The Liars' Gospel: A Novel

by Naomi Alderman

  There is a glory in it, for the young men whose blood is up and whose limbs ache for battle and for the sweet exhaustion of the hunt. Most of them are young indeed, twelve or thirteen, or fourteen or fifteen, and they yearn for a fight. There is a delight in it, because these Romans have taken their land and laid their people low and desecrated their holy places and it is good to see them suffer.

  But in the morning the streets are full of broken pots and the smell of burning in the air and the market traders are afraid to set up their little stalls and the people look at each other with downcast eyes. And Caiaphas thinks: this?

  They begin to gather in the afternoon, at the Prefect’s palace. They are spent now, tired now, but there are so many of them and they keep coming. All the people of Jerusalem are here, shouting out that the Temple money is holy, that the Prefect must not use it for this watercourse, that he must abandon his plans. It is not that they object to having an aqueduct, but this way of trampling down the things that are most sacred to them is abhorrent. He has not tried to understand them. They must make him understand.

  The crowd grows a little ugly, in their chanting and their jeers.

  “Pila-ate. Your mother was an ass and your father was a donkey.”

  “No one wants you in Syria, and they hate you back in Rome, just leave us alone and crawl back home.”

  The crowd is thick, full of men and women who have brought bread and water and intend to spend the day protesting. Men seem to have come from outside the city, for many of those standing quietly in the crowd, faces shaded from the sun by the hoods of their light robes, are newcomers. There are no soldiers.

  A wise man, perhaps, would have let them shout themselves out, encircled them with quiet armed men and, at dusk, had them escorted from the plaza. But Pilate has too much pride for peace, that is his disaster. He leaves it until the late afternoon to address the crowd, when they are hot and thirsty after many hours, at their most irritable. He shouts down from the balcony words that are, perhaps, meant to recall Cicero, addressing an angry mob with enough vivid clarity to calm and soothe them.

  But of course Pilate is no Cicero; his words are not those of the great orator, and his delivery is weedy and thin. And the language is a problem: he begins to speak in Greek and is immediately shouted down. He has Aramaic enough to try it again, but this is perhaps a mistake.

  “People of Jerusalem!” he shouts, and his accent is wrong, and he puts the stress on the second syllable—ru—and not at the end, where it belongs. “I have heard your voices!” And this is wrong too, because it sounds like a mockery of God’s words telling the Children of Israel in Egypt that he has heard their cries. But nothing that Pilate says in this tongue can work. His accent proves he is not one of them and can never understand.

  “Let me be clear. I seek only”—he hesitates, searching for words—“to make your lives better, to bring you comfort and relief.”

  “Fuck off home, then!” shouts one wag in the crowd, and a laugh ripples through the square.

  Pilate flushes, the pink coursing up his face across his bald skull. His hand grips the marble balustrade in front of him. If the crowd were not buoyed up by their sense of invincible oneness, they would understand that they should be afraid.

  “People of Jerusalem, Rome bears great love for you!”

  “Shame, ’cos we fucking hate her!”

  Another ripple of laughter. Can any man bear to be laughed at? Pilate’s knuckles are white against the marble. If it were possible, his fingers would have crushed it to powder.

  “It is time for you to disperse. Rome simply wants”—he coughs, as if he is being strangled—“Rome simply wants to improve the streets of your beautiful city.”

  “The streets belong to us!” someone shouts, and the crowd take it up as a chant. “The streets belong to us! The streets belong to us!”

  And Pilate’s face has gone from red to white, and his nostrils flare and his eyes widen and his whole posture stiffens.

  “You are common criminals,” he says, though he does not speak loudly enough for his words to reach across the crowd, “and you deserve all that is coming to you. If you are old enough to riot, you are old enough to face the consequences.” And Pontius Pilate, who has never suffered, who has never lived under occupation, who has never been trapped by soldiers or known what it is to see those things in which you believe trampled by an overwhelming force, raises his right arm high and brings it down on the balustrade three times.

