The Tongues of Men or Angels

Hours before the Crucifixion

Cephas follows the train of torches across the blackened valley and back into the city. Once inside the walls, on paved surfaces, the boots and spear butts of the Romans resound about confined and quiet streets; sufficiently so that Cephas doesn’t even need to keep the cortège in sight to pursue it. He stays permanently a half-road or an alley back and because of this he sees the faces appear at window slots and heads poke mongoose-like around doorways after the Romans and the high priest’s men have passed by. Even in Jerusalem such a procession of soldiery in the dead of night is a thing unusual. Many of the faces mutter inaudible curses; and the paving in places sparkles with mucus spat at distant Roman backs.

The cohort escorts the prisoner, still encircled in a throng of Temple Guards, to a building in the upper city, which can be nowhere if it is not the house of the high priest. Though to call Annas’s residence a house is to mistake a harrier for a songbird, or a warhorse for a donkey. It is a mansion, and even then a mansion like no other: the bastard offspring of a scared man’s castle and a Latin villa. No doubt trapped with Roman fancies: mosaic floors; marbles; floral frescos of crimson and gold; defrayments of a traitor’s guilt.

Once the high priest’s men-at-arms and the fettered Yeshua are ensconced inside, the cohort of Romans clatters off again, eastward, doubtless returning to the Antonia Fortress. But the gate to the courtyard of the high priest’s house is left open; the whole household is awake, it seems, and various servants, slaves, guards and attendants are gathered there, awaiting instructions or intrigued by events.

Cephas pulls his sword from out of his girdle and submerges it in the shadow-blacked bottom of a stone horse-trough on the street. His wet fingers immediately start to numb, so cold is the night. He pulls up his cowl and slips through the gate into the colonnaded courtyard, trying to be as stealthy as he can, without looking like a man trying to be stealthy.

A group, mostly of female servants, is gathered round a charcoal brazier and Cephas makes his way there to warm his hands and watch and wait.

Yeshua is inside the building, wrists still bound, alone but for the former high priest, Annas, his son-in-law, Kayafa, the current incumbent, and a handful of Temple Guards. The guards look to Annas for their orders — it is clear where real power still lies — though it is Kayafa who questions Yeshua.

‘You attacked the property and business of the Temple. And the authority of the priesthood. Do you deny it?’ Kayafa says.

Kayafa is portly — most priests are: they dine well. You can tell the children of the priests on Jerusalem streets: little fat princelings who eat meat every night when most boys taste it just a few times a year.

‘What authority of the priesthood?’ says Yeshua. ‘You are like one of your own grand Sadducee tombs: fine and whitewashed on the outside, but inside filled with dead men’s bones and all kinds of filth. So it is with you: the exterior of honest men, but brim-full of hypocrisy and crimes of collaboration.’

One of the guards strikes him then, a blow to the jaw. ‘Is that how you answer the high priest?’

Yeshua raises his head again, from where it was knocked low by the blow and looks at the man, who twitches a little from that look alone. Yeshua moves his jaw, as if in test that it is unbroken; his dense beard ripples as he does so, saltbush in a desert wind.

‘If I spoke amiss,’ Yeshua says, ‘state it in the evidence. Why strike me? I have spoken openly to the world. I have taught where all people congregate. Why question me? Ask my hearers what I told them. I have said nothing in secret.’

‘We have witnesses who say that you have threatened to destroy the Temple,’ Kayafa says.

‘Not the Temple,’ says Yeshua, ‘but your rule of it, you truckler puppet, you toad-eater. You wax fat from supping with Rome and oppressing the poor ones. Your obeisance to the heathen is ungodly. You aren’t worthy of your office.’

The guard strikes Yeshua again, and smirks at it this time, pleased to have overcome his fear.

Out in the courtyard, a servant girl recognizes Cephas.

‘You’re one of his disciples,’ she says. ‘I saw you walking with him on the day the crowds cheered him into Jerusalem. You’re with the Galilean, aren’t you?’

‘You are mistaken,’ Cephas says. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

‘Tell us,’ Annas says, ‘are you the King?’

‘If I say so, you won’t believe me. And if I deny it, you still won’t release me. So I’ll tell you the truth anyway. Yes, I am Israel’s King and you will yet see the coming of God’s Kingdom, just as Daniel prophesied.’

