Testament

by Nino Ricci

  For a moment it was as if he’d sucked all the air out of the room along with him. No one was sure what to do, not the examiners or the men in white or the guards who were left behind, and those of us in the cells couldn’t say if we’d heard right and would be freed or were just going to be left to rot there. But finally someone gave an order and the cells were opened and we were marched back down to the courtyard, where we were lined up in front of a whipping post to wait for our forty lashes, under a sky too cloudy to tell the time of day.

  I was in a daze by then, hardly certain what was what, and it was a while before I noticed that the Rock and the Zealot were ahead of me in the line. I managed to catch the Rock’s eye but he turned as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. The Zealot had that stare animals got when they’d been caged too long, clouded as though their will had died. He was about the only one who didn’t flinch when they whipped him, taking his strokes as if he deserved them.

  Afterwards they made us wait in a corner of the courtyard before letting us go. I’d never been flogged before and felt as if my back was on fire. I went to the Simons but for the longest time we just stood there together without speaking. The Rock looked ashamed now at what he’d said to me about Jesus in our cell.

  “Maybe they’ll let another group out later on,” he said finally, as if he hadn’t understood yet what Jesus was probably in for. But the Zealot seemed to know better, his eye catching mine then with the black look of no hope.

  The truth was neither of them had followed the trial well, not speaking much Greek. They hadn’t gathered it was Aram who’d betrayed Jesus and assumed it was Judas, since his was the name they’d made out during the charges—I ought to have set them straight then but didn’t want to admit I’d knelt there beside Aram while he’d sealed Jesus’s fate, and hadn’t done anything. There was no sign of Aram in that courtyard—it looked as if he’d been the one, in the end, that they’d just taken to the gate and let go.

  I kept turning over in my mind what had happened to Jerubal. Here was a man who knew every trick for saving his skin, yet he’d just stood there on his pride as if he hardly cared for his life. It turned out it hadn’t been for nothing—what they’d done, he and Jesus together, had probably saved the rest of us. It was as if they’d planned it, to offer themselves as the victims. But it seemed too much to imagine that Jerubal could think in that way, or that something of Jesus had come off on him until he had reached the point where he’d said, This is the cup I won’t swallow.

  I’d already set my mind to what I would do the moment they let me out of the gates of that castle, which was to leave the city and head for home. That was the plan I’d made when I’d been in my cell with Aram and the Rock, thinking back then to what the flowers would be smelling like on the farm, and how the barley would be coming up for harvest, and to the son there who was mine, even if I couldn’t claim him. And I could see that as bad as things had been for me there, they’d since gotten a hundred times worse, and it was seeming the wisest advice to give a man that he stay home and tend to his own business.

  Didn’t it happen, though, just when I could taste freedom on my lips, the lot of us standing there in the courtyard not even minding the whipping we’d got as long as they let us go, that one of the captains gave an order and a few soldiers came around and started picking men out of the group. I could see they were going for younger ones so I hunched myself and put my head down. But sure enough one of them grabbed me and pulled me out, and then we were made to stand there, the six of us they’d picked, while the rest of the group was led off towards the gates. Simon the Rock could hardly bring himself to look back at me for the shame of leaving me there, and then when the gates opened up and I saw the rooftops of the city, and the holiday banners hanging from windows and the smoke coming up from people’s fires, it brought tears to my eyes. But we got just that smallest glimpse of the outside before the group had gone and the gates were closed again, leaving us stranded there with our guards.

  We were put back in the cage. We tried to find out from the soldiers why we’d been kept behind, but they pretended not to understand us. Night was coming on and they brought some stew around for our supper, with actually a bit of meat in it, or at least some gristle and bone. But all I could think was how Jerubal had said we’d be having our mutton by then. I got to speaking a bit with one of the other men in the group and he said most of those who’d been sent down would probably get sold off as slaves, and end up in Rome or the like. That made me feel better—I thought Jerubal would be in his element in Rome and would wind up at the emperor’s house, or instantly find the way to be freed.

