He never met the son he fathered. But instead of being father of one he proved himself father of many. In that act of love not merely was Judas a saved man, he became the Messiah, the true Messiah in the Judaic tradition, the man whose sacrifice bought salvation for his people, the man who reunited them and offered them peace. There was nothing about Jesus, the Christian Messiah, being God the Father come to earth in the skin of a mortal man. The truths differed starkly.
This was the truth that Menahem had cherished and held close, the promise he had made to Jair that he would never forget his grandfather’s story, and in turn would not let the world forget. From that promise he had forged the Sicarii, men of the dagger, named for his grandfather’s sacrifice.
The third secret had been the forging of the dagger, what it was made from and the truth it represented. The blade had been fashioned by Eleazar and Menahem in the armory of Masada from the silver shekels paid to Judas Iscariot, the coins that bought the sacrifice-for it was not a betrayal, not remotely, it was a sacrifice-that an entire religion was founded upon.
Even for its age, the dagger forged by Eleazar ben Jair was an exquisite piece of craftsmanship. To think this silver had been held by the true Messiah.
Again his hand strayed to the dagger at his side, lingering over the blade.
He wished he could read its story with his touch.
He wished he could understand it all.
Akim Caspi had found him in Geneva. He was young, impressionable, ripe to be imprinted with idealism. He had been drawn to Caspi. The man was enigmatic, but more than that he was inspirational. He talked about the lies of Matthew, whose Gospel sought to force the truth of Judas into fitting some Old Testament prophecy and how the Bible itself contradicted the death of Judas Iscariot. In the Acts of the Apostles he is said to have fallen down head first in a field and burst asunder in Akeldama, the field of blood. Matthew had Judas hang himself from a tree-and in doing so doom himself as a suicide to exile from heaven. He listened while Akim Caspi talked with such passion about how Matthew’s words sought to bury the truth, how so much of these lies of the Church was founded upon were the reworkings of reality. Why paint Mary Magdalene as a whore if not to take away her importance to the true Messiah? Why not even mention Judas, most loyal, most beloved at all, in the Gospel of Peter?
That Peter did not mention Judas of course led others to believe the silver itself could not exist if the man himself didn’t; after all, how could you buy betrayal from a man who had never walked the earth?
But why would anyone be surprised by this? Victors wrote the words remembered by posterity, which is why the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair was so fundamental to what Caspi believed. It was more than just words; it was the truth delivered first hand, truth that supported the Gospel of Judas itself. Jesus told Judas: You shall be cursed for generations. You will come to rule over them. You will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me. Matthew and Mark excoriate Judas: Alas for that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.But who gains from these lies? the would-be assassin asked himself. Who gains from these twisted truths?
Caspi had been passionate in his sharing, and he clearly believed his truth. And even now, with the white Mercedes Benz nearing the stage, the young Swiss Guard knew it was a truth worth believing.
It was a truth that made his heart race, his skin creep with anticipation. It was a truth that the world needed to know, needed to understand, simply because it was honest.
It had taken almost a year before Caspi had shared his plan with him.
It was a simple plan, filled with tragic symmetry.
Two millennia after the silver brought about the death of Jesus those same coins, melded now into the form of a dagger, would be used to kill the Bishop in white, the Pope of the Church of Lies. If Matthew wanted to twist lies about the Messiah to fit prophecies from Zechariah, then they would take prophecies of their own, from every man who had predicted the rise of the Antichrist, and use this death of the False Father to prove these prophecies true.
There were patterns within the patterns. The Prophecy of the Popes given by Malachy, the 12th-century Bishop of Armagh, offered 112 future Popes, according each an enigmatic phrase to identify them. The list, like all so-called prophecies, was enigmatic and open to interpretation, but there were truths in it that Caspi had identified. Truths that helped him believe their path was preordained, that now was the time. Those short phrases were important: Paul VI, Flower of Flowers; John Paul I, the Middleness of the Moon; John Paul II, the Labor of the Sun; Benedict XVI, the Glory of the Olive; and finally, the 112th name on the list, the final Pope, Petrus Romanus.
