Great Lion of God

by Taylor Caldwell

  The valiant die valiantly, thought Saul, listening to the iron hammering which seemed too close, too dreadful, too imminent, in that silence. When the soldiers raised the cross with the youth upon it, and forced it into a hole in the brittle yellow ground, the shock of its falling into the socket appeared to be a shock on Saul’s heart, so awful, so dolorous, it was, so final, so hopeless. The youth sagged with his own weight but did not groan.

  One by one the youths were crucified, and not a cry or a protest or a shriek of agony came from a single heroic throat. Some were proud and disdainful; some were set of lip and eye. Some appeared to have fallen into a dream and looked only at the sky. But not one whimpered. Their rags and wild skins were the garments of sacrificed children.

  It was the watchers who began to weep, to beat their breasts, to beat their temples. But soldiers and the dying seemed not to hear, to be aware. The soldiers worked very fast, sweating and speechless, not looking at the faces of their victims. There was an extraordinary hurry about most of them, for this was the first crucifixions the majority had ever engaged in before, and they were very young and their hearts were not of stone. They had hated these youths, many of whom were their own ages, but now they did not hate. Not one jeered or taunted. This was an evil task, and it could not be avoided, and they wished it to be over and forgotten.

  “Vengeance, vengeance!” whispered Saul fiercely, and thought he would die with his own agony. “Where is the God of Israel, that He permits this?”

  Then that hidden voice, so passionate, so strong and musical, rang out against the brazen quiet:

  “Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you that wait for the Lord!”

  For the first time, the crowd of black-robed men responded:

  “I have waited for the Lord, blessed be His Name, and He comes on the wings of the morning, my Succor and my Hope, my Lord and my God!”

  The voices broke into weeping, but did not falter. The young men on those crosses, so close together, listened and a rapt smile of touching joy passed over many of their faces. Now all could see how emaciated they were, how poor and hungry, for their ribs arched starkly under the tight brown skins, the arms were all dark bone, the legs the legs of children. And the scarlet blood, in that brassy light, began to stream from hands and feet, and sweat, the color of quicksilver, ran down each drawn cheek and lay in the corners of pallid mouths. Here and there, urine and feces released by agony, dripped down the crosses and a stench arose.

  The shadow ran over the sky; it ran over the earth. The soldiers retreated a distance, and stood about their red standards and did not speak, nor did they look at each other. There was only the sound of lamentation as the mourners prayed. There was no sun, yet the armor on the soldiers glistened, and so did their swords, and every face appeared illuminated with a ghastly and searching light, and too distinct.

  Saul, sunken in his grief and despair, heard a disturbed and wondering sound, and felt a quickened movement about him. He raised his head, to see the young peasant he had encountered in the marketplace moving from the ranks of the mourners, and he wore a rude brown robe and his feet were dusty in his sandals. But he moved with slow majesty to the crowd of the crosses, walking without sound, his uncovered golden hair and beard shining cloudily in the increasing gloom. His face was very quiet and serene, his profile lifted. He was tall and slender and muscular, and he left deep footsteps in the dust, which swirled about his ankles. A radiance, shifting and nebulous, seemed to lie on his shoulders and throat.

  Saul watched. The mourners forgot their weeping. The soldiers looked at him alertly, but none made a motion to stop him. He began to walk among the ranks of the fainting and dying and tortured. He stopped before each cross. He lifted his blue eyes to the faces of the youths. He smiled gently. He moved on, slowly, pausing, smiling. He spoke no word.

  Yet the eyes of the dying followed him, and the contorted faces became quiet, and mouths opened as if to reply to something only they heard and which had consoled them. It was as if he had given a potion to each, which had taken away pain and fear and despair, and had left peace behind it.

  There was not one he neglected, not one he ignored. His air was tender and valorous, sorrowful yet comforting. Every man watched, including the soldiers, and all were as still as the men on the crosses, and only eyes moved.

