by Nino Ricci
“We hated it, those of us who had to leave, but we’d given our word,” Jesus said. “So we went into the desert, each on his own, and hoped for the best. Then the next day I went into Aenon to find out what had happened and they told me John had been taken and the rest had just been butchered where they stood.”
The fire had gone low, and there was only Jesus’s voice in the dark.
“I thought of finding the others then,” he said, “but the truth was I couldn’t have looked at them, for the shame. Then I found out that some of them had gone back when the soldiers came, and been butchered as well, so that it seemed simply cowardly that I’d gone. I didn’t know if I could go on then. Here was my teacher in prison, and my friends dead, and I hadn’t done anything.”
He paused. A deep silence had settled over us, all of us hanging on Jesus’s words—this wasn’t just another story he was telling us but something that had really happened to him, and it seemed he wasn’t sure what to make of it any more than we might be. Even Judas was leaning in, and looked as if he had forgotten himself for a moment.
Jesus had wandered in the desert after that, not really knowing what he was doing or where he was going. For food he ate grubs and whatever he could find or nothing at all, and for water he learned where to dig to get little seepages of it, sucking the mud in like that just enough to stay alive. All sorts of mad thoughts were going through his head then so he didn’t know any more who he was or what he’d been up to in his life, and he started to see things the way people in the desert did, and what he saw were his friends who’d been killed sitting around him. But they refused to look at him, and the louder he shouted, the more they pretended he wasn’t there.
Finally he ended up in a town he couldn’t even have told you the name of and sat himself down in the square, thinking he would die there, people leaving little bits of food for him that he was too stunned to eat. And it happened that some of Herod’s soldiers passed through the place with a prisoner they’d taken, and it made him sick to see them, because it all came back to him. He went up to give the prisoner some water where they’d tied him in the square while they ate, but he had died right there in the open without anyone noticing.
“I would gladly have traded places with him,” Jesus said, “but for my sake, not his, just so it could be told that I’d been killed by Herod’s men like the rest. But that was a mistake. There was a man I met there who showed me that. He said to me that if I was alive, it was so I might do some good in the world, and I saw then I’d forgotten what John had told us, that we had to carry on his word, and that I’d only been thinking of my own reputation. And this man I’d met was also the only one who offered to bury Herod’s prisoner, which was a risk because he’d been a rebel. And I took heart from that, from his example, and that was what helped me carry on.”
He stopped, and it was clear he’d finished. He was looking right at Judas then, though with an expression I couldn’t make out, and Judas grimaced and averted his eyes and then suddenly got up from the fire as if someone had kicked him and went off into the dark. None of us knew what to make of that. Jesus looked as if he was ready to take back whatever offence he’d given, but Judas didn’t return.
My head was full by then. Not wanting to make a nuisance of myself I quietly slipped off and made my way back to Jerubal’s tent to get some sleep. But Jerubal had a game going, so I just draped my coat over my shoulders and made a little place for myself under the stars. As it turned out, my head was spinning so much with all that had happened to me in the past few days that I couldn’t sleep. It seemed the strangest thing to me, that I should be lying there in Jesus’s camp under that riot of desert stars when a few days before I’d been safe in my bed on the farm.
I started thinking then about the farm and my life there, and for the first time in years, it felt, I thought of my parents, though it seemed I had only the one memory of them now, which was the day of their deaths. The bandits who’d come then were after the horses we had at the time, though what they left behind was far worse than what they took.
I was just five then. My mother and I were in the courtyard when my father ran in with his eyes lit up like I’d never seen them. Without a word he grabbed me and put me into a basket where we kept our lentils. “Don’t move,” he said, and put the lid on, though I could see through the weave. He barely had time to turn around again before someone came running in after him with a broadsword in his hand and raised it over him. Then the sword came down and there was a splash of blood and everything turned strange, because there was blood everywhere and my mother was screaming and it seemed the end of things had come.
Another man had come in. All I could see from the basket was my father’s back where he’d fallen, and the blood. My mother must have been screaming still, but it was as if I couldn’t hear her. Then things happened very quickly again. There were the two men, big and dirty as animals, and one of them threw my mother to the ground and the other got on top of her. I couldn’t understand what was happening then, what kind of crazed game this was. I would even have got out of the basket, since I had it in my mind it was because I was in there that everything seemed strange, and that I shouldn’t be hiding, and should call Huram. But then I saw my mother’s face, and there was an instant when her eyes went to me in the basket, wild, and told me, stay put.
My mother was a beautiful woman. It wasn’t only me who thought that, who was her son—everyone said so, even after, that she was as dark-haired and dark-eyed as a Damascene princess, though she was just a poor farmworker’s girl from Baal-Sarga. But watching her with those men, first the one and then the other on top of her, it was as if everything that was pretty in her was wiped out. They hit her a few times, to make her screaming stop—after that it looked as if her jaw had snapped, and the only sound that came from her was a broken moan like nothing I’d ever heard.
