Testament: A Novel

By Nino Ricci

A fictional biography of the earthly life of Jesus told from the perspectives of four fascinating figures, by the author of Where She Has Gone.

In powerful accounts colored by their own beliefs and devices, the following men and women tell the captivating story:

Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas Iscariot), a freedom fighter working for Rome’s overthrow who is drawn to the charismatic teacher; Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdeline), a disciple who finds in Jesus’ presence the intellectual stimulation that society has denied her. Miryam (Mary), the mother of Jeus, who has a complex relationship with her precocious son, and Simon of Gergesa, a plainspoken shepherd who travels to Jerusalem and witnesses the last days of the Jewish preacher.

With exquisite detail, Nino Ricci offers a provocative portrait of the historical Jesus, an ordinary man living in a time of political turmoil and spiritual uncertainty.

Praise for Testament

“A hypnotic, deeply lyrical presentation of four gospels . . . . A writer of impeccable craft . . . recreating, in his incantatory prose, the very aroma and the wild, sorcery-filled world through which Jesus walked.” —Pico Iyer, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A fantastic storyteller . . . an unsettling book . . . The four narrators Ricci creates are exceptionally well drawn and brilliantly infused with the details of their time.” —Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor

“The portrait of a difficult, alienated, but compassionate and charismatic intellectual and religious rebel . . . The character that emerges is complex, compelling, and achingly heroic.” —Christine Wald-Hopkins, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 14, 2004
• ISBN: 9780547349510

Book preview

Copyright © 2002 by Nino Ricci

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

First published in Canada in 2002 by Doubleday Canada,

a division of Random House of Canada Limited

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ricci, Nino, date,

p. cm.

ISBN 0-61 8-27353-0

I. Jesus Christ—Fiction. 2. Bible. N.T.—History of

Biblical events—Fiction.

I. Title.

PR9199.3.R512 T4 2003

813'.54—dc21 2002027563

Map by Jacques Chazaud

eISBN 978-0-547-34951-0

v2.1217

for Sarah

for Virginia

for Luca

Book I

Yihuda of Qiryat

I FIRST SAW HIM in the winter of that year at En Melakh, a town of a few hundred just north of the Salt Sea. He had come in out of the desert, people said—from the look of him, his blistered face and the way his skin hung from his bones, he’d passed a good while there. He had set himself up now just off the square, squatting in the shade of an old fig tree; I had a good view of him from the porch of the tavern I’d put up in across the way. Some of the townspeople, no doubt taking him for a holy man, dropped bits of food in front of him from time to time, which he accepted with a nod of his head but more often than not couldn’t seem to bring himself to stomach, letting them sit there in the dirt for the flies to collect on or the dogs to snatch away.

Though the town lay on the Roman side of the frontier, the soldiers of Herod Antipas often passed that way when they travelled up from his southern territories. At the time, I was awaiting an informant we had among Herod’s men on his way back to the court from the Macherus fortress. The holy man had appeared perhaps the third day of my wait, simply there beneath the fig tree when I awoke; from the joyless look of him I thought he might have been cast out from one of the desert cults, the way they did sometimes if some bit of food should touch your hand before you’d washed it or if you missed some pause or half-word in your prayers. His hair and beard were scraggly and short as if recently shaved for a vow—they gave him a boyish appearance but couldn’t however quite take the dignity from him, which seemed to sit on him like some mantle someone had laid over him.

He wasn’t wearing any sandals or cloak. I thought surely he’d had some cave out there to hole up in, and some brush for fire, or he would have frozen to death in the cold. Even here in the valley the nights had been bitter, the little heat the sun built up over the day through the winter haze vanishing the instant dusk fell. I waited to see if he planned to weather the night in the open or repair to some cranny when darkness set in. But the sun dropped and he didn’t move. My tavern-keeper, a mangy sort with an open sore on one of his knuckles, brought a lamp out to the porch and a bit of the gruel he passed off as food.

He’s a quiet one, that one, he said, with his low, vulgar laugh, trying to ingratiate himself. Nearly dead, from the look of it.

