My Glorious Brothers (23 page)

We went to Jerusalem, and there we rested for three days before the Jews and Greeks in the Acra learned what losses we had taken. They waited too long, for at the end of the three days two hundred of the dark, fierce Jews of the South had joined us, and when the rich Jews led their mercenaries out of the citadel, we fought them in the streets, hurt them cruelly, and drove them back into their warren. But again we took losses; for myself, the devouring edge of fatigue never left me, and it seemed that my wounds could not heal. Ruben ben Tubel had lost half the fingers on one hand, and for all the bandaging, they festered and bled, and my brother John lay in bed back in Modin, burning with fever, his cuts running pus and poison. As for Jonathan, the spark, the wonderful, buoyant youth had gone out of him, never to return. He was too young and he had seen too much; silent he became, and his new beard grew in all streaked with gray.

Only Judas was beyond defeat and beyond despair. Once, despair had claimed him and owned him, but it would not own him again, and he said to me, not once but over and over, “Simon, a free people cannot be conquered, they cannot be slain—for us it is always the beginning, always the beginning.”

Then, in Jerusalem, it was Judas who was fully and wholly the Maccabee. It was he who gathered together the bodies of the old men and gave them burial. It was he who cleansed the Temple once more and put on the spotless white robes of the high priest and led the prayers. It was he who comforted the widows and gave of his endless courage to anyone who asked, demanded, or pleaded. And it was he who drove home the fact that we must fight when we learned, with our wounds still unhealed, that a new army of mercenaries approached the borders of Judea.

Never before had it happened so quickly, and now we had no friends, such as Moses ben Daniel, may he rest in peace, to come ahead and tell us what had transpired at the court of the King of Kings. Once it would have taken the mad Antiochus a year or two years to replace the loss of nine thousand men, but now with the awful noise of that valley of horror still ringing in our ears, we learned the news from Jews who fled before the approaching mercenaries. It made Demetrius, the new King of Kings, appear a veritable demon; no one in our ranks had ever seen him, but tales about him there were in plenty. Could he conjure mercenaries out of the air? Thus it was said, and other things were said too—and what use was it to resist if the hordes of the enemy were numberless? There was a chill wind blowing in Israel then.

And from outside of Judea, from the Jews in other lands, there was only silence, as if they had tired of this restlessness in Palestine, this bloodletting that made only for more bloodletting. And in a way, it was even understandable, for we pursued a mirage of freedom which they had surrendered generations in the past, and yet they survived. In the beginning there had been a strange and splendid and singular glory in the tall, auburn-haired young man who took his weapons from the enemy and his soldiers from the simple, peace-loving farmers who tilled the land. But glory palls.

“Perhaps now,” I said to Judas, when we heard that a new army was driving down on us under a new warden called Bacchides—“perhaps now we should wait, go to our homes.”

“And what will Bacchides do?” Judas inquired gently, smiling just a little. “Will he also wait until we are tired no longer and until our wounds heal? Nicanor was a friend of Apollonius, and as I hear it, this Bacchides was a friend of Nicanor. Perhaps he will go to the valley where the bodies of Nicanor and his nine thousand mercenaries lie, and will that make him like us better? No, Simon, believe me, we must fight, and only so long as we fight will we survive; and when we turn our backs to them, then it is over and finished. We will not turn our backs to them—”

It was John, lying sick in Modin, who sent us a message pleading for us not to go up against Bacchides, but to defend the Temple behind the Temple walls and try and wring terms from the Greek—terms that would give us at least enough time to raise a new army and to gather our strength, and with this Ruben and I and Adam ben Lazar agreed, and we argued long and hotly with Judas; but he was firm and even angry, crying:

“No—no! I will not listen! What have we to do with walls? Walls are a trap for anyone who is fool enough to trust them!”

“And where will we find men?” Adam demanded. “Can we raise up the dead?”

“We can raise the living,” Judas said.

