The Testament of Mariam Read online

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘Murdered. The Roman procurator died, and before his successor could reach Judah, a new high priest of the Temple was appointed at Jerusalem, Ananus.’

  ‘Ananus?’ I said. ‘Surely not, after all these years.’

  ‘Not the same Ananus. Not Ananus “the Great”.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘This one also is an arrogant man, greedy for power and eager to exercise it. He was the brother-in-law of Caiaphas and the fifth son of the “great” Ananus to become high priest amongst us. A man of violent temper and overweening pride in his aristocratic heritage. He arrested the bishop and several of his followers, and condemned them to death for transgressing the Law.’

  ‘But under Roman occupation the high priest is not permitted—’

  ‘Exactly. So good men, honest men—some of them followers of the Christ and some not—were outraged at what he had done and laid a complaint before the Syrian legate and King Agrippa. The high priest was removed from office, but there is still unrest.’

  ‘And who was this bishop of Jerusalem?’

  ‘A most holy man, who spent most of his life on his knees. He fasted regularly, and when he took food, ate no animal. He mortified his flesh, never cut his hair or shaved his face or washed his body. He drank no wine or other intoxicating liquor. It is said that he knelt praying so much that his knees grew as hardened as a camel’s.’

  ‘A most holy man,’ I said, hoping that he could not hear the irony in my voice. ‘And what was his name, the bishop of Jerusalem?’

  ‘Ya’aqôb the Just,’ he said. ‘Ya’aqôb ben Yosef. Ya’aqôb brother of Yeshûa.’

  And then he told me how the last of my brothers died.

  The Temple guards bundled my brother Ya’aqôb to the highest point on the roof of the Temple, but their progress was slow, for the old man stumbled from the arthritis in his aged joints and the weakness brought on by the torture he had suffered.

  ‘You’ll soon be flying like a bird,’ the captain of the guards cried, his small red mouth grinning within the frame of a thick curling beard. He poked the prisoner in the back with the tip of his spear and the old man fell to his knees. He began to mumble something, some kind of a prayer by the sound of it, but they hauled him to his feet and dragged and prodded him to the top of the stairs.

  It was a dizzying height, the whole of Jerusalem with its hills and towers, its mighty walls and narrow dirty slums, laid out below them. Ya’aqôb was confused. Was this vision of the Holy City supposed to mean something? He was not ready for this. He had not performed the proper rituals. He tried to speak to the captain, but two of the strongest guards seized him by shoulders and ankles, and swung him up into the air. His emaciated body was as light as a boy’s.

  For a few minutes they amused themselves by swinging the body out over the terrible drop, then back inside the parapet, then out again. The old man was gibbering now, and the guards laughed. There had been little enough to entertain them since Ananus had become high priest, with his new rules, his diktats, his novel interpretations of the Law. Then, at a nod from the captain, on an outward swing, they let the body go.

  My brother was wearing nothing but a dirty loincloth, and the rush of wind ripped it away, so that he flew through the air naked as a newborn infant, and crashed on to the unforgiving pavement below.

  Making his leisurely way down the stairway to the ground, the captain was relieved the matter was dealt with. He would order the guards to clear away the body and hand it over to the man’s friends if they wanted it. Then he could go home to his wife, his meal and his bed. The body lay sprawled at the foot of the tower, one leg stuck out at an unnatural angle. There was surprisingly little blood. The captain poked the body with his foot and it groaned. Then, unbelievably, it gathered itself together and crawled on to its hands and knees.

  The captain jumped back, his heart throbbing violently, a rush of heat bringing out the sweat on his body and turning his stomach. The man was still alive! No one could have survived that fall. No one. He yelled at the guards, yelled at the gawping bystanders, yelled at some men mending the road.

  ‘Stone him!’ he shrieked. ‘He must be stoned to death!’

  They hurried to obey, everyone shocked and terrified by this man who had not died. For an hour they stoned him, till his hair was matted with gore, and every inch of his naked body was battered and bloodied.

  And still he would not die.

