Читать книгу All Who Came Before - Simon Perry - Страница 5

The dagger slipped from Yeshua’s grip, tumbling into darkness and taking with it all hope of justice. Warm blood trickled from his empty hand. Silently the drops fell, until their collective voice would gather to cry from the ground. Yeshua—God will save us—had not saved his people, and his God had not saved him. Facing his final moment, he lowered his eyes and the fear he had so recently shaken returned with mortal force. The clash had lasted only seconds, but the build-up had seemed endless as he lay concealed in the grass, waiting for it to begin.

“Right on time,” he had heard his brother call from across the track as their targets emerged from the city.

“Be ready, Theudas,” Yeshua the Egyptian replied in shallow breath. “They’ll be here before we know it.”

The dark western horizon was crafted by Roman hubris. The cut stones, mounted as legionaries in rank and file, silently forbade any hope of resistance: the city wall, standing like the tip of a colossal blade sunk deep into the heart of the Promised Land; the aqueduct, bleeding the milk and honey from that land to fuel its oppression; the amphitheatre, celebrating the human body by enslaving it. The empire’s capital was incarnate in Straton’s Tower, conquering the sky to monitor all that passed by sea or land.

The intent of this almighty stonework reached far beyond its practical purpose. This was a spectacle to invoke astonishment and fear, and in so doing to radiate the divine power of Rome. Where once the sky would meet the land, magnificent structures now intervened. Heaven and earth could meet only through Rome.

The shallow chill of the Judean summer night still clung to Yeshua’s limbs, but he lay motionless, hidden in the scrubland outside the eastern gate of the great coastal city, Caesarea. Two Roman soldiers had emerged from the gate and begun the shallow descent along the southerly track that in two minutes’ time would bring them within six paces of the would-be assassin. At sight of their approach, Yeshua was seized by a momentary paralysis, which spread from his bowels and ordered his entire body to abandon its absurd intentions. Every limb and organ agreed this was an insane scheme: the son of a merchant, lying in wait to attack soldiers of Rome. A split second transformed these soldiers into immortals. They would surely hear his approach and fall on him long before he was within striking distance. No professional soldier, hardened in battle and sharpened through constant training, would fall prey to such a misguided amateur.

The glint of helmets and spear-points flickered toward them, still over a hundred slow paces away, but an infinite distance to the wavering Egyptian, overawed by the mortal consequences to be determined by the skill or failure of his own hand. Someone’s blood would soon cry out from this dry patch of ground. He looked at the veins carrying a quickened pulse to his fingers and wondered whether that blood would be his.

“No safe path to victory,” Yeshua snarled in an effort to buttress his resolve.

“You alright?” his younger brother asked, in a tone suggesting he himself was not. Yeshua could see, even from the loose curls of Theudas’ hair, silhouetted against the skyline, that his entire body was tense.

The elder brother paused to control his breath before responding in a stage whisper. “We’ve watched them every night for a week. We’ve rehearsed this move to perfection.” His quiet words were packed with determination. “Theudas. We are ready.”

The Romans were protected by carefully designed amour, yielding little in the way of exposed flesh. So the assassins would attack from behind, hands gripped over the pommel of the dagger’s hilt. They had practiced their move repeatedly upon one another using whittled wooden play knives, and even tied scarves around a tree to see whether the real blade would cope with the knot protecting the throat.

Theudas said nothing. Can he go through with this? Yeshua thought, but could hardly ask. “Theudas,” he said, “think of Yotham. Think of Saul. Murdered by these pagans.”

Silence made an eternity out of three heartbeats. Eventually Thuedas grunted. “These pagans will taste justice tonight,” he said.

Yeshua sighed in relief, and with this reminder of why they were here, fear gave way to a stab of grief followed by a deeper blood rush of seething anger towards these troops. His eyes lifted as he offered an embittered prayer. “My brothers’ lives ended the day they went to Your holy city to worship at Your holy Temple. . .” He paused to glance at the approaching soldiers “. . . And so did mine.”

Yeshua inhaled the salty air as if to draw energy from all around him. Lightly moistened by the Mediterranean breeze, small trees and thick grass defied the sandy earth, freckled across a dry landscape where the jackal would hunt the hare. The raging calm of the predator descended upon Yeshua. He looked down at the wiry grass that had been his companion all night, and up at the heavens through a few patches of clear sky. The Egyptian’s cynical prayer had done its job. He knew well enough that it was offered only to himself. He knew this God was merely the convenient name of his own projected anger. But by deceiving his own spirit with the conviction that some greater Other was being engaged, he broke the stranglehold of self-doubt.

The genuine otherness of the prayer was the recollection it brought of his father’s friend, Caius. The legionary’s tales were treasure to a wide-eyed adolescent eager for stories of war. Whatever the story, the same moral would mark the climax: “you can’t fight well ‘till you let go of your life.” Only then can you be totally consumed with the task in hand. “No safe path to victory!” was the old soldier’s refrain. The logic seemed to work, and to work its way into Yeshua’s prayer. His supplication had certainly pulled some handle, released some demon to kindle the fiber of his frame.

