Testament

by Nino Ricci

  The road we were on led us down to the town the Jews called Magdala, another fishing town though the smell was more pleasant than in Capernaum, because the salting and smoking sheds on the beach smelt like something to eat. As it happened we got some breakfast there, buying some roasted fish right at the harbour. We got to talking to people there about Jesus and were surprised at some of the things they had to say. It seemed he had taken a liking to the women of Magdala, and had even chosen a couple of them as his concubines. The thing had caused him a lot of trouble in the end—one of the women had died, no one knew how, and the story was that Jesus himself had brought the thing off with his magic to get rid of her, because she was pregnant. I didn’t know what to make of any of this. Over on my side of the lake he’d always seemed upstanding and decent, not the sort to do people harm because they were trouble for him. But then who knew what he got up to when he was here with his own people.

  Jerubal, though, wasn’t put off at all by any of this, and seemed even more anxious to meet up with Jesus. It turned out we’d just missed him—he’d passed through just the day before, with his followers. People started to tell us then the best way to find him, but warning us to stay clear of Samaria, because they’d kill us as soon as look at us there. I was a bit surprised at that—the way I remembered it, Jesus had always had a good word for the Samaritans. But when I mentioned as much to people they said that only went to show how wrongheaded Jesus was.

  We traded some of our trinkets for coin at the Magdala market and then set off down the lakeshore road again, keeping our ears open for any word of Jesus. It was all we could do when we passed the Tiberias gates to keep from slipping in there, because of all the marble and gold you could see, and the whores who stood right at the gate, and the smell of money, which I could tell was driving Jerubal mad. But you knew that if the two of us put a foot in there we might never come out. By noon we’d got as far as Sennabris, and found out at the roadhouse outside town that Jesus and his crowd had put up there the night before. We reckoned that meant we were only a quarter day’s journey behind him, and could probably catch up to him by dark.

  We didn’t know if he’d gone straight down the Jordan or cut into Samaria the way people had warned us, and no one could tell us. We were just getting ready to set off and take our chances when someone came up to us and said another man had been there looking for Jesus, a friend of his, it looked like, who’d set out down the river not a half-hour before. A dark-skinned man, this fellow told us, and not very cordial, with the look of the city on him. Jerubal and I thought the man might know where he was going, and we set out after him.

  It turned out there were a lot of people on the road at the time, all travelling down to Jerusalem for the big festival. So Jerubal and I were going up to every dark-skinned fellow we saw and asking him if he was looking for Jesus, and some of them just stared at us as if we were mad and some of them ignored us and some of them said, they’d heard of him, but they weren’t looking for him. We were already halfway to Scythopolis, which was where the road branched off to Samaria, before we finally spotted up ahead a fellow in a fancy coat who was walking alone as if he didn’t need anyone, and we thought, here was our man.

  Instead of going right up to him, Jerubal decided to have a bit of a joke, getting up close behind him and dragging his leg as if he was lame. Then he said, in a good loud voice, “I hope we find Jesus soon, because I can’t go much longer on this leg.” Sure enough our man turned right around, and as soon as his eyes were on him Jerubal instantly straightened himself and said, “Gods in heaven, I’m cured, this must be Jesus himself!” For a minute, the man stood there as if somebody had just slapped him. But then Jerubal couldn’t help himself and burst out laughing, and the fellow got a mean look. “What’s your game?” he said to us, and Jerubal, pretending innocence, said, “We’re just looking for Jesus, the same as you.”

  I thought the man was going to take out the dagger I could see poking out of his belt and run us both through, then and there.

  “Who sent you?” he said, narrow-eyed, as if we were spies. But Jerubal, to keep goading him, said with a grin, “Why, it was Caesar himself.”

  The fellow looked ready to spit.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said finally, then turned away and kept walking.

  Jerubal seemed happy enough to let him go. But I felt a panic at the thought, imagining we’d be lost out there on our own, now that we were away from the lake, the countryside starting to get a little desolate and stark.

  “Please don’t pay any mind to my friend, sir,” I told the man, “he didn’t mean any harm,” and then I went on to say how we were just lowly pilgrims hoping to join Jesus, and had heard tell up at Sennabris that someone looking like him might be able to help us. So he eyed us up and down, probably guessing by now that we weren’t Jews and wondering what strange breed we were. But like Jerubal had said, I had that kind of a face, that people trusted.

  “I don’t know where he is any more than you,” he said finally, but he didn’t try to stop us when we came up to walk along beside him.

  We managed to get his name out of him, Judas, though it was as if he’d had to think about it first, and then getting anything else out of him was like calving an ox. But he seemed happy enough to listen to us, which put Jerubal in his element, who started talking about how he’d seen Jesus here and there, and how he himself came from a poor family—though you could hear the coins jangling around in his pockets—and had heard that Jesus was for the poor, so that made him want to follow him. And since Judas didn’t stop him he went on telling more and more lies that got taller and taller. But Judas, from his smirk, was making it clear what he thought of them.

