My Glorious Brothers (22 page)

Through his tears, Judas whispered, “What then?”

“And then Ragesh drank poison and died, and when Nicanor heard of it, he went mad—stark, raving mad, and then he let his mercenaries run amok and they slew the old men and ravaged the city. They killed Moses ben Daniel and they raped his daughter and left her dying in the streets. I went by night with two Levites, and we took her into the Temple, which they had not yet raided, and there she died in my arms, thinking somehow that I was Eleazar come back to her—and then I came here. And that is all, Judas, that is all; and now I am with the Maccabee and I am tired and I want to sleep…”

***

And the next morning, in the gray and early dawn, the three of us left Ephraim, and now we traveled not by the mountain paths but by the roads. To Lebonah we went first, and then to Shiloh and then to Gilgal, and then to Dan, to Levein, to Horal, to Goumad—to village after village down the valley to Modin. And now we traveled by daylight, not by night, and wherever we went we raised up the standard of Judas Maccabeus.

And wherever we went, men flocked to us, men embraced Judas, tears streaming down their faces, men took out their spears and their bows and their knives and joined our ranks. In both Shiloh and Gilgal, there were mercenaries, and we slew them in a cold and terrible fury, but in the other villages word traveled ahead and the mercenaries fled.

It was early dawn when we started, and by midnight we were in Modin with nine hundred men, and still they came, all through the night as word went out to the countryside that the Maccabee lived.

There was no sleep for any of us that first night. Plunged into despair, first at the disappearance of Judas, and then again at the terrible news from Jerusalem, Modin suddenly became the most wildly joyous and chaotic place in all Israel. Every house, every barn, even the old synagogue itself was turned into a barracks, and still there was not enough room and men bivouacked on the hillsides and the terraces. Ruben, the smith, a totally, volubly, insanely happy Ruben, alternately laughing and weeping, set up an arms shop in the village square. Every grindstone was requisitioned, and all night long the square glowed under the sparks of whirling stone and keen metal, while our captains of tens and twenties and hundreds sought for their old veterans, broke the night with their shouts and orders, and piled confusion upon confusion as they sought to bring an army into being.

There was little enough time, for just across the hills lay Jerusalem, and there was Nicanor and his mercenaries. Surely, by now, he had word of the uprising, and unless he was a complete fool, he would attempt to crush it before it gained any real strength. This we surmised, and our surmise was correct; the thing that saved us and gave us the precious twenty-four hours we needed was the unwillingness of Nicanor—a wise enough unwillingness, for already Judas was sending out bands of archers—to march his heavily armored mercenaries through the Judean defiles by night.

Under the ancient rooftree of Mattathias, we set up our headquarters, and there Judas and I labored by lamplight all night long, creating in a matter of hours a new army. Constantly, John and Jonathan and Adam ben Lazar, who had joined us immediately the word came, brought us information, and, on a great sheet of parchment, we laid out a table of command and organization. As soon as a twenty was formed and officered, we gave the tabulation to Lebel, the schoolmaster, who went through the houses and barns, calling out the names, to turn the organized unit over to Ruben to check on arms, equipment and supply. To further complicate the situation, the children of Modin—and Goumad as well, for that town had virtually depopulated itself—raced all over the place, imitating every action of their elders, and making the night hideous with their screeching…

But the wonder of it was the change in Judas. He lived again. He was the old Judas, patient, gentle, fiery—as the need was—indulgent, hard; he was the Maccabee now, and so they termed him, and so it sounded to mark the night, “Where is the Maccabee?” “I have news for the Maccabee.” “I come from Shmoal with a twenty for the Maccabee.” “I fought with the Maccabee five years—he needs me.”

We needed them; we welcomed them. How many times that night was the blessing for wine spoken, as captain after captain came, dog-weary with travel, to enter the house of Mattathias and pledge his allegiance. And with dawn, only the second dawning since Jonathan had come with the news to Ephraim, we had an army in Modin and two hundred additional archers on the hills to greet Nicanor if he should have begun his march by night. And our army in Modin numbered two thousand three hundred men, hard, battle-scarred veterans of a hundred encounters…

***

I made Judas sleep, and I closed the door of the house and set two men to guard it and see that he lay undisturbed. Now the first, sweet rosy tint of dawn was in the air, a band of pink light in the east, where our holy city was, and an answer to the pink on our high and fertile terraces. Through the night-wet grass, I walked up to the little olive grove where once Ruth and I lay in each other's arms, and I spread my cloak there and let my weary body feel the earth under me.

