The Majesty of Judas (The Book of Lily)

by P. Julian

 

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Copyright © 2023 P. Julian

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ISBN: 9798371850331

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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.​

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The Majesty of Judas (The Book of Lily) - Full Text Section 3

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BOOK 9 - TO THE GARDEN

 

117. Early in the morning I feel Him stir. The girl who comes to rouse Him is shy and barely whispers at Him but she leaves us both awake. He lies still for a little while and I lie there with Him, hearing Him collect his thoughts quietly in the early darkness. I would love to lie with Him for longer into the morning but after a few moments He leaps to His feet and pulls on His outer clothing. He is very fleet and once He is on His feet things happen very quickly. I barely keep up with Him as I pull on my cloak. He looks at me with some surprise but He is so taken up with what must happen today that He cannot stop to wonder why I have spent the night sleeping at His feet.

 

118. We emerge from the caves to find the morning clear and fresh. My beloved goes around rousing His men, He wakes the nearest first and they rush around waking everybody else. He waits for them to assemble around Him before announcing that they are heading out early and all of them together. They nod in assent like they always do. Then as they look at Him He smiles and says: I may have done something to my hair. He pulls back His hood and they see what has happened, they are shocked at this transformation and they stare at Him aghast. He preens and adopts a couple of heroic poses and they gradually begin to laugh along with Him, they reach out to rough up His hair and they call Him by His brother's name. The tension of the moment breaks but the clever ones retain a wary look in their eyes. They know something strange is emerging and that we are going out to meet it.

 

119. We tumble out of camp and down into the valley below. As we walk the men joke and laugh and my beloved seems uplifted by their mood. We move quickly over the open ground, hugging the valleys and the northern side of the hills, passing field workers and shepherds and farmers burdened with produce on their way to market. I have not walked this way before but the closer we get to our destination the more it seems overlaid with significance, like I am moving just ahead of events as they unfold behind me, leaving behind familiar scenes that play out slightly differently every time they occur. But our purpose is the same and the contours are the same as we skirt the hills to avoid the morning sun, although this time the sun will barely have risen before we reach our destination.

 

120. As we walk I see familiar forms appearing out of the landscape. Their shapes twined around the outline of trees, or as faces emerging from the shape of rocky outcrops. They seem inert because their thoughts are so slow but they watch over our journey and hint at directions we should take, thwarting anything malevolent that might come after us. I see them often enough but never so clearly as today, in clumps of dense foliage, in the way the wind diverts down one side of a grassy field as they lie down on the other. They watch over the young particularly and every tradition says so, these protective spirits who are not omnipotent although they do have grave power. They record all deeds especially the harming of the innocent, they open their ledgers in that transitional space which surrounds the land of the living.

 

121. When we reach the Garden He tells His men that we will stay here for the day. It is still early but He tells them to rest in the shade and get some sleep if they can, or to retreat to the nearby grotto if the day becomes too hot. He says something about why He has brought them to this place and for once His men begin to openly dissent. They do not understand why His brother deserves protection, they see the danger it puts Him in and they beg Him to reconsider. But after some frank words the men see He is resolute and they agree to abide by His plan. They confirm their allegiance to Him and my beloved takes courage from it, saying: It is only for one day. I will not need your faith in me for any longer than that.

 

122. He leads me out of the Garden and up the near hill. I have no trouble keeping up with Him but He still looks back and smiles at me every so often. We climb towards the summit of the hill and sunshine begins to pour over us, although He keeps His hood pulled firmly over His head. We arrive at what looks to be a graveyard and from the way He stills and steels himself I know this must be the place. He gives me brief instructions and I stand in the shade while He goes out amongst the graves and grave-markers that are now standing in the full sun. He walks out into the bright sunshine and throws off His cloak, I see Him kneel and bend His head and extend His hands palm upwards but nothing else happens for a long time.

 

123. Just as I am about to look away I see a slight fluorescence grow around Him. I see Power drawn down into Him, and I realise that He means to expend this Power and all of His residual strength to draw down the sight They have turned towards His brother. He begins to flare and shimmer in the sun and my view of Him becomes obscure, but with my inward vision I see how He engages Them and it is an ugly thing to witness. He flings insults and threats and accusations out in every possible direction, these are not the beautiful words that His brother speaks but He harbours much more powerful words. I retreat into the far shade and I try to close off my sight. I feel like a spectator trapped in some gruesome arena where the bloodshed has turned general and the slaughter has become too much. 

