Silver

by Steven Savile

  1 Pieces of Hate

  Then - The Testimony of Menahem ben Jair

  One garden had a serpent, the other had him.

  There was a fractured beauty to it; a curious symmetry. The serpent had goaded that first betrayal with honeyed words, the forbidden fruit bitten, and the original sin on the lips of the first weak man. His own betrayal had been acted out from behind a mask of love, again on the lips, and sealed with a kiss. Both betrayals were made all the more ugly by the beauty of their surroundings. That was the agony of the garden.

  Iscariot felt the weight of silver in his hand.

  It was so much heavier than a few coins ought to be. But then they were more than a few coins now, weren't they? They were a life bought with silver. They were his guilt. He closed his hand around the battered leather pouch, making a fist. How much was a life worth? Really? He had thought about it a lot in the hours since the kiss. Was it the weight of the coins that bought it? The handful of iron nails driven into the wooden cross that ended it? Or the meat left to feed the carrion birds? All of these? None of them? He wanted to believe it was something more spiritual, more honest: the impact that it had on the lives of those around it, the sum of the good and the bad, deeds and thoughts.

  "Take them, please," he held out the pouch for the farmer to take. "It's five times what the land's worth. More."

  "I don't want your blood money, traitor," the man hawked and spat at the d between his feet. "Now go."

  "Where can I go? I am alone."

  "Anywhere away from this place. Somewhere people don't know you. If I was you, I'd go back to the temple and try to buy my soul back."

  The man turned his back on him and walked away, leaving Iscariot alone in the field. "If that doesn't work," he called without turning back, "I'd throw myself on God's mercy."

  Iscariot followed the direction of the man's gaze to the field's single blackened tree. Lightning had struck it years ago, cleaving it down the middle. Its wooden guts were rotted through, but a single hangman's branch still reached out, beckoning to him against the dusk sky.

  He hurled the pouch at the mocking tree. One of the seams split as it hit the ground, scattering the coins across the parched dirt. A moment later he was on his knees, scrambling after them, tears of loss streaming down his face. Loss, not for the man he had betrayed, but for the man he had been and the man he could have been. He lay there as the sun failed, wishing the sun would sear away his flesh and char his bones, but dawn came and he was still alive.

  Under the anvil of the sun, he stumbled back through the gates of Jerusalem, and wandered the streets for hours. His body's screams were sweated out in the heat. There was no forgiveness in the air. No one would look at him. But he couldn't bear to look at his shadow as it stretched out in front of him, so why should they want to look at him? He deserved their hate. He shielded his eyes and looked up toward Crucifixion Hill. He thought he could see the shadow of the cross, black against the grass. The soldiers had taken the bodies down hours before. The only shadows up there now were ghosts.

  At the temple they mocked him as he pleaded with the Pharisees to take back the silver in exchange for his confession and absolution.

  "Live with what you have done, Judas, son of Kerioth. With this one deed you have ensured your legacy. Your name will live on: Judas the Betrayer, Judas the Coward. The money is yours, Iscariot, your burden. You cannot buy back the innocence of your soul, and it is not as though you have not killed before. Now go, the sight of you sickens us," the Pharisee said, sweeping his arm out to encompass the entire congregation gathered in prayer.

  He hit Iscariot's hand, scattering the silver he clutched across the stone floor. Judas fell to his knees, as though groveling at the feet of the holy man. Head down, he collected the scattered cois. The holy man kicked him away scornfully. "Take your blood money and be gone, traitor."

  Iscariot struggled to his feet and stumbled toward the door.

  On the road to Gethsemane he saw the familiar figure of Mary seated by the wayside. He wanted to run to her, to fall at her feet and beg her forgiveness. She had lost so much more than the rest of them. She looked up, saw him, and smiled sadly. Her smile stopped him dead. He felt the weight of the coins in his hand. Suddenly they were as heavy as love and twice as cold. She stood and reached out for him. He had never loved her more than he did in that moment. He had gone against so much of his friend's teachings, but never more so than in coveting the woman he loved. He ran into her arms and held her, huge raking sobs shuddering through him. He couldn't cry. After all of the tears he had shed he was empty. "I am sorry. I am so sorry."

