by Howard Fast
When it was finished, when only the two slaves remained, huddled together and crying with terror, the girl Miriam crawled to my father and embraced his legs. We watched him, and he stood for a moment, motionless, bloody sword in hand; then he let go his sword, drew the girl to her feet, kissed her lips and said:
“What is your name, my child?”
“Miriam.”
“Who was your father? Who was your mother?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed.
“And how many like you are there?” the old man sighed. “Do you know where the Wilderness of Ephraim is?”
She nodded.
“Then wash and go there, and when you meet a Jew, ask him to take you to the place of Mattathias and if he asks you who your father is, tell him Mattathias is your father.”
“I’m afraid—I’m afraid.”
“Go now!” he told her sternly. “Go and don’t look behind you.” And then he said to us, “Fetch me the innkeeper!”
People had come up now. First the children—and then more and more, until a half-circle of Jews contained the inn yard, frightened and silent and staring at the shambles of the dead men. Eleazar and Ruben went into the house; we heard them stamping through it, and then they emerged dragging the innkeeper, who was limp with fear, who wept and moaned. They threw him at the feet of the Adon, and he crawled forward on his belly, inch by inch, until he could kiss the straps of my father’s sandals.
“Stop it!” my father roared. “What are you—Jew or Greek or animal that you crawl on your belly to me! Stand up on your feet!”
His only response was to lie there, moaning and rolling his fat bulk from side to side. My father spurned him with his toe, walked away and turned to the people.
“And look you, now—I would have slain him and with my own hand, but let him live and remember that he crawled on his belly like this, and tell it up and down the land, so that his life will become a hell and he can look no man in the face. Our people have been slain and tortured until the whole land sounds with their cries, but his own rotten life is so much that he will press his face to the dirt for it. He is a brave man when the conqueror stands behind him—as are you all, you wretched and miserable people! God’s curse on you!”
The women began to sob. Here and there, someone said, “No—No.” And men covered their faces with their cloaks.
“Will you not look at me?” the Adon cried. “Am I worse than the mercenaries?”
An old man pushed through them and up to my father. “Take back your curse, Mattathias ben John ben Simon! What have we done to deserve your curse?”
“You have bent your knee,” my father said coldly.
“Have you forgotten me, Mattathias?” the old man demanded. “Jacob ben Gerson—have you forgotten me?”
“I remember you,” my father said.
“And I have not bent my knee, Mattathias. Nineteen they slew here in Shiloh, and four of them were circumcised infants, so that we would heed the Greek ways and circumcise no more—and then we made our peace with them. Take your curse away.”
“What holds you here, old man? Is life so sweet? I’ve had my threescore years and more—and so have you. What holds you here?”
“Where shall I go, Mattathias? Where shall my people go?”
“Go to Ephraim!” my father charged him, his voice bitter and unyielding. “Go to the wilderness, where we have camped under tents like our fathers and where we make a strength out of ourselves! But bow yourself to no man, not even to the Lord God, for He doesn’t ask it.” And then, pushing past him, the Adon went to the altar, threw it over, stalked past it, past the people and through Shiloh. We followed him and said no word, except when Judas whispered to me:
“There’s a fire in him—and if he were young, Simon, if he were young—”
“He’s young,” I said curtly. “He’s young and they don’t have to call him the Maccabee.”
“What do you mean?”
“And you don’t know what I mean, Judas?” I murmured.
He grasped my cloak and demanded, almost pitifully, “And you, too, Simon—in the name of God, what have I done to you that you should hate me so?”
“Nothing.”
“And you hate me for nothing?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing—and come. He won’t wait, the old man.”