“Judas—Judas.” I pleaded, “what are you saying? Bacchides is a day's march from Jerusalem, and here in the city we have eleven hundred men, no more. Where will you find men in a day—in two days? Will you go to Modin? There are no men left there. Or to Goumad? Or to Shiloh?”

“No!” Judas cried. “I will not be caught here, trapped here! Once I would have gone to the Assembly of Elders, as I went to them. And they are dead, because they bought their freedom cheaply. I make no bargains with men who fight for hire, for gold, for loot—with the
nokri
who come down on us like wolves! So long as men fight with me, I'll fight, and I will fight as I know how to fight, in the open, in the hills and the passes, as a Jew fights!”

“Judas, listen to me—”

“No! Now heed me, Simon, for as the old man said, it was you in peace and me in war! What were the words you gave to Jonathan to tell Ragesh—that so long as two men walk free on Judean soil, the fight goes on? Were those the words?”

“Those were the words,” I murmured.

“Then if you will go your way, and Ruben too, and Adam ben Lazar and his two hundred from the South, and any others who make cheap victory the price of freedom, then go—go if you will! Jonathan will be with me.” And he turned to Jonathan searchingly, and the boy smiled, a sad, lonely smile, nodding.

“To the end, Judas, I am a Jew.”

“Then come and leave them to deliberate,” and putting his arm around Jonathan's shoulder, he walked with him from the room.

The three of us looked at each other in a long and desperate silence, arid then, one by one, we nodded…

That evening, Judas assembled the men in the Temple courtyard. He spoke as he had never spoken, making neither much nor little of what we faced, but presenting the facts as they were, as he saw them, and I do not know but that he saw them well and truly.

“We must fight again,” he said, “and I do not know that it is the last time, for I think they will come down on us again and still again. But we must fight, and one day we will be free. If there were time, we could go through the land, and the people would come to us, as they came before, and we would arm them and train them; but there is not time, and we cannot hide ourselves in the wilderness, as we did once, and leave the land all open and ripe for the mercenaries. Then we had a smaller debt to the people, but because they trusted us, they went back to their homes and their fields, and we cannot let this Bacchides go through the land like a wolf in the flock. As few as we are, we must fight, not here behind the Temple walls, but in our hills, as we have always fought.” He stopped and waited, but there was no sound from the men. These were the old ones, the handful that were left from Ephraim, the few from Modin, from Goumad, from Hadid and Beth Horon; most of them had fought first under the old man, the Adon, and now they fought under the young man, the Maccabee. They had only to look at Judas as he stood there with his back to the Temple wall, the high, white stone, still lit by the last rays of the sun, framing him, the light glowing in his hair and on his brown, beautiful features, to know the answer to the question he asked. And as always, he said to them gently:

“I want no one with a debt unpaid, with a new wife, a new house, a new field, a new child. Such may go, and there will be no shame in their going. They will fight again. We are Jews among Jews, and there should be no shame in our hearts—”

Men left, weeping as they went; the ranks thinned, but closed, and those who remained stood sure and silent, eight hundred of them. Then Judas went among them, calling each by name, embracing some, kissing some, and they touched him and spoke to him with such love as I have never known to be given to a man. He was theirs, the Maccabee, and they were his. The bond would be sealed, signed in blood—yet I think that even if they knew it then, they would have had it no different.

Then, as darkness fell, they covered their heads with their cloaks, and in a soft yet reaching voice Judas said, in the old Hebrew:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

And the close-ranked men answered, “Amen—so be it.”

***

That same night, we left Jerusalem and traveled due west, for we knew that the Greek was coming down from the northwest, and it was Judas's plan to get behind him and strike at him either from the rear or from somewhere on the flank. We had too little force to meet him head on in some valley, bar his path and harry him from the hillsides, but Judas felt that with a little good fortune we might cut off a section of his army and so hurt it that the whole advance might be stopped or even turned into a retreat. Therefore, we marched quickly until well after midnight, covering almost twenty miles, and then, secure in the feeling that we were well behind Bacchides, we set out our sentries and bivouacked in a broad pasture on the outskirts of Beth Shemesh. We slept like dead men that night, woke refreshed with the dawn, and continued westward.