Not ten strides from the man some of the boys of the town, coming out after their suppers, began to get up a bit of a fire, spitting and holding their hands up to the flames and keeping their talk low lest the holy man overhear them. The orange haze their fire threw out just reached the man where he was, making him seem like someone at a threshold, someone turned away from the room of light the fire formed. Get up and warm yourself, I wanted to say to him, feeling I was out there with him in the cold, with the wind at my ankles and just a few bits of bread in my belly. But still he sat. It occurred to me that he was perhaps simply too enfeebled to rise, that his hapless look was his own hunger-dimmed wonder that he could sit there as his life ebbed away and not be able to lift a finger to save himself.

I had half-resolved to go out and offer him my cloak when I was headed off by a woman who was apparently the mother of one of the boys in the square, and who came out chastising the lot of them.

Animals! Didn’t one of you think to give him a bit of fire?

And she proceeded to purloin some of the precious faggots of wood the boys had no doubt scrounged for all afternoon in the brush and to build a little fire in front of the man. When she’d got a blaze going she took off her own shawl and draped it over his shoulders, then took her son by the ear and dragged him off home. Within minutes the rest of the boys, thus humiliated, had begun to disperse as well, the last two or three lingering defiantly a bit before finally quenching their own fire and shamefacedly dropping their remaining handfuls of wood into that of the holy man.

The holy man, for his part, had seemed oblivious to all of this. But when the boys had gone I detected a bit of movement in him, a slight drawing in towards the fire as if towards some secret it might whisper to him. I thought I ought to assure myself that he at least had his wits about him, and so, with the excuse of further stoking his fire, I took a few twigs from the small bundle that the tavern-keeper kept near his gate and walked out to him. It was only when I got close to him that I saw what his body had been giving in to: he had fallen asleep. I wavered a moment over tending to him—it was always my instinct then in situations of that kind to err on the side of indifference, as the way of drawing the least attention to myself. But seeing him helpless like that in his sleep, and even more hopelessly frail than he had seemed from a distance, I shored up his fire a bit and then for good measure draped my cloak over his shawl, knowing that I could beg an extra blanket off the tavern-keeper for my own lice-infested bed. What struck me as I draped the cloak over him was how peculiar this act of charity felt, how alien to my nature, as if I had now truly become a man whom I’d thought I merely feigned to be.

The group I formed part of was based in Jerusalem, and had among it a few members of the aristocracy from which it derived funds, but also shopkeepers and clerks, bakers and common labourers, though I had never been certain in the several years of my own involvement with it how far its network extended. The truth was that we were not encouraged to know one another, against the chance of capture and betrayal, and in my own case I could not have named with certainty more than a few dozen of my co-conspirators, although there were many others, of course, whom I had met in one way or another or whom I knew only by aliases. I myself had been recruited during my days as a recorder at the temple, where I had taken refuge after the death of my parents. At the time it had been rage that moved me, and a young man’s passion, though afterwards I also had cause to be grateful for the years of boredom I had been saved copying out the rolls for the temple tax.

Like the Zealots, we worked for Rome’s overthrow though, unlike them, we did not imagine that only God was our commander or that it was profanement to know more than what was written in the Torah. So we had a few men of experience amongst us, at least, who understood how the world worked and the forces we were up against. But many of those who had joined us in the hope of imminent revolt had, over time, lost patience with our leaders’ caution and our lack of progress. It was our strategy, for instance, that we stir up unrest in the entire region before risking any action of our own. Yet the fact was that we did not have the contacts for proper embassies abroad, and that outside our borders we had won to our cause only the most minor of tribal lords. So our grand hope of a revolution that would spread across the whole of the empire, and be unquenchable, appeared increasingly the merest fantasy. In the meantime we had begun to descend into factions, and even those who ought to have been our allies often proved, over some point of doctrine, our fiercest enemies. The Zealots, for instance, considered us cowards and collaborationists because we did not protest every smallest infringement of Jewish law; yet they thus wasted in a thousand little outbursts the resources that ought to have gone to a single great conflagration.

