My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  But the wonder of it was the change in Judas. He lived again. He was the old Judas, patient, gentle, fiery—as the need was—indulgent, hard; he was the Maccabee now, and so they termed him, and so it sounded to mark the night, “Where is the Maccabee?” “I have news for the Maccabee.” “I come from Shmoal with a twenty for the Maccabee.” “I fought with the Maccabee five years—he needs me.”

  We needed them; we welcomed them. How many times that night was the blessing for wine spoken, as captain after captain came, dog-weary with travel, to enter the house of Mattathias and pledge his allegiance. And with dawn, only the second dawning since Jonathan had come with the news to Ephraim, we had an army in Modin and two hundred additional archers on the hills to greet Nicanor if he should have begun his march by night. And our army in Modin numbered two thousand three hundred men, hard, battle-scarred veterans of a hundred encounters…

  ***

  I made Judas sleep, and I closed the door of the house and set two men to guard it and see that he lay undisturbed. Now the first, sweet rosy tint of dawn was in the air, a band of pink light in the east, where our holy city was, and an answer to the pink on our high and fertile terraces. Through the night-wet grass, I walked up to the little olive grove where once Ruth and I lay in each other’s arms, and I spread my cloak there and let my weary body feel the earth under me.

  I was happy then—I, Simon, Simon of the iron hand and the iron heart; I, the least, the most unworthy of all my glorious brothers, the single, stolid, plodding and colorless son of Mattathias—and yet I was happy in a way that I never dreamed I might be happy again. For the first time in many years, my heart was at peace and the bitter venom had cleansed itself from my soul. My memories were good memories, and as I lay there, both the living and the dead were close, and they comforted me. No devils plagued me and no hates corroded me; the masterful and angry old man, the Adon, slept gently, and gently too slept the tall and lissom woman who had held my heart as no other woman ever held it, or would, who had kissed my lips and given her soul to me. Perhaps I dozed there a little as the cool morning wind played over me, for it seemed that I dreamed as well as remembered, taking the matter of my dreams out of this ancient, ancient soil of Israel that had reared up so strange a people as we Jews were. Like a benediction, the words of the morning prayers were in my mind, How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy dwelling places, O Israel! And those words came to me over and over again—until I dozed more deeply, or slept perhaps, and wakened with the hot morning sun in my eyes.

  ***

  Straight through the valley pass toward Modin, Nicanor came, with nine thousand men in heavy armor, marching them along the same way we took as children, going to the Temple with the Adon. They had set out from Jerusalem in the early morning, and though our twenties harried them in every pass and defile, they came on under their raised, locked shields. From Jerusalem to Gibeon to Beth Horon, they marched under a rain of the slim and deadly cedar arrows, so that Nicanor learned once and for all what is meant when a Greek speaks of the deadly, snakelike “Judean rain,” and all that distance they left their dead in the sun. And yet Nicanor would not be diverted, but marched on, burning the empty villages they passed. At Beth Horon, they camped for the night, but all night long our arrows pattered and whispered upon their tents, and though they camped they did not sleep; and in the morning, with taut nerves and deep hatred, they came down the valley toward Modin. And three miles from Modin, where a peaceful brook ran through the valley bottom, alongside the road, where the hills and terraces sloped up almost vertically, bare of anything but twisted brush, we built our barricade and blocked their way.

  Our tactics were no longer new, yet Nicanor was new to them. Because every defile in Judea was a deathtrap, a whole generation of mercenaries lay buried in Judean soil, yet Nicanor came on into the pass, into the trap—because there was nothing else for him to do. We stood in his path, and either he must sweep us aside or retreat to Jerusalem, considering that he would get there. He chose to sweep us aside.