  The signal is understood.

  All over the square, quiet men mingling with the crowd throw back the hoods of their simple traveling cloaks and uncover their faces. And pull out their daggers.

  The crowd is unarmed. It is angry and it has hurled insults, but it is not violent. They do not even have stones to throw.

  The first people die before anyone has even understood what is happening. While Pilate watches grim-faced from the balustrade, five hundred plainclothes soldiers among the crowd of ten thousand unsheathe their knives. Pull the nearest man to them by the shoulder. Lean in close. Cut through his neck so that he dies without a sound. All around the square men fall to their knees gasping, clutching at mortal wounds. Or crumple to the floor. Or try to cry out and are silenced by a swift swipe to the throat.

  And then there begins to be screaming. There are men in this crowd who burned the grain store, who killed the horses, who threw the stones, this is true. But the soldiers do not differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. There are women who fall to the ground with bleeding wounds to the stomach. A young man who had stood quietly at the front of the crowd, calling for peace and dignity, is set upon by two of the soldiers, who plunge their daggers into his chest in unison and withdraw them bloody as the young man’s heart struggles and ceases.

  The people try to run, but those quiet men with their blades…well, they are human too and have suffered daily abuse from the people whose land they occupy and they are angry. Many of them are not even Roman: they are auxiliary troops brought in from the local population in Caesarea, or Samaritans brought in from north of Jerusalem. They bear Rome no more special loyalty than do the Jews. If Pilate thought he could control this once it began he was wrong. He does not have the common touch and has never sought to understand the people he governs, either the Jews or his own soldiers. He makes some other signal, a hand waving in the air, but no one is looking.

  The soldiers block the exits to the square and begin to advance, forming a net around the unarmed protesters. Some people escape through the buildings and up onto the roofs. Some manage to barge through the guards at the exits, using the bodies of the dead as shields. Some soldiers have died now—only a handful compared to the three hundred, four hundred Jews dead or bleeding out under the Prefect’s balcony, but enough that some of the Jews have managed to arm themselves with daggers from the corpses. They make a desperate run at the soldiers at the southern end of the square, where the line is weakest. At first the charge seems to succeed. Five soldiers fall, blood fountaining off them like water pouring from a broken aqueduct.

  The people run screaming still in all directions, but when they see the gap in the line they begin to stream through it, making for home or for safety, carrying their injured and their children away from the place of carnage. But the line closes up again and it takes two more attempts and another fifty people dead on the blood-slick stinking floor before the soldiers give in and let them run weeping from the place.

  When it is done, there are four hundred or so soldiers in the long brown robes that made them indistinguishable from the Jews panting in the sun. And six hundred bodies on the floor around them, so that the place is heaped with corpses. And the sun beats down, drying out the blood to a sticky film. And the flies settle on the bodies. And the soldiers go to wash and congratulate each other, because what else can they do now? The deed has been done and so it must have been mighty. And Pilate stands alone on his balcony and looks at the field of conquest and perhaps he wonders
if this is how great Caesar feels after a battle and why it does not feel more glorious. He had read The Gallic Wars at school and had expected something different.

  In the evening the women come weeping to take back their dead, and wash the bodies and bury them according to their custom. Great Pilate sits alone before his little statue of the God-Emperor Tiberius and utters a prayer of thanksgiving, for he is a pious man in this way and believes what he has been taught, that the mightiest man in Rome becomes its god. And in the courtyard outside Caiaphas’s house, Annas and Caiaphas sit together in silence, drinking wine and listening to the wailing ululations from every part of the city.

  “No one said he could possibly plan this,” says Annas after a long time.

  “Did you expect he would lie down like a yearling lamb? He is a wolf, son of wolves.”

  “I thought…” and Annas is broken. He has rarely miscalculated. “I thought there would be a riot. And he would burn down some houses and crucify some of the rebels, but the riot would show that he had not the love of the city and Rome would take him back.”

