The Liars' Gospel

Bar-Avo

THERE IS A Roman sport. It is called “one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which.”

They love this sport. It is their most glorious entertainment. They play it with slaves and captured enemies, they roar and cheer at the spectacle of it. They set up two men — perhaps one with a sword and shield, the other with a net and trident — in a round patch of burnt sand with the smell of other men’s sweat and blood still in the air. And they say: fight. And if the men say: we will not fight, they say: then we will kill you both. If you want to have a chance to live, you must fight.

And when one man is beaten and bloodied and breathing in ragged gasps on the floor, the first man raises his sword and looks to the Governor or the Prefect or the Emperor, who listens to the shouts of the crowd. Mostly, the people like to see a death, but if the crowd shout loudly enough for some beloved gladiator, the man may be spared to fight another day.

In this way, the Governor or the Prefect or the Emperor seems to have the gift of life in his hands. In this way, he appears to be rescuing one man from death. Rather than the truth. Which is that he has condemned both men to die someday, in some place if not in this, for no better reason than that the sport and the sight of it please him and the crowd. It is a good trick, to kill a man while still appearing to be the one who saves a life.

When the time comes for Bar-Avo to look into the face of the Prefect, he knows that he sees a man who, like him, has killed so many men that he can no longer remember their names or count the number or think of how each death felt as it escaped between his fingertips. Men like these recognize each other, and Bar-Avo sees the same sense in Pilate of looking back and thinking: so many and still not done yet? So many dead and still the business is not finished?

But Bar-Avo rarely looks back, if truth be told. For a man like Bar-Avo, everything is a constant present. Like a fight, where each blow must be landed or dodged now, and now, and now. The life that he lives is like that. He is always looking into the face of the Prefect, and he is always listening to the crowd calling out, “Barabbas! Barabbas!” and he is always, always feeling the knife in his hand and advancing on the old man and attempting — he knows not exactly why — to comfort his shuddering as he brings the blade towards his throat and bleeds him in less time than it takes to draw one in-breath.

There is Giora to his left, and Ya’ir to his right, and they are roaring at the soldiers. Ya’ir is shorter, stocky, already sprouting hair across his chest although they are only fifteen. Giora is tall, athletic, nimble. He, in the center, is neither particularly strong nor particularly fast, but he is brave and clever.

“Come on!” he shouts to the soldiers, and it’s easy because he knows Giora and Ya’ir will back him up. “Come and get us if you’re not too fucking scared!”

It was like those dare games they’d played as children. Dare you to climb that tree. Dare you to walk into the dark cave alone. Dare you to dive from that rock.

“Did you leave your balls back home, Samaritan scum?”

That one’s his too. It makes Ya’ir and Giora crease up laughing.

He starts a chant: “No balls! No balls! No balls!”

“I dare you to throw a pebble at those soldiers’ shields. Just a pebble. I dare you,” he says to Ya’ir.

A boy, dared to do something, can he refuse? Would he even want to refuse? When the pebble is so shiny and smooth in his hand, and the sea of shields is so gleamingly tempting. Ya’ir stares at the pebble, feeling it with his fingertips. For a moment they think he won’t do it. Then he throws it. It bounces off the metal and pings on the ground. And nothing happens. Behind their helmets the soldiers are impassive.

A few other boys are watching them now. Standing behind them on the street. Maybe backing them up, maybe ready to run if something kicks off.

“Come on,” says one of them, “something bigger. Come on.”

Come on. That pottery jar, the small one. Giora, greatly daring, spins around, noticing the dark-eyed girls watching them from a rooftop. He hurls the jar, it shatters and still the soldiers do nothing. The boys are getting bigger by the moment now, strutting and squaring their shoulders. They smell of boy sweat and bottled-up anger. They’re remembering how the soldiers treat them, how they get pushed to the back of the line in the market, how the soldiers laugh at them, how they accuse them of thieving when they were just looking, how they search them for weapons in the street like criminals. All of them are suspect just because of who they are. They’re remembering how one of these soldiers took out that girl they like. Because isn’t this always how it is, over and over again?

Come on. It’s his turn now, Bar-Avo’s. He hefts half a brick, feeling the weight of it, then hurls it in a wide arc. It bangs against a shield. It leaves a dent, and the boys laugh and shout, “Look what you’ve done!” just like their mums would. They surge forward towards the soldiers but then lose their nerve before they reach the line of bronze men. They jeer at each other, fall back.

Someone throws a cobblestone. It gets a man on his head, he falls down. He’s all right, he’s moving, but the boys are shocked for a moment. Bar-Avo can see him holding his head, moaning. It’s a nasty sight but at the same time exciting. Something’s going to happen, his whole body knows it. The soldiers start shouting: angry barked commands. The boys don’t understand, the soldiers’ accents are thick, the words they’re using aren’t Aramaic or Hebrew.

Bar-Avo feels himself becoming strong, the blood coming to all the right places as if his heart knew that this is what a man is made for. Now he’ll be a man, right here, father or no. The soldiers start to advance, orderly in their phalanx, and now it’s on. Giora runs towards the soldiers, roaring and throwing cobblestones with both hands, and he gets another one, knocks him down, and then the line breaks, because one of the other men decides to chase, even though his commander shouts at him to come back, to hold the line, not to be an idiot.

Bar-Avo shouts and laughs and grabs his friend’s arm and now they’re off, leaping and running, the blood surging and their limbs singing, and shouting with fear and delight like a toddler chased by a parent pretending to be a monster. They whoop as they scramble over stalls and climb lumber piles, and grab on to roof struts to run along thatch or tile, grabbing handfuls of mud or broken pots to hurl at the soldiers. It is like the feeling when they first held a girl, because even though they had never done the thing before they knew exactly what to do somehow.

Ya’ir is the first one to set a torch of straw and oil aflame and throw it among the soldiers with a jar of oil, which splashes fire onto the men’s legs and feet, causing a great howl. He laughs when he hears the sound, baring his teeth, and the others let out a rallying cry and begin to find flaming things to hurl.

And now it is a running battle on the streets. The soldiers advance, and the boys retreat, but each time they retreat they’ve done a little more damage, and the soldiers are a little more ragged, and the boys are a little deeper into the streets of houses where they’ve known everyone all their lives and anyone would take them in. Bar-Avo and Giora slip through the tiny gap between the house of Shulamit the seamstress and Zakai the spice seller, the gap that doesn’t look like it’s there at all, just wide enough to take their skinny frames, and collapse in the courtyard for a moment, their bodies aching from laughter and fear and exertion all at once.

They climb up onto the roof. Bar-Avo shows his bum to the soldiers. All around the streets, there’s laughter and shouting. From another rooftop, three girls are watching the battle, whispering behind their hands and giggling. The boys fighting down below spot them and play up to it. Giora does a backflip along the street as other boys throw pots and bottles. The girls applaud and shout — commentary to the boys on where the soldiers are coming from, admiration for the acrobatics, anger to the advancing troops.

The thing turns from comedy to violence and back again as swift as a knife. One of those flaming jars of oil hits a soldier — his leg and arm begin to burn and his screams are hideous before his fellows smother the flames with a blanket and even still he whimpers as they carry him off. A red-headed boy is caught by the soldiers and, as he struggles to escape, one of them pulls out a sword and cuts off — somehow, in an awkward close-fought struggle — three fingers of his left hand so he is suddenly howling and bloody.

And yet over here Bar-Avo is clambering between buildings when a goat rushes out from a backyard enclosure, panicking at some small fire, and knocks him to the ground so that his friends laugh and point and howl with mirth. He picks himself up. His pride is a little injured and he makes up for it with a brilliant scheme, luring the soldiers down an alleyway with taunts, then scrambling up the wall with his friends’ help while, from the rooftops, the others pelt them with rotten fruit in a box they’d found left over from the market.

There is no conclusion to the battle. It goes on like this until nightfall, with the soldiers making sudden rushes, capturing a few boys, and the boys throwing stones and sometimes fiery things and sheltering in houses and shouting rude slogans. A storage barn burns and they watch the flames together, fascinated by the slow crumbling tumble of the building folding in on itself. The fighting peters out before dawn, and Bar-Avo has still not been caught.

He has had a good riot. He was one of those young men throwing fire bottles but they did not take him, although a soldier had his leg at one moment and at another he scaled a wall to find on the other side a soldier waiting for him with a red shouting face. He and Giora helped one another escape through a soft place in the roof of a cowshed and then patched it up so that the soldiers who followed them in could not find them. Giora laughed so much that he fell to his knees and almost sank through the roof again.

There were girls watching them, and there was much pretence of protecting them even though the girls could easily have got away, but they nonetheless stayed on that roof, playing at being protected. And after sunset, as the day began to grow dim and the sky was the color of bright blossom shriveling to black and the night sounds of the mountains began to rise up, the soldiers slunk away back to barracks. They were dragging a captive or two but went so sullenly and having taken so little that the boys shouted catcalls behind them and the girls whispered, “You won, you really won.” There were two sets of hands around Bar-Avo’s waist in the dark and two sweet pliant bodies pressed against him and the girls did not seem to mind sharing as the night closed in and their hot mouths found him ready.

That is his first riot, and it seems as far away from death as it is possible for any experience to be. When he wakes the morning after, his head so clear and alive that he feels that God has made the sun rise inside his own skull, he wants to do it again, and again, and again, and wishes with his whole heart that every day would be a day of climbing and shouting and throwing and goats and manure and backflips and oil jars, and that every night could be like the night that has just passed sweet and warm and that every morning for the whole of his life would be like this blue radiant dawn.

He’s been taken notice of already. His cleverness and his daring and his eagerness for the fight — that last one most of all. Men older than him, men who’d kept to the old ways and whose fathers hadn’t given up the battle even when that stone in the wall fell in and the Romans breached the citadel, those men look at the rioters and pick out which ones seem to have something more than the rest.

There is a man, Av-Raham, who sits in the marketplace most mornings, sipping occasionally from a bowlful of smoke. He has a little potbelly and his hair is thin at the crown, but he has a shrewd eye, and men come to him all morning long with questions and requests. He is the one who knows where those cartloads of wheat looted from the Romans ended up. His friends are the people who receive the extra measures of oil which somehow appear when there are bandits in the north. It is he who owns the sharpest swords in Jerusalem, and he to whom one goes if one needs medicine, or aid, or revenge.

They bring Bar-Avo to him the morning after the riot. Bar-Avo is cocky, at least at first. He’s only fifteen and he doesn’t know what he’s doing here. A small corner of him suspects that he’s in trouble. A larger part of him doesn’t care, because last night he had two girls and nothing that happens this morning can ever erase that. He’s still buzzing from the fight.

They’d found him naked under a pile of old sacks, fucking one of those two girls again, his hair a cloud around his face, both of them moving slowly, tired but unable to stop. They’d waited until he was finished and then said, “Av-Raham would like to see you.” And Bar-Avo had taken a swig of water from a jug by his side, swirled it around in his mouth, spat it out into the straw and said, “What if I don’t want to see him?” They had explained most politely that Av-Raham was a good friend to his friends. And, swaggering, Bar-Avo had gone.

There was something he liked about the deferential air surrounding Av-Raham. He couldn’t help imagining how it would feel to be the man whom others talked to in low voices, asked favors of and consulted. He was old — over fifty probably — and not handsome, not like Bar-Avo, but there was something charismatic about him. Over the years Bar-Avo would watch him closely to see how he did it. The formation of the inner circle within his group of followers. The constant denial that he was a man of any importance whatever. The impression that he was holding secrets and that, perhaps, he spoke to God. These are the skills by which a man leads, inspiring both love and fear.

