by Howard Fast
Eleazar led the charge. With his great hammer, he flung himself onto the phalanx, beating the wall of spears aside, churning into the phalanx as the thresher churns into wheat, and behind him came Judas and gentle John, the black Africans and the mass of yelling, battle-mad Jews, people who had suffered and were waiting for this. The phalanx cracked, and all that were left of our exhausted band joined the charge. What remained of order in the battle disappeared, and the mercenaries broke and fled. The charge became a melee and the melee became a slaughter. Some of the mercenaries fought back, but most of them broke and ran, plunging into the mud, floundering knee-deep in the morass, hunted down and killed. Others ran for the hills; a few escaped—a very few, for we fought with a fierce and terrible abandon, and always, wherever the mercenaries held their ground, there was the giant Eleazar and his awful hammer and his black spearmen. For my own part, I was lost with the rage of battle, even as the others were. Never before had I let Jonathan out of my sight and reach, but now I knew only that those who had killed all I loved were before me, and I fought as the others fought, once beside my brother Judas, and again alone, dragging down a fleeing mercenary, and driving my knife again and again into his side, between the plates of his armor.
I rose, and it was twilight and it was done, except for the screaming of the wounded and the fleeing; and a few yards from me, two men stood face to face, the Greek Apollonius and my brother Judas. The sun had already dropped behind the mountains, leaving behind it a great fan of purple and red, and only a bloody glow lit the depths of the morass, glinting from the ponds and coloring the tall reeds. Both Judas and the Greek gleamed red in this somber twilight, the blood from their wounds mingling with the bloody light from the sky. My own weariness was such that the very thought of fighting again made my whole body throb with pain, but in these two men, there was no sign of fatigue, only such hatred as I had never before seen in mankind. Hatred was in their faces, their stance—in their whole being, in their every move and look and gesture. Each held a long Greek sword; Apollonius had shed his shield in the battle, but he still wore breastplate and greaves and helmet. One long cut on his cheek had stained him all over with blood, but otherwise, he was unwounded, while Judas was cut and gashed in a dozen places. They stood the same height, but the Greek was as heavy as Judas was lean, as ugly as Judas was beautiful. Naked to the waist was Judas, and blood molded his linen to his legs. Sometime, in the battle, he had lost his sandals, and he walked barefoot. The Greek was a bull, heavy and ominous and dangerous, and Judas was like the lean, quick leopard that prowls in the hills of Galilee.
I dragged myself toward them, conscious now of my own wounds, the pain of them running from limb to limb, but Judas saw me and waved me aside imperiously. Others approached, and still Judas and Apollonius stood as they were until a circle of men surrounded them, and finally Judas said:
“Will you fight, Greek, or will you run and die the way your men died?”
The Greek’s answer was a quick thrust, which Judas parried, and then they fought as I have never seen two men fight, with the abandon of beasts and the rage of demons. Back and forth they fought, their swords making a wild music in the darkening night, their breath coming in short, violent gasps, their feet sucking at the soft ground. They were closed about with Jews now, but the space was wide enough, and when more was needed, the crowd gave back. This was the Maccabee, and no one interfered; I understood that. Even if Judas died there, neither I nor John nor Eleazar nor Jonathan could help him. I saw them all now; but they did not see me. They saw only the two men who fought.
And then, the Greek brought his sword down on Judas with a cut that would have cloven him to his waist, had he not caught it on his own blade, caught it and snapped his sword, so he stood with a stump in his hand for just a fraction of a second, and then hurled himself in, past the Greek’s recovery, driving the jagged end of his blade into Apollonius’s face. The Greek went down, Judas upon him, cutting again and again at the shapeless face, until Eleazar and I sprang forward and pulled him off.
Sobbing, Judas stood there. He let go his broken hilt, which fell on the Greek’s body, and then he bent over and took the sword of Apollonius. It was night now, but we were too weary to move. We laid down and slept there, the living and the dead, side by side.