  There is a woman screaming and screaming in the night, she will not cease. The screams never waver from complete shock, as if she were discovering an insupportable tragedy over and over again.

  “And what now? Will Rome summon him back for this?”

  Annas shakes his head and his eyes are great and wide and staring. Caiaphas sees the tears begin, but says nothing.

  “I do not know,” says Annas. “I have sent swift messengers to Syria and to Egypt and surely they cannot leave him here now, but I do not know. No one in his own house told him not to do this. Perhaps he even took advice from Rome. I don’t know what it will take to get rid of him. I do not know…” He pauses. “I do not know whether God meant me to do what I have done.”

  And the screams go up again, through the night that smells of blood.

  Days pass and no word comes from Rome or from the Syrian Governor, and Pilate sits in the Prefect’s seat yet. The people bury their dead and Pilate decides that, all said and done, perhaps he will not have that aqueduct after all. Most of the money is returned to the Temple: most, but not all. And even though this is done with the greatest ceremony and loud announcements, no one seems to take particular notice of it.

  Six of the priests died in the riots and Caiaphas speaks with their families. He doesn’t have to do it. Natan the Levite tells him that he can arrange it himself, but still Caiaphas has those conversations. When they realize, after two days, that Elikan, a young priest of eighteen, is the one whose hacked-up body some of the Temple men dragged from the plaza because it was dressed in priestly robes, Caiaphas himself walks down the hill to visit Elikan’s older brother and tell him.

  It is a sorry job. When they see him coming across the orchard, the brother’s wife starts to wail in a thin, reedy tone. Nonetheless, the brother, a stern man in his forties, does not believe it until Caiaphas has said the words.

  The brother holds his breath, when Caiaphas says, “I have come with bad news for you,” and pauses, and says, “You will have heard that there was fighting in the square in front of the Prefect’s house. Some priests were caught up in it, we do not know how,” and the brother is still holding his breath when Caiaphas says, “Elikan is dead. We knew him by the scar on his leg from the dog bite when he was a boy.”

  And the brother lets his breath out in a single violent puff, as if someone has punched him, and says, “I told him not to go near that dog, but he swore he could tame it.”

  Caiaphas stays with them from the ninth hour of the morning until the third hour of the afternoon, and when he goes they beg him to take a little food with him for the walk and a skin of water, but he refuses.

  “It was not your fault,” says the brother’s wife, who seems, when she has finished weeping, quite reasonable and kind. “No one could keep Elikan from excitement, not even the discipline of the priests.”

  But as he walks back up the hill towards the gleaming white marble Temple he thinks: it was my fault, who else’s fault could it be?

  He does not lie with his wife at all for several weeks. And this, suddenly, is not abnormal or to be remarked on. Some people are drawn together at such times, driven to press their bodies against one another to remind themselves that their blood still courses and their loins still flame. But many find they do not have enough of themselves to spare, for a while. That the piling up of corpses has turned them inward, and no one can say that one response is natural and right and the other is not.

  But nonetheless, the other matter does not leave his mind. They cannot send Darfon away for a time now, there is too much turmoil in the streets and in the land of Israel. He has Natan the Levite give the man constant duties, forbid him ever to leave the Temple enclosure.

  And one afternoon Hodia’s daughter comes to see him. She who, if some terrible illness or accident were to kill his wife, would become his wife. She who is therefore, in some sense, already his.

  She looks shaken, as all the people in Jerusalem look shaken now. He finds these days that when he passes a man in the marketplace he has only to hear a snippet of conversation—“Liata has not seen her son since…,” “They say he brought them in from Egypt so that…,” “I heard that Bar-Avo’s men plan to…”—to know exactly what subject they are talking about. There is only one topic on the lips of Jerusalem. Only one thought, refracted through thousands of minds and hearts. There is a look on the faces of the people, a look of quiet uncomprehending shock, like the face of a man who has lost his father. Such a look is on the face of Hodia’s daughter.

