Naomi Alderman - The Liars' Gospel

There are terrible rumors across the land of Israel, stories so shocking that they must be passed from person to person as quickly as possible.

Some say that the Prefect is demanding that the Temple give up its holy money, donated for the glory of God, to build some kind of latrine. Some say that the priests have agreed to it and that the gold will be transferred under cover of darkness. This news alone is enough to provoke angry shouts in the street, insults flung at soldiers, stones and wine jugs thrown from upper windows at them as they pass in the street.

Bar-Avo leads a raid on a caravan bringing wine to a wealthy Roman merchant. It is for actions like this that the Romans call them bandits and murderers, but that is to misunderstand: they are freedom fighters. They kill the guards who resist them and let those who run go free. Inside the wagons they find not only wine but chests of gold and letters for half the most powerful men in Jerusalem and Caesarea. The letters confirm that the Prefect, Pilate, is weak and has been demanding additional resources from Syria. The money goes to shore up their support in the west and the south. Bar-Avo’s esteem increases tenfold with this find.

Now, suddenly, he is the one to whom men come for advice. Av-Raham is still a leader, a man of much influence, but Bar-Avo is the rising star. They come to tell him about a preacher who slaughtered a cat outside the Temple to represent the sacrilege done there every day by sacrificing for the Romans, and one who has been making cures and who upset the tables in the Temple. They tell him about small risings and pockets of resistance. He is the one who decides what punishment should be meted out to men found to have been too generous to the Romans.

What does it take to make a man follow you? Not love. For love a man will mourn you and bury you when you are dead, but not follow you into battle. For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.

A few days before Passover the city is ready.

All of Bar-Avo’s four hundred men are coming to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festival. His provocateurs do not even have to make up stories, just remind people of what has already happened. They say, “Remember the Hippodrome?” and even men who were not born when it happened have heard the stories and see in their imaginations the great structure set aflame and thousands of men crucified up and down all the roads to the capital.

He holds a great feast just before Passover in a place where they’ve made camp with their allies, to the west of the city. They roast lambs upon great fires and sing songs and call down curses on the head of every Roman. He lays out his plans to the men — how it will be when we take control of the city, who will take which of the gates, who will storm the high places and David’s Tower. He is foolhardy, perhaps, because he cannot see every figure lurking at the edge of the crowd or ask where they have come from and what their name is. He holds up the bread and the wine at the meal and says, “Just as we eat this bread and drink this wine, so we will devour the armies of Rome and drink sweet victory!” And there are great cheers.

Shortly after dawn, when the birds are still calling out and the sky is streaked with pink-tinged clouds, he wakes with his wife next to him, soft and sweet-smelling, and thinks for a moment, why did I wake so suddenly, and then he hears the cry again. Loud and low and afraid: “Soldiers!”

They are coming from three sides. There is little time to do anything. He and Judith knew this day might come, that is why only the baby is with them, strapped to her body. The other children are safe with his mother. Judith kisses him hard, white with determination and anxiety, and runs to the horse. She is away and clear of the reach of arrows before he joins his men for the battle.

Someone must have given away their position, it is the only explanation. Someone sold them out for a handful of silver. As the soldiers close in, Bar-Avo looks at the faces of his men. One of them, with his guilty expression, will show himself a traitor. Not his dear friends, surely not, not Ya’ir, not Matan, not Giora? He watches them, while his men fight with the soldiers and he fights alongside the rest, even though he knows they will lose. He watches for men who seem to be hanging back in the fight — one of them knows he will not get his money if Bar-Avo is freed — and at last he thinks he spots who it is, though his heart breaks open. Ya’ir. Open-faced, strong and handsome, and the one he loved the best of all. Ya’ir is the one hanging back. Ya’ir is the one who, he remembers, took care to embrace him last night at the banquet and address him by name even though they all knew not to do so.

His men kill four soldiers, but the soldiers kill three of his before they reach him. There are young men — about the age he was when he started to riot — throwing themselves onto the backs of the soldiers and beating their heads to keep them from him. They know to make for him, it seems, presumably to cut off the head of the beast and leave it wriggling on the floor. He fights off two with his short sword, taking one with a slice to the throat, another with a jab to the groin, but more come and more, and someone wrests the blade from his hand and pushes him back.

As the soldiers reach him, he cries to his men, “Do not deal too harshly with Ya’ir!” and he sees the fear grow on the man’s face as he turns to run. They will kill him if they catch him. Good. And if they do not, and if he escapes, he will kill Ya’ir himself, for if the man wanted money he could always have come to Bar-Avo.

And now they are here, three men from Samaria, bought by Rome to fetch him to their dungeons and their Prefect. They will not take him easily. There is a dagger in his boot and he stoops, seeming to let his head go down, beaten, but draws out the blade in one easy motion and slices through the back of the ankle of the man nearest to him. He falls to the ground at once, and in the gap he leaves there’s a break in the wall of men. Bar-Avo calculates and thinks: I could run now and regroup the men in the forest. But as he takes one step forward, there is a starburst at the back of his head and black spots before his eyes and then he knows nothing at all.

The next thing is the closest he ever comes to death, although death has always walked beside him like an old friend.

Before this he imagined he would meet death in battle, or that death would catch him when he tried to leap from one building to another and misjudged it and so fell into the waiting palm of death instead. Or that death would be a wolf on the road when he was alone and had left his knife in the camp. Or that death would be a Roman sword where he did not see one coming, the one he failed to dodge. He had never imagined capture.

When he wakes in the cell and realizes what has happened, he tests out how it feels. His head thumps, his arms and legs ache, there is a twisting in his belly. Very well, this is what it feels like to be injured in battle and not to take any food or water. He needs a woman with warm water to bathe him and a boy with a pitcher of cold water to quench his thirst, but neither of those things is here.

It does not feel like a disgrace, though. He had thought it might. It makes him angry and it makes him cunning. While he lives, there is a way out. He has learned that from the countless skirmishes with the Roman soldiers. The only man who can never escape is a dead man — while he lives, even surrounded by a ring of swords, he can look about him, identify what there is to use here and make good his escape.

He sits up and sees for the first time that there is another man, weaker than him, in here. He can tell from the way the man moves that he is not a trained fighter, or trained to endure many blows. The other man coughs and shivers but otherwise is so still that Bar-Avo would not have known there was anyone else in this small stone room with dirty straw on the floor.