Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (11 page)

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he was looking at. People were saying 'Did you hear that thunder? Where's the storm?' But we heard no thunder."

I glanced upriver toward John's camp, but they had disappeared from sight.

John didn't return to the river that day.

When evening came Levi touched my arm.

"Come."

We made our way upriver past the other disciples' fires to the Baptizer's lean-to. There, John sat in somber conversation with the gaunt man, who was wrapped in several mantles against the evening chill and cupping a bowl of thin broth.

"Master," Levi said. "This is Judas bar Simon, who has brought us a warning."

The Baptizer looked up at me as Levi quickly repeated the warning I'd delivered to him earlier, and I was distracted again by the bluntness of that gaze.

"I baptized you," John said, after Levi had finished.

"Yes. More than once."

I tried not to stare at the husk of a man huddled beside him, but it was impossible. The words echoed in my head:

Lamb of God.

When the Nazarene lifted his eyes to me, I could not look away. Where I had felt flayed open beneath John's gaze, I saw affinity in the Nazarene's--as though there lived within those sunken eyes mystery and pain to match my own.

That was the first day I saw him, the man who would become my greatest friend.

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TWO WEEKS LATER, JOHN and his followers moved north. Meanwhile, stories came down from Galilee about his mysterious cousin.

Some said he worked a miracle at a wedding in Cana, though no one could agree on what it was. Others said he was nothing but a drunkard, a small-town hand-laborer accepting the favors of strangers and living off the celebrity of his cousin.

And then there were the others, who quietly called him something else.

Messiah.

As winter became spring, I found myself a man lost, without father or brother, wife or son, desperate for the hope I'd momentarily found by the banks of the river Jordan. Haunted by the eyes of the Nazarene.

A few weeks later, John was arrested by Herod. I worried for Levi. I was obsessed with the Nazarene. I could wait no longer.

I wrote to my contact:

I am going to Galilee, to learn about John's cousin, the Nazarene. I will learn his way and whether he may support ours.

And then I went to Simon's house.

"Come with me," I said.

He frowned, the shadows playing about his beard, darkening the hollows of his cheeks. His beloved teacher, the great Shammai, had recently died, throwing the porticoes into chaos. Since then, a new, slithering restlessness had taken up residence behind his eyes.

"And you think you will find peace or answers from a Galilean teacher?"

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"My wife and son are dead. All that I have lived for--it isn't here, Simon.

Please." I had not told him about my affiliation with the Sons, though one day I hoped to convince my contact to bring him to the cause.

He looked away, shook his head. "I'll go with you, but only until fall. We return for the Feast of Tabernacles."

"Yes, Tabernacles," I said, kissing him with relief.

Two days later, as Simon and I left the gate of the city behind us, the sky opened in a rare summer rain. It only lasted for a few moments, but I took it as a blessing.

With every Roman mile that we went farther down from Jerusalem, I felt a weight roll off my back like ballast thrown from a ship. I did not know what we would discover in this Nazarene, but for the first time in more than a year, I found myself reacquainted with a freedom akin to hope.

I didn't know that I was leaving Jerusalem forever. That I would never return to dwell for more than a few nights within her walls again.

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ADORATION

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10

Had I ever seen the real hues of the Galilean countryside? The reds and purples that washed her horizon morning and evening . . . the lake that was the perfect mirror of the sky, so that you could fall into the clouds by merely standing on her shore . . . the wheat that swayed in her fields, grains pregnant on the stem . . .

The sheep that grazed her hills, bound with the harvest for imperial tables.

The closer we got to the cities and villages of Galilee, the more noticeable the stink of poverty became. Everywhere we turned, it seemed the true crop of Galilee was neither wheat nor barley nor even the grapes of the northern heights, but hunger and discontent, the burden of Rome's taxes seeding the soil like salt.

"I only hope you're not bitterly disappointed," Simon said. The words came out of his mouth by rote, like the words of a prayer uttered so often its syllables become devoid of meaning. He had always been a man of such belief--one who required only an anchor staunch enough to bear his zeal.

He was adrift since the

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death of his teacher, and so I took no offense at this kind of censure from him.

The town of Magdala, on the west shore of the lake called the Sea of Galilee, stank of fish. Drying fish. Pickling fish. Rotting fish. Fish in the holding pools, several of them floating up along the surface, covered in flies.

There were few boats this time of day, the fishermen working at the dock mending nets, securing them with fresh stone weights, repairing their boats with gopher or whatever wood they could come by.

We approached one of the elders near the city gate. He was thin, his knees bony through his worn tunic. There were only a small handful of men sitting with him, and I wondered why there weren't more in a town the size of Magdala.

"Sir," I said, "have you heard of a man preaching in Galilee, a Nazarene?"

"Ah, the healer."

Simon and I looked at one another.

"The one who preaches the words of the Baptizer?" the man asked us.

"Yes," I said. "The very one."

He waved north. "They've all gone outside the city to meet him."

We hurried past the docks, along the shore of the lake. It was the first time since leaving Jerusalem that I had seen even the spark of excitement in Simon, and I grinned.

