Testament

by Nino Ricci

  I didn’t have any idea what Jesus planned to say to us. But once we were inside he didn’t say a thing, simply sat us down on some stones there and passed around a flask of water he’d brought in. I could see the Rock was desperate to get some word from him, but still he just sat.

  “You cheated us,” the Rock said finally, spitting it out.

  Jesus took in his anger but still sat there dignified, in the way he had, like a rod that wouldn’t bend.

  “Was there anything I taught you that wasn’t true?” he said, and the Rock couldn’t bring himself to answer him.

  Jesus went off to the corner of the garden then, leaving the three of us sitting there, and got on his knees to pray. He had that intensity he got when his mind was set on a thing, until it seemed he’d brought his god right there into the garden with us by the force of his will, to be called to account. I felt ashamed watching him, because you could see the emotion in him, as if he saved for his god all the things he wouldn’t show to the rest of us.

  He stayed praying a long while. The Zealot looked miserable now that the Rock had declared his side—he’d hoped we were together and would stand by Jesus, and felt betrayed now and lost. But when Jesus came back to us, there was a fire in him. We shouldn’t expect him to come begging for forgiveness, his look seemed to say. By now it was clear he wasn’t going to ask us for anything at all—it was up to ourselves, to make up our minds about him.

  We went out to the camp. I’d lost track of Jerubal and his group by then and didn’t have a tent, and Jesus called me in to share his own. Suddenly I was lying there right next to him, feeling the heat of him against me, and it was the strangest thing, thinking of him as someone with a body like the rest of us. He had a smell to him just like anyone, and a slow rise and fall of breath, lying there asleep with his arms outstretched looking as unprotected as a child.

  When I awoke the next morning Jesus was already gone from the tent, his place cold beside me. My mind had been racing the whole night, after everything that had happened, so that it seemed I hadn’t slept at all. Then at the back of my mind I had a niggling anxiousness about Jerubal, who I hadn’t seen since the previous morning—I had a bad feeling about that, and wondered if he even knew what had become of us when we’d changed camps.

  Outside, it was cloudy and damp and threatened rain. I kept watching Jesus to see if he’d changed, what he planned to do differently, but it seemed he was just going to carry on the same as before. After breakfast he said he was returning to the temple, and I was surprised to see the Rock move in to go with him—it seemed he couldn’t leave him, still waiting for the sign that would make things clear. With the Rock joining him, and the Zealot as well, it seemed I was pulled along by force, hardly wanting to get near the temple again but drawn into the secret group we formed, as if my lot was tied in with it now.

  It was a small band that set out, we three Simons and then Andrew, who the Rock was keeping close to him now, and Aram, and a few others I hardly knew. The Rock and Andrew brought up the rear, and you could see Andrew was more skittish than usual, sensing something was wrong, lagging a bit so that his brother had to hold his arm to keep him moving along.

  A road led down from the farm to a city gate at the south end of the Temple Mount, where Jerubal and I had come out after our visit to the temple market. If anything, the mood in the city seemed even tenser than it had the day before, everyone grown irritable now, the soldiers and the citizens alike, and the air felt stifling and thick as if the clouds were pressing down on us.

  The traffic was heavy along the street at the base of the Temple Mount. But as we were going along there, the crowd seemed to open suddenly, and a woman stood stopped in our path. Two men were next to her but it was the woman your eye went to, small and fine-featured and slender but planted there like an island, all the traffic shifting its flow to give her her place. She was looking at Jesus, with eyes as bottomless and dark as the pool in the garden where Jesus had prayed, and it took just an instant to see they were connected, and feel the force that passed between them.

  Jesus went up to her. There was a tension between them as if it were a wall or a wind, so that it hardly seemed they could stand face to face. But Jesus turned to us and said, “This is my mother and these are my brothers,” as if there was nothing remarkable in this, and then he took the woman’s hand and brought it to his lips.

