Fifth Gospel(20)

She prayed for two things: for the strength to tell the man the truth and for the man’s ignorance of its importance. She thought she might faint to the ground on saying it, but she did not. She stood perfectly poised and still.

‘Cassius!’ the Roman said to a centurion who stood not far off, inspecting some bundles tied to a mule.

When this man looked in her direction Mariam saw that he was possessed of a young man’s body but that his eyes went deep into his skull and were shadowed like those of an old man. He left the mule and came to see.

Her heart moved in a lump to her throat.

‘Come, hear what this woman tells...her son was born in Bethlehem, at the time of Herod!’

The centurion’s face was all a-frown, his voice a sting in her ears, ‘Bethlehem of Judea?’ he said to her.

She nodded.

‘She says he is fourteen springs!’ the other man said, with a smile playing at his mouth.

She felt demons of fear un-spooling a thread of misery into her bowels. She said another silent prayer and caught Yeshua in a protective grasp. A desperate desire to flee fired up her legs and yet, where could she go?

‘Is this true?’ The centurion pressed.

‘It is,’ she told him squarely. ‘My son’s name is Yeshua bar Joseph, of the house of David.’

The centurion was fiercely attentive as she spoke and she noted that it seemed as if a number of pictures were flitting past his eyes as he looked from her to Yeshua and back again.

‘Bethlehem of Judea?’ he asked again, ‘In the time of Herod the Great?’

She nodded.

An expression of relief now surfaced on his face and made it soft, as if all cares were of a sudden taken from it and put away. The moment was suspended while the world moved in loops around them. She thought that he would soon call for his guards. But he said nothing. He allowed his teeth to worry his lips and his eyes to narrow.

She waited.

There was an imperceptible nod of the head and with it the scrap of a moment passed, taking the softness from the man’s face and replacing it with a rigid shield of flesh.

She shuddered and closed her eyes.

‘Mind your son, woman,’ she heard him say, stern of voice, ‘this is a great crowd and the city is large. You have come so far it would not do to lose him now!’ He drove his eyes down into hers to make the significance of his words more clear and turned away.

‘Let them through, Septimus!’ he called out over his shoulder.

The other man hesitated.

There was a look full of danger in that young man’s eye. He let loose a seductive whisper between them, ‘See these hands, Jewess?’ he showed them to her, ‘These were bloodied from killing all the children of your township…one by one I cut their little throats and stacked their pitiful Jew bodies in piles and milked the blood from their veins for your mad king to drink…what do you think of that?’ He watched her, waiting for a response. When none came, he made a cold, perilous laugh at the back of his throat. ‘You were clever to have saved him, I’ll give you that! But you can’t change his fate,’ he leaned in, so that she could smell his wine-sour breath. ‘Fate is a hard mistress, Jewess…she always comes to take her earnings, believe me, and when she does…’ he smiled, ‘I hope I am there to see it!’

Mariam kept her eyes steady on his and her face calm. Meanwhile, the line of pilgrims swelled behind her and the people complained so that the soldier, now drawn from his reverie, was made to shift an eye to the hordes. He straightened and a look of frustration passed over his face for the menial task that had no end, and with a wave of a hand dismissed her and shouted to a place behind her,

‘Next!’





9


THE KISS




It was in the Temple that what had begun three days before came to fruition. Before that there had been three days of endless marches and toiling over rough roads. All around him there had been the constant noise from prayers and songs and psalms, the ever-movement of the people onwards, the laughter of the children and their games and his mother’s concern in his ear.

In the night, dreams shadowed his soul. He had seen an abyss, a dark, fiery furnace molten hot in which he glimpsed many things of darkness, dreadful to behold, waiting to ensnare him. On a far shore stood his friend Jesus, adorned in light, with his heart-face radiating love. In the dream he had gestured for Yeshua to cast into the abyss all his hard-won treasures but Yeshua’s heart had been weighed down with sorrow for the loss.

His friend’s voice had told him, ‘Remember, we are brothers, Yeshua. All that you lose will one day return to you and all that dies will live again through me.’