by Jamie Buxton
“Get out! Get out now before I—”
“What? Have us whipped? Executed? Like I said, you’re just like the Romans, except you’re not as strong, and I’ll get even with you.”
“Leave!”
Yusuf’s spit was bitter. He took a step toward Flea, his hand raised to deliver a blow, but before he reached him he staggered. Flea felt himself lurch. Tesha grabbed him. For half a dozen pounding heartbeats, the walls and floors of the palace turned to jelly. Outside the open window he heard wails and the sound of things falling.
“Another earthquake,” Yusuf said. “God save us all.” And that was that.
So Flea ruined Yusuf, and felt no better. He watched the city start to repair itself and get back to normal, as if there had been no earthquake, as if Jude hadn’t died, as if Yeshua hadn’t died. That was a lesson to be learned, Flea thought, but he did not know if it was a good one or not.
And anyway, things had changed for the Temple Boys, who now had to deal with the thirty pieces of silver Jude had left for Flea and that he had managed to hang on to against all the odds. A miracle, of sorts.
They were, however, proving to be a bit of a headache.
Little Big and Clump didn’t see coins, just jugs of wine, large amounts of meat, and piles of bread. Big, oddly, got religion and thought they should spend it at the Temple on sacrifices. Flea floated the Wild Man’s idea that thirty pieces of silver would buy a flock of sheep and a tent. He saw them all joining the Wild People and becoming another tribe. He’d have to become competent, grizzled, and of few words, but he could learn.
In the end they sacrificed a sheep to keep Big happy, then ate and drank to their hearts’ content until fourteen coins were left.
Everyone got one and no one felt much the better for it.
“The thing is,” Tesha said, “I haven’t got a clue what to do with mine.”
She and Flea were sitting on a hillside to the south of the city. It was a warm day. Spring, proper spring, had come at last, with blue skies and fresh warm winds. Tesha flicked her coin into the air so it glinted in the sunlight. She screwed it into her eye. She stuck it on her tongue. Below them lay the blood fields. Farmers were digging out the blood-rich mud and loading it onto carts to spread on their fields. Jude was buried down there, but Flea did not like to think of that.
“Maybe drinking it away would be the sensible thing to do,” Flea said. “No one can tell you not to.”
He stole a sideways look at Tesha. Her hair was growing out and her skin was taking on color. He would have liked to kiss her but had no idea how she would react. Getting close to her seemed to heat up his skin in a way that was fantastic but sometimes awkward.
“But there might be other things to do. Better things,” Tesha said.
“Then you have to think of them.”
“What if I can’t?” Tesha protested.
“Then go and get drunk for a week,” Flea said.
“You’re no good at all.”
“It’s the same for all of us,” Flea said. “I was going to hire a professional mourner to wail over Jude but I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. I have a feeling it’s just a big waste of money.”
“Then go and get drunk for a week,” Tesha said with a hint of acid in her voice.
Flea shrugged. The memory of Jude was a cold ache in a very deep place. He should still be alive and he wasn’t. He should have wanted to live, but he hadn’t. Right now that seemed like the saddest thing in the world.
“I sort of imagined that me and Jude were going to travel,” Flea said, rubbing his newly cut, almost clean hair. “There was a storyteller I heard once. He talked about a shipwrecked sailor who landed on the back of a giant fish, and there was another about a carpet that flew. The Results Man said there’s an island at the end of the world where the land’s always green and the people are blue.”
“That’d be good,” Tesha said vaguely. “How do you get there?”
Flea made a face. “Dunno. I used to dream about being this magic, powerful person. Flea the Magnificent! Flea the Terrible! I’d tell stories to myself about having fantastic powers. But I don’t seem to want to do that anymore. I just want to go far away. I want to find blue people and tell them this story, and I want it to seem as crazy to them as stories about them seem to us. That’s what I want. I just want people to shake their heads and say, ‘Who’d believe that?’ But we’ll know it’s the truth.”
“I’ll pretend to drink to that,” Tesha said. She had stolen a silver cup from the upper room where Yesh and the followers had eaten their last meal together. She held it up, empty, and tipped it to her lips, then handed it to Flea to do the same.
He wondered where they would end up if they went off together. He didn’t care at all and he did care very much, both feelings at the same time. Together they made him happy, excited, frightened. And ready.
“Do you think we could do that?” Tesha said. “I mean, just go?”
Flea looked across the valley to the city on the hill. Smoke drifted gently through the tight pattern of its enfolded streets. To survive in that maze you had to make a plan, find a way, decide you had a destiny and stick to it, or you’d just give up, wouldn’t you? But other people had destinies too, and where one plan clashed with another, people died.
That was the problem.
The Imperium, Yesh, the Temple … they all thought that if only they could follow their own destiny, they’d be free. But it was just a dream. They were all stuck together in the maze, forced to turn left or right by the hard edges of what other people wanted, what other people needed.
Then all of a sudden the empty land behind Flea seemed like a deep and generous promise that he could fall into. He understood in a way that made his breath thicken and his heart pound that, if he was brave, he could lean into the future, and if he didn’t try to look ahead to the crash at the end he could keep moving until he stopped.
And that would be enough. And that would be good. And that would be the best way to remember Jude, and to keep remembering him.
“Flea?” Tesha asked. “What is it? Suddenly you look all … different.”
Flea sniffed and wiped away a tear. Like morning dew, it had come from nowhere. Somewhere in the city, somewhere in the maze, the old Flea was waving him away, telling him to get lost and that he’d be trapped forever if he didn’t make tracks. Standing next to him, Tesha was more or less saying the same: there were other, better things to do.
He closed his eyes and waited for Flea the Magnificent, Flea the Traveler, Flea the Hero to make his decision, but he was gone too. The time for thinking up stories really was over. Perhaps it was time to become one.
“Well?”
“Yes,” said Flea. “Let’s go.”
“Just for the record, you did say earlier that you made up names for yourself. Flea the…?”
“Flea the Terrible. And the Magnificent.”
Tesha punched him gently on the arm. “You’ll never live that down, you know. I’ll keep reminding you of it.”
“I know. And I don’t care. I am magnificent.”
“You’re terrible.”
“Well … nobody’s perfect.”
Text copyright © 2014 by Jamie Buxton
Published by Roaring Brook Press
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Buxton, J. P. (Jamie P.)
Temple boys / Jamie Buxton. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Flea, the least significant member of a gang of teens who slee
p next to the Temple walls in first-century Jerusalem, witnesses Christ’s passion and resurrection, torn between Jude, who protects Flea and employs him to run errands, and a brutal Roman spy determined to uncover the truth about “the Magician.”
ISBN 978-1-62672-036-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-62672-037-4 (e-book)
[1. Street children—Fiction. 2. Gangs—Fiction. 3. Coming of age—Fiction. 4. Jesus Christ—Passion—Fiction. 5. Jesus Christ—Resurrection—Fiction. 6. Jerusalem—History—1st century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B98315Tem 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014040466
eISBN 978-1-62672-037-4
First American hardcover edition, 2015
eBook edition, February 2015
First Published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Egmont UK Limited
