Naomi Alderman - The Liars' Gospel

Yehoshuah’s friends are still calling out, they are trying to get close to the raised platform on which the men are displayed. Yehoshuah himself stands absolutely silent, his head bowed, his hands tied, like Bar-Avo’s, behind his back. Bar-Avo looks at Yehoshuah, while one of Pilate’s soldiers saws at the ropes that bind him.

And eventually Yehoshuah looks back. He seems shocked and frightened and alone. He understands that he has failed to win a popularity contest, that he has somehow not made enough friends, or loyal enough friends, to fight for him on this nonsensical battlefield.

Bar-Avo too has heard the sayings of the rabbis: that one good friend is worth an army of hangers-on, that fools consort with a multitude while the wise man keeps his counsel among a few whom he can trust. They are wrong, the rabbis, in this matter. In times of peace a man has the luxury of picking a few good friends. In times of war one must hoard the love of men as one lays down stocks of grain and oil and jars of water against an ill-fortuned time. Bar-Avo’s friends are his treasure house. They have saved his life.

Pilate does not have to release him, even still. There is no law that says he must obey the will of the people, just as no statute or edict from Rome has told him to ask them. But Pilate is too fearful a man to be willing to chance a crowd like this. He has rolled the dice hoping for Venus and it has come up Vultures.

They cut through Bar-Avo’s ropes at last. His wrists are sore, his hands numb. There is a gash on his right hand where the knife slipped — though they were none too careful with it and perhaps the wound was intended. The soldiers hustle him by his shoulders to the edge of the platform and half lower, half push him off. He looks back. Yehoshuah’s head is still hanging down. Their eyes meet as Bar-Avo reaches the ground and his friends begin to encircle him, hugging and patting and punching his shoulder.

Bar-Avo says, “I am sorry,” and though the sound of his words is obscured by the noise of the crowd he thinks that perhaps Yehoshuah sees the words form on his lips and understands, because the man’s head moves. It is something like a shake of the head, something like a thin smile, something like a sob in the movement of his shoulders.

He is touched by the man’s ambiguous gesture. As his friends sweep him away, he thinks that perhaps they should attempt to mount a rescue, as they might try to do for one of their own captains. But such maneuvers are risky at best — they would not have tried one even for him. They are more likely to end in losing twenty men than saving one. It is odd, really, that the idea has even crossed his mind, since this man is nothing to him. Except, of course, that this is the man who will die in his place, whose death has bought his life.

He has lived his life in the exact opposite fashion to the way this Yehoshuah has lived and that is why he, Bar-Avo, lives and Yehoshuah will die.

In the marble-floored plaza, as he is taken out in triumph, a few men and women are weeping. He turns his head again to see Yehoshuah led through the iron gates towards the dungeon from which he will travel to the place of execution. The gate closes fast behind him and Barabbas can no longer see his face.

He goes to sit beneath the men who are being crucified, later. He is the most free bandit and murderer in the whole of Judea now, for the Prefect has liberated him in front of a great multitude and so he can go where he pleases and do what he likes.

Besides, two of the men crucified that day have fought alongside his men, stealing grain and arms from the Romans. He pays the guards to cut their wrists as the nails go in so that death will come to them more quickly and he waits until he sees them slump. He has their bodies taken down for burial before the evening, as is right. He has already told his loyal lieutenants to bring pouches of silver to the men’s families. This is how a man makes friends and keeps them.

He would have told the guards to do the same trick with Yehoshuah, to ease his passing, but some of the man’s family and friends are standing by. One of them, the man he’d seen weeping in the plaza, spits and shouts as he walks past, “Murderer! You should be up on that cross, not my master!”

And he finds he no longer has a mind to help that death go swiftly.

It is not, in any case, the worst method of execution Rome has ever devised. There is a particular thing they do which begins with hanging a man upside down by his ankles between two trees and slowly, across many hours or even days, sawing him vertically in half from scrotum to neck. It is astonishing how long a man will live like this, upside down, when he would die right side up. By contrast, crucifixion is merciful. There is another thing he has heard is done in Persia, where maggots of a particular beetle are introduced under the flesh and the man is fed milk and honey to keep him alive while the maggots burrow through his sinews and make their nest in his belly and sometimes crawl out alive through his eyes and ears and nose while he is still himself just living. Sufficiently living to scream, anyway. Death, the only inevitable item on the list of life, is nonetheless such a constant matter of human creativity. He finds he has an odd admiration for it. He would never have had the ingenuity to devise such methods.

He wonders, as he lingers by the crosses, whether it is his destiny to end his days here too, pinioned and waiting to be food for ravens. It is most likely, he thinks. That is how it will probably fall out. He will join all the thousands upon thousands of men whom Rome has nailed up, but the important thing is to make sure he has scratched her face before that day.

Afterwards, he finds the man who betrayed him. His dear friend Ya’ir, the one who was his most loyal and trusted follower, the one who fought alongside him, his most precious Ya’ir.

Bar-Avo is crying when he talks to Ya’ir.

“I trusted you,” he says, “I gave you everything, I looked after you and your family, you are my brother.”

Ya’ir, tied with rope at wrists and ankles, gagged across his mouth, says nothing.

“If you had a reason for me, any reason at all,” says Bar-Avo, “maybe it would be different.”

Ya’ir does not even attempt to speak. His eyes are dead already. What can the reason possibly have been? Only that he had capitulated, taken the Roman money, agreed to betray them because he had accepted that Rome was the only power and had the only favor worth gaining.

Bar-Avo leaps up from his chair and strikes him across the face, but still he says nothing.

They keep him for three days. They have to perform a certain number of unpleasant tasks to be sure they’ve found out everything he knows. Bar-Avo watches, for the most part, but does not participate, and it becomes clear over time that Ya’ir does not know much.

They hang him in the end, from a tree near the village where they’ve been hiding, and put it about that it was a suicide. If anyone questions this story or even wonders if it was true, they do not dare to say it out loud.

He sends later to root out what happened to that Yehoshuah’s followers and family. It is not only sentiment that makes him do it; a rabble army looking for a new leader could be useful to him. He gets back a garbled tale that the dead man’s body was stolen, probably by his family, but perhaps by some of the hangers-on who wanted to set up a shrine to the holy man. He asks his own people to report back if they find out the truth of the story, but no one ever tells him a convincing tale about it.

In those days, Av-Raham dies. It is not sudden or violent; he is an old man now, nearing eighty, and his spirit burns brightly but his body is frail. He has time to gather his men to him, to tell them to keep fighting — they know that — and to name his successors. Bar-Avo is named, of course, as the captain of the north.