That morning, the conversation was brief.

“They tell me you acquitted yourself well in the battle yesterday.”

Bar-Avo has all the humility of a teenager.

“Yes,” he says. “No one can climb as well as me, no one else hit as many soldiers with the oil pots, I think those are the most important things.”

Av-Raham smiled an amused smile.

“The most important things. Tell me, do you hate Rome?”

And there’s no question, none at all. Rome is all the things that are wrong in all the world.

“Yes.”

“Then we may find a use for you. You are the son of Mered, aren’t you?”

The mention of his father stings him. He was not a good father. Bar-Avo has not seen him for a long time.

“I’m a man now. It doesn’t matter whose son I am.”

And Av-Raham’s eyes meet those of one of the men standing beside him and they both laugh. Bar-Avo cannot read the laugh, cannot see that it says: yes, we understand that, we have said those words ourselves when we were boys.

Bar-Avo shouts at this ring of slow, thoughtful men, “Do not ask me about my father! My father is dead! I have no father!”

And Av-Raham says, slowly, “None of us has a father.”

Bar-Avo looks around at them, trying to see if they are mocking him.

“Or at least, God is our father,” says Av-Raham, “no other father matters. You can be simply His son with us. Or mine, for I am father to many.”

Bar-Avo squints and thinks and curls his lip.

“I will be the son of some father,” he says at last, and that is how he gets his name, which means “the son of his father,” and no other name he has had before has ever suited him so well as this. He is this now, a man who carries his own father with him, a nameless, invisible, intangible father.

Av-Raham, whose name means “the father to many,” laughs.

“Either way,” he says, “now you belong with us.”

And that is that.

They give him little tasks at first, and he deals with them handily. A set of daggers to be smuggled past the guards — he conceals them under a cartful of vegetables a farmer asks him to take to market and gets paid twice for the journey, once by the farmer and once by Av-Raham’s men. Messages to be carried. Lookout to be kept as they cut open the leather thongs holding a prized horse belonging to the Prefect in its stable, slap its thigh and send it skittering across the plaza, where, terrified by the smells and the noise, it falls and lames itself. Conversations to be overheard in the marketplace — there is always a use for information carelessly dropped.

He is bored sometimes, but also paid fairly well for his trouble — so much so that he can now be the man of his home, bringing his mother meat and bread. And when there is going to be a riot he knows it, and he is the one who can tell his friends where to be and at what time. And he knows where the fires will be lit and where the roofs will be torn off and what can be stolen early on because everyone will think that this saddle or that blanket or that wheel of cheese must have burned in the flames. A long campaign of resistance and anger is nothing if not pragmatic. Young men must be found to fight, and must be rewarded and encouraged, and people must eat.

Many days are dull — days of waiting for the fighting or for anything to happen. He does not mind the dullness. He finds himself more patient than he’d realized. The more he thinks on it, the more he wants what Av-Raham has. That quiet command, honor in the hearts of men. One has to wait, and work hard, and become trustworthy, before these things start to happen.

There is a day when Av-Raham shows him a map of Israel. He has never seen more than a little plan before — drawn on a table in wine, perhaps — to show where the grain store is in relation to where they are now, or which of three roads leads to the house of the girl he likes. This is a brushed-vellum masterpiece, kept rolled in a cloth bag and brought out ceremoniously when the men sit discussing their affairs.

Bar-Avo has come to bring wineskins he stole from a Roman officer when he was distracted by a commotion in the marketplace, and to receive his orders. But when he enters the small back room where these discussions are held, he cannot help staring at the map.

“They have moved their troops here,” one of the men is saying to Av-Raham, putting a finger on the map, “so their supply lines will have to go through the mountain pass.”

Bar-Avo sees at once what the map is. There is the sea, inked with fine blue waves. Here is the coast, here are the roads leading in from Yaffo to Jerusalem, up to Caesarea, down to the desert. He has imagined the countryside with this eagle’s view when he walks from place to place. And all over the map are dried black beans — from one of the sacks kept in the storeroom which conceals the entrance to this chamber. Av-Raham sees him looking.

“They are the Romans,” he says, pointing out the beans, “here is the garrison”—a cluster of beans near Jerusalem—“and here are the outposts”—all around the countryside. “We keep watch on where they go and what they do, so we know when new supplies will be dispatched to them and when they will be isolated.”

“So you can decide when to strike,” says Bar-Avo wonderingly.

“These are guesses really. Merely that. Our information is often out of date. But we try to steal from them when we can. There is nothing sweeter,” Av-Raham says, smiling, his little potbelly shifting against the table as he leans forward, “than killing a Roman soldier with his own sword.”

Bar-Avo smiles too. He has imagined himself a killer before, like all boys. Has swished a sword and imagined running someone through with it. He has taken lambs to offer at the Temple and seen the life go out of them and understood how simple and how important the thing is.

“How many of them will we kill before they leave?”

Av-Raham looks into Bar-Avo’s eyes, then takes his left hand by the wrist, palm up. He plucks a bean delicately from the table and places it in Bar-Avo’s palm.

“This is how we proceed now. One by one. But with God’s help…”

Av-Raham sweeps the beans off the parchment with the back of his hand. It takes two sweeps, three, to clear them all.

“That is what we must do. Every one of them out. No peace until every single one of them is swept away.”

“We’ll drive them into the sea,” says Bar-Avo, looking at the beans on the floor.

Av-Raham pulls Bar-Avo towards him, so Bar-Avo can smell the older man’s scent of onions and spice and the cloves he chews. Av-Raham holds him at the back of the neck and kisses the top of his head.

“With a thousand boys like you,” he says, “we will do it.”

He is trusted, as time goes on, with bigger things. He is taught where the caches of swords are, and how to grease and wrap them so that they will not rust in their long months underground. He learns the different ways to set a fire in a building so that it will take with little kindling and without time to waste. He learns the names of the important men up and down the land. Av-Raham even has one of the old men teach him to read, though Bar-Avo always does so slowly and hesitatingly, for this is a skill necessary to a revolution.

It is entirely true that some of these skills are dull and he has to be convinced that learning them is necessary. But then there is the day when he first kills a man. That is not a boring day.

There was no reason for this to be the day, though he knew the day would come and that it would be a moment like this. He is nearing twenty now and commands a handful of men of a similar age or a bit younger. They make mischief, steal things where they can, riot and destroy property, telling themselves every time that, piece by piece, they are pulling Rome off their land.

Today it will be the baths. Rome has not built a grand bathhouse in Jerusalem as she does in many of her conquered cities, but there is a small pool, one story only, near to the dormitories for the soldiers stationed in Jerusalem. The soldiers bathe there and that is enough to make it worthy of attack. And it’s used by some of the people in the town, those for whom the traditional ritual baths are insufficiently Roman, those who want to show their loyalty to the occupying power. Traitors, therefore, in their treacherous waters.

Bar-Avo and his friends have decided on a plan. There are open windows in the roof of the baths, and the building is next to several houses, one owned by a man who owes a great deal to Av-Raham and has been persuaded to let them use the window which leads out onto the curved bathhouse roof. Four of them go: Ya’ir, Giora, Matan and Bar-Avo himself. They shin down the wall from the window, each of them carrying a leather bag over his shoulder, each of them suppressing laughter.

Through the windows in the roof, they look down on the Romans at their bath.

They are hilarious, strutting about, each man naked as a child, caring nothing for their modesty, their decency, their honor.

“Look at that!” whispers Giora, the youngest.

He’s pointing out the men being oiled by slaves. One in particular, a man in his fifties with a soldier’s physique, has two male slaves working on his back, rubbing thick drops of yellow olive oil into his skin.

“I’ve never had a woman work so hard on me as that,” mutters Ya’ir.

The man whose back is being oiled lets out a little moan of pleasure and the boys on the roof collapse in laughter.

“Neither has he!” says Ya’ir. “He’s never touched a woman in his life, look at him!”

There are six or seven men being rubbed with oil in a similar way.

Bar-Avo says, “My mum does that with the lamb before she roasts it.”

“Let’s see if they bring out the herbs!” says Ya’ir, and they start laughing again.

“We brought our own herbs, remember?” says Bar-Avo, indicating the leather bag on Ya’ir’s back, and Ya’ir’s face cracks into a grin.

They position themselves at four different downward-facing windows. It will be important, for maximum impact, to start at the back and work forwards. Giora is over the window the farthest away from the exit from the baths. Beneath him are the hot steamy rooms where men are exercising to cause the sweat to run from their pores before they go to be oiled. They are all naked, jogging on the spot or punching at imaginary enemies. Giora pulls the bag from his back and hefts its sloppy weight in his hands. The contents are runny. He undoes the leather draw cord holding it closed just a little and gets a whiff of the contents. He screws up his face. They have each come with a bagful of liquid animal feces. They have mixed it with water and let it rot in a barrel for a couple of days just to enhance the effect.

Giora leans his body half over the window, lowers the hand holding the bag down and then, holding on to its handle, begins to whirl it round and round and round.

The rotten, liquid, soupy feces splatter in wide arcs across the roomful of naked men. The stench is appalling. The stuff is sticky and smells of vomit and disease.

It splashes onto the bodies of all those naked men, across their pink scraped torsos and in their hair, and one man, a young soldier, looking in an unlucky direction, gets it across his face and in his mouth and eyes. He starts and then begins to retch as he realizes what it is.

They run, of course they do. They make for the room with the plunge bath, which is next in line and where Bar-Avo is waiting with another thick full bag. He had found some dog’s vomit to put into his, mixed with the shit. As the men start running through the building away from the whirling stench, Bar-Avo begins to empty his bag too, swinging it to make a splatter of filth, and then on, as they run in disgusted confusion, two of the men already vomiting, Matan empties his bag, and one of them, looking up to see where the pollution is coming from, takes some full in the face. They barely need Ya’ir’s bag, so much destruction has already been wrought in the place, but he empties it anyway, into the plunge pool, where some of them had leapt, attempting to wash themselves.

The boys are laughing as they drop the bags through the windows and can’t help staying to watch for perhaps a little longer than they should, as the men desperately try to clean themselves, and one of them knocks over a huge tub of oil, which spills slick and green across the tiled floor. Another man comically slips and falls in the oil — it’s too good, like players performing just for them — and manages to tip more of it over himself and, struggling to get up, pulls another man covered in brown slime down on top of himself. There’s a sharp snap as another one falls, and his arm is twisted awkwardly where he tried to break his fall — he’s evidently broken a bone and this is the funniest thing of all. Ya’ir rolls on his back laughing and Giora shouts through the window, “Go back to Rome!”

They are of course watching too intently. They do not notice that a man has scaled the back wall with a ladder until it is too late and he is almost on them. He is not covered in oil or shit. He is a soldier in his full uniform, one of the men stationed outside in case of an attack on the bathhouses. They do not notice anything until Giora starts to shout and Bar-Avo turns his head from observing the men covered in oil trying to stand up and sees this soldier, his eyes like gleaming stones, his teeth bared, raising Giora above his head only to hurl him through the window down onto the floor below. There is a loud crack as Giora lands and Bar-Avo cannot see if he’s moving, has no time to see.

