Steven Savile - Silver

The Sicarii paused one step behind the priest.

Yitzhak turned and looked up, startled, hands clasped in his lap. "The god you believe in is a lie," he told the holy man. They were the last words the priest would ever hear. Yitzhak's eyes blazed feverishly with fear as the Sicarii gbbed his hair and pulled his head back. In one smooth motion the dagger sliced across his throat. A death rattle escaped Yitzhak’s lips. He clawed at the gash, trying to force the air and blood back inside the flaps of skin. But there was no salvation. The Sicarii released his grip and Yitzhak fell. He was dead before his corpse sprawled across the blood-slick floor.

Menahem never did forget that promise. It burned inside him as the world turned and he grew into a man. It shaped everything he believed. It echoed in every act he performed and every decision he reasoned. In many ways his grandfather’s truth was the core of the man he had become: bitter, brooding, a loner. Menahem ben Jair was an outsider. He took comfort in solitude. He drew strength from isolation. He called no man friend. He had no time for the sects and their new religions. There were thirty or more already in Jerusalem, everyone worshipping their own brand of messiah. Menahem didn’t worship any false gods. He had a mind of his own. He believed one thing, one truth-that his land should be for his people. He had seen his father suffer. He had sat at his knee and listened to tales of the Pharisees spitting at his grandmother and calling her a whore for loving the wrong man.

And then they had killed Jair. That day had changed the boy into the man he was always destined to be.

Menahem ben Jair was Sicarii.

A dagger man.

The world might have turned him into a killer, but in his heart he still yearned to be the boy who had walked into the garden to listen to his father’s lesson.

His mind raced. He looked down at his hands. Shaped like the wings of an angel they were coarse, hardened by life, but they were still beautiful. The blood was gone, but no amount of scrubbing with lye could remove its bitter iron tang from his mind. Still, it did not matter. He scrubbed them for a fifth time. It was strange… usually it was so easy to forget the faces of those he killed, but not this time. The face of Yitzhak Ari burned inside him. He saw it every time he closed his eyes. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.

Menahem was no stranger to death, but this was the first time he had taken the life of a priest.

Yitzhak Ari’s murder wasn’t about faith or fury. It had another purpose entirely. The motivation was as coldly rationalized as the deed itself. His murder was a political killing. It was the opening gambit in a long game of murder and sacrifice where the glittering prize was freedom. The holy man’s blood would be used to rally the faithful against the faithless. The Herodians and the other Roman sympathizers were already venting their outrage at the killing. They were already out in the streets shouting blue murder. Come sunrise that outrage would have brewed over into fervor and fury, and by dawn Jerusalem would run thick with blood.

It was that simple.

But there was still so much Menahem needed to think about, so much that could go wrong before then.

He paced back and forth. Behind him the door opened. The sun behind him transformed his visitor into a solid black silhouette. Menahem recognized his younger brother.

“What do you want?”

“Well, for one thing, I want you to stop pacing up and down like an old woman,” Eleazar grumbled. “Anyone would think you were losing your nerve, brother.”

“Just thinking,” Menahem assured him, though thinking was different from remembering. Thinking was active, remembering was passive. Menahem was not one for passivity. He lived his life. He was committed to it. He made things happen around him. He did not sit back and simply allow things to happen to him.

“No you’re not. I know you. You’re stewing over what the mad whore said, aren’t you? I know you. Look at me. Now listen. She wasn’t a soothsayer, she was raving. Sickness had got into her mind and undone it. That’s the difference. Not all madness is a glimpse of the future. Sometimes it’s just plain old insanity.”

“And sometimes it’s not,” Menahem said. In truth he wasn’t sure what he believed anymore. And that, more than anything, disturbed him. He was used to a life of absolutes.

The mad whore, as Eleazar so colorfully put it, had come stumbling up the siege ramp to the gates of the Masada fortress that morning, and stood there, hammering on the huge wooden doors until her fists were bruised and bloody. At first they had ignored her, assuming she would go away. She didn’t. Instead she had hit the doors all the harder. One of the others had emptied a slop bucket over her head, thinking it would shut her up. It didn’t. She had kept on hammering away on the massive iron-banded doors.

Finally Menahem had opened the door.

Swathed head to toe in rags that barely hid the sores of leprosy, she staggered forward and clutched him by the scruff of the neck. “You’ll be dead before sunrise if you kill the priest,” she rasped. Her breath was rancid. “Listen to me, Menahem son of Jair, listen to me!” He pushed her away. She went sprawling in the dirt. She lay there, her dress hitched up around her waist, dirt getting into the open sores that wept down her thighs. “I have seen your death!”

“And I have seen yours,” he said, turning his back on her. He slammed the heavy door. He stood with his back pressed against wood, breathing hard. He could hear her through the thick wood.

Menahem drew the beam down to lock her out. It didn’t help. She was already inside his head.

Menahem and Eleazar walked out of the small room together and climbed the narrow stair to the ramparts of Masada. The wind howled around them. Despite the plain lying over a thousand feet below the mesa the stronghold was built upon, Menahem could still feel the sand in the wind as it hit his face. The wind had a name: Simoom. The poison wind. It was an apt name. The air was thick with dust. He watched, fascinated by the giant dust devils that were constantly being whipped up and scattered again. They could just as easily have been the ghosts of the desert, the souls he had sent on their way to oblivion. It was easy to see where stories of the great Djinn originated. All it took were a few superstitious minds, the baking desert sun, Simoom, and a supernatural force was born.

He rubbed at the coarse hair of his close-cropped beard. Eleazar was right; the woman’s curse had gotten to him. Now that her words were inside his head they continued to worm away at his confidence. Doubt festered inside him.

There were no birds, he realized, staring into the lowering sun. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was a rare enough occurrence for him to notice. Yesterday Menahem would have said he didn’t have a superstitious bone in his body. Today all he could think was that yesterday he had been a fool.

“Walk with me, brother,” he said, turning his back on the Dead Sea and the empty sky that rolled away into the middle distance. “It feels like tonight is a time for truth.”

“You’re not going to die,” Eleazar said again, shaking his head.

“I am, you are, it’s the one given in this life,” Menahem said, managina wry smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Ah, so now you are a philosopher? Next you’ll be asking if I ever consider the morality of what we are doing.” Eleazar shook his head. He was more than a decade younger than Menahem. He could see his father in every line of his brother’s face. Sometimes he suspected he could see the old man looking out through Eleazar’s eyes, the similarity was that disconcerting.

“We don’t have the luxury of worrying about morality while our people are still prisoners in their own land. If we don’t kill them, they will kill us. That is just the way it is. Until we are free I am nothing more than the dagger in my hand.”