  The group of us didn’t talk much—for one thing you never knew who might be a spy, and then the others saw I wasn’t a Jew and kept their distance after that. But with some of those men you could see the soldiers hadn’t made a mistake in bringing them in—they had a look in their eyes as if they were ready to slit a Roman’s throat the first chance they got. It was probably just good luck for them that they hadn’t come up in front of the governor. One of them, not much more than my own age, with just a wisp of beard like a goat, had that air that sent the cold up you, and I could see the others were a little afraid of him, and were watching what they said as much on his account as on mine.

  I didn’t sleep much, because of the whipping. Well into the night I could hear the feast going on on the other side of the walls, a thin echo of music and singing and talk that gave me an ache. In the morning we got some food again and then they took us into a storehouse off the courtyard, full of manacles and stocks and a big pile of raw timbers, some longer and some short. They made us carry a stack of these into the yard, half a dozen of each, and then we just sat in the courtyard waiting, one of the guards watching over us. I didn’t have any notion what was happening but I’d noticed the others were looking grim. I asked one about the timbers; he looked at me as if I’d just crawled from my mother’s womb.

  “They’re crosses,” he said, his voice dead.

  It was dreary out, grey and clammy and damp. Then while we sat there a drizzle started up, and our guard let us move against the wall to keep dry. Not long afterwards they brought a line of prisoners out into the yard, chained up in a row, and my heart sank when I saw Jesus was there, and then a couple of men behind him, Jerubal.

  I could hardly believe what I was seeing—these were the ones they meant to crucify. In the rain the whole lot had a miserable sameness to them as if they deserved to be together, wretched and battered and worn down. There were seven of them, all from the trial—two looked like genuine thugs and two others were Galileans and one a foreigner, so that it seemed they’d picked this set so as not to raise people’s sympathies, only their fear. Even Jesus, put in with that pack, didn’t look much of a Jew, fine-boned and fair the way he was, and with Jerubal added in you had the sense it was only outsiders and renegades who wanted revolt, and not upstanding Jews. The group of them had been washed a bit to get the blood off them so you couldn’t tell how badly they’d been treated. But still they made an ugly sight, and half of them with a dead, crazed look in their eyes as if they were too stunned even to understand what was happening to them.

  They were taken to the whipping post and unshackled and stripped to be scourged. What we’d had the day before was nothing next to what these got, the whip split to a dozen strands tipped with nails, each lash taking flesh with it. But it made it better for them, in the end—the scourging started them dying, to shorten the time that they hung. I thought Jerubal would be flayed to the bone but he seemed to hold up as well as the rest, though naked like that in the rain he looked as rickety and frail as an old man.

  They let them put their shirts back on afterwards, so as not to give offense when they marched through the streets, then shackled them again and hung placards around their necks stating their crimes, though I couldn’t read them. Afterwards they brought the group of them over to the timbers. I was still by the wall nearby, and from up close I could see
the whipping had taken more out of Jerubal than I’d been able to tell from a distance. Then he caught sight of me and I hardly knew what to do—I almost wanted to turn away, to save him the shame of being seen like that. But he actually winked at me then and gave me a bit of a grin, as if to say, he had a plan.

  With their irons on, all the group could manage to carry were their own crossbeams. It was why we others had been held back—to carry the uprights. They’d made a mistake in the numbers, though, and only planned for six, and the captain of the guards, who looked nervous and green, shouted to his men to recruit another helper from the streets. There wasn’t any question of the soldiers helping out—they thought it a curse to carry the crosses. In the end they managed to round up a foreigner for the thing, an Egyptian who was promised a denarius for his trouble, and after he’d hauled two more timbers from the storehouse everyone took up their load in the rain, and we started out.

