My Glorious Brothers (16 page)

“I come for favors, not for sacrifice, Judas Maccabeus,” the schoolmaster said simply.

“And how will you play the part, when Apollonius sees in your eyes all the gentle goodness of your soul? No—a renegade should be complex rather than simple, worldly and without honor, I must have a Greek to send to the Greeks.” He went to Moses ben Aaron, taking both his hands, “God help me and God forgive me.”

“So the years go, and if not now then later,” the vintner said. “What I loved is gone, and you are the Maccabee, Judas. So tell me what you want me to do.”

***

That night, Jonathan and I and four hundred men traveled south, across the hilltops, over the narrow mountain trails, driving on until the first rosy gleam of dawn lit the sky—and then we crawled in among the trees and thickets, and for five hours, we slept the deep and motionless sleep of utter exhaustion. We traveled lightly, armed only with our small horn bows and knives, and each of us carried a loaf of bread and a bag of meal. The instructions Judas gave me were clear and direct; we were to meet the advance guard of Apollonius and make life miserable for them, pick off stragglers, cover them with rocks when they went into the passes, and give them no peace, day or night. Only when Moses ben Aaron appeared were we to allow them to evade us—and then we were to return to Ephraim as quickly as we could travel. Meanwhile, Judas, Eleazar, and John would set the trap in the swamp.

It was late afternoon before we heard the voices of the mercenaries, the hard sound of their armor and the muffled beat of their marching drums. We had already divided our forces, a hundred under me and a hundred under the boy Jonathan—and ten twenties as mobile units. We spread ourselves along the edge of a defile and waited, and soon they came in sight, three abreast, the column stretching like a long snake fully half a mile down the road, the brazen helmets gleaming in the sun, the long polished spears rippling like water, the standards flying, the breastplates shining. Possibly because they knew they would have to bite into the mountains, there were no cavalry in the column except a splendid white horse which Apollonius himself rode. I saw him then for the first time, a huge, dark-browed man, his armor silvered, his mantle snow white, his black hair falling loose to his shoulders. He was no Apelles, but a leader of men, a dark, domineering, savage and bloodthirsty man, terrible in battle and sick with a hunger for blood.

They had learned something of our ways, for they moved slowly and deliberately, magnificent in their harsh, metallic inevitability, archers thrown out before them, and officers of the twenties constantly scanning the hills that towered above them. They saw us as I set my whistle to my lips and blew, and the harping of our bowstrings mixed with shouted orders and bitter curses. They made a turtle's back of their shields, and in a moment the whole long column had become a plated, crawling snake, a roof of shields covering every man from our sight—except Apollonius who, oblivious to danger, rode his horse back and forth along the line, roaring orders at his men and curses at us up on the ridge. Yet, quick as they were, they were not quick enough, and the rain of our arrows left an occasional mercenary either dead or twisting in pain on the ground. It is not wholly good—even in terms of murder—to be a mercenary, for those who were badly wounded were put to death there on the spot by their own comrades, their throats competently and quickly cut, and those wounded who lingered behind were slain by us. Yet the column did not halt or allow itself to be diverted into suicidal attempts to climb the precipitous slope, but kept on at a steady, disciplined pace to the vantage and security of an open place. Before they reached it, we killed Apollonius's horse. He became the target for a hundred bowmen, yet he emerged untouched; even though his horse was feathered with arrows, he leaped from the saddle unhurt and kept pace with the column under cover of his shield.

We followed and harassed them as long as the ridge paralleled the road, but when they formed in an open place and detached their light bowmen to attack us, we melted away, and at a loose run, which their armor could never match, we circled up into the hills ahead of them.

When they camped that night, I threw my men around them and we crawled in again and again during the night to rain arrows over their camp. Twice, they formed the phalanx and attacked us, but we melted away, and their formations clattered about, chasing ghosts. Then we camped a mile or so from them, sleeping by turn, but having always five or six twenties to see that the mercenaries got no sleep. In that whole night operation, we lost only four men. Seven others were wounded, but none of them too badly to walk; yet when we searched the mercenaries' camp after they had left, we found the bodies of eighteen of them.

That same morning, Jonathan crawled close to the Greek camp and saw Moses ben Aaron arrive. He saw him seized and watched him plead for his life. Then he saw him talk long and vehemently with Apollonius, until at last the grim hatred on the face of the Greek relaxed and a hint of a smile twisted his lips. This, Jonathan told us—and almost without stopping, we took our way back to Ephraim.

