I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given to the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows – pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised. So you may lick your lips in anticipation of being, as it were, vicariously corrupted at the hands of your author. It is all too possible that the practice of literature is a mode of depravity rightly to be condemned. But, as is well known, literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift: it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing. Let us then, in the interest of allaying the boredom of this our life, agree to our complementary damnations. My damnation is, of course, greater than yours, since I am the initiator and you are merely the receptor of evil recordings. Moreover, you may throw this book into the fire if your disgust becomes too great; I am committed to writing it. Take another cup of wine and accept that we human beings are a bad lot.
My father was Azor the son of Sadoc, and I am Sadoc the son of, necessarily, Azor. In our family there has always been a feeble alternation of names, grandfather tossing the ball to grandson, and the custom goes back to time’s mists. Looking like want of imagination, it probably has more to do with ancient spells, taboos, threats, conditions of inheritance, pacts with gods. I have no legitimate sons, nor have I much respect for tradition, but, were I to be a wave of the onflowing family river and not its ultimate dam, I would feel a certain superstitious fear about breaking the binary heritage. Names in our family, anyway, have always been the dull meat which we have left to others to sauce with sobriquets. My short fat father, in many ways the unluckiest man alive, was called Psilos, tall, Leptos, thin, and, which means primarily fortunate, Makarios. I have been nicknamed in my time Megas, big, and Onigros, donkey, both in reference to an endowment it would be unseemly to specify here. Having spent much of my life as a shipping clerk, headachy with manifests, squinty with the damnable green sea our wicked stepmother beyond the godowns, my spare time consumed in the, alas, overly promiscuous exploitation of the endowment and another activity, more of a passivity, which earned me the nickname Dipsa, I have come, my yapping pack of diseases in tow, to retire far inland. I live in a rundown villa on an upland over a lake in the province of Helvetia, where the agencies of Domitian’s bad version of empire leave me alone, save for an annual visit from the tax collector. For him I must convert one of my sheep or goats to sesterces and slaughter another for his entertainment.
I spend these last painracked days gazing on the misted Alps or else their hoods of snow and setting down what my father, before he died of the bite of a pack of ailments more vicious than my own, imposed as a filial duty – namely, the completion of a chronicle he began with his tale of the career of Yehoshua Naggar or Iesous Marengos. Both these names mean the carpenter Jesus. I write in Greek as he did, though you may be reading me in another language of the Empire. My Greek is not the tongue of Homer or Aeschylus but a sloppy ungrammatical sabir lacking Attic salt and tending to a saccharinity which sets my teeth on edge. This property is not in the writer but in the language. I could have written in Latin or even Aramaic, though my spelling of the latter is shaky. I know also a debased kind of Punic, but the things of Carthage have long gone under the earth or the sea. Whoever translates this, if it is ever to be translated, may be rendering me into the barks of the Goths or the cooings of the Celts, by grace of the alphabet of Rome. Latin itself is too cold and legalistic: even the pornography of Petronius reads like a series of court depositions. I have never had much love of Latin – all, in my life, orders and requisitions and rebukes, cold as executioner’s steel.
Some of you may know my father’s book on the giant who claimed to be God’s son and thundered or wheedled, according to circumstances, of the new way. This new way my father sought to follow as an ethic while rejecting the theology behind it. I have inherited his scepticism concerning such doctrines as eternal punishment and reward, holding it as monstrous that any human enactment should be deemed worthy of either, and, more than anything, the tomfoolery of physical resurrection and life after death. Who, I ask you, wants to drag his bones out of the earth, reclothed in flesh which, in some foul magic of reversal, is regurgitated by the worms, in order that his eyes may see God, who, unless he is really the Emperor Domitian, is by definition unseeable? Who, I ask you, wants to live for ever?
We are not important enough for such transfiguration, nor, wicked though we certainly are, are we wicked enough for eternal fire. I have lived enough and am ready any time for the grand quietus. Life has had its moments of keen pleasure but there has been far more pain. The pain, in what you may regard as my perverted theology, is the work of God, and the pleasure, which all God’s scriptures ban, is the benison of some demiurge too slippery for God to seize and choke. When Jesus spoke of God’s love I do not think he could have been referring to the burly and capricious Jehovah the Hebrews worship in fear, for the scriptural record of his participation in man’s affairs shows much vindictiveness but little charity. Jesus was referring, conceivably, to a God who could, as it were, be forced into existing by the pressure of human belief in him, a spiritual counterpart of himself. Or perhaps his God was a metaphor of the only thing that will save the world – the exercise of decency, tolerance and humorous scepticism.
You will find, I expect, recurring through my narrative the fine phrase una nox dormienda, which I take from Catullus. Only the poets seem to be able to lend humanity and sweetness to that rigid language of the law, but the poets have not been well liked by the guardians of empire, unless, as with Virgil, it was empire that they pretended to sing. Ovid was sent into exile for poeticising about pleasure, and Catullus died too young for the full force of Roman virtus to punish him for singing of kisses. Una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its palliations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure. This life of the body, perhaps tolerable for a senior clerk in a shipping company, is a torment for the enslaved, the captive, the deformed and the chronically sick, and it has been chiefly these who have drunken most thirstily of the Nazarene doctrine of a new life. Let them believe what their wretchedness bids them believe: they will find the una nox dormienda like the rest of us. In their eagerness to reward themselves and punish their enemies (of which Nature herself is one), they miss the essential truth of the new way, which has to do with the foundation and growth of an earthly society called somewhat extravagantly the Kingdom of Heaven. The members of this society pledge themselves to play what my father called the lusus amoris or game of love, though he considered agape or ahavah a more appropriate term than amor, which sounds like Roman patricians taking exercise after a day in camp or court. The game of trying to love one’s enemies is the only practical response to injustice and cruelty. The insight which was responsible for propounding this truth was, one is tempted to think, superhuman. The claim of the primal gamesman of love to be the son of God represents a fine metaphor, but the assertion may contain a literal signification that time, with man’s help, has yet to realise.
I propose, on this grey and unseasonable day of a month that has so far done homage to its presiding goddess Maia with soaked greenery and shrewd winds, the Alps shrouded and the thrushes silent, five dripping ewes and a heavily ballocked ram nibbling forlornly in the scant shelter of my poplar and my arbutus, to begin to set down what I can of the story of the spreading of the ground rules of the love game in the kingdom of the wicked. I shall start with the events that followed upon the supposed death of its founder and end with the terrible time of the Vesuvian eruption which, destroying two fine cities, reminded us all that, though there may be a mother empire and even a mother church, there is an older and more capricious mother who nourishes her children without love and without enmity bids them perish. From the ashes of Pompeii there appears to be no resurrection. When man dies in the body his soul dies too. The temples go down and the tablets and scrolls of the various faiths, and the gods are shown to be impotent. Men, however, must try to live against all the odds and set up rules for living. Nature does not understand these rules, nor do human tyrants. Perhaps what cannot be wholly understood cannot wholly be destroyed. This is a feeble article of faith to begin with, but it helps to push my pen through this exordium and what now follows. Those of you who already yawn at what seems to be a moral tone will get your wickedness soon enough. One never has to wait long for wickedness.
Concerning the resurrection of Jesus, everyone must believe what he can. For my part, I will not accept miracles if the rational lies to hand, and I have no proof that Jesus died on the cross. He was, by all accounts, a man of immense stature and strength with huge lungs rendered the more powerful by the practice of a kind of oratory. He was certainly nailed to a cross by the wrists and feet, his body left to leap like a stranded fish to gasp in what air it could, but when exhaustion came death was still some way off, for those vast lungs, in the control of the muscles of a powerful midriff, still held enough air to sustain life. His legs were not broken, as we know, and the spear that pierced his side seems to have ruptured no inner organ. It was as a whole man that he was removed from that tree of shame, with full vitality in brief abeyance but ready to be restored after a healing sleep. It was no great act of strength for such a colossus to shove aside the stone that served as a door to his tomb, and it was like his humour to replace that stone. To speak of his resurrection, as all his followers did, was to abet no trickery: tombs are for dead men, and when a man seemingly dead is lain in one his lively egress may be termed a resurrection. A prophecy had been satisfactorily fulfilled, the Son of Man or of God had rebuilt his temple after three days in the sepulchre. But if death is defined as the cessation of breathing and the stilling of the heart, with the consequent onset of fleshly decay, then no man has risen from the dead, not even Lazarus. Lazarus’s sleep was exceptionally long and sound, and to restore him to animation was an act of thaumaturgy of a kind, but the breaking of the seal of death, even if it were possible, would surely be a blasphemy against the Creator-Destroyer who inexorably stamped it.
This resurrected or reawakened Jesus appeared to many – first to a common prostitute, next, so some say, to Pontius Pilate in his cups, and then to two of the least of his followers, Cleopas and Zachaeus, the latter a Jerusalem fishmonger who smelt of his trade. Jesus was always close to fishmen, catchers and buyers and sellers, and soon became identified, through typical Nazarene wordplay, with a fish. Cleopas and Zachaeus had been thrown into jail for a brief spell during the Passover that was just ended on a charge of making ugly faces at a Roman decurion. In fact, Zachaeus had been showing Cleopas a bad back tooth that ached and Cleopas had been making a rictus of sympathy. One of the prison guards knew Zachaeus well enough, or at least his fish, and release, though without apology, had, at leisure, followed. The two humble Nazarenes, as the followers of Jesus of Nazareth were beginning to be called, had missed the crucifixion and were in time only to witness the dismantling of the great cross and its two smaller fellows by a Roman workforce, the wrenching out of nails and hurling timbers to the Jerusalem dust with coarse soldiers’ cries of Pone in culum, fili scorti and the like. Cleopas and Zachaeus saw also a blind man being led by a boy to the site of execution, a beggar not too sure whether to retain blindness as his trade or consent to have a healing act performed upon him. He had come, in his blessed innocence, to Golgotha or Skull Hill to discuss the matter with Jesus, having heard that he was the centre of attention there. But now, ‘God knows best,’ he kept saying, ‘God wants me blind, all is providential, blessed be the name of the All High. Pity the poor blind, fair gentlemen and lovely ladies.’
Another beggar, one in rancid rags and with a halo of flies, sidled up to the two, nodding. He lived mostly on stews of fish heads and guts donated by the kindly Zachaeus. He said:
‘Your man’s dead and your man’s alive again. You missed it all.’
‘Alive again?’
‘Shoved him in one of those tombs cut out of the rock and he’s not there no more. The corpse got lifted out during the night, bribery, some of those one-eyed Syrian guards will do anything for money, and now the story is he walked out large as life grinning all over his beard and they’ve got him hidden somewhere. Stands to reason. The priests would get him for coming back to life, which is against the law, and the Romans would nail him up again and make a better job of it next time. That’s the story. Of course, it’s a trick and a good one, like all his tricks was. He’s dead all right.’
‘Do you know,’ Cleopas asked, ‘where the others are?’
‘Others? The one for each tribe bar one, you mean? Some say one thing and some say another. They reckon five or six of them went off to Emmaeus, that’s that dungheap seven miles out of town. Lying low, sort of. The rest are sort of scattered. A sort of council of war, making up their minds what to do. It’s not too healthy here in Jerusalem for those that knew him. They want that dead corpse and they want it quick.’
A cart was being loaded with the uprights and crosspieces and a titulus with IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM scrawled on it. A bucket of water sluiced the area. A sponge, an empty wine flask, the skeleton of a fish, blood, evidences of life to be cleared away by the Roman passion for order. They yelled for free passage for the cart through the city gateway. Cleopas and Zachaeus took the road. They left the city in light rain which became briefly heavy, pushing through the crowds, jostled by police and crying chapmen with handcarts, avoiding donkeydroppings and cowdung and horse-merds, coming out into sweeter air and, soon, weak sunlight. On the road a Roman maniple swung by, sin dex sin dex, with a couple of chained and bloodied prisoners. Cleopas and Zachaeus hid, till it passed, in a clump of dead olives. It was more than halfway to Emmaeus that a big man in a hood and cloak came out of nowhere and gave them a cheery shalom. Where going then? I too. Walk together? Why not? What news then in the great city?
Cleopas and Zachaeus looked warily at the man and at each other. A Roman spy, deliberately chosen for his bulk, face hidden, talking Aramaic like a foreigner. But knowing the scriptures as no foreigner should. They trained them well these days.
