Time Twisters

by RABE, JEAN

  By the will of a woman, the wife of Pontius Pilate, all that Abba and Yeshua’s own mother and poor Chava herself had set in motion simply stopped.

  Just . . . stopped, leaving him, the Lamb of God, the Word Made Flesh, to make do with a world he had not expected to live to see.

  For if Chava could use her will freely and take fruit from the Serpent and give it to her weak and faltering husband, if his own mother Miryam could say yea or nay to Adonai’s angel, so could a canny Roman matron exert all her will to convince her own weak and faltering husband to let Yeshua the Jew go, send him on his way.

  “I have dreamed, and my dream tells me that the death of this man will bring about great sorrow and terrible change.”

  Pilate, who carried lightly the responsibilities of his office, certainly hadn’t wanted to be responsible for that. His wife knew it, and she whispered, “If the crowds hunger for blood, give them a rebel or two. Give them Barabbas.”

  Pilate had, indeed, given the sometime-rebel, sometime-thief to the crowd. Yeshua had seen the crosses as he and his mother and a few friends had made their journey out of Yerushalayim. One of those crosses had been destined for him, until a woman willed otherwise. Upon that cross then had hung the man Barabbas.

  The memory of those crosses haunted the old man’s steps as he approached the broken walls of Yerushalayim. The sun was high; he judged it safe enough to enter.

  He entered barely able to breathe for the stone in his breast, the stone of a lifetime of unshed tears.

  He walked in the ruin of Yerushalayim’s beauty, sometimes gasping for breath as he wound through the streets of a city beloved of Adonai, fallen now to rubble. An old man lay upon a heap of ashes, sleeping in the exhaustion of starvation. He passed others lying in the streets or fallen, their bodies half out the doors of their broken houses . . . sleeping forever.

  In this way, slowly, his chest aching, his limbs growing more and more feeble, he ascended the roads of the city. Gardens had run to seed, those that had not been burned. Dogs ran in the streets, ears back, tails low. One had a large bone in its jaws; the gleaming bone that had once been the leg of a man or woman. The beast’s prize had been stripped of flesh, but there would be rich marrow to dig out.

  He found a stick to use for a staff; the road up was more than he could take unaided. Not all the buildings of the Holy City had been destroyed. During the Roman occupation some had been kept to quarter the legion and house their whores. Others stood empty, but untouched, their doors creaking on hinges in the quickening breeze. As he walked, Yeshua knew himself watched; no man lives so long and has not learned what the peculiar, persistent itch between his shoulder blades means.

  Once he saw a hand move a ragged curtain at a window, then vanish. A pale hand, bony beneath a thin cloak of flesh. Another time, walking through streets that had once housed the wealthy of the Beloved City, he heard what sounded like a child wailing.

  But no child lived in this places of ash and death, and the cat that had cried died soon enough in the jaws of a lean, black-eyed dog.

  As he walked, Yeshua heard no other voice. The city, once home to thousands, rich and poor, Roman and Jew and traders of every nation, sat in bleak silence but for the snarling of dogs.

  He had not seen Sheol, Abbadon; nor ever thrown down Sheol’s gates, but Yeshua imagined that this city in her ruin might make up the landscape of that terrible place.

  When he came at last to the temple mount, the sight of fallen towers and broken walls, of brazen doors flung down caused a sudden, painful easing of the stony lump in his chest. Gasping, he closed his eyes. Like small daggers, tears pricked behind his eyelids.

  When he could bear to look again, he saw the Temple through a wash of running tears.

  It was true what he’d said all those years ago about the stones of the Temple. Not one lay upon another, for the Romans had torn them apart after the fires cooled, looking for the gold that had melted.

  He had foretold the destruction—and he had promised, with the words of his Father on his tongue, that he would rebuild the Temple within three days.

  Three decades and more years than that had passed since that prophecy. The city had fallen, and it lay like a corpse rotting in the sun.

  He wept all the long way down through the city, silently but to gasp now and then, for weeping took strength and he didn’t have much of that.

