My Glorious Brothers (18 page)

We learned a good deal in those eight months of almost unceasing battle. We learned finally, and for all, that a mountain folk cannot be rooted up from the soil that bred them. We learned that a Jew will fight a little better than a mercenary, since our fight is for God and land and the other for money and loot. And we learned to use, when we had to, the weapons of the Greek, sword and spear.

There was no longer, in Judea, a question of who led the people. Judas was the Maccabee—it became his name then, the name he gave to all of us his brothers; and the people, ready to follow in the beginning because there was no one else to follow, came to love him in the end as no man in all of Israel, before or since, has been loved—indeed as no man in all the world was loved by those he led. I remained what I was and am—Simon ben Mattathias, a Jew like other Jews; but my brothers grew into a glory never before known: John, whom the people looked on like a father; Jonathan, young and cunning and wily, raiding like a devil and a wolf combined; Eleazar, the splendor of battle, the terror of battle; and Judas, the Maccabee—Judas, my brother Judas, Judas whom I hated and loved, Judas who was the embodiment of the people and the soul of the people, who had no life apart from them, the gentle in judgment and the terrible in battle, Judas whom I never knew or could know—and whom, I think, no one else ever knew or could know. I loved one woman and lost her, and I became something cold and bitter and apart, like the Adon, my father—yet, I do not know, looking back, that Judas did not love her more. How can I set up my small and dry capacity to love against the ever-flowering warmth of him, my brother, who loved so many and was loved by thousands? Never, in all this time I write of, did I see him do a small thing, a miserable thing, a mean thing; never did I hear his voice raised in anger—except against the enemy, and even there the anger was softened by pity and remorse. In that time and in the years that followed, many of us became hardened by war; better than anything we had ever known, we learned to kill; but Judas was never hardened. The soft and gentle edge of his character was never dulled. When four men were caught as traitors and almost slain on the spot, it was Judas who saved them and let them go. When a dreadful sickness broke out among us, terrifying even the strongest of heart, Judas nursed the sick with his own hands. When food was scarce, Judas ate little or nothing.

The women worshiped him, yet there was no woman for him but the woman who had carried my child and died. I think, sometimes, that over and beyond all of it, he was the loneliest and saddest man I have ever known.

At the end of the eight months, Lysias, regent of Antiochus, came in person to lead the attack, bringing with him from the North four thousand cavalry. Our own numbers had grown to over ten thousand tested and hardened men, but Lysias took twenty thousand foot and almost seven thousand horse, marched them through the dry lands of Idumea, and led them up through the South toward Hebron. It is true that the valleys were wider there, but still he had to come into our Judean hills, and like Gorgias he made the tragic mistake of relying upon cavalry in country where it was often difficult for men to walk two abreast. His horsemen were his own worst enemies, yet he clung to them, even though again and again they went mad with pain from our Judean arrows. From the moment he entered the Mountains of Judah, we harried him, and finally, at Beth Zur, we blocked his way. For three days, he tried to carry the pass, and for three days we slew his men and filled the valley with his dead. He began to retreat, and then his retreat became a rout, and all the way back to the Shephela, we drove him, cutting off group after group, giving him no peace and no rest and no sleep and no pause. Only when he reached the plain itself and could assemble what was left of his phalanx, did we leave off killing—and yet we followed him, bold now, a fringe of trotting bowmen at the edge of his massed shields, day and night. From Judea came thousands of bundles of the slim, straight cedar arrows, and they rained like water on his camp. When he charged with his phalanx, we melted away, and when he sent out what remained of his cavalry, we slew the horses with our arrows…

A year had passed since the great host of the King of Kings had made its way into Palestine to destroy Judea and the Jews. Now it began its march back to Syria in the North, leaving behind, in the course of that year, no less than thirty thousand dead. And as the monstrous, unwieldy mass of mercenaries, slave dealers, slaves, pimps, and whores moved north, we followed them; and all the way, from Philistia to the Plain of Sharon to Galilee, our Jewish arrows rained upon them—that they might remember their scorn for us, and the perversions they had visited upon us.

***

So it was that, in the month of Marheshvan, in the soft and lovely Judean autumn, when the cool wind blows day and night from the Mediterranean, when the valleys are carpeted with poppies, the land was liberated. When the first scent of winter stings the evergreen of the mountain-tops, when the last fall planting is put into the earth, and when the
shekar,
the strong and heady wine, is ready for the drinking, the land was freed—not forever; there was no one among us foolish enough or hopeful enough to think we had seen the last of the Greek, or that the madman Antiochus would so readily give up the rich and perennial and beautiful treasure chest of Judea. There were a million mercenaries available for hire, and there were cities enough from which he could squeeze blood and gold to hire them; but for all of that, it would be months and perhaps years before he could recover from the blows we had dealt him—and in that time, we had respite.