  She hushed him, gentling her fingers through his hair. "They are looking for you. Matthew has whipped them up into a rage. He hates you. He always has. And now he has an excuse for it. They are out of their minds with grief and loss, Judas. You can't stay here, or they will kill you for what you have done. You have to go."

  "There's nowhere left to go, Mary, he's seen to that. This is his revenge," he laughed bitterly at that. "I should never . . .I am sorry. It wasn't meant to end like this. All of this because, fool that I am, I couldn't help but love you."

  "Our god is a jealous god," she said. She sounded utterly spent. The emptiness in her voice cut deeper than any words could have. She was crying but there was no strength to her tears. "Please, go."

  "I can't," he said, and he knew that it was true. He needed to be found. He needed to feel their stones hit. He needed their anger to break his bones. He was finished with this life. The farmer had been right, there was only God's mercy left to him. But what kind of mercy was that? What mercy did a suicide have with the gates to the Kingdom closed to him?

  Judas' mind was plagued with doubts, it had been for days. His friend had known he would not be able to live with this blood on his hands, yet still he had begged for this betrayal. So perhaps this stoning was actually one final mercy?

  "Please."

  "Let them come. I will face them and die with what little dignity is left to me."

  0" width=0" width="19" align="justify">She wiped away the tears. "Please. If not for me, then for our son," she took his hand and placed it flat against the gentle swell of her belly.

  "Our son," he repeated, falling to his knees before her. He kissed her hands and then her belly, crushing his face up against the coarse cloth of her dress. The Pharisee's words rang in his head: Judas the Betrayer. What greater betrayal could there be? He pressed the torn leather pouch into her hands. "Please, take the silver, for the boy, for you."

  He saw the life he had lost reflected in Mary's eyes. He knew she loved him, and he knew love was not enough. He couldn't tell her how alone he felt at that moment.

  She turned her back on him.

  He left her to walk the long road to death.

  He had time to think, time to remember the promise he had made, and time to regret it. It was a walk filled with last things: He watched the sun sink down below the trees; he felt the wind in his face; he tasted the arid air on his tongue. He pulled off his robe and walked naked into the garden.

  They were waiting for him.

  He didn't shy away from the hurt and hatred in their eyes. He did not try to justify himself. He stood naked before them.

  "You killed him," Matthew said, damning him. They were the last words Judas Iscariot heard. Matthew held a rope in his hands. It was fashioned into a noose.

  He welcomed the first stone from James as it struck his temple. He didn't flinch. He didn't feel it. Nor did he feel the second from Luke, or the third cast by John. The stones hit, one after another, each one thrown harder than the last until they drove Iscariot to his knees. All he felt was the agony of the garden.

  Matthew came forward with the rope and looped it around Judas' neck.

&n
bsp; Judas wept.

  2

  Burn With Me Now It was two minutes to three when the woman walked into Trafalgar Square.

  Dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting, yellow tee-shirt she looked like every other summer tourist come to pay homage to Landseer's brooding lions. There was a smiley face plastered across her chest. The grin was stretched out of shape by the teardrop swell of her breasts. Only it wasn't summer. The yellow tee-shirt set her apart from the maddening crowd, because everyone else was wrapped up against the spring chill with scarves and gloves and woolen hats.

  She stood still, a single spot of calm amid the hectic hustle of London. She uncapped the plastic bottle she held and emptied it over her head and shoulders, working the syry liquid in to her scalp. In less than a minute her long blonde hair was tangled and thick with grease as though it hadn't been washed in months. She smelled like the traffic fumes and fog of pollution that choked the city.

  Pigeons landed around the feet of the man beside her as he scattered chunks of bread across the paving stones. He looked up and smiled at her. He had a gentle face. A kind smile. She wondered who loved him. Someone had to. He had the contentment of a loved man.