  “Why haven’t I seen you before,” he said finally, “if you know Jesus so well?”

  But Jerubal hardly paused a breath.

  “So you must be one of his men, then?” he said, and Judas wouldn’t admit it was the case, but you could see he’d been caught out.

  He told us then he was pushing on for the night to Scythopolis, in a tone that made clear he was hoping to lose us. But Jerubal said that was exactly our plan, it was only a few miles now, not that we could have stopped in the middle of that brush in any event, where there were just the few scraggly villages along the way that would probably as soon have chased me and Jerubal into the hills as given us a bed. In the end it paid off for us to have stayed with Judas—almost the instant we stopped in at the roadhouse outside Scythopolis we saw Jesus, going around sharing some supper with his people where they’d set up their tents in a corner of the courtyard. I was surprised how relieved I felt to see him—it was starting to affect me now, being away from home. Watching him I thought about how we used to get together down beneath the farm and the good feeling we had then, and in my head it seemed years since all that had happened. But the truth was I’d seen him there by the lake just a few days before.

  He had some of his women with him, who he’d never brought over to the Gergesa side, a group of them going around with him to help serve out supper. They weren’t as beautiful as I’d imagined, from the way people in Magdala had talked—just country girls, they were, like the girls you’d see in Baal-Sarga, and a couple of them so shy they couldn’t say a word without putting a hand in front of their mouth. Then there were his regular men, up around the cooking pit, and maybe thirty or forty tents set up on the patch of courtyard he and his group had claimed, like their own little village. After the days I’d spent on the road, I would have been happy to settle into one of those tents right then and there. But Judas, who was still beside us, stood there scowling as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to join in like that. I had the feeling that he hadn’t been with Jesus for some time, and was seeing all this like something he’d forgotten, and wasn’t too pleased with what he saw. And for a moment I could see the thing the way he did, Jesus there with his women and his tents like some desert vagabond.

  It took a moment before anyone
in Jesus’s group noticed Judas. When they did, it was as if a bitter wind had blown through the courtyard. The women’s eyes went instantly to daggers, in that way women had, and the men went stiff, though it was harder to tell with them if they hated the man or just felt the cold seep into them at the sight of him. Then finally Jesus noticed him, and everyone watched to see what he would do.

  He tried to smile then but it came out more like a grimace, and it was the first time I’d ever seen him put out over anything. He came towards Judas with an arm out to welcome him, though you could see the gesture wasn’t coming easily.

  “You’ve come back,” he said to him, but right away Judas answered, “You don’t look very pleased to see me.” And Jesus, though I could hardly believe it, looked a little ashamed of himself.

  “You’re the one who left us,” he said. And he told Judas they still had a place for him if he wanted it, though from the look of his people it seemed they’d be just as happy if he simply went back to wherever he’d come from.

  It looked as if Judas had more to say but Jesus had already gone back to his rounds, leaving him stranded there next to me and Jerubal.

  “So you’ve found your Jesus,” Judas said to us, with a look to say it was clear we hardly knew the man, when he hadn’t so much as rested his eyes on us. And the truth was it hurt me that he hadn’t picked me out, though I’d hardly so much as opened my mouth at any of our meetings by the lake but had just sat at the back with my hood up, afraid as I was that I’d be recognized and the word would get back to Huram.

  I had a mind Judas might just have turned around then and headed home, seeing the reception he’d got. But it looked as if he’d set his mind to make a place for himself, sitting right down with Jesus’s men beside the cooking pit as if it was his due, though you could see he was watching his back. And the men said their greetings to him, a bit sullen and gruff but not turning their shoulders to him, and even the women finally passed him some food and made do.

  Jerubal, meanwhile, not one to waste any time, had already got up a bit of food for us as well and had started to talk with some of the people camped at the edges of Jesus’s troupe. “That Judas used to come around a while ago but they chased him away,” one fellow told us. “There were some who said he was a spy for the Romans.” But then we heard all sorts of stories—that Judas went in for love in the Greek way and had fallen for one of Jesus’s men, which was why he’d come back, but also that he wasn’t a spy at all but fancied himself a rebel, though his movement was just him and some fifty others or so who plotted and gave themselves airs but would have run at the first sign of a fight. My own feeling was that you couldn’t trust him either way—there was that nervousness to him you noticed from the start as if he didn’t know where to expect the knife from, which made you think he’d crossed a few people in his time, one way or the other.

  We could see that some of the people in Jesus’s camp were just hangers-on, there because the food got handed out and no one asked anything back for it. But there were plenty of others who you saw were devoted to Jesus, some of them, from the sounds of it, who’d been with him right from the start. It opened your eyes to talk to these, because on the Gergesa side all we’d ever seen was Jesus’s little coterie. I thought that because they were Jews they wouldn’t want to have much to do with me and Jerubal, but that wasn’t the case. Right off they took us in, and shared their food with us, and were ready to lend us their own mats to sleep on. Then we got to talking and I saw that a lot of the stories they knew were the same ones Jesus told us over on the Gergesa side, which surprised me—I’d imagined the Jews would have their own special teachings from him or that he’d just tell them things straight out instead of in riddles the way he did us. I started to think of Jesus a little differently then. Maybe it wasn’t so farfetched, someone like me joining up with him.