In the face of our failures abroad we had begun to put our energies instead into infiltrating the Palestinian outposts, not only those in Judea, which the Romans controlled directly, but also those in the territories of their vassals Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, on the reasoning that in the event of revolt we would need to take the outlying fortresses at once if we were to stand any chance of holding back the Roman legions based in Syria. Most of us were kept in the dark, of course, about our actual strength, going about our little tasks with hardly any sense of the whole we formed part of, not only because our leaders so arranged it but because even amongst ourselves we did not dare to confide in one another or pool our knowledge, for fear of spies. In my own case there were two men I reported to, one a teacher and grain merchant who lived near the stadium, and the other a lawyer who worked in the city administration; outside these I spoke to no one except in the most general terms. For my work, I ran a shop just beneath the Antonia fortress where I sold phylacteries and also various foreign texts, and where I offered services as a scribe. It was in this latter office that I made myself useful to our group—the soldiers from the fortress often came to me to prepare their letters home, and so I learned the comings and goings of the procurator and the movements of the troops and so on. In the beginning, because I had been raised in Ephesus and knew something of the world, I had also a number of times been sent abroad, even once as far as Rome. But eventually it grew clear that I did not have the character for diplomacy. So I was given other duties, though from time to time was still sent on small assignments outside the city, which I increasingly welcomed as the atmosphere among us in Jerusalem grew more and more oppressive.

En Melakh was barely a day’s journey from Jerusalem but seemed much further, at the bottom of the long, bleak road that led down from the city to the Jordan plain. I had left Jerusalem under clear skies, but here a dust-filled wind had daily blown across the flats like the Almighty’s angry breath, blocking the sun and dropping grit in every nook and crevice. The morning after the holy man’s arrival, however, dawned clear. During the night I had hardly been able to sleep for the thought of him sitting out there in the cold—I did not know why my mind had so fixed on him except that he seemed an obscure sort of challenge to me, to my own smug sense of mission, sitting there half-dead yet asking for nothing.

When I awoke, just past daybreak, I did not take the trouble to so much as wash my hands before going out to check on him. My heart sank when I saw he was missing from his spot beneath the fig tree—my first thought was that he had died in the night and had already been carted away, to prevent the desecration of buzzards alighting there in the middle of the town. But then I caught sight of him amidst the early morning traffic a little ways from the square, padding along in the dim red of sunrise towards the stable that served to house the pack animals and goats of the local market. It was a shock to see him fully upright, all skin and bones the way he was, little more than a wraith against the dawn, walking with that strange light-footedness of the very thin and the very frail that makes them look almost lively and spry even when they are at death’s door.

At the stables he ducked into one of the stalls and squatted to ease himself. It was only when he had emerged and had begun to move back towards the square that I noticed he was no longer wearing my cloak, only the shawl he’d been given, which gave him a slightly comical, womanly air despite his wisps of beard; and I saw now that my cloak in fact lay neatly draped over the low mud wall of the tavern’s porch. Clearly his wits were sharper than I had imagined them, if he had known enough to track me down. But rather than being pleased that the thing had been returned to me, I felt a prick of injury at how speedily he had seemed to wish to rid himself of it, as if it were some curse that had been laid on him.

He took up his place beneath the fig tree again. There was a little more life in his eyes than there had been the day before—it seemed he had crossed back, after all, to the land of the living. From somewhere he’d got hold of a gourd that he’d filled with water and now he set about doing his ablutions, with the careful frugality of a seasoned desert-dweller, a few drops for his hands, his forearms, his face, a few more for his ankles and feet. When he had finished he leaned in low on his haunches, arms outspread, to say his prayers.

It seemed shameful to watch him while he prayed. I took my cloak up and drew it over me against the lingering cold and went into the courtyard, where the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Adah, a girl of fourteen or so, was preparing some porridge at the bit of fire there. She was a strange girl, as unblemished as her father was vile but also not quite present somehow, a bit simple perhaps. Sometimes her father would send her half-undressed to my room to bring me my meals or wine, with a conniving that chilled me.

