Judas Read Free Page B

north.”
    Mother’s eyes were wet from remembering.
    A man in the caravan, an Egyptian, took a fancy to her. Zakis left his home in Alexandria and traveled north to Caesarea to work as a designer and maker of mosaics. He was very proud of his skill and, to amuse her and some of their fellow travelers, he took a handful of small tiles and, in a wink of an eye, created a picture of a camel or the face of one of his onlookers. His hands would fly about the stones like swallows in the evening. The people clapped and smiled when he finished.
    They, Mother and Zakis, got along and one night, abandoning any lingering hopes she had of finding my father, we moved into his tent. It is from Zakis that Dinah received her golden curls. He moved us into the shop in Caesarea and worked there for a while, making floors for rich and important people. Then one day, he disappeared just like my father. I do not remember much about him, just that he seemed kind and smiled a lot.
    Not long after he left, a rich merchant came by to commission a floor. Mother persuaded him to stay for a honey cake and some fruit. An hour later, a bargain struck, he took Zakis’ place, though he did not live with us. She managed to meet his friends and when he, in turn, vanished, it was a simple matter for her to adopt a new way of life. That was when Mother began entertaining.
    I did not understand the position it put us in at first. As a child, it was enough that we lived together and knew some measure of security. Later I grew to resent it and the burdens it placed on us.
    “Judas, do not be angry with me. It is all that is left for me to do. I am unclean in the eyes of the Law. No one else will have me.”
    “It is a stupid law then. Only stupid people would make such a stupid law.”
    Mother gave me a look, not of anger, as I expected, but of fear. Not fear of some heavenly retribution, but rather for what might become of me. She had no family to turn to, and the thought that her son, born half pagan, might acquire the other half, made her tremble. I would not know that until later, of course. At the age of eight I had no real sense of it. To me there were the pagan gods and goddesses and then there was Mother’s and the two never seemed to meet. It remained a mystery to me how all the other gods and goddesses seemed to get along very nicely and had not much to say about how people lived, and certainly not who or what was acceptable, but they were never able to join with Mother’s, who did.
    ***
     
    I have red hair, my only inheritance from my father. Not the gold-red they say King David had, but just red, like the “hennaed whores of Babylon.” One of Mother’s friends said that. He meant me and assumed I would not know because he thought me too young to understand. People called my mother a whore but I thought, childishly, that it could not be true because her hair was as black as obsidian.
    My father soon became the pebble in my sandal. I learned to hate the man who left us and drove my mother into the life she led. I chafed at the thought of being the illegitimate son of someone named Ceamon. There is no Ceamon in this part of the world so it became what it sounded like, Simon. Simon the Red, because of his hair. Skyr is the way we say it—red. No one called me Judas bar Simon. My status did not allow me the use of my father’s name. I had no father and, therefore, no patronymic. I became Judas Iscariot, Judas the Red, like my father, no, like my grandfather. I would never be like my father, but I ached to be like my grandfather, to be a hero.

Chapter Four
     
    “We are going to the harbor,” Mother announced, jaw set and determined. “We are going to put an end to this madness.”
    I had just dashed home from another encounter with some boys from the north end of town, my nose bleeding.
    “Mother, they threw stones.” I tried not to cry. I was, after all, the man in the house and it would not do to cry.
    “Yes, I know,” she said, and