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Authors: Howard Fast

My Glorious Brothers (9 page)

BOOK: My Glorious Brothers
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“And even if it were possible,” I said, “and God gave us iron as he gave us manna, when we were a landless folk in the desert, where would the men come from? Could we raise out of Israel a hundred thousand men? Then who would feed them? Who would till the land? Who would be left? And if we raised a hundred thousand men, how many years would it take to train them to fight?”

“We know how to fight,” Judas said.

“In a phalanx?”

“Is that the only way to fight? What happened two years ago when the Greeks put their phalanx against the Romans? The Romans used the pilum and smashed the phalanx to pieces. And someday, someone will train mercenaries with a new weapon—no, it's not new weapons we need, but a new kind of war. What kind of fools are we that when this king or that king marches his mercenaries into our land, we go up against them on a level plain and die! We send a rabble to be cut to pieces by a machine! That's not war—it's slaughter!”

The Adon leaned forward, his eyes alight. “What are you thinking, my son?”

“Of how men fight—and for a year I've thought of nothing else. They fight for booty, for loot, for gold, and for slaves. We fight for our land. They have mercenaries and arms. We have the land and a free people. Those are our weapons—the land and the people, our arms and our armor. We have our bows and our knives—we need nothing else. Spears, perhaps, and Ruben could hammer out a hundred spearheads in a week. Could you, Ruben?”

“Spearheads, yes,” the smith nodded. “A spear is not a breastplate or a sword.”

“And we fight our way—and they fight our way,” Judas cried, looking from face to face. “When Rabbi Ragesh led his people into the caves—and I did not know then, Rabbi—and they followed, the people waited to die. That's not the way. We've died for too long. It's their turn now.”

“How, Judas, how?” John said.

“Let them look for us! Let them send in their armies! An army cannot climb like a goat, but we can! Let there be an arrow behind every rock—in every tree! Let there be rocks on every cliff! We'll never face them, never oppose them, never try to stop them—but cut at them and cut at them and cut at them, so that they can never sleep without expecting our arrows at night, so that they never dare enter a narrow pass, so that all Judea becomes a trap for them! Let them march their armies through the land—we'll be in the hills! Let them come into the hills—every rock will live! Let them look for us, and we'll spread out and fade like the mist! Let them put their army through a pass, and we'll cut it up as you cut a snake.”

“And when they come to the villages?” I asked.

“The villages will be empty. Can they garrison the thousand towns of Judea?”

“And if they burn the villages?”

“We will live in the hills—in caves if we have to. And the war will become our strength, just as the land is our strength.”

“And for how long?” John said.

And Ragesh returned, “Forever—if need be until the judgment day.”

“It will not be forever,” Judas said.

And Eleazar, resting his great arms on the table, leaned forward toward Judas, his head lifted and smiling; and Jonathan was smiling too, not with mirth but with something he saw, his young face aglow in the lamplight, his eyes shining.

***

I could not sleep and I went out into the night—and there was a man on the hillside, and when I went close to him, I saw that it was the Adon Mattathias, my father, wrapped in his woolen cloak and looking at the valley as it slumbered in the moonlight. “Welcome, Simon,” he said to me, “and come and stand by me, for an old man is better with his son by his side.” I went to him, and he put an arm around my shoulders. “What do you look for, Father?” I asked him, and he answered, shrugging, “It could be the angel of death who walks so often in Judea—or it could be these silver hills, and to look at them once more, Simon, for they cleave to me and this is the old land of my fathers. And you come out here because grief and hatred is a knife in you that cuts at your heart. Would you believe me, Simon, that I loved a woman as much once, and she died in childbirth, and my heart hardened like a rock and I cried out to the God of Israel, May you be damned, for you gave me five sons and took away the only thing on earth that I love! A just God weighs a man's grief against his tongue, for consider how singularly have I been blessed in these, my withered years. My five sons have not turned against me, for all of my coldness and hardness, nor has one of them raised a hand against another, and of even the sons of Jacob, blessed of memory, that could not be said. How then, Simon, will your own heart turn to stone?”

