Zealot Page 8

  Simeon turned to him, his face a mix of fear and confusion. “Eleazar says that we’ve no hope against them. That we should burn the complex and kill ourselves before daybreak.”

  “No.” Avram was astounded. He was ready to fight, eager to take as many Roman devils with him as he could before he died. “This can’t be.”

  On the stairs, Eleazar bore the shouts and jeers from the crowd with great patience for some time. Then he spoke again. “We cannot win a battle of weapons against the force arrayed against us. The Empire has us outnumbered twenty to one. To believe otherwise would be madness. On this, we are in agreement. Correct?”

  Begrudgingly, the crowd acknowledged their agreement. After watching the massive military force of the Roman Empire marshal beneath them, only a foolish few harbored belief any longer that the meager forces of Masada could somehow defeat Rome and liberate their homeland.

  Eleazar continued, “Then if we cannot save our lives, I say we save our honor. And the honor of our people.”

  Judah climbed the stairs, challenging. “There is no honor in suicide. You want honor for the people of Israel? I say we fight like men and we die like men. Let our deeds be remembered.”

  ”That’s fine for you, Judah. You fight like a man and preserve your honor. But what about our wives? Our daughters? Look on them.” Although it was forbidden, more than a few of the women of Masada had gathered in the shadows of the buildings surrounding the meeting place to hear the decision of their men. It was toward them Eleazar addressed his words. “What of their honor? Look them in their sweet and trusting eyes and tell them you wish to see them captive on a Roman’s couch. Made whore to the Romans’ lust, slaves to their perverted appetites.” Some of the women present began to cry. Some fled away into the shadows back to their homes, a few braving the wrath of the assembly to run to their husbands, clutching them for comfort. Eleazar took little note of them. “And what about your sons, Judah. Dragged in chains to heathen lands, raised as heathens to service heathens. Is that how the People of God are to be remembered?”

  Judah was obviously affected by his leader’s words. Head low, eyes downcast, he started back down the stairs to join the throng at Eleazar’s feet. But Eleazar stopped him, holding out his hands. “Put away your pride, Judah, and join me in one final victory over the Romans.” Judah hesitated, the pain of his decision on his agonized face, then grabbed Eleazar’s hands like a lifeline. The commander pulled Judah to him in a close embrace, then, with his captain by his side, turned to his people. “We will save the honor of our fathers and their fathers before them. Our deeds here today will he remembered!”

  The meeting ran late into the night, and by the time it had ended, the men of Masada were united in their resolve to snatch the prize of victory from the hands of the Romans. Even Avram, who once dreamed of confronting the Romans face-to-face, conceded theirs would be a victory in the eyes of God and of history. Each man would be responsible for easing his own family’s passing. The ten unit captains would then help the men join their families. As the meeting ended, Eleazar, Judah, and the other captains cast lots on shards of pottery to determine which of them would dispatch the others and put Masada to the torch.

  The corridor running between the fortress walls was empty as Avram returned to their chamber, but behind the doors that lined it, Avram could hear the wailing and howls of grief as the men told their families what must be. He didn’t know how he was going to break the news to Deborah. How to tell her that everything they’d hoped for, everything they’d dreamed of was gone. That their brief taste of life was over. He knew the look in her eyes would kill him more surely than any blade.

  He opened the door to their chamber with trembling hands. Deborah sat on the edge of their sleeping mat, dressed in the embroidered robe she’d made for their wedding, her hair and face obscured by the wedding veil.

  “You know,” he said softly. He moved quickly to sit by her side, pushing back the veil to reveal her face.

  “Hard to keep a secret in Masada,” she said, her eyes ringed red from crying, her face dark with the shadows of grief. Avram reached out to her and pulled her close to him, embracing her as if he’d never let her go. He wished he had words with which to comfort her, words that would make it all go away, that could restore their happiness. But the only words he had were “I’m sorry” and the only thing he could tell her was how much he loved her. And he did, over and over again.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked in a small voice.

