A story for Easter

[sandman67]

HHF encouraged me to write, so heres a little alternative history tale for Easter.

I understand that this may be seen by some Christians as a bit insulting to their beliefs.

Jesus had a sense of humor....and he told you to turn the other cheek.

Ecce Homo has been in print for a while now as well........

[sandman67]

A LETTER TO MARY

My Darling Mary,

If you are reading this then I must be dead, and if that is the case then I no longer care whether you know the truth and how that may affect the way you see me. I’m gone now. None of it matters any more. Dust and dreams blowing in the winds.

I need you to know the real truth, especially in light of John’s recent attempts to smear me.

You see Mary, from the first time I saw you in the market I loved you truly and deeply. I remember you dressing the fine ladies hair, and the way the others looked down on you for that, slandering your profession and saying you were a “collaborator and a prostitute”. The others made snide comments behind your back, and always looked down on you….even he had his moments as I recall.

Not me. I loved you with every breath I took, and defended you despite the way it meant the others looked down on me too. They made me a scapegoat, an outsider. Mooney they called me….”Wheres Izzy ?” someone would shout …..”Mooning at Mary!” they’d all reply laughing.

Of course, he treated all this philosophically, as usual. You only had eyes for him, and no matter how I tried you never saw my true devotion. Such is life, such is love.

I called in on John recently and found him busy writing up his memoirs. Whilst he was preparing dinner I took a quick skim read and was somewhat surprised at his recollections. They seemed a way off what I remembered happening. He’d changed the speeches too.

What gave me most cause for concern though was the handwritten note in Matt’s hand. It simply said “We must find a scapegoat. Suggest Izzy”.

Well I left that evening with the scales firmly off my eyes I can tell you. That friends and compatriots, fellow believers in the cause, can treat me that way after all we have been through just shows that we truly lost our way, and now are directed by mean spirited propagandists and demagogues. I want nothing more to do with any of it.

My only hope in setting this down is that at least you, my love, will know the truth.

As you know my story started a lot differently to his.

I had been a radical since my youth, starting early on, as many others did, by throwing stones at the invaders and painting slogans on the walls under moonlit skies. I look back now on those days with fondness, running into a darkened alleyway to avoid the night patrols, pinging stones off their helmets with my slingshot…..lost innocence I never managed to regain.

Eventually my boyish antics came to the attention of the local big boys, and I soon had a reputation as a “can do” man……if you had a dirty job to do then Izzy was your boy.

The old man’s loan firm provided an ideal front – after all who would suspect the son of a prominent local banker? It also meant I had early training in accounting – always useful when funds needed laundering or monies raising from undetectable sources. Party contributions need hiding? Izzy’s your boy. Money needed to pay for weapons shipments across the desert? Izzy’s your boy.

Need a blade inserting twixt collar and neck in the dark of a privy behind a bar?

Izzy’s your man.

Along the way I gained experience in field craft and surveillance, propaganda and its uses, assassination and the use of poisons, basic chemistry, operative recruiting and handling……all useful skills for the cause.

Then in my 20s I was asked to go meet with Josephus…the main man. Mr Big. The real mover and shaker behind the scenes. I still remember the bitter tang of the wine he served, the sweetness of the figs, and the quiet modulated tones in which he spoke.

“Ah Izzy my boy. We have a job for you….very important, very secret. Time you earned your stripes lad. Well my bright boy…..Truly it is said Your Country Needs You. Sit here, and let us whisper our plans.”

He spoke. I listened. I agreed.

And that was it. I was in. Part of the main crowd, in with the big boys, sitting at the main table.

Joesphus explained that for years we Sicarii had been chipping away at the invaders, assassinating one here, supporting a small rebellion there. All to no effect. Too resilient these invaders are. Too big, too strong.

Then Josephus had dinner with a visiting Greek polymath called Aristogion. He explained what was needed was a mass rebellion, all the population rising as one.

And what a mass rebellion needed was a figurehead. An icon….

A face.

And so the grand plan had been put together by the thinkers. The plan had been running for years now, and the time was right.