“Do you want me to laugh with joy?” I asked.

The old man nodded, his long white beard sweeping his chest. “I do, Simon,” he said. “We are each of us here for a day. How long ago was it that Mattathias kissed a woman under that olive tree? I close my eyes, and it was no more than yesterday, and we are here for an instant on the body of old Israel. God wants no tears, but laughter, and the dead sleep well. For the living there should be a joyful time, otherwise fight no more, Simon—and how can you fight, or hope, or believe, if you cleave to the dead?”

“With hatred,” I said.

“Hatred? Believe me, my son, it's poor fuel for a Jew. How is it written in the holy scrolls they burned?
And
proclaim
liberty
throughout
all
the
land
unto
all
the
inhabitants
thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return
every
man
unto
his
possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Did Isaiah command the people to hatred, or did he tell them to let justice well up as water, and righteousness as a mighty stream? Save your hatred for your enemy, my son—for your own people there must be love and hope, otherwise put down your bow before ever you lay a shaft on the string. Look now, Simon, did God give Ragesh, that tempestuous little man, the only right to say who is the Maccabee? Only the people can make out of themselves a Maccabee and raise him up. Yes, they will follow Judas because he is like a flame—and I, who am his father, say it to you, who are his brother, that never before in Israel was there such a man as Judas—no, not even Gideon, may God forgive me; but the flame burns out, and who will take the ashes and make new life grow out of them? Simon, Simon—”

“Come inside,” I said, for the old man leaned heavily upon me, shivering a little. “The night air is cold.”

“Yes,” he said, “and I've talked on like an old fool, long and not too wisely.”

And we went down the hillside, the Adon leaning on my shoulders.

***

To the house of Moses ben Aaron I went, the next day, and the vintner had become like one of his own grapes, squeezed dry, and of no good to anyone; and his wife sat like a shadow, a black shawl over her head. “Come in, Simon,” he said to me, “come in, my son, and take off your shoes and sit with us. We will think, for just a while, that my daughter is here with us.”

“We will not think that,” his wife said dully.

“A cup of wine for the son of Mattathias,” he said, pouring it for me. “Thus I would send her into the house of the Adon with a new vintage. Let Mattathias ben John taste and judge—Simon, Simon, this is a lonely household.”

“Must you talk of her?” his wife demanded. “Can't you let the dead sleep?”

“Now peace, woman. Do I disturb her sleep? This is the man who loved her—this is Simon ben Mattathias. Of what else should I speak to him? When she was a child, he played with her, and when she grew to be a woman, he held her in his arms. What else should I speak of?”

“Of Apelles,” she said.

“May he rot in hell! His name soils my tongue!”

“Of Apelles,” she repeated.

“Talk to her, Simon,” he pleaded to me. “Talk to her, because she takes no food, not wine, not bread, but only sits like a shadow. Talk to her.”

“I've heard enough talk,” the mother of Ruth said. “Do I need talk from the sons of the Adon? I was like a mother to them, but of my own I had only one child. Simon, what will you do when Apelles returns to Modin?”

Both of them stared at me, and I nodded. I poured another cup of wine and held it out to her. “Drink, my mother. The time of mourning is over.”

She rose, took the cup of wine, and drained it.

***

In a little shed, built out from a fragment of stone wall as old as the hills, was the anvil and forge of Ruben the smith. Now, as in my own childhood, it was a favorite place for the children. Your mother sent you with a leaking pot or your father with a broken hoe blade. The work was done, but you stayed as the day faded away, caught, trapped, taken by the broad little man, soot-blackened, his mighty arms the personification of the metal he worked, his great hammer a fearful engine of destruction, his bellows the living mouth of a dragon. He lived in a world of sparks and heat, and under his hands the dead metal came alive. He liked children, and he told them his strange stories, like no other stories. Well do I remember coming there once with Ruth, and how she clung fearfully to me while Ruben told us of Cain, the black-browed, red-handed Cain, who was plunged down to the nether world where first he saw the imps work metal—and how he rambled on and on until finally Ruth burst into tears. “Weep not, little girl,” he said, melting all at once, and picking her up in his bare, hairy arms. “Oh, weep not, my golden one, my queen in Israel, my beautiful one.” But she fought him until he let her go, and then she ran and hid in our corn crib, where I found her and comforted her.