***
So it was that we became an army, not like any army that was before, but an army out of the people and the strength of the people, the one army in all the world where men fought neither for pay nor for power, but for the ways of their fathers and the land of their fathers. That night, we slept in the soggy turf of the swamp of Ephraim, and the next day we stripped the bodies of our enemies and buried them—all but Apollonius, we buried, and his body was taken by a group of men to the gates of Jerusalem, where it was flung in the dirt, that the rich Jews who defended the city and dwelt in it might see the madman in whom they had put their trust.
But for us, there was no rest. Our strength increased. Ragesh went off to the South with Jonathan, to raise another army out of the dark, fierce Jews who for hundreds of years had defended their land from the endless stream of Bedouin raiders the desert spewed forth. Village after village rose, slew their garrison, put to death their own traitors, and trekked to join us in the Wilderness of Ephraim. As the weeks passed, our number increased to twenty and then to thirty thousand folk—and finally more than a hundred thousand; and as the people increased, the strength of our army increased. For me, the task of providing for this host of people, organizing them and feeding them, became a staggering burden. Day after day, I worked from dawn to sunset. Patrols covered Judea, emptying cisterns and warehouses and bringing food and wine and oil to Ephraim where we built new storage places for them. Whatever the villages could spare, they gave us, the Jews of Alexandria raised their own defense force and with it convoyed caravans of food to us. In Ephraim itself, in the most inaccessible mountain valleys, we began to clear the brush and forest and repair the ancient terraces that had not been farmed for three centuries.
In this John helped me, his patience without end, his gentle forbearance achieving results where my own hot anger raised walls all around me, the while Judas and Eleazar and Jonathan trained our people to fight. The war that we had learned so well by now, the war that made a trap and threat out of the whole land, every village, every hillside, every valley—went on without pause. From the desert in the south to the mountains of Galilee in the north we raided constantly, one or another of my brothers scouring the country to let Greek or rich Jew know that only behind fortress walls was there safety; but three months went by before we fought our second great battle.
Yet how am I to sort it out? The years began in which battle followed battle; and always there were more mercenaries, and more and still more, a bottomless well of countless thousands of these paid murderers with whom the world abounded; for the world made them and sold them to a mad king in the North whose life presently consisted of only one obsession—that the Jews must be destroyed.
It took time to find a new warden for Judea. His name was Horon, and he led four thousand mercenaries, four hundred cavalry among them, down the great main road to Egypt, swinging eastward and north at Ekron and into our mountains, even as Apollonius did before. It was between Modin and Gibeon that we met him and smashed him, hemming him in between the hills and driving him back. Eight hundred dead he left there at that battlefield, and for two days we followed the broken retreating phalanxes, letting arrows rain on them from every hillside and every cliff, until at last they reached the fortified cities of the coast.
Thus, in the space of three months, we smashed two great armies, and now, except for the citadel of Jerusalem, where rich Jews shared the cramped space with a Greek garrison, there was no road, no path, no village in all Judea where mercenaries could move in a force of less than thousands; and even when they moved in their thousands, they feared the close valleys and the high mountains as they mig
ht fear hell itself. From Ephraim, our liberated area now extended south to the very walls of the city, and I remember well the first time Judas and I led five hundred Jewish spearmen to within sight of the Temple. For hours we stood there, silent at the ruin and filth of our holy city—and then retreated when the mercenaries moved out against us.
A new life was growing up in the land. In Ephraim, the terraces were beginning to blossom, as we filled baskets with the fertile muck from the morass and piled it behind stone walls on the hillsides. Even as far as Modin, families were returning to the ruins of their homes, putting in crops and taking out harvests. But it was reprieve rather than freedom, as we learned when Moses ben Daniel came again from Damascus; a different Moses ben Daniel, older, with the light of terrible things in his eyes.