The servant girl stares at Cephas and insists, ‘It was you I saw. You are a head taller than the rest, I would hardly forget. And you speak like one of them too. You’re from Galilee. You are definitely with him.’

‘I am not,’ Cephas says. ‘I told you, you are mistaken. Half the Jews of the world are here for the Passover. There must be another hundred Galileans who look like me. I do not know him, woman.’

They don’t need witnesses. Annas and Kayafa have heard sufficient from Yeshua’s own mouth. The two high priests retire to a smaller adjacent chamber to talk in private.

On their own they seem different: sager and grimly sorrowful. They know what must be done, but there is neither pleasure nor malice in it. It is just one of those things necessary for the survival of the chosen people — like cutting a lamb’s throat in the Temple — an act best performed quickly and quietly. Judaea balances on the point of a Roman javelin. A pretender to the throne could tumble the whole country.

Strictly the Nazarene should be tried, but they can’t call the council of the Sanhedrin: it never takes place outside the Chamber of Hewn Stone in the Temple and it never meets at festival times and it certainly never meets at night. And even Annas’s palatial home doesn’t have a room where seventy-one men could hold court. In any case, the council is half filled with Pharisees who consider sedition against Rome a righteous path and in most things hold the view that they should be left to their own course: ‘If The Way be of men, it will come to naught, and if it be of God, you will not be able to overthrow it.’ That would be the talk of the Pharisees, were they here.

But they aren’t here: it is only Annas and Kayafa and this is no trial, just a decision-making process, the result of which is all but predetermined anyway. Not by prophecy, but by pragmatism.

‘Should he be allowed to continue until more of the populace believes him, the Romans will destroy the Temple and the nation,’ Annas says. ‘They have crucified men before for dropping a coin with Tiberius’s head on it to the privy floor. Just to wear a robe that faintly resembles the emperor’s is a capital offence. If our people start to follow a rival king, the streets will soon enough be ankle deep in blood.’

‘Agreed, of course,’ Kayafa says. ‘More expedient that one man die than that the whole nation be destroyed.’

A Temple Guard comes over to the group by the brazier now; perhaps Cephas raised his voice more than he intended; perhaps the guard just likes looking tough in front of servant girls.

‘What is your business here, fellow?’

‘I warm my bones, nothing more.’

‘I know your face from somewhere.’

‘He is with Yeshua bar Abba, I tell you he is,’ the maid chips in.

‘I swear to you that I am not. I do not even know the man you’re talking about. I have to go now anyway. I have orders to attend to and not enough time to blather with gossips.’

Cephas storms away as if offended, but breaks into a run as soon as he is back through the gate. He abandons his sword where it lies in the trough. Bolts the other way and takes every narrow alley and sudden turn he can. Though he hears no one pursuing, he runs until his lungs overcome him and he cannot do other than stop. And there he crouches, panting, trembling, heart of melted wax, hunched in the shadow of a tanner’s vat.

A cockerel crows then, a boastful warble, which marks the moment sufficiently for Cephas to know that every dawn henceforth is going to shrill with the agonizing shame of this dishonour and desertion. Every proud-combed rooster in the world is going to sing about Cephas’s crime. He curls, impossibly small, on his side. The ground is cold — so very cold — and Cephas’s bitter-salted tears will not warm it.

Annas has authority to order the death penalty for religious offences, but there is no blasphemy committed here. Declaring yourself to be a king is not blasphemy, it is sedition against Rome. And for that crime the prisoner should be sent to the prefect. Pilate is expecting him to be turned over anyway: lending the priests command of a cohort of soldiers is not a normal occurrence. Better to get on with the deed, then, and have it done, Annas thinks. Maybe the Galilean really is of the royal line of David; probably he’s just another madman. But either way, the best thing now is for the Nazarene to be dead and gone before Jerusalem even hears what has happened.

Kayafa is not as sturdy as his father-in-law. Kayafa lacks the stomach for this role. Some days he can barely believe that once he wanted nothing more than to be the high priest. After he gives the guards their orders, he rends his robe with horror and sorrow and sickness and self-pity at the shit he has to go through. It is a hard path to be this figure of half-rule. Even harder being hated for it. About the only thing the Romans and the Judaeans can agree on is that they all despise the high priest and yet they all still need him, as their go-between and negotiator: the Romans with the people; the people with God.