For one reason and another, the spirits of the men were high. Part of it was the glorious day, the blue sky, the clean wind from the Mediterranean, and the lovely green of the terraced foothills; part of it was the fact that they marched again with the Maccabee, and the deep-seated confidence that under him they could come to no abiding ill. As we swung north at the edge of the coastal plain, to return again to the hills in the rear of the Greek, they lifted their voices in an old Judean battle song—and broke it as suddenly, for there, in the broad coastal valley, were the mercenaries, thousands upon thousands of them, a broad mass in front—and then a long, extended flank that cut off our retreat to the hills…

I think I knew it was the end—I think perhaps we all knew it, even Judas, yet his voice rang out in high spirit as he called us to follow him and then set out at a run, driving all our strength against that extended flank.

We turned the surprise into something else; somehow—whether through traitors or spies we never knew, but somehow—Bacchides had anticipated our tactic, and for once the Greek had laid a trap for the Jew; yet we sprung the jaws. Desperate we were, and desperately we smashed the phalanx at its weakest point, driving our unarmored bodies against the massed spears, separating them, making first a small hole and then a larger one through which we poured, closing with the mercenaries and driving them into flight by the fierce, unfettered violence of our attack. For the moment, it seemed like a victory, and we shouted triumphantly as we cut them down, pulled them down from behind; but then, over the din, we heard the voice of Judas calling us to stand, and as we broke off the pursuit, we saw that both ends of the long flank had reformed themselves and were moving in upon us, and behind them the serried ranks of the main army.

We fell back into an area of high boulders and narrow ravines, where the phalanx could not be used against us, but Judas dared not order a retreat for fear it would turn into a rout, for fear they would pull us down even as we had pulled them down a moment ago. Already, we were outflanked; already they were closing in on us from every side. Judas did the only thing he could do; he pulled us together in among the boulders and rocks in a rough circle, and there we fought.

Never will I forget that wild, bestial roar that went up from the mercenaries when they saw that at last they had a Jewish army in a position from which it could not retreat, could not escape. They had waited many years for this. They had carpeted our Judean soil with their dead for this. They had planned for this, dreamed of it—and here, at last, it was.

Yet we stung them. We were not sheep to be pulled down in the fold, but rather the oldest, hardest and best fighting men in all the land of Judea, and we did not leave them that day without a little glory. No, Judas—you left your mark, you left your mark.

First, as they closed in upon us, we shot away our arrows, not as we were wont to shoot in the defiles, filling the air with them until they fell like rain, but slowly and carefully, seeking a mark for every sliver of cedar, knowing that when the twoscore arrows each of us carried were shot away, there would be no more. We feathered the crevices of their armor; we buried our shafts in their eyes, in their brows, in their arms, and they paid dearly for that first attack. They shouted less; they came more slowly—and yet they came.

Until midday, we fought with our spears, and when they were broken, with our swords and our knives and our hammers, and in that time we beat back charge after charge, how many I don't know, but many, many—so many that the memory itself is unbearable with pain and weariness. And then they drew back to rest, to regroup their forces, to count their dead who lay around us like a wall.

They paid a price, but so had we, and out of our eight hundred, less than half remained. Old wounds had opened and new wounds had seared them. When I dropped my sword, I felt that to lift it again would be an effort beyond any mortal will of mine. My mouth was dry as parched leather, and when I tried to speak, only hoarse croakings came forth. All about us the wounded lay, pleading for water, and all among us were the dead who would plead no more. I looked for Judas and Jonathan, and my heart beat less wildly when I saw that they still lived and stood—as Ruben did and Adam ben Lazar too; but Judas bled from a long cut across his breast, and the face of that fierce and vengeful man from the South was smashed in, so that his mouth was a raw and gaping wound.