 

124. As He burns and postures in the sun I see exactly why She had me cut His hair. Why She has defiled Him by sending Him out amongst these graves. If He had retained His former strength He might have wrenched down their palaces with His bare hands. He could have devastated the Romans almost without exertion and that would just be the beginning. I see His soul bloating outwards to the point where He exercises His strength for the sport of it, I see Him kill His brother and take Her as His slave and enslave every one of Her kind. Out of His vast Love awakened too early and crushing everything in its embrace, turning Her slave revolt towards a Slave Religion that would never let the world from its thrall.

 

125. What fragments of His strength do remain are eventually exhausted. When He walks back to share the shade with me a few times during the day it hurts to see Him so diminished. He cannot eat but He does take a little water before He heads back out amongst the graves. Each time He kneels I see more stutters in His strength, I see Him more and more laid low but He succeeds in diverting their attention. The sun makes its way down towards the western horizon and as the light slants past a certain point He collapses forward on to the ground and I know that He is done. I steal out of the lengthening shade towards Him and He sees me come, and as I help Him up He sighs and manages to laugh gently and say: it is finished. Thank you for staying with me. We should go back and tell the others the next part of the plan.

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126. I help Him stagger back down the slope until we are almost in view of His men. He does His best to stand upright and smile but none of them are fooled when we shamble back into the Garden. He takes a waterskin and the little bit of fruit they offer Him but He brings neither food nor water to His lips. He is sunburnt and half-crazed with the sun and none of them know what to do. As He tries to reassure them and say His farewells I move far enough away that I can't hear what they are saying, but I still see them hold their hands out to Him and plead against this madness. But after all of their cries and remonstrations, their warnings and their grief, I know in the end they will do exactly what He asks them to do.

 

127. The men gather their things and dole out their food and their silver, a portion to each of them equally and the same. They kiss Him on both cheeks and tenderly embrace Him and it is a tragic scene I am now called to witness. How loving and brave these young men are even to be parted from one another, with each one facing an unknown fate and possibly a fate worse than death. But as their farewells finalise I hear laughter somehow ringing out in the face of all of it. I see the young and the very young smile and shake their heads and resign themselves to what must now be done.

 

128. When His men have dispersed He lies down and groans in the early twilight. He has completely exhausted His strength and it is pitiful to see it, with His hair cut and His courage drained out by His brutal exertions in the sun. I come near Him and sit quietly and listen to Him think, I try to console Him with visions but I do not know how much He sees. I keep thinking how I might take Him and hide Him at least for another night. The darkness is not their domain and we could move quickly under the moonlight. But as soon as the sun rose we would be captured and taken, and if He drops from their vision they will immediately turn back towards the hunting of His brother.

 

129. Not every Roman is corrupt and this is His best chance. To deliver Himself to the proper authorities in the hope of some kind of a trial, securing days or even weeks for His brother to be hidden and protected. My beloved is not known to have broken any law and He might well be spared the worst of their punishments. He knows as well as I do that this is a faint hope, but even a few hours in captivity might make all the difference. And after His exertions in the sun, the fools that He has made of them, it would be better to be taken publicly than to be savaged in secret as soon as the sun rose.

 

 

BOOK 10 - IN PRAETORIUM

 

130. As we approached the gates of the Holy City I let go of His hand. He walked a few more steps as I fell behind and then He stopped to look back at me. I motioned for Him to go on which He was reluctant to do, He kept stopping to look back at me as I fell further behind. He was hurt by what I was doing but there was no way to explain that I needed to remain in His wake. That I had to sever our bodily connection so that when He was taken I would not be taken with Him. I was leaving Him in order to preserve us both for the coming ordeal, to help Him though the tribulation and the terror He was going out to meet.

 

131. I was surprised by the abilities I found within myself. I was able to withdraw almost completely from my being-in-the-world, which was already tenuous enough, and by stilling every particle of my body I became pale and ghostly and unseen. My beloved still felt me near Him but upon the minds of other people I made very little impression. The matter composing my body ceased to vibrate and everything passed through me and I was brought down into a state much closer to death than life. I could have passed directly into death had I wanted to, through the fissures in the world that opened all around me as my body stilled. But there would be no return if I were to enter that state and lose my connection with the living, and with the light of His heart that now seemed to be the only light left in the world.

 

132. When we arrived at the palace compound He demanded to be admitted. He gave them the name of His brother, claiming to be a servant of Rome who had been summoned there on urgent business. The guards were on high alert against any storming of the city and they told Him to move on, but He assured them that they should not let Him go without at least announcing Him to their masters. They asked Him for papers or formal proof of His business but He merely repeated His request to be announced. In the end they sent a refractory messenger back into the compound to announce Him, and it was not long before the inner parts of the Praetorium erupted with a mixture of triumph and fear. The elite guard were dispatched to where He stood, they took Him and bound His hands and dragged Him inwards through the merest crack in the palace gates.

