We could clearly see the murderer’s face in the moonlight. Maggie gasped, “Jeremiah.”
His eyes went wide, with fear or recognition, I don’t know which. He released Joshua and made as if to grab Maggie. I pulled her away.
“Mary?” The anger had left his voice. “Little Mary?”
Maggie said nothing, but I could feel her shoulders heave as she began to sob.
“Tell no one of this,” the murderer said, now talking as if he were in a trance. He backed away and stood beside the dead soldier. “No master but God,” he said, then he turned and ran into the night.
Joshua put his hand on Maggie’s head and she immediately stopped crying.
“Jeremiah is my father’s brother,” she said.
Before I go on you should know about the Sicarii, and to know about them, you have to know about the Herods. So here you go.
About the time that Joshua and I were meeting for the first time, King Herod the Great died after ruling Israel (under the Romans) for over forty years. It was, in fact, the death of Herod that prompted Joseph to bring his family back to Nazareth from Egypt, but that’s another story. Now you need to know about Herod.
Herod wasn’t called “the Great” because he was a beloved ruler. Herod the Great, was, in fact, a fat, paranoid, pox-ridden tyrant who murdered thousands of Jews, including his own wife and many of his sons. Herod was called “the Great” because he built things. Amazing things: fortresses, palaces, theaters, harbors—a whole city, Caesarea, modeled on the Roman ideal of what a city should be. The one thing he did for the Jewish people, who hated him, was to rebuild the Temple of Solomon on Mount Moriah, the center of our faith. When H. the G. died, Rome divided his kingdom among three of his sons, Archelaus, Herod Philip, and Herod Antipas. It was Antipas who ultimately passed sentence on John the Baptist and gave Joshua over to Pilate. Antipas, you sniveling fuckstick (if only we’d had the word back then). It was Antipas whose toady pandering to the Romans caused bands of Jewish rebels to rise up in the hills by the hundreds. The Romans called all of these rebels Zealots, as if they were all united in method as well as cause, but, in fact, they were as fragmented as Jews of the villages. One of the bands that rose in Galilee called themselves the Sicarii. They showed their disapproval of Roman rule by the assassination of Roman soldiers and officials. Although certainly not the largest group of Zealots by number, they were the most conspicuous by their actions. No one knew where they came from, and no one knew where they went to after they killed, but every time they struck, the Romans did their best to make our lives hell to get us to give the killers up. And when the Romans caught a Zealot, they didn’t just crucify the leader of the band, they crucified the whole band, their families, and anyone suspected of helping them. More than once we saw the road out of Sepphoris lined with crosses and corpses. My people.
We ran through the sleeping city, stopping only after we had passed through the Venus Gate, where we fell in a heap on the ground, gasping.
“We have to take Maggie home and get back here for work,” Joshua said.
“You can stay here,” Maggie said. “I can go by myself.”
“No, we have to go.” Joshua held his arms out to his sides and we saw the bloody handprints the killer had left on his shirt. “I have to clean this before someone sees it.”
“Can’t you just make it go away?” Maggie asked. “It’s just a stain. I’d think the Messiah could get a stain out.”
“Be nice,” I said. “He’s not that good at Messiah stuff yet. It was your uncle, after all…”
Maggie jumped to her feet. “You were the one who wanted to do this stupid thing…”
“Stop!” Joshua said, holding his hand up as if he were sprinkling us with silence. “If Maggie hadn’t been with us, we might be dead now. We may still not be safe when the Sicarii realize that three witnesses live.”
An hour later Maggie was home safe and Joshua emerged from the ritual bath outside the synagogue, his clothes soaked and rivulets running out of his hair. (Many of us had these mikvehs outside of our homes—and there were hundreds outside the Temple in Jerusalem—stone pits with steps leading down both sides into the water so one might walk in over one’s head on one side, then out on the other after the ritual cleansing was done. According to the Law, any contact with blood called for a cleansing. Joshua thought it would be a good opportunity to scrub the stain out of his shirt as well.)
“Cold.” Joshua was shivering and hopping from foot to foot as if on hot coals. “Very cold.”
(There was a small stone hut built over the baths so they never got the direct light of the sun, consequently they never warmed up. Evaporation in the dry Galilee air chilled the water even more.)
“Maybe you should come to my house. My mother will have a breakfast fire going by now, you can warm yourself.”
He wrung out the tail of his shirt and water cascaded down his legs. “And how would I explain this?”
“Uh, you sinned, had an emergency cleansing to do.”
“Sinned? At dawn? What sin could I have done before dawn?”
“Sin of Onan?” I said.
Joshua’s eyes went wide. “Have you committed the sin of Onan?”
“No, but I’m looking forward to it.”
“I can’t tell your mother that I’ve committed the sin of Onan. I haven’t.”
“You could if you’re fast.”
“I’ll suffer the cold,” Joshua said.
The good old sin of Onan. That brings back memories.
The sin of Onan. Spilling the old seed on the ground. Cuffing the camel. Dusting the donkey. Flogging the Pharisee. Onanism, a sin that requires hundreds of hours of practice to get right, or at least that’s what I told myself. God slew Onan for spilling his seed on the ground (Onan’s seed, not God’s. God’s seed turned out to be my best pal. Imagine the trouble you’d be in if you actually spilled God’s seed. Try explaining that). According to the Law, if you had any contact with “nocturnal emissions” (which are not what come out of your tailpipe at night—we didn’t have cars then), you had to purify yourself by baptism and you weren’t allowed to be around people until the next day. Around the age of thirteen I spent a lot of time in and out of our mikveh, but I fudged on the solitary part of penance. I mean, it’s not like that was going to help the problem.
Many a morning I was still dripping and shivering from the bath when I met Joshua to go to work.
“Spilled your seed upon the ground again?” he’d ask.
“Yep.”
“You’re unclean, you know?”
“Yeah, I’m getting all wrinkly from purifying myself.”
“You could stop.”
“I tried. I think I’m being vexed by a demon.”
“I could try to heal you.”
“No way, Josh, I’m having enough trouble with laying on of my own hands.”
“You don’t want me to cast out your demon?”
“I thought I’d try to exhaust him first.”
“I could tell the scribes and they would have you stoned.” (Always trying to be helpful, Josh was.)
“That would probably work, but it is written that ‘when the oil of the lamp is used up, the wanker shall light his own way to salvation.’”
“That is not written.”
“It is too. In, uh, Isaiah.”
“Is not.”
“You need to study your Prophets, Josh. How are you going to be the Messiah if you don’t know your Prophets?”
Joshua hung his head. “You are right, of course.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll have time to learn the Prophets. Let’s cut through the square and see if there are any girls gathering water.”