  All the movement around us seemed to stop for an instant, and it was hard to say what was in the woman’s eyes, surprise at what Jesus had done but also a hundred other things, and you saw how she looked him over in his ragged clothes, with his ragged band, and wondered at what he’d become. For a moment then it seemed that the feeling between them had to find an escape, and that what stood between them would crumble. But she had the same look of unbending will as her son, and the two of them stood there without a word, and finally Jesus turned and walked on.

  He didn’t look back at us but made straight for the Rat Gates. I felt a panic then. But somehow I just got caught up with the crowd and before I knew it I was going up, with that sick churning in my gut again, the crowd so thick around me and the passage so dim and tight that it seemed impossible to turn and make my way back. When we came up into the square it was the same, people jammed shoulder to shoulder so that I could only follow along, trying to stay close to Jesus in the hope I’d be safe with him. I saw now there were soldiers stationed all around the top of the colonnade and outside the fence as well, the whole place seeming like kindling ready to burst into flame, the people jostling and all the shouting and flaring tempers and then the soldiers standing guard with their fists on the handles of their clubs, ready to put us down at the least sign of any disturbance.

  Jesus was heading straight for the temple. There was a defiance in him, and it occurred to me he probably no more belonged on that side of the fence than I did, being a bastard. I thought what Zadok or his like would do if he was discovered and it started to seem that was Jesus’s intention, to throw the thing in people’s faces. I imagined him going to stand right in the temple door and shouting, Here I am, to make people accept him, showing them the foolishness of using this rule or that to judge a man instead of the evidence of their own eyes. He had it in him, to do such a thing. But then I thought of the temple with all its workers and courts and crowds, and the speck we were in the huge construction of it, and knew the Zadoks of the place would simply have called out the temple guards then as if Jesus was nothing, and had him carted away.

  In the end, the trouble that came to us was simpler than that—someone in the crowd recognized Jesus as the one who’d built the snow huts in the olive fields. In that throng that might have amounted to nothing more than a finger or two pointed at him before we moved on, except that we were stalled at the moment and there was time for people to take notice. Someone repeated the joke then that had somehow gone around about Jesus building the temple in an hour and someone else took offence, saying it was sacrilege. It took only an instant then, in that packed swarm, for an argument to start up. And it wasn’t long before people were shouting at one another, everyone at the edge of their patience at being stuck in the crowd and at the oppressive air and soldiers all around desecrating the Jews’ holy space.

  Someone fell somehow in the crowd and a panic went through it, people starting to jostle and shove to try to get free until we were swaying like a wave. It seemed chaos was about to break out. Then without warning someone was howling beside me at the top of his lungs—it was Andrew. He’d started to flail, wildly, people falling back to get clear of him and his brother trying to grab hold of him to calm him. By then everyone was scrambling, trying to make sense of what was happening, and the soldiers assumed a riot had begun and leapt over the fence to put it down.

  It took only a few moments for the soldiers to make their way through the crowd to us. People were in an uproar at the sight of them on the wrong side of the fence but they kept coming, swinging their clubs. I hardly knew what was happening
by then. But somehow Jesus and a few of us had ended up cut off from the crowd when people had fallen back, and then one of the soldiers seemed ready to go for Andrew, and Simon knocked the man down. The soldiers were on us in an instant. I felt a blow to the head and things went dark, and then I was being dragged along with my arm wrenched up behind me and all I saw was a haze of blood and all I heard was a dull thundering. There was a whimpering beside me and I made out Aram’s voice, terrified and pleading, then heard a thud, and quiet. Finally we went through a gate and the muted roar of the temple square fell away, and I knew we were in the fortress.

  My heart was pounding. It seemed this couldn’t be happening, that it didn’t make sense. But I could taste the cold stone of that fortress and feel the rough pavement under my feet and see other soldiers moving past, with their soldier’s stink and the rustle and clank of their gear. There was a flash of daylight from a courtyard but then right away we were marched into a narrow passage where the soldiers had to stoop to get along, with uneven walls of crumbling stone and a sewer smell and just the barest bit of light from lamps along the way. We seemed to be descending—right into the earth, from the looks of it, the walls getting damper and more oozing the further we went and the stink got stronger. I thought of the Rat Gates at the Temple Mount, but here the rats were real—I could smell them in the sewer air and hear them scratching and twitching ahead of us in that narrow shaft.