 

133. She had given Him words to say to them, and although deception was not His element He made a brave show of it. Speaking in the stolen cadences that His brother would have used, mimicking his gestures and the way his eyes search his audience. He claimed to be one of them and in fact the greatest amongst them, He promised all of His secrets including the dwelling places of the Elect. And without comprehending His own words He promised that the witches would be theirs, that He would split their stealth wide open for their legions to hurry through. He called them night-hags and turnskins and the very worst kind of whore. He vowed that He would make Her pay for deceiving Him for so long and for deceiving His brother also. The Romans swelled against Him with an express desire to kill Him but He assured them that a few secrets stolen from His corpse would be nothing compared to what now ran within His living blood.

 

134. He had them running backwards and forwards in a flurry of indecision. They debated His words and what their meaning might be, the vindictive wanted to kill Him but others craved the secrets of His living flesh. Their seers clamoured to try Him, with some of them glancing in my direction as they cast bones and muttered and prayed. They plucked hairs out of His head and burned them to ash, they cut His fingernails and put a pumice stone to His feet. They burned and dissolved the results of every enquiry and they failed to learn anything. As the night wore on many lawyers and scribes arrived from the surrounding countryside, ruining their horses in speeding to the palace in their rush to interrogate Him. Some pronounced that He was not the One while others shouted to preserve Him, knowing what would be lost if they killed Him in error, and fearing what might befall them if what He said was true.

 

135. Eventually they came to a middle way and decided to examine His blood. He refused to let them take it and this activated their cruelty, they directed that He be flogged with lead-tipped leather thongs and that His brow be cut by thorns. He was bound to a pillar that His old strength might have brought down, but in His weakened state He could not prevent them from scourging Him or jamming a briar crown down upon His newly shorn head. They scraped up the blood from His various wounds and put it in their vessels, they subjected it to fire and admixture with quicksilver and they cast their spells around it. They were thorough to the point of tasting His blood but they did not have to exhaust every possibility before they broke in to the truth. They found no knowledge flowing within Him and they knew all His secrets were lies. 

 

136. This was His moment of disaster and triumph. His captors knew they had been tricked and that their real prize had escaped from their clutches, they guessed that His brother would now be days away and they gnashed their teeth at their stupidity. They cursed Him with terrible ferocity for having deprived them so easily, stealing this unique chance to destroy the Daughters of Levi. And the pathetic means of their deprivation: an escaped slave who had simply cut off His hair, an illiterate boy who had deceived them in this most momentous of things. In their impotence and rage all they could do was slander Him, and accuse Him, and make names for Him that would ring in infamy down throughout the ages.

 

137. They slander Him with every name that their cowardice can imagine. They call Him traitor, son of perdition, false friend, money-lover, the puppet and the liar and the One For Whom Hell Was Built. Calling Him false suitor, kiss of death, dealbreaker, grave robber, swindler, betrayer. Slandering Him even for the colour of His skin: the dark and the swarthy, the shady and squint-eyed, the Black Prince and the Black Son and the Black Sun. Every slur that could possibly be flung: unclaimant, false coiner, blood-libeller, Ruination by Silver, schemer, treacherous, lascivious, vow-breaker, Ration of Whores, the unsuckled and the unloved, the remorseful, the unforgiven. And so too have you said: blood-moneyed, Strange Fruit, rope-wearer, tree swinger, the broken open, the drawn and the quartered, the better unborn, false witness, breaker of hearts, God's Fool and the Prodigal Son.

 

138. But these names will be countered by the opposite claims of the faithful, who kneel before images of His suffering and call Him the Saviour of the World. They call Him Deliverer and Liberator and Harrower of Hell, they praise Him for the sacrifice He made at such terrible cost to Himself. I hear Him called Conqueror and the Risen Sun and the One True Light of the World, He is called Courageous, the Son King, the Great Hope and the Glory of the World. Some more closely instructed call Him the Lion of Judah, the Black Sun, the Unsung Hero and the Hidden Purpose of the World. And there are those receptive enough to call Him by His true names: Brave Judas Iscariot, the most slandered son of the world, the self-hanged God so viciously accused for the latter part of history.

 

139. They curse and rage against Him until they see it only wastes more time. He stands revealed as a mere proxy and nothing more than a shadow, while their true prey slips further away with every moment they waste. Just a few hours before my beloved entered into their palace as a future King, they crowned Him with thorns and now they deny Him even that mocking honour. Their magicians and seers wash their vessels thoroughly, their leaders wash their hands of Him and order Him taken from their sight. He is brought down to the lowest levels of the compound and flung like a dog into a cage, with the half-mad inhabitants jeering at Him as He is cast down before them, calling out Handsome Boy, Handsome Boy, this is what happens when you don't do what you're told.