‘Well, if this was truly the Messiah prophesied in the sacred writings he had of necessity to rise from the dead. The prophecies have to be fulfilled. Believe he was what he said he was and you have to believe that he went into the underworld for three days, there to ransom the good men who died before he came to redeem them, and then in the flesh returned to the world of the flesh.’ Cleopas and Zachaeus now knew that this was no spy but the man himself. How were they supposed to respond? This was one of his games, in which you were to pretend to be ignorant of his identity until he gave you the key. But he had given the key already. In his hood and cloak, marching towards Emmaeus at a pace they panted to keep up with, the stranger gave them many chapters and even more verses, citing all the prophets until the brains of Zachaeus and Cleopas whirled enough to make them forget the pains in the soles of their hurrying feet. But Zachaeus’s bad back tooth did not forget its master and shot a twinge at him coinciding with Jeremiah IX iii. The stranger saw his grimace and said: ‘This citing of scripture gives you pain?’
‘It’s a back tooth, a grinder. I have to have it out.’
‘You seek a tooth surgeon in Emmaeus? You would have been wiser to have it drawn in the big city.’
‘In Emmaeus,’ Cleopas said, ‘we seek the chief of the companions of Jesus. Might we ask why you’re going there?’
‘Country air and a country meal in an inn and a night’s meditation. I am what you might term a thinking man.’
‘A reading one too,’ Zachaeus winced.
‘You have to load your brain with the thought of the past before you can hatch thoughts about the future. So. Here it is.’ Meaning Emmaeus, a miserable small town of naked children chasing scrawny hens. An old man sat outside a cottage door whence floated garlicky oil fumes. He watched their arrival, sucking few teeth. The inn had a collapsed thatch. The last drops of the late rain made the surface of the water in the bucket in the eating room set for the rain’s indrip gently shimmer. Anybody from Jerusalem been around? Not that I know of, the landlord said. Had some troops in taking prisoners, spitting good wine on the floor and not paying for it. You say from? These were going to. What will it be then? A jug of red and fish on the coals. Bread’s brick hard with there being no baking these last days. Take what comes is what I say.
The three ate their supper not in the eating room with its melancholy raindrip but at a table set in the garden, a weedy neglected affair full of mewing kittens, the sunset a free show of crimson, green, purple, spilt eggyolk. It was when the talkative stranger reached for the winejug that Zachaeus saw. His tooth was not shocked into quiescence by the sight of the dark red wound. They had both known, of course. Cleopas said: ‘So it really happened.’
‘Oh yes, it happened.’
‘And we …’ Cleopas began to choke on a fishbone. The stranger who was no stranger hit him kindly thrice on the back. Cleopas spat out the bone on to his trencher. ‘Thanks. We, I was trying to say, are the first to know. We’re the least, we’re nothing, and this place is on the road to nowhere.’
‘Casualness, you can say,’ Jesus said. ‘Life being a matter of the casual. You’re not quite the first to know. There was a reformed prostitute firsthand then—never mind. No trumpets, so to speak. No flamboyance, except in that sunset over your shoulder. There’s something Roman about a sunset. Never despise the casual. You are custodians of the truth and sowers of the word as much as any of them. You, your toothache is a warning of worse pain—’
‘Zachaeus is my name, Zachaeus.’
‘I know your name and I know your trade, you smell of it. The bad time’s coming, the time when you’ll be questioned about love. Let’s finish this jug and have more.’
‘Love?’ Cleopas gulped.
‘Of course. You will preach love to the world and the world will think there’s a catch in it. For love you will be whipped, flayed, clawed, burnt, nailed to a tree. I preached nothing but love.’
It grew dark. Zachaeus shivered as the night wind rose. ‘You had skill in it,’ he said. ‘Preaching the word, that is. Have skill still, I mean, in preaching, that is. What will you do? Lord,’ he added.
‘I’ve done my work,’ Jesus said. ‘I leave the world soon. Your world. A whisper of encouragement, there is no death and so on, and then – best not to ask where I go. Go, yes, but in a manner stay. I am on this table.’ They saw that his hands were but saw that he meant more. ‘In the bread, brickhard though it is, and in this wine where, see, the vinegar-making mother is already at work. It’s all quite simple. Believe, when you take both, that I am in them. I am on this table, in your mouths, dissolved in your stomachs, becoming your flesh and the spirit the flesh serves, excreted, yes, but daily renewed. When wine ends and bread ends the world ends. Till then I’ll be there. That is a truth as love is a truth, but more important than the truth is the game you will play. The game of taking bread and wine and tasting me in your mouths. The game of trying to love, because love is not easy. But it is the only answer.’
‘What now?’ Zachaeus asked. His tooth sang viciously. ‘Tonight, I mean. I don’t like the look of this darkness.’
Jesus understood. ‘Yes, the enemy lurking in it, the eyes of bad beasts in the woods and carrion birds untimely awake in the branches. Nothing to fear. The beasts will roll at our feet to be tickled and the enemy will know love. Stay the night here and then go back to Jerusalem. I have to go, there are others to see. They too must be sent back to Jerusalem.’
‘So they are near here?’ Cleopas said.
‘Yes, in an old farmhouse. I must have words with them. They are to go to Nicodemus’s house in Gethsemane, if they can bear the smell of treachery there. I will pay the reckoning for you and go. Though, as I told you, I also stay. In that bit of hard bread that is left and these red dregs. So take my blessing while I take my leave.’
Both Cleopas and Zachaeus felt that the night whose falling had all their lives been a friendly summons to sleep had now become a malevolent visitation bearing no seeds of sunrise. ‘Stay with us,’ Cleopas said urgently. ‘Don’t leave us, Lord.’
‘I stay and I go.’ And he went, paying the reckoning on the way. Who had given him money? The reformed prostitute?
It seemed to Zachaeus, though he recognised the unworthiness of the thought, that it would have been a good gesture on the part of the resurrected to ease that flaming tooth. Meditatively and with his fingers shaky, he probed his dry mouth. The tooth was loose and, as he finger and thumbed it, it grew looser. He rocked it like a screaming child in a cradle. He felt confident that by morning, if morning were ever to come, he might well have it out. There were things that a man could sometimes do for himself.
‘Questioned about love,’ Cleopas brooded. ‘I don’t like it.’
The kinds of love enacted on the island of Caprae were not of a sort that anyone durst question. This refuge of the Emperor Tiberius was also called Capri, but it was nicknamed Caprineum, meaning a place of goatish lust. Here let us meet Tiberius Claudius Nero, called from his youth Biberius Caldius Mero, meaning boozer of neat hot wine. A man of orgies, who would hardly accept a dinner invitation unless assured that the waiting girls would all be naked, who promoted a nobody to the quaestorship because he could down a quart tankard without taking breath, who made Flaccus governor of Syria and Piso prefect of the city of Rome because they were all-night guzzlers and swillers, he is, in his seventies, aware of failing appetites, especially in the area of what he would call love, and needs a variety of stimulants.
See him now waking late in the presence of a large picture of Atalanta and Meleager performing the rite of fellatio, whimpering because he cannot attain a swift fore-breakfast emission with a catamite whom he has lashed for his failure to arouse the requisite rush of lust, gulping cheese, wine and the feathery bread his baker has learnt from the Arabs, then going to look upon his spintriae. These are boys and girls garnered from all over the Empire for their skill in unnatural coits, and he sets them to copulating in triads to whip up his difficult desires. Then he visits the woods and spinneys, where there are Pans and Syringes beckoning him into their caves with the lewdest gestures. Now he goes to the sacrifice, there to conceive instant lust for the bearer of incense and his brother the holy trumpeter, haling them out of the temple before the end of the ceremony so that he can bugger them both. It is a dry and fruitless process and he groans. The brothers protest feebly at being so ill used, so he has their legs broken. He hears then that his chief cook’s wife has had a baby, so he has the blind suckling brought to pull on his flaccid penis with its boneless gums, what time the mother wails and is beaten for wailing. Then it is time for him to swim in his warmed marble piscina, with the little boys he calls his minnows darting between his spread legs to nibble at his shrunken genitalia. This, O Romans, is your Emperor, successor to the great Augustus.
Dried and wrapped, he sits in the imperial garden, full of stony magnificence. Naked boys and girls from all the provinces save one serve him cooled white wine and morsels of salt fish. Curtius Atticus, an ageing and respectable patrician, comes and is permitted to sit with his Emperor. Curtius has always averted his eyes from Tiberius’s excesses. He is here on Capri to exert what good influence he can on the old goat, but he knows the task is hopeless. It is above all things necessary, in his view, that there should be a ruler in Rome, but there is none, and the Senate is corrupt and impotent. Curtius has recently taken to Stoicism. Tiberius says:
‘You have some more gloomy wisdom for me?’
‘I wouldn’t call it gloomy. The aim of the Stoic philosophy is to dispel gloom.’
‘Only the pleasures of the senses can ease the pains of the spirit,’ Tiberius says in the Greek of Rhodes, where he was once in exile. He nods to one of his secretaries, a fresh-faced clever Greek slave who smiles inwardly at the Doric accent. He has transcribed this same trite maxim at least a dozen times before. The attendants, boys and girls, now strip naked and, to the music of the thrushes in the pines, perform a chaste enough ballet, PNS F TH SPRT, writes the slave.
‘The senses fail,’ Curtius says justly. ‘At your age, our age.’
‘Speak for yourself. And I think you may keep your philosophy to yourself. I was looking at my spintriae earlier this morning, and I note that there is only one race unrepresented among them. I mean the Hebrews. Why,’ he quavered petulantly, ‘does not our procurator at Caesarea send me little presents like the other governors?’
‘Last month there was a shipment of dates and a couple of camels.’
‘The Hebrews are all for truculence and incorruption. That isn’t human, Curtius. I’ve a mind to see some of the younger incorrupt corrupted. We have enough corrupting agencies here. I would like to see some little handsome Jews, boys and girls, wrested slowly of their incorruption. That would be a new pleasure.’
‘May I mention the word duty, Caesar?’
‘You may not. I’m not going back to Rome.’
‘Well, at least perform some of the essential duties from Capri. There are no governors of consular rank in Spain and Syria. The Dacians and Sarmatians are plucking Moesia like a ripe plum. The Germans are in Gaul. In Armenia the Parthians—’
‘Shut up, Curtius. I forbid you to mention these things. Talk to me of the duties of rule when you’ve experienced the burden of rule and the nightmare of treachery. My only concern now is self-preservation. That’s why I’m here. A natural fortress of rock with one well-guarded landing beach. I’m safe. I’ve made sure of that.’
He was indeed safe, but the rocky island was not so impregnable as he thought. Down below, rocking on blue calm, on the other side from the Villa Jovis, a small fishing boat rode a chain’s length from the wall of rock. A hardworking fisherman, gnarled and lean and black with sun, was dragging his netted catch inboard. It was a huge sea perch or morone labrax being nipped by angry crabs. ‘Row in,’ the man said to his boy.
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ He slammed with his fist at the mad despairing eye of the bass, which leapt in its confines like a man on a cross. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this afore?’
‘It’s a big bastard right enough.’
‘Well, it’s going up to him. His worship the Emperor. I’m off up that rockface with it. Plenty of tufts to cling on to. That’ll give him a bit of a surprise that will. What I’ll say is this: From the god of the sea to the god of the world. That’ll show him I’m book read too. There’s many a small man been made big by doing the unexpected. It’s the spirit that made the Empire what it is.’
‘It’s like intruding,’ the boy said. ‘There’s soldiers all over.’
‘Row in, boy.’
Not knowing he had a gift coming, Tiberius was saying: ‘You’ve not seen your own son, heard him howling in his blood while the knives struck and struck and she there, grinning—’
‘With respect, Caesar, you did not see it either.’
‘I see it every night. I wake sweating.’ Drusus, his own son, sitting at the cleared supper table, his wife Livilla playing the game of holding up fingers quickly for the guessing of how many. And then Sejanus, the one man in Rome the Emperor could trust, prefect of the Guard, came in with his killers, and Drusus crawling under the table while Livilla laughed. They dragged him out by the hair and then stabbed and stabbed. Livilla laughed because now she was going to marry Sejanus, and Sejanus was going to be Emperor. Sejanus, trusted master of Rome while his ageing master tasted an earned repose on Capri.
‘And what satisfaction did you find in revenge?’
‘It was retribution, it was—’
‘The whole family?’
The daughter was a mere child, crying: ‘I didn’t mean to be bad. I won’t do it again. Please don’t hurt me.’
And the captain of the detail said to the executioner: ‘This girl’s a virgin presumably. We don’t execute virgins. That’s the law.’
And the executioner: ‘I’ll rape her. Then we can follow the law.’
Tiberius now shakily drained his cup of white wine. Curtius said: ‘Calm, Caesar. Refuse to be moved. Take a calm mind back to Rome. Rome has become a filthy shambles. Macro is worse than Sejanus was. Rome needs its Emperor.’
‘I will not go back to Rome. I will die here. In my bed.’
‘And the succession?’
‘The succession is assured. Gaius has the army behind him. Nobody is going to kill Gaius.’
