The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  And he is right that the city is ready to burn. That is the riot over the money for the aqueduct. Six hundred people die in the public square.

  Bar-Avo is not one of them, though he sees his friends cut down, and women, and children. His own son, still just a boy, might have been one of them if he, Bar-Avo, had not gathered him into the folds of his cloak and broken through the Roman line using his teeth to tear at the soldier holding him back, bringing up his mouth red and with a chunk of the man’s face warm and bleeding in his mouth.

  Men and women and children. It is the smell Bar-Avo remembers most as the years cloud up his memory of precisely how he escaped and who he left behind to die when he ran.

  Bar-Avo pricks himself with this memory when he grows weak, when his heart says for any moment “enough.” It will never be enough until they have rid the land of every Roman on it. It will never be enough.

  And perhaps on the same day that Bar-Avo decides this, Pilate begins to think to himself: so many dead, and still the thing is not concluded? Perhaps he does think so, there is no way to be certain.

  And then it is the last days of summer and the wheat is high, and then it is autumn when the fruit trees bring forth their goodness, and then it is winter when the winds howl, and then it is spring again and the earth which has died is reborn. And ten years can go past like this quickly and they continue the fight.

  Pilate is finally ordered home to Rome after one massacre too many, and there is some brief rejoicing. It is true that he has killed many thousands of Jews, that his men have left the city worse and more afraid and more angry than it has ever been, but at last he is gone, and perhaps this is hopeful.

  In Rome the old goat Emperor Tiberius dies and a new emperor ascends to rule. His name is Little Boots and he is full of the promise of a new era of tolerant understanding, but it falls out that he is madder than his predecessor and the name Caligula is soon a byword for cruelty and sickness. Caligula believes he is a god—though the people of Judea already know that no man can ever be a god—and sees no reason, as a god, to keep to the old compacts between Rome and Jerusalem. He orders his statue to be placed in the holy Temple. His generals attempt to explain to him that the Jews will rebel, that this has been tried before, that they would have to kill every man in the city to make this happen.

  “Then kill every man in the city,” Caligula says. Or something similar to that. Or something as unconcerned as that, at least.

  Caligula’s madness has encircled him so that although he rules an empire as wide as any ever known, he is entrapped within the labyrinth of his own mind. He cannot see beyond the horizons of his own loves and hatreds, his own family, his own cock. He fucks his sister, they say, and makes his horse a consul, and when his sister falls pregnant he cuts the unborn child out of her belly.

  In Jerusalem the new prefect, Marullus, attempts to place the statue. And the anticipated consequences come to pass.

  Bar-Avo has three thousand men under his orders now in Jerusalem alone, and more importantly the people are with them, the households give them shelter, the young men come to fight with them. This statue of the Emperor Caligula, his nose upturned to the heaven, a laurel wreath on his mad brow, is too much for the people of Judea to tolerate and the High Priest cannot convince them, does not even try to do so. Caiaphas is gone now, and it is another of Annas’s sons who meets with Prefect Marullus to say, “Not this, not this, there will be no way to stop the killing.” But the Prefect, even if he were the best man in the Empire, would have to obey the commands of his God-Emperor.

  Caligula has set himself against the God of Israel. Upon Him particularly and necessarily, for both are jealous gods. All the people who will have to die to wage that war of god on God are insignificant.

  Massacres and riots and rebellions and battles are nothing new now. Mothers sharpen weapons for their sons. Grandparents shelter fleeing rebels, saying, “He was never here, we have seen no one.” Men are slaughtered in the noonday square and their bellies sliced open so that their entrails slide out glistening as they yet scream. There is death upon death, and though it never starts to feel easy, it begins to feel expected. The land is becoming accustomed to living this way.

  For every Roman excess there is a rebellion. Every rebellion is put down with increasing brutality. Every act of brutality hardens the people a little further, making the next uprising more violent. Every act of violence justifies a more extreme show of force in suppressing it. There are fewer and fewer people among the Jews who trust Rome at all. Even to speak of trusting Rome now, of wanting peace with Rome, is to forget the murdered sons, the repulsive statues in the Temple, the men with daggers concealed in their cloaks. The thing has no end. Or no end but one.

  Bar-Avo sidles up to a man in the marketplace. Who is he? A baker, by the scent of him and the flour dusting his drawstring trousers and his leather shoes. Bar-Avo has never seen him before. He probably does not deserve to die. There is a crumb of dandruff above his ear. The back of his neck is red from too much sun. He has a hot boil starting just above the place where his tunic rubs his neck. Some woman probably loves this breathing body, or is used to it at least. Some woman would have a hot compress with fragrant herbs to draw the poison out of that boil this evening after his work is done. He should not have come here to stand in the marketplace.

  To do good, sometimes, one must do evil. He reminds himself that this honest baker has paid his taxes like a good citizen of Rome. That perhaps he sends loaves to the Roman garrison or to the Prefect. That he collaborates, over and over again, just by living in the city and not rising up against them.