  Behind the barricade, we put eight hundred of our best men, armed with spear, sword, and hammer. The rest we deployed on the hills with their bows and their knives and with bundles of thousands of the short, straight, needle-sharp arrows. The barricade was rock and dirt and brush, eight feet high and twenty feet thick, not the shelter of a wall, but an impediment to a phalanx. Our men manned it, and a few yards in front, Ruben, Judas, and I stood, watching the great, metallic mass of the mercenaries creep down the road behind their locked shields and their bristling front of long, unwieldy spears. They filled the full eighty foot width of the valley; they walked in the brook; they crowded the mountainside with their shoulders; and ever and again one of them would pitch forward, held for a moment by the very mass of the phalanx, cheek or eye or brain transfixed by one of our arrows, and then falling to the ground under the metal-shod feet of the others.

  They were close enough now for us to see their angry, dirty, sweat-glistening faces; close enough for us to feel what it meant to walk for hours in the burning Judean sun, carrying eighty pounds of hot metal; close enough almost for us to smell, on the morning wind, the hot, sickening stink of their unwashed bodies, and of the leather in their harness. The clangor of their metal filled the pass, mingling with the wild shouting of our archers, with the deeper thud of rocks flung from above, with the screams of the wounded and the sobs of the dying, with the short-breathing, corrupt Aramaic filth that spewed from the mercenaries’ lips.

  And then, no more than fifty yards from us, they paused. Five men led them, one of whom was Nicanor, and he came toward us with his arm raised—and the noise and shouting fell away, and the rain of arrows halted.

  “Will you talk, Maccabee?” Nicanor cried.

  “There is nothing to say,” Judas replied, his voice cold and piercing.

  “You killed Apollonius, Maccabee, and he was my friend—with all your rotten Jewish tricks and traps, you slew him! Do you deny that, Maccabee?”

  “I killed him,” Judas said.

  “Then I make you a pledge, Jew—I pledge that today I will kill you with my own hand and open this pass and clear that Jewish scum from it! And from every olive tree in Judea, a Jew will hang! And in every synagogue, a pig will be slaughtered!”

  While he spoke, he came on, and Judas walked toward him. Nicanor carried a shield, but his sword was in his scabbard, and Judas wore neither shield nor armor, only the long sword of Apollonius, slung over his neck and before him. Like a tiger Judas walked, clad only in white linen pants and sandals, bare to the waist, the long, supple muscles rippling as he moved, and like a tiger he crouched and sprang. Few men knew his strength as I knew it. Nicanor tried to fend him off with his shield while he dragged his sword from the scabbard, but Judas wrenched the shield aside and, through the sudden roar of sound, we heard the bone in Nicanor’s arm snap. With his bare hands, Judas killed the Greek, with two terrible blows to the head, and then lifted the body, swung it above his head and hurled it onto the spears of the driving phalanx.

  The roar of sound obliterated all else. Judas ran back, and a hundred hands reached down to lift us to the barricade. The phalanx drove toward us, met us, scrambled at the barricade, when I saw that like men gone mad our Jewish archers were pouring down the hillsides into the valley, fighting with rocks and knives and with their bare hands too, filled with a mad, wild, terrible hate, filled with the accumulated agony of a decade of senseless, cruel invasions, filled with memory of countless murders, innumerable rapes and tortures, endless burning and destruction, filled with the rage of free men who had never asked more than their freedom, filled with the memory of desecration and insult and woe.

  Then, if the mercenaries had had a leader, if they had held, if they had not been packed so tightly at the valley bottom, they could have done what they had come to do; but the death of Nicanor and then the wild willfulness of the charge broke their morale.
The front ranks tried to give back from the barricade, and the rear ranks drove up against the front ranks to overwhelm the barricade—and from the barricade our spearmen caught the fever and hurled themselves down…

  There were nine thousand of them and less than three thousand Jews, and for five long, awful hours we fought there in that valley bottom, Judas and Jonathan beside me in a frightful hellish slaughterhouse. Much of that fight I have forgotten; much of it the mind could not retain and exist—for never was there a fight like that before and never again, not even when the end came—yet some things I remember. I remember a pause once, as men must pause and rest when they fight, and I stood in the brook and it ran red against my legs, thick and sluggish, the blood overwhelming the water. I remember walking on dead men five deep, and I remember being caught in a press of bodies where no man could raise an arm, mercenaries and Jews, face to face, shoulder to shoulder. And I remember when, for a long moment, we stood clear with the dead around us piled five feet high, but no living thing within ten yards of us…