The signs all pointed to the truth. The Flower of Flowers bore the Fleur-de-lis on his coat of arms, the flower of purity and chastity. The Middleness of the Moon, Albino Luciani as he was born in Belluno, so close to bela luna, Beautiful Moon, reigned for only 33 days, dying before the new moon. The Labor of the Sun, born and died within a solar eclipse. The Glory of the Olive that would bring peace to a troubled world by demanding a sovereign state for Palestine, one might have reasonably thought, yet Caspi taught him otherwise. The Glory of the Olive, he argued, was the glory of the Olivet Discourse in the Gospel of Matthew, that the time of Tribulation was at hand. The prophecy of the Popes led them by the hand to the truth, that the true Messiah’s return was at hand, the one who was everything this Christ of the Christians was not.
The car turned into the square and the faithful began to cheer.
His heart burned with the birth of the truth.
Soon the world would know.
Soon.
24
Knife Then — The Testimony of Menahem ben Jair
He crept up behind the holy man. The air was thick with musk meant to hide the filth of humanity. Sunlight streamed in through the narrow windows and scattered across the floor like gold coins given up in offering to the greediest of gods. Yitzhak, the priest, was on his knees, hunched over before the altar, mumbling his devotions in the temple's inner sanctum. The holy man didn't break away from his prayer. He crept closer, listening to the shallow rise and fall of Yitzhak’s breathing and the gentle rise and fall of his prayer. There was hope in it, love, and strength. In a matter of heartbeats there would be nothing but empty silence where all of that had been.
The Sicarii paused one step behind the priest.
Yitzhak turned and looked up, startled, hands clasped in his lap. "The god you believe in is a lie," he told the holy man. They were the last words the priest would ever hear. Yitzhak's eyes blazed feverishly with fear as the Sicarii gbbed his hair and pulled his head back. In one smooth motion the dagger sliced across his throat. A death rattle escaped Yitzhak’s lips. He clawed at the gash, trying to force the air and blood back inside the flaps of skin. But there was no salvation. The Sicarii released his grip and Yitzhak fell. He was dead before his corpse sprawled across the blood-slick floor.
Menahem never did forget that promise. It burned inside him as the world turned and he grew into a man. It shaped everything he believed. It echoed in every act he performed and every decision he reasoned. In many ways his grandfather’s truth was the core of the man he had become: bitter, brooding, a loner. Menahem ben Jair was an outsider. He took comfort in solitude. He drew strength from isolation. He called no man friend. He had no time for the sects and their new religions. There were thirty or more already in Jerusalem, everyone worshipping their own brand of messiah. Menahem didn’t worship any false gods. He had a mind of his own. He believed one thing, one truth-that his land should be for his people. He had seen his father suffer. He had sat at his knee and listened to tales of the Pharisees spitting at his grandmother and calling her a whore for loving the wrong man.
And then they had killed Jair. That day had changed the boy into the man he was always destined to be.
Menahem ben Jair was Sicarii.
A dagger man.
&
nbsp; The world might have turned him into a killer, but in his heart he still yearned to be the boy who had walked into the garden to listen to his father’s lesson.
His mind raced. He looked down at his hands. Shaped like the wings of an angel they were coarse, hardened by life, but they were still beautiful. The blood was gone, but no amount of scrubbing with lye could remove its bitter iron tang from his mind. Still, it did not matter. He scrubbed them for a fifth time. It was strange… usually it was so easy to forget the faces of those he killed, but not this time. The face of Yitzhak Ari burned inside him. He saw it every time he closed his eyes. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.
Menahem was no stranger to death, but this was the first time he had taken the life of a priest.
Yitzhak Ari’s murder wasn’t about faith or fury. It had another purpose entirely. The motivation was as coldly rationalized as the deed itself. His murder was a political killing. It was the opening gambit in a long game of murder and sacrifice where the glittering prize was freedom. The holy man’s blood would be used to rally the faithful against the faithless. The Herodians and the other Roman sympathizers were already venting their outrage at the killing. They were already out in the streets shouting blue murder. Come sunrise that outrage would have brewed over into fervor and fury, and by dawn Jerusalem would run thick with blood.
