The rabbi stroked his beard and stared at him in the pallid half-light of dawn. He said with a frown, “Friend, why do you want to know such things? You’re not Jewish.”
“I’m interested in what happens to him,” Agios replied impatiently. He repeated, “Where will Pilate try him?”
A woman spoke up. “I can tell you. Pilate always holds court north of the temple, usually in the courtyard of the fortress. You may be able to get in to see. Roman trials are public, unless it’s a question of a plot against the emperor.”
Though the sun was still low and dimly red in the waxen sky, already masses of people filled the streets of Jerusalem. They surged in a mixture of scents, animal and human sweat, the dung of horses and mules, the aromas of cooked foods. Agios never liked the smell of cities. It was too much like the stench of despair.
As Agios and Krampus pushed through the press of the crowds, he overheard bits and pieces: “The Sanhedrin said he threatened to destroy the temple . . . Pilate is questioning him in public . . . one of his followers denied even knowing him . . .” The mood of the place grew dark with conflicting emotions: anger and resentment and fear and foreboding.
They tried to make their way north, but the broadest streets were the ones most choked with foot traffic, and when they found their passage blocked for a moment and had to turn down an alley to find an alternate way, Krampus put a big hand on Agios’s shoulder. He patted Agios’s upper arm, his awkward way of trying to offer comfort. It was meant to be reassuring, but Krampus himself looked frightened and sick.
Agios nodded but did not trust himself to speak. Now, he thought or prayed, beseeching the heavens. Do it now. In this heavy hour, reveal that he is King of Kings. Jesus had cast out demons, healed lepers, and raised people from the dead. Surely the rebellion he was inciting, the revolution that would turn the whole world upside down, was happening now.
“Have faith,” Agios whispered, and didn’t realize he had said it out loud until Krampus echoed him: “Faith.”
Still, Agios’s heart hammered painfully in his chest, and his mind raced with worry. He and Krampus threaded their way through the crowds and followed the street as it climbed the Temple Mount. It was only a few hundred steps now to the fortress. The gates stood open, and the crush of people stood thickest just outside. The courtyard was full to bursting already.
Agios tried to find a way through to the fortress gate, and the two of them made slow progress, but near the gateway courtyard they met an impassable flood of people pouring out and coming the other way. Agios stopped one of them, a poorly dressed man whose expression looked desolate. “What has happened?” Agios asked him. “Is it . . .” He could hardly bring himself to say the name, he was so afraid of the answer. “Jesus?”
The man looked frightened, but he tugged Agios into the shelter of a deep, shaded doorway and then as the yelling crowd surged past he leaned in close and said softly, “Yes.” It confirmed what Agios already knew, but he felt his heart pitch just the same. “Pilate asked Jesus if he claimed to be king of the Jews, but Jesus wouldn’t answer one way or the other. Pilate declares that he can’t find evidence to support the charges the Sanhedrin raised. He can find no harm in Jesus.”
Agios sagged with relief. “Pilate didn’t judge him? Then he’s been released? He’s free?”
The man gulped a deep breath and replied, “No. Jesus told Pilate that he was from Galilee. Pilate decided that since he came here from Herod Antipas’s realm, Herod has the proper jurisdiction and must judge him. He sent Jesus to Herod for trial.”
Agios suppressed a moan. “To Tiberias in Perea?”
“No, not Herod’s capital,” the man replied, a little impatiently. “Herod is here in the city. He came for Passover.”
The man started to move from the doorway, but Agios stopped him, gripping his arm above the elbow. “Please. Tell me, where can I find Herod?”
“I don’t know. I—I’m not of Jerusalem, I’m not even Jewish. I came here following—” The man darted a glance around. The crowd was thinning, everyone heading southward now, and no one seemed to notice them. Still, the man whispered, “Are you one of us? A follower of Jesus?”
The air seemed to go unnaturally still and Agios stifled a shiver. The man’s fear was like an infectious disease. Suddenly, the man took a few steps back, glancing around as if he wished he had never dared to ask the question at all. He almost fled into the street.
