Read My Glorious Brothers for Free Online Page B

you be then?”
    â€œEnough,” the Adon said. “Must you always be at each other’s throat? There is sorrow enough in our land. All of our hands are washed in blood. Go tonight to the house of Lebel, and beg his forgiveness and God’s forgiveness, even as I will do.”
    I went on eating, and Judas paced back and forth. Then, suddenly, he stopped, faced the Adon, and said:
    â€œI ask no man’s forgiveness from here on!”
    ***
    Time passes, and ours is a healing land under a healing sun. I found Judas, one day not long after, sprawled on the hillside with the goats, and he looked up at me and smiled. The smile I remember well, for the smile of Judas, my brother, was not something easily forgotten or easily resisted.
    â€œCome sit with me, Simon, and be my brother,” he said,
    I sat down beside him. “I am your brother.”
    â€œI know—I know, and I hurt you and I don’t know how. All my life, I hurt you, Simon. That’s true, isn’t it?”
    â€œIt’s not true,” I said, won already, his the way anyone he desired to be his became his.
    â€œAnd yet when I myself was hurt and it had to be made better, when I wept and my tears had to be dried, when I was hungry and I wanted bread, it was not to the Adon I went, not to my mother who was dead, not to John—but to you, Simon, my brother.”
    I couldn’t look at him; I didn’t want to look at him, at those strong clean features that might have been cut from stone, at those wide, pure blue eyes.
    â€œAnd when I was afraid, I came to you to hold me in your arms and quiet my fear.”
    â€œWhen will you and Ruth be married?” I asked.
    â€œSometime—how did you know, Simon? But you know everything, don’t you? Sometime—when things are better.”
    â€œThey won’t be better.”
    â€œBut they will, Simon, believe me.”
    Then we lay silently on the grass for a while, I staring at nothing, but Judas with his eyes fixed across the valley to the tangled passes that led down to the coastal plain.
    â€œHow do men fight?” he said suddenly.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHow do men fight?”
    â€œThat’s a strange question—”
    â€œThat’s all I’ve asked myself,” Judas mused. “Day in and day out, I’ve asked myself nothing else. How do men fight? Why don’t you answer me, Simon? How do men fight?”
    You had to answer him. Whether you were Judas’s brother or his servant or his follower, you could not have the relationship with him that other men had with you. He took you into himself; he absorbed you; you found yourself hanging onto his words as if the words themselves were entities.
    â€œHow do men fight?” I repeated. “With weapons—with armies.”
    â€œWith armies,” Judas said. “And armies are mercenaries, always mercenaries. Men for hire—in all the world, mankind is divided into three groups.” He stretched out on his back, arms spread, staring at the sky, at the blue Judean sky, where the thin, lacy clouds shred themselves back and forth, like new flax on a loom. “Three groups,” he said softly: “the slaves, those who own the slaves, and the mercenaries, those who kill for hire, who murder for hire—for Greece, for Egypt, for Syria—or for that new master in the West, for Rome. You’ve heard that, Simon, for Rome; and Rome makes them citizens and pays them less. But it has always been that way, mercenaries—” He lay silent for a moment. “You remember, when we were children we watched the Syrian mercenaries marching south to attack Egypt? War among the nokri, always the same. A king hires ten or twenty or forty thousand mercenaries, and he marches against a city. If the king of that city can hire enough mercenaries, they meet on a plain somewhere and hack at each other until it is decided. Otherwise, they close the gates and a