I never see you go out to the market like the other girls, I said to her. Maybe your husband’s there.

But she misunderstood.

I don’t have a husband, she said with a panicked look, then hurried off to bring her father his breakfast.

I was accustomed enough to biding my time in those days but the holy man had made me restless—simply that he was there, fired by a sense of purpose different from mine, or perhaps the waste that I saw then in his sort of devotion. I went out after I’d eaten and he was still sitting beneath his tree, the sun just rising above the houses behind him to cast his shadow all along the length of the square. Without quite knowing what I intended, I walked out to where he was.

I tossed a coin on the ground in front of him.

For your breakfast, I said. But he didn’t pick it up. Up close I saw he still had a dulled look, his eyes sunken, the skin sagging against his bones.

Bread would be better, he said.

His voice was stronger than I would have imagined it, seeming to echo in the hollow places in him.

With a coin you can buy bread.

All the same.

There didn’t seem any arrogance in this, only stubbornness—I thought perhaps it was part of his vow, to abjure any coinage, or that he was one of those who wouldn’t touch coins on account of the images there. I bent to collect the thing and went at once into the market, where I bought a bit of stew that I brought back to him. He thanked me roughly and set into it with a barely controlled vehemence, his appetite clearly returned.

I lent you my cloak, I said.

He didn’t look up from his food.

I recognized it.

And yet did not think to thank me. So it seemed I must wrestle him for my blessing.

And you returned it. For which I’m grateful.

It seemed so fine I thought you’d miss it.

But you haven’t returned the shawl you were given.

It’s less fine. I thought it would be less missed.

He put me in mind of those barefooted Greeks I’d seen as a boy in the squares of Ephesus, who lived on air and made it their job to poke fun at the least hint of pretension.

He had finished his food.

Should I send another bowl? I said.

If you like.

I paid a boy to bring out more stew, then moved on through the market. En Melakh was one of the towns that the madman Cassius had razed when he was in Syria, for failing to pay him tribute, and it had been rebuilt in crude Greek style with an open market just inside the gates. There wasn’t much of interest to be had in it—a bit of coloured wool from the coast, a few trinkets and hair combs, some dried meat and fruits. At the back, where the concessions gave way to the narrow alleys of a bazaar, an old woman ran a shop out of her house that I’d noticed people hurrying from carrying secret parcels wrapped in sackcloth: potions and charms. A carved figurine of three wise men wrapped in fish skins stood in a niche above the woman’s lintel. These were our God-fearing Jews, I thought, hedging their bets, worshipping icons of old men dressed up as fish.

As I was coming out of the far end of the market there was a commotion near the town gates. Some sort of detachment was coming into town—Romans, I thought at first, but then I recognized the standards of Herod Antipas. I made my way through the gawkers who had already lined the street to get a better view. They were a bit of a rabble, it seemed, around a dozen in all, arranged in rough formation around their captain, a bearded colossus who was the only rider. It took me a moment to see what it was that had caused such a stir: they had a prisoner in tow. He was being pulled along, virtually dragged, by a rope attached to the captain’s saddle, though because of the soldiers and the crowd I could not get a good view of him. Then a gap opened up and I saw his face and was stopped dead, for though he was badly beaten I recognized him at once as my contact.

I did not know how to react. The truth was that nothing in my experience had prepared me for a situation of this sort, so that it seemed as if what had been merely trifling until then, playing a part, had become suddenly real. I moved to the back of the crowd to be out of the soldiers’ path, afraid some look or glance from the man might give me away. But he looked too far ruined for that. Both eyes were swelled to slits from whatever beatings he had got; one of his ears had been cut away, but crudely, so that there were still ragged bits of flesh left hanging, encrusted black with flies and dried blood. As he went past he stumbled and fell and did not get up again, so that he ended by being hauled along the street on his backside while one of the town dogs ran barking half-crazed around him and the townspeople laughed, no doubt taking him for a simple criminal.