 

140. They beat Him before and they cut His brow but that is nothing compared to what they do to Him now. They pick the most sadistic of their guards and these brutes know what to do. They drag Him around by what is left of His hair, they tie Him to a rack and they kick Him and spit on Him and drench Him with their urine, laughing all the while to see Him so degraded. They dole out as many lashes as His poor body can stand, they scourge Him until His skin hangs in strips from His body and they continue to slash at what muscle and bone their whips expose. They leave off beating Him only when He is nearly dead. They are instructed that this man is to hang and so they preserve His life for that purpose. He is so wretched and spent that there is no need to guard Him now, His cage will hold Him easily as the other inmates delight in humiliating Him in any further way that they can.

 

 

RUTH - Tenebrae

 

Now comes the agony of His long dark night. And the dismal places I go to seek Him some reprieve. Staking everything I have for Him to be torn back out of the world before His ultimate suffering comes, until my pores flow with blood and the sweat and the tears are drained out of me -

 

I know you have also begged for such relief, fighting every inducement to end your own life so you can avoid bearing witness -

 

Pray for Him on this night when He should have died of His wounds. Beg that He not be made so stubborn and so proud. Send tears back into the Maundy darkness where He somehow maintains His life -

 

And to every place I visit on my night-journey. Knocking and entreating like some crazed, mendicant priest. To end His life before the dawn ever begins, or to forbid dawn from coming back into the world when this ghastly night of Tenebrae finally reaches its end.

 

 

BOOK 11 - TELL THIS TO THE PEOPLE

 

141. You know how this story ends. If there is one thing that the future tells me it is that you have been told. My task is merely to rectify the detail, to say who suffered blows and who was hung. Out of His love for His twin brother and for the salvation of the world, out of His decency and courage and not any lust for silver.

 

142. The Romans proliferate their temples endlessly and carve this story on their walls, the profane glorification of the death of an innocent man. You have seen Him beaten, abject and bleeding and torn, you have seen Him mocked and pierced as they play dice for His clothes. You have seen the earlier parts played out too, seen Him stagger beneath the terrible weight of the cross they will use to murder Him. And every other story that is in fact the same story, the end of every Slave Revolt playing out like every other. Against the shameless face of their oppression: every earnest, loving, helpful young man, tortured and killed for the love they have within them.

 

143. One thing you have not been told is that I was there. I saw Him emerge into the cold light of day, I was there when they laid the timbers upon Him and He buckled under their weight. I walked beside Him like His shadow and witnessed them goad Him like a beast, to get up under His burden again and again and drag it towards Golgotha. Through all of it I was with Him, regardless of how much He would have wanted me to leave. I stayed with Him even though I could not look in His direction, because I knew that even in His extremity He would try to smile at me, and that one thing would have broken my heart and ended my life at the very moment He most needed me to stay with Him.

 

144. For the first time in my life I was not merely a witness. I stepped forward to find I was able to take His suffering upon myself, at times almost completely, and I moved forward gladly to embrace this new skill. Out of some route He had opened within me to take up the worst of His pain. I felt Him soften and exhale every time I took His pain on, He was reprieved every time I exchanged His old strength for His current agony. And He knew what I was doing, I feel sure of it. He tried to set limits on the pain I could uplift from Him because He did not want me to suffer, and this halting exchange between us continued all the way to the end. Every time His strength failed I was there to be His strength, and every time He used that strength to pull pain back out of me and upon himself again.

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145. His ordeal was long and bitter and I gave Him such comfort as I could. Spending all of the strength He had relinquished when He had me cut His hair. The sun flared very hot as noon passed overhead, and in His beaten state it began to wear Him down badly. I sent Him every bit of strength I had left but He slowly sank beneath my reach, and as the sun blazed overhead I found limits within myself that could not be surpassed while my soul remained in the world. He sank more and more helplessly against the timbers, He had lost so much blood and His eyes were blinded by blood and salt and dust and the glare of the sun. He gradually became mad with heat and thirst and as death stole towards Him I could not hold Him steady. He no longer knew where He was or what had happened to Him and He could not feel me with Him no matter how desperately I reached out.

 

146. This part of your Book of Heartbreak is true. As death called Him onwards He strove to remain in the world but He could no longer see me or feel me there kneeling at the foot of His cross. Amidst all of His suffering this was the most terrible thing, to think that I would rise and turn my back and walk away from Him. With His last few breaths I heard Him cry: Lily, Lily, why would you abandon me? Not out of anger but in puzzlement and heartbreak and I will testify that this is the worst part of this story. He wept for me forsaking Him even as I knelt there in tears, reaching out towards His soul to tell Him I was there. But your brutality had put Him beyond reach, He neither saw me nor heard me and I want you to know that this is the way this boy died: despised, rejected, brutalised, and abandoned by His only love.

