by Jamie Buxton
“Open up by the authority of the Temple,” a voice called out. The banging on the door made Flea wince.
“We have to run,” he hissed. Panic made him feel sick.
“Have faith. The Temple has no authority here,” the old woman said, with a smile. “Husband, send them away.”
The old man climbed down the stairs to the lower room. Over the flustered clucking of chickens they heard him calling out to wait and be patient as he unbarred the door.
“We’re looking for two children. Lawbreakers. Blasphemers. Have you—”
“Children?” the old man said. He sounded honestly confused.
“They come from a street gang. Been involved in terrorist activity. Have you seen anyone like that?”
“Nothing like that, but these old eyes…”
“Alone, are you?”
“I live with my wife.”
“Well, be careful. These are dangerous times.”
“Oh I know,” the old man said. “I know.”
He was smiling when he returned to the room. “Well, I didn’t lie, did I?”
“No, indeed you didn’t.” The old woman returned the smile. “You did very well.”
“When he said, ‘Have you seen anyone like that’ … the truth is, I have seen the thing itself, so nothing like it.”
“You’d split hairs with the barber,” the old woman said. “What these boys want is a cup of milk and a place to rest, not a lecture on how clever you are.”
“Whatever happens, we don’t like the idea of grown men chasing children down the street. We’ve lived through this kind of madness before. There’s always trouble at the feast, especially when the latest one turns up at the east gate.”
It took a second for the words to sink in. “The latest one?” Flea said. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, every other year someone rides into the city on a donkey claiming to be the Chosen One. You know the old prophecy: ‘Behold your king is coming for you. He is just and will save you. He is humble and mounted on a donkey.’”
Flea shook his head. “I’d never even heard of the Chosen One before yesterday. We just went to see Yesh because we thought he did tricks, but then it all got complicated. I don’t know how it happened.”
“Poor child. Life can be very simple but people like to make it complicated. They go through the old books looking for prophecies, for example. This ‘Yesh’: can he heal the sick, do you know?”
“Yes,” Crouch said quickly.
“Of course you know the verse from the Holy Book?” the old man said hopefully.
When Flea and Crouch looked at him blankly, he said, “‘The lame will leap like a deer and the dumb will shout for joy.’ Did he go into the Temple?”
“Yes,” Flea and Crouch said together.
“‘And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly go to his Temple.’ It’s all there, written down in the old books. All you have to do is look. But the problem is, people just don’t seem to study the texts the way they used to.”
“Are you saying that if he did all these things, then he must be the Chosen One?” Crouch asked.
But Flea’s mind had raced ahead. “No! Don’t you see? If they’re all written down, he just has to follow them, so that they look like the prophecies working themselves out. The donkey on the bridge: that had been set up in advance. The trouble in the Temple—all done for a reason. The healing and probably everything else he did. That was the plan!”
Crouch stuck out his bottom lip. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “If it was prophesied and he did it, then…”
“But if he knew about them, then they’re not prophecies at all. They’re more like … instructions. You must see that.”
“It doesn’t matter if he really is the Chosen One.”
“It does matter. It has to matter!” Flea’s head was like a room full of voices he could not understand. They were getting louder and louder. He thought his head would burst.
“Enough, enough.” The old woman bustled over. “Time for talk tomorrow. You look exhausted, you poor things. Rest here. Stay with us and, tomorrow, join us for the feast.”
The old man put a comforting hand on Crouch’s shoulder. “Come now. I can tell you’ve been pinning your hopes on this Yeshua. Well, in spite of what your friend thinks, he has a lot going for him. We heard he’s from Gilgal, and that’s part of the prophecy you can’t fake. He’s got quite a following up there, and that counts in his favor. And of course there was that desert prophet who recommended him. Yohan, he was called. Yohan the Dunker. So don’t lose heart, that’s the main thing. And if you…”
Flea stood suddenly. The voices had come together to form a single clear question. “What comes next in the prophecy?” he asked.
Silence. The old man looked away. “It is best not to meddle, child. Stay with us for the feast. We shall kill the lamb, cook it, and mark our door with its blood so the Angel of Death passes overhead.”
“But I need to meddle! I’ve messed things up. I don’t know how, but if I know the next stage of the prophecy, maybe I can do something!”
“Really, child…”
“You know. Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because it is a terrible thing.” The old man looked at his wife, who nodded sadly. Then he took a deep breath and chanted, “He was pierced through for our sins, he was crushed for all the unfairness in the world. He was punished for our comfort and we can only be healed when he is whipped. That’s what the writings say. It is not good. You don’t want to trouble yourself. Many pretenders claim to be the Chosen One, but all fail when they are faced with the ultimate test.”
Flea swallowed. “Whipped? Crushed? You mean tortured?” He thought of the whipping post in the Fortress’s courtyard and the awful instruments in the Results Man’s cellar. He felt sick.
“He will be betrayed, tortured, and suffer a miserable death. Is it any wonder that none of these pretenders has ever gone through with it?”
“Betrayed? Did you say betrayed? I’ve got to go,” Flea said.
“Child, you should not meddle in these matters,” the old man said.