  Avram pulled back from their embrace so he could look into her chestnut eyes. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

  “Deborah, if I could take this away from you, you know I would.” His anguished words were choked.

  “Avram, it’s all right,” she comforted him. “I can be brave, because I know we’ll be together. We’ll live as man and wife for all eternity in the world to come.”

  “And here I always thought I was boring you with my studies,” Avram smiled wistfully. It was the foundation of Pharisaic belief, he had once devoted his life to its study, and yet in his dark hour of need it had taken an uneducated woman to remind him that death was not the end, it was only the beginning. “On the day of Resurrection, we will be together again.”

  “And for all the days to come,” Deborah added. “I’m not afraid of death, my love. I’ll be with you.”

  Off in the distance, the shofar sounded. Avram drew Deborah near to him once again, kissing her lips, stroking her face, pretending he hadn’t heard it, willing it to go away. Then his father appeared in the doorway.

  “It’s time, Avram.”

  Avram looked up at his father and nodded, the face of agony. “May we do this privately, Aba?”

  “In a moment,” Mordecai said, entering the room. He moved to Deborah and slowly, painfully, knelt beside the mat where she sat. He took one of her hands and held it close to his heart. “Thank you for making my Avram happy, daughter,” he said. He kissed her awkwardly on the forehead. “God bless you.”

  “Good-bye, Aba,” she managed to say, stunned at his show of affection, and then the tears started and she could speak no more. Avram helped his father back to his feet.

  “I’ll be outside,” Mordecai said, gripping his son by the arm, willing them both strength to face what must be done.

  As his father left the room, Avram went to the small wooden chest in which they kept their few belongings. He re-moved an iron knife, testing its edge as if he was about to carve a shank of lamb. He moved back toward the bed, where Deborah waited in her wedding finery. She turned her head away, unable to bear the sight of the knife. He sat beside her.

  “Kiss me, Deborah. Let’s remember each other as lovers.” They kissed—a deep, longing kiss made more passionate by the taint of death. “I love you, Deborah,” he murmured.

  “For all eternity,” she whispered back into the kiss, then a small, surprised sound cut off as the cold on of Avram’s knife sliced into her throat.

  He pulled her to him even more tightly. He could feel her blood surge over them both, washing them in her life’s essence as it ebbed away. He could feel her tighten in panic, then slowly relax as life left her, draining her, leaving her empty.

  When he knew she was gone, he released her and carefully arranged her body on the sleeping mat. Her bridal garments were stained in her blood like their marriage bed had once been. He lovingly placed her wedding veil over her beautiful face, so she would not be disgraced by the gaze of some lecherous Roman pig.

  Avram heard movement in the doorway. “It’s done, Aba,” he said, not taking his gaze oft’ Deborah.

  Mordecai entered the room. With sorrowful eyes he took in his son kneeling by the body of his dead bride, covered in her blood. “Avram, I’m so sorry.”

  Avram stood and faced him. “No, Aba, I’m the one to be sorry, sorry I ever brought you here. We should have gone to Galilee, or Bethlehem, somewhere we could have had a normal life.”

  Mordecai shook his head. “An
y life under Roman rule is not normal. You did the right thing. I lived to see my son grow into a man, to see him take a bride. at more could a father ask for?”

  Avram looked at his father in amazement. “Then…you’re not angry with me?” Mordecai hugged his son close to his bosom as he’d not done since Avram was a child.

  “My little Avram, I have never been more proud of you than I am right now. Yes, we die, but we die free. See, you’ve even taught your old Aba something.” He reached up to kiss Avram on the forehead—Avram had never before noticed that he was taller than his father. Then he picked up the bloody knife and handed it to his son. “Let’s get on with it. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I see your mother again.”

  Mordecai painfully lowered himself to the floor near the sleeping mat and lay down, carefully adjusting his tunic, making sure the fringes on the corners of his mantle weren’t tangled. He folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes in prayer. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, Whose judgments are true.” Then, with a sigh, he tilted back his head, exposing his throat. “Strike well, son. Trust in God.”