It was that simple.
But there was still so much Menahem needed to think about, so much that could go wrong before then.
He paced back and forth. Behind him the door opened. The sun behind him transformed his visitor into a solid black silhouette. Menahem recognized his younger brother.
“What do you want?”
“Well, for one thing, I want you to stop pacing up and down like an old woman,” Eleazar grumbled. “Anyone would think you were losing your nerve, brother.”
“Just thinking,” Menahem assured him, though thinking was different from remembering. Thinking was active, remembering was passive. Menahem was not one for passivity. He lived his life. He was committed to it. He made things happen around him. He did not sit back and simply allow things to happen to him.
“No you’re not. I know you. You’re stewing over what the mad whore said, aren’t you? I know you. Look at me. Now listen. She wasn’t a soothsayer, she was raving. Sickness had got into her mind and undone it. That’s the difference. Not all madness is a glimpse of the future. Sometimes it’s just plain old insanity.”
“And sometimes it’s not,” Menahem said. In truth he wasn’t sure what he believed anymore. And that, more than anything, disturbed him. He was used to a life of absolutes.
The mad whore, as Eleazar so colorfully put it, had come stumbling up the siege ramp to the gates of the Masada fortress that morning, and stood there, hammering on the huge wooden doors until her fists were bruised and bloody. At first they had ignored her, assuming she would go away. She didn’t. Instead she had hit the doors all the harder. One of the others had emptied a slop bucket over her head, thinking it would shut her up. It didn’t. She had kept on hammering away on the massive iron-banded doors.
Finally Menahem had opened the door.
Swathed head to toe in rags that barely hid the sores of leprosy, she staggered forward and clutched him by the scruff of the neck. “You’ll be dead before sunrise if you kill the priest,” she rasped. Her breath was rancid. “Listen to me, Menahem son of Jair, listen to me!” He pushed her away. She went sprawling in the dirt. She lay there, her dress hitched up around her waist, dirt getting into the open sores that wept down her thighs. “I have seen your death!”
“And I have seen yours,” he said, turning his back on her. He slammed the heavy door. He stood with his back pressed against wood, breathing hard. He could hear her through the thick wood.
Menahem drew the beam down to lock her out. It didn’t help. She was already inside his head.
Menahem and Eleazar walked out of the small room together and climbed the narrow stair to the ramparts of Masada. The wind howled around them. Despite the plain lying over a thousand feet below the mesa the stronghold was built upon, Menahem could still feel the sand in the wind as it hit his face. The wind had a name: Simoom. The poison wind. It was an apt name. The air was thick with dust. He watched, fascinated by the giant dust devils that were constantly being whipped up and scattered again. They could just as easily have been the ghosts of the desert, the souls he had sent on their way to oblivion. It was easy to see where stories of the great Djinn originated. All it took were a few superstitious minds, the baking desert sun, Simoom, and a supernatural force was born.
He rubbed at the coarse hair of his close-cropped beard. Eleazar was right; the woman’s curse had gotten to him. Now that her words were inside his head they continued to worm away at his confidence. Doubt festered inside him.
There were no birds, he realized, staring into the lowering sun. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was a rare enough occurrence for him to notice. Yesterday Menahem would have said he didn’t have a superstitious bone in his body. Today all he could think was that yesterday he had been a fool.
“Walk with me, brother,” he said, turning his back on the Dead Sea and the empty sky that rolled away into the middle distance. “It feels like tonight is a time for truth.”
“You’re not going to die,” Eleazar said again, shaking his head.
“I am, you are, it’s the one given in this life,” Menahem said, managina wry smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Ah, so now you are a philosopher? Next you’ll be asking if I ever consider the morality of what we are doing.” Eleazar shook his head. He was more than a decade younger than Menahem. He could see his father in every line of his brother’s face. Sometimes he suspected he could see the old man looking out through Eleazar’s eyes, the similarity was that disconcerting.