  Around her the tourists divided into groups: those out in search of culture headed toward the National Portrait Gallery; the thirsty ducked into the cafe on the corner; the royalists crossed over the road and disappeared beneath Admiralty Arch onto Whitehall; the hungry headed for Chandos Place and Covent Garden's trendy eateries; and those starved of entertainment wandered up St Martin's Lane towards Leicester Square or Soho, depending upon their definition of entertainment. Businessmen in their off-the-rack suits marched in step like penguins, umbrella tips and blakeys and segs, those uniquely English metal sole protectors, tapping out the rhythm of the day's enterprise. Red buses crawled down Cockspur Street and around the corner toward The Strand and Charing Cross. The city was alive.

  A young girl in a bright red duffel coat ran toward her, giggling and flapping her arms to startle the feeding birds into flight. When she was right in the middle of them the pigeons exploded upwards in a madness of feathers. The girl doubled up in laughter, her delighted shrieks chasing the pigeons up into the sky. Her enjoyment was infectious. The man rummaged in his plastic bag for another slice of white bread to tear up. The woman couldn't help but smile. She had chosen the yellow tee-shirt because it made her smile. It seemed important to her that today of all days she should.

  She took the phone from her pocket and made the call.

  "News desk." The voice on the other end was too perky for its own good. That would change in less than a minute when the screaming began.

  "There is a plague coming," she said calmly. "For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now."

  "Who is this? Who am I talking to?"

  "I don't need to tell you my name. Before the day is through you will know everything there is to know about me apart from one important detail."

  "And what's that?""Why I did it."

  She ruffled the young girl's hair as she scattered another cluster of pigeons and burst into fits of giggles. The girl stopped, turned and looked up at the woman. "You smell funny."

  The woman reached into her pocket for her lighter. She thumbed the wheel, grating it against the flint, and touched the naked flame to her hair. She dropped the phone and stumbled forward as the fire engulfed her.

  All around her the city screamed.

  3

  Thirteen Martyrs Nah Larkin lay on his back, looking up at the cheap hotel room's equally cheap ceiling fan. The blades stuttered as they turned, making a painfully shrill squeal every fourth revolution. The room, in the basement of an old Victorian Town House, set him back twenty quid a night. As the old saying went, you got what you paid for, and what he'd paid for was a mattress riddled with the black smears of crushed bed bugs, a crusty top sheet that hadn't been washed since Victoria herself sat on the throne, and water stains that crept more than halfway up the wall.

  The light from the fly windows looking onto the street was almost nonexistent.

  The room smelled of whiskey-fueled dreams, stale sweat and week-old kebab relish. It was not a pleasant mix.

  He closed his eyes.

  On the other side of the bed the woman shifted her weight, causing the entire mattress to yaw alarmingly. A coil of bedspring stabbed into Noah's backside. The woman beside him wasn't a beauty, but that really didn't matter to him. It wasn't that Larkin was deep or looked beyond the shallows of beauty; he wasn't and he didn't. There were no hidden depths to him. Like the room, she was cheap, and like the room, he got exactly what he paid for. It wasn't about sex. He hadn't touched the woman. He just wanted someone to sleep beside him. Of course, he couldn't sleep.

  Mercifully, his mobile rang. He reached over for the phone on the night stand.

  "Larkin," he said, sliding back the handset.

  "Where the hell have you been?" Ronan Frost's Derry brogue grew more pronounced when he was angry. That one sentence would have been enough for a linguist to pin-point what street he was born on.

  Noah looked down at the prostitute as she lay beside him. Her red lace bra sagged beneath the weight of the years. She opened her eyes. They were lost, like one of T.S. Elliot's Hollow Men. She smiled up at him. "Preoccupied," he told Frost.

  "Well, stop arsing about and get yourself down here, soldier. The brown stuff's exploding all over the fan."

  "On my way, boss," he said.

  On the other end of the line Frost grunted.

  Noah killed the connection and fumbled the phone back onto the nightstand. Beside it, the neon light of the clock tried to convince him it was almost midnight. He didn't believe it for a minute.

  He pushed himself out of the bed.