His name was Ezekias. He was not much more than a boy, a messenger for the court in Tiberias who had been scouted out because of his position and then recruited during a visit to Jerusalem for one of the feasts. My only dealings with him had been a short encounter in the city at the time of his recruitment and a further one in Jericho some months later—he had struck me then as young, loyal, earnest, and entirely unaware of the danger he had entered into. It seemed more and more we relied on this sort, who could be easily replaced; indeed, I myself had not been so different when I had joined.

His use to us had been that he was often able to bring us news from the Macherus fortress, which was second only to Masada in impregnability, and with it formed the backbone of the southern defences of the Palestinian territories. We had been working to infiltrate the place for some time, in which task we had some reason to feel hope since, unlike at many of the other outposts, there was a large contingent of Jews among the company there. But there were also many Edomites, whose lands lay nearby and from whom Antipas’s father had descended, and who therefore could not be trusted. The Edomites held all the positions of command, and found every means of keeping the Jews subordinate. Yet there were one or two Jews who by dint of sheer perseverance and faultless service had got ahead, and these were the ones to whom we had directed ourselves and so gained a foothold.

The soldiers had come to a stop in the middle of the square. There were a couple of hitching stones there, near the well; they tied the captain’s horse to one and bound Ezekias to the other with the rope he’d been dragged by, haphazardly, as if he were a sheaf of wheat they were binding. After they’d drawn up their own fill from the well, they watered the horse but left Ezekias untended, not so much out of malice, it seemed, but more as if he were something they’d lost interest in, in the oafish way of boys who tired of some creature they’d caught. Ezekias, however, seemed aware neither that water was near nor that he was being denied it, his head drooped and his body straining against the rope that bound him so that it seemed the only thing that held him upright.

After the days of cloud and dust the clear sky now seemed an assault, the sun already beating down like a hammer. I stood there in the street but could not form a plan, felt only a general outrage as if some trick had been played on me. I could not know what Ezekias’s capture meant or who else had been implicated by it; I reasoned the soldiers knew nothing of our meeting or they would not have come into town so openly, but even that wasn’t certain. They had moved off now towards the tavern where I was staying, the tavern-keeper hurrying out to greet them, putting on his most servile of appearances, smiling and bowing and scraping and promising wine and meat, which I myself had hardly seen a trace of in my days there; and meanwhile the townspeople were still lingering uncertainly about the square, in the hope, perhaps, of some sort of violence.

I looked to Ezekias again and thought, He must be killed, for his own sake and for the sake of those he might name, when the king’s men in Tiberias put their wits to his torture. Then once the idea had entered my head, there was no putting it out, because of its logic. All of us had heard the stories of those who’d been taken and the things that were done to them, and how sometimes, for instance, to make them name their accomplices, their children or wives were brought before them and their fingers severed one by one or their eyes gouged out. So it was not simply a matter of sparing Ezekias—my own life stood at risk if I did nothing, for surely I would be among the first he would give up, if he had not already done so.

I had a dagger in my room that I always carried among my things. In all the time since my recruitment I had never had cause to use it; it seemed a great irony to me that its first victim would now be a member of my own cause. Thus, even as it grew clear that I must attempt the thing, it seemed a sort of joke, not the least part of which was that I would need to find the courage to slit my own throat if I was caught, or I would merely have put myself in the place of Ezekias. So I stood there in the street and did not know how to begin, and the sun grew hotter and the flies continued to cluster around Ezekias’s bloodied face. Twenty paces from him the holy man still sat beneath his tree—next to Ezekias he seemed diminished somehow, though I saw how he had watched the soldiers’ progress closely.

The company had been too large to fit in the tavern-keeper’s courtyard so he’d had his sons set up awnings in front of the porch and lay out carpets there. When the group had finally settled itself he sent Adah out, arms bared, to serve the wine, with the predictable result that the soldiers, lethargic and dull until then, grew suddenly animated, slipping their hands on poor Adah’s backside as she passed and laughing at her frightened retreat from them. While their attention was thus diverted I made my way past them in order to get to my room. Only the tavern-keeper showed any particular awareness of me as I went in, catching my eye dismissively as if to say he was sorry, he had more important matters than me to attend to at the moment.

