by Nino Ricci
I was fine until I got to Gergesa, just whistling along in the sun like that, feeling fairly pleased with myself now that I’d actually set out. But then I made the mistake of going into the town, to get some food, I thought, and to see what was what. I wasn’t a minute past the gates, though, when some thug came up to me and made a grab for my purse. I managed to hit him off but he got a blow in himself and left me with a bloodied nose, and not a single soul stopped to give me a hand or say a word to me, just passing me by as if I was the one who was a thief. I had a mind then just to take myself right back home again, and it was only my pride that stopped me from doing it.
I got a cake in the market, but in an instant a fellow came up to me—and not very handsome he was, scrawny and dark and with a nose like someone had bashed it in for him with a hatchet—and he said, how would I like a game, and showed me his dice. Now, like I’ve said, I was young but no fool—I knew his sort. So I lied and told him I’d just spent my last cent, smiling and playing the dullard. He looked me up and down and then he grinned at me with his rotten teeth, nodding his head to show he’d seen through my dodge.
“Where’re you going?” he said, so I told him about Jesus, and said I was going over to Capernaum to join up with him.
The fellow made as if he’d never heard of the man and asked all sorts of questions about him, what kind of person was he and what he did, which to be truthful I found a bit difficult to answer. Before I knew it, maybe just to impress the fellow, I started telling him things I’d only heard second hand as if I’d seen them with my own eyes, how he cured lepers and walked on water and the like. But the fellow just nodded and rubbed his chin as if he believed me, then offered to come along with me to see the man for himself, just like that.
I’d never been one to mind company, but when we got outside town and had to cross the border there into Gaulinitis I started wondering if this fellow I’d hooked up with—Jerubal, his name was—might cause me some trouble with the guards. Instead, they took one look at us and let us through without even a toll, though the people ahead of us had had to hand over half their purse. Jerubal winked at me and said, “Don’t worry, they’ll get their cut.” And it didn’t take long before I saw what he was getting at, because he had a little game going that brought him in a good penny. He’d stop along the road, and scratch out a gaming board somewhere, and then it never took long before a bit of a crowd started to gather. But here was the twist—I was his hook, because people would see me gambling there like one of the crowd and winning almost every time, and so they’d put their own money down. Then oddly enough they didn’t win quite as often as I did, and Jerubal would start drawing in the coins.
I thought he managed the game with loaded dice but he said he’d be dead in an hour if that was the case, someone always spotted them. It was the board that counted, he said, every dip and swell and knowing how to play them, and then the players, they had to be played as well. He was a master at that, I had to hand it to him—he knew just when to let up to keep someone in the game, and when to push. I wasn’t bad myself, it turned out—Jerubal said I had the perfect face, the kind people trusted, which was why he’d picked me out.
We didn’t cover a lot of ground this way, and by nightfall we hadn’t even got to Bethsaida. Jerubal had us put up at a village in the hills off the main road where the people knew him—even the children there were happy to see him, and he handed around some roasted almonds to them that we’d bought along the road. You’d have thought he was the most respectable man in the world, the way people treated him, bringing food out and laying down the mats for us, and the girls giggling behind their hands to be near him, even ugly the way he was. On his side, Jerubal was suddenly fine-mannered and polite, bending down before the elders and going off to the little hovel of a temple they had at the edge of the village to make a sacrifice. It was only after, when people started coming around with gifts for him to have their fortunes told, that I saw this was just another one of his games—they took him for some kind of wizard, though he wouldn’t tell me how it was that he’d won them over. “It’s like your friend Jesus,” he said to me, “walking on water and the like,” and I couldn’t tell at first if he was fooling or not. But then he grinned at me and I saw it was his way of saying he hadn’t exactly taken me at my word before when I’d told him about Jesus.
