My Glorious Brothers (15 page)

“What for you, Eleazar?” someone demanded.

He plunged the blade into a pot of water that boiled and sent off clouds of steam, and then he took from behind him a huge hammer. “This is for me—a hammer.”

They felt it, a mighty lump of iron, with a handle of twelve iron rods, beaten together and bound. The women tried to raise it, and laughed as it bent them over. The children touched it, and Eleazar watched and glowed with pride. He picked it up and swung it around his head, letting it go and spinning it on its leather strap—until the crowd broke away, laughing with apprehension mixed with delight. Ruben was twice his age and more, but they were alike in the simple wonder with which they approached weapons' iron, their delight at the submissiveness of metal to them and what came forth from their hands. Thus it was with my brother, my brother Eleazar…

There came to me a man and wife out of the town of Carmel in the far South, and the man, Adam ben Lazar, tall and dark and hawklike and unbending, as so many of those who live close to the Bedouins are, said to me, “And thou art the Maccabee?”

“Not the Maccabee, who is my brother Judas. Are you new in Marah that you don't know Simon ben Mattathias?”

“I am new, and I come to be judged by a child.” But his wife, who was round and lovely, yet worn and terrible with grief, said nothing.

“And yet I judge,” I said. “If you want other judgment, go to the Greeks and find it.”

“You are bitter the way the Adon your father was bitter, Simon ben Mattathias.”

“What I am I am.”

“Like him,” his wife cried suddenly, pointing to her husband. “The men in Israel were emptied and hatred was poured in. I want him no more, so separate us and make us strangers to each other.”

“Why?” I asked the woman.

“Shall I tell you, when every word is wiped in blood?”

“Tell me or don't tell me,” I said, “for I make no marriages and break none. Go to the Rabbis or the Kohanim for that, to the old ones, not to me.”

“Will the old ones understand?” the man demanded coldly. “Listen, Simon, and then send me where you will, to hell or to the arms of your brother, the Maccabee.”

“We are married twelve years,” the woman said, “and we had a daughter and three sons,” and she said it in almost those singsong tones of the teller of tales in the market place. “Bright they were, and round and beautiful and a blessing in my heart and my house and in the eyes of God. Then the warden, whose name was Lampos, set up his Greek altar in the market place and told the people to come and bend their knees and burn incense. But he”—whirling on her husband and pointing an accusing finger at him—“he would not bend his knee, and the Greek smiled with pleasure—”

“With pleasure,” Adam ben Lazar nodded, wooden-faced. “He was the right man for the South. For if there are hard men in Judea, you will find harder if you travel South.”

“So he slew my little girl,” she said, “and he hung her body on the rafters over our door, so that the blood dripped on our doorstep, and all day and all night, the mercenaries sat there, drinking and eating and watching, so that we should not cut down her body and give her burial—
”

Without tears she told this. I judged in the open, sitting on a rock, and sometimes the people listened. Now they listened, and more and more came, and as she told her tale, the people were packed around, shoulder to shoulder.

“This for seven days, and when the Sabbath came, with his own hands this Lampos cut the throat of my little boy and hung the body up beside the girl, the girl who was already foul with corruption and smell. Yet we must live there. All around the house stood the mercenaries, day and night, with their spears linked, so that a mouse could not crawl through. Then, on the third Sabbath, Apollonius came to consult with his warden, and it was great sport—” Her voice dried up; she did not cry or appear to be moved, but her voice dried up.

“It was great sport and the Greeks love sport,” her husband said, nodding. “With his own hands, Apollonius cut the throat of the third child, for he pointed out to us that a people who could not bend a knee, to God or man, were an abomination on the face of the earth. It was merciful to kill the young, he said, so that mankind could look forward to a time when it would be rid of Jews forever, and then all the world would be sweet with laughter.”

“And the next week, they slew our first-born and hung the body beside the others,” the woman added in her terrible singsong tones. “And all in a row, the four bodies hanged, and the birds came to feed upon them; but we could not cut them down, we could not cut them down, and the flesh that came out of my womb rotted away. So I hate him, my husband, even as I hate the
nokri,
for his pride was too much and it destroyed everything I loved.”