***

It is hard to tell of a battle, until its end; for at the beginning, it moves slowly, spread out over a deal of ground, and you see only what is directly before you. Yet I have been in at the end of many, as you will see, and that is different. Here I must tell things as they happened—as well as I may—for who else of my glorious brothers will narrate things as they were? Or the men of Modin—where are they?

I must tell how Moses ben Aaron died, even as I told of the death of his daughter Ruth, who was my heart and my flesh too. This I did not see. We came back to Ephraim, having marched in two days and two nights over seventy miles of mountainous country, having fought and retired bearing our wounded with us, but Judas had neither sympathy nor praise, and ordered me to take my men and hide them along the defile that led to the deep and lonely morass of Ephraim. “But we have not slept!”

“Sleep when you've taken your position,” Judas said, “and God help the man who reveals himself until the Greek has passed! He'll die by my own hand!” I opened my mouth to speak, and then swallowed the words. Judas was transformed; I saw that; I saw the awful wildness in him that permitted no crossing, not even by his own flesh and blood. He stood in the valley where the people had dwelt, and now it was empty. He was alone and lord and tyrant of the devastation. “Where have the people gone?”

“They hide until we have won or died.” He took me by the arms, his talonlike grip reminding me more of the Adon than any gesture or look could. “Simon, Simon, there is only one way into Ephraim and one way out—and you will be there! You will not fail me? You hated me, Simon—now promise!”

“I don't hate you, Judas. How shall I hate my brother?”

“How shall you love him?” Judas said. “Jonathan is with you, and treasure him, treasure him.”

We went to the defile then, Jonathan and I and our four hundred, and we hid in the thickets, behind the rocks or in holes we dug in the ground. There was no food and no fire, and we mixed our meal with water and ate it. We slept where we lay, and at last, the mercenaries appeared, Moses ben Aaron leading them, and they marched through the defile beneath us and into the morass of Ephraim.

Then, when they had passed, we slipped down into the defiles, worked like mad dragging rocks and tree trunks across it, and then manned the barricade. An hour went past before they attacked us.

As it was told to me, they went on through the cleft into the dim, sun-splotched loneliness of Ephraim. Almost a mile they marched into that sad, unhappy desolation before the mud caught them, before they realized that from this reed-strewn wilderness there was no way out but the way they had come. It was there, buried in the mud, that we later discovered the body of Moses ben Aaron, cruelly mutilated. It was after they killed him, that they made two more attempts to cross the swamp before turning back. But when they came back to the hard ground, they found that the defile was blocked—blocked by us, while from all sides Judas and his men rained their arrows upon them.

That was as close to panic as the Greek Apollonius came. Twice he led his army into that narrow defile, and twice we fought there behind our barricade. We shot away our arrows and then fought with our spears. We broke our spears, and fought with rocks and sticks and knives and with our bare hands too. From us, from the four hundred under Jonathan and me and Ruben, he took the worst toll, for he drove at us with a close phalanx again and again, until fully half our men were slain or bleeding all over with wounds; yet we managed to hold him, while all the time Judas's men on the rocks above rained their arrows upon him—the short, needle-sharp, devastating arrows that fill the air like snow, seeking out every nook and crevice in a mercenary's armor.

It seemed forever that we manned that barricade, but it could not have been too long; yet there, in that defile, Apollonius lost at least half of his men. Half of our four hundred to half of his three thousand. He fell back to the hard, open ground—and we in the pass leaned on our weapons, bleeding and panting, weary unto death and yet drunk with our triumph, almost hysterical with rage and triumph and terror, our dead all around us and the dead of the mercenaries strewn like a carpet along the length of the defile. For the first time, Jew had met Greek, knife to sword, and stopped him and smashed him and beat him back—and for all of our exhaustion we pressed down the defile to the meadow where they stood.

Apollonius had formed his phalanx four square. We were outnumbered, they could have driven through us then; but they had no heart for it, and hardly was the square made when Eleazar and Judas led their men against it, shouting as they poured from the hills. They were fresh, and Apollonius had marched his men all day and dragged them through a mire and led them into two costly attacks. We wore no armor and the mercenaries were burdened down, each of them, with nearly a hundred pounds of plate and weapons. We knew this place as we knew our own faces and they were lost in a strange and frightening wilderness, a place where already the long shadows of evening were beginning to close in, where mountains towered on every side and where all the spirits and demons they feared were evoked.

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.