Agios also went back into the crowd, Krampus limping at his side. People jostled and shoved at them, but Agios did not react. That morning the streets of Jerusalem seemed like channels carved by waves on a stony shore of the sea, ebbing and flowing with a tide of agitated people. Some of them knew more than others, and Agios questioned a good many.
By the time Agios and Krampus reached the place where Herod was said to be staying, they were too late. From people in the crowd they learned that Herod, too, had briefly questioned Jesus before sending him back to Pilate. Agios felt trapped in a nightmare, snared in a fever-dream that at turns chilled him and set his blood ablaze. He stumbled through the street with Krampus clinging to his sleeve and felt each word like an assault.
“Herod commanded Jesus to perform magic for him, do some miracles, but Jesus stood silent.”
“He accused Jesus of being a follower of John the Baptist . . .”
“They dressed him in a robe befitting the king of the Jews, and sent him back again to Pilate.”
The sun had climbed high enough to show above the city walls and cast its sickly light on the eastern side of the Temple. Because of the throngs of people, Agios and Krampus took a long, indirect way around, but still they could not force their way into the square courtyard where Pilate sat in judgment. “What’s happening?” Agios asked, and it seemed at first that no one knew.
Finally, though, a man who had climbed to a window ledge opposite the gate where he could look over the heads of the crowd called down, “Pilate asks: ‘Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews or the rebel Barabbas?’ He wants to spare Jesus! Barabbas is a thief, a murderer some say, a revolutionary—”
From the front, from the middle, from everywhere Agios turned, the cry rose: “Barabbas!”
Agios knew it was customary for the Roman governor to release a prisoner of the crowd’s choice during the Passover festival. But a notorious criminal instead of Jesus? What were they doing?
“Give us Barabbas!” The sound echoed in the streets around the fortress. The crowd was getting out of hand. Agios could feel the hostile shift and watched, horrified, as men began to clench their fists and raise them heavenward. “Give us Barabbas!”
And, then, just as quickly as the outcry began, the crowd hushed in a sweeping wave. A moment of near silence, the earth held its breath, and Agios could just make out the words. He didn’t know if they came from Pilate himself or if they were broadcast by the man on the ledge, but they filled him with dread all the same.
“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?”
The shout was vicious. Instantaneous. It was as if the crowd had been waiting for this moment, as if an insane brew of hatred had been fermenting for years. Decades. Longer. And maybe it had been.
“Crucify him!”
Krampus looked as if he were moaning, but Agios couldn’t hear him over the tumult. The shouts were wildfire roaring through the crowd, consuming it. “Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!” Krampus collapsed, his grip tearing Agios’s sleeve. The violence of the masses, the bloodlust for a man whom Agios only knew as a boundless source of love and hope and peace, terrified Agios, and he saw his own fear reflected in the eyes of his friend. He pulled Krampus to his feet before the crowd could trample him.
As Agios half-carried and half-pulled Krampus, he saw one old man rip his tunic in a Hebrew gesture of deep mourning. Others shoved at the graybeard, jeering and laughing. His face streamed with tears as they tore his clothes further, as they spat on him.
They turn from peace and want blood instead. Madness. Like a disease, madness consumes them!
Agios managed to drag himself and Krampus through the furious press of people and slip down a relatively secluded side street. The throb and beat of the crowd was only minimally lessened here, and Agios found he had to cup Krampus’s face and shout into his ear to be heard.
“I must find him!” he cried, his voice breaking. “He needs me!” His own prayer, his promise, echoed in the hollow cavern of his chest. Let me serve him until his mission is completed. Jesus’s mission couldn’t be over yet. Not yet.
Krampus’s hands found Agios’s hair and he pulled his old friend’s forehead to his own. “I go with you, Father,” Krampus said in a harsh voice that would not stand for a refusal, and with those words he was the brute Agios had first known, fierce and loyal and strong. There was no mistaking his meaning. Agios was ready to abandon Krampus, to leave him somewhere safe so that he could fulfill the covenant he made without putting his friend in harm’s way. But Krampus was right.
