Temple Boys (24 page)

“What is it?” Tesha whispered. A dusty carpet lay in the middle of the floor, with mats arranged around it as if the room was waiting for people to walk in. But there was more: a jolt of familiarity.

“It's like I know this place but don't know it. I can't explain.”

“We're all from here,” Tesha said. “Didn't you know?”

“What?”

“I thought everyone knew. All the beggars our age … their parents … you know … the massacre,” Tesha said. “Don't you talk to anyone?”

“I…”

“Like I said … Flea. Don't go all funny on me now. Flea. Flea!”

But Flea could not hear. The house he was looking at seemed to expand, then become so thin and gauzy that he could see through it and into another room just like it, with a window on the street and a courtyard to the side.

Shy memories slid up. He remembered pressing his eyes to the gap in the courtyard gate and peering up and down the narrow street to watch men and women, donkeys, and even the odd camel pass by. The crack in the wall across the alleyway always scared him. There was a time in the evening when the bats began to swoop like charred leaves on the breeze and someone would come up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

He looked up and down, half expecting to see the same animals and families. Of course. These were the Dead Streets. This was where the Imps had massacred every man, woman, and child. This was where he had run from. But, more important, this was where he had come from.

The memories grew bolder. They were insistent. Relentless. They swarmed. An earth yard where chickens scratched in the dirt, a dark room where water stood in cool, earthenware jars. Sleeping on a mat next to his parents, his mother singing, a ball of rags he could throw and catch.

But something else was trying to break through—a fist behind a sheet. He tried to shut his memory down but it was too late. He saw the door exploding inward and then the room was full of men and their metal. Metal helmets, metal breastplates, metal swords. One sword in particular was shining as it fell but red when it rose, and then he was falling and when he stopped he was on a street and all around was quiet. He saw people and bits of people lying in the street. There was a lump on the side of his head and a hollow ache in his heart, an emptiness that multiplied in empty doorways and dark windows. No faces looking out. They were all looking up at the sky or down at the ground and their eyes were blank.

Flea had had enough. He began running to escape a pain that was more than hollow; it was the pain of missing whatever had filled the void. First in one direction then another, until the running started to hurt, which was better than the other kind of pain. So he ran more and more—and the only thing that stopped him was when a hand grabbed him by the collar.

 

50

The hand was not a memory.
The hand was real and big and meaty. And he was not the little child about to be set to work in the glue factory; this was Flea, who'd survived all that and a whole lot more.

He twisted and tried to bite, but the hand lifted him effortlessly and he hung in the air, jerking and twisting like a fish on the line.

“Gotcha!”

Flea managed to twist around and found himself face-to-face with Tauma. He was as thick as a barrel and held Flea easily. There was no sign of Tesha, which was good.

Tauma said, “Call me suspicious and nasty if you want, but I've seen rather too much of you lately. What are you doing here?” He pretended to examine him.

Flea, suspended, missed with his kick. “It doesn't matter what I'm doing. What about you? Skulking here while half the city's after you,” he spat.

Tauma seemed unimpressed. “Which half?” he said. “The half that's too scared to come here or the half that doesn't care?”

“The half that wants you kicked out and sent back to Gilgal where you belong!”

Tauma grinned unkindly and Flea lost it. “Murdering pig! Liar! Coward! You killed your own precious leader, you killed Jude, and now you're going to die, because no one's going to let you get way with any of this! Don't pretend you don't know. You had him killed. He was standing between you and your prophecy. But you can't kill me. If you kill me, everyone will know.”

Tauma's grin died. His eyes went as dead as dust. He tightened his grip and pulled him so close Flea could smell raw onion on his breath.

Shim bustled into the room. “What's all this shouting?” He caught sight of Flea and his mouth flattened into a red slot. “You.”

“Hoping for someone else?” Flea spat. “Someone you haven't seen for a while? Last time I saw you, you were too scared to admit you even knew your own leader! Or is that just part of the prophecy?
You
betrayed him, not Jude.”