The soldier draws his sword and the three of them, Bar-Avo, Ya’ir, Matan, scramble to their feet and back away across the roof. They are unarmed. The soldier roars and lunges. Ya’ir almost loses his footing on the edge of one of the windows and Bar-Avo pulls him back by the waist of his tunic. Taking his advantage, the soldier slashes at Ya’ir, brings his sword back red. Ya’ir screams, frightened, intense, like a child. The soldier’s taken a great slice of flesh out of Ya’ir’s raised arm and seeing this brings such rage to Bar-Avo that he surges forward, not thinking of himself, only of his anger and finding a place to sheathe it.

He is lucky. If he had tripped or missed his step the soldier’s downward slash with his sword would have caught him on the back of the neck and his head would have rolled down through the window to the tiled floor beneath. Instead he manages to lunge low, while Matan dances backward and the soldier is confused for a moment.

Bar-Avo kicks out wildly at the soldier’s knee and hits the perfect spot, at the side. There’s a gristly crunch and the soldier trips, falls to his knees, shouts and grabs out, reaching for the back of Bar-Avo’s tunic. He has him, he’s caught him by the tunic collar, he raises the sword in his right hand and Bar-Avo catches at the soldier’s wrist.

Bar-Avo is the weaker of the two. The soldier is behind him, pushing his arm down. Bar-Avo is trying to hold it back with his own right arm, but he’s not strong enough and the sword is descending towards his ear, his face. And then the soldier gives a sudden start. Matan has kicked his spine and this moment of released pressure gives Bar-Avo enough leeway. He grabs the soldier’s wrist, pulls the sword down and back and there, into the soft part of the throat, just above the armored breastplate.

The soldier falls backward. He chokes and groans and grabs at the sword sticking out of his throat. The blood bubbles down his front like the blood of the lamb when it is slaughtered for the sacrifice. And he dies just as easily, there on the roof tiles, his sticky blood dripping down through the open window. They stare for a minute, startled and silent, before the shouts from the bathhouse remind them to run, to scale the wall, to get away.

Bar-Avo had not quite meant it but had not tried to avoid it either. He feels nothing afterwards, not grief or shock or pity, only perhaps a kind of surprise that it was so simple. And a kind of shock at himself, at his own cool capacity. He knows something about himself now that he didn’t know before, that it will not trouble him to kill a man. He thinks: this will be useful.

Av-Raham, when he hears, congratulates Bar-Avo in front of his men and says, “The first of many!” And Bar-Avo agrees. Yes. The first of many.

There are reprisals. Rome does not know precisely who attacked the bathhouse and killed the soldier, and Giora somehow managed to limp away on a broken ankle before he could be caught and questioned, so the Prefect’s men round up a few dozen young men and give them lashes in the marketplace. They execute five or six for “stirring up unrest.” Av-Raham sends gifts of money and promises of loyalty to the families of those young men. Rome wins nothing by this.

Bar-Avo marries soon after this, because the death has sharpened him somehow and the girls are not enough night after night. He has not got a child on any girl yet but at some point he will, he knows, and this thought, the thought that he might have to take a girl because he has given her a child, makes him think that it is time to marry.

He does not need to look too hard for a wife. There are a dozen girls of the right age — fifteen or sixteen — among the daughters of Av-Raham’s friends, and they are sweet and kind and think him handsome. There is one he likes, Judith, not just for the spread of her hips and her neat bottom, but because she seems to understand when he talks.

He has not slept with her; it is not right to do so with the daughters of these men. But once they sat together in a barn during a rainstorm and he told her how he longed to make his mother proud, and take care of her in her old years, and at this Judith leaned her head on his shoulder and said, “She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a son like you.”

He had kissed her on the mouth and her kiss tasted faintly of cherries, and he tried to do more but she pushed his hands away and moved to put a little distance between them.

“You think everything will always come easily to you,” says Judith, “but one day there’ll be something you can’t get and then what will you do?”

“I’ll have to ask your father for you instead,” he says, and she laughs.

Judith’s father, one of the zealous men, is delighted by the offer of a new son-in-law and agrees rather swiftly.

She is a good girl, and gives him six children in six years, all of whom live to be bright toddlers and then on and on. They are four boys and two girls and Bar-Avo is surprised suddenly to be a father to many small delightful people whom Judith presents to him each evening washed for bed, who ask him if he has apples for them, who are delighted by the gift of a shiny stone or a piece of misshapen clay.

Judith, sensible as she is, does not ask questions about where he goes during the day or who he sees or what they tell him. She knows where they keep the daggers, wrapped in leather in the roof, and knows to keep the children from them. She knows what food to give him to take if he suddenly says that he will be away for a few days, and who to ask if he’s away for longer than he said. She is very calm if he happens to give her a message to tuck into the baby’s wrappings and pass to a man selling saltfish at the market.

His job, in these days, is to gather followers. A movement of revolution needs an army and each man must be recruited individually.

He travels to Acre, and then to Galilee, and talks to the strong men who are gathering their fishing nets in from the great lake. Their arms are knotted with muscles. Their thighs are bunched like tree trunks. Their bodies are meaty like bulls’. These are men who can thrust with a sword or a spear and pierce straight through another man’s body so that the point sees daylight on the other side. It is men like these that he wants. This is how to secure power, he sees. Work hard, be loyal to those who have much help to give you, but secure your own followers too. A day will come when Rome is gone. But before that, he will slowly become stronger and more powerful.

“Come and follow me,” he says to the fishermen, “follow me and free the country from tyranny.”

“We cannot follow you,” they say, “we have hauls of fish to pull in and families to feed.”

And he says, “Is not God the Master of all?”

And they say, “Yes.”

And he says, “Then will not God provide for His children, if they will only follow Him?”

And one of them, more curious than the others perhaps, says, “How shall we follow?”

And at that Bar-Avo gives them instruction. How they will become trusted friends of those who are zealous for the Lord. How they will listen for the code words that will show that the speaker is a true messenger from Bar-Avo. Such a messenger will tell them that he has “God alone as leader and master.” God alone. He says it again, and he knows how it feels to hear. No disgusting Emperor steeped in seamy sin upon his golden throne. No Roman army. No Prefect laying waste to good men’s lives upon his whims. God alone, he says to them, as leader and master.

“What of the priests?” says one, and Bar-Avo knows by this question that he has them.

“The priests connive with the Prefect and Rome and wheedle for their own fortunes. Haven’t you heard how rich the High Priest’s family is? Where do you think that money is from? It’s stolen from the Temple. And it’s blood money paid by Rome for our lives.”

And they believe, because they have heard the stories.

“God alone,” he says, “leader and master of all. None but God. God alone.”

They repeat it after him.

And when he walks on to the next village and the next most of the men stay, but giving him their word that he can call on them. And one or two — young men, men without families or men who long for the fight — walk with him. Strong fighting bodies, and he has them practicing their dagger thrusts in the evening and fashioning arrowheads. When he comes back to Jerusalem after three months’ walking, he has a score of men built like muscled oxen with him and another twenty times that number who have promised their right arms to the cause. He will not need them yet. But they will all come to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festivals of pilgrimage, and then suddenly he will have an army.

“There is a logic to battles,” says Av-Raham, welcoming him back with a great feast and a calf spit-roasted over a fire of old olive wood. “There is a way to sense when the city is ready for war.”

All his friends are there: Matan and Ya’ir, and Giora, who broke his ankle in the fall from the roof and walks with a limp now but is still useful to the cause. Bar-Avo’s own mother has pride of place by the fire and his brothers and sisters with her, because now he is a man of some influence. It pleases him to see his family’s hands shiny with grease from the calf slaughtered in his honor. His wife is here too, her body newly strange and enticing to him after so many months away, and their children filled to the brim with meat and dozing like a half-dozen little puppies draped across her lap. And Av-Raham and the elder men, who look at him with new respect now. They sent several men out to recruit but none has come back with such good news as he.

“I can feel it is coming now,” says Av-Raham. “It will not be long. A year or half a year. Have you heard about the holy men each claiming to be the Messiah? This is a sure sign that the time is near. And the people who follow them? They will come to us.”

They drink wine and eat meat. Their moment is at hand.

There are terrible rumors across the land of Israel, stories so shocking that they must be passed from person to person as quickly as possible.

Some say that the Prefect is demanding that the Temple give up its holy money, donated for the glory of God, to build some kind of latrine. Some say that the priests have agreed to it and that the gold will be transferred under cover of darkness. This news alone is enough to provoke angry shouts in the street, insults flung at soldiers, stones and wine jugs thrown from upper windows at them as they pass in the street.

Bar-Avo leads a raid on a caravan bringing wine to a wealthy Roman merchant. It is for actions like this that the Romans call them bandits and murderers, but that is to misunderstand: they are freedom fighters. They kill the guards who resist them and let those who run go free. Inside the wagons they find not only wine but chests of gold and letters for half the most powerful men in Jerusalem and Caesarea. The letters confirm that the Prefect, Pilate, is weak and has been demanding additional resources from Syria. The money goes to shore up their support in the west and the south. Bar-Avo’s esteem increases tenfold with this find.

Now, suddenly, he is the one to whom men come for advice. Av-Raham is still a leader, a man of much influence, but Bar-Avo is the rising star. They come to tell him about a preacher who slaughtered a cat outside the Temple to represent the sacrilege done there every day by sacrificing for the Romans, and one who has been making cures and who upset the tables in the Temple. They tell him about small risings and pockets of resistance. He is the one who decides what punishment should be meted out to men found to have been too generous to the Romans.

What does it take to make a man follow you? Not love. For love a man will mourn you and bury you when you are dead, but not follow you into battle. For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.

A few days before Passover the city is ready.

All of Bar-Avo’s four hundred men are coming to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festival. His provocateurs do not even have to make up stories, just remind people of what has already happened. They say, “Remember the Hippodrome?” and even men who were not born when it happened have heard the stories and see in their imaginations the great structure set aflame and thousands of men crucified up and down all the roads to the capital.

He holds a great feast just before Passover in a place where they’ve made camp with their allies, to the west of the city. They roast lambs upon great fires and sing songs and call down curses on the head of every Roman. He lays out his plans to the men — how it will be when we take control of the city, who will take which of the gates, who will storm the high places and David’s Tower. He is foolhardy, perhaps, because he cannot see every figure lurking at the edge of the crowd or ask where they have come from and what their name is. He holds up the bread and the wine at the meal and says, “Just as we eat this bread and drink this wine, so we will devour the armies of Rome and drink sweet victory!” And there are great cheers.

Shortly after dawn, when the birds are still calling out and the sky is streaked with pink-tinged clouds, he wakes with his wife next to him, soft and sweet-smelling, and thinks for a moment, why did I wake so suddenly, and then he hears the cry again. Loud and low and afraid: “Soldiers!”

They are coming from three sides. There is little time to do anything. He and Judith knew this day might come, that is why only the baby is with them, strapped to her body. The other children are safe with his mother. Judith kisses him hard, white with determination and anxiety, and runs to the horse. She is away and clear of the reach of arrows before he joins his men for the battle.

Someone must have given away their position, it is the only explanation. Someone sold them out for a handful of silver. As the soldiers close in, Bar-Avo looks at the faces of his men. One of them, with his guilty expression, will show himself a traitor. Not his dear friends, surely not, not Ya’ir, not Matan, not Giora? He watches them, while his men fight with the soldiers and he fights alongside the rest, even though he knows they will lose. He watches for men who seem to be hanging back in the fight — one of them knows he will not get his money if Bar-Avo is freed — and at last he thinks he spots who it is, though his heart breaks open. Ya’ir. Open-faced, strong and handsome, and the one he loved the best of all. Ya’ir is the one hanging back. Ya’ir is the one who, he remembers, took care to embrace him last night at the banquet and address him by name even though they all knew not to do so.