I couldn’t have said how much time passed but suddenly Huram was there. He was holding a sword and was already covered in blood—later I found out he’d fought one of the others outside, and killed him. He was only fourteen then, but large, and strong as a bear. It took him only an instant to see what was going on, and even before the two men had noticed him, he’d lifted his sword and brought it down on the head of the one who was standing, watching the other. There was a spray of blood, and the man fell. But Huram didn’t stop—he swung at the other, who was still on his knees, and cut into his back. The man tried to turn then but a fury had taken hold of Huram, who hacked at him again and again until you could hardly see for the blood. Then the man fell forward and our mother groaned underneath him, and Huram, maddened, kicked and pawed at the mass of cut flesh he had turned him into until he had cleared him off her.
There was a moment then when Huram’s eyes went to my mother’s and she turned away, just wheezing there, quietly and horribly. I had a sick feeling then. I saw Huram look to our father lying dead on the ground and then to our mother again, with her ripped clothes and the blood on her and her face crooked and broken. And at that instant it was as if I could feel the tumble of Huram’s thoughts in my own head, how they were churning, pushing him to what he could hardly bring himself to think. Then he raised his sword, with my mother staring up at him with a look that was half fear and half pleading for the thing, and he brought the blade down.
I must have screamed then, though I didn’t know it, because in an instant the lid was off the basket and Huram was staring down at me. He went hard as stone then, realizing I’d seen everything.
I was spattered in blood that had come through the weave of the basket.
“Go out and wash yourself,” Huram said, angry, as if I were to blame. And when I went out I didn’t even dare to look around in the courtyard, at what my father looked like, or my mother, lying dead.
Huram spent the rest of the day and into the night getting rid of the bodies, though I couldn’t have told you what he did with them, our mother and father any more than the rest, because the whole time he mad
e me stay in the stable. By the next morning, when he finally let me back into the house, I could hardly tell that anything had gone on in the place except for a spot of dried blood here or there. It was as if the whole thing had never happened, and the truth was that the time went by and not a word of the thing was ever breathed between us, not of our mother or of a single circumstance of what had gone on that day.
It was from then that things were never right between me and Huram. And the more time that passed the worse they got, because I’d started to say to myself that what he did to our mother was no better than what he’d have done to an animal, or just that she hadn’t been worth anything in his eyes, being a woman. But I knew it wasn’t like that—I couldn’t have said what it was like, except that I’d understood, in a way, what Huram had done, and that made it worse. Lying there under the stars now I tried to tell myself that maybe all those horrible things had been part of some plan, the way my mother used to say that there was a plan for each of us, and that somehow that made them right. But I knew I was just fooling myself, and that there wasn’t a thing that was any good about what had happened back then, and even lying there thinking back on it now almost made me want to take a knife to myself, because of the waste of it.
I woke up the next morning stiff with cold out there in the open, the stars still shining over my head and just a lick of daylight skimming the hills. The rest of the camp was quiet so I went over to one of the caves nearby to relieve myself, wanting to get out of the cold. But while I was there I heard voices, so close they might have been right behind me. It was a trick of the caves—someone was talking in another one nearby and somehow the sound was getting tunnelled into my own.
It took me an instant before I realized who it was—Judas and Jesus. So Judas had finally got Jesus alone. At first all I could gather from what Judas was saying was that he didn’t want Jesus to go into Jerusalem, and that he was already risking his life telling Jesus the little he had.
But Jesus answered him, “From what you’ve told me, I only see greater reason to go, so there’ll be at least a few of us who’ll be on the side of peace instead of blood.”
“Then you’ll just be killed along with everyone else,” Judas said, sounding angry now. “From your story last night, I’d have thought you’d want to stay alive.”
“Not if it means letting other people get killed.”
“You didn’t seem to mind in the case of John,” Judas said, but from the silence that followed it was clear he regretted saying it.
A tiredness had come into Judas’s voice when he spoke again.
“I had to betray all my oaths to tell you what I did. Don’t let it be for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing if you did what you thought was right,” Jesus said.
An instant later I saw Jesus walking back to the camp, and then Judas following several paces behind him. I didn’t know what to make of any of this. But Jesus was already going around the camp rousing people to start up our march again. I made my way back to Jerubal’s tent and told him what I’d heard in the cave, starting to think by now that it might be time to heed the signs, given all the things that had gone wrong for us so far on our journey. But Jerubal said it was nothing to fret about—there wasn’t a festival that went by in Jerusalem that one group or another didn’t plan some sort of mayhem, though the Romans always smelled things out and squashed them before they ever got started. Jesus, at any rate, seemed only more set on his path, hurrying us along as if we were his little soldiers. It wasn’t for me to gainsay him—I’d thrown in my lot now, for better or ill.
Jesus wanted to make Jericho by nightfall, and we had to do a quick march to get past the halfway point before the sun got too hot. I hung at the back with Jerubal but at one point Jesus caught sight of me and called me up with his own little circle. I was too pleased with that to do anything more than just slip in quietly there with his other men. I was starting to feel almost at home with them now, as if I might actually belong with them, half-scoundrel that I was—it wasn’t like Jesus, in any event, to keep a man out simply for being a scoundrel. There was one fellow in the camp, by the name of Aram, who had actually tried to ransom Jesus’s followers to a bandit chief, and Jesus had forgiven him in the end and let him stay with the rest. You didn’t see much of him, though—he’d get his food, and dart his eyes around like a thief, then steal back to whatever corner it was he’d come out of.