It was a golden autumn, as if the whole land, every rock and every grain of sand, every flower and every blade of wheat, gave thanks to God for that, the most precious of all things, freedom. From the Wilderness of Judah in the South and from the Wilderness of Ephraim in the North, thousands of families began their trek homeward, to the ruined farms and villages they had left. In the sweet eventide, you could hear their singing in the deep valleys and along the mountain tracks, as they gave thanks for the liberation. And other thousands converged upon the holy city of Jerusalem, for word had gone about that the Maccabee would enter it and cleanse the Temple.

For two whole days, Judas, and we his brothers, and his captains as well as the leading Adons and Rabbis of the land, held council as to what should be done with the last remaining enemy within Judea, the Greeks and wealthy Jews who, with their mercenaries, held the citadel within Jerusalem. Some, like Ragesh, proposed conciliation, an attempt to bargain with them on the basis that they leave the land, but this I opposed, and my brothers backed me.

“We do not bargain with traitors and swine,” I said, and Judas agreed, adding, “There was a swine's head on the altar, and they worshiped it. So there will be time enough when they crawl on their bellies to us, as I once saw a traitor in Shiloh crawl, to decide whether they should live or die.”

Others wanted to mass all our power and storm the citadel, particularly the Alexandrian Jews, who felt that their engineers would come from Egypt with machines enough to overcome any obstacle, but Judas opposed this. “There has been bloodletting enough,” he said. “All our fighting has been in the valleys—and how are we to go up against stone walls twenty feet thick? Let them rot there in the citadel—and let them see with their own eyes how the people cleanse the Temple.”

So we returned to the Temple, even as the Adon said we would return. We marched first to Modin, which was rising again from its ashes, and there we cleansed the synagogue, and the Rabbi Ragesh led the prayers. Then with two thousand picked men, led by the veterans of Modin and Goumad, all of them in full armor for this occasion, bearing sword, spear, and shield, we began the procession to the Temple. First came the Kohanim, four red-bearded old men who had been driven from the Temple five years before, all stalwart patriots who had fought with us. Strangely like the Adon they were, in their blue and white vestments. Then came twenty Levites, all in white and over their shoulders snow-white cloaks, and they walked barefoot with their heads bowed in shame, for too many traitors and too many of those who had shut themselves up in the citadel were Levites. After the Levites, Judas walked, he too barefoot, a red cap upon his head, and from beneath it his beautiful auburn hair lay upon his striped cloak. Like the Levites, he was unarmed and without adornment, and like them he walked with his eyes upon the ground, even though again and again as we passed through a village, people pressed forward to kiss his hands and to hail the Maccabee. Behind Judas we, his four brothers, marched; and like the fighting men who followed us, we were clad in the heavy panoply of war. We carried neither spear nor shield, but we wore polished brass breastplates and long Greek swords, and on our heads were four brazen helms with blue plumes, and behind us marched our two thousand men.

Yet that was not the end of the procession, for a concourse of people followed us, increasing as we neared the city, and under the broken walls of Jerusalem thousands more waited our arrival.

How could I help but thrill with pride as I looked at my glorious brothers—Judas so tall and handsome; Eleazar like a great, tawny lion; Jonathan so lithe and quick and eager, like a lean deer in the first flush of his young manhood, the new beard curling on his brown face; and John in his gentle and loving sadness?

We marched on, over hill and dale, as I had walked the first time with my father so long ago, but the city was not the same. It was a crazy ruin of filth and desolation. Grass grew amidst the rubble; doorways gaped, and the empty streets gave it a sad and tomblike aspect. Wild dogs slunk back into the houses as we passed, and everywhere there was evidence of crazy, senseless vandalism—the better to remind us in time to come of the higher civilization that had paused so briefly, leaving its mark upon this place. Wherever you looked, you saw dry, sun-bleached human bones, with here and there a skull. As we climbed higher and higher, nearing the Temple, the signs of vandalism increased—and as we approached the mount, we could see movement on the walls of the Acra, tiny figures who watched us from the walled security of their citadel.

The people saw them too, and noticing the looks of hatred I felt it boded ill for the Jews who had shut themselves up in that place. At first, we were all noise and shouting, filled with the triumph of our victory and our return, but as we entered the city, our tones became more subdued, hushed as we climbed higher—and silent as we entered the Temple area, for here what was done was not human but monstrous.