Jerubal wanted to stop in at Bethsaida the next day for a game but I convinced him to make straight for the Galilean border and into Capernaum, in the hope we’d catch Jesus before he’d gone. We reached the town with the sun at its height, a terrible stench of fish coming up from the harbour in the heat. But you could see people worked for a living there, hardly catching your eye in the street, just going on with their business. We tried to ask around for Jesus but it took a while to make sense of people’s accents, and we couldn’t get by in Greek because there wasn’t a person we met who spoke a word of it. Finally we ended up at what someone told us was the temple, though it looked plain as a barn, for all that the god of the Jews, as they said, was so great. Then the old man who looked after the place made it seem as if Jesus was a devil incarnate when we asked about him.
“Go ask his followers where to find him,” was all he said, then more or less closed the door in our faces.
All this seemed fairly strange to us—we’d come there thinking to see a great wise man of the Jews and instead were being all but chased out of town just for asking about him. Then finally someone sent us to the house of a fisherman where Jesus was supposed to be staying. It wasn’t much of a place, from the looks of it, windowless and with a rough wooden gate half fallen away, and then the woman who came to the gate, as homely as a stable door, couldn’t make heads or ships of us when we tried to talk to her. “You go,” she said, talking like a little child. “Next town. Gennesaret.” Jerubal knew the place and said it wasn’t far, and so we decided to try our luck, and set off.
By now it was getting clear that Jesus and his people had already started out and we’d missed them. I was a bit relieved about that at first—who was I, I’d got to thinking, to imagine I could join up with a man like him, when all I knew was barley and sheep. But then I remembered Huram, and how I’d left, and saw I didn’t have much choice in the thing.
When we were a ways from the town, Jerubal stripped to nothing to cool himself in the lake. It happened that there was a village up the way and some girls at the shore doing the wash, and Jerubal decided to have a bit of a frolic, climbing up on a rock and wagging his backside at them. Wasn’t it our luck, though, that their father came out and saw what was going on, and straightaway he started coming at us, picking stones up and flinging them as he went. We hardly knew what to make of him and we started to run, over the road and into the hills. But even then the fellow wouldn’t let up, so that we were well up the hillside before we lost him, scrambling the whole way through a thicket of thistles and scrub. We didn’t dare go back to the shore then so we just kept going, though Jerubal looked fairly amused at what his little tail-wagging had cost us.
We came out finally to a plateau that was high above the lake. There was a sort of town built across it, but there was something not quite right about the place—the walls had a makeshift look to them as if they’d just been cobbled together, with hardly a thought to keeping the place from harm. There was one spot where there was so much rubble piled against the thing you could actually climb up on the stones and have a look over the top. Sure enough that was what Jerubal did, and I followed behind, poking my head up slowly just in case someone got a mind to fling a rock at us again or run us through.
I could hardly make sense of what we saw in there at first—there were houses and streets as you’d expect in any town, except this seemed a town of the dead, people floating around with their bodies putrid and stinking as if they’d just come up out of their graves. For a moment my blood froze, and I thought that somehow the codger on the beach had chased us right over to the other side. But then it came to me, what we were seein
g—they were lepers. I’d seen my share of them in my time but it didn’t prepare you to look out over a whole city of them, just going about their business as if it was any normal day.
Jerubal, though, didn’t seem to mind them at all, and when someone spotted us and called up to ask us our business, Jerubal instantly started speaking with the fellow. “My friend Simon and I,” he said, “are looking for the teacher Jesus to join up with him.” It turned out that was the right thing to say—all of a sudden the man started calling out to everyone around that we were Jesus’s followers, and it wasn’t long before half the camp was standing there under the wall. Jerubal, with that crowd looking up to him, suddenly seemed to know a lot more about Jesus than he’d let on to me at the start, talking with people about what he’d done and the stories that were told of him. The lepers said that Jesus came to the camp every week, curing those he could and bringing solace to those he couldn’t. And Jerubal said he could believe it, and that he’d heard he’d cured cripples as well, and even a blind man, once. “He put his hands on him,” Jerubal said, “and he asked him, can you see anything, and the fellow said he could see people but they looked like trees walking around. So Jesus put a little spit on the fellow’s eyes then, and everything came clear.”