 

147. He was so young. You call Him a man and He did the work of a man but in His skin and His bones He was hardly more than a boy. On that day He was the youngest hanging on the hill, with His face shaved and His hair cut back to reveal His youth and vulnerability. Dying for the love of His mother, the only mother He had ever known, who had divided Her love against Him and cast Him into heartbreak. And His image will be used to break the heart of every mother, to deny every son of her love and affection, because the best of our sons are doomed to die and so it is foolish to love them. This lesson intended to end all maternal affection, with the blood of the Son shed to satisfy His brutal and jealous Father.

 

148. When He died there was no thunder or lightning. The sky remained clear and the sun hot, although there were storm clouds massing above the hills to the East. I felt Him slacken and breathe out and He did not take another breath. In that moment I was afforded a sudden peace, allowing me to recover myself a little, I fell back from my efforts to comfort Him and began to sink into my grief. But as I softened I felt the approach of a strange swarming presence, rushing with the touch of many djinns as they began to swirl around His body. They came together in order to seize His soul and they whispered in triumph as they bore His soul away. And suddenly He was lost to me, taken far under worlds to a place where I could not reach Him, and from which His soul lacked even the slightest chance of redemption.

 

149. As my beloved was snatched away I felt my vision fracture. I saw the future infinitely overlaid upon the present facts of His death, I saw portraits of His suffering splay out in every direction throughout history. Every step of His broken feet, every breath His poor mouth struggled to take. They nail Him up millions and millions of times, His heart is always pierced and His brow so cut with thorns. They luxuriate in images of His torture and I cannot comprehend the heart of the Roman. Everything is violence and degradation, overlaid with a tyranny called peace, every road leads to cruelty and the astonishing luxuries they crave. Their empire which continuously prevails until the whole world is on its knees, His brother railed against the sins of Babylon but Babylon was nothing compared to the ultimate sickness of Rome.

 

150. There are some stranger things that the future also shows. Their artists restore His hair to Him because they can sense what it means, they boast that they took Him at the height of His powers and that they were never deceived. But I see the colours they invest Him with and I know why they do it. Why His skin is as light as my skin and His hair is the colour of a lion, why His beard is shot through with the gold of my hair and His eyes are pale like mine. These are not His colours but artists do not lie, they sense me merging with Him as I knelt at the foot of His cross, they depict our tenderness and connection and how I nursed His stolen strength. They show our twinned strength as it was poured out between us, they show our joint suffering but also the colours of our love.

 

151. The faithful bow and scrape but they fail to read the signs. Like the riddle posted above the cross on which He died, the four initials of two brave men painted in the language of the Romans. Asking of anyone who can read: is this Jesus of Nazareth, or is it the Majesty of Judas? Because this is the greatest pleasure of the ugly and corrupt, to dangle their misdeeds in front of you, knowing not a single person will interrogate these signs or ask themselves what they mean. They taunt the decent and the kind, they boast of their murderous exploits and force you to kneel down before them. But the sign-maker knows, the artist always knows, leaving all of it written down for the truth-teller when he comes, when their brazenness is uncovered as emptiness and the facts become plain to see.

 

152. So to anyone with understanding: go into their temples, the way His brother was brave enough to do. Interrogate their idols, that are only wood and iron and clay. Demand that they reveal the truth to you and it will be revealed. That would be enough, to preserve the dignity of His memory, but I would be lying if I told you this is all I want you to do. I want these temples desecrated the way they desecrated my beloved, and every other suffering servant it has been their pleasure to kill. But violence does not engender peace and so I will restrain myself to asking that these temples be shut down, and walked away from, that you shutter up every crucifix that lines their Appian Way. And that their priests be instructed that that these are not images of Love, even in the false story they tell, these are craven images of the destruction of love, the love of His men and also my love and all who are lost without Him.

 

 

BOOK 12 - FURY

 

153. When He was gone I slumped back on to my haunches and felt the life go out of me. There was no longer any need to be strong for Him because He was now beyond any help. I had been in a state of constant weeping but now He was gone my tears withdrew and I emptied out completely. I thought I would quickly follow Him into death but after a short while something surged inwardly to fill me back up, something akin to grief but much more intense and fitting, encompassing resentment and outrage and burning even hotter than these things. I began to quake from the inside out as this feeling overtook me, I became incandescent with it and for once in my life I allowed myself to burn.