It might have been yesterday when I came to his workshop, for the children were there still, as close as they dared come, while he worked with his hammer, and Judas, stripped to the waist, clamped his metal for him. “And here is Simon,” Ruben said, down with the hammer,
clang, clang, clang,
“also to teach me my trade? I was burning metal before you were weaned, either of you. And I've seen a thing or two, for twice I went north to the mountains with Moses ben Aaron, to buy the iron where they dig it from the earth, where the slaves crawl into the ground like moles, all naked—and blind, too, and at night they sleep fenced in, like animals, whining and whimpering. That I saw with my own eyes on the slopes of Ararat, where the ark settled to earth, where the Greeks bring slaves from the whole world over to mine the metal for them. Yet when I make a spear, it is no good, too short in the haft, too heavy in the head—”

“A weapon must serve a man, not man a weapon,” Judas said.

“You hear him, Simon ben Mattathias,” Ruben smiled, the hammer showering sparks as he beat at the iron—“me, he tells of spears and weapons. When you toddled, Judas, when you were in swathing, I was in Tyre and a Roman cohort came—the first, mind you—and I felt their pilum, six pounds of metal and six pounds of wood behind it. There is a weapon, by all the devils! I have seen the spear of the wild men who live beyond Ararat, three feet of metal and shaped like a leaf, and I have seen the nasty, snakelike spear of the Parthian. Or your Syrian spear, a shovel to scoop out the flesh, or your Greek weapon, fourteen feet long for three men to hold, or your miserable Egyptian spear with its bronze head, or your Bedouin lance. The Roman captain said to me then, Who are you? I answered, A Jew out of Judea, a smith, a worker in metal whose name is Ruben ben Tubel. I hadn't his language or he mine, but we found them to translate. I never met a Jew, he said. Said I, I never met a Roman. He said to me then, Are all Jews as strong and ugly as you? And are all Romans, I answered him, as foul of mouth to strangers? That is a dirty weapon in your hand and a dirty tongue in your head. For I was young then, Judas ben Mattathias, and never afraid of anything that lived. Well, he took a pilum from one of his men and there was a donkey on the street with a bit of a sweet-faced lad pulling it. Look, Jew, he said, and drove the pilum through the donkey with one motion, so that the wood pressed the donkey's side and the iron pole stood two feet beyond. There's our weapon, Jew, he said, while the lad screamed with fear and grief, and there's good pay and better glory in the Legion. I told you I feared nothing then. I threw a silver coin to the lad, and I spat in the Roman's face and walked away. Yes, he might have killed me, but they were strangers there—”

True or not, the children loved his tale, their eyes fixed upon him, their faces rapt. Judas held up the spearhead, long, slender as a reed, still glowing red from the heat.

“Temper it!” the smith said, and Judas plunged it into a bucket of cold water. Through the steam, I heard the smith ring it with his hammer.

“Too frail,” he said. “Too frail. Armor will stand it.”

“But flesh will not,” Judas answered evenly, “and it will find its way. Make them, Ruben, make them.”

***

And in the month of Tishri, when the sweet breath of the new year was all over the land, Apelles returned. So things have a beginning and an end—even Modin.

Judas laid his plans well. He was tireless; day and night, he worked, planned, schemed, and day by day, the store of long, slender spears mounted. A village condemned was Modin. We dug our bows out of the ground. We made new arrows. We turned our plows into spears. We put a razor edge upon our knives. And already, even now, it was to Judas that people brought their woes. “And six children, Judas ben Mattathias—” “We will make provision for the children.” “And what will a man do with his goats?” “Our stock goes with us.” It was Lebel, the teacher, who pleaded his case. “I am a man of peace, of peace.” He came to the Adon, his bloodshot blue eyes wet with tears. “Where is the place of a man of peace in Israel today?” And the Adon called for Judas, who listened and nodded.

BOOK: My Glorious Brothers
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