  The day was ending when he stood again beside the old man sleeping on his bed of ash. The poor creature in his rags seemed not to have moved in all the hours past.

  Yeshua hesitated, for he was moved to take his cloak and spread it over the man, to give him warmth against the coming night. While he hesitated, the old man rolled onto his side and glared through narrowed eyes.

  And the glitter in those eyes belied the white-haired, stringy appearance of the man. He might have been in his middle years . . . in another age.

  “I’ve nothing to kill me for, old father, unless you want to sell my bones to the dogs.”

  “I don’t want to kill you—”

  The man laughed, then coughed. “—and the dogs can manage on their own, eh?” But when he saw Yeshua remove his cloak, he struggled to sit. He held out his hands as though warding off a blow. “No. For that fine cloak of yours anyone would kill me.”

  Yeshua winced, but he did as he was bid. He knelt beside the man and took food from the leather wallet at his belt, bread and cheese and dried, salted fish.

  “Eat—” He shot a look around them as though expecting to see someone, man or beast, ready to pounce on the food. “Eat all you want.”

  The man shook his head.

  “I am Natan ben Enosh, and I have not eaten in many days. Nor had water to drink. I want none, and will not take yours for it will delay the day of my death.” Then, strangely gentle, he said, “Though I thank you.”

  Natan waited, a discordant courtesy in this terrible place, to learn the name of his would-be benefactor. After a long moment, he heard it.

  “I am Yeshua ben Yosef. I ask you, please, eat. Don’t let the days Adonai has granted drift away. I’ll take you from here and . . .”

  The pain in Natan’s eyes stopped him from saying more.

  “You’ve eaten well, old father, I see it, and slept on good beds, tasted good wine. You don’t know what it is like to count the hours until your death and know the last is still too far away.” Natan sighed, a sound like a groan, and slumped to the ground. “Go. Find a better place to be. The city is for robbers, dogs, and the dying now. Go back home, tell your people what a dead city looks like.

  “Or go where all the madmen have gone. You talk like a rabbi, so maybe you should go to the Fortress and see how the People of God make their last fight.” He wheezed, it might have been laughter. “They will need a rabbi there. I think no rabbi survived what happened here to flee to the Fortress, and Eleazar and his thousand have decided to face down Flavius Silva and all his legions.”

  And so Yeshua knew he hadn’t used all his tears that day. He sat for a while beside the silent man, prayed a prayer for the dying, the kind he’d known in the days when the people of Judea knew him as Reb Yeshua, when the people of Natzeret called him their rabbi. He left Natan ben Enosh, the man barely breathing, as chill twilight fell and he went out to the hills where it would be safer among the jackals than the robbers and the starving dogs now coming out of their holes in broken Yerushalayim.

  But he would not go back home to tell a tale they already knew.

  Laying himself down to sleep in the shelter of a hollow in the hills, ignoring the unkindness of stone to an old man’s bones, Yeshua listened to faint cries echoing up from the ruined city. He did not know whether they were the cries of the ghosts of those who had died in the terrible battle for Yerushalayim, or those still left alive in the city the Romans, and after them the zealots and revolutionaries, had destroyed.

  In the morning, he turned his face south and east. It was another day of leaving, another choice. It was not o
rdained, not commanded, not demanded.

  It was a choice wholly his own.

  Yeshua began the long walk to the Fortress, to Masada. It would be a journey of weeks. As he had for too many years, he walked alone with no friend at his side or Father to guide him.

  Of the two Romans at the approach to the wall, the younger looked at the old man with barely concealed boredom.

  “What are you, one of their holy men? A priest?” Yeshua shook his head. “I’m not. Once I was a teacher, a rabbi.” He paused, then stated what must be obvious. The youngster looked on edge. “I’m not armed.”

  He’d been searched twice before, then waved on to these two at the wall surrounding the foot of the high hill. On it stood a walled fortress, which itself surrounded a walled palace and temple.

  Herod the Great had earned many enemies, and so he’d built many walls, upon which sprouted many towers; all of them but this one on the ground at the foot of the high hill where Herod’s great fortress, Masada, stood.

