by Stant Litore
Koach stood there with Rahel, apart from the others, occasionally lifting his one good hand to scratch at his cheek, at the first fuzz of beard on his young face. Shimon stood near, blinking in the sun, called from his rest after a night at sea by the hoofbeats and the shouts in the town. Yet Shimon stood with his back to his younger brother. Koach used to try to draw his attention, to help him clumsily with small tasks. Now he knew better.
Small and weighing less than a milk-goat, Koach was unobtrusive at his mother’s side, yet he felt how the others standing in this open space looked away from him or past him, as though despite his size he were so obvious and so visible that it took great labor not to see him.
All but a few, like Bar Cheleph, who watched him in open hostility, his eyes hot with the capacity for violence; once, Koach had been set upon and beaten in the street. Vividly he recalled Bar Cheleph forcing his hand open, tearing a small carving from his fingers and tossing it into the grass. Vividly he recalled the blows falling on his back. To many of the ragged survivors in Kfar Nahum, Koach was an unwelcome reminder of the night of tombs, and all their grief. Of sorrows they’d rather bury and forget. Hebel, the men called him, “useless.” Rahel had sewn his right sleeve longer than the left to help him conceal his deformed right hand, and she had padded the sleeve with wool to hide the thinness of his withered right arm, yet it made no difference.
He cast a resentful glance at that synagogue door, with its old Hebrew letters carved into the lintel and the doorposts—words of the Law. He was barred from entering; he should have stood before the men of Kfar Nahum and recited from the Torah, a year since. But the priest would not allow him his bar ‘onshin.
Koach stared up at the stranger with sudden heat in his eyes. Barabba was so different from him—a strong man on a giant horse, with muscled arms and a scarred, cold face. No one would ever deny him anything; he would never be helpless or useless.
Barabba turned his horse slowly and made a disgusted sound in his throat. “I came here looking for men!” His voice was low but strangely clipped. His was not a Galilean accent, but it had none of the softness of the Greek in it either. “I came looking for men, but all your faces are pale and your mouths gape like fish. Tell me this is Kfar Nahum, the town of Yonah bar Yesse.”
“This is the town of Yonah bar Yesse,” a tired voice said from the door of the synagogue.
Zebadyah stood there, his tallit over his head, having just come from his prayers within. He stepped out and stood in the whiteness of the sun and the whiteness of the synagogue steps, the whiteness of a world long since drained of color.
“Good! This is what I’ve come to say.” Barabba leaned a little from his saddle, addressing the priest, though all the others could see his face and hear his voice, which carried. “If there are true men of Yehuda tribe in this town, they are needed. Each year there are more dead in the hills, and they are in the cities now, too. And what’s more—” His voice rose hot with hate. “There are Romans! Always more of those, too. They mock our ways, they starve us, they spit in the face of our God. Beth Anya would not pay their pig-tax, so the Romans broke the doors of their synagogue and burned their Torah. In our Yerushalayim they’ve hung Roman eagles of gold and silver on the walls of the Temple. Graven images, in the places where we worship! While you in the north sleep, Rome has come into our house like a thief, to take our bread and defile our women and hang their foul gods on our walls.”
Koach heard the stirring of the men and women of Kfar Nahum, indrawn breaths and muttered curses. A few hands flickered in the sign against the evil eye. The corpse-heads at Barabba’s saddle stared sightlessly.
“For two generations the Romans have done so with us,” Zebadyah said quietly. “Why ride all the way here to tell us what we already know?”
“Because it is getting worse.” Barabba stroked his horse’s neck, then dropped his hand to his side. “I know your kind in the south, priest. Pharisees. Appeasers. Most of our People cower and shrink back from Romans who pass in the street, but you—the Romans own you already.”
With a quick move of his wrist, he unhooked one of the heads—one of the unclean heads—from the right of his saddle and hurled it into the center of the square. It rolled a moment, then stopped with its dead gazing up, as if to accuse God in his sky of crimes of violence that its lips had never been able to reveal in words—only in a long moan of anguish silenced by Barabba’s knife.
