My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  It was not a long battle, and my own part was small. The spear of a battle-maddened mercenary tore my cloak, and I closed with him and broke my spear on his shield. We rolled on the ground, he trying to draw his sword, I cursing the neck plates that impeded my fingers. He half drew his sword, and I stopped trying to throttle him, but beat his face in with my clenched fist and continued to beat at the bloody face even after he was dead. I took his sword, and all of this seemed like hours but could only have been a minute or two at most, yet the people of Modin had already poured out of the houses, some with spears and some with bows, and the world was full of that wild screaming that goes on in a battle—and the mercenaries were no longer in orderly ranks with lapped shields, but in clumps and clusters, and a good many of them on the ground and others running.

  But around Judas and Eleazar and Ruben they made a knot, as if these three must be torn down and offered to whatever Gods mercenaries worshiped, or the world would end surely; and there I went, where my brothers fought, and there too the Adon came, knife in hand, cloak torn and bloodstained. I killed another man—I remember yet the blasphemous ease of slaughter—running through the small of the back, severing his spine just beneath his armor; and I saw the Adon drag down another, an old wolf, truly, and terrible in the strength of his wiry arms—and then it was done, and Judas and Eleazar and Ruben and my father and I stood panting and gasping for breath with twelve dead and dying men at our feet, and what remained of the mercenaries fled. They fled through the streets and the Jews followed them with arrows and slew them. They fled into the houses where they were hunted down and fought like wolves until they were slain. They fled up the hillside, pricked all over with arrows, and yet they were dragged down. We took no prisoners; these were mercenaries we fought. The last one was dragged out of a cistern where he crouched, soaked in olive oil, and a spear was driven through his heart.

  And then the battle of Modin was done. Only eight Jews were dead, although at least fifty, including my father, bore wounds of the fight; but every mercenary had died. Apelles was dead, as was the Levite. Of the nokri, only the slaves who bore the litter remained.

  ***

  So I tell it here, I, Simon, the least of all my glorious brothers, and as I tell it, the fighting in Modin was finished, and Ruth was avenged, hollow as vengeance is, and the blood ran in our village street, and the whole valley was like a charnel house, with ninety dead men sprawled through it. It was the end and the beginning; for after that fight, no man of Modin was ever again the same, and even to this day it is said of the few of us who are left, the pitiful few out of Modin—“He was in the valley when we first slew the mercenaries.”

  In an hour, we, the people of peace, of the book, had learned to kill, and we learned well. With Judas, I faced the huddled knot of slaves who had borne Apelles’s litter. Coldly, Judas told them that they could do one of two things; they could join us, accept circumcision, become Jews and fight by our sides, or they could go out of Judea forever. Uncomprehendingly, they stared, and Judas repeated what he had said, and still they stared uncomprehendingly, their mouths wide, their frightened eyes still mirroring the brief, bloody, savage fight in which no quarter was asked and no quarter was given.

  Where could they go? They were branded breast and face as slaves; slaves they had been and slaves they would always be, and there was no hope and no courage left in them. All over their bodies, they bore the marks of Apelles’s metal whip; but Apelles they knew, and we were strange, bearded devils whom they did not know; so finally they trudged out of the valley, westward to the sea, where some new master would find them and put them into bondage once again.

  There was much to do, and curiously enough there was little mourning—very little for Jews who are so close knit, man and wife, parents and child, making a sanctuary out of the family. We buried our dead. We gathered together the bodies of the mercenaries, stripped them of arms and armor, and put them together in one grave. Only one body was desecrated—that of Apelles. Moses ben Aaron, wounded and bloody all over from the fight, cut off the head of Apelles. First some of the people tried to stop him, but the Adon said sternly:

  “Leave him be and let him make his own peace with God!”

  The vintner moved like a man in a dream, walking here and there in the village street, holding the head by its curly, oiled locks, dripping blood behind him. His wife ran after him, screaming; it had been her deep hatred for Apelles that left him unmoved once, but now she cried at him:

  “What terrible curse will you bring down on us? Are you a man or a devil?”