  Bar-Avo’s cloak flows around him in loose, deep folds. Within the cloak is the dagger. The crowd surges and bounces. There are sizzling scents of freshly cooked meat from the stalls. People are loud, shouting for attention from stallholders, watching out for the thieving hands of small children, demanding from one another where they need to go next and have they tried yet the bread with dill, the cheese, the wine, the garlic, the oil? He waits until a surge pushes him forward into the baker.

  They learned the lesson Pilate taught them extremely well. Pilate understood the methods of terror. Pilate is no longer the prefect, but his methods are still effective.

  Bar-Avo’s dagger slides out so smoothly. No one sees it within the folds of the cloak. He finds the baker’s ribs with a steadying hand and sends the dagger through just here, behind the heart, with that horizontal slicing motion that cuts the heart in two. The baker says “ump.” That is all. It was an easy death, insofar as men are ever afforded an easy death. His body slides against the wall but the crowd does not let him fall completely to the ground quite yet, they are pressed so tightly. No one has even noticed. Bar-Avo moves a little away. It does not have to be far. It is not wise to try to run. He has learned that before.

  He has already sidled up to the meat stall, is haggling with the vendor over the price of a pound of chicken hearts, when someone else finds the baker is dead. It is a woman. She is screaming over the body slumped sideways against the wall, the red flower blooming across his back.

  People still remember the massacre in the public square. They know whose trick it is to conceal men with daggers in the crowd. Bar-Avo says to himself: it is not I who have done this, but Rome, who taught me that this is the way to bring fear to the city. The crowd begins to turn towards the baker’s body to find out what the commotion is. Now. It is time now.

  “Romans!” shouts Bar-Avo. “Roman spies! They’re among us with their long daggers!”

  “Yes!” shouts someone else, because people are always eager to spread bad news and to lie to augment it. “I’ve seen them in the crowd! I saw a soldier’s knife under a cloak! They’re here! They want to kill us all!”

  There is a stampede then. Stalls are overturned, hot fat spitting as it fizzles on the moist stone and makes the ground slick, piles of good fresh bread trodden into the dirt, dogs barking and grabbing for unattended meat, apples rolling here
and there, women screaming and men taking the opportunity to grab what they can. People fall and other people tread on them, and children are crushed up against the walls and little fingers are squashed underfoot. Bar-Avo sees a child screaming, under a teetering pan of hot oil for frying cakes, and he snatches him up, lifting him above his head, so that he is out of reach of the crowd, which now thinks with one mind.

  That is what he has learned in his life. What a crowd thinks. How to change what a crowd thinks. How not to think like them.

  He holds the child above the crowd, smiles at it as he would at any of his own children, gives it a roll he has snatched from one of the stalls, dipped in rendered goose fat. The child munches contentedly and when the commotion has settled down the mother finds them and takes her baby gratefully, with a smile.

  By this time the market is quieter and almost empty, with just a few sobbing stallholders to count the cost. Let the people remember, he thinks. Let them remember that they are not free. That this happened today. Just because the Romans did not do it, the Romans could still do exactly this. They must never forget that these people are in their homeland. Whatever is necessary to do to be rid of them must be done.

  This was the special thing Pilate taught them. The cloak and dagger. Bar-Avo and his men do not often do it. But sometimes, when things begin to seem too peaceful, when it appears that perhaps they have forgotten. People need to be reminded all the time. Most men will simply fall asleep if you let them.

  They gather more and more men to them. Not just fighters but preachers, fishermen, healers, sailors, spies in distant lands. His men go combing the streets for people who will be sympathetic to their cause. There is a point when they are particularly interested in healers and holy men—people listen to these men when perhaps they will not listen to a man with a sword. If a man can heal, it is a sign that God is with him. They want God with them.

  So they bring him, once, a man who worships that dead preacher, Yehoshuah, as they bring many men whom they have found preaching in the marketplace or teaching in a quiet spot at the edge of town. The worship of Yehoshuah is a rather esoteric cult, though not the strangest that exists, and the man seems grateful for the attention.

  His name is Gidon of Yaffo and he is not far off Bar-Avo’s own age, rangy and quietly fervent, speaking as Yehoshuah did of the end of days, which will surely come within our lifetimes. He tells how Yehoshuah died and rose again from the grave and was seen by several people.

  “Did you see it?” says Bar-Avo.

  “I have seen it in my heart,” says Gidon of Yaffo.

  “That is not the same thing. Did any man you would trust with your life see it?”

  “I would trust them all with my life for they have seen the risen Lord.”

  “But you did not know before to trust them. And if the Messiah is come,” says Bar-Avo, “why does not the lion lie down with the lamb? Where is the great crack of doom that presages the end of the world and the final judgment of all mankind? Where is the true king of Israel now, if he has performed this strange trick and returned from the grave? Why does he not take his throne?”

  “These things will happen,” says Gidon of Yaffo, “soon and in our days. I have heard stories from the very mouths of those who saw miracles. Before this generation has passed away, there will be the signs and portents, the lord Messiah will return and the Temple will run red with blood.”

  “That last,” mutters Bar-Avo to Isaac, the man who brought Gidon of Yaffo to him, “will surely happen, for we will make it happen. Fellow,” he asks, raising his voice, “will you take arms with us to fight the Roman scum?”