  Avram knelt beside his father. “Good-bye, Aba,” he whispered, then pulled the knife swiftly across his father’s throat.

  Avram didn’t know how long he knelt there, watching the blood rush, then run, then trickle from his father’s throat. He was numb. Completely numb. Beyond pain. Beyond grief. Numb. He stared at the knife in his hand, watching the patterns the red fluid made against the iron blade, his Deborah’s blood mingling with the blood of his father.

  Finally, he managed to rouse himself, his task still unfinished. He opened the wooden box that housed their possessions and removed the few pieces of pottery and glass inside. With all his strength, all his anger, all his grief, he hurled the bowls, the cups, and Deborah’s cooking pots at the wall, shattering them, until nothing remained that the Romans could use. The rest of their meager possessions—their clothing, a few wooden implements, some cloth—he placed in the wooden box and moved it near the oven. He emptied the last of the lamp oil on the box and set it alight with the wick of a lamp.

  He was still staring wide-eyed into the flames when Eleazar came for him. His commander was covered with blood, like a demon butcher, and his face was haunted with the horror of his deeds.

  “Avram.”

  Avram turned to look at his commander, haunted by his own demons. “I killed them.” The anguish in his soul manifested in his voice. “God forgive me, I killed them,” he wailed.

  “He will, Avram. You know He will.”

  Avram nodded numbly. He moved to the sleeping mat, lay down beside the body of his wife. He put one arm around her lovingly, protectively, then looked to Eleazar. “Now,” he said. Avram closed his eyes and prayed as Eleazar’s sword drove into his heart.

  Masada: 14 Nisan, The Present

  Avram opened his eyes and wiped away an escaping tear with a shrug of his shoulder. Nearly two thousand years had passed, yet the memory stayed with him, as sharp as if it had happened only yesterday. He could still feel the pain, not of Eleazar’s sword, but of his heart as it broke when he awoke to discover that he had failed, that he could not die. That he could never be with Deborah.

  Today was the anniversary of her death, of all their deaths. He had faithfully kept the anniversary ever since, in the decadent villas of Rome, the tiny Russian shtetls, the teeming cities of Eastern Europe, wherever his life had taken him. With the liberation of Israel, he’d finally been able to return to the rock, to this tiny room where they had loved, to the room where he had killed her.

  Avram knelt by the clay oven, bowed his head, and began to recite softly, so softly only he and God could hear. “Extolled and hallowed be the name of God in that world which He is to create anew, and to revive the dead and to raise them to an everlasting life. Then will the city of Jerusalem be rebuilt, the Temple be erected there, the worship of idols be ,erased from the land, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, will reign in His Kingdom in majestic glory. May this happen in your lifetime and in your days, and in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel, speedily and near in time, and let us say, Amen.”

  The words were in Aramaic, the language of his childhood, a language nearly forgotten, but which gave him great comfort. It made him think of his father, who had drilled him in his prayers from the day little Avram started to speak, confident that his son was smarter and quicker than all the other boys. One of the hardest parts of being Immortal for Avram had been learning that Mordecai ben Enoch and his wife were not his natural parents, that Mordecai had adopted a foundling child to be his only son. At first he was devastated, but as time passed Avram came to realize that no father could ever have loved a son of his loins more than his father had loved him. He remembered the beaming look of pride on his father’s face the first time he’d read aloud from the Torah in front of the other men of the synagogue. After all these centuries, he hoped his father would still be proud.

  “Let His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed, praised and glorified, exalted, adored and honored, extolled and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He; though He be high above all the blessings and hymns, praises and works of solace which are uttered in the world; and say ye, Amen.”

  Avram stopped on the “Amen,” hearing footsteps nearby. He turned his head to see a man, gray-haired, yet tanned and very fit, coming toward him.

  “Son, are you all right?” One of the guides who helped patrol the complex and conducted tours for the visitors stopped in the ruined doorway.