  “A devil,” he answered dully. “Get away from me, woman!”

  At last, he stopped in the market square, where the worst fighting had taken place, where the bronze altar lay. His face set, he righted the altar and jammed the head of Apelles onto the slim statue of Athene.

  “This way I worship,” he said, and spat into the dead face and then turned away, this mild and philosophic little man, who a year ago would have cringed at the sight of blood. What happened to him, I will tell in its place.

  We finished our preparations. We gathered our stock, our goats, our sheep, our donkeys. The donkeys we loaded with our household goods, and whatever else we could carry, we took with us. What we could not carry, we destroyed. The cisterns of sweet olive oil, we befouled. The great tanks of wine, we smashed. It was farewell and good-bye to everything we had known, to the whole, deep, straightforward current of our lives. It was farewell to Modin, to the little valley that had nurtured us, to our sacred scrolls which were ashes, to the ancient stone synagogue, to the terraced and fertile fields which we had built and our fathers before us and their fathers before them. It was farewell to the graveyard where Jews had lain for a thousand years. It was farewell, yet no one protested now and no one wept. And then, when most of the night was done, the caravan started—and once more we were the wanderers, the homeless ones.

  So the village moved out of Modin and northward, and now we were armed. We carried spears and swords and bows, and we were a grim band as we wended our way through the terraces, higher and higher. In Goumad, where we paused to rest and where the people brought us milk and fruit and wine, we told the story of the fight, and when we left Goumad, twelve families of that village were with us. We did not recruit; we did not harangue. When they asked “For how long?” we answered “Until we are free.” Until the land is cleansed over, three times, as it is written.

  With nightfall, we camped on a lonely mountainside, and as the sun set, we prayed and remembered the dead. Now, after the weariness and strangeness of the day’s journey, some of the children began to weep, and their mothers comforted them, singing to them, “Sleep, my lamb, my woolly lamb; slumber, little waif of God. Never fear the darkness; your pure heart fills it with light…” that song which was old already when Moses heard it from his mother’s lips.

  I sat by a fire, and Judas plucked my arm. I followed him, and we climbed up the face of the cliff, higher and higher, until we saw the Mediterranean, all bathed over with the final, rosy hue of sunset. Then Judas pointed down through the valleys to Modin, and I saw a glow that was not of the sunset. The village was burning. For over an hour, we stayed there, watching it, never speaking, but watching it burn, and at last, Judas said:

  “They will pay—for every lick of flame, for every drop of blood, for every hurt.”

  “It will not bring Modin back.”

  “We will bring Modin back.”

  ***

  We had planned where we would go. Two days north of Modin, twenty miles as a bird flies, but two days weary journey for a strong man on foot and twice that for our village, on the very border of Judea, is the Wilderness of Ephraim. Once, centuries ago, before the Exile, this was a more populous and fertile land than even the terraced hills and lush valleys around Jerusalem. In those days, many thousands of Jews lived there, for the bottom lands were deeper and ric
her than anywhere else in Palestine; but in the time of the Exile, it was depopulated, and only a sprinkling of hardy folk had returned to its lonely ravines. Judas had been there, and Ragesh too, and years before, my father and certain others of the old men. But I saw it for the first time on the afternoon we went into it, the great, dark, wooded peaks, with grim Mount Ephraim towering over all, flinging its menacing ridges eastward to Mount Gaash; the tangled forests, cedar and pine and birch, the bare cliffs and the deep, dark gorges.

  A woeful silence fell over us as we approached. Conversation stopped, and even the persistent, unconquerable laughter of the children died away. We went into a narrow valley, wended our way downward and downward through lush green woods, and the broad sunlight broke into bands and then into flecked splotches. Deer darted past, and once a jackal barked, and there were other noises in the woods that were strange to us. At the bottom of the valley was a swamp, from which cranes and herons darted up as we pushed through. For hours, we trod the muck of that swamp and then we came up to higher land, and then turned up into a cleftlike, sheltered valley, full of dead leaves and pine needles, unholy in its quiet, and almost never visited by the sun.