The movement would exploit existing propaganda seeded as prophecy by earlier operatives many years before, and provide the movement with a public figurehead – someone we could all get behind. Someone to draw the masses into our fold. Someone we could use to get rid of the invaders once and for all. The priests were on side….after all, they were paying our bills.

I was to be the groups financier, accountant, fixer and most importantly the handler, controlling its direction under direct orders from Josephus and the other senior boys back in Megiddo. They had already selected our new “leader”, and now it was my job to make sure our doggie jumped through all the right hoops.

Simple….or so I thought.

A simple hick from the sticks, an honest son of the soil. Simple to train, simple to manipulate. Do as we say, say what we tell you. It seemed so clear, so beautiful.

I remember realising within ten minutes of meeting our boy that this would be a walkover. He was so….innocent. So we went off to our deep desert training facility, and filled his head with dreams and messages. One month later we had our face.

And so off into the big wide world to sell our revolution.

I remember the first time he saw the big city, His eyes looked like those of a rabbit when he sees the hunter. “Eyes shining with destiny and righteousness” John sold it as of course, and with Pete and Paul The Walking Walls backing him up with muscle then who was to argue?

I maintained him on a careful diet to keep that other worldly prophetic look about him. I ensured a steady supply of his night drink to ensure he slept, laced of course with blue lotus so he would dream of “speaking to papa” and see that bright tomorrow.

Sure in the early days it was easy to make sure he met the right people….all our people of course, previously trained and set up in nice comfortable sleeper cells waiting for the right time to come. Quickly activated and formed into a close team of associates who ensured there was a wall maintained between our man and the people. Minders, protectors, propaganda agents, and fixers like me. He was never alone….we saw to that.

He was “so clever”, “so wise”, and yet so blind. He never saw the exchanges and looks behind his back, the small hand signals, the way we controlled his every move. Who he saw, what he said, the message they carried to their friends. The way we used our dinner conversations to steer his thinking, control his position, progress our platform.

Worked a treat – the people loved him. Couldn’t get enough, would walk miles to see him pass by….got a bit embarrassing to tell you the truth. I felt guilty conning the masses.

“Its easy to fool the undertrod Izzy….just sell them a dream, a future” old Josephus used to tell me. “Just don’t ever try fooling yourself”.

Well, I fooled myself it would be easy.

Of course what none of us anticipated was the way it would all go to his head, the way he would start believing all the hype.

We should have seen the warning signs early on. That drunken boat trip on the lake should have warned us…..”I can walk on water”…..yeah sure. Took us half an hour to fish him back out after he sunk like a stone. The glassy look in his eyes when we did get him aboard showed Id added too much ergot to the bread and he was tripping balls. My bad I suppose.

Still, its not like my experiments in the applied use of mass hallucogenics were always cock ups. After I’d ironed out the early issues with drugs and dosage I found I could apply just enough to the bread or the wine, and could use suggestion to inspire all sorts of fun stuff in the brains of others…..doves, lights above heads…speaking in tongues? No my friend you are stoned. Relax, Izzy’s here.

The resurrection reunion still stands as one of my best. God that was hard work….especially convincing that teetotal fool Tom. Still, I always say you can do wonders with mind bending drugs and a bottle of red ink.

So there I was, working the hardest behind the scenes, directing the operation, filling in endless intelligence reports and handling sheets, sending them by secret courier back to HQ, waiting endless hours for new instructions. Spiking drinks, greasing palms, moving, shaking, spinning. Josephus seemed happy with our early gains with the masses, and I was given some degree of autonomy.

Did I feel bad about cynically manipulating a hick from the sticks and selling him as the next big thing? Did I hell. I kept my eye on the ball, freedom for all, and kept my boy on message. The crowds loved him, and my occasional Hey Presto propaganda stunts kept the crowds wowed.

Remember the incident with the leper? More of my work I’m afraid. That was Flaky Ben, confidence trickster and fake cripple extraordinaire.