“We don’t have the luxury of worrying about morality while our people are still prisoners in their own land. If we don’t kill them, they will kill us. That is just the way it is. Until we are free I am nothing more than the dagger in my hand.”
“So, dagger, why don’t you share this truth of yours, then?”
He did.
They walked a while in silence, Menahem gathering his thoughts. There was a lot he needed to tell, a lot that would have the ring of lies about it, and he needed his brother to believe. For the first time Menahem shared with his younger brother the truth of their grandfather Judas Iscariot. He showed him the thirty Tyrian shekels that were his legacy, and told the true story of the agony of the garden. After all these years protecting the secret, it surprised Menahem how good it felt to unburden himself and to have someone else understand.
“I want you to have the coins,” he finished. “Take them, they are yours.”
Eleazar braced himself against the wall, staring out over the plain. “No,” he said, finally. “If what you say is true, we should use them to honor grandfather, not hide them.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
Eleazar thought about that for a moment. “We are Sicarii, brother. We are men of the dagger. What better way to preserve his truth than use them to commission the greatest blade ever?”
“Were you listening to anything I said? These coins are cursed. They cannot be spent. Grandfather couldn’t even give them away.”
Eleazar rubbed his thumb and forefinger across the stubble of his chin. He did not have an answer for that. What good were coins that could not be spent? They stood in silence for a few moments longer, until Eleazar grinned. “Humor me a moment,” he sid. “So the coins can’t be used to pay a master weapons smith, but that doesn’t mean the coins themselves can’t be forged into a dagger, does it?”
“A silver dagger?” He thought about it for a moment. There was a certain righteousness to the idea, given that the coins-or rather what they signified-had been one of the major influences behind the founding of the Sicarii. To turn the shekels into a dagger seemed somehow fitting. But silver was such a
soft metal, any blade made out of it would be almost useless. But then perhaps a dagger never intended to kill was even more apt a tribute to Judas Iscariot? “Let me think on it.”
He lost the remains of the day in thought. The notion of the dagger appealed to him, so he had Eleazar light the forge fire and promised he would join him soon.
His mind refused to rest. All he could think about was tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It promised to be the defining dawn in the dagger men’s struggle. The harridan’s curse gnawed away at the back of his mind. In killing the priest had he damned them all? No. He refused to believe that. The plan was good. He had gone over it a thousand times. It was simple-misdirection, subterfuge and bloodshed.
Come first light the Sicarii would hit Jerusalem’s supply lines. They would burn the fields and slaughter the cattle. Without food the city would collapse in a matter of days, forcing the people to turn on the besieging Romans. There would be no more weak men out there trying to negotiate peace for the hungry. They would be out there on the streets with one thought: food. That was the shadow play. It turned the eyes away from what they were really doing, and allowed the dagger men to disappear into the ghettos. Once they found the shadows they would be able to orchestrate the true rebellion from the streets, striking only to fade away before the dying was done. Again and again, like vipers, they would attack, sinking their steel teeth into the pilgrims as they shuffled toward the Temple Mount looking for salvation, hitting the priests and the soldiers and leaving them clawing at the dust as they bled out into the road. And they wouldn’t stop until every last Herodian and Roman sycophant was either dead or driven from the city, leaving Jerusalem for the Jews.
It would be glorious. Righteous. More, it would be a fitting memorial for both his father and his grandfather, and would mean even more souls to join them wherever they were now. He refused to think of heaven or some beneficent Maker tending to the spirits of the dead. In Menahem’s mind the afterlife was a place of torment and suffering, Gehenna, with the gates of teshuvah firmly closed. How could it be anything else, built as it was on lies? There was no caring Christian God, no everlasting life in Olam Habah. The only deity he believed in was vengeful, the one who brought the flood to purify his creation, who demanded Abraham murder his own son to prove his fidelity. That was the god who owned the afterlife, the god capable of imagining such hells as the great fiery lake that existed solely to burn the sinners.
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