  And yet, the Romans had done damage to the outermost wall, battered it with siege engines and built embankments and ramps high enough so that archers would make it hard for any defender from with the Fortress to so much as put up his head.

  “Why do you want to go there?” the elder of the two solider asked. “Don’t you know they’re all mad up on that hill?”

  “I’ve heard it said.”

  The solider snorted. “Do you have a calling to death, old one?”

  I’d heard it said.

  “No. I have a calling to this place.”

  “Another one of their mad prophets,” said the young man to his companion. “He’s unarmed, he might try to pray us away, but I’m not worried about that. Their god hasn’t been paying too much attention to prayers lately. Let him go, he will find plenty of company among the madmen.”

  The other thought for a moment. Two roads went out from the Fortress, one from the top of the hill led to the lake and it was a trader’s route for bringing supplies into the city. The other had been known always as Snake, the brutal, winding path leading up the hill from the east.

  Grinning, the elder soldier nodded toward the winding way.

  “There’s your road, old man. Go if you will.”

  But the younger stopped him before he could take a step. He thrust a leather bottle into Yeshua’s hand. “The day is hot. Take it.”

  A moment later, the young soldier appeared ashamed before his companion, muttering about not wanting to be the one to have to go kick the corpse off the side of the road when the old man fell down dead. Still, he didn’t withdraw the water, and Yeshua was glad to have it.

  Yeshua thought the road might better have been named Anvil, for it was hard as iron underfoot and heat rippled before and behind, even off to the sides where the drop was so deep he could not see to the bottom. He went with great care, letting his staff feel the way before him, for the road had long lain in disrepair and the edges crumbled easily. In some places, he must go one foot in front of the other.

  But he came to where he wanted to be, and he had little trouble gaining admittance. No one thought such an old man could be a danger to the well-fortified multitude sitting now in old Herod’s ancient fastness.

  Certainly Eleazar the Zealot didn’t think so. With less interest than the Roman soldiers below, he looked up from where he sat among a cohort of a dozen men, all hard-eyed and lean. He glanced at the newcomer and then looked away. As though the looking away were a signal, a small woman left a covey of others and came to greet Yeshua.

  “Adonai be with you, old father,” she said. White teeth flashed in a face fine-boned and brown as a nut. “I’m Marta bat Yakov, and the wife of Eleazar there. If you have only come up the hill, you have come a long way to be here among the besieged. Though I think you have come farther. Have you eaten? Are you thirsty?”

  Yeshua glanced around the compound at the men, the women and the children going about the task of a warrior’s encampment. The place felt like the hour before a storm. He declined her offer of food and drink, and he too gave his name—said he was Yeshua ben Yosef, a rabbi come to see if all they said about this place was true.

  “Well, if they say we are all mad here, they could be right. If they say we are the last of the Jews, they are probably right about that.” Marta drew a breath and let it out softly. “If they say my husband leads an army of a thousand—they are wrong about that. You cannot count the children; not the little ones. Most of us are farmers and shopkeepers, but we can fight when we have to. We don’t lack for weapons. Just as we don’t lack for all else.

  “The old king had such an armory that no one here need worry about running out of spears and swords. Water still fills the wells, for there are springs in the caves below this fortress and the water is always fresh. His granary was as fat as he used to be. He laid by figs and dates and olives. By some miracle or the quality of the air so high up, much of his provisions remain edible.”

  Marta nodded toward a line of low buildings. “There is where we are quartered. We have room for you, Reb Yeshua, if you wish. Rest, refresh yourself and when you are able, tell us what news you have heard in the world outside of here.”

  She showed him to a cool chamber, windowless and protected from the sun in the shadow of one of the inner wall’s great towers. She gave him a pile of thick blankets to lie upon and left a jug of cool water.

  “I’m glad to have a rabbi among us,” Marta said. “A man of sense and learning.”

  She said no more. And as he lay down to sleep, Yeshua thought that in Marta’s eyes, he saw storm coming.