Ben turned up a few times along the way….cured at least six times of various ailments….blindness, lameness, leprosy….the list goes on. How it made me laugh. A few times I nearly cracked and burst out laughing. To this day I don’t know what was more funny…..the lampooning japery of Ben or that pious holier than thou look on his face as he played the patsy…..curing old Ben of whatever put on illness he had this week. His fake beard fell off once, not that the big boy noticed. Too busy being filled with the light or something.

Occasionally of course I had to arrange for a “real” cure. Curing the possessed was my favourite there. So simple to set up, so dramatic to witness.

As usual I would go out early to case the scene of his latest appearance, suss out the crowds, prepare the ground, etc. Simple enough then to select a cure victim and lace his wine with blue lotus, ergot and some hashish oil. Five minutes later and the man would be foaming at the mouth and barking at the chickens. Time the appearance just as the victim peaks, slip him some pumice, belladonna and charcoal on the sly, and bingo. Lay on hands and wake up the now back to normal man. Demons gone, miracle achieved, faithful cannon fodder recruited.

And then there was all that hoo-ha with my cousin Resurrection Laz.

You do realise he was playing dead to avoid paying taxes on his new olive groves don’t you? It’s a family dodge we use from time to time. Fools the government every time.

A hard enough look at his “tomb” would have showed it seemed to have a back door, and that the deathly pallor was in fact flour and a little indigo…..its a trick I taught him….Laz said when he heard all the banging on the door he thought it was the police coming for him. He was so relieved he cried. Of course He thought that they were tears of gratitude and faith.

Ive spent a few years on and off dead for official reasons. Its odd to think that as you are reading this I guess this time it is for real.

It all started to go off track when you came along.

Sure there had been some female hangers on since the early days, and I don’t think you want to know how hard it was for me to keep His dalliances and indiscretions out of the press. A bribe here, a threat there….and of course his official biographers will leave all that out. I was so angry at the way I’ve been treated I started some false rumours about his illegitimate children being about….scions I call them.

I digress.

You were like a breath of fresh air to the old boys club that our group had become. How many long afternoons have I spent gazing at the wind tussling that beautiful red hair, whilst He spoke to the masses? Watching the way the sunlight fell on that slender neck? Hypnotised as you watched him speak whilst twisting a lock of your hair around your finger? Caught by your light, as he babbled on endlessly about loving your fellow man?

All I wanted to do was love you….. but then my eyes would see you staring at him entranced and I knew my love would always go unrequited. Such are the perils of a life as a field agent. Always in the shadows, never in the light.

Your every move intoxicated me like rare wine, your every word like a sweet draught of cool water after a long desert crossing. I found it harder and harder to concentrate, and impossible to keep my eye on the ball.

After you snubbed the approaches of a few of the others early on I knew your card had been marked, that they would exact their petty revenge somehow, and that because of my obvious love of you I would be drawn in to their plans. I was enraptured and I didn’t care.

And so we slipped.

I never noticed how he started to deviate off message, to start substituting his own thinking instead of ours. “Turn the other cheek”? When was that the Sicarii code? “Blessed are the meek”? Collaborators we called them.

Then the wheels really came off.

Id been distracted badly after we argued over our morning meal, and didn’t notice him eating the ergot laden bread Id forgotten to stash for later use. As we walked to the temple I didn’t pay heed to his clenching his teeth or the twitching hands….all bad signs of ergot overdose. He was a distant thunderstorm.

He was supposed to deliver a speech penned by Josephus’ propaganda department about how our core values were being eroded by the invaders and that passive resistance was not working. Soft stuff, nothing too controversial. Id got him to learn the speech by heart over many evenings, and it looked like he had got the message and was on track. The message was subtle, it subversiveness hidden carefully in down home platitudes and populist slogans. A masterpiece of propaganda.

Then he saw them….the moneylenders. One look and he flipped out.

How the hell was I to know his dad had defaulted on a loan and lost his shop in a repossession? When he screamed in fury I realised that he was overdosing. Too late.

Even Pete couldn’t hold him down….ergot will do that to a man. Cue smashing up the temple and pissing off Ciaphas. He was like a whirlwind, smashing, punching, screaming and kicking. Utter chaos. It took three of us to pin him down and get him off the scene before the patrols arrived.