‘A fish?’ Curtius said. They both looked towards a grinning man, approaching with a monstrous sea perch in his arms. It was kicking still. He was between two guardsmen. They too grinned. The fisherman said:
‘From the divine Neptune a gift for the divine Tiberius.’ He had been practising the new and improved form all the difficult way up the rockface. Tiberius approached, saying:
‘Not so divine if mortal men can climb his Olympus. You guards, you forget your instructions. Throw this man where he came from, fish and all. Then report to your commanding officer for disciplinary action. No – wait. For me, you say? A gift from Neptune? Strange that he doesn’t deliver it personally.’
And he took from the arms of the fisherman the huge fish, staggering under its weight but, despite his age, strong enough to bear it. He smiled, and the fisherman smiled back. Then Tiberius took the fish by its tail in his hands like a flexible club and began to lash the man with it. Sharp scales struck his face like flakes of flint. He screamed, he was wearing blood like a moving mask.
‘If fishermen can get in, so can hired murderers.’ He threw down the battered fish, panting. ‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s saying, sir,’ said one of the guardsmen, ‘that he’s glad he didn’t give you his crabs as well.’
‘Take him,’ Tiberius ordered, with a promptitude that bespoke well the imperial gift of swift decisions, ‘to the fish tanks and set all the crabs upon him. Then throw him back the way he came.’ Curtius held on to his stoicism and his breakfast. So, howling, the fishgiver was hauled off. Tiberius sat. Curtius remained standing. A servant came on flat bare feet bearing a black snake from Sabatum on a velvet cushion. ‘My darling Columba,’ cooed Tiberius, taking it to his bosom. ‘My little pet. The only living creature I can trust. She’s hungry, Metellus. Bring some frogs and mice. Make sure they’re properly alive.’ The snake hissed happily.
Having hurled the screaming fisherman over the rocks, the crabs clinging to his face and head in indifferent viciousness, the two guardsmen reported to their centurion, Marcus Julius Tranquillus. He was a young and decent man, his family of the plebeian branch of the Julian line, in the army as a career, like his father before him, a junior centurion on detachment from the Praetorian Guard. He listened gravely to what they told him and delivered judgement.
‘He expects me to order your execution,’ he said, ‘so we will take it that this has already been done and that your bodies have been at once buried in the communal dump because of the great heat. Take over guard duty near the beach. I will arrange your immediate replacements. You realise, I hope, that you were very foolish.’
‘We knew the man, sir. Drunk with him in the bars. Not an ounce of malice in him. Climbing up those rocks at his age with a struggling fish on his back. Out of respect and love for the Emperor, as he put it. It strikes me nobody can do right these days, sir.’
‘That’s how it strikes you, eh? So that’s how it strikes you. Strikes you that way, does it? All right, dismiss.’
He was a lonely and troubled young man, well built and not unhandsome. He had tried, throughout his brief career, to hold on to certain principles of virtus. A congenital incorruptness had brought few rewards. He had been fortunate enough to be one of the first to pick up certain hints that Sejanus had been responsible for the murder of Drusus, despite Sejanus’s own eager prosecution of a case that at first proferred no solution – the Emperor’s son hacked to pieces and found, a feast for flies, in an alley near the Tiber. Well, great men always had enemies. Farcical trials and executions, no shortage of informers and perjurers. And then a slave had said something to another slave – slaves, having nothing else, had become depositories of honesty; being in theory insentient machines, they heard and saw more than was available to free men – and a love note from Sejanus to the Lady Livilla had been found crumpled under the pillow of a bed that a slave was making, and one thing had led to another. Julius, as acting mess secretary, had been offered this note by a slave in the officers’ kitchen for a hundred sesterces. One thing had led to another, including the rape and execution of an innocent child. The whole of the Praetorian Guard had been rewarded – ten gold pieces a man – for not following Sejanus in his revolt; the legions in Syria had received equal sums for refusing to set specially blessed effigies of Sejanus among their standards. And he, Marcus Julius Tranquillus, had been honoured for his loyalty by this present appointment, forced to warm his hands at the central fire of corruption, madness, danger. But Tiberius could not live much longer. The son of Germanicus was, it was certain, to inherit the purple. Germanicus, adopted son of Tiberius, great soldier, fine man, unfortunately dead untimely in Syria and everyone knew why and how, had no bad blood to transmit to the boy who had been the darling of the military camps. Always in soldier’s boots; they had nicknamed him ‘Little Boots’ Caligula, which meant that, was a name that already made one smile in referred affection. There could be nothing but good in a son of Germanicus.
In one of the outer courts of the Temple, upon which Syrian guards looked down indifferently from Antonia’s Tower, the Rabban Gamaliel discussed with his senior class the dangers of zealotry and the virtues of compromise. ‘Compromise,’ he said. ‘Some of you wrinkle your noses and curl your lips, as though compromise were a dirty word. But it is only through compromise that we may keep the faith alive. We have ruling here in the holy territory of Israel an infidel race with unclean habits and an undisguised contempt for our religious laws. With one stroke of the sword they could sever the silken cord that binds us into one people. With their battering rams they could destroy the Temple. We live uneasily with the Romans, but at least we live.’
‘That is Sadducee talk.’ So spoke Caleb the son of Jacob.
‘What,’ said Seth the son of Zachaeus not the fishman, ‘is wrong with Sadducee talk? If it weren’t for us Sadducees you’d be kissing the little toe of Tiberius’s statue. You’d be burning incense before Jupiter and Mercury and the rest of the godless crew. Rabban Gamaliel is right. Diplomacy is the way. Jewish intelligence can always defeat Roman stupidity. You Zealots would have us all strung up on that hill over there.’
‘Nailed up,’ Stephen shuddered. He was a Greek Jew.
‘Look,’ Caleb said. ‘The Zealots ask only for a restoration of the Jewish birthright. Jewish rule in a Jewish land. Rome grows weak and Rome grows frightened. An old mad Emperor and a Senate full of squawking chickens. Interim rule in Syria, and how long can they hold Syria? Strike at Rome in Palestine and the provincial structure would collapse. Rome wouldn’t send out any legions. The Roman Senate would say good riddance to Judaea and then go off to dinner. Let the Jews rule themselves, they’d say; they were almost more trouble than they were worth.’
‘I think,’ Gamaliel said, ‘that you underestimate the Roman appetite for power. I see no sign of debility in Pontius Pilatus. His Syrian troops would rush in and eat your Zealots for breakfast.’
‘Some say,’ Stephen said, ‘that he saw the light.’
‘If you mean the Galilean,’ Caleb said, ‘it was a very short-lived light.’
‘A short-lived light for all his followers.’ This was Saul, a young man already growing bald, his eyes in dark caves, the frontal lobes unnaturally bulging. ‘We’ve had a succession of these false prophets, almost one a year in the last ten or so. Most of them knew the scriptures, I’ll say that. The scriptures drove them mad. But this one was an ignorant carpenter burbling about love.’
‘A carpenter’s trade,’ Gamaliel said slyly, ‘is not inferior to a tentmaker’s.’
‘If I make tents,’ Saul said, ‘it is in accordance with our Jewish tradition. We must all work with our hands. But I think of myself first as a scholar.’
‘He was a scholar too,’ Stephen said. ‘The scriptures were never out of his mouth. And what was wrong with burbling about love, as you put it?’
‘I’ll tell you what was wrong and what is wrong,’ Caleb said. ‘By love he meant submission, turning the other cheek, putting up with foreign injustice. He countenanced tyranny. He said nothing about a free Israel.’
‘Caleb, my son,’ Gamaliel said, ‘admit there was something in what he preached. We must change ourselves before we change our systems of secular rule. Man’s soul comes first.’
‘A soul in chains,’ Caleb said, as was to be expected, bitterly.
‘The chains are personal sin, not foreign oppression. Don’t disparage love. Love is a thing we all have to learn, and through hardship and bitterness too. On a practical level, it may well be that love will save us. We Jews play into Roman hands by hating each other – Pharisee against Sadducee, Zealot against both. Sect against sect, tribe against tribe, division not unity.’
‘So you,’ Saul said, ‘are becoming a Galilean?’
‘Like you, Saul,’ Gamaliel said, ‘I belong to the Pharisees. At least I accept the doctrine of resurrection. As for the narrowness, the xenophobia of small farmers – that’s another matter. But God forbid that I should approve the blasphemy of his desperate claim to be—the very thought of the words makes me shudder – I cannot utter them.’
‘The Son of God,’ Stephen said. ‘The Messiah. Well, a Messiah was prophesied.’
‘Is, Stephen,’ Saul said. ‘Is prophesied.’
‘An endless is, I see. We believe in the coming of the Messiah, but anyone who claims to be the Messiah is condemned and put to death. Must it always be so?’
‘Yes,’ Caleb said. ‘So long as you live under a foreign power that puts down free speech. So long as the holy Jewish council is in the control of a sect that loves the Romans.’
‘You will take that back,’ Seth said with heat. ‘That is a lie and a calumny. That is a gross insult to the guardians of the faith—’
‘Enough, enough,’ Gamaliel said mildly. ‘Can we discuss nothing in rational calm? Let us think always in terms of the things that unite, not divide. We are all Jews and we must stop these dissensions. You may sneer at love as you sneer at compromise – but find me some other answer.’ And he dismissed the class.
The class became a little mob of high-spirited youths as soon as it touched the secular life of the street – a roaring camel, a donkey bonneted in flies, hucksters. Seth and Caleb wrangled still, however. Caleb said: ‘You licker of Roman arses. God bless the Emperor Tiberius and all the little boys that he buggers. Kick us, your exalted divinity, lay it on real hard.’
‘That’s stupid, and you know it,’ Seth said. ‘Do you really think I like these foreign louts with their spears and eagles and hairy legs? I stand for a free Israel too, but we won’t get it by spitting at their shadows—’
‘May the Roman eagle spread its wings,’ Caleb jeered.
‘Till it splits its—’
‘Sycophantic Sadducee.’
‘Xenophobic Zealot.’
And then they began to push each other in high good humour. They started to wrestle. Saul held their coats, cheering on neither. A weary non-commissioned officer from the Italia legion in Caesarea, posted to Jerusalem to keep the Syrian troops in order, paused with his dusty maniple to watch the wrestling match. Disturbance. Jewish noise. One of those two Jewboys had got the other on the ground in the dust. What they called public disorder. There were onlookers roaring and cheering. Time to step in. He stepped in.
‘All right, enough of that,’ he said in bad Aramaic. ‘If you Jews want to fight join the Roman army. Not that we’d have you. Come on, get off home. You, get up.’
He meant Caleb, but Caleb had twisted his ankle and made the ascent slowly and in pain. The non-commissioned officer grabbed him by the collar of his sweaty robe. Caleb spoke unwisely. He said:
‘Keep your filthy Roman paws off, you uncircumcised pig.’
‘Uncircum—whatever it was. Pig I know. Chasir means sus, doesn’t it? Nasty, very. Dirty lot, you Jews, aren’t you?’
Caleb unwisely hit out. He was encouraged by the sight of a little gang of known Zealots in the crowd. Action. You had to act sometime, no good just talking about action.
‘All right. You’re under arrest. Disaffection, disorder, insult to the occupying forces. Come on.’ Saul intervened. Saul said:
‘Excuse me, officer – he’s a little overwrought. See, he’s in pain. Surely an apology would be enough.’
‘And who and what are you?’
‘Who doesn’t matter. But I’m a Roman citizen.’
‘You’re a Jew.’
‘Yes, a Jew. But also a citizen of Rome. Lucius Saul Paulus, if you must know my name. The name is enrolled in the praetorium—’
‘Look, sir, if that’s what you’re to be called, we have our duty. This one has to be taught a lesson. He’ll learn it while he’s looking down from that hill up there. Come on, you.’
As he started to drag Caleb off, the little gang of Zealots thought they might as well erupt now. Five Syrian privates and a fattish red-haired Roman. Seven Jews more than a match. Then a bucina grated from the watchtower. Reinforcements on their way. Fists and clubs against swords and spears. A rangy Zealot clubbed the non-commissioned officer briefly. Then a panting maniple got its spears to work. A quieted riot, not much of a riot.
‘You’re here in time for some rough justice, sir,’ Quintilius said. Pilate had just arrived from Caesarea. Dusty, hot, tired, he took a swig from the winejug kept cooled under a statue of Mercury, patron of thieves. ‘A Jewish riot to celebrate your arrival.’
‘Started again, have they? Been suspiciously quiet for too long.’
‘A synagogue student spat on the uniform, used insulting language, blasphemed against the Emperor, resisted arrest. Then it started. None killed. But a Roman soldier severely wounded.’
‘Yes yes yes yes yes yes. That last letter from the island of Capri said something about our skill in maintaining tranquillity in Palestine. Have we, in your informed opinion, Quintilius, shown such skill?’