North of the city, we ran through grass turned brown in the summer sun, past the occasional fisherman's hovel, anticipation as thick as the smell of drying fish around us.

What I saw gathered on that low plain utterly amazed me. Hundreds of people. I strained to see the gaunt man of my memory

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and dreams, but couldn't see past the children chasing one another around the edges of the throng, the men and women pressing closer to see and hear.

"Come!" I said, eager as a boy.

We pressed against the edge of the crowd. From here we could hear his voice but not make out his words over the murmur of those around us.

"What does he say?" I asked a man in front of us. He was dirty and reed thin, as though he hadn't had a meal in days.

"That the kingdom of God is like a pearl--one that a man sells all he has to acquire," he said, his eyes bright.

I glanced at Simon. It was the last thing I expected, having already heard in my mind the words of John: Repent! The kingdom is at hand!

I was about to ask him what else but before I could speak a surprised cry flew up from the gathering like a flock of startled birds. The crowd fell back, abruptly spreading out from the man at the center of it so that instead of standing at its fringe, as we had been, we found ourselves standing almost near the front of it.

And then, as those around us shrank farther away, I found myself staring through a lopsided corridor at the very man himself.

Could this be the same man who had come to the river Jordan, starving and baked by the sun? What a change in him! His hair was clean and glistened with oil, and his shoulders had some meat on them--I had not realized how wide they were before. But it was his face that seemed the most changed. It no longer had the sickly look of the starving and the dehydrated, but was full and alert as it had not been on that first day, when it had looked as drawn and haggard as though he had walked out of Sheol.

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But I was struck, most of all, by how exceedingly ordinary he looked. The man whose gaze I had never forgotten--was it possible this was he?

The entire assembly had all but parted, some of the people stumbling even into the lake. Then I saw the reason why: A man had come to stand before the Nazarene, his twisted hands lifted before him, stunted fingers spread wide like the misshapen and missing points of a star.

A leper.

I took an involuntary step back.

The leper staggered forward on a foot that was the wrong color for flesh, his face obscured with warty growths so that it looked like the lichen-covered anchors we had passed on the docks. I felt, more than saw, Simon draw back at my side. Heard the strangled sound of his revulsion.

I had seen lepers before, but never in close proximity. They kept outside the city, living off the gifts and leavings of their family, impure beyond touching, required to announce themselves with shouts of "Unclean! Unclean!" They were a walking horror, a symbol of the displeasure of God.

This man was so covered in the disease as to be deformed, as to hardly look like a man at all. He had uncovered his face, the rest of him wrapped in the rags mandated by law. His skin had peeled away so that it was hard to distinguish flesh from dirty cloth. And now I remembered why I used to think that lepers lived in tombs, because the man before me was truly no more than a walking corpse, his flesh dying on his bones while his soul perversely remained intact.

Mothers grabbed up their children, turned their faces against 95

their breasts, while a few men angrily shouted for the leper to go away, couldn't he see there were people here? But it was not only anger that lent volume to their voices. It was fear. Every one of us had looked at some lesion in our flesh with dread at one time or another, worrying that a boil would rupture, that it would stay broken, giving too close of an access to the blood beneath, which was too holy to be spilled or touched. Every one of us feared broken flesh for what it signified--impurity and judgment . . . shunning from community and from the Temple. How great was this man's sin, that he had been struck so horribly, so disfigured by this disease--and how far were any of us from crossing that same threshold ourselves?

Surely the leper knew the law! And yet, even saying so, he staggered forward, his mouth gaping, lip-less and obscene.

"Please!" the leper cried, his voice cracking as though he had not spoken or cried out in a very long time. Now I could see the way his eyes darted this way and that, the way his hands with the stumps of fingers trembled like the flutter of a leaf. "Please!"

The Nazarene moved forward and one of his disciples said, "Teacher, he is unclean!" I blinked. I knew that man. Was that not Andrew, who had been a disciple of John?

The Nazarene lifted a hand to Andrew, his eyes on the leper before him. All around, the hundreds were silent. Somewhere in the crowd, a child wailed.

The leper lurched forward, closing the distance between him and the one man who had not moved since his appearance. He pitched to the ground, onto his knees, onto his face.

"Please!" he wailed in a hoarse voice that carried with terrible clarity.

"Please, if you are willing, you can make me clean."

When the Nazarene sank to one knee and laid his hand upon 96

the leper's shoulder, I staggered back as though struck. I stood fixed, acutely aware of the taut gaze of every person there, all fixed on one point like the gathered threads of a spider's web.

That hand on that shoulder.

The man on the ground lifted his head, his face contorted. His mouth gaped open in a low keen as though having gone so long without the touch of another human that it pained him to feel it at all. He lifted one starlike hand as though wanting to touch the clean hand upon his shoulder except that he didn't dare. He began to shake and his head dipped back down with the soundless moan of one who has suffered so long he cannot remember how to cry.

"I am willing."

I could not mistake the way his voice broke as he cupped the leper's face. As he said again: "I am willing."