We turned off the road, crossed the valley, and mounted the hillside. High up, where we could see for miles in every direction, we made our camp, ate our bread and washed it down with wine, and then lay down in our cloaks around a smoldering brushwood fire. Night fell, yet I could not sleep, so filled was my mind with the day’s events, with the brief and savage slaughter at the inn, with the dread picture of the old man, my father—and with memories before that too, our pleasant sweet childhood in Modin, Ruth and her love for me, and my love for her—what it was, memories of what are now less than memories, so short and strange and little known is life. As always in that time between night and day, where there’s no comfort of slumber, life became like a dream, a moment, something to be grasped at and sought and sought—just as I would always seek, and have sought, indeed, for the kind of love I knew in that moment at Modin, that brief and sun-soaked moment when there was neither yesterday nor tomorrow but only now. And the remembering, the fear and the loneliness, became too much, and I rose and went to the dying and sullen pit of our fire, heatless now in the cold melancholy of early morning. As I stood there, someone touched my arm, and I whirled to see the Adon, looking at me like an old hawk. Had he not slept?
“Find your brother, Simon, and come with me,” he said.
I woke Judas and we followed the Adon up the hillside to a rocky escarpment. “Look there,” my father said, pointing down the valley away from Shiloh and toward Jerusalem, and following his hand, we saw in the blackness a suggestion of light, like a few flung and dying embers. “What would you say?” he asked.
“I would say you should have killed that swine, the innkeeper,” Judas replied angrily, “for that’s a camp of mercenaries. No time was wasted to bring them.”
“And yet you were silent enough at the inn,” the old man murmured.
“I was silent.”
“And now—Judas, whom Ragesh calls the Maccabee,” he said ironically, “what now?”
Silent and stony-faced, Judas stood and stared down the valley.
“What now, Judas Maccabeus?” my father demanded contemptuously. “They sit there in the valley, and when dawn comes they will go into Shiloh and make ashes of it. If I had slain the innkeeper, Judas Maccabeus, I would have done so with my own hand and my own sword—but you who talked so well of war, how many children will die in Shiloh tomorrow?”
Without answering, Judas strode toward our fire, and I turned on my father furiously. “Would you break every living thing around you, old man?”
The hand that grasped my shoulder was like an iron claw, and for days after the marks were there, and the old man, the Adon, said to me, in that soft and awful way of his:
“Honor me, Simon, for you are out of my loins and still less of a man—and by all that is holy, I’ll have soft words from my sons! What is strong doesn’t break!” And then he walked off after Judas.
When I reached the fire, everyone was up, and a moment later, we moved through the night after Judas. With no words spoken, the Adon fell back, and Judas led. Already, the night was breaking, and eastward there was a gray haze of dawn, and it was just light enough to make out the path we followed. Southward, Judas led us, climbing higher, until we walked on the crusted edge of the hills, and he led us quickly, never pausing for care or breath, but quickly, almost headlong, until in not too long a while we hung on a ledge over the camp of the mercenaries, square beneath us, some six or seven hundred feet down, sprawled in sleep on the road itself where the road and
the two hillsides of the valley merged. Here too was evidence of the contempt the Greeks had for this bucolic and peaceful folk, the Jews, the peace-worshiping Jews who knew neither how to war nor to defend; for there in relief of Shiloh were only two twenties of footmen, with no guard over them as they slept, no sentries, but only stacked weapons and piled armor and deep sleep.
Now Judas didn’t hesitate; he gave his orders swiftly, almost bitterly, sending a handful of men under Jonathan, the boy Jonathan, the quick, eager, restless boy Jonathan, a few hundred paces north; John went with them, but the boy Jonathan led, and they were to go down until they were a spear-length from the road and wait; and a handful more went south with the Adon. Eleazar and I and Ruben remained with Judas, who led us to a great boulder, a mighty boulder that perched on the ledge and had perched there since God first cast the hills on this sweet and ancient land. “Can you move it, Eleazar?” he asked, and Eleazar, smiling, crouched under it, spread his arms to gain purchase, and then heaved. Dawn was coming, the rosy, wonderful Judean dawn, and in the faint, new light Eleazar’s mighty frame unfolded itself like Samson of old. He had shed his cloak, stripped off his coat and cast his sandals. Clad only in his linen trousers, he was all of man’s strength, the muscles bunching, tightening, and then driving in one savage effort that unhinged the stone and moved it, as it had not moved since first the earth began. It shook, and we joined our arms to his; it stirred, and Eleazar urged it as though it lived; it rocked, and then it turned over and fell. One moment, it paused at the edge of the ledge, then over and down with a crash that shook the hills like thunder, splitting in two and starting a hundred other rocks that bounded and roared and drove down on the sleeping mercenaries—asleep no longer, but frightfully awake, seeking about them, crawling, running, picking up whatever arms were at hand, screaming in terror as the rocks plunged on them.