I was happy then—I, Simon, Simon of the iron hand and the iron heart; I, the least, the most unworthy of all my glorious brothers, the single, stolid, plodding and colorless son of Mattathias—and yet I was happy in a way that I never dreamed I might be happy again. For the first time in many years, my heart was at peace and the bitter venom had cleansed itself from my soul. My memories were good memories, and as I lay there, both the living and the dead were close, and they comforted me. No devils plagued me and no hates corroded me; the masterful and angry old man, the Adon, slept gently, and gently too slept the tall and lissom woman who had held my heart as no other woman ever held it, or would, who had kissed my lips and given her soul to me. Perhaps I dozed there a little as the cool morning wind played over me, for it seemed that I dreamed as well as remembered, taking the matter of my dreams out of this ancient, ancient soil of Israel that had reared up so strange a people as we Jews were. Like a benediction, the words of the morning prayers were in my mind,
How
goodly
are
thy
tents, O Jacob, thy dwelling places, O Israel!
And those words came to me over and over again—until I dozed more deeply, or slept perhaps, and wakened with the hot morning sun in my eyes.

***

Straight through the valley pass toward Modin, Nicanor came, with nine thousand men in heavy armor, marching them along the same way we took as children, going to the Temple with the Adon. They had set out from Jerusalem in the early morning, and though our twenties harried them in every pass and defile, they came on under their raised, locked shields. From Jerusalem to Gibeon to Beth Horon, they marched under a rain of the slim and deadly cedar arrows, so that Nicanor learned once and for all what is meant when a Greek speaks of the deadly, snakelike “Judean rain,” and all that distance they left their dead in the sun. And yet Nicanor would not be diverted, but marched on, burning the empty villages they passed. At Beth Horon, they camped for the night, but all night long our arrows pattered and whispered upon their tents, and though they camped they did not sleep; and in the morning, with taut nerves and deep hatred, they came down the valley toward Modin. And three miles from Modin, where a peaceful brook ran through the valley bottom, alongside the road, where the hills and terraces sloped up almost vertically, bare of anything but twisted brush, we built our barricade and blocked their way.

Our tactics were no longer new, yet Nicanor was new to them. Because every defile in Judea was a deathtrap, a whole generation of mercenaries lay buried in Judean soil, yet Nicanor came on into the pass, into the trap—because there was nothing else for him to do. We stood in his path, and either he must sweep us aside or retreat to Jerusalem, considering that he would get there. He chose to sweep us aside.

Behind the barricade, we put eight hundred of our best men, armed with spear, sword, and hammer. The rest we deployed on the hills with their bows and their knives and with bundles of thousands of the short, straight, needle-sharp arrows. The barricade was rock and dirt and brush, eight feet high and twenty feet thick, not the shelter of a wall, but an impediment to a phalanx. Our men manned it, and a few yards in front, Ruben, Judas, and I stood, watching the great, metallic mass of the mercenaries creep down the road behind their locked shields and their bristling front of long, unwieldy spears. They filled the full eighty foot width of the valley; they walked in the brook; they crowded the mountainside with their shoulders; and ever and again one of them would pitch forward, held for a moment by the very mass of the phalanx, cheek or eye or brain transfixed by one of our arrows, and then falling to the ground under the metal-shod feet of the others.

They were close enough now for us to see their angry, dirty, sweat-glistening faces; close enough for us to feel what it meant to walk for hours in the burning Judean sun, carrying eighty pounds of hot metal; close enough almost for us to smell, on the morning wind, the hot, sickening stink of their unwashed bodies, and of the leather in their harness. The clangor of their metal filled the pass, mingling with the wild shouting of our archers, with the deeper thud of rocks flung from above, with the screams of the wounded and the sobs of the dying, with the short-breathing, corrupt Aramaic filth that spewed from the mercenaries' lips.

And then, no more than fifty yards from us, they paused. Five men led them, one of whom was Nicanor, and he came toward us with his arm raised—and the noise and shouting fell away, and the rain of arrows halted.

“Will you talk, Maccabee?” Nicanor cried.

“There is nothing to say,” Judas replied, his voice cold and piercing.

“You killed Apollonius, Maccabee, and he was my friend—with all your rotten Jewish tricks and traps, you slew him! Do you deny that, Maccabee?”

“I killed him,” Judas said.

“Then I make you a pledge, Jew—I pledge that today I will kill you with my own hand and open this pass and clear that Jewish scum from it! And from every olive tree in Judea, a Jew will hang! And in every synagogue, a pig will be slaughtered!”