Even to the last, the place had been traduced with swine's flesh, for it lay about, rotting and filling the place with an awful smell. The wonderful carved wooden gates of the Temple were burned; the priceless marble in the corridors was gouged and smashed; and the ancient scrolls of the Law were torn to bits and scattered about. As a last gesture, the mercenaries, or the Greeks, had taken three children, cut their throats, and dragged their bodies through the inner chambers as they bled, flinging them dead onto a pile of the blue silk hangings that had once separated room from room. Thus it went, senseless destruction, perversion and madness—the frenetic madness that seems to come only from blind hatred of Jews.

And on the altar itself, there stood a marble statue of Antiochus, the King of Kings, the apostle of civilization and all the gentle virtues of Western culture. Even the sculptor, with whatever fears and rewards pursued him, could not remove the sense of bestiality that pervaded the image of the King of Kings…

It was not a time for mourning. I dispatched Eleazar with a thousand men to guard the Acra, and I led the others to see what could be done about repairing the aqueduct and filling some of the great siege cisterns with water. When I returned, a thousand Jews were scrubbing the Temple with lye and ashes, Judas among them.

It took us three weeks, and there was no scarcity of labor. From all over Judea came Jews to lend their arms to rebuilding the Temple. Stonecutters took marble from the lower city and recut it to replace the slabs that were damaged. The aqueduct was repaired and a stream of water flushed out the place. Rings, bracelets, trinkets of every sort poured into the common coffers, to be melted down and shaped into new
m'norah
by Ruben the smith. The best woodworkers in Judea fashioned new gates, and from every village came offerings of silk for the hangings. All day, and all night by the light of torches, workmen swarmed over the Temple, and finally, on the day of the twenty-fourth of Kislev, it was finished, rebuilt, cleansed and beautiful again.

And on the morning of the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the new Temple was consecrated, and there sounded in its halls once again that ancient, ancient declaration:

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!”

In the
m'norah,
the lights were lit, and for eight days the ceremony of dedication continued. During those eight days, almost every inhabitant of Judea came to Jerusalem—and for those eight days, a thousand armed men with bows strung stood around the citadel, day and night.

And now I must tell what is hardest to tell, how the end came to my glorious brothers. The Greeks, who have many gods and many versions of the truth, and many notions of liberty, too, have a goddess whom they call the Muse of History, and they are very proud that they set down the truth when they write of their history; but the making of history among us, who are Jews, is like the searching of a people's soul. We are not obsessed by the truth, since our past and our future too is a pact between ourselves and our covenant and our God—and all those things in which we believe; and what else should we state but the truth? Would we hide the fact that Cain slew Abel, in cold and terrible anger, or that David ben Jesse sinned as few men have sinned? We are not like the
nokri
, for we were slaves in Egypt; and for all time to come, through our children's time and their children's, we will not forget that; and we will bend our knee to no man and not even to God. Can you separate freedom from truth? And with what other people is it said, as we say, that resistance to tyrants is the highest and truest obedience to God?

And so I write, seeking in the past, that is given to no man to visit again, but only for God and for His immortal records; and the memories come like clouds driven by the winds, so that I want to put aside the parchment and lay my head on the table and cry out:

“Oh, my brothers, my glorious brothers, where are you—and when will Israel or the world see your like again?”

Already in the synagogues there is a new scroll, the scroll of the Maccabees, as they call it—as if there could be more than one, more than Judas, my brother Judas, who of all men was without peer and without reproach—and in this scroll it is written thus:

Then his son Judas, called Maccabeus, rose up in his stead.

And all his brethren helped him, and so did all they that held with his father, and they fought with cheerfulness the battle of Israel.

So he got his people great honor, and put on a breastplate as a giant, and girt his warlike harness about him, and he made battles, protecting the host with his sword.

In his acts, he was like a lion, and like a lion's whelp roaring for his prey.

For he pursued the wicked, and sought them out, and burnt up those that vexed his people. Wherefore the wicked shrunk for fear of him, and all the workers of iniquity were troubled, because salvation prospered in his hand.

He grieved also many kings, and made Jacob glad with his acts, and his memorial is blessed forever.

Moreover, he went through the cities of Judah, destroying the ungodly out of them, and turning away wrath from Israel; so that he was renowned unto the utmost part of the earth, and he received unto him such as were ready to perish.