  The captain was almost out of his wits, his eyes stretched wide. He looked around desperately. What could he do? Then he caught sight of a passer-by who had stopped to stare at the gruesome execution. His clothes were stained with fuller’s earth and he carried the club which he used to beat the cloth and soften it.

  ‘Here, you!’ the captain shouted.

  The fuller came reluctantly, cursing himself for having stopped. The captain looked crazy enough to do anything.

  ‘That club of yours, is it heavy?’

  ‘Heavy enough.’

  ‘Then finish him off. Club him. Smash his skull in.’

  The fuller backed away. ‘It will make me unclean.’

  ‘Do as you’re told,’ the captain yelled, ‘or I’ll have them stone you to death in his place.’

  The fuller did as he was told.

  And so, finally, Ya’aqôb died.

  I sit here under the vine arbour and watch the Phoenician ship reach harbour and furl her sails. The air is sticky with the sound of my bees and dry with the rasping of the cicadas. My daughter-in-law is cooking the sardines. The smell of them floats out to me here. Let her cook by herself for once. I have done enough for one day. I can hear my grandchildren arguing in the orchard.

  The sailor from the Land of Judah told me something else. Now that the Christ sect is spreading to many lands, there is talk of writing down the teachings and the whole story, before all those who were there either forget or die. Paulus, who was a posthumous convert, has been writing letters of guidance and instruction to some of the far-flung churches which have been set up amongst the Gentiles. The letters will be brought together into a book to be copied and circulated. Others are preparing testaments and books of the life, which they call ‘gospels’.

  I shut my eyes. My head is aching. From too much sun, perhaps. Or from the story of Ya’aqôb’s death, which I have not allowed myself to think about until now. A testament. A testimony. Perhaps I should get out my writing quills, buy parchment and ink next time I am in Massilia. I have not lost the art, for Yeshûa taught me well. The Testament of Mariam?

  Chapter Two

  When my younger son Sergius was about fourteen, he asked me, ‘Why do you and Father always speak Latin to us? It isn’t his mother tongue, or yours.’

  He was a thoughtful boy and deserved a careful answer.

  ‘Your father believes the future lies with Rome. It is better this way. You are Roman citizens and should look to the future, not the past.’

  ‘But Father’s family is an ancient one here in Gaul. They held power in the land around Massilia, he’s told me. And he has a Gaulish name.’

  And one that must sound uncouth to Roman ears, I thought.

  ‘All that has changed now,’ I said.

  Generations earlier the people of southern Gaul had been conquered by Rome and then, by that subtle process which has proved so effective throughout most of the Empire, they had become Romanised themselves. It was never a success in the country the Romans call Palestine. We were too stubborn, too separate, too arrogant and unshakeable in our belief in our righteousness, our Law, our special status in the world as the Chosen People of the One God, Yahweh. Petradix’s ancestors, on the other hand, had taken gladly to Roman ways, Roman clothes, Roman baths, Roman hypocausts, and Roman cities. His grandfather had gained citizenship.

  Petradix, however, was the youngest of five boys, with little chance of inheriting land, so he had joined the Roman army, risen to first centurion, and retired after his twenty years with several battle scars, but otherwise
intact. His legion had been serving in Egypt at the time, so he was given his land grant there. A commendable Roman practice—to steal other people’s land, then hand it out to army veterans as a pension. There were whole towns of these veterans on the far side of Gennesaret. With a little persuasion from powerful friends of his father’s, Petradix was able to exchange his grant for land at home in Gallia Narbonensis—this farm, which had been seized owing to the non-payment of land taxes. He then looked around for a wife. He was ever a practical man, Petradix.

  I had arrived in Gaul a few months earlier—an outcast, a refugee—amongst a group fleeing from the Land of Judah, and had found work serving food in a caupona in Massilia. Petradix came there to eat when he brought produce to market, and I suppose he thought I would suit as well as any. I was clean, well-spoken, something different from the other women who worked there, and who augmented their earnings on the street at night. I had not yet been driven to that, though things were very bad. I came to him a virgin. I shared a small, filthy room with three other women, all prostitutes. I possessed nothing but the clothes I wore, a bedroll and a small box. And if the owner of the caupona did not give us the leftovers to eat at the end of the day, then I did not eat. Petradix’s proposal of marriage seemed like a miracle.