 

154. This thing was called Fury. There is no other word to describe it. It was an insane urge for vengeance against everyone who had harmed Him, it burned with accusation against Her and His brother and every last servant of Rome. Fury burst within me and I raged against what they had destroyed, condemning the whole world that lusts for cruelty over kindness, accusing the present world but also the crazed worlds of the future where His suffering is feted and admired. I sought retribution for the destruction of my beloved and every other man who harboured such courage in His heart, for the violence the world promulgates and has the presumption to call Love.

 

155. Fury engulfs me and curses me in my turn. I was the one who cut off His power, it was my hand driving the blade. And even then I could have used His stolen strength to spirit us away, I spent the last of His power to console Him on the cross when I should never have allowed that to happen. I also hear Him accused: for His insistence on valour when sometimes it is better to hide, for His willingness to compensate for errors that were never His to resolve. But I cannot tolerate any slander of His memory and so I press my accusations against the ones who killed Him, He was innocent of everything except bravery and decency and I will not slander His name.

 

156. Fury seeks a way out and suddenly I see Her. Holding Her dead love in Her arms, comforted by a group of luminous women. He looks just like my beloved but death was gentle with him, there is a serene look on his face and no marks disfigure his body. The faithlessness of this transaction pierces me because my love was the innocent one. He died protecting His foolish brother who had dived so thoughtlessly into love. Without thinking or pausing I storm down the pathways She created when She looked so greedily within me. She feels me rush towards Her and then I burst into Her vision, Her Sisters cannot see me but they see Her stiffen and claw at the air because now I am the one gripping Her face in my hands, it is me staring into Her soul for my purposes alone.

 

157. She is appalled from the moment I grab Her face and Her horror only intensifies. She knows what She has done, there is no injustice in this, She has killed two innocent men and I am determined to show Her the horror of it. Every blow that He suffered, every time His flesh was torn, every drop of sweat and blood and heartbreak that poured out of His poor body. I ram words into Her soul that speak of this obscenity, in hushed tones but also in screams of pain and fear and humiliation. I show Her every detail of His death and how the world cried out against it because these were the Two who could have redeemed everything, if they had remained in Trinity with Her, they could have overcome the Romans as though they were wooden pieces on a board. If some patience had been shown, if some real love had prevailed in Her heart and not the avarice that has brought everything crashing down.

 

158. Finally I reflect Her own image back to Her. It is the first time She has ever seen Herself truly and She is completely horrified, to see Her arrogance and Her presumption and Her wild deep grief at the loss of Her mother. She goes to plead that loss but it only stokes my Fury. I lay out brutal images of my own mother and the manner of her death, I show Her my mother protecting me at the precise moment that I lost her. I match Her grief and I surpass it and I say to Her: this is no excuse for multiplying suffering as you have done. I rebuke Her as She rebuked others so often in my sight: how dare you think that your suffering is worth more than other people's. With what you have caused, how dare you plead your grief against what all of us must grieve?

 

159. I hold Her face in my hands for a very long time. Long enough to feel Her consciousness fracture and Her vision fail. I continue to accuse Her until She is completely overcome, then one hand at a time I let go of Her face, withdrawing out of that shared vision space and coming back to my own senses. As I do that my Fury breaks and finally I can feel some pity, for the burden of Her shame and how young She really is. There is no doubt that She genuinely loved them both, although Her favours turned unequal, I see that same love condemning Her even though She cannot actually die of grief. She sinks like a widowed queen under the weight of Her shame, and although Her Sisters try to soothe Her there is nothing to be done for Her.

 

160. My Fury continues to break until I am left with nothing but pity. For all of us marooned here in this transitory kingdom, for everyone yet to enter this world of denial and pain. I feel a mad wish to follow my beloved and seek Him under worlds, but there is work that will keep me here and I know it is crucial work. If I had the slightest choice about it I would follow Him wherever He went, hoping to retrieve His soul, but worlds do not work that way and even if I died I would not find my way to Him. I am condemned to linger here to pick up the pieces of whatever has not been lost, to gather any fragment of the People that has not been scattered to the winds.

 

161. Before I go I pause long enough to touch His feet. He would never ask anyone to wash His feet but I wipe them of the blood and the bloody grime left from His ordeal. His face is bowed but I can close my eyes and see Him as He once was beneath me, rather than dead and stiffening and hung as a warning to all. I see Him close to me and warm once again as I bend down to kiss him and these are visions I will never surrender. He will not hang lifeless in my dreams. He will come to me full of warmth and love and He will sigh as He did in those moments I was given to hold Him. Rising up towards the kisses of my mouth that I gave to Him so freely, kisses I wish that I had multiplied now that He slumps above me and is gone.