I got the knife from my things. I had a scabbard for it but had never been in the habit of wearing it. Strapping it on now I felt like a child dressing up for a game of assassin. It made a bulge beneath my cloak when I had it in place that I imagined would make my intentions plain to anyone who laid eyes on me.

I went through my sack then, since I did not think I would be returning to my room. But other than a bit of cheese and stale bread from the trip down from Jerusalem there were only some underthings and a dirtied shirt, which I left there.

Stepping out to the porch from the courtyard, I ran full into Adah as she was hurrying in. The force of the collision sent the jug she was carrying smashing against the ground and sent Adah herself sprawling backwards practically into the laps of the soldiers, who at once were in an uproar, half-drunk by now and pleased beyond reckoning at the mishap.

I’m sorry, Adah stammered, I’m sorry, scrambling to collect up the broken jug before fleeing back into the courtyard.

The soldiers, meanwhile, had now decided that they must make me their good friend and pulled me down to join them at their libations, with that brutal jocularity soldiers had, that you knew could turn against you at the slightest whim. I was worried they would ask me my business—I had put it out to the tavern-keeper that I was expecting some traders from Nabatea—and would catch me out in some mistake, since I did not know very well the movements of the traders in those parts. But they did not seem to have much interest in anything outside their own crude humour. I saw now that there wasn’t a Jew among them—they were mainly Syrians, it seemed, except for the captain, who was clearly an Edomite.

Because my cloak had fallen open one of the soldiers noticed my dagger, which had a jewelled handle. He was one of the younger ones, whose provenance I could not make out, since he spoke neither Aramaic nor even Greek very well. Without asking my leave he pulled the knife from its sheath and then with a grin made as if to stab me with it, the whole company bursting into laughter when I started back. He then pulled out his own knife, which had a curved blade and a handle of tooled leather, and offered it in exchange. I was afraid this was some custom of his that I would be forced to honour.

It was my father’s, I said of my own, which was the truth and which seemed to satisfy him, since he returned the thing to me.

With each moment I sat there, it seemed increasingly farfetched that I should carry my plan through; and indeed there was that part of me that was happy I had been compelled to stop there. The thing was simple enough—I lacked the courage. Or perhaps for a moment I did not see the point, of Ezekias’s death or my own, the useless pile of bones we would amount to.

I asked as casually as I could manage after their prisoner.

We always carry a Jew to draw off the dogs, the captain said, his first words to me.

The soldiers at once broke into laughter, not bothering to restrain themselves in the least on my account, so that I felt sickened to have sat down amongst them. I started to rise but one of them held me back, clapping an aggressive arm around me, until I thought I must draw my dagger then and there. In the meanwhile, however, the captain’s attention had been drawn to the square. I looked out to see that a small crowd had gathered there near Ezekias—it seemed the holy man, while the soldiers had been busy with me, had gone to the well to get a scoop of water to bring over to him, and people had gathered around now to see if he would get away with the thing.

The captain had one of his men out there in an instant, who snatched the scoop away and sent the water spilling, in the process practically knocking the holy man over. Some of the crowd jeered him at that, for it was one thing to torture a prisoner but another to slight a Jewish holy man; and then someone, it wasn’t clear who, threw a stone at him. The soldier drew his cutlass then and it seemed for a moment that there would be a riot, which however would have suited me very well. But the captain at once roused his men and hurried them out into the square, where they stood with their hands on their swords until the crowd had backed off.

In all this I had quietly made my way back to the edge of the market, still awaiting a chance if one should present itself. But in a moment it grew clear that my plan had been truly foiled now, for the captain had apparently had enough of the place and had begun rounding up his men to resume their march. He sent one of the soldiers back to pay the tavern-keeper, lest he lodge a complaint and the Romans bar Antipas from their roads; some of the others prepared his horse. But when they went to loose Ezekias from his post, he simply slumped to the ground and did not move.