So it says:
And
he
received
unto
him
such
as
were
ready
to
perish.
Judas, Judas, how few of us there were, in the end, who were ready to perish! We became weary—and weary you never were. We lost hope, when you knew that the strength of a people is something that cannot die. Yes, and I remember when you returned again to Modin, to the broken rooftree of Mattathias, and put away your weapons and worked side by side with me and with Jonathan to rebuild the house and the terraces, and Nicanor came there in all his splendor and found you in the field with your hands on the plow, you, the Maccabee, the Kohan, the priest of the Temple, and I remember how, as you spoke with him, the first captain of the King of Kings, you bent again and again to pick up a lump of that good Judean earth we tilled, breaking it, and letting it slide through your fingers…

Yet I must tell before this of how Eleazar died. I am an old man, wandering in the past and trying to understand the things that make a Jew a Jew, and I must be forgiven for my wandering.

***

There was short respite when we cleansed the Temple. In his hunger for money to hire more mercenaries and thereby to gain more money, the mad Antiochus led an expedition eastward against the Parthians, and there he died. But his son and his regents lacked none of his insatiable hunger. Westward they could not go, for already the grim strength of Rome barred their path—and said, Go this far and no farther. Eastward were the deserts, and beyond the deserts the terrible arrows of the Parthians. But to the south always was the treasure chest of Judea. The rich and beautiful hill country of the Jews that could, with its boundless fertility, bring back all the glory of Macedonia—provided that the Maccabee was crushed.

Four times more armies were sent into our Judean hills, and four times we crushed them, smashed them, and filled the defiles with the arrow-tufted bodies of our foes—yet how much war can a people endure? We no longer lay in the Wilderness of Ephraim, but had gone back to the farms and the villages. With each invasion, Judas sent out his call for volunteers. At first, they came by the thousands to the standard of the Maccabee, the standard which had never known defeat, but when the awful monotony and suffering of invasion repeated itself again and again, the amount of volunteers dwindled. For each campaign there were a few less; with each campaign; the knife of years of warfare sank a little deeper. We could not, like Antiochus, call upon a numberless swarm of mercenaries. There were just so many Jews in Judea—and no more…

And then, Lysias, the new warden, came with the elephants. I will tell you of the elephants, those great and terrible beasts that no one of us had ever seen before, but first I must explain why we had to go against them with only three thousand men. The best of our men, two thousand, among whom were the battle-scarred veterans of Modin and Goumad—these we had to leave at the Temple, to stand endless guard over the Acra, where month after month the Jewish traitors and the Greeks maintained themselves, defying us to batter down their huge walls. Jonathan and John remained there in command. Another thousand men garrisoned the fortress of Beth Zur, for the Bedouins were growing bold, now that the mercenaries had been swept from the land, and again and again, they came from the desert, camel-mounted, to raid our villages. For Judas to find additional men to patrol the borders of Judea—against the numberless bands of mercenaries who between masters would seek for booty among the Jews; against the Philistines in the West, a bastard, corrupted people; and against the minor Greek satraps, who had broken away after the death of Antiochus, and who could keep neither their hands nor their eyes off the treasure chest of Judea—was a constant and heartbreaking task, for once the Greeks were smashed, it was not easy to persuade men from their farms and their families. It was against this that he had to—and did—raise an army to stop four separate invasions; but when they came with the elephants, that was an additional terror.

***

We heard only rumors of the struggle for power that went on in the court of the dead Antiochus. The dead madman left an idiot son, to whom they fed perversions, drugs and women, and animals too, for these practices were common in Antioch, and in Damascus. And meanwhile Philippus, the King's regent, fought for power against Lysias, a Greek sailor, who through shrewdness, deceit, and wholesale murder had climbed high in Syrian power. Knowing that the conquest of Judea might well tip the balance, Lysias hit upon the idea of the elephant troops, and he dispatched his messengers, loaded down with gold and jewels, all the way to the valley of the Indus, where they hired two hundred of the great beasts, along with drivers and archers to man the castles upon their backs. It was the Greek's idea that if our hills were a fortress, he would invade them with a new kind of fortress, and once and for all crush the power of the Maccabee and his followers. Thus he came down the coastal road with the elephants and ten thousand mercenaries to back them up, and they swung inland through the Vale of Eshcol to come upon us through the broad Southern passes.

All during their journey South, we had reports of these new, monstrous, ungainly beasts that lumbered along like living castles, carrying wooden walls upon their backs with slits for arrows; and as the rumors spread through Judea, the elephants grew in size and fearsomeness. It was the quality of the unknown, looming over us like devils, and people who through years of warfare against awful odds had feared nothing mortal now trembled at the thought of these moving mountains.