His men kill four soldiers, but the soldiers kill three of his before they reach him. There are young men — about the age he was when he started to riot — throwing themselves onto the backs of the soldiers and beating their heads to keep them from him. They know to make for him, it seems, presumably to cut off the head of the beast and leave it wriggling on the floor. He fights off two with his short sword, taking one with a slice to the throat, another with a jab to the groin, but more come and more, and someone wrests the blade from his hand and pushes him back.

As the soldiers reach him, he cries to his men, “Do not deal too harshly with Ya’ir!” and he sees the fear grow on the man’s face as he turns to run. They will kill him if they catch him. Good. And if they do not, and if he escapes, he will kill Ya’ir himself, for if the man wanted money he could always have come to Bar-Avo.

And now they are here, three men from Samaria, bought by Rome to fetch him to their dungeons and their Prefect. They will not take him easily. There is a dagger in his boot and he stoops, seeming to let his head go down, beaten, but draws out the blade in one easy motion and slices through the back of the ankle of the man nearest to him. He falls to the ground at once, and in the gap he leaves there’s a break in the wall of men. Bar-Avo calculates and thinks: I could run now and regroup the men in the forest. But as he takes one step forward, there is a starburst at the back of his head and black spots before his eyes and then he knows nothing at all.

The next thing is the closest he ever comes to death, although death has always walked beside him like an old friend.

Before this he imagined he would meet death in battle, or that death would catch him when he tried to leap from one building to another and misjudged it and so fell into the waiting palm of death instead. Or that death would be a wolf on the road when he was alone and had left his knife in the camp. Or that death would be a Roman sword where he did not see one coming, the one he failed to dodge. He had never imagined capture.

When he wakes in the cell and realizes what has happened, he tests out how it feels. His head thumps, his arms and legs ache, there is a twisting in his belly. Very well, this is what it feels like to be injured in battle and not to take any food or water. He needs a woman with warm water to bathe him and a boy with a pitcher of cold water to quench his thirst, but neither of those things is here.

It does not feel like a disgrace, though. He had thought it might. It makes him angry and it makes him cunning. While he lives, there is a way out. He has learned that from the countless skirmishes with the Roman soldiers. The only man who can never escape is a dead man — while he lives, even surrounded by a ring of swords, he can look about him, identify what there is to use here and make good his escape.

He sits up and sees for the first time that there is another man, weaker than him, in here. He can tell from the way the man moves that he is not a trained fighter, or trained to endure many blows. The other man coughs and shivers but otherwise is so still that Bar-Avo would not have known there was anyone else in this small stone room with dirty straw on the floor.

“You,” says Bar-Avo, “what’s your name?”

The man remains silent. Bar-Avo can see his dark eyes staring at him, hungrily he thinks. With great intensity. Bar-Avo is not daunted.

“I am Bar-Avo,” he says. “I command some of the zealous forces around Jerusalem. Tell me, friend, have you fought alongside us against Rome? Or have you battled for freedom in some other way?”

This is an obvious gambit, but in the context it is more likely to succeed than not. Men in Roman jails have often been rebels, or might like to style themselves so after the fact. At the very least, men in Roman jails have no love for Rome.

“I am going to die,” says the man slowly.

Ah. Yes. It takes some men this way.

“That is certainly their intention,” says Bar-Avo, “and they surely aim to carry it out. But if you have made your peace with God there is nothing to fear from death. Do not be afraid.”

“When I die,” says the man, “the whole of creation burns, and God Himself descends from heaven to judge the righteous and the guilty.”

Hmm.

“I can see you are a great teacher,” says Bar-Avo after some thought, “and that the spirit of God is in you. Tell me, do you have many followers?”

“All of the earth are my disciples, but it must not be spoken. Do not speak of it.”

It is very possible that this man will be of no use whatsoever. Nonetheless, he must sound him out. He has heard strange men like this before and knows their usual preoccupations.

“The time has not yet come for you to be revealed, I understand.”

The man nods slowly and shifts his hands. The shackles clink.

“The world will burn,” he says apropos of nothing, “when the abomination that causes desolation is in a forbidden place, then there will be great earthquakes and famines. It is then that I will come in clouds with great power and glory. Only then will my name be known.”

There is something about him, it is curious. Although the things that he says are nonsense and Bar-Avo has met ten times ten of his kind, nonetheless there is a conviction to his voice. Perhaps a hundred times a hundred such madmen have merely ordinary skill of rhetoric and so they are not believed and people see in them only a sad wreckage of a confused mind, but one in ten thousand are gifted with this combination: the calm manner of self-assurance, the penetrating gaze, the low commanding voice, the particular way of holding his limbs even now, even shackled. God throws such a one together from time to time: an arresting man. If he had not been thus mad, he could have been a great man.

“I know who you are,” says Bar-Avo. “I have heard about you. You are Yehoshuah of Natzaret. You have near six hundred men with you, they say.”

He had not heard that the man was captured. But he had heard that there was such a man: a healer, a caster-out of demons. Some of his own men had gone to seek healing for a wound that would not knit or a deaf ear.

“There will be more,” says Yehoshuah, “there will be many more. Listen”—and Yehoshuah leans forward and Bar-Avo, despite his mind, despite his sore limbs and his aching head, cannot help leaning forward too—“listen Bar-Avo, son of no one, don’t you think that God Himself will take his revenge for what has been done in this city? You make your plans and gather your forces to you, and you hope to overturn His will, but don’t you know that He has sent the Romans to scourge us so that we’ll repent and return to Him before the end of the world comes? Bar-Avo, king of bandits, God is angry with His creation and the time has come to fold it up and put it away. You are as much a tool of His will in this as any Roman soldier.”

Bar-Avo shivers. He has thought this himself, alone, late at night. Where is the Lord in all this? When he is fighting to rid the country of Rome, when he wants to see the holy Temple purified of their unclean bodies, isn’t their presence a sign that God has turned His face away? And if He has turned His face from Jerusalem, it can mean only one thing.

“Are you a prophet?”

Yehoshuah smiles.

“I may not tell who I am.” He pauses. “It is no accident that you and I are in this cell together.”

Bar-Avo struggles. There are more false prophets in Jerusalem than seeds in a pomegranate, and he cannot say why this one is striking him so forcefully. Perhaps it is just that his head is sore and he knows this may be his last night on earth.

“If you are God’s prophet, why not tell your men to join with ours? To fight with us and drive the Romans from Jerusalem and set up God’s house again?”

Yehoshuah smiles and wipes his dirty face with his dirty, shackled hand.

“Bar-Avo, murderer and leader of murderers, do you think God needs help to do His work?”

Bar-Avo is stung and impatient. This is the same rhetoric he has heard a thousand times from the people who support the Temple, who preach moderation, who don’t trust in God but in their own full bellies and warm beds.

“God has told us what He wants already. He says that no idol shall be tolerated, that we shall destroy all those who make graven images. He has given us work to do already and we are too cowardly to do it. Join with us, do the work God has commanded, turn the heathens out.”

“We are far beyond that time now,” says Yehoshuah. “God has cast His judgment on the land.”

Bar-Avo looks at him. His head throbs, his vision pulses with beads of light at the corners of his eyes. He knows he may die tomorrow on a cross set up by Rome.

“Shall we not try?” he says, and his voice is cracked and he longs for water although he knows they will not bring it, for he is already dead in a sense. “Shall we not strive with all our might to do what is needed, and if God in His wisdom decides to slay us all, shall we not then die knowing that we fought as hard as we could, that we tried for freedom?”

Yehoshuah says nothing.

“Shall we not strive to live? That is all we know, that life is good. Shall we not fight to gain our own lives?”

Yehoshuah says, and he smiles as he says it, “God’s will, not my will be done.”

And Bar-Avo, who has always been a fighter and a survivor, who has crawled out of holes not quite as dark but almost as dark as this one, finds himself thinking: very well, then. If this is your choice, you make my choice easier. Because he has a notion of what might happen next, since it is getting close to Passover and Jerusalem will be full of angry men and Pilate is a damned coward.

They come for them early in the morning. One guard places an earthenware vessel filled with dank, warm water in front of Bar-Avo. He drinks it greedily to the bottom before he even checks whether a similar jar has been given to Yehoshuah. It has, but the man drinks sparingly, and washes his face. Bar-Avo rubs at his face with the corner of his garment. He knows what is coming.

The guards kick at them to make them stand and, despite their shackled arms and legs, hustle them along the passage towards the light. The breath of wind is a cool kiss to the forehead. The sky is bright and clear with early-morning streaks of feathered cloud. Yehoshuah does not look up at the sky, but Bar-Avo cannot keep his eyes from it until they are dragged into the house where Pilate has his office.

They bring both the men in to see the Prefect, one after the other. Bar-Avo waits in the outer vestibule — he stands with his legs shackled and his hands now fastened behind him and his back aching and his knees aching and his shoulders aching, and he listens to the conversation taking place inside the room as best as he can hear it.

Pilate says, “They tell me you’ve been going around calling yourself the King of the Jews.”

Silence. The sound of birds singing in the courtyard outside and of a maid clanging pots downstairs.

“Well, out with it. Are you the King of the Jews?”

“Those are your words.”

This is not a good answer, though it will make Bar-Avo’s task considerably easier. It would have been better at this stage to blame the priests, to imply that they had encouraged him to declare himself to foment rebellion against Rome. It would have been better to say that he would lay his men’s loyalty, however much that is worth, at the feet of Pilate. It would have been better even simply to deny it. “No, I am not,” would have been a better answer for a man who wanted to live.

There is a sigh and a sound of rustling paper.

“You understand that this is gross sedition and if you do not deny it and swear loyalty to your Emperor I will be forced to execute you?”

Pilate sounds tired and irritated. This is useful information which Bar-Avo might be able to turn to his benefit.

The man still says nothing when there is so much he could say that might save his life. Pilate doesn’t trust the priests any more than he trusts the people. There is always a crack to work a knife into, to twist the blade, to break open.

“Very well. Take him away.” This to the guards. They half drag, half bully Yehoshuah out the door directly past where Bar-Avo is sitting, but the two men’s eyes do not meet. Some men give up their lives for nothing, but Bar-Avo is not likely to do so.

They bring him in. He is standing, with his hands bound behind his back. Pilate is sitting at his ease, sipping on a cup of hot soup, for a little chill is in the air this morning. The whole thing will have to be played as carefully as a game of knives.

“Do you think he has run mad, that man Yehoshuah?” says Bar-Avo, before Pilate has a chance to ask his first question.

It is a bold maneuver, to speak first, but it is a calculated risk. This way he sets the tone: reasonable, thinking. But he asks a question also, deferring to Pilate. It is a risk. Pilate could have him killed here, for insolence.

Pilate looks surprised. Looks at him full in the face. Says at last, “You were with him in the cells, weren’t you? Was he mad then, or as sane as day?”

“He has moments of clarity and moments where he falls into insanity. I am not sure he knows what he’s done, or why. Everyone is looking for a Messiah. Every leader has followers who tell them that they are the Messiah. I think he’s started to believe them.”