Everyone drew back.
Koach swallowed against the tightness of his throat. The dead. The dead that were in the water, the dead that were in the past, the dead no one talked about.
But this severed head was here, and terribly close, and could not be ignored.
“Look at it.” Barabba’s voice was a whip crack in the dawn air. “Look at it! Can you appease that? When our People returned out of exile—the only one of the twelve tribes to come back, the only one true to our Covenant—we found our land crawling with these. Teeming like ants. Because the heathen have never cared for our land as we do. Have never cared for the dead as we do. But we took back our land, built walls against the dead, lit the sacred fire in a new Temple. We carried out the Law until no moan could be heard in our land. We did that, because we are a People whose faith cannot be bent and whose teeth cannot be drawn. We are a People of lions.” He turned in his saddle, his gaze sweeping the crowd. “Well, that is how we have always been. Exile in Susa did not tame us. The Greeks did not beat us. And now, now, will you let the Romans take your teeth? The Romans are good at stilling the dead—that’s what I hear the children of Israel say, wherever I ride. There have never been men with swords like those the Romans breed or hire. They may walk on us and ravish us and starve us, but they keep our land safe. That is what I hear. But our Roman masters, they take our teeth, our claws. Until we are sheep. And then what? What then? What happens one day when the Romans tire of us, or are busy defending some other shore? Will we sit about like a flock of sheep, waiting to be eaten by the dead?”
“God will send us a navi to deliver us,” one of the younger men called out. “A messiah!” After a moment, Koach realized that was Bar Cheleph’s voice.
“Navi!” Barabba turned his horse about and walked it toward Bar Cheleph, staring him down. “We make our own navi, our own messiah. God waits too long; let God affirm whom we anoint, or speak from heaven with his own voice if he dissents. Follow me, men of Kfar Nahum. We will make this land Hebrew again.”
“What can you do?” That was Shimon bar Nahemyah’s voice. He stepped forward to face Barabba. “The Romans are strong. What can you do, Barabba?”
“A strong man can still die with a knife in his back. Even a Roman.” He leaned nearer. “There are many of us—in the south. Not so many in the north. But there, about the Mount of Olives, we harry the Romans wherever we find them. Another year, boy, and we will make the Romans beg to leave Israel.”
They held each other’s gazes, each measuring the other.
“What is your name?”
“Shimon bar Nahemyah.”
“Ride with me, Bar Nahemyah. I see the shofar about your throat. It’s time for the ram’s horn to be heard in our cities again. I tire of the braying of Roman trumpets and the din of Roman drums.”
Bar Nahemyah watched him a moment; the others watched him. Shimon frowned. Bar Nahemyah’s yearning was naked in his face. In a moment, perhaps his old rage would return, that rage with which he had once faced the dead at the synagogue door. He still wore that night’s shofar about his throat, having refused to relinquish it to the priest after the battle with the dead fourteen years before.
“You were hiding,” he had accused Zebadyah in the days that followed, when they met at the door of the synagogue.
The priest had looked stricken. “It is not my sin that I am here to discuss,” he said hoarsely, “but yours. The dead unburied, the dead you threw in the sea.”
“The Romans came, and you hid. The dead came, and you hid. You weren’t there at the sy
nagogue. You didn’t blow the shofar when it was needed,” Bar Nahemyah had told the priest coldly. “I will carry the safety of this town, and do what needs to be done.”
And he had left the synagogue steps that day and had never again stepped within it, not even for the Sabbath. Bar Nahemyah had no surviving kin, no wife, no children. It was said that Bar Nahemyah lived and ate alone in the atrium of his father’s empty house, with only his bitterness and anger for company. And in Kfar Nahum, only he and Koach did not go to meet God with the other men.
The thought that he might leave the town struck Koach with sudden fear. Unlike his own brother Shimon, Shimon bar Nahemyah had never been ashamed to speak with him, had never looked away from him.
Bar Nahemyah never looked away from anyone.
