My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

siege begins. There’s profit in war, and nothing else. Only—Simon, has it ever occurred to you why we free our slaves after seven years?”
    â€œIt’s the law,” I said, “and it’s always been that way. For we were ourselves slaves in Egypt—and how can you forget?”
    â€œThe Adon would answer me like that,” Judas smiled. “Egypt was a long time ago. But consider—instead of three, there are four kinds of people on this earth, the slaves, those who own them, the mercenaries—and the Jews.”
    â€œWe hold slaves,” I said.
    â€œAnd we free them—marry them, make them a part of us. Why is it that we don’t have mercenaries?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I never thought of it.”
    â€œYet we don’t. And when war comes, when the Syrian or the Greek or the Egyptian comes down on our land, we take our knives and our bows and go out to meet them, a rabble against their trained, armored murderers, against their faceless men who were born for war, bred for war—and live only for war. And they cut us to pieces, the way they would have cut us to pieces in Modin the other day.”
    â€œWe can’t have mercenaries,” I said after a while. “If you hire mercenaries, you must make war; otherwise, where will the money come from to pay them? We fight only to defend our land. If we fight as the nokri fight, as the strangers fight, for gold and for slaves, then we will be like them.”
    â€œI could break Apelles in two,” Judas mused. “I could squeeze him like a ripe melon. Never has he done a day’s work, used a muscle. When he bathes, a slave lifts his parts—providing he has any—to dry beneath them. Yet he comes with eighty mercenaries, and the power of eighty thousand stand behind him.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œAnd he calls me a dirty Jew—and he slaps my father’s face—and he cuts the throat of a little girl; and this he does in three hundred villages, and I remain silent.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œUntil it’s more than we can bear, and we go out like a rabble against them—and they slaughter us.”
    What could I say, but to stare at this brother of mine who saw it as I had never seen it?
    â€œWe don’t keep slaves,” Judas went on evenly, “because when you hold slaves, you must have mercenaries to hold them down, and you must have gold to pay your mercenaries—and you must always war, always, because there is never enough gold—until someone else is stronger, and then you must have the walls of a city to wrap around you. And we have none of those things, neither cities nor slaves nor gold nor mercenaries.”
    â€œWe have none of those things,” I agreed.
    â€œOnly our land. But there must be a way, a way to fight without being slaughtered, a way to turn our land into walls. There must be a way.”
    ***
    Early one morning, I woke in the gray part of life, in that absolute pause between day and night which is, as the Rabbis tell us, a perpetual reminder of the time when there was only the void—unbroken, unseparated, neither day nor night nor month nor year. We slept, as always, in the big single room of our house, on the floor on our pallets, my brothers and I and the Adon, only five of us now that John had married. I rolled over on my side and saw the Adon standing before the window, a dark silhouette—and in his hand he held the sword of Pericles, which he must have taken from its hiding place under the roof beams during the night. As I watched, almost without a sound, he drew the sword from its scabbard and held it—not as a man holds a strange thing. Minutes went by, and he stood there, holding the bare sword, yet I felt neither fear nor apprehension, only a deep curiosity as to what lay in his mind, so old, so closely wedded already to the minds of all the old men, all the