The captain squatted down to him and held a hand out to feel for his breath. After a moment he stood and kicked the slumped body over angrily, then for good measure pulled out his cutlass and stuck it into Ezekias’s side. A trickle of blood seeped up through the wound.

Leave him, the captain said, and abandoned him there by the hitching post.

The captain wasted no time now in taking up his march again, and in a matter of minutes he and his men were already out the gates. I stood there in the square and could not believe the way the thing had ended, nor could I say if it showed the Lord’s mercy or his spite.

The crowd around Ezekias had grown again but no one dared to touch him, fearing who knew what defilement. There were mumbles of confusion, then the question of what should be done with the body; I cut off debate by undertaking to look after it. Of the entire crowd the only one who came forward to offer to help was the holy man.

I can manage it, I said, given his state. But he had already moved to take Ezekias’s feet.

We carried him out through the gates. The holy man proved surprisingly agile, keeping up a brisk pace without complaint. We were silent until we were a little way beyond the town, but then we needed to discuss how best the body could be disposed of. It would take a day’s work to dig a hole in the rock-hard earth outside the town there. But I could not bear the thought of simply burying Ezekias beneath a pile of stones like a common criminal.

There are some caves in the hills, the holy man said. Not far.

But it was two miles or more of barren plain before the hills began, and the sun still climbing.

You’ll be all right? I said.

If not, there are caves enough for all of us.

It was past mid-morning before we reached the hills. The sun was relentless; beneath it the landscape looked utterly transformed from the previous days, stark and deathly and unreal. Ezekias’s body was sending up a terrible stink—from the slit in his side, mainly, though it seemed also that he had soiled himself at some point.

It took all our effort to make our way up the scree of the first hills. But the holy man knew his way around, leading us to a small promontory beneath which were sheltered a few natural caves. A bit of careful manoeuvring got us down to one of them and we set Ezekias’s body inside. The holy man pulled a waterskin from under his shirt then, and wetting his sleeve he wiped some of the grime and blood from Ezekias’s face. It was only now that I allowed myself to truly look at it, so mangled, though it had once been quite handsome. The jaw looked broken, perhaps the nose as well; the hair was matted with blood where his ear had been severed. But under the holy man’s ministrations the face began to look human again.

You knew him? the holy man said.

No. But it bothered me to lie to him, nor did he seem to believe me.

When we had laid the body out and wrapped my cloak around it as a shroud, we set about closing up the mouth of the cave, heaping rubble down from the slope above it and scrounging what rocks we could from the hillside. The work took an hour or more, in a heat that was like a wall bearing down on us. Afterwards we sat on the ledge that came out from the cave and drank what remained of the holy man’s water. From where we sat we had a view of the Jordan plain, with the palms of Jericho to the north and the intimation of the Salt Sea to the southeast. En Melakh, directly ahead of us, looked almost indistinguishable from the rubbled plain it rose out of—it was a town that defied logic, sitting nearly undefended like that at the frontier, with its houses of unbaked mud that a few good rains would wash to nothing. If it were ever abandoned, the desert would have erased every trace of it inside of a year.

Will you spend the night in the town again? I said.

I think I’ll go on to Jericho.

We sat talking, in the tired, laconic way that came of our fatigue and of the gravity of the task we had shared. His name was Yehoshua; when I asked him what had brought him to En Melakh, he told me, with surprising frankness, that he had been an acolyte of the prophet Yohanan, whose camp had been nearby. It was not two months then since Yohanan had been arrested, by Herod Antipas, though everyone knew it was the Romans who had put him up to it.

We heard Yohanan’s acolytes had been killed, I said.

Not all of them. Though he wouldn’t look at me when he said this.

Things were clearer now: he had shaved his head to hide from the soldiers, since it was a mark of Yohanan and his men that they went unshorn. So we were both of us outlaws, it seemed, joined in that way if no other. In fact our movement had followed Yohanan’s arrest closely, to see if we could find the way to turn his supporters to us; but in the end we had found them too leaderless and fanatical and dispersed. In my own view the Romans had been wrong to see in Yohanan a political threat, for all the numbers he drew—rather he had been a boon to them, by diverting to mysticism those who might otherwise have put their energies to burning Roman garrisons.