“I come to stay,” he said. “There are no Jews left in Damascus. Antiochus is mad—stark, raving mad. He issued an order that every Jew in Syria must die, and Jewish blood ran like water in the streets of the city. Outside the city for ten miles, there is a row of spears, and on every spear, there is a Jewish head. I escaped because I was able to buy freedom, but you can count on your hands how many others escaped. They killed my wife and my other daughter.”
All this he said in a cold and matter-of-fact way—in the same way that Jews would speak of terrible things, such things and other things. “Every Jew must die,” he said tonelessly. “Every Jew in Damascus, every Jew in Hammon, in Sidon, in Apollonia and in Joppa—and in Judea. He will build a mountain of Jewish skulls and he will fill the valleys of Judea with Jewish bones. Thus he says, screaming it in his madness, and thus says the proclamation in every city in Syria. To kill a Jew is no longer a crime, but a virtue—thus it says.”
“And how does he plan to kill every Jew in Judea?” Judas said softly, while Eleazar clenched and unclenched his big fists, the tears running down his face as he listened.
“He will come down with more men than ever marched into Palestine in all time—a hundred thousand, he says, although I do not think he will find money enough for such an army. But, however, it will be a mighty host—I tell you that, you young man whom they call the Maccabee. Even before I left, Damascus was filled with slave dealers—dealers from Athens and Sicily, and Rome too, and the King’s treasurer was hounding them for advances against concessions. In the great jewelry mart, four hundred rubies from the King’s own treasure were on sale, and everywhere around the city mercenaries were camped, and still more arrived—”
“And they make us an angry and awful people,” Judas whispered.
So it was that the third army came against us. How many men it comprised, I don’t know, for it stretched out over seven miles of road, and it was a host such as had never been seen in Judea before. There was no counting it. This one said fifty thousand, and another said eighty thousand—but this I know: With Ruben and Eleazar and three of the black men, I went to the ridge of Mount Gilboa and saw them coming into the land. It was not a sight to make a man brave, men swarming on like locusts, mercenaries without end, miles of wagons, slave dealers, prostitutes and other camp followers—like the migration of a whole nation. Here was every mercenary who could be scraped into service from Syria, and many from Egypt and Greece and Persia. And against them, we had six thousand.
Their very size saved us. In its entirety, this mass of men and women and animals could only crawl down the coastal road, a few miles a day. From the hills, we watched them, and whenever they detached details to raid the countryside for food or booty, they were met in the passes by swarms of Jewish arrows. In their path, we poisoned the wells and cisterns and burned every bit of food we could not carry away, and always at night, around their sprawling camp, our signal fires blazed. When they slept, Eleazar and his black Africans would lead little parties into their very camp itself, cut throats and sow confusion and escape into the very vastness of their multitude.
As far south as Hazor they came. Their number had swelled itself, for the slave dealers had managed to gather up two or three thousand Jewish captives, as well as five or six thousand of the nokri who lived on the coastal plain. They were not particularly discriminating about who they put in chains, for they labored under their cash advances to Antiochus, and our spies told us of the discord and bitterness between the motley of slave dealers, the lords of prostitution and the Greek officers of Antiochus. In addition to all this, the trash and refuse of the coastal cities, the miserable, dying cities of that land which was once the proud and mighty Philistia, sold themselves to Gorgias, the Greek commander, as mercenaries. Gorgias was a wavering, uncertain specimen of the same mongrel type as Apelles, and he had only one fear—of returning to the north without having reduced Judea and destroyed the Jews. Thus, he welcomed every addition to his ranks, swelling his original army, as we heard, to over a hundred thousand men. At the same time, he waged war like a madman against every defenseless Jew who still dwelt on the coastal plain.
