Read Iscariot: A Novel of Judas for Free Online

to sit in a seat of honor. Now I only wanted to have my father and brother back, in any obscurity we could be together.
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    The Romans were in the forest.
    The fall of axes rang out from the grove for half a day, their rhythm a dull thud in the ears. We dozed to the strike of axes, the shouts, the laughter. Always the axes. Always the laughter.
    My mother and I lay curled together in the darkness of the cave until we could no longer tell waking from sleeping, nightmare from delirium.
    My mother, I think, might have lain in that grave and gone directly to Sheol, were it not for me. I knew it by her eyes, dull and lifeless, staring at nothing in this world as though already fixed on the next. When she closed them, only the slow beat of her heart and the occasional sound of her breath let me know she lived.
    Sometimes I thought I heard voices crying out in the darkness, reciting even, part of the Shema or a hymn. Sometimes I heard them cry out before falling into groans.
    By the eighth day, the hammer-falls and ruckus of the Roman camp transformed into the machinelike grinding of a legion on the move. We lay in the stupor of hunger and dehydration as they
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    passed along the west side of our hill, south into the Galilean countryside.
    Finally, my mother stirred against me.
    "Come," she said. Her voice was hoarse. I heard her try to swallow.
    She took my hand and together we went down the hill on weak and unsteady legs. Now in the sun I saw that her hair was coated with dust, her face covered in grime, as were her clothes. She looked as though she had come out of Sheol itself. In a way, I suppose we had.
    Distantly, I thought: We have missed Sabbath, which occurred our first night and next day in hiding. And then I realized: It is Sabbath again.
    We paused halfway down the hill. Where the grove of pines had stood, there were now mostly stumps.
    My mother moved woodenly, the smooth, girlish step that had never ceased to cause men and women alike to watch her, gone.
    We came to the bottom of the hill.
    The road was lined on both sides with crosses.
    Mother's knees buckled and she stumbled, yanking me nearly to the ground.
    Her breath came like a serrated knife. Her hand was crushing mine, shaking all the way up her arm so that it seemed her shoulders had seized up.
    A keen escaped my lips and I sagged but she jerked me upright, with what strength I don't know.
    We walked onto the road. Through the gruesome corridor, past the bodies of ten. Twenty. Fifty. I lost count.
    I had seen the crucified from a distance in Jerusalem--nearly every day someone went to hang on a tree for something. It was the 36
    Roman execution reserved for noncitizens, devised specifically to be as lengthy, painful, and humiliating as possible. They crucified them naked and we always took care not to look at them, at the crude shame of them suffering their way to Sheol.
    But now I stared at the bodies wracked in such gruesome display, every one of them a signpost to Roman power, a warning to anyone who had not submitted himself to the cross of Roman occupation in life.
    The air was saturated with blood and excrement, rank with bodies already decaying in the stifling afternoon heat. Some of them stared down at us with flat eyes as though having realized upon the moment of death that the next life was not what they expected. The mask of that horror remained on their faces like the shed scales of a lizard, a thing bearing only the imprint of the life that once wore it. Ravens came and went with a flap of dark wings, settling on the corpses to jab at their faces. No calls, no cawing. Just the flutter of wings and intermittent silence as they pecked at wounds and genitals, lips and eyeballs.
    I became aware of the dazed milling of others like us, of their cries in the putrid air. Farther ahead, a woman had all but collapsed at the foot of one of the crosses. Another man, standing in the middle of the road in the rough tunic of a peasant, clasped his head,