thin spring sunlight beating against a wall. Here after a minute Dysmas and Gestas were taken off in one direction and me in another. A room with a Centurion by the window, holding his helmet and smoothing the plume; one of the soldiers unlocked my manacles, bent to free my ankles. I stood there rubbing wrists and waiting. The Centurion let me wait.

Then he said: ‘ You are free, dog. Get from here, and, if you are wise, do not show your face in Jerusalem again. The next time there will be no act of clemency to save you …'

Well, d'you know, the flood of relief fairly turned my knees to water in a way no prospect of death would have done. To my shame I had to be helped from the room. Then I was led, recovering all the way, through the Praetorium of Pilate's palace and on to a balcony, where a huge crowd of people was milling about below. When they saw me they let out a great yell of joy.
That
was a moment – to feel free again, to be free to join my own, free to plot again and free to fight. Free to breathe the air and smell the sunshine and to live for tomorrow. I came near to blubbering like a weakling and recognized no face in all that crowd, though a voice now and then rang a familiar note in my ears.

I turned to go down the steps, and then saw that beyond the Procurator and a couple of his lackeys was this preacher, Jesus Bar-Joseph; and God, he was in a mess, his face bloodstained, with a sort of laurel wreath on his head, and blood dripping down his legs and on his shoes, and an old purple cloak round his shoulders. He looked like death. We stared at each other for a second or so, and I guessed then that I'd been right – it
had
been him or me to get the special pardon, but for some reason that I never expected it had come my way. A shiver went down my spine and I thought, out of here before they change their minds, the fools, the damned fools, the thrice-damned fools to give it to me.

I made him a little bow and went down the steps three at a time, and in a few seconds I was being greeted by all my Zealot friends, hugging and kissing me with delight; and in no time I was swallowed up and away. The whole crowd, with me in the middle, began to push and stream out of the square; but just before we got out of sight. I turned and saw them leading the preacher away. And I thought to myself, well, there but for the grace of God go I …