  When we stopped we were in a space like a cave that seemed as if it had just been hollowed out of the dirt and rock. The only light was from a couple of sputtering lamps up against one wall, the smoke from them hanging in the air. It was the first time we’d stopped since the soldiers had taken us, and that I was able to look at the others—they’d taken Jesus and Aram, and the two Simons.

  Jesus looked the worst of the lot, his ear bloodied and a purpling lump above his brow. But the instant he was able to look the soldiers in the face he said, in Greek, “There’s been a mistake.” For his trouble he got a blow to the back of the neck, and the rest of us got the same, to make us kneel. In all this not a word had been said to us in any language we could understand.

  Two brutes who had been lurking in the shadows came towards us now carrying manacles and leg irons. They were dressed in plain sackcloth and big and ugly as beasts, with a smell to them of excrement and something worse, as if they’d started to rot. In an instant they had us shackled, joining Aram and the Rock and me in one group and Jesus and the Zealot in another, hammering the pins into place with a mallet. I thought they’d hand us back over to the soldiers then, but without a word the soldiers turned and departed the way they’d come. It came home to me then how bad things were for us—here we were at the end of nowhere at the mercy of these animals who didn’t know if we were killers or rebels or just petty thieves, so that it seemed we’d been thrown to the bottom of a pit to be forgotten.

  The two got us to our feet using wooden prods with the ends sharpened to points, as if we were goats they were herding. One of them held each of us in turn while the other frisked us for purses, though the only one they found was my own, which they pocketed. Then they marched us forward to a rusting iron gate at the far end of the cave that gave onto darkness, looking like a passage into the very bowels of beyond. In the light of a lamp near the gate I noticed shapes etched into the floor with bits of bone scattered over them—we’d interrupted the two at a game of jackals and hounds.

  They took us through the gate, one loping ahead with a lamp and the other prodding us from behind. The stench that hit us then stopped my breath. We were in a man-wide corridor with cells coming off it, and you could feel the excrement under your feet and see the runnels of it coming from under the wood doors of the cells and pooling in a trench that ran along the middle of the corridor. That was the only sign of anything human in the place—otherwise it was quiet as death along there, and all you could hear was maybe the faintest wheezing of breath like a wind blowing in from the other side.

  The warder in front opened a cell door. I wanted Jesus to say something to give us hope, but in an instant the warder had shoved his prod hard against Jesus’s side and pushed him and the Zealot into the cell, clapping the door shut and ramming the bolt into place. We seemed lost then, with Jesus gone. Aram and the Rock and I were shoved into the next cell over, finding ourselves suddenly in total dark, tangled in a heap in our chains so that we could hardly get free of one another. The cell didn’t seem to stretch more than a few paces in any direction and we kept banging up against stone, so that we ended with our limbs all entwined and our bodies hunched against whatever piece of wall or ceiling or floor we could lean up against for support. To make matters worse, the floor was pitched towards the door, to keep the excrement running out, and was so soiled with old filth you couldn’t keep a grip on it against the slope.

  I couldn’t have said how much time we passed in there. At one point Aram started his moaning again, but dreamily, as if he was muttering in his sleep, so that it seemed he hadn’t yet recovered from the blow he’d got. Finally he slumped up against me as if he’d drifted off, and then for the longest time we just crouched there in that stinking cell in total silence. At one point one of our gatekeepers came along and passed a little saucer of water through a portal at the bottom of our door and shone a bit of light in so we could drink, the Rock and I sharing what was there since we couldn’t wake Aram. But then hours went by, and nothing happened. It was impossible to sleep in there but also to think or talk or do anything, because every bone in you hurt and you could hardly breathe for the stink and you were as hungry and thirsty and tired as you thought you could get. But still at the bottom you had the feeling that as bad as things were, they might get worse.