“But he has been betrayed. Shim, one of his followers, has betrayed him to the Romans. The Romans are torturers. It’s happening like the prophecy says, but I can stop it! I can warn them. I know where they are!”
“Hush, child. What will be, will be. If this is Yeshua’s destiny, then trying to stop it will be pointless. A true prophecy is like a river—you can try to block it, but it will always find its way.”
“No,” Flea said. “It’ll be my fault! If I’d just done what I was told in the first place, Jude could have already done something about it. That’s what he wanted. But now that I know what’s going to happen, I can make it right. Crouch, come on. I’m sorry. We really have to go now. They can’t be too far from here.”
But when he held his hand out, Crouch would not take it. Instead he turned to the old man. “If he is the Chosen One, what will happen when all the prophecies come true?”
A little smile lit up the old man’s face and his eyes crinkled in delight. “Ah, now, that is very interesting. If all the prophecies come true, it is said that this world will end and a new world will begin. A world of peace and plenty. A world that will make this one seem like a sad memory. Pain and hunger will be no more—fading shadows on the golden fields of paradise.”
“And the poor will be rich?” Crouch asked.
“All will be rich.”
“And the lame?”
Flea read the twist in Crouch’s face and the longing in his eyes and did not like it. “Snap out of it, Crouch,” he said. “Yesh might be tortured. Your precious magician might be tortured. And the world will end. Don’t you get it? The. World. Will. End.”
Crouch’s face was anguished. “But then there’ll be a better one. What will happen to the lame?”
“They’ll dance in the streets for joy,” the old man said. “Glory be!”
“Me too?”
“Of course.”
Flea took him by the shoulders. “Crouch—you can’t mean…”
“Child, child, do not blame him,” the old man said. “It is a prophecy. It has been decided. If he is the One, he will die.”
“No,” Flea said. He stamped on the floor and the little house boomed. “Don’t you see? It can’t be a prophecy if it’s all just my fault. The whole thing can’t … hang on that!”
“Child…”
“No,” Flea said. “I’m going.”
And he went.
33
The streets had emptied by the time Flea set off again. He forced himself to jog, trying to run off his tiredness.
Flea had heard the priests chanting in the Temple. You had to be deaf not to. They did a lot of praising, and there was always something to be grateful for: the whiteness of lambs, the juiciness of pomegranates, the plumpness of doves, the yield of the threshing floor, and so on.
Flea didn’t buy it.
Any good fortune he enjoyed had come about through his own quick wits. Or sheer blind luck, like the day he had found the coin on the Temple steps, or the time he’d fallen through a rotten ceiling when he was being chased by a knife gang and they’d been too scared to follow. Luck was just another link in the chain of disasters that was his life.
But right now, as he climbed the side of the valley heading for the room he had seen Shim visit, he could not see how luck could help him. Shim had already betrayed Yesh to the Results Man and now the prophecy would roll out like a Temple scroll.
Yesh would be tortured, Yesh would die, the world would end, and Flea could not take that responsibility. The problem was even knottier than that, though. Because if Yesh was the Chosen One and his death led to a whole new world that was free of suffering, maybe he should just let that happen. Then everyone would be happy, if (big IF, great big IF, great big size-of-a-mountain IF) the prophecies came true.
Too many choices. Flea stopped running and looked up at the sky for guidance.
Big mistake. The stars seemed to be circling around him—him—as if he were the pivot of the world. Perhaps the old couple was right. Perhaps he should just accept his fate and let events take their course. Perhaps he should just head back and drink their milk and eat their bread and wait for the world to end.
Once, twice, three times Flea stopped. But something kept him moving forward to the upper room where Yesh and Jude and all the rest of them were eating and drinking happily, ignorant that Yesh had been betrayed.
An Imp picked him up about a hundred paces from his goal. Flea tried to fight, but he was so tired he could barely struggle. When the Imp put him down Flea just stood still, his head swinging from side to side like a cow on the edge of sleep.
The soldier took him straight to the Results Man, who was sitting on the back of a cart a single street away, swinging his legs, smiling his tortoise smile, and picking his teeth with his horrid little spike.
“Wanted to see what happens? Good for you,” he said casually. “Unless of course you were trying to warn someone?”
Flea opened his eyes wide, tried to look innocent, and shook his head.
The Results Man ruffled Flea’s hair. “Because you’re cleverer than that. You’ve worked out that if you said anything to Jude, Shim would know, and if Shim knows anything, he tells me, and I would take it out on your little friends. Who are fit and healthy, by the way. So far. I showed them my instruments this afternoon and invited them to sing along. None of them took up the offer, so I popped them into a little room, gave them a bath, turned out the lights, and suggested they have a sleep.” He pretended to play his spike like a flute.
Flea looked down the street to the house where Yesh and his followers would be sitting down to eat. He could see warm light through the shutters. He wanted to be there. Nothing else. Just to be there. If he hadn’t gone snooping after Shim, if he hadn’t met the Results Man. If, if, if …
The Results Man broke into his thoughts. “You see, what I think is this. I do a job, and my job is to do what’s best for the Imperium. Is a soldier who fights for his country bad because he’s killed a man or two? Far from it. He’s a hero. Well, so am I.”