It’s hardly surprising Ciaphas reacted so badly. After all, it was him and the rest of the Samhedrin who were funding our little covert operation from behind the scenes. Temple gold paid for our publicity and movement, and now it was paying for our icon to demolish the marketplace…..where our funds were generated. One of our main party contributors was there….my uncle! His Holy Righteousness gave him such a kicking it took a month for him to walk. I bet they leave that out of the official writeup.

After the temple incident things went downhill badly. He started loosing it more and more, becoming erratic and hard to control. Blue Lotus will do that after a while. I should have seen the signs, but by the time I did it was way too late.

The temple chaos went to his head, and he started taking a militant anti-Temple-establishment line. The man turned into a tree hugging hippy, convinced he was the son of Yaweh. An eye for an eye had become love thy neighbour. And how were we supposed to gain freedom by turning the other cheek?

I begged, I pleaded. I even threatened to off his mother and father. He just said I could not kill his father, as his father was Yaweh.

I panicked and went to see Ciaphas. That was a mistake.

Ciaphas wrote a series of increasingly abrasive memos to Josephus and the Sicarii council, after which I was issued a warning and was threatened with “retirement”…and we all know what that meant. The dark alley, the bright blade, a flash in the moonlight then the endless sleep. I’ve done it myself often enough.

So I struggled to get things back on track, but he was having none of it. My ever more desperate requests for assistance from HQ went unheeded….it seemed a decision had been made.

I was at home writing up another field report when my instructions arrived by courier. The committee had decided to cut their losses and shut the project down. Heads quite literally had to roll. It had been decided that a loose cannon was less desirable than a martyr to the cause. He was it, and I had to set things up. Now.

So as instructed, through liaison with Ciaphas I set up a meeting with the other side to see if we could get them to dispose of our little problem. What a waste of time that was. The governor was an effete snob who looked down on us locals, and couldn’t understand why we “just didn’t all get along with things as they were”. Like all government employees he was a washout when it came to making a decision and taking action. All rhetoric and bluster. Seemed to think I was a leper by the way he kept wafting perfume at me and washing his hands incessantly.

Ciaphas and his men did most of the pressuring of the authorities to take action, spreading the lies and false intelligence. To my shame I did help trump up the charges. Simple enough given his latest anti-everything outbursts.

The set up in the Garden was simple enough, drug the main man so he didn’t notice the bushes were full of police, one swift greeting and the boys swarmed in.

All done and dusted. Or so I thought.

I went to see Ciaphas to get my payoff as instructed. That’s when I noticed I was being followed. It seems Josephus and the Sicarii wanted all the loose ends tied up, including me. I had become surplus to requirements, a liability.

So I ran. I hid in back alleys and inns, avoiding all contact with the rest of the boys in the group. We were all marked men. The Sicarii take failure badly, as you know.

Of course they took that to mean Id betrayed them all. I tried to contact the group to warn them, sending my best man to the safehouse. They just denied all knowledge of the plot, and blamed it all on me. I heard Pete was caught out on the street, and the carnifex’s broke him. I heard he broke under interrogation and fingered me, like the others.

Bastards.

Eventually the heat got too much, and so I bought a body and set up a false suicide. Another one of the families little tax dodge tricks.

That wasn’t me hanging off the tree, it was just the body of some poor shepherd or homeless shmo Bethlehem Benny found and sold me. Still, a change of clothes and a few hours swinging in the sun and we all look alike to a Roman as I always say.

Since then Ive been on the run. My payoff didn’t last long, and since then I’ve changed my name so many times I have trouble remembering who I am. Josephus’s boys are always close behind, and I sleep with a knife beneath my pillow at night.

What still astounds me is that nobody seems to have worked out the whole thing was a set up.

How many times have we sneaked out at night and recovered our colleagues from crosses? It takes up to three days to die up there as we all know, and the Romans never place guards at the site. An hour or so of hearing you scream and they loose interest. Too hot to stand in the sun all afternoon in metal armour.

Wait till darkness falls, get them down, treat their wounds, and a few months later alls right again. Okay, sometimes they cant hold cups or walk but hey, better than being left up there to die.