  Then out of the darkness I heard a voice, strange after all that silence, and it took me a moment to realize it was the Rock.

  “We’ve been in here a while now,” was all he said, in that fisherman’s way, as if he was sitting at home waiting for supper to come instead of rotting there at the bottom of a hole with no hope. He was quiet again, and then he asked me where I came from. It was the first time he’d ever put a question to me. I told him about the farm and he wanted to know how many sheep we had, and did we plant barley or wheat, and did we ever go fishing on the lake. And talking that way with him, casually as if we were sitting under the stars or sharing a drink of wine, I almost forgot for a few instants where I was, and it became a little bearable to be there in that place.

  By and by, without any push from me, he got to talking about himself, about his two boys and his girl and the one girl who’d died not long after she was born, and about his two boats, and the size of them, and how many fish they could hold when they were full. And then he got on to Jesus, and how Mary’s father, who he’d had a lot of business with, had come by one day and said there was a teacher he knew, and could Simon put him up. And how it had seemed to him then when he’d got to know the man that he wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met before, and when he talked you had to listen, and the things he said made you feel all of a sudden as if you’d been sleeping all of your life until he had told you, Wake up.

  I’d never known the Rock to string together so many words that way, and it changed my view of him, to hear the thoughts that went on in him. But still he seemed a bit of a child, the way he’d been so taken with Jesus—seeing all the wonders that Jesus had started to do, curing lepers and chasing away devils, he and some of the others, though they’d kept it to themselves, had started to think this might be the saviour the Jews had been waiting for. It didn’t take a wise man to see the Rock’s hopes were too high—Jesus had his few hundred who followed him but from inside that cell the number seemed paltry, and even if the lot of them had banded together they couldn’t have saved him from where he sat now.

  A lot of things looked different from inside that cell. There was Jesus’s god—out in the open, when you were standing in the golden glow of his temple door, you felt overwhelmed with the greatness of him. Bu
t a few hundred paces away, his temple was nothing and you were in a Roman dungeon, not at the centre of the world but just the smallest scrap at the edge of the empire. Everyone knew how the Jews had only been beaten all their years, and beaten again, back to Sargon the Great. Who, then, was their god when he’d given them only fifty acres of desert and rock for their home and let a teacher who praised him every day of his life end up locked up like a common criminal.

  The Rock, though, was ready to put all the blame to Jesus now—he had made a mistake, he said, since Jesus could never be a saviour for the Jews, being a bastard. And he’d kept turning the matter over in his head and still had to think that Jesus had cheated them, and got his power not from their god but from the devils, and so had been cast down in the end.

  I didn’t know what to say to him. Everything about Jesus had started to skew in my head by then, how he was always turning things around as if he wasn’t any different in the end from the Sons of Light, preying on people’s weaknesses and warping their minds to accept all his strange notions and ways. Someone like Huram would have spotted a Jesus from miles off and stayed clear—the way things had been was the way they should be, and anyone telling you differently had his eye on your freedom or your purse. But I thought of the comfort I’d taken from Jesus, and the thoughts he’d opened me up to, and how in front of my eyes he had raised a man from the dead, and it seemed a grave loss to me that I should stop believing in him now, at a time when believing in something was all I could look to for hope.

  I hardly knew how I passed the time after that, or if there was any thought in my head except that I had to get out of that cell, or die. It was as if I’d been dropped into a well and was drowning there in the water and dark, hanging always just an instant from choking. Then just when I imagined I would have to smash my own skull for relief, the door opened and one of our warders was standing there. Without a word he grabbed my arm, since I was nearest the door, and dragged me into the corridor, pressing me to the wall while his partner dragged out Aram. They knocked the pin out that connected Aram to the Rock and pushed the two of us, joined at the leg, out through the gate, though we were so numbed and cramped and stiff by then we could hardly stand.