“But Rome isn’t your country, is it?” Flea said.
“Not in your sense. Not in the backward, old-fashioned sense where you’re stuck with a country just because you happen to be born on one particular patch of earth. I mean, who wants this place?” He gestured around him. “Who wants to be trapped in this hideous, heaped-up dump of a city that runs on blood and smoke? Rome is bigger than that. Rome is an idea. Believe in the idea and you become a Roman.” He paused to smile. “When all this is over, what are you going to do?”
“I think I’d like to go a very long way away from here, from Rome, from everything,” Flea said. He remembered the line of camels, their red halters, and the sense of freedom they had given him.
The Results Man snorted. “Oh, wake up, idiot. Listen, on the very edge of the world there’s an island where the sky is always gray, the land is always green, and the people have blue skin. When they kill a man, they eat his heart, cut off his head, and jam it onto a spike so they can talk to it. And yet that place is Roman too. You can’t travel the world to get away from Rome. Rome is the world. Travel to explore, travel to conquer, travel to learn, but do not think for one second you can travel to escape. Anyway, I need you.”
“You need me?”
“Perhaps need is too big a word, as is me. Better to say that I have decided to work a person into my plans, yes, and that person might as well be you. You see, we have a tiny, possible risk of a situation. There are Temple patrols out tonight. If I arrest Yeshua here it might lead to trouble, and I don’t want trouble I can’t control. So, change of plan. When I ask you to, I want you to join the party, find out where they’re going next, and then come and tell me.”
It took a second before Flea saw the opportunity this presented. “All right,” he said.
“Now curl up and go to sleep for a bit. I need to think without being disturbed.” It was not an invitation. It was an order. Flea curled up in the back of the cart and screwed his eyes tight shut.
Getting to see Jude would not be a problem now, but how could he get him away from the others to warn him?
34
Pitch-black. Flea woke up very carefully, the spike sliding coldly up one of his nostrils and the Results Man’s breath warming his neck. The spike encouraged him to sit up and was not removed until he did. Still stupid from sleep, Flea slid down from the back of the cart and looked out into the street.
The room that Shim had rented stood out even more starkly now. Warm tints from the lamp-lit windows looked soft and inviting. Distant voices dented the silence.
“Quite a meal they’re having.” The Results Man’s voice was as soft as a lover’s. “They’ll have had a drop or two of wine by now, so they’ll be loosened up, and a clever boy like you should be able to find out what we need. Ready?”
Flea stood and nearly fell. His heart was hammering so hard his legs seemed to tremble. He didn’t think he could make it.
“What is it?” the Results Man asked. “Scared? Have I been too harsh? Should I have been nicer? Should I coax you? Go, my sweet little insect. Go!”
A hand in the middle of Flea’s back compelled him to take a step. The movement shook down his thoughts and seemed to bring new clarity. If it was a choice between saving the world and saving the Temple Boys, he had to save the world, because if the world went then they would all die anyway. He would warn Jude in any way he could, whether Shim overheard or not. He took one more step and then another, a small boy in an empty street, and then climbed the steps to the upper room.
On the landing, two neat rows of dusty sandals were laid out on the little platform along with a wide bowl of dirty water. It seemed homely and normal. He looked up at the door. No one had marked it with lamb’s blood and no sprig of hyssop had been tied to the doorpost. Did that matter? Had the Angel
of Death passed over anyway, or was it up there waiting? If he opened the door, would it slip into the room with him like a deadly shadow?
He pressed his ear to the flaking paint. The magician was talking in a low, pressing voice, occasionally interrupted by laughter or protest. What should he do?
Should he just open the door? Make a noise? Shout? He scratched the wood with his fingernails and felt the loose, crumbly grain threaten to give him splinters.
He coughed. No response.
He kicked it gently. No response.
He leaned his head against it, the catch gave, and he fell into the warm light.
35
A meal of lamb, bread, olives, and wine was laid out on a cloth in the middle of the room. At the far end, under a shuttered window, Yesh sat on a cushion, cross-legged and upright. The others were sitting or sprawling around him, seemingly frozen by the sight of Flea stumbling into their feast: Yohan with a beaker of wine held in midair, Yak reaching for an olive, Shim with his mouth clamping down on a piece of bread. Tauma broke the silence by swallowing noisily. Jude rose to his feet and stepped over the remnants of the supper, reaching Flea in two strides.
“Flea, child, what’s happened to you?”
His concern was so sudden and so honest that Flea felt a choking rush of tears. He fought to keep them down and shook his head.
“We’ll pop outside and talk,” Jude said, shooing him to the door.
“Wait,” Yesh said.
“But I want a word alone…”
“And I said wait! I want to see the child first. He looks terrible. Why’s he here anyway?” Yesh’s voice was slightly slurred and his eyes were bright. He gestured to Shim, who rose to his feet and closed the door, then ushered Flea forward.
Jude smoothed the annoyance from his face. “Master, he must have come to tell me something.”