They surveyed each other without warmth. Pilate had to go carefully with his deputy, who was, Pilate knew, intriguing in long letters for the governorship of Syria. Too friendly with the Jews, to be construed as a capacity for cooperating with men of compromise who would help keep down a growing dissidence. A bribetaker, but one who regarded a bribe as a gratuity for which he would do nothing in return. The givers of bribes retained their innocence, hopelessly believed you could bargain with Rome. He, Pontius Pilatus, had been a protégé of the late Sejanus. He had written friendly letters to Sejanus, wishing him all that he wished himself. Those letters would be on file. He, Pilate, had not made himself indispensable. The procuratorship of Judaea was no plum. He was due for retirement soon. He wished to resign into a sinecure, a numinous Roman presence in a mild climate, one who did not even have to sign papers. He felt hopeless. Quintilius was, as ever, smiling and foxy, saying:
‘Well, procurator, there’s been no call to bring in reinforcements from Syria. It’s been a matter more of policing than of invoking martial law. Of course, the ill-smelling gentlemen of the Sanhedrin have helped—’
‘Not from any love of Rome. Those Jewish priests like a quiet life. They know where the best wine comes from. They like their seaside villas.’
‘A foxy lot,’ Quintilius said foxily. ‘The best of both worlds.’
‘We played into their hands,’ Pilate said. ‘Over that Jesus of Nazareth affair. That still rankles. They made us crucify the wrong man. It won’t happen again.’
‘Assuredly not, procurator. About these Zealots—’
‘There’s a Jewish feast coming up, isn’t there? Pentecost. A Greek name for a Jewish carnival.’
‘Hardly a carnival. Feast of the first fruits or something. Pentecost means fifty days after the Passover.’
‘I know what it means, Quintilius. I think it might be a good time for reminding them where the power lies. They had three crucifixions for Passover. We let one of those damned Zealots go. Because the people wanted it that way. Then he murdered one of ours.’
‘Never mind the name. It was one of our people. This time we’ll nail up three Zealots. And if the mob howls, let it.’
‘Including this Caleb bar something? He’s no more than a boy, procurator.’
‘A student, you said. All the better. Get them young. Destroy them in the egg. Which reminds me that I’m hungry. Shall we dine together?’
‘I’m invited out, procurator.’
‘By Jews?’
‘The maintenance of good relations with the subject people. You taught me the importance of that, sir.’
‘Don’t get too close, Quintilius. Remember who we are, what we are.’ Saying it, he felt hopeless.
‘Oh, I never forget that, procurator.’
Pilate grunted and went off to his quarters. Quintilius looked out from the terrace to the street, where a Jew of wealthy appearance was hurrying, as if late for an appointment. Busy people, a busy town. They believed in money. They sometimes seemed more solid, somehow, than the Roman Empire. It was sustained by soldiers, and soldiers didn’t make much money.
In the upper room where that last supper had been eaten, in retrospect it appeared with little appetite, but the mutton had been carved to the bone and the last of the sour herb sauce scooped up with the last of the hard bread, the eleven were assembled. Simon, Peter and Matthew, once the sorely taxed and the sorely taxing, stood with Thomas, the dour North Galilean given to scepticism, hard to please and pessimistic. Philip hummed a tune and Thaddeus breathed it on his flute, so that Thomas said: ‘Ach, for the Lord’s sake—’ Bartholomew silently nursed his dyspepsia, big James, called Little, performed the muscle flexings of the country wrestler he had been. The other James was biting a hangnail. Andrew and John and Simon, who had been a Zealot, were talking quietly to a nervous man named Joseph Barnabas, Simon saying: ‘Well, if he doesn’t come the place is yours, that stands to reason—’ But then they heard feet arriving rapidly up the outside wooden stairway and then the door opened and the Jew of wealthy appearance whom Quintilius had been idly watching came in, breathless.
‘I’m sorry to be so late. My nephew – Caleb – he’s under arrest. I was trying to make an appointment to see the procurator—’
‘Well now, master,’ Little James said to Peter, ‘we can start.’
‘Don’t call me master, Little James. I am no master.’
‘Peter. Here are the—Are we right to use them?’ Peter took them in his left hand and clicked them together. He then addressed the assembly with some diffidence, saying:
‘Friends, brothers, when the master was with us he had many followers but only twelve disciples. He chose that number as you know because it is the number of the tribes of Israel. One of the twelve died – shamefully, by his own hand. He is buried in the potter’s field that is now the burial ground for strangers who die in Jerusalem. The Field of Blood, it is called. I will not mention his name. Nor, so I may hope, will his name ever again be mentioned when we are met together. Well, today we are met together for a happy purpose. It is to complete our number, choosing between Matthias and Joseph Barnabas, equally good men, equally worthy – though who of any among us can be called worthy?’ He bowed his head as though to wait for a cock to crow, but they were far from any fowl-run. ‘We may add only one to the inner brotherhood. Chance, they sometimes say, is one of the toys of God. Toys are for children, but the master told us we had to become like children. Chance shall choose for us then. We have dice.’ He showed them. ‘I think you all know where they come from. A certain Roman soldier diced for a certain garment and regretted what he did. Joseph Barnabas, take the dice and roll.’
Joseph Barnabas was a swart young man with a round trimmed beard. His eyes were large and liquid. He took the dice timorously and shook them in the cup of his right hand. He threw. All looked at the table surface. Three and two.
‘Matthias.’
Matthias rolled in both hands, shaking their clasp in what looked like premature self-congratulation. He let fall rather than threw. Two and four.
‘There is almost nothing in it,’ Peter said. ‘Welcome, Matthias, to our midst.’ Joseph Barnabas was good-humoured in defeat. A matter of luck only. Matthias was taken to various bosoms and thumped on his back like a baby with wind. He was, they all noted, the first as well as the last of the well-dressed disciples: a gold chain round his neck and his beard not only trimmed but oiled, his single long garment embroidered at neck and hem with a Greek key pattern. Well, he would have to become ragged and unkempt as befitted one close to the Lord God. They could certainly use his money, solid clean money made out of land.
‘We will sit round the table,’ Peter said. ‘And if Little James will be so good as to go down to the cookshop and fetch up our dinner, not forgetting the wine, we can have the first feast of our new our new—’
‘Dispensation?’ Bartholomew suggested.
‘I was going to say something like lonely responsibility,’ Peter said. ‘I’m not good at words, as you know, and we’re all going to have to spout a lot of words. Look, Joseph Barnabas, there’s no need to fidget as though you shouldn’t be here. If one of us gets picked up by the Romans or the Sanhedrin and stoned and crucified it’s you who’ll take his place. How many of us are there now in Jerusalem? I’d say about two hundred—’
‘More like a hundred and fifty,’ Matthew said.
‘Well, we’re all brothers together, and there’s nothing secret about what we’re going to try to do. So in future there won’t be many meetings of just the twelve. We’ll need all the help we can get from the others, and that means you more than anybody, Joseph Barnabas. It’s only a pair of dice that says you’re not one of the twelve.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir. Peter’s the name. Go and get the dinner, Little James. They said they’d have it ready.’
James got up in his burly way and swung towards the door. A dry wind peered in as he opened it.
‘He’s back in the world,’ Peter sighed, ‘but to us he leaves the burden of the word, so to speak. We’re not well prepared to shout the glory of his rising from the grave and the truth of his message. I dreamt last night I was back on the lake working at the nets. It was fine to be – well, what you might call ignorant and peaceful again, not to have any responsibility. But I have to accept the burden as you do too. The trouble is that we don’t know well how to carry it.’
The door opened and Jesus came in carrying a jug of wine and a bread basket. James followed with cold broiled fish and cups and platters on a square tray. He kicked the door shut and the wind out. They all stood clumsily. Those who sat by the wall had difficulty getting up at all. Jesus waited till they were all standing and then said: ‘Sit. Thirteen of you? Of course, I understand. You’re Matthias. You take the place of poor dear Judas, who was killed by his own love and innocence.’ They all looked at each other uncomfortably. He had always been one for mentioning the unmentionable. ‘And you, Barnabas it must be, are the unlucky thirteenth. Well, there’ll be trial and tribulation for everyone, no shortage of that.’ He grinned at Thomas as he sat next to Barnabas on the rocking bench, saying: ‘And how are the doubts today?’
‘Ye know what I thought,’ Thomas growled in his rough North Galilean accent, ‘and I was in the right to be thinking it. There’s too much trickery about these days. There’s not many as comes back from the grave. I know there was Lazarus who got himself killed in a tavern brawl three days after, something of a waste of effort I always thought. And there was the girl where I was working and ye first dragged me into the fellowship, saying ye needed what ye called a sceptic. Well, we’ve seen enough of false prophets about, and what was to stop one going the rounds with a dab of red paint on his wrists and ankles. I was in the right to say seeing is believing.’
‘I say again,’ Jesus said mildly, ‘blessed are they who believe and have not seen.’
Ye’ll no convince me of that. Well, not all the time.’
‘Listen. And eat while you’re listening.’ The wooden trenchers clattered dully and the cheap winecups clanked. Matthew’s knife made heavy arithmetical work of dividing the fish into fourteen pieces. ‘You must all try and impart this power of innocent belief to those who hear the word. My word but now also yours. This is the last time you will see me in the flesh but do not forget I stay with you in these simple gifts of God. I will start the ceremony, you must finish it. I take this bread and break it. This is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.’
He tore at the loaf roughly. The wrist wounds seemed nearly healed. He threw the pieces to the farthest, handed them to the nearest. Peter said, chewing Jesus’s body and then gulping it, ‘The last time, Lord?’
‘Yes, I leave you tomorrow at dawn. Don’t ask me where I’m going.’
‘We’re well aware of where ye’re going,’ Thomas said, ‘and we don’t have to see it. Ye’re going back to your father.’
‘Difficult,’ Jesus said, picking out the bones from the piece of fish in his hand, ‘for this flesh to become spirit. But take it that that is what is going to happen. I will take none of the flat roads out of Jerusalem. I’ll climb Mount Olivet and disappear at the top, and that will be the last of me. You may come and wave farewell if you wish. Then you have to wait for a particular visitation. You won’t have long to wait. I’m going now to have a word with my mother. Complete the ceremony, Peter.’ He stood and put his fingers to his lips. With the other hand he motioned that they remain seated. He opened the door, letting in no wind, and closed it. They could not hear his feet going down the outside wooden stair. Silence. Peter sighed very deeply, took the winejug, filled his own cup, said:
‘Now his blood.’ He passed it round. They all sipped.
‘A matter of waiting, is it?’ Thomas said. Nobody else said anything. That last brief sight of the living God, capricious, unhelpful, gave them little comfort. They needed comfort badly. The dry wind grew stronger and rattled the catch of the window shutter.
‘A young man, your honour,’ Caleb’s mother was saying, ‘and you know what young men are like – full of wild ideas. He has no father to keep him on the right path. A mother can do nothing when a young man’s head is filled with mad notions. Freedom and suchlike nonsense.’
‘So freedom is mad,’ Quintilius said. ‘Freedom is nonsense. What do you think – you?’
He meant the elder daughter Sara, eighteen years old, pale-skinned, tall, unveiled, who looked steadily at him, without sexual appraisal, rather with a kind of quiet polar challenge which he found hard to interpret. Judaea against Rome? One generation against another? The upholder of a rigorous scheme of social conduct against its careless violater? For Quintilius had insisted that the interview take place in his dining room. He ate while they stood. Ruth, sixteen, her veil over all but her eyes, watched each mouthful of meat with what could be horror. A barefooted Syrian mixed wine with wellwater. It was against the Jewish law for the faithful to enter under the roof of the infidel. Matthias, who had brought them hither, insisted on waiting in the courtyard, though that left the women unchaperoned. They considered that the need to plead for a son and brother absolved them from a taboo which, being women, they could not anyway take seriously.
‘There are two kinds of freedom, sir,’ she said. ‘It does not matter if the body is in chains so long as the mind is free.’
‘To think. To believe. That is a freedom that cannot be removed – not even by—’ She had perhaps gone too far.
‘Not even by the oppressive forces of Rome – is that what you wish to say?’ He began to work on a bone.
‘It’s a thing we accept,’ Sara said. ‘Roman rule, I mean. We in our generation have known nothing different.’ Then she said: ‘You seem to have difficulty with our Aramaic. Would you prefer that I spoke in Latin?’
‘I neither have nor have not difficulty with your Aramaic,’ he said in Latin. ‘It is not a language I wish to master. To render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. You know the saying?’
‘And to God the things that are God’s,’ she said in Latin with a strong Judaean burr. ‘It’s a common saying.’
‘And a saying that your brother spits out like a bad fig. Where did you learn your Latin?’
‘At home. We Jewish women stay at home. But I can see the world through books.’