They were in this together.
“We will find him,” Agios said, and was shocked to taste salt. There were tears on his cheeks, his lips, in his beard. Were they his or Krampus’s? Did it matter? “We’ll find him together. Come, son.”
They set out through the city, the howl of the crowd still ringing in their ears.
Crucify him.
Chapter 14
Crucifixion was the Romans’ cruelest punishment: they drove spikes through wrists and heels and raised the victims up, their bodies bent and sagging, their chests arching hopelessly toward life as they slowly suffocated. Anguish, exhaustion, and finally the body’s slow betrayal brought on a death that the victim in the end yearned for. As punishment it was unnatural, it was wrong. It was evil.
Agios panted as he hurried through the streets, Krampus’s arm thrown over his shoulders for support. He felt winded, but more, sick with panic. He would have vomited if he’d had anything in his stomach to reject, but his belly was cold and empty, as hollow as his aching heart. He trudged on.
They are going to crucify him.
It was difficult even to think it, impossible to accept. Surely someone would realize what was happening. Surely Pilate would come to his senses and understand that this could not be done. But they said Pilate had called for a basin of water and, in the presence of all who were gathered there, washed his hands of the entire affair. Of Jesus.
Impossible.
Now, Agios prayed, directing his entreaty heavenward. Do it now. If you are who Caspar believes you are—and Melchior and Balthasar and Krampus—show your power now! Revolution, a new order, a new kingdom. Bring it now!
But even as he wished it so, a part of Agios already knew that Jesus would not stop this. The man who caressed a child’s soft curls, taught forgiveness and love for neighbor and peace—would he take up a sword and fight? Would he shout a battle cry, bloody his own hands, end the lives of the very people who filled his eyes with a compassion that Agios still couldn’t grasp? Never.
It’s up to me, Agios thought. But he was chained to Krampus, weighted by his old friend’s bulk against his own aging frame. And he’d come unarmed. Their provisions were with the mule in the stable where they had quickly tethered their animal upon entering Jerusalem. For all Agios knew, some thief had stolen them. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered with Jesus being nailed to a cross.
A crowd streamed north out of the city gates on the road to Golgotha, the place of the skull, and whispers drifted through the people like mist. People spoke of a crown of thorns, a scarlet robe, and the vicious bite of a Roman whip.
Krampus moaned and wept at that. Even after all these years, he carried the memory of a Roman scourge as clearly as he carried the crisscrossed scars on his back.
“I’m coming,” Agios muttered through clenched teeth, tears of rage and grief flowing hot on his cheeks. Krampus gave him a look filled with sorrow and confusion, and Agios bit his tongue.
I won’t give up hope! I swore to protect Jesus! I swore it to God!
They followed the multitude, caught up in the wave of humanity. From time to time Agios would try to press forward, through the mob, to drag Krampus along with him so that they could make better time on the path to the domed, rocky hill where the crucifixions were to take place. But the sea of people and the burden around his neck prevented him. He could have screamed at the injustice of it and wept for the guilt and despair it churned up in his soul.
By the time they made it to Golgotha, Agios was staggering, and Krampus—though decidedly weaker—was trying to support him. Agios felt half blind, unable to see clearly. A dense fog had risen around him, brought on by terror and disbelief. What if he couldn’t fulfill his promise? What if it was already too late? He looked at Krampus and croaked, “Philos, why doesn’t he free himself ?”
Krampus gave him a sideways glance. “Philos?”
Not Philos. Why did I say Philos? With an effort, Agios focused his eyes and his mind. “Krampus,” he murmured. “Krampus.”
His friend pulled him forward. “Come. I help.”
He can barely walk, and he’s supporting me. I’m failing him! Failing Krampus, failing Jesus!
In the distance the execution party had climbed to the top of the hill. The Romans had prepared everything, working with their usual lethal efficiency. Within a few moments a cross rose, then another to its left and a third to its right. Men had been nailed to all three. Agios wiped his eyes and led Krampus to a place where they could stand on a boulder.