Not knowing at first which route the elephants would take, Judas concentrated what forces he could muster at Bethlehem, from where he sent out scouts. The first rumor was to the effect of the main attack being upon Beth Zur, and Judas and Eleazar set off with two thousand men in that direction. The other thousand, under my command, moved toward the deep pass near Beth Zechariah. We had marched for only an hour or two when we heard the ominous rumble of the elephant troops, a sound like no other sound I had known. The men tensed and paled, and already I could see uncertainty and fear running like cold water through the ranks. Ruben, the smith, was with me, Ruben of Modin, who in a hundred encounters had never shown fear or hesitation; but now, at this new and unknown sound, the blood left his face and the spring went from his step. “They are beasts,” I told him. “God made them and man can slay them.” “And if they are not beasts?” “Then you are a fool—and a coward!”

Seizing my arm in an iron grip, he cried, “No man ever called me a coward, Simon ben Mattathias!”

“I call you that, damn you!”

“And why do you curse me, Simon?”

“Because we have fought too long to be afraid now. I want you to take half the men and bar the pass and hold it the way we held it so many times! Hold it against hell itself, until Judas can come to us! But if you leave it before the Maccabee arrives, God help you!”

“I'll hold it, Simon…” And then I sent our fleetest runner after Judas and Eleazar.

At a quick trot, I led our thousand to the neck of the valley, the northern end where it narrowed to perhaps twenty yards, and while Ruben and his men worked madly to erect some sort of a barricade out of stones and fallen trees, I led my five hundred up the slope, where they could take vantage points for their arrows. We had hardly time; we were still clambering up the slope when the first of the great beasts became visible, moving up the valley at an ominous and inevitable pace, slowly, yet the more terribly for that. Three abreast, the elephants moved, and truly there seemed no end of them. On the head of each, the driver sat, and behind him there was a box of heavy wood, slit all over for the archers. All naked were the drivers, thin, brown men, who sat with crossed legs, dangling a long stick, pointed and with a hook just below the point, and occasionally they hooked or prodded the beasts they drove. Adam ben Lazar was my lieutenant there, and I told him to kill the drivers first, but I wondered whether it would stop or divert the beasts. Now, more than a hundred of them were in sight, and we could see the gleaming spears and helmets of the mercenaries who marched behind them. The frightening rumble of their feet filled the whole valley and mixed itself with the shrill shouting of their drivers, while from beyond them the hoarse cries of the mercenaries sounded heady with triumph.

Let me try to tell what happened as it happened; tell it I must, and other things too, for all the pain in the telling. I do not blame Ruben; how shall I blame you, Ruben, my comrade who rests now with my glorious brothers in that past that belongs to all men? Nothing he knew Ruben feared, and time was to prove that, but our little cedar arrows that fell like rain only enraged the great beasts. We killed the drivers, but the elephants came on. We feathered the wooden boxes on their backs, yet they came on—onto the barricade, smashing it under their feet, and Ruben and his men broke and ran, and it was the first time in years that a Greek saw the backs of Jews in combat.

I ran to help them, and for all their fear, my men followed. We sped along the ridge, leaping down the hillside, yet it was not I who stopped those who fled, but my brothers and their two thousand, pouring into the valley, with Eleazar at their head, Eleazar and his mighty hammer, Eleazar, the splendor of battle, the one man I knew who never feared, never doubted, never mocked, the simple, brave, wonderful Eleazar—and behind him came the eight black Africans who remained of the original twelve, the eight soft-voiced men who loved my brother and had fought beside him through these years.

I was close enough then to hear Eleazar cry, “And are you afraid? Of what? Are beasts born that cannot be slain?”

In that mad rush of the elephants, the men behind Judas halted in fear and wonder; but Eleazar leaped ahead and alone he met one elephant that had outpaced the others. Such a sight was never seen before then or since, for Eleazar's great body arched, the hammer swung back over his head, and then it met the elephant with a crushing thud that sounded above the screaming and shouting. And the elephant, skull crushed, went down on its knees, rolled over and died. But already Eleazar and his black men were surrounded by the beasts. They fought with their spears and Eleazar fought with his hammer until a blow from an elephant's tusk tore it from his grasp. It was not as long as it takes here in the telling. He was dead before Judas and I could reach his side. They were shooting arrows from the boxes, and there were already two arrows in his body, when he seized the spear of a fallen African, ran under one of the great beasts and thrust the whole length of the spear into his bowels. The stampede of elephants came on; nothing could have stopped it then; and in the valley bottom, crushed under hundreds of pounding feet, lay my brother Eleazar and his black comrades.

We scattered. We clawed up the slopes, and always I tried to keep near Judas—and perhaps I wept as Judas was weeping. I don't know; I don't remember. I know only that Eleazar was dead…

By nightfall, we had gathered together eighteen hundred of our men—and we retreated northward. For the first time, the Maccabee had been smashed in battle.