  We who had left home were home, and it was the beginning.

  Part Three

  Eleazar,

  the Splendor

  of Battle

  It was not a cheerful place, that wilderness of Ephraim, and as the days passed, it became less cheerful. The ashes of Modin were scarcely cold when a hundred other villages of Judea became flaming reminders of the Greek passion for civilization, and singly, in pairs, by the fives and the tens, refugees trickled into the little valley where we hid. “Marah,” someone called the place, because it was born out of bitterness and sorrow, and the name took hold.

  To Marah came people because there was no other place, particularly, for them to go, and because they had heard that in Marah the sons of Mattathias were. Apollonius, chief warden of Jerusalem and Judea, lined the valley road from Modin to Hadid with the heads of Jews, seven hundred of them mounted on poles, to wipe out the insult of Apelles’s head on the altar. With five thousand mercenaries, he ranged Judea from end to end, killing and burning and destroying. And we hid in the mountains, paralyzed at first, until the bitterness of the people demanded of Mattathias, “What will you do?”

  “We will fight,” Judas said; but it was one thing to say that now, hidden away in the hills and another when the enemy came into your own village. The old man, the Adon, said nothing. How he had aged in the past year! His hair was snow white; his cheeks were sunken, and his high-ridged nose was all that remained to show his fierce and unremitting will. For hours he sat alone, chin on hand, brooding, thinking, dreaming of God-knows-what; and it seemed to me, often enough, that when the people came to him with their complaints, he listened with unhearing ears and looked with unseeing eyes.

  When Judas and I came to him, one day, he demanded of us, “Which of you did Ragesh call the Maccabee?”

  “What would you have us do?” Judas asked, a note of bewilderment in his voice.

  “And what would you have me do? I sit here, an Adon of a wilderness, and I dream of my youth. Am I a young man that you ask me what to do?”

  “The people are afraid and lonely and bewildered,” I said.

  “You are afraid, not the people,” the old man said to me, contemptuous.

  “What should we do?”

  “Bring me your brothers and any others who are not afraid, and I’ll show you what to do,” the Adon answered coldly. Judas faced him, staring at him; then Judas turned and walked away and I followed. It was not a change in Judas, and there was still the same cold hopelessness and emptiness inside of me; but the world had changed, and we were a homeless, tiny group of a tiny and insignificant folk, a handful of folk who farmed the valleys of Judea and called themselves Jews and worshiped an invisible God and made themselves different from all other people—and now had ranged themselves against the might of the Syrian Empire with its one hundred and twenty walled cities, its Greek aristocracy, and its untold thousands of mercenaries. That was what had sunk home, in me, in Judas too, in everyone among us as we fled into Ephraim—the war machine that was backed by a hundred thousand talents of wealth, a hundred thousand mercenaries, and a hundred thousand more if those were slain—and beyond Syria were the other Greek empires, and there was Egypt ravening in the south for the lush wealth of our valleys; and it came to the whole world, which could pause in its affairs to eliminate Jews, because to all nations and all peoples the Jew was the same, an abomination whose ways were not their ways.

  We found our brothers, and Ragesh too; Ruben the smith, Moses ben Aaron, and a handful more who could rouse themselves out of their misery to follow the Adon. We armed ourselves with bows, knives—and swords, those of us who wanted to know the feel of this strange weapon, and we came to the Adon. He didn’t greet us well. “Where there should have been a hundred, there are twenty,” he said, and then he said nothing else for hours, leading us a swift pace southward—a lean, tireless, angry old man.

  We came into Shiloh on the road to Jerusalem, a pleasant little village on a mountain stream, a village that tore at our hearts, it was so like Modin. It was a way-stop, with an inn, for Shiloh, then as now, was famous for its amber-colored raisin wine and the honey cheese it prepared. As we came striding into the town, walking close, grim-faced and dusty, the people looked at us with surprise and fear. Arms and all, we were covered with our cloaks, but who was there in Judea who did not know, by description if not by sight, the towering, white-bearded figure of the Adon Mattathias? And who did not know that he and his sons were outlaws, cursed by the Macedonians and by the high priest Menelaus as well?