  And finally, it finished; it was done; we had triumphed; fighting hand to hand and face to face, we had wiped out a great army of mercenaries—yet at what a cost! In that terrible valley of death, less than a thousand Jews stood on their feet, and every one of them was covered from head to foot with blood, naked from the battle, a blood-soaked rag hanging from shoulder or hip; and every one of them was cut and bleeding, so that blood dripped from their bodies and joined the spongy, blood-soaked earth at their feet.

  I sought for my brothers, but in that nightmarish place all men looked alike. Sobbing, weeping with exhaustion and fear, I called them and they came to me, Judas and Jonathan and John, too—but John wounded so deeply that he had to crawl over the dead, yet struggled to his feet that he might stand and be among us…

  ***

  Thus we won a victory; and as Judas said, as we dragged our aching bodies and our moaning wounded to Jerusalem, a victory without triumph, without joy. The night before in Modin was the last time of joyous anticipation, for how many were there now in Modin or in Goumad or in Shiloh who were not fatherless, or brotherless, or widowed? More men there were in Israel, but in that valley of hate there fell the cream of our army, the loyal veterans of our very beginnings. Out of the men of Goumad, only twenty-two were left alive after that great battle, and of the men of Modin, aside from myself and my brothers, only twelve lived. What consolation to us that the mercenaries had perished to the last man, that even those who had doffed their armor and fought their way from the valley were slain by archers, and children too, in the villages of Gibeon and Gezer near by? Thus it was in the beginning, and again and again and again, for there was no end to the mercenaries with all the world to supply them, and it would be again—and was all of life to be like that, a nightmarish, endless, countless succession of invaders into our little land? Was there no end, no finish, no respite? What consolation when Lebel the schoolmaster had died in that valley, when Nathan ben Borach, who had been with us at the age of thirteen in our first fight, left his bones there, and when Melek, Daniel, Ezra, Samuel, David, Gideon, Ahab, men I had known all my life, children I had played with and fathers of the children too, left their bones to rot with the bones of the mercenaries? What consolation—and when would it end, and how would it end?

  We went to Jerusalem, and there we rested for three days before the Jews and Greeks in the Acra learned what losses we had taken. They waited too long, for at the end of the three days two hundred of the dark, fierce Jews of the South had joined us, and when the rich Jews led their mercenaries out of the citadel, we fought them in the streets, hurt them cruelly, and drove them back into their warren. But again we took losses; for myself, the devouring edge of fatigue never left me, and it seemed that my wounds could not heal. Ruben ben Tubel had lost half the fingers on one hand, and for all the bandaging, they festered and bled, and my brother John lay in bed back in Modin, burning with fever, his cuts running pus and poison. As for Jonathan, the spark, the wonderful, buoyant youth had gone out of him, never to return. He was too young and he had seen too much; silent he became, and his new beard grew in all streaked with gray.

  Only Judas was beyond defeat and beyond despair. Once, despair had claimed him and owned him, but it would not own him again, and he said to me, not once but over and over, “Simon, a free people cannot be conquered, they cannot be slain—for us it is always the beginning, always the beginning.”

  Then, in Jerusalem, it was Judas who was fully and wholly the Maccabee. It was he who gathered together the bodies of the old men and gave them burial. It was he who cleansed the Temple once more and put on the spotless white robes of the high priest and led the prayers. It was he who comforted the widows and gave of his endless courage to anyone who asked, demanded, or pleaded. And it was he who drove home the fact that we must fight when we learned, with our wounds still unhealed, that a new army of mercenaries approached the borders of Judea.