It was he who had driven away Bar Cheleph and the other young men who had knocked Koach to the ground, that one hot morning. Often Bar Nahemyah would pace the unkept streets of Kfar Nahum, his eyes fierce, the lines of his body taut like a ship running before the storm. Years ago, some had left Kfar Nahum, fleeing to other towns along the shore, but any who encountered Bar Nahemyah as they slipped from their houses stopped, looked down, and quietly went back within their doors and unpacked. There was a fury in Bar Nahemyah’s face that none could ignore. While he, he, remained in Kfar Nahum, who else would dare abandon it?
“I want to,” Bar Nahemyah said at last. “I want to come with you. My heart demands it. But my head hears the screaming of our People in your smooth words.”
“Maybe it is the Romans you hear screaming.” Barabba’s face darkened with anger, but his voice was steady.
“Maybe.”
“Go with him!” Bar Cheleph cried out. His face bore that same fear that Koach felt. As he always did, Bar Cheleph was lashing out before he could be hurt. “And others with you! We’ll have fewer fish. And fewer mouths.”
“Be quiet, son,” Zebadyah said.
Bar Nahemyah was staring coldly at the corpse’s head, where it lay defiling the earth near the priest’s feet. “I trust my own hands and anything I hold in them,” he said. “I do not trust you, Barabba. I’ve fought my fight. I am done.”
“Go, stranger.” Shimon bar Yonah lifted his head and faced the horseman, his voice bitter, his shoulders hunched as with remembered pain. “We are men who grieve, and this is all that is left of our home. We will not leave it for you or anyone else.”
“Pray the Romans don’t take it from you,” Barabba snapped.
“We have little left for them,” Shimon said. “If they want it, let them try. But you, leave us be, as you’ve been asked.”
Koach stared at Shimon in wonder, never having heard his taciturn brother speak so many words at once.
Barabba wheeled his horse about in a cold fury. “Why are the rest of you silent?” he cried. “Rise up! I call you, rise up! What is wrong with you? Maybe you are all half-Roman or Roman-lovers.” Suddenly he caught sight of Koach, where he’d shrunk back against his mother’s side. “There! That boy! What is wrong with his arm? Why haven’t you cast him out? What kind of Hebrews are you?” His voice rose in a shout. “He is probably a Roman’s child! A rape child!—”
“He is not!” Rahel shrieked, and her small hand thrust Koach behind her.
“The Outlaw is right!” Bar Cheleph cried. “God does not bless us or feed us. We are starving! We have let such a boy live!”
“Starving!” someone else shrieked. “We’re starving!”
“Stone the boy!” He recognized Mordecai’s voice.
“Stone the boy!” others shouted. “Stone the boy!”
It was as though all the griefs and terrors of fourteen years had been poured into a wineskin and sealed, and the wineskin had held them contained and out of sight. But over the years, the skin had grown brittle, and now Barabba with his words and his hurling of severed heads to their feet had dashed the skin against the earth, and everything this town had refused to look at was gushing out. It was gushing out ugly and sharp as vinegar. These angry faces no longer seemed those of men and women whom Koach knew. They stared at him with dead eyes and opening mouths, like the mouths of the dead.
Several stooped to lift stones from the side of the street.
Koach took a step back, blanching, but the stones did not fly. Not yet. Shimon stood between Koach and the crowd, his body tensed. Some of them wavered. Bar Nahemyah and Benayahu—the town’s nagar, the woodworker and repairer of boats whose house stood by theirs—took their stand by Yonah’s son. Zebadyah looked on in horror.
Rahel gripped Koach’s good arm, her face rigid with fear. “If they throw,” she whispered, “you run.”
“Amma …” he whispered.
“You run, Koach. Your brother and I, they will not throw at us. They will not.” There was a savage edge to her voice.
At that moment, Barabba wheeled his horse, and his long knife rang from its sheath. “I will take care of this for you,” he shouted, and kicked his heels in. But even as his gelding sprang forward, Shimon tore the heavy fishing coat from his shoulders and flung it over the animal’s head. The horse reared, hooves striking the air. Cursing, Barabba fought for balance.