  That is not a word I should use so lightly. And I am allowing my own cynicism to cloud the memory of a good man. Petradix loved me, fell in love with me, as unlikely as it may seem. And I was fond of him. He was . . . a dear friend. And I miss him surprisingly much.

  I never told him who I was. To him I was a homeless orphan who had fled from the threat of persecution in Palestine. He had served in the lands around the eastern end of the Middle Sea, and he knew all about persecution. He never questioned me, for which I remain forever grateful.

  We gave our two boys Roman names, Manilius and Sergius, and brought them up as good Roman citizens. Manilius has been happy to remain here on the farm, and like his father he is a good farmer, with a feel for the land, though he does not have my passion and my eccentric interests. Sergius is more restless and has moved to Massilia, where he works as a ship broker. He has not yet taken a wife. Both boys—both men, rather—are entirely their father’s sons. I see nothing of myself in them, and that is good. Except, perhaps, that small itch of restlessness in Sergius. If we had had a daughter, she might have taken after me, but I do not really regret this. I regret nothing. Almost nothing.

  When I was seven years old, I was set, like other village children of my age, to watching our flock of goats when they were driven out to pasture on the higher slopes of the hills, the midbar. It was easy work, so long as you kept your wits about you and did not allow the goats to stray too far. And so long as the flock was not attacked. Mostly, my family owned a herd dog, but at that time our old dog had died and had not been replaced, so the responsibility for the flock was greater than usual. I was happy in the hills. It was cooler there, where the breezes blew freely amongst the pasture grass. There were small scrubby olive trees, self-planted from the olive orchards below, which provided shade.

  Yeshûa’s friend Yehûdâ had made me a reed pipe, and I was teaching myself to play it, though I am not sure the goats enjoyed my first attempts. I hoped they would gather around me, or even dance to my playing, as in some ancient myth, but they were inclined to distance themselves. There were other children on the hills, mostly boys, but the youngest of my brothers, Shim’ôn, was nearly eleven now and starting to learn the carpenter’s trade with our father, so the herding of the goats fell to me. To give the goats the best pasture, we kept our flocks at a distance from each other, though sometimes when we stopped at midday to eat the food our mothers had provided, some of us would meet near a pool where the goats drank. A small stream cascaded into it over a smooth grey rock, worn down by centuries of water. At its lower end, the stream left the pool to run down the hill and join the river below the village.

  One day I was walking back to my grazing ground after the midday meal, urging on three of my goats who had followed me down to the pool. I had lingered longer than I should have done, showing off my prowess on the reed pipe to three of the boys.

  ‘No girl can play a pipe,’ one had jeered.

  ‘Mariam is so conceited, she thinks she can do anything a boy can,’ crowed another, and they rolled on the ground laughing until they clutched their stomachs.

  I was furious.

  ‘Listen, stupid!’ I said.

  And fuelled by my anger, I played a simple folktune right through without a mistake, a feat I had never achieved before. Now I was feeling pleased with myself, and sauntered along, swishing my thin hazel branch behind the goats whenever they showed signs of stopping to graze. I needed to get back to the rest of the flock and make sure none of them had strayed.

  I climbed up a rock which projected out of the turf and began to count: one, two, three . . . There were only twenty-one. There should be twenty-two. It was not long since the nannies had dropped their kids and some were still very small. One was missing, but it might simply be hidden in a hollow or behind a boulder. I began to run from one end of the little meadow to the other, giving the chirruping cry I used to call the flock together. Nowhere could I find the kid. Could a wolf have taken it? There were wolves, lurking in the caves high in the hills. They did not hesitate to attack the flocks if there was no wild prey nearby. If I had had a dog, it would have alerted me, but I had seen nothing, heard nothing. I was searching aimlessly now, my sight blurred with tears, partly at the thought of the beating I would receive, partly at the image in my mind of the innocent kid, bloody on the ground, before it had even had a taste of life.