  Gidon shakes his head. “We do not fight for this broken land and this corrupt people. When our Lord returns he will cleanse the earth himself.”

  “Then you are of no use to me,” says Bar-Avo, and sends him on his way.

  Isaac says to him, “Romans as well as Jews are taking on this teaching.”

  Bar-Avo shrugs.

  “I have heard it preached in synagogues in Egypt and in Syria. Slaves and women like it, for they say that they encourage all to join in, with no exceptions.”

  “Tell me again,” says Bar-Avo, “when there are as many temples to Yehoshuah as there are to Mithras or to Isis.”

  “It might happen,” says Isaac stubbornly. “My grandfather said he remembered his grandfather telling him of when only a few men worshipped Mithras. There were not always such temples. Gods rise and fall—”

  “As the angels on Jacob’s ladder, yes, I know. And only our God rises above them all and lives forever. And what good will it do if you are right and the dead man Yehoshuah becomes a god?”

  Isaac blinks.

  “He was a Jew, Yehoshuah. If he were…not like Mithras or Ba’al, but if his worship were even as widespread as the cult of Juno—”

  “Juno!”

  “All right, Robigus then. Even Robigus, the god of crop blight, if he were even as loved as that…a Jew…might not the Empire soften towards us?”

  Bar-Avo looks at him. What a kindhearted boy he is. How did he get to be so simple, in a world this hard?

  Bar-Avo speaks very quietly and low and very slowly.

  “Rome hates us,” he says. “We are their conquered people and we are dust under their feet.”

  “But if—”

  “Listen. If they want something from us, they will take it. They will not stop hating us. They will find a way to say that the thing they want was never ours to begin with.”

  Isaac looks at him with those trusting cow eyes.

  “Do you think that when they send our good oil to Rome they say, ‘This is oil pressed by Jews’? They say, ‘This is oil brought from the far reaches of the Empire by the might of Rome.’ If Yehoshuah ends by being loved in Rome they will find a way to use him against us.”

  Bar-Avo puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “You fight bravely,” he says, “and you love peace. I know it is hard to understand. We want to find a way towards peace. But the only way is the sword. If we do not drive them out, one way or another they will crush us.”

  And Isaac is still looking uncertainly towards the man who preached long after Bar-Avo has gone.

  And then it comes time for him to do what perhaps he had always been destined to do. If we believe that God has seen all things before they come to pass, that every woman is destined to bear the children she does, and every betrayer is bound to betray and every peacekeeper intended by God to attempt to keep the peace, perhaps too a warmonger is destined for that purpose by the good Lord who made him.

  On the hillsides the mothers weep for their fallen sons. In the marketplace men preach curious doctrines and strange new ideas to fit with these uncertain times. In the Temple, Annas the former High Priest and father and father-in-law of High Priests, dies quietly without having secured the lasting peace he longed for. He dies knowing that war may come again at any minute, and that the streets of Jerusalem are no less bloody than when the Empire first breached the Temple wall. His sons gather to mourn him and one of the youngest among them, Ananus, becomes High Priest in his stead.

  And it is morning and it is evening. And it is one hundred and thirty years since Rome first breached Jerusalem and still she squats over the city, enforcing her will, enslaving the people. And something must be done. Something more extreme.

  It is clear to all that they are on the verge of open war with Rome. There have been scuffles, Romans have been thrown out of the city and are pressing their way back in. Some urge war and some urge peace. Ananus, the new High Priest, makes a speech in the center of Jerusalem. It is a good speech and a merciful one, calling upon the people not even yet to despair, for they may still come to some good accommodation with Rome and there need not be war. He calls on them to think of the values of their forefathers, and the love which they feel for peace. Annas, his father, would have been proud of his son for giving this speech and the people are moved by it.

  Bar-Avo does not hear
the speech but he hears word of it from a dozen different men. Well. So much blood spilled and yet still the thing is not done. How quickly people forget the taste of freedom, swapping it for this easy comfortable thing they call peace. Sleep is peaceful. Death is peaceful. Freedom is life and wakefulness.

  He feels a kind of contempt for the people of the land these days. He is fighting for them, but apparently they do not understand why or feel gratitude. He has to lead them by the hand through every part of the journey and still they can be swayed off course by any mildly effective rhetorician in the public square.

  Well, sacrifices must be made. For the good of the people, sacrifices must be made.

  There is a storm the night they invade the Temple. It’s not a coincidence. The Temple is guarded by thick walls, by strong men. There are barred gates which are lowered at night to keep the treasures inside safe while the men sleep. The whole city of Jerusalem is a great guard to the Temple also. If they had tried to take the Temple on a dark quiet night, the moment one man saw them he would have shouted the halloo to the city and Jerusalem would have defended her greatest treasure and dearest joy.

  So when the storm blows up, they know God Himself is signaling to them that it is time. When it comes louder and louder, when the thunder begins to roll across the sky in almost ceaseless peals and the rain lashes down and the wind screams, then they know that God has given them the cover they need. No one will hear them now, and no shouts of alarm from the Temple will reach the city. They gather their tools and their weapons and they run through the rain up the hill to the place where God lives.