“How much does he know?” Shim asked Tauma.

“Your guess is as good as mine. He says we killed Jude.”

“Jude's dead?”

“Apparently. How—?”

Shim waved his words away. “We can't let that distract us now. We have to keep on track. He doesn't understand. The secret is still safe. But we do have to work out what to do with him.”

“I know all about your precious secret and I know you were wrong,” yelled Flea triumphantly. “Yesh is dead. Nothing happened. You're finished. There's nothing left for you to do, unless you want to hand me over to the Romans to be crucified!”

Shim slapped him hard across the face. Flea blinked back stars and tasted blood in his mouth.

“How dare you? Tauma, how dare he?”

Flea spat blood. Tauma looked at him and shook his head sadly. “Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. See, I'm thick-skinned. I don't care what you say, but Shim's sensitive. You're in trouble now. Come on.”

The other followers were all sitting in the back room that opened up onto a small yard. The air was close with the smell of bodies. In the yard broken pots lay scattered in yellowed weeds.

“The return of the prodigal flea,” Tauma said, pushing Flea into the room. He stood, surrounded by the followers, all sitting with their backs against the walls.

No one spoke at first. Worry had roughened them all. Yohan's dreamy eyes were bloodshot. Mat's face had sunk and his hair was standing up in a spiked halo.

“What's he doing here?” he snapped.

“Jude's dead. He thinks we killed him, so I imagine he's come looking for us to wreak revenge. There was another kid with him but it got away,” Tauma said.

“And she's going to tell the Temple where you are if anything happens to me,” Flea added.

“Good planning,” Tauma said. “If they believe a word she says.”

“Of course they will. And now that your prophecy's failed, you can admit to what you did,” Flea snarled.

“Those two statements will take a lot of untangling,” Mat said.

Flea was having none of it. “You arranged to have Yesh killed. Then you arranged to have Jude killed, too, for getting in your way.”

Mat nodded. “So that's the second half of the statement covered. Now for the first half. You said the prophecy had failed. How do you know this?”

“Because Yesh is dead. I saw him die, unlike you bunch of cowards. If he's dead, he can't be the Chosen One. If he can't be the Chosen One, you can't change the world. It's so simple a child could see it.”

“Or something so simple only a child could be stupid enough to think it. But do you really think we're that stupid? The Chosen One is betrayed, dies, and then comes back to life. Praise be!”

“He didn't. I was there.”

“Child, he comes back to life after three days.”

“What?”

“It takes three days for the power to gather. That is the prophecy.”

Flea looked around the room and saw that the faces of the followers weren't defeated. They were tense, as if they were waiting. His confidence collapsed like an empty anthill.

“How…” Flea began but he didn't know what more to say.
How?
seemed to sum up how he was feeling right then. How will this happen? How will you know? How can you have the patience? “But that's tomorrow.”

“Indeed. Do you know the story of Jonah and the whale?” Mat asked. “For three days he lay in its belly before he was released onto the shore alive.”

“That's just a story,” Flea said faintly.

“Be ready for the third day. That's from Moshe's Book of the Leaving. And later it says, ‘Let them be ready for the third day.' In the Book of the Kings, we read: ‘On the third day, you shall go to the house of the Lord.' And in our Holy Book of the Beginning: ‘On the third day, Joseph said, do this and you will live.' Yeshua our Lord will lie in his grave for three days as a dead man and on the third he will reanimate. He will revive. He will come back to life. He will rise again.”

“Praise be! Praise be! Praise be!”

“It's just words!” Flea said. “He can't!”

Mat nearly smiled. “In all the long days we were traveling to the city our Lord tried to convince us with words, but we were weak and blind, like you. We did not have faith. And then, just a day's walk away we saw it with our own eyes. In Bethany.”