I doubted even the lepers believed Jerubal’s stories but they seemed glad to have them, and to not have to think about their misery for a while. Jerubal could have gone on like that the rest of the day, and I didn’t mind it myself, since the more you talked to these people, the more they started to seem just like anyone you might meet. But by now the guards looking after the place had got wind of us and had come around to chase us off. You could see the lepers didn’t like to see Jerubal go, and they called out to him that he should pass their regards on to Jesus.
It was getting late by now. We asked the guards and they said we’d passed Gennesaret, but Arbela was close by if we wanted to put up there. Jerubal, though, asked if there were any villages nearby, and the guards shrugged and said there was one about a mile off, but it was just Amorites and bush. But that was exactly where Jerubal wanted to go, he didn’t say why, and so I set off with him though it was getting dark, and we were getting deeper and deeper into the woods.
Sure enough, though, we went about a mile and there was the village. It was only a bunch of hovels in the middle of the forest, from what we could see, and people were just lighting their fires and putting things up for the night. But Jerubal made us stop before anyone saw us, and from one of his pockets, and he had dozens of them, he pulled out a kind of tinderbox and some flints. “Hold on to these,” he said, and then he made us pull back from the village behind a bit of hill and got busy as if he knew what he was doing, gathering up little bundles of twigs that he tied together with bits of cloth from his own coat. Then he went up to a tree and cut into it with his knife until a honeyish resin started oozing out of it, which he spread fairly thickly on his little bundles. “Put some fire to one of them,” he said to me, and I didn’t have any idea what he was up to but I got out the tinder and flint and started up a little fire. When I put the flame up to one of those bundles the thing sputtered a bit, and seemed as if it wasn’t going to catch, then all at once burst up like a demon. I looked at Jerubal and he was grinning. “We’re ready,” he said, but ready for what, I didn’t know.
It was pitch-dark by then, and you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. But Jerubal said, “Climb up into that tree,” pointing to a big oak that stood there, “and bring these bundles with you, and each time you hear me say, ‘Out, devil,’ light one up and throw it down into the village. And keep quiet up there, and don’t come down until I tell you.” By now I’d started to have serious doubts about what Jerubal had in mind. But fool that I was, I did what he told me and climbed up the tree, even though a dozen times I thought I was a dead man, because I couldn’t see enough to know if it was a branch I was reaching out for, or empty space. Meanwhile Jerubal had painted himself up with a bit of berry juice and mud so he looked even more frightening than usual, and now he walked into the village and without any warning started keening at the top of his lungs as if it was the end of things.
In no time those villagers were out their doors, holding whatever weapon they’d been able to lay their hands on. But Jerubal didn’t pay them any mind, dancing in between them as if he was in a trance and still singing his song. Then when he came to the little fire they had going in the middle of the village he stopped dead, and looked around him as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was or how he’d got there, and the villagers just stood there staring at him dumbfounded. And finally he said, “It’s here,” and I could hear him as clear as day, because I was up there in the highest branches of my tree almost exactly on top of him.
He had people’s attention now. He waited a moment, just holding the silence, then went on to say, in a slow, solemn voice I’d never heard from him before, that he’d been tracking a devil across the bush to destroy it, and had followed it here. You could feel the tremor that went through them at that. He asked if there’d been any trouble in the village the last little while and at first no one could think of anything, but then someone said there was a boy who’d died of fever a few months back, and then there was the field that had caught fire in a storm, and then once, not long before, half the village got sick when an animal died in the well. And Jerubal nodded his head, as if to say, weren’t those just the kinds of things that devil would get up to. And by now he had the whole village convinced they were infested, and that this devil was at the bottom of all their troubles.