‘She is a clever girl,’ her mother said, as in apology. ‘It’s the way some of the young are these days. Asking questions and so on. I don’t hold with it, sir.’
‘Well, woman, see where asking questions has got your son. For him I can do nothing. He defies the Roman state and he must take his punishment.’
The mother began to wail.
‘Wait,’ Quintilius said, ‘I hadn’t finished. He’s not alone. There are others of his kind. To me indeed he’s not even a name. What would you give to see another in his place carrying the punitive cross?’
Sara said cautiously: ‘What do you mean, sir – give? You mean we can – buy his freedom?’ They were back on Aramaic; her mother knew nothing else.
‘Crudely put – buy. A very crude word. Shall we say that his punishment could be commuted into a fine. A heavy one, of course. There is money in your family?’
‘My husband worked at the potter’s trade, sir. He left nothing. There is my brother, though—’
‘Uncle Matthias,’ Ruth said, ‘has joined the Nazarenes, mother. He is going to give his money to the Nazarene poor.’
‘Aren’t we the poor?’ the mother wailed. ‘Isn’t his own sister’s son more deserving than the – unwashed beggars of the town? We’ll speak to him, your honour. Give him an hour and he’ll come back with the money?’
‘Shall we say fifty aurei – gold pieces?’
Sara said firmly: ‘It’s impossible, sir. I know it’s impossible. And we have no—’ She looked for the word and could not find it.
‘No guarantees, you mean, I think. You have no trust in Roman mercy? Or in the word of a Roman officer?’
‘Just half an hour, sir,’ the mother cried. ‘I know he can get the money.’
‘Alternatively,’ Quintilius said, ‘you ladies are now, I suppose, destitute. You are hereby offered posts in the household of the deputy procurator of Judaea. Unpaid, of course.’
‘You mean,’ Ruth said, very wide-eyed, ‘to be slaves?’
‘Come, mother, Ruth,’ Sara said. ‘As the deputy procurator says, Caleb has defied the Roman state. He must take his punishment.’
But Caleb’s mother was on her own knees and clinging to those of the deputy procurator. A small dog, almost hairless and with eyes like small lamps, looked up from his bit of gristle with surprise. Quintilius kicked her off and calling the waiting guard:
‘Get these Jewesses out of here.’
Matthias, waiting in the courtyard, now in a very plain and, it appeared, artfully torn and soiled garment, asked how things had gone. Badly. ‘There was never any hope,’ Sara said. ‘I’ve heard of his ways before. He takes money but gives nothing in return.’
‘Save him, Matthias,’ the mother wailed. ‘Fifty gold pieces.’
‘No,’ Sara said firmly. ‘Caleb knew this would happen sooner or later. He talked of being a living torch burning for the cause. I knew there was no point in going. All we can say is that we did what we could.’
‘You’re a hard hard girl. All this book learning.’
‘But he’s not dead yet,’ Sara said harshly. ‘He’s not even been whipped. It’s not over yet.’
Matthias, before going to his widowered home, escorted them to their single-roomed lodging in the house of Elias the mad. This Elias was a second cousin, bequeathed his house by his wholly sane brother Amos, and was mad only in the sense that he believed the world would soon be taken over by rats, achbroschim, and that the Romans, who spoke what he called rat language, were the harbingers of their coming. Matthias himself had a large house not far from the Temple. He was now in his thirties but had been made a widower in his twenties, when his wife Hannah had died of an infection from cutting her finger along with the evening loaf. The achbroschim, according to Elias, were the responsible ones. On their way in the early evening the little party saw with gloom the festooning of the housetops in the narrower streets in celebration of coming Pentecost or Shabu’oth, the feast of weeks or the day of the first fruits. Young men were climbing ladders to affix strings of dried leaves to roofs, and these were lifted across the street with pronged poles to be affixed to the roofs opposite. Whole streets were so festooned. The Greek Jew Stephen saw the three women in black and the ragged rich Matthias from the summit of his ladder, interpreted their gloom and cried: ‘Don’t worry. It’s not finished yet.’
On his way home Matthias passed the Temple, behind which a sunset of splendid though as it were casual lavishness glowed in a sort of benediction. Was it, Matthias asked himself, still properly the house of his faith? Yes, more his Temple than that of the many who would not accept that the history of the race had reached its fulfilment. It was the solid and immovable tabernacle of the living numen whose son he had known, though but briefly and not intimately, in the flesh, and whose message he accepted with all his heart. Why then, this sunset, did the Temple seem faintly hostile? Because it was in the hands of the custodians of a past already dusty; it had nothing to say to the present. The task of the Nazarenes was to take over the Temple, slowly, slowly, through the infiltration of belief. It was to be the Temple of fulfilment, but not yet. It had, in a sense, to be loved more than ever, as a dumb but living creature gently to be taught that it was the house of the Christ as well as the immemorial Father. Yet hard hearts would set themselves long against the truth.
Here was one hard heart, though a young one, one prematurely indurated to dogged ancient priestly intolerance. Quite near Matthias’s home the young theological student from Cilicia lodged in the house of his sister. He sat cross-legged outside this house in the dusty unwalled garden, working with hard fingers at tent-stitching while the light lasted. He nodded somewhat menacingly at Matthias, who nodded more amiably back. ‘So,’ Saul said, ‘you are become the replacement of the man who hanged himself.’
‘The twelfth of the inner group, yes. How did you hear of it?’
‘I see it as a duty to keep my eyes and ears open to all things that would impair if they could the serene fortitude and sempiternal truth of the Jewish faith.’
‘You speak pompously for so young a man. But much study will often make a young man pompous. Why do you look so bitterly at me?’
‘Is my look bitter? It’s meant to be pitying. You have fallen into terrible error. Error, they say, must be burnt out quickly before it takes root. Don’t you fear the burning?’
‘I am a good Jew who, by God’s good grace, have been granted a vision of salvation. Very well, I am in error as the world sees it. There is hardly one prophet in the holy record who was not stoned and reviled because he caught a gleam of the truth. We were promised a Messiah, in time not eternity. In the reign of Augustus he was born, in the reign of Tiberius he was put to death. Because he wore the robes of human history does he defile the eternal by induing the temporal?’
‘Now it’s you who talks pompously. You know as well as I that these last years have seen too many of these false saviours puffed up with their mad inner visions. They are all as bad as each other. We shall have more yet. Some of them have been sane enough not to spit defiance at authority. Your man blasphemed against everything – even the Temple.’
‘I have just come from seeing the beauty of the Temple in the glow of this sunset. He never blasphemed against it as the house of God. He loved it as we all love it. But just as the presence of the Lord himself can inhere in a bit of bread, and bread is no more than flour and water, so the Temple is, without God’s presence, no more than bricks and stone and slime and a little gold and silver. It was made by human hands, as bread is. But the body, he said, is a greater Temple, because it was not made by human hands. If we must choose between the two Temples, even an erring man is more sacred than what Solomon built and Herod, to his own vicious glory, improved upon. Do not say: even the Temple, young man. There are greater things than Temples and Sanhedrins and high priests.’
‘You see.’ Saul seemed to marvel. ‘He’s been adept at leading you into dangerous error.’
‘I’m a simple man, not a theologian like you. His simplicity spoke to my own. But it isn’t only theologians who have to be saved.’
‘Well, hug your simplicity to yourself, or it will be the worse for you.’ And he dug the strong sharp needle into the tough canvas.
‘You, a mere student, have the power to threaten? The law speaks through me, and through all of the true sons of the faith.’ His sister then called him in to supper. He put his needle with others into a little wooden case and nodded a fierce good night at Matthias.
I am, like many, somewhat confused about the events that, we are told, transfigured the sixth day of the month Siwan. Early in the morning the disciples, along with Mary the mother of Jesus, who had been telling them some story of the early youth of the man who had disappeared in the dawn mists on the peak of Olivet, had assembled in their upper room with the intention of going to the Temple to witness the first fruits’ offerings. Thomas, tetchy, tired, sat at the table while the rest stood around the mother. He dozed.
‘He was climbing to the roof of our house and the ladder collapsed when he was near the top. He fell – oh, it seemed a terrible fall. He was so young and we thought he would cry. But he didn’t seem to be hurt. He got up and laughed, then he shook his little fist at the ladder. Then he seemed to comfort the ladder, embracing it as if it were a kitten that had scratched him and couldn’t understand why it was being scolded—’
At this moment Thomas woke with a harsh shout as of terror. They turned to him. ‘Did ye no see it?’ he panted. ‘It was the mouth of God ready to swallow me and in the mouth was a tongue all red and the tongue split in two and all fire came out of it.’ Then he knew it was a dream. ‘Ach, I’ve a wicked taste in my mouth. Pass that waterjug, James, one or other of ye.’
Peter’s story later was that Thomas spluttered his water out, for a wind rose suddenly, in the room not without. Without there was no stir of flag, leaf or garment. They saw each other’s hair and beard lifted by this wind. It sang at them like a choir and, exerting huge force, drove them in a huddle to the door.
The streets were full of people of the separation: Parthians and Medes and Elamites, citizens of the other provinces of Palestine, of Cappadocia, Pontus, the territories of Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Cretans and Arabians and even men and women from Rome, all Jews come to the sacred city for the ritual of the presentation of the first sheaf of the barley harvest. Many of these people saw twelve men come tumbling laughing down wooden stairs and many more saw and heard them in the streets that led to the Temple. Thaddeus the fluteplayer had, it seems, found a ram’s horn or shofar, and he was blowing this not in the normal manner of an angry summons but so as to produce a melody of four notes, like a camp call to dinner or parade. The laughter of the others was like drunkenness or inspiration, which have something in common, and, in the way of all people seeking diversion, even at a solemn time, people followed the dozen, smiling, shaking their heads, mockcheering.
At this time Caleb was being prodded down one of the narrower lanes towards his crucifixion. His wrists were roped to the crossbar he bore on his shoulders. He was naked except for a cloth round his groin which would in time be pulled off to underline the obscenity of his execution. On his back were visible the bleeding stripes of his statutory flogging. Behind him were his two nameless Zealot victim companions, and a Syrian maniple thrust spears at all three and at the murmuring crowd in the street. The Syrian under-officer had chosen this street rather than the main road in the innocent belief that the little grim procession would thus attract less public notice, and he feared, being a somewhat timorous Syrian, Jewish violence. In fact he got neither; he got worse. Knots of people followed the tuneful shofar against the current of the cortège and bumped against speared small Syrians with little fear. Caleb interpreted the great noise as the alleluias of zealotry. His mother and sisters, weeping, accompanied by those good-hearted ladies of Jerusalem who tried, against Roman opposition, to give drugged wine to the crucified, attempted to join his death march, wailing and weeping with the loudness considered proper on such an occasion, and Caleb cried:
‘You hear them, mother? This is the noise I wanted to hear. I regret nothing. Leave me.’
At this moment young men leant from the roofs of the houses and set torches to the festoons of dry leaves and flowers that stretched across the street. Acrid smoke got in eyes and nostrils, as much those of the Syrian escort as of the crowd, most of which read this as a new and somewhat brutal mode of rejoicing. Young men, cushioned from yelling Syrian military by staid and bewildered visitors to the city, got at Caleb’s roped wrists and freed them with a pair of knives, and the crosspiece fell and caused stumbling. A rope ladder rolled down from a roof. Caleb began to climb. The Syrian under-officer yelled and prodded with an impotent spear, whose shaft had been grasped by two youths who showed fine white teeth. Burning and smoky festoons still fell. Caleb reached roof level, the ladder was drawn up with remarkable speed. By Jupiter, there was going to be trouble for somebody.
By now it could be said that a great part of Jerusalem, natives and visitors, had found its way to the open courts of the Temple, where Peter, as leader of the twelve, had fixed on a pillar with a plinth that afforded room for two bare feet and volutes on the column that granted a handhold. From this he was to speak. The Syrian escort, holding on to the remaining two prisoners, were diverted from the straight road to execution by their need to find Caleb. He had got on to a roof, meaning that he could now be anywhere. The under-officer frankly wept, waving his spear in gestures of desperation. By Castor and Pollux, there was going to be trouble.
Priests in the courtyard were chanting: ‘We offer you, Lord God of Hosts, these first fruits of your planting and nurturing, as also this holy bread baked from the first of the new barley grain—’ But they had but a small attendance. They turned at the babble of many voices. A brawny Nazarene, no longer young, was bawling:
‘Men and women of Judaea, and all that are dwelling in Jerusalem, give ear to my words.’