At Hazor, this host paused, their camp sprawling over miles of the plain, while we gathered our six thousand at Mizpah in the foothills, less than ten miles away. They were good men, our six thousand. As they stood on their arms, Judas and I walked through their ranks, he praised this one and remembered some deed of that one. He had that uncanny facility of memory which never allowed him to forget the name of a man he knew, or a name he had heard or a deed he had seen, and now he took hand after hand, stopping occasionally to embrace someone who had been with us in the old days, when we raided with our tens or our twenties. He glowed with pride at the ranks of tall, lean, hard men, men who could walk thirty miles over the mountains on a piece of bread or a handful of meal, and fight at the end of that time, living and fighting like lean and angry wolves. They crowded around him as he spoke, their eyes glowing.
“We have a venture and a deed before us,” Judas said, “that was never given to Israel before—for when did such a host come into our old and holy land? Not David and not Solomon faced such might, yet the Lord is our right hand—and we will smite them and destroy them and drive them back whence they came. Their case is not so good. They are hungry and angry and already they fight among themselves. And we have stung them a little,” he added smiling. “We’ll sting them again.”
A roar went up, which Judas quieted with arms spread.
“Would you have them hear you?” he smiled. “They sit down there in the valley, even now, looking up at our hills—and sooner or later they must gather their courage and come through the passes. Thus will we fight: I lead, and under each of my brothers a thousand men will march. If we should fail, then let us die, so that we will not have to bear the memory; but if we live and are separated, we will rendezvous at Modin, where the Adon Mattathias, my father, dwelt, and we will make an assembly there and give thanks to God.”
The “Amen” swelled up and shook the trees…
***
How shall I tell it, when there were so many battles? It is simple to say that Gorgias took five thousand foot and a thousand horse and moved north to Emmaus, probing at our hills. When he left his camp to advance, we went behind him and burned his camp. That was the first but not the last time we cut a force off from its main group, burning its base behind it. So many battles—that it is hard now to separate the one from the other. Yet Gorgias was less than Apollonius. He was in the hills already, with six thousand men, when he heard on every side of him the twittering of our whistles and the sonorous rumble of our shofars. When he saw the lights of his burning camp, in the early evening, he already knew the terror of those who march through Judean defiles when the skies rain Jewish arrows. He must have decided to turn then and there and make a night march to rejoin the eighty or ninety thousand he had left behind him. He was a fool and afraid, and that night he learned the full meaning of fear, doing what no other Greek commander would have ever dared, marching by night in the Judean passes, his army strung out, his horses wild with pain from our arrows and riding down his ow
n men. The arrows never ceased, all that night. In the narrow passes, landslides of stone increased his agony, and once, where the valley bottom narrowed to a space hardly more than a yard wide, Eleazar and Ruben the smith held the pass, the Africans and the men of Modin behind them, and the Africans had a new score to settle, loving the wife and daughter of Moses ben Daniel who were slain in Damascus. For three hours, Gorgias hurled his mercenaries against the pass, and for three hours the great iron hammer of my brother Eleazar beat them back. In the night, in that pass, the bodies of the dead lay shoulder high, and those who held the way waded ankle-deep in hot blood—until the screaming, terror-stricken mercenaries clawed their way up the cliffs to die by our knives and our arrows. Ever since, that valley pass has exuded a fearful stench, for we filled it with the bodies of more than two thousand mercenaries, making a fit memorial for Antiochus, the mad King of Kings.
Some escaped, but not many. Gorgias and a handful found their way back to the coastal plain, but the rest we hunted down in the night and through to the dawn, dragging them down almost within sight of the mighty encampment…
For eight months that followed, the huge, sprawling army of the Greeks camped there on the Plain of Philistia, and in that time they made nine separate efforts to penetrate the Judean hills, and nine times we clawed them to pieces and sent them reeling back to the shelter of the plain. Hunger, demoralization and disease preyed upon them, and during that eight months they raped the cities of Gaza and Ascalon, supposedly under their shelter and protection, handing over the whole population of both places to the slave dealers to settle the long overdue debt of the King of Kings. Yet inland, only ten or fifteen miles away, at Mizpah and Gath and other villages of the sort, Jews rebuilt their terraces and cultivated their land in peace.