  In the hour before dawn, he woke to shouts of glee and cries of triumph. Yeshua ran from his chamber to see that a storm had indeed come—a firestorm.

  Fire lit the sky as though the firmament itself had been set ablaze. Yeshua saw dark figures running through the compound, women after their children, men and boys for their weapons. He found Marta at once, and she herded all her frightened flock toward him and went to look for more. He, in his turn, hurried them to the nearest well.

  One or two brave boys scrambled up ladders to see where the greatest danger lay. No one had expected to hear their hoots of derision and scornful laughter.

  “Adonai wills!” one shouted, turning to yell the news into the compound. “The Romans forgot to check where the wind felt like traveling!”

  Indeed, the fire the Romans had set ran before the north wind, which turned the flames back upon their makers. A great cry of dismay arose from below as Flavius Silva’s soldiers ran desperately here and there trying to move their wooden siege engines.

  At the well, Yeshua saw no joy in the frightened children. Smoke and shouting and a sky turned red by fire left them all trembling and the smallest crying. Old joints creaking, he sat on his haunches and took the smallest into his arms, told the older ones to stand look out.

  “For Romans,” one said, somewhere between bravado and terror.

  “No.” He ruffled the boy’s hair and turned him to face outward. “For Marta. She will want to know where we are.”

  Nor was it long before Eleazar’s wife came to the well, trailed by women searching for their lost ones. Low voices murmured, “Thank you, Rabbi; Adonai bless you, Reb Yeshua,” as each mother claimed her child from the well to bring them to safety on the other side of the fort, far from the fire.

  Yeshua didn’t go with them. He watched as one after another, men and boys climbed to the towers and onto the walls to jeer at the Romans and watch them run before the fire. And so he was there when the wind turned, the fire ran back to the fortress wall and the cries of the watchers on the wall became cries of anger, terror, and despair.

  Yeshua joined the water line, taking his place behind a brawny youth pulling buckets from the well. One after another, he passed the brimming containers and saw them go man to man in the frantic endeavor to save the wall.

  Old man, he thought each time his muscles groaned or his joints cried out in pain. Old man,
old man. Old Man Yeshua, what are you doing here?

  Fear not . . .

  The words settled like a balm on his soul. An old phrase from another time, he thought, and made his aching arms swing another brimming bucket to waiting hands.

  When the fire was out, the women and children and the men of Eleazar’s army were black with soot and streaked with sweat. Reb Yeshua stumbled back to a pallet of blankets. He lay in a stupor of exhaustion, and he heard a long, howling cry winding out of the darkness.

  Eleazar the Zealot, he who’d led his people out of Yerushalayim and to this fastness, walked through the fortress, like ghost wailing.

  “We are the abandoned of God!”

  Too weary to give voice, Yeshua could only move his lips to frame words before he fell asleep.

  Fear not . . .

  When he woke again, he heard Eleazar holding forth not far from the door of his chamber. The zealot’s words of despair had hardened into something else, something like stone rushing down a hillside plowing all before it.

  Yeshua went out into the morning and found all the nine hundred sixty who had for long months of siege lived in the ghost of King Herod’s fortress. Upon the faces of all but the infants suckling or sleeping in their mothers’ arms, Eleazar had painted dread with his words.

  “Hear me,” Eleazar shouted. “We are deprived by Adonai himself of all hope of deliverance. That fire which was driven upon our enemies and of its own accord turned back upon our wall—this was Adonai’s anger against us for our sins. We have been arrogant, insolent, changed ourselves into the enemies of our countrymen!”

  Yeshua stepped out from the shade of the wall, into the sunlight.

  “Eleazar,” he said. The words came gentle into the heat of the morning. So they used to do, in the past. “Eleazar, you mistake Adonai’s will if you think a north wind turning south is such a thing of wonder that no one has seen it happen before.”

  The crowd’s silence rustled and became muttering. A child sobbed, another wailed. Eleazar turned as though stung, his bloodshot eyes like two red coals. Here was a man counting the dead, though they had not yet died.