 

162. I press my lips to His feet and then I turn away, walking back down the hill with Rome's brutal carnage around me. I know that my suffering is not unique. So many other women have suffered the way that I do, and this particular brand of suffering brutalises every one of us. Restraining the endless streams of love that should be flooding into the world, turning hearts towards hostility and dragging us into contempt. This landscape of horror that joins infinitely with horror from the past and the future. We call it history but only so we retain the strength to bear it. With the human heart thwarted at every turn, until something breaks and we break through or we are broken down completely and this cruel world ends, as it is bound to do, one way or the other.

 

 

BOOK 13 - COMFORT THE PEOPLE

 

163. For days after He was killed I wandered around the city. Not recalling quite where I wandered or where I slept. I had some vague idea that I should find His men, but He had told them to disperse and they did that very well. I did not care whether I was captured by the Watchmen of the City, and my carelessness for whether I lived or died rendered me even more spectral and grey and transparent to the people who passed me by. Not a single living being noticed me or challenged me or even really encountered me at all.

 

164. As I wandered I passed by the place where He was crucified. I might have passed it more than once but not once did I look for His body. My grief had turned my soul very dull and to my dulled senses His death seemed no more tragic than the death of any other man. If I had retained some of His strength I might have gone looking for those responsible, but how would I distinguish them? This is the invulnerability of Empire: you do not know who to fight or who to kill even if you have the strength to do it. And I was never born to bear arms. I was brought into the world to bear witness, armed only with the forlorn hope that life might lose the power to keep me in the world, and that I might be released into death sooner rather than later.

 

165. Days of wandering eased my grief just enough to bring me back to my senses. I found myself hungry and thirsty in a dry wash outside the limits of the city. I began to walk towards the head of the valley, exploring a few shaded gullies and digging down into the sand. Eventually I found a soak of sweet water at the terminus of a narrow ravine. I tasted the water dubiously at first and then I took huge draughts of the cool water that I let pool in my hands. I also washed myself the best I could, the sweet water flowing over my arms and face and neck as some of the dust was washed away. As I washed and my thirst abated I felt a bit of life come back into me, and it continued to flow as I knelt down by the spring and wiped the tear-tracks from my face and wondered what I should do.

 

166. The only thing I could think of doing was to return to the caves. As dangerous as it might be I knew it had to be done. I rested for a while and then I began to walk the long way around, keeping watch for any spies, approaching the caves from the safety of the opposite ridge. As I walked up through waste ground and sparse oak forest I was tempted to turn back but I knew I had to continue. The People may have scattered but there may be some who remained, and if there were remnants they would be the youngest and most frightened of the children. He would have wanted me to gather them up, I felt certain of it, and bring them to safety if a safe place could be found. I trod the dusty path up to the crest of the ridge and I was surprised at how equably I could remember Him, thinking of His wishes without grief or horror, thinking of His care for the People that was always the best part of Him.

 

167. When I came within view of the cave entrance it was getting late in the day. I lay flat against the ridge to silhouette any sign of movement. A long time passed but in the softening afternoon sun there was no movement at all. No equipment, no refuse, no sentries. The caves seemed completely abandoned but still I kept watch until the valley and both ridges sank into shadow. Eventually I got to my feet and started to creep down the near slope towards the opposite bank. As I reached and then crossed the valley floor the caves seemed so deserted that I wondered whether I might have returned to the wrong place. But the ground outside the caverns was perfectly familiar, as was the main entrance, although when I put my head inside the caves there was absolutely nothing to see.

 

168. It was only when I pushed deeper into the caves that I encountered the few remaining People. They called for me to stop in tremulous voices and I saw them standing against me in the gloom, holding out sticks and cooking knives and shaking as they did so. They were willing to fight but these were the smallest and most malnourished of the children. They were brave but they showed how doomed Her dreams of a Slave Army really were. I walked gently towards them with my head bowed and I removed my veil. After a moment of hesitation they recognised me by my hair, and they dropped their crude weapons and ran across the cave to embrace me.

 

169. Their story was bleak. Most of the People had scattered once it became clear that some disaster had happened. They fled in twos and threes and did not stop to consider the others. They sensed that She was gone and that Her power to protect them was withdrawn, they had seen Him gather up His men and they knew He would not return. Most shocking of all was the condition His brother was in before he fled with Her out of the caves, his look of terror in the face of imminent death that all of us know too well. The older ones fled but the youngest children know nothing but obedience to Her. They stay in these caves because She put them there and nobody can countermand Her order. They remember the bright power She commanded on Her wedding night, they believe She might yet return to lead them if they only have the faithfulness to wait. 