Even more heartening was the thought that his target was no legionary. No elite troops were assigned to Caesarea, only civilians with ill-deserved military uniforms. “Remember, Theudas—these are not real soldiers. They’re just auxiliaries.”

“Auxiliaries, p’ah,” Theudas scoffed, mimicking the old soldier’s scorn for any troops but legionaries. His brother’s response lifted Yeshua’s spirit. He was ready. Creation had taken his side and bestowed upon him divine status for his righteous duty.

The auxiliaries, basking in their delusions of divinity, were about to discover they were all too human: mortals, unworthy of all reverence or respect. Yotham and Saul had been worthy, before they were crushed under the might of the empire. His brothers’ lifeless faces; his father’s undignified wailing. The inescapable memory of them fuelled the Egyptian’s resolve as he considered the justice of his motives. If his targets were gods, he would be an angel of revenge. Appointed and anointed by whom, he was unsure. But he was an agent of justice, a justice that must be served if the world were not to crumble under the weight of unrighteousness.

The facial features of the soldiers were now visible and their conversation audible. Yeshua held his dagger in the predetermined grip, his hands ice-cold, the only remnant of fear his body now retained. Confident, he ran his left hand through the loose gravel scattered across the harder, sun-baked texture of the ground. Looking up, he found himself commanding a heightened sense of all he could see. Every stone and tree, every cloud and star was in on the plan, feeding his determination, but he would not move as a wild savage. As the soldiers ambled slowly towards the assassin’s position, the Egyptian’s nerve was utterly calm. His fury would be measured, disciplined: no war cry, no raised arms, only a simple task to fulfill. He had become a machine, waiting to be activated the moment his targets crossed the line between the trees under whose shade he lay.

“No more talking now. Stay calm. Hold your nerve.”

“This is it,” Theudas replied.

The soldiers arrived within ten paces as Yeshua loosened his limbs and prepared to move. But across the track, Theudas sprang to his feet in full view of his targets. The soldiers turned towards him. And there he stood: motionless, speechless.

Yeshua acted instinctively. Theudas’ departure from the plan had created a decoy. The soldiers had walked side by side along the track but by turning towards Theudas they presented their backs to his brother. He moved in on the first target. Neither feeling nor calculating his attack, he merely rehearsed his move. By the time he registered the smell of the leather and oil rising from the soldier’s metallic amour, his target’s muscles had flinched, relaxed and given way. The still upright corpse was abandoned to gravity as the Egyptian closed in on his next mark.

Undistracted by the liquid that dripped warmth from the dagger onto his cold right hand, the assassin repeated the move. He pulled the blade into the scarf. But the resistance of the knot protecting the soldier’s throat forced the dagger handle, now lubricated with blood, to slip through Yeshua’s fingers.

Instantly, the alerted soldier became as solid as Roman marble. A statue quickened with life, he twisted sharply to the left, throwing off his assailant’s embrace with his right elbow. Yeshua, in the knowledge his life was now forfeit, stepped back towards the fallen body of his first target. The second soldier had dropped his spear but had also now turned fully. Yeshua sank to the ground to retrieve the first fallen spear. The Egyptian cotton merchant, who before that moment had never laid his hand on a spear, prepared to face an infantryman, fully trained, fully armed and ready for combat. The soldier’s right hand reached for the hilt of his sword, but the terrible chime of his unsheathing blade was never heard. Another face had appeared at the Roman’s left shoulder. The soldier froze, gurgled and coughed. Theudas had finally completed his mission. A heavy thud concluded the action.

Theudas began to shake his head. “Yeshua. I am so, so . . .”

“Late? . . . Or was it early?” grinned Yeshua.

“Better late than never,” Theudas grimaced as he answered his older brother. “I don’t know what happened, I just . . .”

“Theudas. . .” Yeshua frowned as he embraced his younger brother, before turning toward his fallen victims, mesmerized by their lifeless bodies.

“Now what do we do?” Yeshua heard his brother’s words, but was immersed in an involuntary prayer of thanksgiving to the God he did not believe in . . .

“Yeshua!” came the whispered shout.

The Egyptian waited a moment and, without change of expression, the command, “search them!” escaped his mouth before his brain had chance to hinder it.

Stooping in compliance, Theudas offered an obligatory but meaningless protest: “Robbery was never part of the plan.”

Stepping towards the other body, Yeshua replied with equally casual tones, “Well, neither of us have followed the plan that well.”

Killing a Roman soldier did not feel like a crime, but fumbling around his dead body . . . “Forget it. Let’s just hide them, take their swords and go.” But as Yeshua dragged his victim from the sandy track, he noticed a small bag, full of coins. A purse was removed from each soldier, their bodies pulled into the long grass and sand kicked over the deep red patches underfoot. Within three minutes of the soldiers’ appearance at the gate of Caesarea, the companions were on their way. Armed with a sword, a surplus of ego and an unknown sum of cash, the newly graduated assassins ran silently towards the dawn, stretching the ground between themselves and the Mediterranean.