  The soldiers had lined themselves up on either side of us like a wall, riding the prisoners hard to keep them moving. Another row of soldiers stood at the bottom of the steps that came down from the fortress gates, so that as we came out to the street we seemed an army moving in. In that crowd I hardly noticed at first that Jesus’s two brothers were standing off to the side with one of the women from Jesus’s troupe, Salome. They caught sight of Jesus in the line, but I couldn’t read what was in their faces then, confusion or horror or simple incomprehension. Almost at once one of the brothers hurried off with Salome, but the other followed behind us, keeping a distance as if unsure what his place was.

  A crooked avenue rose from the castle stairs into the bazaar, and we started along it in the rain. It went up in steps, with grooves cut into them for the merchants to move their carts, and it was a job for that gang to get along them, chained and weighed down as they were and the pavement slick with wet. The shops along there were closed since it was still a holy time for the Jews, but when the word went around of the prisoners coming through, people started to poke their heads out of their doorways or over their rooftops. From an alley we went past someone spit at one of the soldiers, then disappeared before anyone could grab him. But mostly we moved along in an eerie peacefulness, because of the hush of the rain and the sleep still in people’s eyes and the sight of us passing through with our battalion of soldiers and our line of men heading for death.

  With the soldiers flanking us there wasn’t room for people to follow alongside. But soon enough a tail had started to form behind us, mainly of boys at first but then others. Jesus’s brother was keeping pace but still hanging back, falling in behind the rest. Then after a while I noticed the second brother had joined up with him again along with another who looked older. This one looked clearly broken, chafing like a tethered animal at the back of the crowd as if he might surge forward at any moment to get Jesus free.

  Salome had come back as well, with two other women in veils against the rain—Mary and Jesus’s mother. It was strange to see them together like that. They looked like mother and daughter, both small and dark and with eyes that burned into you, the same wildness in them then as they searched the line to make out Jesus there, hoping against hope it wasn’t true. When they picked him out, his mother’s eyes went dead and she turned away, but Mary’s only got wilder. It was the different way they saw him, as a woman and a mother. I thought of his mother outside the Rat Gates, and the look in her eyes when she’d seen Jesus with his followers and his dirty coat, and knew she must blame herself now since she’d made him what he was.

  We were getting tired with our loads, which seemed heavier by the instant in that rain, so I was sure my back was about to break. For the prisoners it was worse, after the flogging they’d got, the backs of their shirts just a wash of blood. Then just as we were coming to where the street jogged around towards one of the city gates, Jerubal slipped and fell, crumpling like a sapling under the weight of his beam. For an instant I thought he’d planned it, that it was part of some scheme. But right away the soldiers were on him to get up and I saw it was real, because the minute he tried to right himself he fell again in a heap, screaming with the pain.

  Jesus was chained behind him and in the confusion managed to drop his beam and crouch to him before the soldiers could stop him.

  “His leg’s broken,” he said, feeling around the bone there. The captain looked as if he didn’t know what to do, and Jesus said, “I can help him.”

  The street had widened there near the gate and a crowd had been able to form around us, watching. The captain, not wanting to appear an animal in front of it, gave a nod to Jesus and had his men undo his and Jerubal’s irons. Jesus called for a stick from the crowd and someone passed him a walking stick, which he broke in half. Then he started to shift the bone around gently with his hands while Jerubal, hardly seeming to feel the movement, sat there on the wet pavement. After massaging the thing for a few moments like that, Jesus tore a strip off his own shirt and used it to tie the two halves of the stick to Jerubal’s leg as a splint.

  The crowd had fallen quiet, watching Jesus work there in the rain. He hadn’t done any miracle, maybe just what any doctor would do, but still they could see there was something in him, that he wasn’t what they’d expect in someone condemned. I saw his mother looking on, still at the back of the crowd, and how she watched him as if she was seeing him for the first time. Likely she hadn’t known anything of him but the stories people told, and so had been afraid he’d become a delinquent or worse. But now she saw him with Jerubal, not just the skill he had but the dignity.