  Avram smiled at the old man. “I’m fine. Just resting a bit.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “I had to be Rambo and come up the long way.” They shared a chuckle at Avram’s expense.

  “The next tour’s starting up in about fifteen minutes.” The guide was full of enthusiasm. “Bet you I can show you some things you never imagined were up here.” He gave Avram a wink. “I promise I won’t go too fast for you.”

  “Fifteen minutes? Sure,” Avram said amiably, “meet you there.” With a wave, the guide continued on his way.

  Avram turned back to the corner by the oven, reached out to touch a faint mark of scorched rock on the wall nearby— still marking the spot where he had burned the last of their possessions. He bowed his head and continued.

  “May abundant peace and life descend from heaven upon us and upon all Israel; and say ye, Amen. May He who makes peace in His heights bring peace upon us and upon all Israel; and say ye, Amen.”

  Then he stood up and removed a handful of pebbles from his pocket. He had collected them during his hike up the serpentine path. Pebbles that predated the concession stands, the sound and laser show, the cable cars. Pebbles that predated even the Romans. He rolled them around in his hand for a moment and then set them down in a little pile on top of the clay oven, marking his visit. His kaddish complete, Avram took one last long look around the ruined fortress and started the journey back down the mountain. He’d be back in Jerusalem before Pesach began with the setting of the sun.

  Chapter Seven

  Paris: The Present

  According to Monday morning’s paper, which MacLeod read over a leisurely pot of coffee and a fresh baguette smothered in grapefruit marmalade on the deck of his barge, the previous day’s negotiating session had been relatively undramatic. No fistfights had broken out over minor points of protocol. No one had walked out in a fit of pique over some slight, imagined or otherwise. No one on either side had threatened to pick up their toys and go home. But, once again, for the seventh day of the Israeli/palestinian talks, only an impasse had been reached. No agreement. No understanding. No movement toward a peaceful resolution of the fate of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisioned someday as the capital of their new autonomous nation, and which the Israelis viewed as an inviolate part of the Holy City.

  MacLeod spent most of the day on the barge, washing her glass, touching up her paint, polishing her chrome, and getting her
ready to embrace the spring after a long, hard winter. Puttering, really, though he probably wouldn’t admit that to himself. It was the first day of Passover for the Israeli delegation, there would be no negotiations that day, and he worked with half an ear toward the phone—but Maral’s call never came.

  Later that night, as he settled on the couch in front of a cheerful fire with a snifter of brandy and a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, he tried to see her in the back of his mind. Alone in the sumptuous appointments of the Lutétia, picking over a first-rate dinner delivered on a room-service tray. A beautiful bird in a gilded cage.

  It had been a long time since he’d been this infatuated with a woman, a long time since his waking thoughts were preoccupied with the image, the touch, the smell of a woman. Probably not since that day he’d leapt onto Tessa’s tour boat not far from the spot where his barge was now moored on the Seine. But with Tessa, even from their first meeting, he knew it was more than simple infatuation, more than pure physical attraction that brought them together like two halves of a broken locket. Beautiful and intelligent as she was, Maral wasn’t Tessa, could never be Tessa. There would probably never be another Tessa for him, even if he lived a thousand years.

  Still, there was something to be said for physical attraction. If she didn’t call tomorrow, he would find a way to contact her.

  Tuesday morning dawned with the threat of showers, but by midmorning, the clouds had fled and the sun shone bright off the waters of the Seine. A promising knock on the barge door after lunch had proven only to be the international courier service, bearing the box containing Karros’s sword from the States. Wearing a pair of jeans with a T-shirt under his brown leather jacket, MacLeod started off for the museum with the sword case under one arm.

  As MacLeod passed through the massive wooden doors into the marble hall where the Hostes Romae exhibit was installed, he realized the gallery was awash in rugrats. Three young boys played an impromptu game of tag in and out of the columns of the Arch of Titus, their voices shrieking above the martial music their antics in the Arch kept triggering, over and over again.