Swords drawn, we four followed the rocks. At least ten of them must have been killed and crippled by the landslide, and perhaps half again as many fled wildly along the road in either direction, to be slain by the arrows of our two little groups; yet four times our number rallied and stood and faced our little group with sword and spear. Again I saw my brothers fight, Judas, so swift and terrible and deadly, and Eleazar, the gentle, amiable Eleazar who was one with battle, who loved it and fought like a demon out of hell. There were only four of us, and we were not rocks upon their sleep, but men of flesh and blood, and there were fifteen or sixteen of them. Let it not be said that a mercenary cannot fight; that alone they can do, well; and I learned it that morning, fighting for my life, with Judas on one side of me and Ruben on the other—even as we fought again, so many long years later—but with Eleazar now, who slew two men and cut down a third, and without whom then, at the beginning, when we had scarcely learned to fight, we should have surely perished. Battle is forever; time stands still; and the strength goes from the body like water from a hole in a bottle. Back to back, four square, we held them off and seven of them were down, but I was cut and bleeding and so was Ruben from a long spear thrust. They came at us again with spears when Jonathan and his men reached us, and then it was over. Two fled up the hillside, Eleazar after them, barehanded and barefooted, springing from rock to rock, like a great cat. One he reached and slew with a crushing, awful blow of his fist, but the second turned at bay with his long, shovel-like Syrian spear. He thrust at Eleazar, who avoided the blow, caught the spear with a lightninglike movement, and jerked. The mercenary fell forward and Eleazar was upon him. It happened quickly, so quickly that we stood and watched; panting, bleeding, we watched, as if there were an unwritten but known pact that this was for Eleazar ben Mattathias and no other, for Eleazar to struggle with him, roll over once, and then come erect with the mercenary’s throat in his two hands, come erect and lift, so that the man hung there, screaming and clawing until he died and Eleazar let go of him.
We dragged all of the bodies to the road and piled them there, after we had taken what weapons we could carry. Almost all of us were wounded, cut and bleeding, even my father, and some badly; but we were all alive and able to walk—and there was no mercenary who lived. We piled the bodies and Judas said:
“This way, and again and again until they come into our land no longer.”
And then we washed our wounds and laid down to rest.
***
So it began and we learned the new war, the people’s war that is not fought with armies and wealth, but with the strength that comes out of the people; for we went again to Shiloh and told them how it was. Twelve men of Shiloh joined us, and we gave them arms out of what we had taken from the mercenaries; for the rest, sentries were posted on the hills around the village, so that when the mercenaries came again they would be warned and they would take their possessions and flee.