  Jesus helped Jerubal up and called for another walking stick from the crowd, which someone passed in, and Jerubal managed to limp forward a bit with it. But he looked helpless now. Seeing him seemed to bring home to me suddenly that all this was real, that Jesus and Jerubal were headed for the cross and no trick or plan would save them. It was a solace that they had each other, at least—I saw that Jesus was stronger than Jerubal and Jerubal needed him, that Jerubal had stepped beyond what he could manage but Jesus was ready for this, as if all his life had prepared him for it.

  There wasn’t any thought of getting Jerubal’s crossbeam onto his shoulders again, and the captain of the guard was looking more and more distraught at how the march was going. His eye went down the line of those of us in back and quickly settled on me.

  “Tie it to his upright,” he said to his men, and they scrambled then to join Jerubal’s beam to my own. We started up again but looking less impressive now than when we’d set out, the soldiers churlish at the setbacks and the steady downpour and the imposing line of fetters and chains that had joined the prisoners broken now where Jerubal had been unshackled and was hobbling along on his cane.

  We passed through the gate. There was a bit of a hill there rising up beneath the city wall where they did the executions, just an outcropping of mealy rock with the yellowed look of old bone, ringed round at the base with a stone fence and completely bare except for a couple of bushes and withered trees. Off to one side, closed off behind its own low wall, was a small graveyard with a few humps of tomb carved into the chalky stone where the convicts were put after they’d died. There were a few soldiers on the hill carving out holes for the uprights, or more likely clearing old ones, since you could see the place was already riddled with holes from the regular killing the Romans probably did there.

  We were marched in through a small gate in the stone fence, half the soldiers staying behind to keep watch over the crowd and the other half staying with the prisoners. The hill didn’t rise up more than forty paces, but still it was hard getting up it because of the slick of dirt that covered the stone, slippery as ice in the rain. I was sweating with the effort but at the same time chilled to the bone, and so numbed I could hardly feel my legs. When we got to the top and the captain told us to drop our loads I couldn’t bend enough to get free of mine, and one of the soldiers had to lift it off me.

  The prisoners had been unshackled and lined up in a row facing out towards the
crowd, the wall of the city rising up wet and grey behind them. They looked ready for death, rain-drenched and hobbled by their march and their shirts still dripping blood from their flogging. But Jesus hadn’t lost that look of being apart. I overheard one of the Galileans then, looking already as pale as death, confess to Jesus that he was a murderer, and that he could see what a thing he’d done to take a life, now that his own was being taken. But Jesus said, “If you’ve understood that, you’re already forgiven,” which seemed to comfort the fellow.

  Those were the last words I heard Jesus speak, because our group was herded away, now that our work was done. Before we were led off the hill one of the soldiers came with a bag of coins—it seemed we were all entitled to payment for our efforts. The Jews refused it to a man, not even deigning so much as to say a word but just shaking their heads. But the soldier just shrugged them off and offered to split the lot between me and the Egyptian. I had to think then—I hadn’t a penny to my name, all my coin pinched by the warders in the castle. In the end I took just the denarius that was due to me, and let the Egyptian have the rest.

  I saw now that the crowd looking on was not as large as it had seemed in those narrow streets—there were a few hundred in all, and half of them just urchins. It didn’t seem much when I thought of the crowds I’d seen lined up in the temple square to kill their lambs, the thousands and the tens of thousands of them, so that it made what was happening here appear insignificant and small. But just beyond where we were was the camp the Romans had laid out for the pilgrims, and people had started filtering in from it despite the rain to see what was happening. It was in amidst them that I made out Simon the Rock, drifting in hunched and alone towards the wall at the bottom of the hill and looking as lost as I’d ever seen a man.

  I went over to him. I hardly knew what to say to him and just stood there, and he looked at me with such a blank stare that he might never have laid eyes on me before.