be the defining dawn in the dagger men’s struggle. The harridan’s curse gnawed away at the back of his mind. In killing the priest had he damned them all? No. He refused to believe that. The plan was good. He had gone over it a thousand times. It was simple-misdirection, subterfuge and bloodshed.
Come first light the Sicarii would hit Jerusalem’s supply lines. They would burn the fields and slaughter the cattle. Without food the city would collapse in a matter of days, forcing the people to turn on the besieging Romans. There would be no more weak men out there trying to negotiate peace for the hungry. They would be out there on the streets with one thought: food. That was the shadow play. It turned the eyes away from what they were really doing, and allowed the dagger men to disappear into the ghettos. Once they found the shadows they would be able to orchestrate the true rebellion from the streets, striking only to fade away before the dying was done. Again and again, like vipers, they would attack, sinking their steel teeth into the pilgrims as they shuffled toward the Temple Mount looking for salvation, hitting the priests and the soldiers and leaving them clawing at the dust as they bled out into the road. And they wouldn’t stop until every last Herodian and Roman sycophant was either dead or driven from the city, leaving Jerusalem for the Jews.
It would be glorious. Righteous. More, it would be a fitting memorial for both his father and his grandfather, and would mean even more souls to join them wherever they were now. He refused to think of heaven or some beneficent Maker tending to the spirits of the dead. In Menahem’s mind the afterlife was a place of torment and suffering, Gehenna, with the gates of teshuvah firmly closed. How could it be anything else, built as it was on lies? There was no caring Christian God, no everlasting life in Olam Habah. The only deity he believed in was vengeful, the one who brought the flood to purify his creation, who demanded Abraham murder his own son to prove his fidelity. That was the god who owned the afterlife, the god capable of imagining such hells as the great fiery lake that existed solely to burn the sinners.
And that was a god he could kill for.
Menahem stopped his pacing. The red sun was a fiery glow behind the mountains in the middle distance. This land was his land. He felt a fierce attachment to it. When he died he wanted his blood drained and poured into the dirt so that he could become one with it. Was the woman right? Would he join them in Gehenna tomorrow? Was that his fate? Curiously the thought didn’t frighten him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t resigned himself to dying, more that he was at peace with it. He would leave the world a better place for his people than it was when he had entered it. That was all any man could ask of his life.
Menahem disappeared into one of the dark tower doors that led out of the sun. His footsteps echoed as he rushed down the spiral stair. The air was different, older. It was so much colder than outside, his scalp prickled and his skin crawled. It was only a few years since they had taken Masada by force. The blood of the Romans still stained the sandstone where it had been spilled. It leant the stairs a second set of shadows. How many ghosts still walked the walls? How many death rattles did the old stones remember?
At the bottom of the stairway the passage opened up into an antechamber. Like much of the fortress, the room was devoid of any decoration. There was an archway, lit by flickering torchlight. A draft blew through from outside. Beyond the arch three doors led off into other rooms. Another stair led down deeper to what had been the Romans’ dungeon, and a passage led toward the courtyard. Menahem followed the passage. The torches in two of the sconces had burned out, leaving dark shadows in their place. The passageway curved slightly, following the contours of the mesa. Around the corner, the passage branched into a second one, which in turn led out to the courtyard.
The heat hit him immediately. The temple stood in the shade of Herod’s three-tiered, round palace. When they had taken the fortress they had stripped it of much of its luxury. The bath house had fallen into disuse. The huge palace itself served as barracks for the assassins. Menahem hurried across the courtyard. Like Herod’s great temple in Jerusalem, this one had a variety of entrances. Even here the servants could not worship their Lord side by side with their masters. There was a door for the women, a door for the first-born sons, a door for the priests with their offerings and a door for the commoners. The Sicarii had stripped the temple of all religious trappings and turned it into a sheep croft for no other reason than it amused them.
He pushed open the temple door and went inside.
The air was hot. Uncomfortably so. And it stank of animals. Eleazar had brushed the straw away from around the altar. Behind it sandstone bricks had been built up around a wooden fire to trap the heat. The wood had already burned down to charcoal. His brother was hunched over the fire, feeding it.
Eleazar was the Sicarii smith-the dagger men’s dagger maker. He moved with quiet economy, every movement precisely measured. He didn’t look up as his brother entered. Menahem saw he had made a crude sand cast to pour the molten silver into. It would give the dagger its basic shape. The smith’s hammer lay on the altar. On the floor beside the altar was a bucket of luke-warm water.
Eleazar took the silver coins from Menahem and emptied them into the crucible and fed them to the fire. It didn’t take long for the metal to begin to fuse together. Eleazar removed it from the fire, allowing it to cool slightly, turning his wrist so that he could better see the lump of metal the coins had become before replacing it. This time he left it there until molten, then took the crucible from the flame and emptied the swirling silver liquid into the form. The metal began to solidify immediately, swelling to fill the bar-shaped cavity hollowed out in the sand. As it cooled it lost its luster.
Menahem lost all concept of time as he watched his brother take the silver bar with tongs and beat the metal flat, turning it over and over, each hammer blow shaping it a little more. Sweat dripped from every inch of his brother’s skin. The veins stood out angrily against his muscles. He didn’t stop for a moment, not even to wipe the stinging sweat from his eyes. He returned the silver to the fire, heating the metal until it began to soften and lose its shape, then moving quickly laid it flat on the altar. He took up the hammer and beat it towards its final form. Again and again he turned the silver, beating first on one side and then on the other, flattening it and putting an edge on the blade until even to Menahem’s unskilled eye it began to resemble the dagger it would become.
“As silver is melted in the middle of the furnace, so shall you be melted in the middle thereof; and you shall know that I, the Lord, have poured out my fury on you,” Menahem breathed, the words of Ezekiel’s ministry becoming a prayer on his lips as Eleazar folded the silver, heated it until it was malleable, then beat each fold flat. Each new layer of folds offered the blade more strength.
The sky through the temple window was dark. It could have been any time in the long night.
Eleazar worked on while Menahem watched, fascinated by his brother’s skill. Finally, he was done. He wrapped the hilt with leather, and the dagger was finished.
Menahem took it from his hand.
The blade was curved slightly to resemble a serpent’s tail. The rippled effect on the flat of the blade caught in the moon. It appeared almost as though it had been etched into the metal. There was a beautiful subtlety to it. More, he thought, examining it, there was a truth to it. The blade was strengthened by what appeared to be imperfections in its surface but were in fact the whisper-thin layers between the metal.
The dagger was much like the man wielding it.
Menahem was tempered by the heartbeats of happiness, those fleeting moments of joy and the agonies of disappointment hammered flat around his soul like protective armor.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, holding the dagger reverently.
“How could it be anything else?” bragged Eleazar. “It’s forged from the coins that paid for an entire religion.
25
As he reached the square Konstantin realized the extent of the crowd. It wasn’t just people lining either side of the street anymore. More than two thousand people had crushed into the small square to witness the benediction. They were talking, excited. It took him a moment to realize what they were saying. The murmur ran through the crowd: “Papa is coming.” He looked at his watch, then up at the huge clock above the door of St. Florin’s church. It was a pointless gesture now. The clock on the church’s facade and his watch said the same thing. Time had run out.