  He was approaching the final rank and now he was close to the Roman soldiers who looked at him from under their young and uneasy brows and made bold faces. He stopped for a moment to consider them, and to Saul’s astonishment no anger touched his peaceful brow nor did his lips curl in an imprecation nor did his face pale with stern wrath. In truth, his expression became exceedingly compassionate and even more gentle than before, and Saul suddenly remembered the words of Amos, repeating the words of God:

  “Are you not like the Ethiopians to Me, O people of Israel? Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?”

  They were the loving words of the Father of all men, tender land merciful, and Saul was struck by them, and he trembled. It I seemed that the nameless peasant who gazed at the Roman soldiers was repeating this inwardly, too, and remembering, and directing it at the soldiers.

  No, no! cried Saul in himself, fearful that his rage and pity would leave him, and in their leaving he would lose his strength and his hatred which gave him that strength. If one believed that the worst of men were also the children of God then one could not fight evil, could right no wrongs, could deliver no oppressed, could not, in truth, defend the Name of God. He looked at the peasant and told himself that he was presumptuous, and he thought again that the stranger was a sorcerer who was numbing the victims with his mind and deceiving their heroic spirits.

  The stranger still gazed at the Romans, and they gazed back at him, and they were more uneasy than before, and oddly discomfited. They shifted their iron-shod sandals; they shrugged their shoulders. Some even put hands on swords, the gesture of frightened men. But they did not speak. And some there were who looked at the stranger and their faces were moved. When he went on as before, they watched him, then exchanged disquieted glances.

  He had done. Now he stood before the first rank of crosses and looked at the dying upon them. He lifted his hand to all and he said in a voice that had the soft sound of distant thunder in it, the words of the Shema:

  “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One!”

  Now, for the first time, the dying spoke in unison, and their voices were triumphant and exultant and prayerful, and they cried also:

  “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One!”

  The raptness of their straining faces increased. They saw only the stranger and he smiled at them, a smile of infinite love and kindness, like a father, and they drank in that love and kindness, that sorrowful yet reassuring sweetness, as those dying of thirst drink the living waters of life.

  The stranger bowed his head, and he covered the golden crown with his hood, and he prayed, and one by one the weakest among the dying passed into that faintness before death and their heads fell on their chests. The blood poured in dark ripples from their hands and feet; their bodies sagged. But all was silence again.

  The stranger turned, and Saul saw his face, white and motionless as a statue’s, with eyes that appeared to see no one any longer. He approached the crowd of watchers, and melted among them, and Saul, against his will, wished to be among those near him. But when he came to the thickest of the crowd he heard only bewildered and hushed voices:

  “Where is he? He was here, but he has gone. He was among us, and is no longer with us!” And they craned and searched, and pushed comrades aside, and peered and questioned and exclaimed and shook their heads and shrugged and lifted their hands in bafflement. “He was here, but he is not here!”

  It was then that a roar of enormous thunder shook the brassy sky and the purple mountains and a great wind rose and a long booming assaulted the earth. Then the sky
turned very dark and black clawing clouds rushed across it and a sudden torrent began to fall.

  Saul felt someone take his arm and he started wildly, and he saw that the man who had accosted him was Joseph of Arimathaea, his hood pulled over his head.

  “Come with me,” said Joseph, and he led Saul away and Saul, though he would have resisted could not. They passed through the Damascus Gate and there was Joseph’s litter, waiting, and he pushed Saul through the curtains onto the cushions and sat down beside him. The bearers lifted the litter and hurried away through the sudden crimson lightning and the screaming wind that flung the curtains about and the bursting violence of the thunder.

  Saul felt weak and undone, shattered in body and mind. What he had seen, what he had endured, flooded over him. He was horrified to the heart, but he began to weep. Joseph watched him compassionately in the mingled flaring and dimming of the lightning.

