Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

‘Your offer is generous,’ the other replies, ‘but I am not the sort to lie down quietly. Or to strike empty air. I would offer you that same favour: the kindness of a quick death.’

Were they real gladiators, they would have enjoyed the cena libera last night: the unrestricted feast where warriors can eat and drink what they please. But these two, in the stink of a gaol-cave, dined only on a corn puls , watery as fish piss. One of them sincerely believes that it transformed into the body of his saviour-God; for the other, such ideas are blasphemy and lunacy.

But there will be time yet for other people to ponder those impenetrables. Things are currently in flux; rituals are sprung and growing, but remain pliable shoots. Some will fall on stony ground, some will be wrenched out entirely and some will become deep-rooted as oaks, tenacious as weeds.

And these two men here, clothed only in loincloths and helms scarred from former blows, share more in common than divides them. Both of them believe that the end of the world is nigh and in this, in a way, they are correct: they will most certainly die this day.

As iron whets iron, each has been sharpened through the years of interaction with the other. And now they stand, opposed and motionless, on the hot sands, listening for the slicing of air. Blindfolded before the view of thousands. Sightless in plain daylight.

The sounds of the earthworks cease only at night: the pounding of dirt being packed; the clatter of poured stones and thud of boulders; the hammering of timber; the shouts of slave-masters. Noises that fill him with the same shiver that the night screech of the bittern did as a child, only now numbed to a constant dull dread.

A dust devil swirls on the fortress square, a little whirl of life. Credulous men believe they are djinn, but the Highlander knows them to be sand and wind. The Highlander has seen all the wonders under the sun and most turned out to be nothing but ephemeral trickeries, pursuits fruitless as grasping at olive oil, or chasing after the wind.

The Highlander came from the Golan Heights of Galilee, though he has spent most of his life outside that plateau. Of course: since one does not gain a name like ‘The Highlander’ except by leaving a place where it could be applied to anyone. It was Jerusalemites who gave Yosef the appellation Haramati, a word that might sound like ‘Arimathea’ to those who don’t speak Hebrew. But there is no such inhabitation as Arimathea; one might just as well seek the end of the wind as Arimathea.

This is a fitting enough place for a highlander to end his days: the highest inhabited point in a boundless realm of red rock. Distant cliffs stratified, as if they have layers within them, almost as if it was not all God-moulded in just a single day. There is desert on every side from up here and that wet-desert of the Dead Sea in the distance. A sea in which no creatures can live. Such strange waters there are in this covenanted land. What a queer gift God gave. They say that Galilee’s great lake also became a sea of the dead: turned red with blood by the fighting that took place there. Six thousand bodies finished within it, putrefying under the sun, the stench corrupting the air.

Galilee’s waters and highlands are some way from here. But this is still a fitting enough place for a highlander to finish. Even if Yosef can’t help wishing that end could be delayed.

One would think that an old man should be less afraid of death. But somehow death’s proximity makes what little life you have left all the more precious. Dying is a young man’s game. That toll of Roman tools — which began three months ago, imperceptibly distant then, impossibly far off — cuts into the Highlander’s bowels and marrow. The end will not be long now.

Nature knows nothing of the ills of man. Soft-squeaking orange-winged starlings still call to each other, gentle as the noise of leather sandals on tiled floor. A tender eek-eek, familiar somehow to human ears. It is the song that we would sing if we were birds. We wouldn’t whistle, like larks and jays, or hoot, like plovers. We would peep as starlings, saying: Come to me my brother, sister, please. I get lonely on this breeze. I’ll share my catch with you. I have enough for two. I just don’t want to be alone any more .

But soon enough those orange-winged starlings will be gone and this cliff-top castle will belong to the carrion crows.

Many people said that all the things which subsequently befell Judaea were to avenge James the Just. But the Highlander is of a view that causes are invariably more intricate and complicated than that; unless, perhaps, they are even simpler: maybe war came only because war was always going to come, sooner or later. Whatever the real cause, many named it redress for the death of James.

The Highlander never knew James but was a great admirer of his brother, though not, of course, a disciple. Jochanan was the last of the Twelve, and they say he died back at the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

The constant drums are the worst. The Romans beat drums to keep their slaves in rhythm as they haul dirt and rock on the ramp. And Roman signallers sound trumpets to relay orders, blasts that echo one another up and down, always reminding that they are coming.

At first defenders of the fortress fired down upon the builders of the slope. But Roman engineers constructed a great tower, plated with iron against flame and crammed with bowmen and slingers and engines for flinging stone and ballistae with bolts long as loom arms. And after that, even to lift eyes above the battlements would immediately bring a volley so dense that the sky would turn black.

It was futility and fear that ceased the activity of the defending archers, not the knowledge that the scarp-builders they killed were fellow Judaeans, enslaved.

But, then, if this hideous war has taught the Highlander anything, it is that the Romans do not have a monopoly on cruelty. At the very beginning of the Jewish rebellion, the legionaries stationed in Jerusalem were induced to surrender, with a promise they would be spared, then were murdered once they gave up their swords. And those Sadducees who might have sued for peace had their throats cut in cold blood. The high priest, Annas son of Annas, was found hiding in an aqueduct and killed without trial. And ambassadors under truce were executed, against every code of war. And the Zealots fought the Sicarii for domination of the insurgence. And the poor killed the rich and burned the archives of debt and ownership. And Jerusalem at the finish was divided between three battling factions within, even as the Romans besieged it.

Such atrocities have forced Yosef to confront the sickening possibility that, if it were Judaea that ruled the earth, maybe Roman peasants would be broken by tax and tribute and brave sons of Italy would hang from trees.

But that, of course, is not how the world is: Rome is the great power and through that the great evil. No nation can stand for ever against Roman discipline and fearful efficiency. Though Judaeans fought hard and had many victories, at the end of four years of war, four legions closed on Jerusalem, a city already torn by bitter internal fighting. Much as they have now done to little Masada, the Romans surrounded Jerusalem and built fortified banks and siege towers and stationed their great trebuchets, out of range of Judaean arrows, but able to hurl back boulders.

Starvation found those trapped inside and the Romans found those who fled. In the depths of the half-year Jerusalem siege, five hundred or more of those who tried to escape were crucified every single day. It became so mundane to the legionaries doing the nailing that they tried to outdo each other in the imaginative poses chosen for those they put to slow death. They crucified so many that they ran out of space for the crosses and ran out of crosses for the prisoners. The land was stripped of trees for ninety furlongs around. And even in the evidence of the agony of those captured — nailed as far as the eye could see — multitudes still deserted the city, so desperate was the famine inside. Families suspected of having cached food were tortured to reveal its whereabouts. People ate girdles and sandals and even plundered old animal dung for the wisps of hay within it.