With the mention of Yohanan, Yehoshua’s mood had turned—it weighed on him, as I guessed, to have deserted him. He seemed tired to me, and embittered, like someone at the end of a road.

If you left him it was to save your life, I said, so that you might put it to good use. But the words sounded empty—I was not some wise man to tell him such a thing, nor even, it seemed, more certain of myself.

He didn’t take offence, however, but made light of the thing, saying, He’s better off than the man in the cave, at least.

It was Yehoshua, before we set out, who said a prayer for poor Ezekias, asking the Lord to look to him. Then, where the hills gave way to the chalky plain again, we took our leave of each other. He handed me the shawl he’d been given in En Melakh, and which he’d been using as his headgear, and asked me if I might return it to its owner. I could not say why it so moved me that he should make this request of me.

I’ll find her, I said.

I watched him as he melted into the barrens, not imagining I should see him again but feeling still bound to him, because he had shared with me the contamination of Ezekias’s death. I thought of the story of the priest who saw a dying man by the road and passed him by, for fear of uncleanness—at least that was not the school that Yohanan had raised him in. It was to prepare God’s way that Yohanan taught, as I’d heard it, though his acolyte seemed to have lost his own. No doubt his courage had failed when the soldiers had come and he’d run; yet I could not say I would not have done the same.

He had already disappeared in the haze off the desert when I turned back towards En Melakh. A wind had come up by then and the dust was rising. By the time I reached the town it had blocked the sun again.

The purge that followed the discovery of our infiltration at Macherus was a great setback to us and indeed seemed to threaten to undermine the whole of our movement. At the fort itself it was not only our leaders who were discovered but also their handful of recruits, all of them summarily executed, so that our strength there was wiped out. But by far the greater blow to us was that the Romans and the Herods were quick to use the thing to their own ends, joining forces to rid themselves of anyone who had ever been the least trouble to them, and in the process ferreting out by chance many of our own people. In Jerusalem there was such a stink from the rotting corpses outside the Gennath Gate that the members of the council, as I heard it, sent a protest to the emperor, no doubt imagining that they had thus stood strong against our Roman oppressors and showed the dignity of the Jews.

I myself had gone quietly back to Jerusalem after Ezekias’s death but did not dare to speak to anyone, for fear I was being watched. Then a few days after my return, I learned that the teacher in the city I had reported to had been arrested. I did not waste any time then but at once packed away all the goods I had in my shop and then collected what money remained from my inheritance and left the city. For a number of days I took refuge with a cousin I had at Joppa, though I told him nothing, of course, of my situation. But Roman battalions often passed through the town on their way from Caesarea Maritima up the coast, which the Romans had set up as their capital, so I grew afraid of bringing him into risk and moved on.

In the end I crossed the northern frontier and went on to Tyre, having heard we had a group there. I had passed through Tyre with my father several times as a child and had thought it a great city, with its grand causeway and port and its many temples. But it now seemed a vulgar and lawless place, full of beggars and scoundrels. It took me many days to track down our group, since there was much suspicion and fear even there at the time, and then what I found were half a dozen aging rebels who still hearkened back to Yihuda the Galilean and who had been so long absent from our country as to have lost all sense of the realities facing us. As a result, my relations with them were strained from the start. As others of our party began to filter into the city with more news of the reprisals against us, the members of the Tyrian group grew puffed up with the delusion that the leadership of the movement would now somehow come to rest with them. So the rest of us began to avoid them out of fear they would compromise us in some way, with the Roman authorities or with our own leadership. For my part, since I had heard of no warrant against me in Jerusalem, I began to think seriously of leaving the city, though I knew also that a few of those close to me had been arrested and shipped off into slavery.

Through all this I had hardly given another thought to Yehoshua. But one day after I’d been in the city a matter of months I came across a gathering of some twenty or so near the city gates and there

Reviews for Testament

[turtlesleap · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A secular account of the life of Jesus Christ, told from the POV of Judas Escariot