  Saul found his kerchief in his pouch and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He did not wish to speak to Joseph of Arimathaea, but he said, “Who was that man, with the presumption of a prophet, who attempted to console the condemned?”

  “He is not a prophet,” said Joseph in a peculiar tone. “And he comforted them.”

  Saul tried to see Joseph’s face, but the darkness increased. “Who is he?”

  Joseph did not speak for a moment. Finally, in a very kind voice he replied, “One day you will know, Saul ben Hillel. Ah, yes, you will know!”

  Hillel decided that he would ask for his daughter, Sephorah, to come to him despite Clodia Flavius’ rigid dictum that women should not appear in the men’s quarters nor in the main house, and especially not virgins, unless the occasion was imperious. But Hillel’s misery too acute and he was desperately lonely and full of grief and sense of abandonment.

  But before he could clap for a servant his wife’s brother, David ben Shebua, appeared in the atrium. He looked at Hillel and it was a moment before he responded to his greeting. He appeared sober and a little stern, most unusual for the graceful and courteous David. His mouth was set and he seemed coldly displeased. He indicated a carved chair and asked Hillel to seat himself, and then he regarded Hillel under his light brows and his blue eyes were hard. Now the earring did not look absurd to Hillel, who was vaguely disquieted, but even a little sinister.

  “Were you desirous of visiting my father?” asked David.

  “No. My daughter.”

  David continued to contemplate him as one contemplates an unpleasant stranger. He said, “You have gravely disturbed my father, Hillel ben Borush.”

  “He has gravely disturbed me,” said Hillel, coloring with humiliation, for was he not a guest in this house, though unwilling? “I assume you are referring to the night I implored his intervention with Pilate, the Roman Procurator, and King Herod, in behalf of his people?”

  David raised a slender and impatient hand. “Not only that. You have perturbed him since your arrival.”

  “For that, I am indeed sorry,” said Hillel. “We are in conflict in our characters. We are armed against each other, in our beliefs. I fear your father considers me uncouth and provincial and uncultured. I consider him superficial and effete and an alien to me.” He tried to smile in spite of his distress, and David’s expression changed in a peculiar way and he regarded the rings on his fingers pensively.

  “I believe,” said David, “that it is the teaching of the ‘old’ Jews that one must give respect under all circumstances to one’s elders, and particularly those in a patriarchal position.” The faintest smile passed over his beautiful lips. “I should ask my father’s forgiveness for even suggesting that he is a patriarch. The very idea would revolt him.”

  Hillel could not help smiling in the very face of his wretchedness. “True,” he said. “It may be that I was amiss recently, but you know I spoke truth, David ben Shebua, and so did your brothers. They hated me and that is proof enough. Is it now an evil thing to plead for the condemned? That disturbed your father more than our previous conversations.”

  David sighed. He fixed his eyes now on a distant wall, and considered. “My father,” he said, “is not what you think he is. He is the creation of the style and postures of others. He is a mirror what he believes is admirable. You shattered that mirror. He is now confined to his bed, under sedatives.”

  Hillel was astonished. He said, “Is it possible I made an impression on him? That I discomfited him? I thought him an armored man, armored in his disdain for such as I.”

  “You do not understand,” said David. “My father cannot live without the esteem of others. He cannot endure it that a single man might despise or criticize him. He is not a man. He is an image, easily scratched, easily stained; he is colored plaster.”

  Hillel was even more astonished, but he was also incredulous. He said, “I have heard that of all the traders in Israel, and the merchants, and the bankers, and the stockbrokers, and the investors, he is the most astute! I have heard that in these pursuits he is a man of iron, and cannot be moved.”