  The prostitute leaned forward on her elbow, studying his naked body. He repaid the compliment. He would have said something but he couldn't remember her name. Instead he took his wallet from his pocket, folded a handful of notes in his hand and offered them to her.

  "It's too much," she said, looking at the cash. It was. It could have paid for her for a week.

  Noah shrugged. "Call it a bonus for not having to do the deep and meaningfuls while we cuddled up."

  She rolled the notes and stuffed them into her bra.

  "The room's paid for the night. Stay here, sleep. Get yourself a good breakfast in the morning."

  He went across to her side of the bed, bent down and kissed her gently on the forehead. It was a surprisingly intimate and tender gesture. She reached up and touched his cheek, her red-painted fingernail lingering on the scar that cut through the midnight shadow of stubble. And for just a moment they might have been lovers. The roll of money in her bra banished the illusion quickly enough.

  Noah left her in bed. As he closed the door behind him he remembered her name: Margot.

  He stepped out into the street. The North Star was bright in the night sky. Street lights burned sodium yellow on the pavement. A fat-bodied rat scurried out from beneath the mountain of plastic trash bags stacked in the gutter. No matter where you were in London you were never more than ten feet away from a rat, or so they said.

  Noah's 1966 racing green Austin Healey was parked up against the curb. It looked like a relic from a better, nobler age, surrounded by the corporate uniformity of the Volvos, Fords, BMWs and Citroens lining either side of the street. The Austin's side panels were beige, finished off with gold and black piping. The black leather soft top was down. He had fallen in love with the car when it was a wreck up on cinderblocks in a wrecking yard by Clapham Common. There was just something about it. It was like the proverbial bullet with his n it; they were destined to be together eventually.

  The registration papers listed its original date of sale as March 27, 1966. He liked the idea of the car being "born" on the same day Pickles found the old Jules Rimet trophy under a hedge in South London. Noah had spent thousands of pounds and hundreds o
f hours restoring the car. In truth, the car was the one constant in his life; the one thing he loved. No doubt a shrink would point to a loveless childhood and a lack of hugs when he scraped his knee, either that, or every time he entered the car he was thinking about his mother in some Oedipean way. Sometimes, though, a car was just a car, and that man-love was just man love for the wire rims and the walnut dashboard.

  He gunned the engine and peeled away from the curb.

  London at night was a strange beast. It was alive with the pheromones of danger, adultery and random acts of senseless violence. Like Sinatra's New York, it was his kind of town. On the corner he passed a three-legged dog trying to piss up against the wall without falling over. Ahead of him two girls walked, arms linked, down the white line in the middle of the road. He honked once, then swept around them, accelerating from a crawl to sixty in a couple of seconds and back to a dead stop at the first set of red lights. Noah loved the illusory freedom the wind in his hair gave him, even if it was short-lived.

  This part of London existed on three levels: the underground; street level, with its instant gratifiers of fast food joints, discount clothes shops, electronics stores and florists; and overhead, with its amazing architecture that everyone down below was too preoccupied to notice. Windows were hidden behind steel shutters, the steel shutters hidden beneath inventive graffiti and spray-painted gang tags. He could never get used to the sheer emptiness of the city at night. It wasn't that the city was dead. It wasn't. It was vampiric. Come midnight the only people out were those who for one reason or another were afraid of sunlight.

  Bracing the wheel on his thighs, he reached down for the rack of CDs lined up beside the gearstick and picked the one he wanted. Ignoring the lights, he took the left onto Belgrave Road at seventy-five and chased it down through Pimlico, hitting Vauxhall Bridge Road just shy of ninety miles per hour.

  As he crossed the Thames, James Grant's melancholic voice wondered who in their right mind would want to live in this city of fear. It was a fair question. Noah loved London almost as much as he loved Grant's voice. Both had that lived-in quality that made them immediately comfortable, familiar but not so much so as to breed contempt. Both of them were so much more than they appeared to be when you scratched away at the surface. The voice and the streets were steeped in hidden subtleties. He couldn't imagine living anywhere else. He was a London boy to the core. He lived and breathed the city. He grinned, knowing full well that no one would be in a rush to accuse him of being in hisht mind.