  She says, and her voice is very calm and measured and low, “Tell me how this happened.”

  He shrugs and he says, “All Jerusalem knows as much as I know.”

  She shakes her head, her gentle curls stirring, the scent of her perfumes rising.

  “There are a hundred different rumors. I’ve heard that the priests let Pilate take the money because he bribed them with the Temple gold. And I’ve heard that Rome sanctioned it. And I’ve heard that it wasn’t really about the money at all but revenge for an assassination plot. Which of those things are true?”

  It is unusual for a woman to ask a question like this. Of a man who is not her husband, of someone she scarcely knows. But they stand in an unusual relationship to one another. He supposes she has as much right to know what kind of husband he might be as he has to ask himself and others what kind of wife she would make. And times like this change things. People meet each other’s eyes differently in the streets. Strangers swap remarks or theories about the terrible events. Something has broken down in Jerusalem. And she is right in thinking that he might know more than the gossips on the street.

  “No,” he says, “it was nothing so complex. Pilate demanded his money and we gave it to him. And word got out”—he leaves a hole here, a lacuna unfilled, hoping she will not notice it—“and we thought it would pass with a little disturbance.” She is looking at him with such shining eyes of trust. “But Pilate is not a good man,” he says.

  “He is a Roman.”

  “There are better Romans and worse,” he says, “don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. There have been prefects we’ve been able to come to an arrangement with, who’ve tried to learn how things are here, to bend with us as we bend to them. Pilate is not like that.”

  She nods. “He put Caesar’s head on the coins. My brothers said that was an offense against God.”

  He runs a hand across his hair. She moves fractionally closer to him. He notices it. They are sitting in chairs next to each other. The door is slightly open, though. She moves her chair closer to his.

  “People are too swift to find offense against God,” he says, “and too slow to recognize the truth of our situation. Look.”

  He stands up and walks to the window. She follows and stands close to him. A little closer than he had expected.

  He points out of the window, past the Temple courtyards. She lea
ns in close to see where his finger is pointing. It is the red-roofed Roman building facing towards the Temple, its eyes always open, its lookout always manned.

  “The garrison,” she says. “I know. I see it every day.”

  “But do you know what it means?” he says.

  “It means that soldiers walk among us. That strangers tread our sacred streets.”

  “It means,” he says, and his hand is touching her arm, because he suddenly wants to make her really understand what he is saying, “it means that none of us is free. Each of us is shackled, I as much as you. If we destroyed the garrison they would send a legion, and if we destroyed them they would send four, and if we fight it can only end with the sacking of Jerusalem. Rome couldn’t ever lose that fight, you know, never.” He finds his wheedling politician’s smile creeping across his mouth and he stops it, pursing his lips, making his face stop lying for him. “We are trapped. All of us. No matter how high or how low, we must make accommodation with what they demand of us. I am as trapped as you.”

  Her fingers find the back of his hand. She is very warm, and he realizes how cold he is.

  “Is there nothing but duty?” she says. “Nothing at all but that?”

  He glances behind him. The door of the room is closed now. When did that happen? He does not take his hand away.

  He shakes his head. “Not for me. Not if we are to keep Rome from our door.”

  “Nothing at all?” she asks again, and her voice is very low, and her face very sad and serious as she looks up at him from behind her lashes.

  Is it possible she is a virgin? With the way she looks at him and the way she is dressed? It is possible, he knows it is. Some girls bloom like this at even twelve or thirteen: knowing, without understanding what it is they know. Watching for an effect.

  Making himself examine it, he realizes she is dressed so modestly, it is impossible to fault her. A pair of loose white trousers, showing nothing of her legs. Apart from that slice of bare foot slipped into her leather shoes, visible when the trousers move just so. The brown, bare, warm skin. The tunic is loose also, seemly, white with a pale blue woven belt at the waist.