What language was he speaking? Some say that a miracle had been performed, whereby he spoke the primordial Adamic tongue and his listeners had been granted an instant course of highly skilled lessons in it. It is safer to believe that he spoke not Aramaic, nor a bizarre amalgam of all the tongues of the dispersal, but a pure Hebrew with no Galilean accent (the Galileans always had difficulty with the gutturals). That the language of the sacred texts should now become the medium of immediate discourse may be taken as miracle enough, as also an eloquence Peter had not previously possessed and, indeed, rarely possessed thereafter. A Thomasian kind of sceptic (I refer to what Thomas had been; there was danger now of his becoming overcredulous) stood near to Peter and, hearing the careful enunciation of one who must consciously control the movement of tongue and lips, as well as the tonalities of enthusiasm, was heard to say:
‘He’s drunk. They’re all drunk. They’ve been at the new wine.’
I must cast some doubt on the new of his accusation. The vintage of the year was still some months away. He may have said sweet instead, knowing, as we all know, that if you put new wine in a jar and cover the stopper with pitch and then place the jar in a fishpond, your removal of the jar after thirty days will ensure that your wine will stay sweet the year long.
Peter laughed and said: ‘I heard that. I’m not drunk, nor are any of my friends here. It’s only the third hour of the day and the taverns are hardly open. No, this is no drunken talk but the giving forth of the good news. You know, some of you, what was said by the prophet Joel: “I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh. And your sons and your daughters will prophesy. And your young men shall see visions. And your old men shall dream dreams. And I will show wonders in the heavens overhead, and signs in the earth beneath, blood and fire and the vapour of smoke.”’ Some there had certainly seen that. ‘“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before the day of the Lord comes, that great day, that notable day.” Well, that great and notable day is upon us. Jesus of Nazareth, approved of God by mighty works and wonders and signs – Jesus, crucified, slain by lawless men – him has God raised up, having loosed the pangs of death.’
Dangerous talk. Priests listened grimly.
‘This Jesus,’ Peter repeated, ‘did God raise up. Of this all we twelve assembled before you are witnesses. Being therefore exalted by the right hand of God and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured forth these words which you hear and of which I am the vessel. Let all the House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ – this Jesus whom you crucified.’
Some of the Sanhedrin were now present. Saul, who should not have been here but tending his fellow student Caleb, hovered near them, showing a proper horror.
‘Save your souls,’ Peter yelled, ‘men and women of Israel – for the wonders and signs are upon you.’
The impressed ones in the crowd cried: ‘How?’
‘Repent. Be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Save your souls – save yourselves from this crooked generation.’ And, the die finally cast, he pointed towards the back of the crowd, where the priests were. Some of them stalked off. Saul, blazing and silent, stayed.
Matthew, the former tax collector, trained in practicalities like sums due on what dates, cried to the crowd that baptisms would start next day at dawn on the banks of the Kedron.
On a rooftop which granted a distant view of a huge gathering being addressed in tones that, their words being indistinguishable, had a flavour of zealotry and showed also a lack of retaliatory preparation on the Tower of Antonia, the Zealot Caleb was having his wounds washed in white wine and then soothed with a grass-green ointment. Stephen, no Zealot, performed these tasks while six true young Zealots, Joshua son of the Sabbath, Tobias, the younger Elias, Joseph bar Joseph, Jonathan Levi and Abbas Barabbas, watched for Roman action. There was none save for the due and unusually vicious execution of the two who had not escaped. They had not been theological students. Stephen said:
‘Wait for nightfall. Then go to Qumran. You’ll get there by dawn. I have a friend there, Ananias. He’ll take care of you.’
‘One of us?’
‘He’s no Zealot, if that’s what you mean. He’s trying to become an Essene, but he’s not sure about it. Whatever you’ll think of the Essenes, and you probably won’t think much, they’re against the Romans.’
‘The smoke and the ladder – all that was your idea?’
‘It wouldn’t have worked without that crowd. It looks, by the way, as if the Nazarenes have come out of hiding. You ought to be grateful to Jesus.’
‘You’re not one of us. And yet you did it. Now you’ll be in danger. Let’s go to this place together.’
‘No. I help you as a friend, not otherwise. I think the Zealots are wrong, or should I say impractical. You won’t prevail. The true road lies somewhere else.’
‘The Sadducee way? The Pharisee way? The – who are these people I’m to go to?’
‘They live the life of the spirit. Cut off from the flesh. That’s as impractical a way as yours. I’m a Greek Jew, Caleb, not a Palestinian one. We think differently. My idea of God isn’t yours. I can’t accept a bellowing tribal Jehovah protecting his own – rather inefficiently, if I may say so.’
‘Saul would call that blasphemy. I suppose it is.’
‘Let Saul call it what he likes. Saul, by the way, wasn’t very helpful. Other things to do, he said, than confirm fools in their folly. I notice you show no concern about your womenfolk. Something vaguely Nazarene about the Zealots. Give up your family and follow the right. Very unJewish.’
‘I know. I thought about them too late. But the Romans don’t know them, won’t find them, unless somebody like Saul gives them away.’
‘Saul’s Roman citizenship doesn’t go so far. Quintilius knows them. They visited Quintilius but got nowhere. But Quintilius won’t find them. They’ve already gone to my place. Besides, I have a feeling that Pontius Pilatus isn’t going to last much longer. The Romans are supposed to be an efficient people—’
Caleb smiled faintly at that.
In the praetorium the procurator hit out at the flies with his whisk. The flies seemed busier today, bit more. They were like Jews who did not disdain to enter a Gentile dwelling nor suck at honey unblessed by priests. When Quintilius showed in prisoner and escort, Pilate did a thing unseemly in a Roman officer: he struck the wretch twice on the face with his flywhisk. ‘You’re a damned Syrian but you’re still in the Roman army. You’re going to answer for your crime in the accepted Roman manner, so get the point of your sword sharp. There’ll be songs tonight in the taverns about an eagle that lost his claws. You have disgraced my procuratorship and disgraced Rome. Don’t botch your suicide as you botched—Ah, get him out of my sight.’ The guards led him off wailing in the Syrian manner. ‘I presume,’ Pilate said to his deputy, ‘that you’ve found the man by now.’
‘Totally impossible, procurator. These Jews all look alike, and the town’s crammed with tourists. How could we ever find him, and what would be the point of making an arbitrary arrest and saying that was the man? Best to talk about last-minute mercy if there’s to be any talk at all. Two of them are hanging up there on Golgotha, and that ought to be enough to show the authority of Rome’s ah plenipotentiary. Of course, we could declare war on the city, but that would mean bringing in legions from Syria and the sudden interest of the Emperor. They got the better of you, so best, sir, just to shrug it off. It’s not the end of the world.’
Pilate gave Quintilius a good long look. ‘Got the better of me, did they?’ he said. ‘I left all that business in your hands.’
‘Yes, sir, but I remain merely the one who takes orders.’
‘I smell insolence.’ Quintilius shrugged and said nothing. Pilate said: ‘I take it you’ve already delivered Roman justice to whatever family that Jew has.’
‘Not yet, sir. A mother and two sisters. The girls presumably are virgins. Roman law doesn’t allow—’
‘Well, get them deflowered, man, and then shove the sword in. Go on, what are you waiting for? No, wait – lash them till the skin comes off and then put them on the next boat to Puteoli. Tiberius may relish a little Jewish flesh for what he calls his love games.’
‘Do we,’ Quintilius asked, ‘have to report this – unfortunate humiliation to Syria? Or to Rome?’
They looked at each other. Pilate said:
‘I don’t think, Quintilius, anyone will care one way or the other. A very minor incident, such things happen. On the other hand, you may be already preparing your report for the authorities, suggesting that the procurator of Judaea is ripe for replacement—’
‘I would never dream, sir, of so disloyal an act.’
‘Of course not, Quintilius. But, listen, Quintilius, if I fall, you fall with me – remember that. Now – get on with the prosecution of Roman justice.’ Quintilius rather ironically saluted, then marched away slowly, as from a funeral.
It was a long day, unseasonably warm, with full taverns but not many arrests. The twelve disciples stayed quietly in their upper room, some of them lying on their pallets, while they unpicked the fabric of the morning. Euphoria had passed and there was a slight sense of crapula. Peter said little, having already said enough. Bartholomew the country doctor, learned in little except medicinal herbs, was yet enough of a thinking man to raise the business of the Holy Spirit, a term used freely by the oratorical Peter but not yet defined. ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘this is the wind that blew and the fine Hebrew Peter spoke and everybody understood, and I would say it was also Thomas’s nightmare of a tongue split and on fire.’
‘Those,’ Simon the former Zealot said, scratching his cheek, ‘are what you might call appearances of this Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit seems to be the power coming out of the two of them. The Father and Son get on with the business of whatever has to be done up there, and they leave this Holy Spirit down here.’
‘Ye fail to see,’ Thomas said, ‘a very peculiar change that’s come over things. There used to be one God, and now it looks as if there were three.’
‘There can’t be three,’ John, so mild and yet with so inordinately powerful a voice, put in. ‘The Father and the Son are the same, and so is this Holy Spirit.’
‘The same as what?’
‘The same as these two that are one. Three in one. So tomorrow, if anybody turns up for the mass baptising, we have to say something like “I baptise you in the name of the three.” That’s going to upset some people.’
‘There’ll be a lot turning up,’ Matthew said. ‘Especially from those who’ve come from a long way off. Something free to take home with them. You’re right in a way, John. Things have got a bit complicated. God has a son now, and they’ve sent down a sort of bird.’
‘Bird?’ Peter said, rousing himself from counting over his narrow stock of pure Hebrew. He was also watching his performance of the morning as though he were one of the crowd. ‘Let us have no nonsense and no blasphemy. What has a bird to do with anything?’
Matthew turned in surprise. ‘I saw the bird up on the ceiling when the wind started blowing. Like a pigeon only big as an eagle.’
‘What wind?’Andrew asked.
‘Is everybody going mad?’ Peter cried.
‘Well, yes, it could be put that way,’ Matthew said. ‘We were all a bit mad this morning, else we wouldn’t have done what we did. And that’s how it’s going to be in future. It’s another name for being touched by the Holy Spirit.’
They ate little and went to rest early, for the next day would, they thought, be a busy one. Nor was the Kedron, set in its steep ravine, at all like the Jordan. Steep banks, no true shore, and the river flowing fast and hostile. A difficult day beckoned, and after it a difficult future, what with the Holy Spirit descending and withdrawing with the capriciousness of the Jesus who had promised it or him or her, a wind or bird or the fiery tongue of Thomas’s dream. It is said that John, once the beloved disciple, woke everybody before dawn with his loud voice (to be accounted a curse to him, according to the Book of Proverbs) and said he had invented a sign, or rather a sign had come to him in a dream. This sign, made with the thumb on brow, breastbone and shoulders, combined the cross Jesus died on with the Father, the Son and the other one. It made things clearer. It also imported into the simple faith an element which the fisherman Peter, who had never heard the word mustikos, considered dangerously fanciful. But let them now all ride on chance, dreams, visitations from the Holy Spirit, and the actions of their enemies. Amen.
At dawn, while the new faithful or merely curious were picking their various ways over stones, roots, dry ground towards the ravine, the Zealot Caleb arrived at a hill on which simple stone dwellings had been roughly reared. He was cloaked and staffed and bone-weary. In his ears faintly sang certain words of Stephen: ‘I pray you’ll rethink your philosophy while you’re there. If God made the world, he made it for more than the Jews. The end of life isn’t the proclamation of the free Jewish nation.’ Caleb had said: The end of my life.’ Stephen had responded: ‘It nearly was.’
It had been a rough night journey under the moon, with God’s night creatures rasping or barking or hooting signals, words from some unreadable book that God could read well enough, along with owls and foxes. He had sat on a stone and munched some bread and salt fish, washed down with Jerusalem water. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose her cunning. Now, with the sun starting to wash white stone, he heard a thin hymn: the faithful of the sect that had abandoned Jerusalem, Temple, Sanhedrin, all, were saluting another day presided over by the solar spirit. Caleb climbed rocks among which a few thin goats pulled at yellowing grass and saw an open gateway. Within were men in bleached garments ready to sit at an open-air breakfast. Water was being called up from a well and new bread was being borne in in a basket from a bakery. There was a man who had clearly been expecting him. But how had a signal reached here? Had this all been foreseen at the time of the Pentecostal festoonings? The man was in early middle age, and he wore a white robe that was dingier than that of the gaunt Essene who summoned Caleb to break his fast. Caleb said: ‘Anias?’
‘Ananias. I was told you might come here.’
‘When? How?’
‘The young man who gave me lessons in Greek in Jerusalem said there was some scheme afoot. I came here only four days ago. I am not yet one of the brotherhood.’
Caleb sat at a thin feast of bread, water, roots, dried figs and shrunken grapes. His presence was neither questioned nor welcomed. He had come from Jerusalem because he had rejected Jerusalem, and that was enough. Caleb could not understand the prayers said over the breaking of the bread. A kiss on the cheek was passed about the table from left to right. Caleb kissed the shaven cheek of a bloodless epicene youth without relish. After breakfast Caleb was permitted to visit Ananias’s cell and wash in a ewer, wiping himself after on a bleached towel. He said:
‘Everything white. No blood in it. Even the bread’s white.’