  “That, too, is true,” said David. “But those he deals with in those matters are men like himself, of sweat and iron and bronze and hard fists. However, only in the reek of the marketplace. It is a different Shebua ben Abraham who returns to this house and goes to his baths and his concubines and his perfumes and his togas. He no longer remembers those grimy adversaries and allies, those adroit dealers. He is the great gentleman of culture and fineness and I sophistication, in this house, and in those houses he visits—which are not the houses of his companions of the day. The Shebua ben I Abraham who is raucous and adamant in the marketplace is not the Shebua ben Abraham who visits Pilate and King Herod and dines with the philosophers and the elegant Greeks. This Shebua is a cosmopolitan, another posture, another appearance, another countenance, another aim, another desire, another aspiration. And that dainty man is easily shattered, easily injured, if others look upon him, even for a moment, as if he is still a man of the marketplace.”

  “Or a man of flesh and blood,” said Hillel, with bitterness. “You are implying that I made that delicate man tremble in his plaster and rattled his rings and bracelets? Are you not saying that he is very fragile? Shebua is not one, even in his postures, to care for the opinions of a man like me, who has no pretensions.”

  “He is fearful of the bad opinion even of a slave,” said David. “Ah, I meant no offense. This is the house of my father. In this house he stands in imperial dignity and beauty and refinement. It is all his borrowed creation. You thundered ruthlessly among the silks and the perfumes and did it on a number of occasions, like a wild man from the desert roaring into a lady’s bedroom.”

  “The analogy is, perhaps, very apt,” said Hillel. “And so your father is annoyed?”

  “He is overcome,” said David. He was smiling handsomely now. “I know you have considered me an imitator of him. Let me suggest that he imitates me, instead.”

  Hillel exclaimed, “I had not thought of that! But it may be true.”

  “It is most true, and that is why he dislikes me,” said David.

  Hillel felt a little regret. “One must admire him for his aspirations above the reek of the marketplace.”

  “I trust you will remember that,” said David, and he was stern again. “There is another matter. My father dearly loved my sweet sister, Deborah, and he cannot forgive you that you made her sorely unhappy.”

  Hillel’s tired brown eyes widened in utter stupefaction. “Deborah! I loved her with all my heart! I thought of little but her happiness! I cherished her, protected, sheltered her! She was as a daughter to me, a precious one. I would have given my life for her!”

  David was studying him keenly. “That is not what she wrote to my father. She wrote of your lack of interest in her, her loneliness, of avoidance of her, of neglect, of your devotion to more spiritual things, of your relegation of her to the level of a concubine, or the meek mistress of the kitchen.”

  “Before God, it is not true,” said Hillel, an
d felt the anguish of betrayal, the sad gall of it, the unbearable acridness. He could not believe that his adorable Deborah, his charming child, for whom his heart was so broken, could have betrayed him in such a fashion, and in such cruel false words, could have craftily written letters unknown to him, accusing him of things of which he was not guilty. Deborah’s face subtly changed before his agonized inner eye. It became the face of an ugly malicious stranger, who hated him, who leered at him, slyly.

  “Did you think I loved such as you?” she seemed to be saying with contempt.

  This was worse than her death to him, the knowing that she had despised his love for her, that she had lain in his arms detesting him, plotting evil letters to her father, deceiving him, that he had embraced a woman he had not known at all and had given her all his heart—which she had mocked. Even one so unendowed with true intelligence—even a dog—knew when love was given. But a dog returned that love. Hillel could have wept with his overpowering grief and degradation, considering the treachery which had been done to him. He mourned for one who had never existed except in his mind and his soul, and he mourned that Deborah had been what she was. Light though she had been, he would have trusted her with his life.

  David, watching him, felt compunction. “Women are very trivial and not to be trusted,” he said. “And Deborah was more trivial even than the majority of women. Not all have wives like my Clodia, who can make life very stringent, but is a shield and a sword in the house. I would tell my father that Deborah was only a pampered child, and that she complained like a child, but he chose to believe her and take her most seriously.”

  But Hillel hardly heard him. He had been prostrated by Deborah’s death. He was now more prostrated. He had been lonely. The loneliness he had felt, the bereavement, was nothing to the loneliness, the hollowness, of what he felt now.