While he spoke, he came on, and Judas walked toward him. Nicanor carried a shield, but his sword was in his scabbard, and Judas wore neither shield nor armor, only the long sword of Apollonius, slung over his neck and before him. Like a tiger Judas walked, clad only in white linen pants and sandals, bare to the waist, the long, supple muscles rippling as he moved, and like a tiger he crouched and sprang. Few men knew his strength as I knew it. Nicanor tried to fend him off with his shield while he dragged his sword from the scabbard, but Judas wrenched the shield aside and, through the sudden roar of sound, we heard the bone in Nicanor's arm snap. With his bare hands, Judas killed the Greek, with two terrible blows to the head, and then lifted the body, swung it above his head and hurled it onto the spears of the driving phalanx.

The roar of sound obliterated all else. Judas ran back, and a hundred hands reached down to lift us to the barricade. The phalanx drove toward us, met us, scrambled at the barricade, when I saw that like men gone mad our Jewish archers were pouring down the hillsides into the valley, fighting with rocks and knives and with their bare hands too, filled with a mad, wild, terrible hate, filled with the accumulated agony of a decade of senseless, cruel invasions, filled with memory of countless murders, innumerable rapes and tortures, endless burning and destruction, filled with the rage of free men who had never asked more than their freedom, filled with the memory of desecration and insult and woe.

Then, if the mercenaries had had a leader, if they had held, if they had not been packed so tightly at the valley bottom, they could have done what they had come to do; but the death of Nicanor and then the wild willfulness of the charge broke their morale. The front ranks tried to give back from the barricade, and the rear ranks drove up against the front ranks to overwhelm the barricade—and from the barricade our spearmen caught the fever and hurled themselves down…

There were nine thousand of them and less than three thousand Jews, and for five long, awful hours we fought there in that valley bottom, Judas and Jonathan beside me in a frightful hellish slaughterhouse. Much of that fight I have forgotten; much of it the mind could not retain and exist—for never was there a fight like that before and never again, not even when the end came—yet some things I remember. I remember a pause once, as men must pause and rest when they fight, and I stood in the brook and it ran red against my legs, thick and sluggish, the blood overwhelming the water. I remember walking on dead men five deep, and I remember being caught in a press of bodies where no man could raise an arm, mercenaries and Jews, face to face, shoulder to shoulder. And I remember when, for a long moment, we stood clear with the dead around us piled five feet high, but no living thing within ten yards of us…

And finally, it finished; it was done; we had triumphed; fighting hand to hand and face to face, we had wiped out a great army of mercenaries—yet at what a cost! In that terrible valley of death, less than a thousand Jews stood on their feet, and every one of them was covered from head to foot with blood, naked from the battle, a blood-soaked rag hanging from shoulder or hip; and every one of them was cut and bleeding, so that blood dripped from their bodies and joined the spongy, blood-soaked earth at their feet.

I sought for my brothers, but in that nightmarish place all men looked alike. Sobbing, weeping with exhaustion and fear, I called them and they came to me, Judas and Jonathan and John, too—but John wounded so deeply that he had to crawl over the dead, yet struggled to his feet that he might stand and be among us…

***

Thus we won a victory; and as Judas said, as we dragged our aching bodies and our moaning wounded to Jerusalem, a victory without triumph, without joy. The night before in Modin was the last time of joyous anticipation, for how many were there now in Modin or in Goumad or in Shiloh who were not fatherless, or brotherless, or widowed? More men there were in Israel, but in that valley of hate there fell the cream of our army, the loyal veterans of our very beginnings. Out of the men of Goumad, only twenty-two were left alive after that great battle, and of the men of Modin, aside from myself and my brothers, only twelve lived. What consolation to us that the mercenaries had perished to the last man, that even those who had doffed their armor and fought their way from the valley were slain by archers, and children too, in the villages of Gibeon and Gezer near by? Thus it was in the beginning, and again and again and again, for there was no end to the mercenaries with all the world to supply them, and it would be again—and was all of life to be like that, a nightmarish, endless, countless succession of invaders into our little land? Was there no end, no finish, no respite? What consolation when Lebel the schoolmaster had died in that valley, when Nathan ben Borach, who had been with us at the age of thirteen in our first fight, left his bones there, and when Melek, Daniel, Ezra, Samuel, David, Gideon, Ahab, men I had known all my life, children I had played with and fathers of the children too, left their bones to rot with the bones of the mercenaries? What consolation—and when would it end, and how would it end?