  Surprise there should have been, but not such fear, even though this was a place where Apelles had worked well, even though a tall altar to Zeus stood in the square, garlanded with fruits and dirty with new blood; even so, there should have not been such fear in their faces, though cowardice is not a rare thing in such times and surrender is easier than a burned home and a cave in the mountains of Ephraim or the lonely Wilderness of Bethaven.

  And then we saw the mercenaries at the inn, sitting on the grass outside, comfortable with loaves of bread and goblets of wine and fresh boiled chicken that they crammed into their mouths, the fat running down their unwashed jowls. A dozen of them, there were, tribute to the gentle charm of a bent knee, and they had two slaves with them to carry spears and shields. The better for comfort, they had laid aside their heavy breast armor, unlaced their leather jerkins and turned back their skirts, so that their manliness might be as well displayed as their filthiness. Then as now, the mercenary is an everlasting mystery to the Jew—this landless, nationless, cityless creature, who is born and raised and hired out only to kill. Since these labored for Greeks, they abided by the regulation on shaving, but there was always the dark growth of a few days on their cheeks. For them, water was neither to be taken by mouth nor by skin; an abomination to them, they liked better the smell that surrounded them, the dirt that encrusted them—which were good comrades for their incredible ignorance.

  There was a poor, half-witted girl of Shiloh, whose name we later learned was Miriam, an orphan waif from Jerusalem who had found shelter in the town, but not too much more than that as it seemed, and they were playing a game with her as we came along the street, passing her from man to man, playing at childish and perverted and miserable exhibitionism, laughing and shouting at each other in the crude and vulgarized Aramaic patois that is the common speech of the Macedonian hirelings—this they were doing until we came up and halted there, twenty Jews, tall and unsmiling, dust-covered from the road and cloaked, head and foot, led by one lean, hawk-faced, white-bearded old man, calm, but with something awful that pervaded his quiet, something the mercenaries could not but sense, even as they must have sensed an extension of that quiet to the village, suddenly still and
almost deserted of people.

  “Get on, you old crow,” one of them said, and the others laughed; but their laughter was unnatural now, and the girl Miriam curled up on the ground and wept. The innkeeper came bustling out, a fat man, clean-shaven, but a Jew from his speech.

  “What is it now?” he said. “I want no trouble here and no beggars from the road!”

  “And we look like beggars?” the Adon asked softly. “Who are you, innkeeper, that you call us beggars? If we are out of the dry lands and thirsty, is there no draught of wine for us?” As my father spoke, the officer of the mercenaries came to the door of the inn and stood there, sipping at a glass of wine and prepared to be amused by the bout between the innkeeper and us.

  “You see my house is occupied,” the innkeeper said, but less certainly, looking at us narrowly and uncomfortably.

  “And thus the blessed Abraham spoke when the three strangers came to his tent?” the Adon went on, even more softly and gently. “Or did he come forward with sweet water to wash their feet? Or did his wife, Sarah, cook food with her own hands that they might eat? Your doors are closed to your own people—if you still have people—but open to this filth, to these creatures who kill for hire.”

  The mercenaries and their officer could follow only a little of what was said, for my father spoke in the old Hebrew instead of the Aramaic, but the innkeeper went white.

  Shaking visibly, he managed to ask, “Who are you, old man?”

  “The Adon Mattathias!” the girl screamed.

  My father threw off his cloak, as did we, drawing our swords, except for Jonathan whose bow was strung, who crouched as the captain of the mercenaries leaped forward shouting, who loosed an arrow that sank into his throat and ended his screaming in a terrible, blood-choked cry. The innkeeper fled into the house. The mercenaries lay where they were, half drunk, paralyzed at this sudden and awful appearance of twenty armed men led by a fierce and angry old patriarch, and we slew them where they were, without mercy and without pity. It was a bitter thing to do, a terrible thing to do; but these were not men whom we could take captive, talk to, entreat, move, change—these were mercenaries.