  Suddenly there was a shape before me, there without sound or movement, a shape. I rubbed my eyes with the back of a dirty hand. At first all I could see was a radiance, like a cloud at night passing before the moon, then it seemed to gather together into the form of my brother Yeshûa. The sun was behind him, so that he floated gold-rimmed against the green of the grass, insubstantial as a painting.

  Then the light was gone. I had noticed no change in the sky as I searched for the kid, but from nowhere, it seemed, a dark cloud wiped out the sun. And the grass of the midbar was leached of all colour and streamed flat along the ground like silver hair, moaning in a sudden wind. The short curls on the back of my neck stirred, and if I could have moved my feet, which were frozen to the ground, I would have fled to the high caves and hidden there even amongst the wild wolves of the hills.

  Out of the darkness, I heard a voice. ‘Was this what you were seeking, Mariam?’ It sounded far away.

  I was shaking so much, I could not speak, but covered my face with my hands.

  Then as swiftly as it had come, the darkness was gone, and I peered fearfully between my fingers. The terrifying, intangible shape had become my brother Yeshûa, ordinary, substantial and real, and I saw that he had the kid draped round his shoulders like a cloak, its four feet held together with one hand against his chest, the way you will see a shepherd carry a sick or injured sheep.

  ‘Is it dead?’ I whispered, trembling. The kid lay passive, inert. Surely it was dead.

  He grinned. ‘Not at all. Just needing its mother.’

  And he lifted it down from his shoulders and set it on the turf, where it skipped off, crying for its dam.

  ‘Oh, Yeshûa,’ I cried, ‘I was so afraid!’

  I could not have said what I had feared most. The loss of the kid. The attack of a wolf. Or the sudden manifestation of my brother—out of the sun?—out of the shadow of the cloud?—where, a moment before, there had been nothing. I flung myself at him, still shaking, desperate to feel the warm solidity of him, my brother, not some apparition. And he swung me up and held me, so that I buried my face in the hollow at the base of his neck.

  And I remember as clearly as if it were here and now, his skin did not smell of the kid. His skin smelled sweet, of honey and cinnamon.

  As a child what I knew was not the rich expanse of the Middle Sea, no
r the bright glitter of sweet Gennesaret, but that narrow valley where our village lay, high in these Galilean hills. It was fertile—far more fertile than Judah to the south, with its desert and its barren rocky cliffs, its lifeless inland Sea of Sodom. The people of our village ate simply but well. I never remember going truly hungry to bed (except when I had misbehaved) and there were no village beggars. We were not rich, but neither were we paupers. My father possessed no cattle, though he owned the land of our own smallholding and a few fields. The only family with enough wealth and pasture for cattle was the family of the merchant Shim’ôn, father of Yehûdâ, who owned the largest farm and was landlord to many of the villagers. Shim’ôn of Keriyoth had bought land in our village before I was born, although he spent much of his time about his business in Sepphoris and Jerusalem. Later, he owned a great house in the tetrarch’s new city of Tiberias. My brother would never go there, although Yehûdâ, who was his closest friend, often invited him.

  ‘It is unclean,’ Yeshûa said at last, one afternoon when they were perched on the low wall of the courtyard, and I was crouched at their feet. ‘The whole city is being built on a cemetery and wherever you go, you walk over the bones of the dead.’

  I was surprised when he said this. Ya’aqôb was rigorous in his observance of the Law and took every opportunity to rail at the rest of us for any minor infringement, but Yeshûa was much more easy-going.

  I glanced up at him, questioning, but he was looking far away, over my head, and twisting the hem of his tunic between his hands until I heard a thread split and the fabric tear.

  Yehûdâ laughed at him for his squeamishness, but my brother shook his head, and his face was serious.

  ‘It’s an evil thing Herod Antipas is doing, building a city there. Unclean.’

  ‘He chose a site on the lake which would be profitable for trade and more central in Galilee than Sepphoris is,’ said Yehûdâ reasonably. ‘It’s much better placed for his capital. My father thinks it promises to be a fine city, with magnificent buildings, a credit to Galilee and the whole Land of Judah.’