She did not weep, but an anguished sigh came from the people listening.

“His pride was too much,” she said, “his pride was too much.”

There was silence then for what seemed to be a long while, a silence broken only by the weeping of those among the people who did not hate too much to weep. Yet I could not judge and I said so, motioning to Ragesh who stood there, listening. “Come and judge,” I said to him. “You are a man of years and a Rabbi.” But Ragesh shook his head, and like two lost and eternally tormented souls, the man and his wife stood in the circle of the people—until Judas pushed through them and stood before her, such sorrow and love on his young and beautiful face as I have not seen before or since on the countenance of any human being. All she had said of death and the making of death seemed to wither away in the face of this man who was the very embodiment of life, and he took her two hands in his and pressed his lips to them.

“Weep,” he said softly, “weep, my mother, weep.”

She shook her head.

“Weep, for I love you.”

And still she shook her head hopelessly and damned. “Weep, because you lost four children and gained a hundred. Am I not your child and your lover—then weep for me, weep for me or the pain of your children will lie on my heart and destroy me. Weep for me and the blood on my hands. I am proud too, and I wear my pride like a rock around my neck.”

Slowly, it came, a crinkling of her long dark eyes, a bit of moisture there, and then tears—and then long, screaming moans as she fell to the ground and lay there. Her husband picked her up in his arms, weeping even as she did, and Judas turned from them and passed through the people, who made way for him. He walked through them, his head bowed, his hands hanging by his sides.

***

And two things happened: my brother, Eleazar, married, and word came from Jerusalem that Apollonius had gathered together three thousand mercenaries and would march on Ephraim. Not a great army, but trained, disciplined, and merciless professional soldiers—and a host indeed to match with our hundreds. Don't think that we were not afraid, for a Jew is wrapped in a curiously sensitive skin—and our fears seem to go deeper even than the fears of others, as our shame does too, and as that pride does, for which the
nokri
hate us. A pall fell over Marah, and what laughter there had been in Ephraim disappeared as hours passed after the word was brought.

Still, we had some respite. Ours is a small land, but each valley is a world unto itself, and just as the mountains are numberless, so are the valleys; and what is an easy mile as the crow flies can be ten or even twenty arduous miles as a man walks, climbs, and crawls. There is a great road that runs from north to south, from the cities of Syria to the cities of Egypt, and there is a road from Jerusalem to the sea, but the rest are paths, winding mountain tracks, sometimes wide enough for a cart and sometimes only wide enough for a single man on foot. The cart roads and paths creep through the valley bottoms, winding here and there; we, who know the land and were bred to it, go across the hills and ridges, but men in armor stick to the valley bottoms and take the long way. Thus it was not a bird's thirty miles from Jerusalem to Ephraim, but three days' journey, even for men on forced march—and we made the most of those three days.

As soon as the news came that Apollonius was on the march, Judas called for a concourse of all the people, the men and women, the little children and the rheumy-eyed ancients—the first of the many assemblies that took place during the resistance. He sent out runners, and almost immediately people began to flow into the spoon-shaped, cedar-grown hollow of Marah. That was in early morning, and until late afternoon people moved into the valley, young men and old men, and women with babes at their breasts. The few isolated villages in Ephraim emptied themselves, and the whole populations of near-by Lebonah.

Kaarim and Yoshay trekked over the mountains and down into Marah. From the caves, the people came, from their brushwood huts, their tents and crude shelters; and hour by hour, the valley filled.

Never before had I seen anything like it, a flow of people like slow-running water. Later, we had concourses where a hundred thousand came together, but this day in Marah, fifteen thousand Jews stood with their faces turned up to Judas, who mounted a high rock to address them; and it seemed truly a mighty host of people, women with troubled eyes, silent children and eager-faced young men.