Judas was seeming even more of a mystery now. He’d delivered his poison, and logic would have said he’d be on his way, given the danger to him, from what I’d understood, of returning to Jerusalem. But instead, like some cur, he was sticking with us, skulking along as if in the end he wasn’t any different from the others, and just wanted Jesus to love him. When we joined up with the main road, where the traffic was fairly heavy with the other pilgrims going along, he kept looking around him as if he expected the knife any moment, so that my heart almost went to him. Something happened then, when we stopped to rest once, that surprised me—Judas had sat to massage his blistered feet when Mary came, though with a face like a mourner’s, and offered to rub oil on them. Judas could hardly look at her then for his embarrassment. But still he nodded and she knelt in front of him, and it was the strangest thing then, watching how gently she rubbed his sores and knowing it cost her to do it.
The sun was beating down on us by then, and with every step we took the air got drier and the land more gravelly and bare until there wasn’t anything to look at but the stones and the white hills and maybe a thorn bush here or there and a buzzard or two in the sky. For all the traffic along the road, it seemed even ten thousand of us couldn’t have made an impression on that rubbly wilderness. Already from a long way off, though, you could see the walls of Jericho in the valley up ahead, surrounded by palm and balsam fields because of the springs there. It made the journey easier to see that oasis of green waiting ahead for us. At noon we put up at a roadhouse to wait out the heat and then around mid-afternoon set out on the final leg to Jericho, making for the ford at Bethabara so we could cross back over the Jordan into Judea.
When we reached the customs-house at the river, though, the soldiers there, without any explanation, made us all line up at the side of the road and then came along and searched us one by one, even the women, and went through every bit of our baggage. Judas, just standing there with the rest of us, had turned to stone, whether from anger or fear I couldn’t have said. But when the soldiers came to him they took his dagger, a fine thing with a gilded handle covered in jewels. He seemed ready to make an argument, the blood rising in him, but in the end he just swallowed his words. The soldiers dumped the knife into a burlap sack they carried where they’d put a few others and told him he could collect it back when he returned from his pilgrimage. But you knew he would never see the thing again.
When they’d gone through the line of us they let us cross the ford. From there, we pushed on for Jericho, reaching it after dark, and only to find it crawling with soldiers as well. We had to line up outside the city gates and go through another search. It was clear by now what had happened—the Romans had got wind of whatever plot was afoot, as Jerubal had said they would. Judas must have come to the same conclusion because he had a bit of a wildness in his eye, like an animal that didn’t know which way to turn. I noticed he wouldn’t let Jesus out of his sight now, as if he had to protect him. But Jesus himself only seemed to get calmer the more chaotic things got around him.
When our group had been passed we were herded off for the night to a camp the soldiers had set up just outside the walls, since the roadhouse was filled. In the dark we could hardly see what we were doing, tripping over people because the place was swarming as well, everyone trying to stake out their bit of ground for their tents. We had to fight to get a corner for ourselves, and then it was mainly just rubble and rock, so that it didn’t look like a very good night ahead for us.
Our spirits improved after we’d all settled and the food had started goi
ng around. Seeing that everyone was looked after, Jesus said he wanted to see a friend of his in town who’d taken care of him after he’d come out of the desert. Simon the Rock arranged for a little group to go with him, and I noticed that Judas just pushed in to join them as if it was taken for granted. So I did the same, knotted up with the sense that something was going to happen, on account of the soldiers.
But when we passed through the Jericho gates, all the confusion and noise from the searches and the crowds dropped away and we found ourselves on a beautiful paved street lined with torchlight and fine palaces. It turned out the place was more a retreat than a town—in the time of Herod the Great it was only his cronies who were even allowed there, and now it was mainly Romans who stayed in the town and the richer Jews from Jerusalem, who had their winter houses there. We all wondered who Jesus could know in such a place, and if it was the fellow he’d talked about the night before who’d helped him carry on after John was killed. But Jesus said, no, that was another man, although this one did almost as much for him.
I’d noticed that Judas’s ears had pricked up at the subject. I’d started to suspect by now who the man who’d helped Jesus might have been, putting things together and thinking of the look that had passed between Jesus and Judas around the fire the night before, and how Judas had bolted off. At the time I’d thought he was angry but it wasn’t that—he’d been ashamed. Jesus had been saying to him, see what you meant to me once, though it was clear that at some point they’d fallen out, and hadn’t found the way to come together again. You couldn’t imagine two men more different than Judas and Jesus, one a rebel and the other for peace, one rude and hardly willing to give you the time of day and the other one taking in every beggar who came by, but still you could see they were connected, even more than if they’d been alike. At the same time you knew it had to end badly between them, because they were both of them so stubborn and set on their path, Jesus even more than Judas.