Pilate shrugs and raises one eyebrow.

“Well,” he says, “Jerusalem won’t suffer for having one fewer of those. Now. You have brought a great deal of harm to this city and this nation. The sooner the people learn that no rebellion will stand against us, the better it will be for them. I propose to put you to death. However, if you are willing to give up your co-conspirators, I will give you an easy death by the sword. If you refuse, we will torture you and then crucify you.

“We will, for example, slice your tongue to pieces and pierce your eyes with nails. And we will, of course, arrest some others of your followers whose faces we know anyway, so that whatever you do it will be put about that you betrayed them. Do you understand? There is no chance for glory. Either torture and ignominy, or ignominy but a quick and merciful death. I only need a handful of names and locations. Let’s start, for example, with Giora. Tell me where he is now.”

“I do not know,” says Bar-Avo.

Pilate sighs. “You may be surprised,” he says, “by how much you will start to tell us when the branding irons are applied to your flesh. The ears, they tell me, are surprisingly sensitive. And the bottoms of the feet. Quite brave men find themselves babbling like women after having hot coals and iron scourges applied to the bottoms of their feet.”

It is time to take back this conversation. Pilate’s lines are too practiced now; he is in a rhythm which will be hard to break.

“Do you think any one of us tells the others where they are to be found?” says Bar-Avo. “Prefect, you know better than that.”

He lets it hang in the air for a second too long. The insolence of it catches Pilate short.

Bar-Avo pushes on: “You might as well ask that Yehoshuah where all his followers are now, all that rabble he brought with him from Galilee who fled as soon as he was captured. Every meeting place will have been changed the moment they knew I was taken alive. Every man I ever knew will have moved to another home. Every family will have been told to deny their sons. Prefect, you can beat me and scourge me for as long as pleases you, but don’t think for a moment that my bruised body will do more than excite greater hatred of you. Even if they think I am a traitor, they will still hate you more.”

Pilate looks at him. He knows that what he says has the ring of truth to it.

“A true leader,” says Pilate, “does not care whether he is hated, as long as he is feared.”

“And has it stopped them rising up? You’ll never hold Jerusalem like this,” says Bar-Avo. “Every man and every woman and every child will fight you. You can’t take us by fear, only by love.”

And he knows that this is the right thing to say, because his men have intercepted some of the letters from Syria and Rome, and he knows that this is what Pilate’s masters have been saying to him for months now. These exact words. Not by fear, but by love. Bar-Avo is not stupid. He is not ill-informed. He is the leader of many men.

“Do you want them to remember you like this, Pilate? As a bloody tyrant? A man who made the streets run red, not one who brought the civilization and order of Rome?”

This is a gamble too.

“They will remember me for discipline. Rome does not bring marble and gold only, Rome brings order and obedience.” Pilate is talking to himself now, for the most part. Bar-Avo has him. The right words at the right moment and Pilate is his now.

“If I were you,” says Bar-Avo, “I would release that man Yehoshuah and put me to the sword.”

Pilate stares at him and nods, as if he has said something tremendously wise and interesting.

“Why release him?”

“To show mercy. To bring the love of Rome as well as the scourge. You’ve done it before at the festivals. You know it works. It is clever.”

Too much to compliment him in this fashion? No. Pilate is as vain as any man.

“They have already come to ask, it is true.”

“Then release him. He has a body of followers, many of them women.” He drops this in as if it is in Yehoshuah’s favor. It is not. Rome takes only a little more account of women than Greece ever did. “That is my advice to you”—he lowers his head—“in return for a swift and merciful death. I’ve killed your men. Your soldiers will love you for doing away with me. It will be easier for you to keep them in line.”

Pilate’s lip curls.

“The soldiers will obey me because it is their duty so to do. They owe it to me, to Rome, to their Emperor.”

He motions with his head to the little golden statue of the God-Emperor in the alcove shrine opposite the window.

“You should still execute me. If you want to be wise.”

It is so easy to bait Pilate. He is entirely unable to conceal his reactions. He is angry that Bar-Avo has suggested a wise course of action, implied that he is not wise already.

“I know what men like you are. You consider it an honor to die at our hands, fighting. What if I don’t want to give you that honor? What if I keep you here as my slave? There’d be no martyr’s death for you then, no crowd of wailing women to keep your name alive and use it to spur on further rebellion.”

Bar-Avo shrugs.

“I am in your hands, Prefect. Do with me as you see fit.”

Pilate narrows his eyes, certain now that some game is being played with him.

“And what if I let you go?”

“My men would, of course, be delighted.”

“Yes,” says Pilate, “yes, your men. Ten thousand of them, they say, across Judea, loyal to you.”

This is not true, but Bar-Avo does not contradict him. There are nearer five thousand and they are loyal not to him but to the cause. To live free is more important than merely to live. Loyalty to him would hurt that cause. They must be willing to give him up if necessary; he would do the same to them.

“Yes,” Pilate muses, “let them taste the mercy of Rome as well as the kiss of her strap.”

The man is not an idiot, and yet he behaves like an idiot. It is pride. If another man were considering this course of action, Pilate would bring him up easily on five or six points which make it unthinkably foolish. But he cannot bring his mind to bear on his own plans.

“They would be grateful to me, would they not, if I released their master?”

“They would suspect I had turned traitor,” says Bar-Avo, because he can see the growing, gathering shimmer of the way to save his own skin.

“Hah!” Pilate smiles broadly. “Even better! Gratitude and mistrust. Magnificent. You could not have promised me anything better if you had designed it yourself.”

Bar-Avo tries to make his face as impassive as a stone. As if the thought of what he has done has hardened his heart.

“I’ll tell you what,” says Pilate, “I’ll make a game of it.”

His men are in the crowd. Bar-Avo sees them as soon as he and Yehoshuah are brought out blinking into the light of the square below Pilate’s home, the place where later on the Prefect has his soldiers massacre all those men.

They are here to see him die, perhaps. Or to start a riot, or join in with one if one starts. They mingle quietly with the crowd. The hoods of their cloaks are drawn up around their faces. There are perhaps two hundred people here and probably forty of them are his own men. Because of the respect and love they hold him. Not to try to save him, but to witness his death and bear witness of it to his friends, and to his mother, and to his wife and sons.

He sees two or three of the friends of Yehoshuah in the crowd. He had a smaller band, of course, and they were not strong men, not used to fighting or to witnessing death at the hands of Rome. He wishes more of Yehoshuah’s men were here. Such a united force should see how Rome kills. If they saw, they could not help but rise up.

Pilate addresses the crowd.

“People of Jerusalem!” he shouts. “I come here today to offer you a choice!”

The crowd stirs and mutters. He has played this little game before. He does not always do it, only sometimes. So they should not become complacent, of course.

“Your will is important to me! Rome does not wish to hurt you, only to bring you order and good governance. Therefore, I have two criminals here: the preacher Yehoshuah, who called himself the King of the Jews, and Barabbas, a rebel who murdered men during the rebellion.”

There is more muttering. Not men, the crowd are thinking to themselves, soldiers. Who do the Jews kill in a rebellion? Not other Jews. Soldiers. Even those who didn’t know that Bar-Avo had killed soldiers know it now. Pilate has as good as said: here is a freedom fighter, a hero. Does he know he’s said it? It’s so hard to tell with that man whether he’s being cunning or stupid. Or whether his cunning is the same as his stupidity, because only a stupid man would try to be cunning like that.

“I am going to allow you to decide which of these men shall live and which shall be executed. They are both criminals, both found guilty by your courts!”

But we know who influences the courts, murmur the crowd, we know who tells them whom they may find guilty and whom innocent.

“This man Yehoshuah has blasphemed against your God! And this man Barabbas has murdered men!”

But there are women in that crowd to whom Bar-Avo’s men have given bread when the Romans burned the wheat field. There are men in that crowd whom Bar-Avo’s men have fought with, defending their homes from bandits. There are children in that crowd whom Bar-Avo’s men have found medicine for. No group of guerrilla fighters can last for long without the love of the people they live among. What could Yehoshuah possibly have to compare with that? No preacher has anything to offer to an oppressed people that compares with bread and water and tinctures and swords.

“So which do you choose?” he shouts. “You can save one and only one! Which of these men will you save?”

And there’s no choice, none at all. Yehoshuah’s friends try to call for him, but there aren’t enough of them, and they’re drowned out by the voices rising up one on another on another saying, “Barabbas! Give us Barabbas! Blessed Barabbas!”

It is a pitilessly cruel game. If they refuse to call out names — and it has happened before, like gladiators refusing to fight — Pilate will simply kill both men. It is entirely unfair. It makes a mockery of life itself. And yet what can anyone do but participate?

Bar-Avo stares at Yehoshuah. Yehoshuah is looking out at the crowd, where his scattered friends are shouting themselves hoarse on his behalf. There is a man with tears streaming down his face as he shouts, “Yehoshuah! Yehoshuah!” Bar-Avo can see his lips moving, but the sound does not reach, so great is the clamor of “Barabbas! Barabbas!”

Pilate is disconcerted by the vehemence of the cries. Whatever calculation he thought he’d made, it seems to have fallen out differently from his expectation. His shoulders slope. He quiets the crowd. They settle down watchfully. He could do anything.

“But this man,” he says, “don’t you want this King of the Jews?”

And it’s clear to the crowd that he’s mocking them now. As if they’ve been left with any such thing as a rightful king, as if they’d be able to tell their rightful king when they saw him.

It is nearly one hundred years this year since Rome took hold of Jerusalem and breached her and penetrated her by force. He is asking this question as if every king for one hundred years hasn’t been placed on the throne by Rome. He despises them, and it is obvious in every word he utters.

“What shall I do with this King of the Jews?” he says.

“Execute him!” shouts someone in the crowd, and the rest take up the cry of “Barabbas!” again. The few pitiful voices calling out the other name are entirely inaudible.

How is it possible that a whole life can come down to this moment: seeing how many friends you have and how loudly they are prepared to shout your name?

Bar-Avo wants to live, he thinks, but not like this. But that is a lie. He realizes it as he stands there, with the humility of a man who has been for these past few days half dead, half alive. He wants to live and he does not much care how, as long as it does not destroy the cause he’s fought for. He and Yehoshuah are both weeping, and the preacher’s friends are still shouting his name, still desperately trying to save him, and it is obvious they love the man. If it were possible to save them both, Bar-Avo’s men would be shouting for that. If it were possible to expel the occupiers from the land by shouting, they would shout for that until their throats bled. But there is never the choice to save both. There is never more mercy than absolutely required.

A look crosses Pilate’s face, and he glances to his left and right as if he wishes he had more soldiers around him. If he were to refuse to give them Bar-Avo now, his life would be in danger. There are enough men in the crowd to rush them. Crowds have a single voice and mind and heart. This crowd wants Bar-Avo.

“Very well!” shouts Pilate. “I have heard your wishes! I hope that seeing the magnanimity of Rome will encourage you to be loyal! To love your Emperor! To stop your petty uprisings! I know that Barabbas, having felt this mercy, will join with me in longing for peace between the two great nations of Rome and the Jews!”

Yehoshuah’s friends are still calling out, they are trying to get close to the raised platform on which the men are displayed. Yehoshuah himself stands absolutely silent, his head bowed, his hands tied, like Bar-Avo’s, behind his back. Bar-Avo looks at Yehoshuah, while one of Pilate’s soldiers saws at the ropes that bind him.