‘The very elixir of the faith,’ Ananias said. ‘Here it attains the limits of purity. Dung and make water, and you must bury the ordure in the ground, wearing white gloves. No marriage, no fornication – bodily pleasure is sinful. The body is made of dirt and red mud. Men must transcend it and live in the spirit.’
‘It’s not easy to forget we have bodies,’ Caleb said. ‘So these men never take a woman in their arms. How do they breed?’
‘They don’t breed. After all, the end of the world has been prophesied and soon it will come. Not much point in breeding. What is needed is purification.’
‘I was taught that the world was beginning, not ending. The new world of the free Jewish nation.’
‘A flippant dream, they would say. Purification is the one serious thing. Then pure soul is lifted up into heaven.’
‘And you’re joining them?’
‘Well, I’ve been doing a certain amount of searching for the right way. That’s why I wanted to read Greek. I see these Essenes as the final posting house on the journey. John the Baptist was one of them, you know. And then he was led to something different. I don’t believe the world is going to end. I think it’s wrong to be cut off from a world in which much wrong has to be put right. I’m here to ponder the new doctrine. You’ve met the followers of Jesus?’
‘My uncle Matthias has just become the twelfth of the dead man’s disciples. Absurd, isn’t it? A disciple of a dead man.’
‘The message is only just beginning to be born.’
‘And it says you have to submit to the Romans. It won’t do.’
‘The point is that the Romans will burn themselves out sooner or later. We ought not to waste breath or muscle on them. The important things happen outside the politikon.’
‘Stephen taught you that?’
‘Of course, Stephen. I’m bad at names. No, I read that in a book.’
‘They say,’ Caleb said, ‘that John the Baptist is buried in Samaria. They say that he appears to them and cries that the hour of deliverance is at hand.’
‘And what do the Samaritans think deliverance means?’
‘What I mean by deliverance. Herod the Great built solid fortifications there. It may be in Samaria – not Judaea, not Galilee – that the great blow is struck. That came to me in the night, wandering, missing direction, finding it and the thought of Samaria at the same time. You know Samaria?’
‘I know that the Samaritans are supposed to be a bad lot. They shovelled shit once on to the steps of our Temple. And dead men’s bones. They’re not real Jews – halves and halves—’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt there are good Samaritans. There’s even a story about one.’
Caleb’s morning of rest was a time of labour for the disciples, listening to sins, degged with tears of repentance: there was enough water about. High above, on either side of the ravine, troops from Jerusalem stood. There was even an Italian centurion from Caesarea, the real thing, no Syrian nonsense. Beware of Jewish crowds was a fair Palestine watchword. All that these Jews seemed to be doing there in the river was saying a few words and then getting ducked. Some of them carried leaves and fronds of the season. There seemed to be no harm in it, but you never could tell.
Thaddeus, a clumsy baptiser, had composed a song based on the prophetic words of Joel:
Daughters with a prophet’s tongue,
Visions, visions with the young,
Dreaming dreams for the old,
And dreams and visions will have told
Of Jesus Christ
Sacrificed.
He taught this but, teaching it, held up the baptising business. It was strenuous work. The heads of the disciples swam with other people’s sins, most of them to do with cheating and robbing and having sexual desires for the wrong person.
Meanwhile, in a Jerusalem quiet after Pentecost, a maniple searched for Ruth, Sara and their mother. They eventually found their lodgings, where a potter’s wheel and dried clay were kept still in widow’s remembrance. Elias the mad greeted the troops with laughter and spoke of the coming of the whiskered achbroshim. They tried to knock him about, but he was spry and wiry. His lodgers, he said, had been eaten by rats. The soldiers asked people on the streets where the three women were, but none knew.
They were, in fact, now lodged in the house of Stephen and his parents. The father, a retired schoolmaster called Tyrannos, had given up the Jewish faith but was tolerant towards his son’s learned devoutness. Tyrannos had decorated the house with scenes out of Homer and was eager to teach the girls Greek. Sara, who had the seeds of scholarliness in her, was quick to start tracing the alphabet and was soon reciting autos,auton, autou, auto. Ruth and her mother helped Maia, the crow-haired lady of the house, with the cleaning and cooking. They sobbed sometimes in fear. Stephen said:
‘You’ll be safe enough. We have this deep cellar. Safe, that is, if you can talk of safety these days. You’d be safer still with the Nazarenes.’
‘With an uncle,’ Sara said, ‘who’s giving his money to the poor. Not to his own family.’
‘The Nazarenes have a different concept of family. They say their family’s the world.’
‘Are you becoming a Nazarene?’ Sara asked.
‘I’m sick of the wrangling of the sects,’ Stephen said. ‘I’m sick of the shrieks of the Zealots.’
‘Yet you saved Caleb.’
‘In spite of his zealotry.’ Outside the dining room where the three young people, their elders already having eaten, lingered over dates and olives and flat thin bread, came the wailing song of an old beggar being led somewhere by a boy who said, bored: ‘Alms for the love of heaven.’ He was being led to the Temple because the ninth hour was coming up, time for prayer and oblation, and a few coins were regularly thrown to the blind and crippled by the worshippers – less real generosity than a token of it.
Peter and John were also going to the Temple for the ceremony of the ninth hour. The other disciples were sleepy; the baptising of a thousand or so had been hard work. So Peter and John mounted to the Court of Israel through the Court of the Gentiles, passing the notice which said in Greek and Latin that the unbeliever would be stoned to death if he went any further. There were nine gates from the outer court to the inner, and one of these, which led to the Court of the Women, was called the Nicanor Gate or the Gate Beautiful. It was made of Corinthian bronze and was skilfully crafted. It had, of course, cost a pretty penny. As Peter and John approached this gate, they saw a cripple on a cart, a boy with him. The beggar had a strod or thumbstick with a crossbar. He said to Peter and John:
‘In the name of the Lord, give. For the sake of the love of the Lord—’
Peter saw the cruciform shadow of the beggar’s stick on the square right post of the gate. He was being told something. Peter looked the beggar in the eyes and waited for the capricious Holy Spirit to rush in. ‘Look at me,’ he said. And then: ‘We have no gold nor silver, being poor men like yourself. But what I have I now give you. Get out of that cart. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk—’
The beggar made a grotesque mime of walking, to show that he could not, and then, to Peter and John’s surprise as much as his, got up on his useless feet. Peter held out his right hand and he took it. Then he found he could walk.
‘Always knew he was a cheat,’ a Sadducee said. ‘The same with too many of them here. He’s certainly kept it up for a long time.’ The beggar allowed indignation to usurp the place of fear, wonder, gratitude, regret at the loss of his trade: ask, and you always get too much or too little, never enough. He said:
‘I know you, Zadok the fat, and you know me. I’m coming up to forty-one and I’ve had no use of the ankles since I was born. Now, look at that bone and muscle and praise the Lord’s goodness before you start sneering.’
‘You’ll have to dance for a living now,’ the Sadducee sneered.
‘Watch me.’ And the beggar began to leap and cavort. A Pharisee nodded in awe and said:
‘Isaiah thirty-five six. “Then shall the lame man leap as a hart”.’
‘Come in with us,’ Peter said, embarrassed. ‘Pray. Attend the sacrifice.’ So the beggar leapt the way along to the candled gloom within and merely walked in a decorous fashion down to the place of sacrifice. When he and Peter and John came out again, they were followed by a large crowd towards Solomon’s colonnade. Peter knew he had to say something, so he waited for what he took to be an inflation from the Holy Spirit, a bird fluttering in his lungs and fire on his tongue, and he spoke.
‘People of Israel, what you see you truly see, no trickery. What has happened to this leaping beggar here has not come out of any power or goodness that I have, or that John here has. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob who is the God of our fathers has glorified the Lord Jesus his servant. Don’t forget that it was you who delivered him up to what you called justice in your mealy-mouthed ignorance. You had him stretched on a tree and jeered at while you let a murderer go free to commit more murders. The Prince of Life is what he was and is, for we saw him rise up from the grave. Faith in his name turned into the strength which made this man whole. Now you see that what was prophesied was no foolery. Repent and be baptised in the Holy Spirit. Set your feet on the new road.’
‘Trickery,’ muttered some of the Sadducees, ‘for all his fine blasphemous talk. Ah – now we’ll see.’
For the crowd and the flying rumour of a miracle had brought to the colonnade of Solomon the chief of the Temple police, the sagan or segen, the man of the mountain of the house, whatever that means – ’ish har ha-bayith, I can render it no other way – leading a body of muscular Levites. The Sadducees and some of the chief priests, the lowlier ones keeping out of it, laid the usual charge – preaching resurrection, practising mountebank trickery, collecting a crowd and causing a disturbance – and the sagan or segen, in his fine breastplate and helmet, said: ‘Under arrest, you and you and this leaping one also. You’re to be locked up for the night. You’ll be tried at dawn.’
‘We’ve things to do at dawn,’ John roared. ‘Baptism of the newly faithful.’
‘Well, you won’t be available, will you? Come on.’
The ’ish har ha-bayith and his dozen or so Levites with their ornamental daggers took Peter, John and the healed cripple to a small and holy prison (necessarily holy: it was not Roman) near the eastern end of the bridge that crossed the Tyropoeon valley. There they were shown into a cold cell with a heavy door and locked in with a heavy key that ground squealingly into a rusty ward. There was a seven-barred wind eye above standing head level. The beggar leapt up to see if he could see out of it. ‘Stop that,’ Peter said wearily. John bawled through the doorbars:
‘Food!’
‘If you want food,’ a guard said, ‘you’ll have to pay for it.’
‘Have you any money?’ John asked the no longer leaping one.
‘I’ve not taken much today. And here’s a question for you: how do I earn my living from now on?’
‘We always get that question,’ the tired Peter said. ‘Learn a decent trade. Pottery, carpentry, something.’
‘At my age? Who’d take me on as an apprentice now?’
‘Have you money or have you not?’ John bawled.
‘Oh, all right then. But you won’t get much with this bit of tinkle.’
They got stale bread and musty water. They slept uneasily on the cold stone floor. When the dawn cock indiscreetly crew (who of us is worthy, who?) they were let out and led to the council chamber, not far from the jail, the place called the lishkath ha-gazith, or hall beside the Xystos, this Xystos being the polished stone gathering place in the open air on the western side of the hill of the Temple. The beggar leapt most of the way to confirm that his cure was genuine, and Peter in his fatigue said: ‘Please. Walk like a man.’ Outside the chamber they were kept waiting for over an hour. A man was selling baked fish nearby, and the pungent reek was a torture to their empty bellies. At length they were admitted and they gaped at what they saw. Most of the Sanhedrin was assembled for them, though there were more Sadducees than Pharisees. You always stood a chance with the Pharisees.
Annas was there, appointed high priest by Quirinius, the legate of Syria some twenty-six years back, deposed nine years later but the main power still of the priesthood, which was all in his family anyway. His son-in-law, Caiaphas, made successor to the old man by Valerius Gratus, procurator before Pilate, they knew too well. There was the son of Annas, Jonathan, and a mild little man named ineptly Alexander. There were priests and laymen muttering in their beards. Caiaphas, president of the court, opening the proceedings by saying:
‘It is claimed that you cured a man well known to be incurable. Is he in the court? Yes, I see he is. This leaping is unseemly. So. By what authority and in whose name have you effected this cure?’
Peter had prepared no words. Jesus had always insisted on the advisability of keeping one’s head and mouth empty so that the bird of inspiration could flutter in, or wind blow in. Peter’s tongue felt fire blaze at its root and he said:
‘Rulers of the people, elders, it seems that John here and I are charged with the crime of doing a good deed to a poor cripple who is, by God’s grace, a cripple no longer. Power and authority? These come from Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, as you will remember, and whom God raised from the dead. Now there is a line in one of the Psalms of David, which one I cannot recall, not being a man of book learning, and it goes like this: “The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.” There is salvation only in him. There is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved. The making whole of this beggar here is a testament or testimony, I am not sure of the right word, being ignorant, of his glory. I say no more.’
There was a good deal of muttered arguing and ocular daggers aimed at Peter and John which missed their targets. Then Caiaphas ordered that the two disciples be put outside so that the muttering could be augmented into open, though secret, plain speech.