Not this time. No rescue attempt. Guards at the site. Stay there till he’s dead they are told.

And that Sicarii patsy Roman centurion Longinus stabbing him with a spear to make sure he was dead? Come on! He was one of ours…I know as I’d been paying him for information on how the governor was taking our movement for years.

This was a very pubic assassination.

And where were the big brave Apostles? Hiding like cornered rats, running for the shadows like the good little field agents they all were.

But every tale needs a villain, and every figurehead or martyr his assassin. It seems this time that role was mine. They all killed him, but I get the blame.

Now the official biographers are writing up his life, and it seems old Izzy is the fall guy. Matt, Mark, Luke, John and the others have their instructions from HQ, the official party line is set, and now history will remember me as a coward and a traitor. That’s my thanks for five years hard work in the field. Great.

So now you know. He wasn’t a god, or even the son of god. He wasn’t The Messiah we were all waiting for. Just a man.

One man, some smoke and mirrors, and a whole lot of behind the scenes publicity control.

He was selected, trained, and controlled. Drugged and deluded he died for our great cause.

He failed, we failed, and we all paid the price.

Still, I hear Peter and some of the lads are making some mileage out of his death. I heard they’ve set up a religion around him now. Those lads…you have got to admire their pluck, and their sense of irony.

Josephus tried another rebellion, got caught, and now works for the new governor Vespasian as an advisor on Hebrew Relations. Do you believe that? The bastard could always land on his feet, no matter how the wind blew.

I stay away from all of them now….the last time Paul saw me on a road near Antioch he tried to run me off the road with his cart. “Next Time Judas You Scum!” he cried…..I can hear it still. I went to Antioch and Damascus for a while, changed my look again, changed my name, and lived a lie.

So much for turning the other cheek and loving your fellow man. Bunch of hypocrites one and all.

I tried writing my own gospel down, my own testament to what happened. I left it with a book dealer in Damascus, and he promised to make sure it was published. I tried to set the record straight, and suggest you do the same. I enclose his card with this missive. He collects and publishes the memoirs of the movement members. Says he’s always surprised how they all contradict each other, and wanted to get my side. Odd man, but trustworthy.

God knows how you will come out in their official writeup…..probably as a prostitute.

I wrote that in jest, but now reading it a chill passes through me.

The poison pens scratch busily as you read this, and jealousy is a horrid thing my love.

Well Mary my angel, that’s about it.

Its time for this old revolutionary to fall away from your side for the last time.

Im packing up my things and heading out to a place called Masada – seems my old Sicarii colleagues intend making a last stand and kicking some Roman ass, so maybe its time for one last stand for these old bones. They are anticipating victory…..Im predicting a slaughter.

I’m too old and bitter now, so maybe I’ll use the last of my strength to strike a blow for liberation. At least I will strike a blow for the fall guy.

I will be dead by the time you read this, my only regret I never told you how I truly felt.

I will always love you, and you will always be my Magdalena.

Yours,

Judas “Izzy” Iscariot.




On the outside of the letter:

“This letter was discovered in the belongings of body of a man found run over by a cart or chariot on the road to Masada, Outer Judea.
Our investigations into the incident are concluded, but we are at a loss to positively identify his killer, accidental or no.
Our investigations showed he was a travelling merchant of means, and had left payment and instructions with an innkeeper to carry this letter to you. We forward this under its original seal, unopened as a sign of respect to your dead friend.

We forward it to you as a courtesy of the Administratus Judea, Roman Empire.


Under the seal of M Licinius Varro

Secretary to T Flavius Vespasianus. Governor, Judea.

S.P.Q.R.”

[hhfarang]

Brilliant read Sandman, and a great new twist to an old story. Your knowledge of the Bible and of human nature both show in that story.

That is worthy of publish in an unbiased short story periodical. I can't wait for your next one!

[Vital Spark]

Blimey! Now I know why I only got a 'D' in my (compulsory )Religious Studies O Level. I only wish that my cross-eyed teacher had had the same level of humour and cynisism.

VS

[Khundon1975]

Sandman

EXCELLENT brightened up my Monday morning.