It made a noise, the sound of many, like water, turbulent but far, until Judas spread his arms for silence and the noise fell away, leaving only the breathing of the folk and the wind in the high trees. Late afternoon now, a golden cast of sunlight flowed down into the valley; the sky overhead was white, pink-fringed; two hawks circled, lifted and dropped, and the trees bent to the breeze, as if by so doing they could better cast their fragrance down upon us. The ineffable sweetness of our Judean land laid its spell over the whole throng, eased them, so that mothers, tired with their babes, sat down on the earth and the whole crowd softened, unbent itself, taking sustenance it seemed from the sweet land and the sweet air that had nurtured them. Above them, on the lip of the rock, Judas stood, tall, slim-hipped, auburn-haired, all in white, trousers and jacket, his long hair blowing—child and father, young and old, a strange mixture of the gentle and the fierce, the humble and the arrogant, the tame and the wild…

He said those words that are written, “An army of mercenaries march on Ephraim to destroy us—and we will go against them in our smallness and smite them”—speaking Hebrew, the old tongue in which best things are best said—“hip and thigh, root and branch, for it is the warden of all Judea who leads them. Now we will make our accounting to the King, and when he sends three thousand alive, we will return him three thousand dead, measure for measure.” The people fixed their eyes on him; no one moved, and indeed it seemed that no one breathed. “Our cup is full.”

Judas said, “And truly it runneth over! Why do they come to our land to despoil us? Are we not human that we should watch our children slain and not weep? Let them go away from us and trouble us no more, otherwise we will become a people of awful anger.” But he spoke with no anger now, only a simple and direct kind of regret, and the people whispered, “Amen—so be it.”

“If you have a house that still stands, go to it,” Judas said. “I want only those who have nothing to lose but the chains that bind them. If you have a pot of gold, treasure it and come not with us. If you love your children more than your freedom, go away and no one will mark you with shame, and if you are betrothed, go to your betrothed—for we are betrothed to freedom. But if there is one among, you, just one, who will lay down his life for our cause—and surely, mind you, for what I plan is death and only death—let that man seek me out in my tent afterward. I need only one, only one.” He paused, sweeping them with his eyes. “Now, let the twenties form here in Marah. The others must go into the hills, to the caves and the woods and the thickets, and hide there until we have finished fighting.”

***

I went to our tent, and four men waited there for Judas. Four men who were not afraid of death, which all men should fear, but would welcome it, girding themselves with hatred. There was Lebel, the schoolmaster, who had taught me my first letters, who day after day had marked the seventy-seven pages of the Law with quick, birdlike motions of his thin stick, that omnipotent stick that so surely and quickly sought out and rapped the knuckles of any boy foolish enough to doze or whisper; Lebel, the father of Deborah, who had been thrust through the throat by the sword of Jason, the mercenary; Lebel, who had opened each day's lesson with a variation of the first adage—“What does the Lord require of a man, but that he should walk humbly and love righteousness?”—Lebel who was meek and gentle as a lamb.

There was Moses ben Aaron, the father of the one woman both Judas and I had loved. There was Adam ben Lazar, the hard and terrible man from the South, whose pride was too much. And there was Ragesh, the whimsical, questing, curious and philosophical Ragesh, to whom death was no less intriguing a problem than life itself.

I greeted them, “Peace.” “And unto thee, peace,” they said. But my mind and my heart were tearing at me, and I could not speak, nor they either, until Judas came.

They were none of them young men, but Judas gave them more virginal youth than he himself had as he kissed each of them, saying to them, with something of awe, “You will go to die because I say it is needful.”

“You are the Maccabee,” Adam ben Lazar shrugged.

“And Ragesh,” Judas said, “you who have neither hatred nor pride, why would you die?”

“All men die,” Ragesh smiled.

“Yet I need only one, and it cannot be you, Ragesh, for Apollonius knows you, and will he believe that the Rabbi Ragesh would betray his people and his God and his country too? I want someone to lead them into hell, and for that they will take the life of the man who betrays them, even if he should succeed. I want someone to go to them and bargain with them for a price. Then he will lead them where they must be led, into the great swamp, over the hill of Gerson, where there is only one way in and there will be no way out. And it cannot be you, Adam ben Lazar, for how will you walk softly and treacherously, with your eyes downcast? Lebel, Lebel, should I destroy you? What I know, you taught me, and shall I repay it thus?”