Agios’s heart felt as though it would burst. At the foot of the center cross knelt a woman whom he could recognize even at a distance. She was older and bent, but the humble slant of her head and the curve of her lovely profile were burned in his mind.
Mary.
“It’s Jesus. It’s really him.” Agios’s voice cracked around a sob. He had hoped for a different outcome, for a last-minute reprieve, anything. He clenched his fists, ready in his anger to fling himself off the boulder and fight his way to the cross. He would—what? Defeat them all, help Jesus down? One man?
Krampus made a sound in the back of his throat and Agios turned his attention to his immediate surroundings. Ranks of Roman soldiers hemmed in the crowd. Some of them walked through, dispersing groups, shoving men and menacing them with spears and swords. The tyrants truly fear rebellion, Agios thought. As the soldiers pushed back, lashing out at people who moved too slowly, Krampus drew his turban lower on his head. He looked down at the earth and whimpered like a beaten dog, like a child whose heart had been broken.
Yet Agios couldn’t comfort his friend, not now, not at this moment. I allowed myself to hope—for the first time since I lost my son, I allowed myself to hope! And, then, he admitted something even more painful: I saw him for myself. I believed.
Agios climbed down from the rock and took Krampus by the arm. Without a word he pushed his way through the crowd, desperate to get closer to Jesus, to look in his eyes and see what was written there. If Jesus so much as nodded, Agios would explode. He was still strong, his body muscled. His favorite carving knife was in his belt. It wasn’t a weapon, but it would suffice.
When only a handful of men stood between them and the cross where Jesus hung, Agios found he couldn’t take another step. He wanted to raise his eyes and finally see the Teacher face-to-face, but his heart was as heavy as a millstone in his chest, his feet rooted to the ground. Krampus wept silently, and as Agios stared at the trampled earth he realized that the soldiers were dividing up Jesus’s clothes by casting lots.
They can’t do this. He is the Messiah! Agios thought. He knew, he knew with all his soul. Jesus is the only one who can heal my son Krampus! Only he! It’s my duty to protect Jesus in exchange for his healing! I know! I know! He is the Messiah, he is!
Then, as if something evil were slyly whispering in his ear, came the thought Is he? Is he, really?
So much in Agios’s life had be
en a lie—the belief that he could protect Weala and his children, the thought that wine would ease sorrow, the idea that frankincense would bring wealth and ease to his family. Don’t let this be a lie, too! Let this man Jesus truly be the Messiah! Let him work a miracle now—
Then from the centermost cross came the voice Agios had grown to love: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Agios caught his breath. Hung in agony, on a tree, and still on his mission! It couldn’t end with the Messiah nailed to a cross, hanging on a tree—his own son dead on a tree—Agios pushed forward. “Rabbi!” he called, and a Roman soldier thrust a menacing sword at him. It caught him on the face, just missing his left eye, and he fell back.
“Father!” Krampus said, catching him.
Furious, Agios shook his head, blood dripping. The slash started at the bridge of his nose and cut diagonally across his left cheek. He ripped a piece of his sleeve off and pressed it to the wound. Reached for his carving knife—
Krampus caught his arm, and he looked into the big man’s eyes. “Forgive,” Krampus mouthed without speaking aloud. “Not evil for evil.”
The anger left Agios. Jesus had looked into the eyes of the lowest sinners—the prostitute and the tax collector and even the demon-possessed—and had spoken love and forgiveness to them. And now Krampus, the most downtrodden of them all, spoke the same message.
Still, Agios believed there must be an end point to grace, a line that even such love and forgiveness would not, could not cross.
For love was all too simple, too idealistic and selfless and pure. The world was a dark and desperate place. Surely there was room in Jesus’s kingdom for death by the sword—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Every man for himself and my people, my interests, my life above all others.
And yet Jesus looked with compassion on the very people who were killing him. He pleaded with the Father on their behalf, begging for the forgiveness of a sin that eclipsed them all. It defied everything.