And eventually Yehoshuah looks back. He seems shocked and frightened and alone. He understands that he has failed to win a popularity contest, that he has somehow not made enough friends, or loyal enough friends, to fight for him on this nonsensical battlefield.

Bar-Avo too has heard the sayings of the rabbis: that one good friend is worth an army of hangers-on, that fools consort with a multitude while the wise man keeps his counsel among a few whom he can trust. They are wrong, the rabbis, in this matter. In times of peace a man has the luxury of picking a few good friends. In times of war one must hoard the love of men as one lays down stocks of grain and oil and jars of water against an ill-fortuned time. Bar-Avo’s friends are his treasure house. They have saved his life.

Pilate does not have to release him, even still. There is no law that says he must obey the will of the people, just as no statute or edict from Rome has told him to ask them. But Pilate is too fearful a man to be willing to chance a crowd like this. He has rolled the dice hoping for Venus and it has come up Vultures.

They cut through Bar-Avo’s ropes at last. His wrists are sore, his hands numb. There is a gash on his right hand where the knife slipped — though they were none too careful with it and perhaps the wound was intended. The soldiers hustle him by his shoulders to the edge of the platform and half lower, half push him off. He looks back. Yehoshuah’s head is still hanging down. Their eyes meet as Bar-Avo reaches the ground and his friends begin to encircle him, hugging and patting and punching his shoulder.

Bar-Avo says, “I am sorry,” and though the sound of his words is obscured by the noise of the crowd he thinks that perhaps Yehoshuah sees the words form on his lips and understands, because the man’s head moves. It is something like a shake of the head, something like a thin smile, something like a sob in the movement of his shoulders.

He is touched by the man’s ambiguous gesture. As his friends sweep him away, he thinks that perhaps they should attempt to mount a rescue, as they might try to do for one of their own captains. But such maneuvers are risky at best — they would not have tried one even for him. They are more likely to end in losing twenty men than saving one. It is odd, really, that the idea has even crossed his mind, since this man is nothing to him. Except, of course, that this is the man who will die in his place, whose death has bought his life.

He has lived his life in the exact opposite fashion to the way this Yehoshuah has lived and that is why he, Bar-Avo, lives and Yehoshuah will die.

In the marble-floored plaza, as he is taken out in triumph, a few men and women are weeping. He turns his head again to see Yehoshuah led through the iron gates towards the dungeon from which he will travel to the place of execution. The gate closes fast behind him and Barabbas can no longer see his face.

He goes to sit beneath the men who are being crucified, later. He is the most free bandit and murderer in the whole of Judea now, for the Prefect has liberated him in front of a great multitude and so he can go where he pleases and do what he likes.

Besides, two of the men crucified that day have fought alongside his men, stealing grain and arms from the Romans. He pays the guards to cut their wrists as the nails go in so that death will come to them more quickly and he waits until he sees them slump. He has their bodies taken down for burial before the evening, as is right. He has already told his loyal lieutenants to bring pouches of silver to the men’s families. This is how a man makes friends and keeps them.

He would have told the guards to do the same trick with Yehoshuah, to ease his passing, but some of the man’s family and friends are standing by. One of them, the man he’d seen weeping in the plaza, spits and shouts as he walks past, “Murderer! You should be up on that cross, not my master!”

And he finds he no longer has a mind to help that death go swiftly.

It is not, in any case, the worst method of execution Rome has ever devised. There is a particular thing they do which begins with hanging a man upside down by his ankles between two trees and slowly, across many hours or even days, sawing him vertically in half from scrotum to neck. It is astonishing how long a man will live like this, upside down, when he would die right side up. By contrast, crucifixion is merciful. There is another thing he has heard is done in Persia, where maggots of a particular beetle are introduced under the flesh and the man is fed milk and honey to keep him alive while the maggots burrow through his sinews and make their nest in his belly and sometimes crawl out alive through his eyes and ears and nose while he is still himself just living. Sufficiently living to scream, anyway. Death, the only inevitable item on the list of life, is nonetheless such a constant matter of human creativity. He finds he has an odd admiration for it. He would never have had the ingenuity to devise such methods.

He wonders, as he lingers by the crosses, whether it is his destiny to end his days here too, pinioned and waiting to be food for ravens. It is most likely, he thinks. That is how it will probably fall out. He will join all the thousands upon thousands of men whom Rome has nailed up, but the important thing is to make sure he has scratched her face before that day.

Afterwards, he finds the man who betrayed him. His dear friend Ya’ir, the one who was his most loyal and trusted follower, the one who fought alongside him, his most precious Ya’ir.

Bar-Avo is crying when he talks to Ya’ir.

“I trusted you,” he says, “I gave you everything, I looked after you and your family, you are my brother.”

Ya’ir, tied with rope at wrists and ankles, gagged across his mouth, says nothing.

“If you had a reason for me, any reason at all,” says Bar-Avo, “maybe it would be different.”

Ya’ir does not even attempt to speak. His eyes are dead already. What can the reason possibly have been? Only that he had capitulated, taken the Roman money, agreed to betray them because he had accepted that Rome was the only power and had the only favor worth gaining.

Bar-Avo leaps up from his chair and strikes him across the face, but still he says nothing.

They keep him for three days. They have to perform a certain number of unpleasant tasks to be sure they’ve found out everything he knows. Bar-Avo watches, for the most part, but does not participate, and it becomes clear over time that Ya’ir does not know much.

They hang him in the end, from a tree near the village where they’ve been hiding, and put it about that it was a suicide. If anyone questions this story or even wonders if it was true, they do not dare to say it out loud.

He sends later to root out what happened to that Yehoshuah’s followers and family. It is not only sentiment that makes him do it; a rabble army looking for a new leader could be useful to him. He gets back a garbled tale that the dead man’s body was stolen, probably by his family, but perhaps by some of the hangers-on who wanted to set up a shrine to the holy man. He asks his own people to report back if they find out the truth of the story, but no one ever tells him a convincing tale about it.

In those days, Av-Raham dies. It is not sudden or violent; he is an old man now, nearing eighty, and his spirit burns brightly but his body is frail. He has time to gather his men to him, to tell them to keep fighting — they know that — and to name his successors. Bar-Avo is named, of course, as the captain of the north.

They bury Av-Raham just before sunset and stand weeping over his grave for a long time. Bar-Avo lingers after the other men have departed, wanting to wring some final wisdom out of the dry earth. It is for him now to decide how to prosecute the ongoing war.

He says, “They captured me. They have spies among our ranks. If we push on we may perish and be defeated.”

And from the grave he hears Av-Raham’s voice and smells the man’s scent, the smoke and the mild smell of frying onions: “Better perish than live under occupation. Better every man dead than that.”

Bar-Avo is pragmatic. He knows that the dead often appear in dreams and visions, that just because you think you have smelled the scent of a man’s clothes after he has died does not mean that you should do what that voice tells you.

Pilate is mobilizing his forces, striking back at the “bandits” who have harried his supply lines for months. It might be a time to retreat, to scatter the men to their homes and wait for the crackdown to end. It is not Bar-Avo’s decision alone, but he is part of the decision. He says no, tell the men to come to the city even still. If there is no fight there will at least be a mighty demonstration of anger. We are ready now, or we will soon be ready. The people want to overthrow the Romans.

And he is right that the city is ready to burn. That is the riot over the money for the aqueduct. Six hundred people die in the public square.

Bar-Avo is not one of them, though he sees his friends cut down, and women, and children. His own son, still just a boy, might have been one of them if he, Bar-Avo, had not gathered him into the folds of his cloak and broken through the Roman line using his teeth to tear at the soldier holding him back, bringing up his mouth red and with a chunk of the man’s face warm and bleeding in his mouth.

Men and women and children. It is the smell Bar-Avo remembers most as the years cloud up his memory of precisely how he escaped and who he left behind to die when he ran.

Bar-Avo pricks himself with this memory when he grows weak, when his heart says for any moment “enough.” It will never be enough until they have rid the land of every Roman on it. It will never be enough.

And perhaps on the same day that Bar-Avo decides this, Pilate begins to think to himself: so many dead, and still the thing is not concluded? Perhaps he does think so, there is no way to be certain.

And then it is the last days of summer and the wheat is high, and then it is autumn when the fruit trees bring forth their goodness, and then it is winter when the winds howl, and then it is spring again and the earth which has died is reborn. And ten years can go past like this quickly and they continue the fight.

Pilate is finally ordered home to Rome after one massacre too many, and there is some brief rejoicing. It is true that he has killed many thousands of Jews, that his men have left the city worse and more afraid and more angry than it has ever been, but at last he is gone, and perhaps this is hopeful.

In Rome the old goat Emperor Tiberius dies and a new emperor ascends to rule. His name is Little Boots and he is full of the promise of a new era of tolerant understanding, but it falls out that he is madder than his predecessor and the name Caligula is soon a byword for cruelty and sickness. Caligula believes he is a god — though the people of Judea already know that no man can ever be a god — and sees no reason, as a god, to keep to the old compacts between Rome and Jerusalem. He orders his statue to be placed in the holy Temple. His generals attempt to explain to him that the Jews will rebel, that this has been tried before, that they would have to kill every man in the city to make this happen.

“Then kill every man in the city,” Caligula says. Or something similar to that. Or something as unconcerned as that, at least.

Caligula’s madness has encircled him so that although he rules an empire as wide as any ever known, he is entrapped within the labyrinth of his own mind. He cannot see beyond the horizons of his own loves and hatreds, his own family, his own cock. He fucks his sister, they say, and makes his horse a consul, and when his sister falls pregnant he cuts the unborn child out of her belly.

In Jerusalem the new prefect, Marullus, attempts to place the statue. And the anticipated consequences come to pass.

Bar-Avo has three thousand men under his orders now in Jerusalem alone, and more importantly the people are with them, the households give them shelter, the young men come to fight with them. This statue of the Emperor Caligula, his nose upturned to the heaven, a laurel wreath on his mad brow, is too much for the people of Judea to tolerate and the High Priest cannot convince them, does not even try to do so. Caiaphas is gone now, and it is another of Annas’s sons who meets with Prefect Marullus to say, “Not this, not this, there will be no way to stop the killing.” But the Prefect, even if he were the best man in the Empire, would have to obey the commands of his God-Emperor.

Caligula has set himself against the God of Israel. Upon Him particularly and necessarily, for both are jealous gods. All the people who will have to die to wage that war of god on God are insignificant.

Massacres and riots and rebellions and battles are nothing new now. Mothers sharpen weapons for their sons. Grandparents shelter fleeing rebels, saying, “He was never here, we have seen no one.” Men are slaughtered in the noonday square and their bellies sliced open so that their entrails slide out glistening as they yet scream. There is death upon death, and though it never starts to feel easy, it begins to feel expected. The land is becoming accustomed to living this way.

For every Roman excess there is a rebellion. Every rebellion is put down with increasing brutality. Every act of brutality hardens the people a little further, making the next uprising more violent. Every act of violence justifies a more extreme show of force in suppressing it. There are fewer and fewer people among the Jews who trust Rome at all. Even to speak of trusting Rome now, of wanting peace with Rome, is to forget the murdered sons, the repulsive statues in the Temple, the men with daggers concealed in their cloaks. The thing has no end. Or no end but one.