The village headman, his brow all furrowed, asked Jerubal what they had to do to get rid of the thing, and how much it was going to cost. But Jerubal made as if he was offended and said he would do what had to be done and it wouldn’t cost them a thing, because he was a priest and it was his duty. Already everyone was bowing and scraping to thank him for that, but Jerubal just held himself up as if it didn’t matter what they thought. He told everyone to gather together and stand behind the fire, which I supposed was to keep the light in their eyes so they didn’t notice me up in my tree. Then he drew some odd shapes on the ground with a stick, and spit on a few stones, and finally looked up into the heavens and shouted, “Out, stinking devil!” and started up his chant again, so no one could hear me clicking my flints. And it took me a moment but finally I got one of my bundles smouldering, and just before the resin caught I tossed it out of the tree, so when it flamed up it looked as if it had just appeared in the air out of nowhere.
Well, those villagers were in awe at the sight of that, hiding behind each other’s shirts and falling down on their knees. Jerubal, meanwhile, had gone into his trance again, and threw himself down on the ground and started rolling around in the dirt. Finally he shook himself out of it and got on his knees and shouted up again, “Get out, you devil!” I was trembling a bit with the cold by then, and had that syrupy resin all over myself, but somehow I managed to get another one of the bundles going and I threw it out.
This one took a while to catch. I was afraid it was just going to die out there on the ground, and the game would be up. But when it was just above Jerubal’s head it burst up like the other one, and it was fairly spectacular, because it looked as if that devil really had it in for him. Except that what happened next was that Jerubal’s coat caught fire—some of the resin must have got on him, because it went up quickly. Jerubal, though, didn’t do what anyone else might have done, roll around in the dirt again or jump in the well or scuttle off into the bush, happy to get away with his life. He just stood there, burning like that, and looked up into the sky and said, “Devil, take me if you have to, but spare this village.” And then as calm as a summer day he took the coat off and threw it on the ground, and the fire went out.
All this couldn’t have worked better if we’d planned it—by now the villagers were convinced that Jerubal was some sort of god, and if he’d said to them, hand over your first-born, they’d have done it. Suddenly
this fellow who’d said he wouldn’t take so much as a coin from them had them so they were nearly begging him to take what they had. It was the headman, after people had started to recover, who came up first—he took off two bracelets he had on and laid them in front of Jerubal. It wasn’t long before everyone in the village had lined up to add some other valuable to the pile. And Jerubal stood there long-suffering and patient as if these trinkets didn’t mean a thing to him, but he wouldn’t be so rude as to refuse them.
If that had been the end of the matter I would have been fairly happy with all of this, and with my share of things. But then the headman got out the wine, and one of his wives brought out some bread and some meat, and before you knew it they were having a feast down there, and Jerubal was telling them stories of all the devils he’d fought and sitting warm and well fed by the fire. Meanwhile I was left biding my time up in my tree, not having had a morsel to eat since breakfast. It was the middle of the night before the last of the villagers had dropped off and Jerubal, looking sober as stone though he’d been drinking with the worst of them, finally collected up his gifts and came to my tree to whisper for me to come down. I was furious at being left up there, but right off Jerubal handed me one of the headman’s bracelets to keep me quiet. Then as soon as we were out of earshot of the village, stumbling along in the dark, we both broke out laughing thinking back on the thing, and could hardly stop ourselves until we were back on the main road and halfway down to the lake.
It was getting towards dawn by then. Jerubal, the gods reward him, had thought to put a mutton chop aside for me in his pocket during his little feast, which I ate right down. We should have slept then but we were both of us too wrought up, so we just stopped for a rest in a pine grove off the road. There were the ruins there of a rough little temple that must have been abandoned a long time before, probably when the Jews took over, and a spring that came up with water that tasted sweeter than wine. We found a patch of grass to stretch out on and then just sat back and watched the sun come up over the lake. It seemed the life, with the sun on us and no worries, wandering wherever we pleased. Across the lake I could see where our farm was, and even imagined I made out the smoke from the breakfast fire, and I thought of Moriah stoking it up and of Huram waiting for his porridge. But all that seemed fairly distant from me now. We were on the road, Jerubal and I, and looking for Jesus, the wizard of the Jews, though it seemed maybe we’d already come to his special kingdom and it didn’t much matter one way or the other if we actually found him.