“Run, Koach!” Rahel cried.
Koach stumbled back, then fled, the slap of his sandalled feet against the dry, packed earth before the synagogue. Someone grabbed for him and missed; others sprang out of his way. Glancing over his shoulder, Koach caught a glimpse of Barabba tearing the coat free and hurling it aside. A spray of red in the air as his knife took Benayahu across the face; the nagar had tried to grab at the bridle, and now fell back with a gurgled cry. Zebadyah was shouting, and there were screams, and Rahel stood before Barabba’s horse.
Then a turn in the narrow streets hid the synagogue and the Outlaw from view, and Koach panted as he ran. More screams—terrible screams—but he didn’t dare stop. Panic beat an overpowering drumbeat in his chest, and in his ears he heard his mother’s voice: Run, Koach, run. Run. Run.
He ran. Gasping for breath, he leapt as far with each stride as he could, down the slope of the land toward the sea. He began ducking through the narrower spaces between houses. Behind him, hooves like battle-drums against the packed earth of Kfar Nahum’s streets, and in his ears the rush and roar of his blood. Without thought, Koach ran to where the small houses were packed thickest, nearest the water where his mother and his brother and the surviving fishers lived. Barabba bellowed somewhere behind him, but he ran on, panting. He had the confused impression that if he could get to his mother’s house, he might hide somewhere within. But already his sides burned, and he ran half hunched over.
Then he could see his mother’s house ahead, that small stone structure, its walls whitened by the sea, and the hooves were louder behind him. He ran past the last few houses, and the door to the house ahead of him—the door of the last house before his mother’s, the nagar’s door, in better repair than most—was thrown open. A girl stood there, one his own age, a girl with a strange face and a frightened look.
“Inside!” she cried. “Quickly!”
Koach had only half a breath in which to make up his mind. Home was before him, but he would be alone there, in an empty house, with a furious man and a blade coming for him. He could hear the hoofbeats behind, just around the corner. He didn’t trust others in the town, none but his mother and perhaps Shimon his brother and perhaps Bar Nahemyah who was alone, as he was.
“Come on!” the girl cried.
Something in her eyes told him what he needed to know.
With a gasp he flung himself toward the girl and her door.
EPISODE 4
THE CARPENTER’S DAUGHTER
The girl caught Koach’s hand—her fingers so warm around his—and pulled him up against her side and into the house; her other hand caught the latch of the door and swung it shut against the sound of hooves. Her eyes were wide in the soft dark. Koach could hear her breathing and his. He could also feel her body, the softness of it, pressed to him. It made pla
ces low in his body heat in a way that astonished him.
She put her lips to his ear and whispered, “Come on. I’ll hide you.”
She led him quickly across the atrium of her father’s house, beneath the open sky. Koach looked at her in wonder. There were few young women in Kfar Nahum, and few young men, but Koach did not remember having seen her before. There were finger-shaped bruises just below her sleeve, as though someone had gripped her arm hard enough to drag her across the atrium and fling her to the ground or into a room. But at that moment, with Barabba’s hoofbeats still loud in his ears, Koach barely noticed them. She had a strange face. Her eyes were wide apart—too wide—but they were fierce with the fire of her heart, and for a moment he found it difficult to look away from them.
She did not look at him with the horror he was used to seeing in girls’ eyes.
She pulled hard at his wrist. “Come on!” she whispered.
Outside, the hoofbeats went still.
“God of Hosts,” she whispered. She pulled him out of the atrium into one of the small rooms along the wall, drew him in, and let the great rug that served for a curtain fall closed across the door. Within, shards of light speared toward the floor from a window long boarded up against the dead, in lines as sharp as though a man had drawn them there. Koach could see motes of dust flashing into existence as they drifted into the light, and then fading out of existence again, each one lit up briefly with fire from the sun. Despite the terror in his heart, it startled him; it was so beautiful. As the girl stepped through the light and into the shadows behind it, Koach caught the briefest glimpse of hair the color of rich earth.