Bar-Avo sidles up to a man in the marketplace. Who is he? A baker, by the scent of him and the flour dusting his drawstring trousers and his leather shoes. Bar-Avo has never seen him before. He probably does not deserve to die. There is a crumb of dandruff above his ear. The back of his neck is red from too much sun. He has a hot boil starting just above the place where his tunic rubs his neck. Some woman probably loves this breathing body, or is used to it at least. Some woman would have a hot compress with fragrant herbs to draw the poison out of that boil this evening after his work is done. He should not have come here to stand in the marketplace.

To do good, sometimes, one must do evil. He reminds himself that this honest baker has paid his taxes like a good citizen of Rome. That perhaps he sends loaves to the Roman garrison or to the Prefect. That he collaborates, over and over again, just by living in the city and not rising up against them.

Bar-Avo’s cloak flows around him in loose, deep folds. Within the cloak is the dagger. The crowd surges and bounces. There are sizzling scents of freshly cooked meat from the stalls. People are loud, shouting for attention from stallholders, watching out for the thieving hands of small children, demanding from one another where they need to go next and have they tried yet the bread with dill, the cheese, the wine, the garlic, the oil? He waits until a surge pushes him forward into the baker.

They learned the lesson Pilate taught them extremely well. Pilate understood the methods of terror. Pilate is no longer the prefect, but his methods are still effective.

Bar-Avo’s dagger slides out so smoothly. No one sees it within the folds of the cloak. He finds the baker’s ribs with a steadying hand and sends the dagger through just here, behind the heart, with that horizontal slicing motion that cuts the heart in two. The baker says “ump.” That is all. It was an easy death, insofar as men are ever afforded an easy death. His body slides against the wall but the crowd does not let him fall completely to the ground quite yet, they are pressed so tightly. No one has even noticed. Bar-Avo moves a little away. It does not have to be far. It is not wise to try to run. He has learned that before.

He has already sidled up to the meat stall, is haggling with the vendor over the price of a pound of chicken hearts, when someone else finds the baker is dead. It is a woman. She is screaming over the body slumped sideways against the wall, the red flower blooming across his back.

People still remember the massacre in the public square. They know whose trick it is to conceal men with daggers in the crowd. Bar-Avo says to himself: it is not I who have done this, but Rome, who taught me that this is the way to bring fear to the city. The crowd begins to turn towards the baker’s body to find out what the commotion is. Now. It is time now.

“Romans!” shouts Bar-Avo. “Roman spies! They’re among us with their long daggers!”

“Yes!” shouts someone else, because people are always eager to spread bad news and to lie to augment it. “I’ve seen them in the crowd! I saw a soldier’s knife under a cloak! They’re here! They want to kill us all!”

There is a stampede then. Stalls are overturned, hot fat spitting as it fizzles on the moist stone and makes the ground slick, piles of good fresh bread trodden into the dirt, dogs barking and grabbing for unattended meat, apples rolling here and there, women screaming and men taking the opportunity to grab what they can. People fall and other people tread on them, and children are crushed up against the walls and little fingers are squashed underfoot. Bar-Avo sees a child screaming, under a teetering pan of hot oil for frying cakes, and he snatches him up, lifting him above his head, so that he is out of reach of the crowd, which now thinks with one mind.

That is what he has learned in his life. What a crowd thinks. How to change what a crowd thinks. How not to think like them.

He holds the child above the crowd, smiles at it as he would at any of his own children, gives it a roll he has snatched from one of the stalls, dipped in rendered goose fat. The child munches contentedly and when the commotion has settled down the mother finds them and takes her baby gratefully, with a smile.

By this time the market is quieter and almost empty, with just a few sobbing stallholders to count the cost. Let the people remember, he thinks. Let them remember that they are not free. That this happened today. Just because the Romans did not do it, the Romans could still do exactly this. They must never forget that these people are in their homeland. Whatever is necessary to do to be rid of them must be done.

This was the special thing Pilate taught them. The cloak and dagger. Bar-Avo and his men do not often do it. But sometimes, when things begin to seem too peaceful, when it appears that perhaps they have forgotten. People need to be reminded all the time. Most men will simply fall asleep if you let them.

They gather more and more men to them. Not just fighters but preachers, fishermen, healers, sailors, spies in distant lands. His men go combing the streets for people who will be sympathetic to their cause. There is a point when they are particularly interested in healers and holy men — people listen to these men when perhaps they will not listen to a man with a sword. If a man can heal, it is a sign that God is with him. They want God with them.

So they bring him, once, a man who worships that dead preacher, Yehoshuah, as they bring many men whom they have found preaching in the marketplace or teaching in a quiet spot at the edge of town. The worship of Yehoshuah is a rather esoteric cult, though not the strangest that exists, and the man seems grateful for the attention.

His name is Gidon of Yaffo and he is not far off Bar-Avo’s own age, rangy and quietly fervent, speaking as Yehoshuah did of the end of days, which will surely come within our lifetimes. He tells how Yehoshuah died and rose again from the grave and was seen by several people.

“Did you see it?” says Bar-Avo.

“I have seen it in my heart,” says Gidon of Yaffo.

“That is not the same thing. Did any man you would trust with your life see it?”

“I would trust them all with my life for they have seen the risen Lord.”

“But you did not know before to trust them. And if the Messiah is come,” says Bar-Avo, “why does not the lion lie down with the lamb? Where is the great crack of doom that presages the end of the world and the final judgment of all mankind? Where is the true king of Israel now, if he has performed this strange trick and returned from the grave? Why does he not take his throne?”

“These things will happen,” says Gidon of Yaffo, “soon and in our days. I have heard stories from the very mouths of those who saw miracles. Before this generation has passed away, there will be the signs and portents, the lord Messiah will return and the Temple will run red with blood.”

“That last,” mutters Bar-Avo to Isaac, the man who brought Gidon of Yaffo to him, “will surely happen, for we will make it happen. Fellow,” he asks, raising his voice, “will you take arms with us to fight the Roman scum?”

Gidon shakes his head. “We do not fight for this broken land and this corrupt people. When our Lord returns he will cleanse the earth himself.”

“Then you are of no use to me,” says Bar-Avo, and sends him on his way.

Isaac says to him, “Romans as well as Jews are taking on this teaching.”

Bar-Avo shrugs.

“I have heard it preached in synagogues in Egypt and in Syria. Slaves and women like it, for they say that they encourage all to join in, with no exceptions.”

“Tell me again,” says Bar-Avo, “when there are as many temples to Yehoshuah as there are to Mithras or to Isis.”

“It might happen,” says Isaac stubbornly. “My grandfather said he remembered his grandfather telling him of when only a few men worshipped Mithras. There were not always such temples. Gods rise and fall—”

“As the angels on Jacob’s ladder, yes, I know. And only our God rises above them all and lives forever. And what good will it do if you are right and the dead man Yehoshuah becomes a god?”

Isaac blinks.

“He was a Jew, Yehoshuah. If he were…not like Mithras or Ba’al, but if his worship were even as widespread as the cult of Juno—”

“Juno!”

“All right, Robigus then. Even Robigus, the god of crop blight, if he were even as loved as that…a Jew…might not the Empire soften towards us?”

Bar-Avo looks at him. What a kindhearted boy he is. How did he get to be so simple, in a world this hard?

Bar-Avo speaks very quietly and low and very slowly.

“Rome hates us,” he says. “We are their conquered people and we are dust under their feet.”

“But if—”

“Listen. If they want something from us, they will take it. They will not stop hating us. They will find a way to say that the thing they want was never ours to begin with.”

Isaac looks at him with those trusting cow eyes.

“Do you think that when they send our good oil to Rome they say, ‘This is oil pressed by Jews’? They say, ‘This is oil brought from the far reaches of the Empire by the might of Rome.’ If Yehoshuah ends by being loved in Rome they will find a way to use him against us.”

Bar-Avo puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“You fight bravely,” he says, “and you love peace. I know it is hard to understand. We want to find a way towards peace. But the only way is the sword. If we do not drive them out, one way or another they will crush us.”

And Isaac is still looking uncertainly towards the man who preached long after Bar-Avo has gone.

And then it comes time for him to do what perhaps he had always been destined to do. If we believe that God has seen all things before they come to pass, that every woman is destined to bear the children she does, and every betrayer is bound to betray and every peacekeeper intended by God to attempt to keep the peace, perhaps too a warmonger is destined for that purpose by the good Lord who made him.

On the hillsides the mothers weep for their fallen sons. In the marketplace men preach curious doctrines and strange new ideas to fit with these uncertain times. In the Temple, Annas the former High Priest and father and father-in-law of High Priests, dies quietly without having secured the lasting peace he longed for. He dies knowing that war may come again at any minute, and that the streets of Jerusalem are no less bloody than when the Empire first breached the Temple wall. His sons gather to mourn him and one of the youngest among them, Ananus, becomes High Priest in his stead.

And it is morning and it is evening. And it is one hundred and thirty years since Rome first breached Jerusalem and still she squats over the city, enforcing her will, enslaving the people. And something must be done. Something more extreme.

It is clear to all that they are on the verge of open war with Rome. There have been scuffles, Romans have been thrown out of the city and are pressing their way back in. Some urge war and some urge peace. Ananus, the new High Priest, makes a speech in the center of Jerusalem. It is a good speech and a merciful one, calling upon the people not even yet to despair, for they may still come to some good accommodation with Rome and there need not be war. He calls on them to think of the values of their forefathers, and the love which they feel for peace. Annas, his father, would have been proud of his son for giving this speech and the people are moved by it.

Bar-Avo does not hear the speech but he hears word of it from a dozen different men. Well. So much blood spilled and yet still the thing is not done. How quickly people forget the taste of freedom, swapping it for this easy comfortable thing they call peace. Sleep is peaceful. Death is peaceful. Freedom is life and wakefulness.

He feels a kind of contempt for the people of the land these days. He is fighting for them, but apparently they do not understand why or feel gratitude. He has to lead them by the hand through every part of the journey and still they can be swayed off course by any mildly effective rhetorician in the public square.

Well, sacrifices must be made. For the good of the people, sacrifices must be made.

There is a storm the night they invade the Temple. It’s not a coincidence. The Temple is guarded by thick walls, by strong men. There are barred gates which are lowered at night to keep the treasures inside safe while the men sleep. The whole city of Jerusalem is a great guard to the Temple also. If they had tried to take the Temple on a dark quiet night, the moment one man saw them he would have shouted the halloo to the city and Jerusalem would have defended her greatest treasure and dearest joy.

So when the storm blows up, they know God Himself is signaling to them that it is time. When it comes louder and louder, when the thunder begins to roll across the sky in almost ceaseless peals and the rain lashes down and the wind screams, then they know that God has given them the cover they need. No one will hear them now, and no shouts of alarm from the Temple will reach the city. They gather their tools and their weapons and they run through the rain up the hill to the place where God lives.

Up on the hill, although they do not know it, Ananus has looked out at the approaching storm and taken a message from it too. God is saying, in words as clear as fire, that no one will stir from their houses this night. The rain has given them a night of peace, while the thunder is His voice shouting His presence over the land. They are safe, they are well.

“Tell your men to sleep,” he says to the Levite head of the guards. “Leave a few men to stand watch, but let the rest of them sleep tonight.”

And Ananus takes to his own warm bed in the Temple enclosure, sends word to his wife in the city that all will be well this night, gives his prayers to God for a good night and that his soul will be returned to him in the morning when he awakes. He plugs his ears up with soft wool to drown out the noise of the storm, pulls his pillow under his head and sleeps.