  I would have been happy to spend the night talking with these folks, seeing that they weren’t the sort to give you a crust of bread with one hand while they took your mutton with the other. But I could see Jerubal was chafing—he wanted to go into town. We knew better than to ask any of Jesus’s followers to go in with us, since all these Greek towns were cesspits as far as the Jews were concerned. But as soon as people started to turn in, I and Jerubal slipped away from the roadhouse and into the city. I’d never seen the likes of the place—there were lanterns all along the main street as if it was the middle of some festival instead of just any normal night, and then people everywhere even as late as it was, and horses and carts in the streets making such a racket you’d think you’d come to Rome itself. Jerubal said the first thing to do was to make an offering, so we went off to the temple of Bacchus, who was the god of the place, and bought two flasks of holy wine, pouring one into the bowl the priest set out for us and drinking the rest ourselves. And Jerubal said, “Bacchus protect us and keep us drunk,” and as it turned out Bacchus kept up the bargain.

  We started at the baths, where the attendant, seeing how rough we looked, seemed all pleased at the chance of turning us away until we came up with the required fee and he had to let us through. I’d never been in a bathhouse and it felt fairly strange, the hot water around me like a blanket and the old men lying naked beside me. Then the boy we’d hired on to look after our things said any service we wanted, he could get, so Jerubal asked for some wine and he brought a flagon of it, and then he asked to be rubbed down and we were led off to a private room where two girls rubbed oil over every bit of us. And by the time we’d left the place we were a good deal poorer in coin, but not, as they said, in spirit.

  What happened next I could hardly have told you, since the first thing we did out of the baths was to head for a wine shop, and we were down to the ranker sort now so it hit us fairly hard. Somewhere we got into a game, with someone even sharper than Jerubal, and then we drank with some soldiers from Ephesus and apparently stumbled into a brothel with them, or at least that was where we were when first light broke, lying in a heap in a room that stank of piss. Seeing the light coming in through the window, I shook Jerubal awake and we headed out. We made the roadhouse just as Jesus and his troupe were breaking camp, and it was lucky we’d got to them and were able to get a bite of breakfast, because by the time we’d paid our way out of the brothel there was nothing to count in our purses but a bit of lint.

  The route we ended up taking out of Scythopolis wasn’t east across the Jordan into Perea, where everyone else was going, or even west to Samaria, but south right along the river valley, though there wasn’t really much of a road to speak of and you had the feeling bandits would jump out from behind every rock. Jesus was walking out ahead of us all seeming in a foul mood, and I thought maybe some of his camp had got up to the same sort of mischief the evening before as me and Jerubal. But what had happened was that he’d sent a couple of his men into Samaria to collect his followers there for the trip, and the men had come back in the night saying the Samaritans wouldn’t join. They had their own temple, they’d said, and didn’t want any part of going down to the Jewish one. But Jesus took it hard—it seemed he’d been trying from the start to bring the Jews and the Samaritans together but couldn’t find the way to do it, though from what I understood it was only this little rule or that one that made the difference between them and then just the bad blood that there’d been for hundreds of years.

  After the night we’d had, Jerubal and I put up our hoods against the sun and stayed at the back of the troupe. The road we’d taken was scarred with gullies sometimes as deep as a man, and it was a struggle getting along it. Then at one point I glanced over at Jerubal and saw he was looking a little grey. I thought it was just the wine from the night before, but it was something he’d eaten—not long afterwards he suddenly retched up his breakfast, and soon enough half of the rest of us had done the same, spilling our stomachs into the river. It seemed some of the fish we had along had gone bad. We had to abandon three baskets of it there by the river for the buzzards to take, going on then hoping to
reach a town up ahead where there was a place to rest. But after we’d gone on a ways, Jerubal pulled me to the back of the file and told me to slow my pace a bit, and then without warning gave my arm a tug so that I suddenly found myself lying on top of him at the bottom of one of those gullies. I hardly knew what to make of that. But Jerubal put his hand up to keep me quiet. He peered up over the edge of the gully to make sure no one had noticed we’d disappeared, then said, “We’re going back for the fish.”

  I had no idea what he intended and was half-inclined to leave him to work the thing out on his own. But he had that grin of his, which always said, you’d be missing something to pass this up. So in the end I followed him back. And it turned out a good deal of that fish wasn’t as foul as we’d thought, and the lot of it was wrapped in ferns that hid the smell. So there we had ourselves a windfall, three big baskets of fish for the taking, except I didn’t see what we were going to do with it, out in the middle of nowhere. But Jerubal grinned and said he’d worked it out—there was a town we’d passed a ways back, a bit off the river. He had us run the baskets through the river a bit to freshen them up, and then we hoisted them onto our shoulders—and I was the one who got saddled with two of them—and started retracing our steps, though the sun was getting high and the heat rising by the moment.