“What happened there?” Flea's voice was a whisper. Now he remembered about Bethany. He had heard Shim and Jude mention it on the night of the supper in Yusuf's house. And Jude had been appalled by something that happened there …

“We walked from Gilgal,” Mat said. “We knew we would be in for a hard time when we reached the city, so we wanted a place to rest close by, to gather our thoughts and strength. Are you listening? The place we normally stayed was in the house of a friend, Eleazar. Laz, we called him. But when we reached his house, we found it in mourning. Eleazar had died and was three days in his grave.” He paused. “Our Lord brought him back to life.”

“No.”

“Yes. Yeshua broke his tomb open and walked inside. No one would follow. The stench … Anyway, an hour later he walked out, with Eleazar by his side.”

Flea put his fingers in his ears and shouted, “Wordswordswordswords.”

Tauma grabbed Flea's hands, pulled them away, and said, “Listen! Jude always said you were clever and Yeshua agreed with him. He said that if we could convince Flea, we could convince the world.”

Mat made a face, then said: “Call him forth, Yohan. Bring Eleazar to Flea so he can witness the miracle. The dead can walk. The dead can live!”

Tauma held Flea again. Yohan left the room and walked across the little courtyard to a shed on the far side. He knocked on the door and stood back. Flea's mouth went dry as the door opened. A pause, then very slowly a man stepped into the early evening. His skin was the color of sour milk and his eyes had sunk back into his head. He took a step into the sunlight and winced. In the room, the followers winced too. Flea felt the hairs on the back of his neck lift and fought the scream rising in his tightening throat. The man stepped back into the shadows.

“Eleazar was dead and is now alive,” Mat chanted. “He grows stronger every day. It can happen. Yeshua is the Chosen One. Since the world began and the stars began to move around the heavens and Adam first met Eve it has been waiting for this moment. A new world is coming. All will be unmade and then remade and the dawn will be the light of our Lord!”

“No,” Flea said. “No.”

“Do you understand now, Flea? We did not have to kill Jude. His life and his death were foretold from the moment he was born, and so shall we all die to be reborn in the new world! Nothing can change the prophecy! The day is coming! The time is coming! The end of time and the end of days!”

His words were echoed around the room.

“Praise be! Praise be! Praise be!”

“Tell the city. Tell the people. Tell the world. Spread the word!”

Tauma led Flea out of the room. “Do you hear that, sonny?” he said. “It means Mat's decided that we're letting you go. It's what Yesh would have wanted. We'll all be standing in front of him tomorrow, giving a full account of our actions.”

“Do you really believe that?” Flea asked.

For a second Tauma's face went blank, then he smiled. “I suppose you could call me a seeing-is-believing sort of man, but in the end it doesn't matter what I think, does it? What will be, will be. And no one will be happier than me to see Yesh again. Walking. Talking.”

“Killing Romans?”

“It won't be like that. It'll be different. It'll be a change.”

“But what can I do?”

“Between now and then? Try to put right anything you did wrong, and tell the world the news.”

“About what? About Jude?”

“Forget about Jude. He was using you. Do something for yourself. Ask yourself, what do you want to do? What's best for you in this short time?”

“I want to—”

“Don't talk. Do. Now, go, before Mat changes his mind.”

Flea left, an idea growing in his mind until it blotted out everything else.

 

51

Tesha alerted him
with a long, low whistle. She stepped from behind an abandoned cart.

“What took you so long? Are you all right? I was beginning to get scared.”

“I'm fine.” Flea found himself suddenly breathless. “I know all about it now. We were right and we were wrong. Nothing was ever going to happen when Yesh died, and you were right: he couldn't change the world when he was dead. We just missed the obvious. The real prophecy says he's coming back to life first. And then the big change comes.”

Tesha stared at him blankly, then asked, “When?”

“Tomorrow. They told me to … do whatever I had to do before it all happens.”

“And what's that? What's the big change?”

“The end of the world.”

“Oh, just that?” Tesha sounded sarcastic. “So what's the point of doing anything?”