At the gates of the outer courtyard of the Temple, Bar-Avo’s men gather. They are sodden already. The driving rain which the wind sweeps in all directions has poured on them like buckets emptied over their heads and flung at their bodies. This is not the gentle rain of blessing. It is the rain of anger, of the God who knows that His terrible will is to be done this night and who is already full of rage at those who dare to carry out His plan.

There are ten of them at this gate. There will be others elsewhere. Even with the protection of the storm, the work must be done as quickly as possible. Bar-Avo is not here yet — this is work for young men. The team at the gate is headed by Isaac, who will one day distinguish himself gloriously in battle but today is simply extremely competent, directing the men to cut through the five iron bars of the main gate.

They bring out their saws. There is no other way. The saws shriek, metal biting metal. It could not have been done on any other night — a single howling cut would have wakened a dozen men from the deepest slumber.

The rain drives and they are soaked through and dripping and their fingers slip. One man makes a deep cut in his own hand with the serrated saw blade, filled with flakes of rust and iron from the gate. They wrap it up and continue to work. A lone guard makes his solitary round of the ramparts at the top of the Temple wall. They press themselves into the shadows as he passes. Soon enough, one bar is free, then another, then another.

The skinniest of them presses himself through the gap and they can work the saw two-handed, so it goes faster. The fourth bar is out when a guard dozing in the outer courtyard thinks he sees something hazily, through the rain, moving at the gate. He is a large man, fat and tall, carrying a stout belly proudly before him and a stout club by his side. As he sees the men at the gate he shouts back behind him and breaks into a heavy run.

There is not enough space for the others to get through yet. The skinniest of the men at the gate — his name is Yochim — freezes, his shirt and cloak plastered to his skin by the rain. He is shuddering. The guard grabs him by his clothes, hurls him against the gate, shouting and calling through the storm, but the thunder crushes his words. He bellows again for the other guards, as he picks up Yochim and then roars into the boy’s ear, “Where are the others? Where are your fucking friends?”

Yochim, dazed, blinded by the rain, deafened by the blow, lashes out with his hand, which he finds is still holding the saw, and the guard goes down, his face raked and his eye sliced in two. He is screaming and writhing as one of the other men passes Yochim a sword through the gate and, after a nod of confirmation, Yochim brings the point down through the guard’s throat.

The body jerks and trembles and is still. Yochim sinks to his knees for a few quiet moments while the wind whips up again around them and the thunder roars and there are three quick flashes of lightning one after the other. Then he scrambles to his feet again, wipes his face, leaving a long smear of bright red blood on his wet cheek, and they begin to saw again.

The bars pop free one after another. Isaac squeezes through the gap, scraping his arm on a protruding tongue of metal. Ariel and Joseph follow him, then the others, carrying their swords now openly in their hands. They walk towards the guards’ gatehouse. No one could see them if they looked out of that window, the rain is driving too hard and the night is too dark. They might see a shadow moving, but it could as well be a barred cloud moving across the face of the moon.

They stand by the door of the gatehouse. Inside it is warm and dry. Isaac boldly places his ear to the door. If someone inside opened it now, they would have his head off before any of the others could stop it. But no one opens the door. Isaac listens for a moment and holds up three fingers. Three guards.

They burst in, swords drawn, shouting with the raging voice of the storm that batters on the Temple. They slay one man before he has even been able to look around, a sword digging down into his neck from the top of his shoulder and dragged out again, leaving his head toppled at an awkward angle. The other two throw down their mugs and draw weapons to fight, but the numbers are too great.

One of them is a boy not much older than Yochim. He fights like a demon, whirling his arms and screaming and yelling. It is Isaac, the leader of the band, who steps in and cuts him with an upward thrust as his arms are raised, coming in through the armpit and slicing into the chest. The other man, older, in his fifties with a beard of pepper and salt, fights well and honorably. He backs himself into a corner of the room when he sees the numbers, forcing them to come at him one at a time. He manages to take an arm off one of the Edomeans — Haron — before they bring him down, bubbling blood from his mouth, falling to his knees and then onto his face.

There are more deaths. Six guards in the inner gatehouse. A dozen priests asleep in their beds — they surround them in the dormitory with raised swords and bring the blades down at the same moment so that all twelve die without waking. A man returning in the night from the privy dies with his head half in a dream he’d had of a woman — not his wife — bearing a garland of flowers. They give him a red necklace before he even knows who they are.

When they have taken the inner courtyard, they send for their eminent leaders — the men who are too old now to fight but will wish to see the glorious victory. They slit the throats of two guards posted at the door to the High Priest’s house in the Temple when one of the men goes to take a piss and the other comes to see where he went.

They think that the High Priest will have escaped into the Temple building. But he is waiting there in the upper chamber of his small house. Perhaps he did not think it could come to this. Or perhaps, like his father, he believes so strongly in the power of the office that he knows no harm will come to him. Who would hurt the High Priest? And perhaps he can still reason with them. Perhaps it is not too late for peace.

It is then that Bar-Avo comes, a warm fur robe around him and four strong men by his side. They have saved this for him. He is an old man, but still commands the respect he did in the prime of his life — Av-Raham taught him how to do that. He comes wrapped in layers of warm clothes and with one of his men holding a hood above his head to keep him dry.

As they cross the threshold of the Temple, through the gates that are now thrown open, Bar-Avo finds himself thinking again of that man who was crucified in his place by Pilate, half a lifetime ago. Of how certain he was that the world was coming to an end, and how perhaps it is coming to an end, perhaps it has always been his place to make it come to pass.

They enter the chamber of Ananus. He has been the son most like his father, the one most fit to take Annas’s mantle as far as the business of accommodating Rome goes. He has tried to keep this worthless peace, he has apologized for Rome and made excuses for her. He has made the daily sacrifices to Rome in the holy Temple. Bar-Avo has already had his elder brother Jonathan killed. Ananus does not know Bar-Avo’s name, but he knows whom to fear.

When he sees who is there, his body tenses. He begins to shake. His lips become pale. He tries to call out for the guards, then stops himself, saying, “No, no, they’re dead already, aren’t they? Dead, for you have killed them, haven’t you? Yes, I know you have.”

Bar-Avo hits him across the face. It is not a hard blow. But no one has struck the High Priest in quite some time, probably since he was a little boy. He turns very white. Does he begin to understand now the seriousness of his situation?

“What do you want?” says Ananus.

Bar-Avo smiles. “Just to talk, High Priest. For now, only to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to a man like you.”

Bar-Avo strikes him again. It is like a game between them. Bar-Avo’s composure does not alter as he hits the High Priest, or as he sits back in his chair and says, “Very well, then. I shall say a few things to you.”

He reminds himself suddenly of another interview, where he was the one standing, and his interlocutor was sitting just so, composed, behind a desk. Is he Pilate now? Is any man with enough swords at his disposal Pilate?

They have the usual dance.

Bar-Avo requests information about the strongholds of the city, about the weapons in the Temple. Ananus refuses to answer.

Bar-Avo flatters, suggesting that the High Priest has a great deal of influence with the people and that a speech from him could convince them to fight against the Romans.

“If every man in this nation took up swords against them,” says Bar-Avo, “they could not stand against us. United, we cannot be defeated.”

“You will kill us all like this,” says Ananus. “You and your fucking faction, you and your army of ten thousand men — don’t you know there are fifty thousand who serve the Temple? Don’t you think they’re more important than you? Them alone. Not even beginning to count all the others.”

“Traitors,” says Bar-Avo, “collaborators. Rome would control Jerusalem for ten thousand years if they had their way. The land must be free. The people thirst for freedom!”

“The people don’t care!” Ananus is shouting now. “They support you because you bring them bread and water and willow bark for their fevers.”

“It’s more than you do.”

Ananus inclines his head, a little.

“We distribute bread also. And we give them a place to talk with the Lord. Most people…listen, ordinary people”—and Ananus has never sounded more patrician than now—“out of a thousand men, do you know what nine hundred and ninety want? A good price for their crops, a good husband for their daughter, good rain in its season and good sun in its time. They don’t care who rules. They don’t care about who controls holy Jerusalem as long as they can still go to their Temple and worship in peace. Most people want us to find a way to live peacefully with Rome.”

“Rome who slaughtered their sons? Rome who raped their daughters?”

“Even so. There will be more daughters and more sons, thank God. And shall they also be sacrificed to fight an unwinnable war?”

“We shall win,” says Bar-Avo, “for God is with us.”

Ananus shakes his head. He is so old now, though his eyes are still sharp and his mind is not clouded. Once he had been as tall and as strong as his father. The best of the brothers, people said, the best of the five of them, with those muscles in his shoulders like hard knots of old rope. But the power in his mind is not in his body now. He could not fight these men off.

“God is with the victor,” he says, “that is all God has ever done. Listen”—he places his hand palm down on the table, as if he concealed a trick underneath it—“it is not too late to make your peace. People remember my father. The men who were his friends are my friends now. I have a great deal of influence. I could speak on your behalf. Perhaps some arrangement can even be brokered. Your forces are strongest in the east, are they not? Perhaps we can make an agreement with the Roman captains in the east to give you some control of that region—”

Bar-Avo slams the heel of his hand onto the table.

“We do not negotiate,” says Bar-Avo, “with the occupying force. The whole of the land is ours.”

Ananus will not give up. No one who longs for peace can ever give up. Not even now, with the knife on the table before him.

“There will come a better day than this,” he says, “there will come a better way. God has promised us this land. Don’t you think it’s for Him to fulfill His promises in the time and in the way He sees fit?”

The storm whips up again and around Ananus’s little chamber the wind moans and the great gouts of rain like the blood of the lamb scattered to the four corners of the altar splatter in through the open window and the thunder crashes and the lightning cracks because God is angry with the land though Ananus does not know how he could have done differently.

He has lived his whole life under the words of his father, the same words the whole family lived by: keep the peace, keep the Temple working, keep the sacrifices which allow us to speak to God every day. It is he who has oiled the relationship between the new governor and the Temple, who has maintained his father’s old relationships with Syria and Egypt, with informants in Rome and along the coast. Every man must choose what to dedicate his life to and he has chosen this: only peace. Not justice, because peace and justice are enemies. Not vengeance, not loyalty, not pride, not family, not friends, not — on occasion — dignity. Only ever peace, which demands the full load of a man’s life. But his life has not been enough.

He is calling out loudly for his guards as they approach, although he knows his guards are dead, although the wind whips his words away and the thunder drowns them out.

Bar-Avo touches the spot on the man’s forehead, between the eyes, but it does not calm him. He places a restraining hand on the forehead and their eyes meet.

“I dedicate your death to God,” says Bar-Avo.

“You condemn all of us to bloody war,” says Ananus.

“Rather everlasting war,” says Bar-Avo, “rather everlasting flight and battle and flight again, than surrender now.”

And he remembers the crowd shouting, “Barabbas! Barabbas! Barabbas!”

There is that Roman game called “one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which.” If that game had fallen out the other way round, he would not be here now to complete this task, and that other man, Yehoshuah, would have continued his own curious work. And everything would have been different. But the world continues as it is and it is not given to us to see the contrary outcome. And Bar-Avo does not play that Roman game. It is he who decides who will live and who will die.

Ananus begins to say, “You are wrong,” but he does not complete the sentence.

And Bar-Avo puts the knife to Ananus’s throat and bleeds him like a lamb.