 

170. The children seek hope but I have a duty to show them the truth of what has happened. I pull the oldest one gently towards me, bringing our faces together, and although she has no skill in looking into me she gradually starts to see. I show her oblique images of the disaster and she begins to moan, saying no no no, and as she continues to look this is the only word she can utter. The others begin to tremble and they join in with her moaning because they recognise the sound of death when they hear it, they know our dream has ended in disaster and they cannot restrain their grief.

 

171. My visions escape my control and they begin to play out in vivid stations across the walls of the cave. We see the wicked find His brother and drag his corpse out of his tomb, and how their magicians manage to reanimate him just long enough for his blood to flow again. Death left his body terribly degraded but some of his secrets remain, they drain out what is left of them and they drink his blood for its secrets. They also tear at his flesh, that has been decomposing for days, and these vile acts will be commemorated for the whole of the rest of history. Their Blood Magic shows them enough to consolidate their hold over the world. It is not the absolute victory that would have flowed from his living blood but the Romans triumph all the same.

 

172. They profit by his blood but it is the Word that gives them their power. We are shown endless scenes of them preaching his Words of Love to their sighing slaves, they practice oppression under cover of these words and their slaves sigh all the more. The corrupted Word lulls every victim into passivity and their empire becomes spiritual, they steal the love out of their victims and they make them bow down as they do it. Raising up images of death and brutality in front of them, securing their complete surrender without a single drawn sword.

 

173. But the Word is vast, as are the places where it is spoken, and finding no other place in this world it comes suddenly back into me. My stilled tongue is loosened and I hear words spilling out from within me, announcing that I am no longer the Sealed Prophet it was ordained for me to be. Those seals are broken and I am commanded to testify by the Word that has been revealed to me, to set down a True Testament to His courage and His sacrifice, shoring it against their lies until I am no longer resident in my body. Lines that will identify me when He storms back into the world, and remind me of Him in those many lifetimes when He does not appear. But I am mostly commanded to set down words to be signposts upon the path, some comfort to the weary traveller who yet presses on alone.

 

174. My first act of leadership is to cast off the name She gave me. I tell the children that I am now bound to this soil because of the blood that was shed here, I say that Ruth no longer fits me as a name if it ever did. I tell them the name my mother gave me, translated from my mother's tongue, and I say that from now on amongst the People I will be known as Shoshana. I ask them to repeat my new name and each time it gets louder in their mouths: Shoshana, Shoshana. I tell them they are also free to select new names for themselves, and in fact it is fitting that they do so, because their names were given to them in an exercise of power and they still have the flavour of slave names. I see one slight boy practicing the name of my beloved on his lips, he seems like a brave boy and he would be blessed to live under the aegis of that name. As I am blessed to remain amongst the People, with a voice within me calling them the Shoshannim, knowing that my work is to tend to them and nurture them even if I cannot do it alone.

 

175. Our next aim will be to locate Peter. And as many of His men as we can find. My beloved said as much that day in the Garden and I know how crucial it is. There are truths scattered amongst their books of lies and this is one bedrock truth: that everything depends upon us coming together, that we must join together and look after one other and hold all of our things in common. And to spread throughout the world what was always the best aspect of the People. I see vague scenes where we drift northwards until we come to quieter places, places where the Romans have become sedentary and might allow us to live in safety. This close to the Holy City everything is violence and madness, from their commerce and their unrepentant bargaining in souls, from their Gods who demand burnt offerings and who lust to humiliate and enslave.

 

176. The children have not been sleeping, and when the excitement of my arrival subsides they fall into sudden sleep. Wrapping their grimy cloaks around themselves, closing their eyes to the world. I am left wakeful with them scattered all around me on the floor of the cave, still thinking how I might contact His men or move us to safety until we find them. I think of reaching out to Her but Her presence is now completely gone out of these caves. She sinks back out of the world so completely that there is no longer any way for me to reach Her. When I shook off the name She gave me I broke the last connection between us, and in the absence of Her dominant light I feel my own radiance swelling gently to fill the caves, a softer and more golden light shining without need of dominion. For what good is it to liberate a slave only to bend them to your will?

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177. I pray that I will be able to sleep tonight. It has been so long since I had any proper rest. The darkness brings its own fears but for the moment I am too tired to worry about that. My visions can't be interpreted when I am this short of sleep and it is a relief to see nothing except what is laid out in front of me. I have a mat to sleep on, with my veil rolled as a pillow. I have water and a little bread and that will do for now. There is the lamp I will trim and the darkness I will welcome in. I might say a formal prayer that I be granted restful sleep, and for protection to come down over us for this our last night in these caves. I pray to be given sleep without visions of the past or the future, I ask for one night that my sleep not be troubled by dreams.

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