György Spiró - Captivity

“Let’s push on,” said Aaron.

They resumed their northward muleback trek in the gathering twilight, while people streamed past in the opposite direction, shouting, lamenting, raising their hands to the heavens, and cursing.

That night they stretched out farther away from the trail. Aaron again organized them into a duty roster. He ordered a start soon after daybreak the next day, only allowing them a drink from a brook but giving them nothing to eat.

By the morning they reached the village of Tirithana at the foot of the hill.

Several hundred corpses were scattered around, with blood, or something very like it, still oozing from some of them. Fires were smoldering. Children, women, and old people, decapitated, without legs, impaled, all lay motionless, among them mourning relatives kept vigil, whole clans beating their chests, sprinkling ashes on their heads, rocking back and forth as they prayed and rent their garments.

There were no soldiers to be seen.

Aaron went with two men into the village to seek out the elder. Meanwhile the rest sat down. Uri felt a dull empty numbness overcoming his insides. He had no wish to look at the dead bodies, but some force ordered him to look. The women were all dressed in colorful garments; they had been cut down in their finest clothes.

Here and there, wailing mourners raised a dead person aloft to take them to be buried. A crowd tried to carry the body of a small child; everyone wished to get near, jostling and wailing, shaking fists. The mountain loomed on high; Uri narrowed his eyes but couldn’t see any ruins, only the clouds above.

An old man was being carried off next to him. A long, white beard flowed down his face, and his eyes were open as if in wonder, even though he was dead.

Farther off, a man who had been split in two lengthwise was now being put back together, his innards stuffed back into his abdomen and the two halves knotted together with cord. A sword blow had landed on his shoulders and split him apart again down to the navel.

Uri shivered; he would have easily vomited had there been anything in his stomach. Aaron knew full well when he did not allow them to eat.

Uri suddenly discovered that even sitting down he was rocking back and forth, quietly intoning a prayer for the spiritual tranquility of the murdered. That made him feel better. He grasped a handful of earth and sprinkled it on his head; the ground was cool, which was gratifying.

Aaron appeared with the two companions.

“We’re going back,” he declared.

Two mules that had gone lame during the journey were left behind, and they proceeded in turn by muleback and by foot. Aaron hustled them along, almost as if they had been responsible for the murders of those several hundreds.

They spent the Day of Atonement praying in a cave. It occurred to Uri that Aaron had too much local knowledge for it to have been pure chance that they came upon a suitable cave on the way back — and what’s more, an uninhabited cave.

Uri entered the high priest’s palace in Jerusalem for a third time, this time along with his companions.

Before that they took a dip in the basin of the bathhouse built on Mount Zion, the water in which was only knee-high. The Essenes said that they, having seen dead bodies, would be going through a cleansing process for another week.

It was only on the third day that the reek, the stench of rotting human flesh, comparable to nothing else, left Uri’s nostrils.

They were now led to the upper level, where they entered a chamber. Someone came and took Aaron away with him.

They waited.

Uri wondered whether Joseph ben Nahum was here in the palace. What did he know about the mission?

They waited and held their peace.

Eventually a short old man in a blue robe and white tunic appeared, supported by two men, Aaron and the hunchbacked, narrow-eyed man who had sent Uri to Beth Zachariah.

All the others prostrated themselves, and Uri quickly followed.

The old man made a sign of blessing with his right hand and took a seat on a bench. The other two remained standing. Uri’s fellows got to their feet, as did he.

Aaron then spoke.

“The high priest Ananias has honored us by welcoming us in person.”

Uri squinted. So this was the high priest who was no longer a high priest but father-in-law to the present high priest, as someone had said.

Aaron carried on.

“It is Ananias’s wish that as a sign of reaching agreement on the text that is to be read out you all subscribe to it with your signatures.”

The young man unrolled the scroll in his hands and started to read in Greek.

Without being asked, Jehoram, the scrawny youth, interpreted fluently into Aramaic. Not a pickpocket, then, but an interpreter. So he had been the spy among us, the Sanhedrin’s man.

The text read that they, the members of a festival delegation from Judaea heading for Mount Gerizim, on the morning of the day of the festival in the village of Tirithana were eyewitnesses of an attack by the Judaean cohort on a celebrating throng misled by the false prophet. Several hundred people had been slain.

That was exactly what Uri was able to hear in Aramaic as well; the youth interpreted it accurately.

But we were not eyewitnesses, and the cohort was not Judaean but Syrian.

“Are you in accord?” the high priest asked.

“I’m in accord,” said Aaron.

He stepped over to the small table on which the hunchbacked young man had placed the scroll and wrote his name on it with a quill, the inkpot held by the young man.

Everyone else, the Essenes included, went over and added their names in turn.

Uri was the penultimate; only Jehoram, who politely stepped aside, would follow him. It did cross Uri’s mind what would happen if he were to speak out and ask that the text be corrected because it was a lie as it stood. What would happen? He would be clapped in prison and would never reach Alexandria, that’s what would happen.

They needed several witnesses, preferably people belonging to different sects, and they clearly considered a Roman with full rights of citizenship to be important.

Uri dipped the quill’s nib in ink and wrote his own name in Greek letters under the others.

So did Jehoram.

The high priest got to his feet.

“Thank you, my sons. May the blessings of the Eternal One be upon you.”

He recited a priestly benediction, his right hand raised toward them, his fingers splayed, then left the chamber on the arm of the young man.

“I, too, thank you,” said a relieved Aaron. “You may pick up your rewards on the ground floor. Jehoram will lead you there.”

“Most High Eternal One!”

The words escaped Uri’s lips as he first glimpsed the harbor of Alexandria through the bluish-violet gemstone he was holding to his left eye.

He had received the flat, circular stone, polished and set in a silver mounting, from the captain, who used it mainly at night when viewing the stars for long periods. One day, at around dawn, Uri had asked if he could try and placed it over his left eye — that was the stronger one — and he was amazed at how sharply he could see with it. All at once the odors of Far Side, that he had smelled as a child, when his eyesight had been good, filled his nostrils. Tears came to his eyes, and Uri resolved that either in Alexandria or back home in Rome he would learn how gemstones are polished.

The captain laughed: he was used to hearing expressions of that sort from the lips of those who caught their first glimpse of Alexandria from the sea.

On the right was the Pharos, much like the tower in Jerusalem in which Uri had lived for several months, except bulkier and topped by a statue of Zeus Soter; on the left, opposite the small island of Antipharos, was another promontory on which sat gardens and a palace. The proper name for it was Antirhodes, the captain related; it had been given that name around three centuries ago, when Rhodes had still had a larger harbor than Alexandria’s. A row of enormous palaces, each more magnificent that the last, rose to ever-greater heights along the shoreline. Alexandria might not have been built on hills like Rome, but so far as Uri could see Rome could never rival Alexandria: the banks of the Tiber were nothing in comparison to this huge harbor.