Then for nine days, we raided among the hills and valleys of northern Judea. In those nine days, we learned our warfare; we learned to fight in a different way than people had ever fought before. We traveled by night, in the starlight and the moonlight, and in the warm days we slept in caves or in sheltered wooded thickets. We moved quickly, and Judas began to use a tactic which later became the basis for all our operations, attack from the rear and sudden appearance in the rear of an enemy who pursued us. It was a rhythm of motion, and once it had begun, Judas allowed no pause, no rest. We learned other things too, for at first we weighed ourselves down with the heavy spears and swords of the mercenaries, many of us putting on their breastplates as well, but whatever we gained with the unfamiliar weapons, we lost in a lack of mobility, and toward the end of our raid, we had abandoned all our armor. The mercenaries were not bowmen, and where they had detachments of archers, the bows were heavy, five-foot-long staffs of curved wood. These too, we took at first, attracted by the deadly look of them, but soon threw them away for our small and practical bows of laminated ram’s horn, which we had used all our lives for hares and jackals and wild birds. When we could, we attacked before the dawn—otherwise at some time in the night. Nor was it all victory. The two fights at Shiloh made us overconfident, and lent us contempt for the mercenaries; we paid a price for that, a terrible price, for flushed with our success we attacked a column of sixty mercenaries outside of Bethel, three twenties of them and in daylight, so that they could mesh their shields and drive a phalanx at us. By then our number had grown to thirty-nine, yet we would have all perished had it not been for the terrible fighting fury of Eleazar and Judas, who beat back attack after attack, even when only nine of us still stood on our feet, so that finally what was left of the mercenaries and what was left of us drew apart, panting and weak from the fight, each group too hurt to do more; and we were able to lift our wounded and bear them away.
That was the end of our raid, but in the nine days all Judea had been set aflame and seething and turbulent, and there was no family, no matter how far removed, but knew the name of Mattathias and his sons. And the Greeks licked their wounds and no longer regarded the Jew as a meek and gentle scholar who would sooner die on the Sabbath day than lift a hand in his defense. No longer did their mercenaries travel the roads of our land alone or in tens or even in twenties, but they withdrew into their walled fortresses, and when they moved, they moved as armies, and when they slept their sentries paced anxiously back and forth. No, it was not all on our side, for they took their revenge, killing and burning and looting and lighting up the whole land at night with the flames of burning villages. But the people fought back; they died in their burning villages with knives in their hands, and everywhere, by the thousands, the people retreated into the mountains, the wild, wooded hills of Judah, of Bethaven and of Gilead. And from everywhere, from all over the land, a steady trickle of the strongest, the most bitter, the least afraid, found their way to Ephraim.
***
Among the men we bore back was my father, the Adon Mattathias, with a sword cut deep in his thigh and the cruel gouge of a shovel spear in his shoulder. With my own hands, I dr
essed his wounds, feeling his pain under my fingers but seeing no sign of it in his white, hawklike face. As tenderly as we might, we bore him back to Ephraim, none but his sons carrying the litter; yet at last when we reached the little valley where our people were, with our mixed tale of battle, victory and defeat, his wounds were already infected and giving pus. He lay in a tent we had raised for him, and one of us tended him constantly, yet he grew no better, only worse. The Rabbi Ragesh, who had studied healing with the sages of Alexandria, put glass drains into his wounds, so that they might remain open and allow the discharge to run off, but the Adon chided him gently, saying:
“Ragesh, Ragesh, you make a great thing of a small matter. Life has been a bitter thing too long for me to cling to it. Like an old Jew, I will go to my Lord with my knees stiff and a willful heart and I’m not afraid.”
“You’re not going to God, Mattathias,” Ragesh smiled, “while we need you. A little while—”
“You don’t need me. I have five strong sons, so take your devil’s instruments, Ragesh, and leave me to my pain.”
Day by day, his fever increased, until he lost all knowledge of where he was and what had happened and wandered in his own youth when all the land was sunny and peaceful and he sat with the scrolls in the synagogue and studied under the ancient scholars what the wise men of Babylon had written. His flesh fell away in those days and the skin of his face stretched itself tight and thin. There was only one brief moment when his fever broke and he was lucid and clear, and then he called for us, his sons—and we gathered around him, John holding him up so he could see us, Judas caressing one thin hand, and Eleazar kneeling before him and weeping like a child. There was little light in the tent and outside the rain pattered down, but even through the sound of the rain it seemed to me that I could hear the soft, lost murmur of the people—all of the people in Ephraim, who had gathered about the tent where the old man, the Adon Mattathias, lay dying.