  Never before had it happened so quickly, and now we had no friends, such as Moses ben Daniel, may he rest in peace, to come ahead and tell us what had transpired at the court of the King of Kings. Once it would have taken the mad Antiochus a year or two years to replace the loss of nine thousand men, but now with the awful noise of that valley of horror still ringing in our ears, we learned the news from Jews who fled before the approaching mercenaries. It made Demetrius, the new King of Kings, appear a veritable demon; no one in our ranks had ever seen him, but tales about him there were in plenty. Could he conjure mercenaries out of the air? Thus it was said, and other things were said too—and what use was it to resist if the hordes of the enemy were numberless? There was a chill wind blowing in Israel then.

  And from outside of Judea, from the Jews in other lands, there was only silence, as if they had tired of this restlessness in Palestine, this bloodletting that made only for more bloodletting. And in a way, it was even understandable, for we pursued a mirage of freedom which they had surrendered generations in the past, and yet they survived. In the beginning there had been a strange and splendid and singular glory in the tall, auburn-haired young man who took his weapons from the enemy and his soldiers from the simple, peace-loving farmers who tilled the land. But glory palls.

  “Perhaps now,” I said to Judas, when we heard that a new army was driving down on us under a new warden called Bacchides—“perhaps now we should wait, go to our homes.”

  “And what will Bacchides do?” Judas inquired gently, smiling just a little. “Will he also wait until we are tired no longer and until our wounds heal? Nicanor was a friend of Apollonius, and as I hear it, this Bacchides was a friend of Nicanor. Perhaps he will go to the valley where the bodies of Nicanor and his nine thousand mercenaries lie, and will that make him like us better? No, Simon, believe me, we must fight, and only so long as we fight will we survive; and when we turn our backs to them, then it is over and finished. We will not turn our backs to them—”

  It was John, lying sick in Modin, who sent us a message pleading for us not to go up against Bacchides, but to defend the Temple behind the Temple walls and try and wring terms from the Greek—terms that would give us at least enough time to raise a new army and to gather our strength, and with this Ruben and I and Adam ben Lazar agreed, and we argued long and hotly with Judas; but he was firm and even angry, crying:

  “No—no! I will not listen! What have we to do with walls? Walls are a trap for anyone who is fool enough to trust them!”

  “And where will we find men?” Adam demanded. “Can we raise up the dead?”

  “We can raise the living,” Judas said.

  “Judas—Judas.” I pleaded, “what are you saying? Bacchides is a day’s march from Jerusalem, and here in the city we have eleven hundred men, no more. Where will you find men in a day—in two days? Will you go to Modin? There are no men left there. Or to Goumad? Or to Shiloh?”

  “No!” Judas cried. “I will n
ot be caught here, trapped here! Once I would have gone to the Assembly of Elders, as I went to them. And they are dead, because they bought their freedom cheaply. I make no bargains with men who fight for hire, for gold, for loot—with the nokri who come down on us like wolves! So long as men fight with me, I’ll fight, and I will fight as I know how to fight, in the open, in the hills and the passes, as a Jew fights!”

  “Judas, listen to me—”

  “No! Now heed me, Simon, for as the old man said, it was you in peace and me in war! What were the words you gave to Jonathan to tell Ragesh—that so long as two men walk free on Judean soil, the fight goes on? Were those the words?”

  “Those were the words,” I murmured.

  “Then if you will go your way, and Ruben too, and Adam ben Lazar and his two hundred from the South, and any others who make cheap victory the price of freedom, then go—go if you will! Jonathan will be with me.” And he turned to Jonathan searchingly, and the boy smiled, a sad, lonely smile, nodding.

  “To the end, Judas, I am a Jew.”

  “Then come and leave them to deliberate,” and putting his arm around Jonathan’s shoulder, he walked with him from the room.

  The three of us looked at each other in a long and desperate silence, arid then, one by one, we nodded…

  That evening, Judas assembled the men in the Temple courtyard. He spoke as he had never spoken, making neither much nor little of what we faced, but presenting the facts as they were, as he saw them, and I do not know but that he saw them well and truly.