Free The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman Page B

here, a young girl, she could plead for him.
     She could not leave.
    “The danger has passed, father,” she said, “the square is quiet. Rest, and when you are able to walk we will go together.”
    “Run,” he kept saying, “run now.”
    His fingers and his legs were cold. He was shivering. Crawling on the floor, she brought more sacks and covered him. The shivering
     diminished. He moved onto his side and began to breathe more slowly and evenly. He was sleeping—a true sleep, not a faint.
    There was a sound from the square like the sound of trees being felled. A great cracking sound. She wondered if the Romans
     had brought battering rams. There was a low, rumbling roar, like the sea heard from far off. She put her eye to the shutter
     again.
    The Romans had set the Hippodrome on fire. The bottom part of the structure was stone, but the upper floors and galleries,
     the parts where the Jews had climbed, were wood. And the wood was crackling flame, like the altar of the Temple, like the
     smell of the burning sacrifices, the wood was on fire.
    She saw that a great host of men had retreated to the very roof of the Hippodrome, where the clay tiles were not yet aflame.
     But there was no way down. The ladders had burned and no building was near enough the Hippodrome to jump. They were going
     to burn to death there, on the flat roof of the building. Some of the men were clinging to each other and some were on their
     knees praying and some were shaking and tearing their clothes and hair. She saw one man take five paces back from the edge
     of the roof and run forward, as if trying to jump to the next, but it was too far and he fell to the stone floor and did not
     move again.
    There were others who joined him soon enough, jumping from the roof to escape a death by flames. She saw some as the fire
     crept up the wooden structure draw their swords and fall on them. And some did not jump and did not take a blade to end their
     lives but waited or tried to climb down through the flames and their cries were the loudest and most anguished of all. She
     had heard it said that a man who died as a martyr to Rome would be rewarded by heaven. The growling, unquenchable fire sent
     bright sparks up to the skies and she remembered how the life of a lamb goes back to its maker while the flesh remains here
     on earth, but the cries were so loud that after a time she could not think of anything else.
    The square between the stables and the Hippodrome was stone and marble. The flames did not extend across them. She watched
     through the night, ready to drag her father behind her if he could not move himself and the flames jumped to the buildings
     nearby. But they did not. The soldiers had made a neat job of it. And the rain, coming and going, helped a little. The fire
     burned out while it was still night, leaving just blackened stumps of wood poking up into the sky from the stone base. Before
     dawn the next morning, Miryam shook her father until he woke and, stumbling, dizzy, crawling sometimes, he came with her to
     the house of his brother Elihu.
    They stayed in her uncle’s house then seventeen days, not daring to leave even to find food or to hear the news of what had
     passed in Jerusalem. They had the well, and wheat flour and dried fruit enough to live on, and her father grew stronger every
     day. He and her uncle agreed they must not go into the country—the Romans would be looking for anyone who fled Jerusalem,
     guilty or innocent. Anyone trying to leave the city would be branded a criminal and a traitor. Especially a man with fresh
     wounds showing.
    When at last her father was well enough to attempt the long journey, and Elihu had made inquiries about the best time to attempt
     the gates and the best lies to tell there, they left. They went in the early morning. The soldiers at the Double Gate asked
     them what business they had and Miryam replied, as her father and uncle had schooled her, that they were citizens of