‘Well, look, holy fathers and reverend gentlemen,’ old Annas said, his parchment face scored as by claws and his wattles wagging, ‘I can give you only the fruits of my experience in this sort of business. I have, as you know, no authority here.’ He beamed hideously at them all. ‘Belial and Beelzebub and the rest of the devils don’t cure cripples, they make them more crippled, so you can get diabolic power out of your heads, it won’t work. The whole city, I gather, is talking about this piece of thaumaturgy. Of course,’ he said, appraising the limbs of the beggar, who could not remain still and so walked the length and breadth of the court without rebuke, ‘we could always have his ankles broken and say that the cure never happened, but I think that would be gratuitous cruelty.’ Some of the Sanhedrin nodded agreement. ‘The God of our fathers sometimes effects prodigies which no man of learning is able to explain. What we have to do is to separate the act from the alleged spiritual force behind it. The thing to do is to say to these men that they have to stop propagandising in the name of the Galilean. My son-in-law here didn’t actually put him to death, he left that to the Romans, but he must find it acutely embarrassing that an amateur rabbi carpenter should now be proclaimed as the resurrected son of the Most High.’ He grinned maliciously at Caiaphas. ‘And the source of undeniable miracles.’
‘You won’t stop them,’ Jonathan said. ‘They either should not have been arrested at all or they should be stoned now for blasphemy. But that means stoning all of them, and the converts they’re making will turn against us more than they have already. It’s an awkward situation. What is needed is somebody like Rabban Gamaliel – why isn’t he here by the way? – who can spin new words and theories and make out that this Jesus was a genuine minor prophet acceptable to the priests and the people.’ He was shouted down.
‘You must be careful,’ Caiaphas warned. ‘No compromise is acceptable. It’s the claim of messiahship that’s dangerous, along with what many will take to be proof of it. One thing at a time. Threaten them with dire punishments if they preach the Galilean again.’
‘Apeile apeilesometha,’ Annas mouthed with relish. ‘Threaten with threatening. Not really a tautology. All we can threaten with is threats.’
‘Let them go then? With a warning?’
‘That’s right. Till the next time.’
Peter and John arrived for the day’s baptising late. Peter relieved Bartholomew, who needed to seek his own relief behind a bush. The Roman bucklers to the west drank the new sun. ‘Your name?’ Peter said to the young man before him.
‘Stephen.’
‘And what sins have you committed, Stephen?’
‘The ordinary human sins. Lust, though lust unenacted. Impatience and anger. Prolonged failure to see the light.’
‘But now you see it?’
‘I seek.’
‘I baptise you, Stephen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’
Now began the setting up of a Jerusalem community with no private property. Matthias turned his lonely house into a mart where furniture, plate and title deeds to fields and messuages could be brought, evaluated, and transferred to the hands of the primal twelve as administrators. Cunning merchants willing to turn personalty and realty into liquid cash came and offered as little as they could. Matthias had not yet become a totally feckless Nazarene and inaugurated a system of auctioneering. The pens of clerks drove hard. Saul, hearing the crash of the hammer, came to see in his uncharity and anger.
‘Monstrous and unclean. To throw away hard-earned money on snot-nosed beggars and stinking cripples.’
‘And yet failing to buy the release of my nephew from the hands of the Romans. Unnatural – is that what you wish to say? Well, God took charge. God knew as well as I that the Romans are unbribable.’
‘First things first, Matthias. Family. The company of the faithful. But of course you’re no longer of the faithful.’
‘I call myself a God-fearing Jew to whom a new grace has been added. You’re an intelligent young man, Saul, as well as a learned one. You must see the signs of the times. The old way is finished.’
‘I will protect the old way, as you call it, with the last breath of my body. And I will attack the new.’
‘Simply because it is the new?’
‘No, because it is blasphemous. God is a pure spirit and all above the decaying flesh of humanity.’
‘We believe differently.’
‘Believe then to your sorrow and destruction. The stones of justice are already grinding.’ And Saul elbowed his way irritably through the press of bargainers and appraisers, hearing the voice of Matthias pursue him into the street.
‘May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ bring you yet to the true way.’ Saul spat, then jostled the weaker members of the street crowd. He was in no mood for tentmaking and, besides, he had a sore thumb. He came to the grounds of the house which Joseph Barnabas had formerly owned and saw a new thing: there were awnings, and under the awnings litters, and on the litters the bodies of sick people. Stephen and Bartholomew were binding a wounded knee. Ananias was taking from bed to bed a breadbasket and a wine-flask. He smiled when he saw Saul. He said:
‘You’ve come to us at last? This is a good place for easing a stiff neck.’
‘So,’ Saul said. ‘How long will this continue? You leave the Pharisees and join the Essenes. And now you belong to this blasphemous sect. Stephen too, I see. Folly. Have you too sold everything for the sake of the drooling cripples?’
‘Everything, Saul.’
This was not strictly true. Later that day, in the former house of Matthias, Peter repeated, though with more grace, the words of Saul.
‘Everything, Peter. Count the money – it’s there on the table.’
‘And the bill of sale?’
‘That,’ Ananias uncomfortably said, ‘is not strictly the affair of the community. I was not bound to sell my farm. That was a voluntary act. Surely all our acts are voluntary? We live, surely, under no compulsion?’
‘As we vow to live without possessions of our own and share all things in common, you, as one of us, were bound to give everything. I ask again, Ananias – everything?’
‘Everything.’
‘What does your name mean, Ananias?’
‘My name? Why ask about my name? It’s properly Hananiah, I’m told. Something about Jehovah giving graciously—’
‘You mock what God does and you mock your own name. I see to your soul, Hananiah. And you, Saphira, you abet the lie?’
Saphira was Ananias’s wife, her name properly Shappira, meaning the beautiful one. It is a dangerous thing to give girl babies names they may not live up to. Saphira was small of eye and thin of lip, her hair lank with an excess of God’s own oil. She said, in some confusion: ‘The farm was my father’s. It’s my father giving from the grave, but he made no promise to the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes did not exist when he died.’
‘The money is nevertheless that of you and your husband to give. I ask again: do you abet the lie?’
‘I am no liar,’ she said. ‘Were we not entitled to some small place of our own? Where are a man and his wife to live? There are things a husband and wife must do in private, they cannot sleep as in a jail with strangers who call themselves brothers snoring around them or keeping awake to watch what is forbidden.’
‘So some of the money has been kept back. Yes, Ananias?’
‘Nothing has been kept back. This I swear.’
‘We’re enjoined by our master not to swear but to say plain yes and no. Are you a liar, Ananias?’
‘Whatever is meant by liar. We were granted a small messuage of the farm, no more than an outhouse. But the money from the sale is all there.’
‘So,’ Peter said, ‘Ananias the liar finally speaks the truth. Go now, and Saphira with you. We’re not like the Romans or the Sanhedrin. We exact no punishment, leaving that to God. For now the knowledge of wrongdoing should be punishment enough. Savour your crime alone, the two of you.’ And he turned his back on them.
‘Give me a little water,’ Ananias said. ‘I feel faint. My heart is not strong.’ Nobody gave him anything. ‘I see. The giving is all on one side. This shall be a curse to you, you will see.’ And he left tottering, supported by Saphira. Matthias said to Peter:
‘Forgive my presumption – I know I am the newest of the company and so understand least – but I can’t see how Ananias was wrong. I had the opportunity to have my nephew freed – I mean Caleb. It was a matter of paying out money. How if I had kept back money that was really my own?’
‘Was,’ James the other, son of Zebedee, said. ‘Was, remember that. Now you are in a happy position. Before you were in confusion, for you knew that bribes did not work and yet you had the faint hope that one might. It’s always best to be without money. Turn money into what can be consumed and consumed quickly. That rids a man of confusion and greed and many another vice.’
‘You would have lost your money,’ Peter said, ‘and, if things had not worked out differently through God’s grace, your nephew would have lost his life. The Romans don’t make bargains, James is right. Things have worked out for the best. Always look for the hand of God.’
‘As now?’ Matthias asked. He was looking out into the street, where Ananias had fallen into the dust. Saphira was bending over him, her hand on his bared chest, feeling for the heartbeat. She raised her head and her voice, crying for help. A laden camel went by, roaring out of its own inner dissatisfaction, and it was led by a man who, though not roaring, had troubles of his own. A dry wind bestowed more dust on Saphira and her husband. Two fat women passed with baskets loaded for the market, chattering.
‘I thought we preached charity,’ Matthias said. ‘Or should I say that there is a gulf between preaching and practising?’
‘God hates a liar,’ Peter said doubtfully.
Caleb arrived at Sebaste, the capital city of Samaria. This, which had once borne the name of the country itself, had been rebuilt in the Greek style by Herod the Great and named for the Roman Emperor Augustus, who was styled in Greek Sebastos. Caleb saw in morning sun the hill Gerizim, on which the Samaritans had built their own temple to rival that of Jerusalem. It was not so fine to look at, though its east facing gold and silver doors were as brilliant in the sun as those of the city of true holiness. There could be no real holiness here, so the Judaeans taught. A lot of half-breeds. Assyrian blood, blood of the Hasmoneans, a bad lot. But the people looked much like Caleb’s own. They wore dirty robes, chaffered at fruit stalls, spat, scratched. An unveiled girl of rare pale beauty looked down wistfully from a high window and was then roughly dragged in to darkness by a scolding voice.
Beggars cried for alms in the name of Jehovah. A man in white-edged black with an Assyrian beard performed conjuring tricks before an idle knot of citizens the police rudely beat from the thoroughfare of burdened donkeys and camels, a closed litter in the Roman style borne on tough poles by near-naked men who looked like Ethiopians. There were, as in Jerusalem, Syrian troops but more decurions of Italic blood. Caleb had a few coins stamped with the head of Tiberius Caesar, given to him by Ananias when he left the thin pale community of the Essenes. He found a small tavern and broke his fast. The bread here was baked hard in thin slabs on oiled iron. The wine was more pink than red. The girl who served him noted his accent. From where? Jerusalem. She was not impressed.
It was near noon when he met Samaritans of his own age and something of his own fire. This was in the bathhouse attached to the temple on the hill Gerizim. When he stripped to sluice himself they saw the fresh scars on his back. They called an older man who, combing his wet hair with five tines of iron, came over and looked at the scars before properly engaging the eyes of their possessor. ‘Who are you?’ the man said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Caleb from Jerusalem. One of the Zealots. Scourged by the Romans. Escaped crucifixion.’
‘We don’t hold much here,’ the man said, ‘with the people of Judaea. The Romans did a good thing when they freed us from Judaean rule.’
‘But now it’s a Roman Judaea that rules you. Is that any better?’
‘We don’t hear much from your Pontius Pilate. It’s all left to the prefect. He’s a bastard called Gracchus who’s got his eye on this temple here. The usual thing. Loot, loot, more loot.’
‘I take it you head the freedom force.’
The man gave a single guffaw. ‘That’s a pompous way of putting it. No, I’m not a leader or anything like it. Call me more of a spy. I work in the prefecture as a sort of clerk. One thing I’ve found out is that they’re reducing the garrison here. Increasing it in Judaea. What’s going on there? Is it to do with you?’
‘There’s this new sect, the Nazarenes. I gather there’s been a miracle or something like it, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm. It won’t last, that sort of thing never does, but the Romans get worried when the Jews get enthusiastic.’
‘What are you after here? We’re not your people.’
‘I should have thought this was the wrong time for division. Zealots are Zealots, I should have thought, wherever they are. It’s time to strike.’
‘And what do you get out of striking?’
‘We get rid of the Roman presence. It’s been around too long. We get the House of David ruling the kingdom of Palestine.’
The Samaritan stroked one cheek then another. He said: ‘We’re not too sure here whether we want to be back under a Judaean king. But we certainly don’t want the Romans here. You’d better have a word with John.’
‘His father named him after John Hyrcanus. He dropped the Hyrcanus for obvious reasons. You know who John Hyrcanus was?’
‘He took over here over a century ago, didn’t he? Destroyed your temple as a blasphemous parody and so on.’
‘John’s father had this mad idea that there was conqueror’s blood in the family. John and he have come to blows. John’s just John, a good Biblical name. John wants to kill Gracchus.’
‘The prefect?’
‘Gracchus had John whipped. Like you were whipped. Some charge to do with embezzlement, false of course. John used to carry money from the treasury to pay the troops. We know who the real embezzler was.’
‘Well, why doesn’t he stick the knife in?’
‘Not easy. Are you used to fighting?’
‘I led a raid against a desert camp once. The time’s come to strike nearer the centre now, I think. The point is this, as I see it. It’s not a question of winning pitched battles against the Romans. It’s a matter of convincing the Romans that there’s nothing for them in Palestine. It happened before. They’ll be ready to take their governors out and let the Herod blood back in again. It’s bad blood but it’s native blood. And it’s the beginning of something better.’
This John whom Caleb met was nearly all black beard and total baldness, though young enough. He sat cross-legged mending sandals on the city’s outskirts. His hovel was dusty. He said:
‘We’ve had strangers like you here before. Sadducees in the pay of the Romans.’
‘Of course,’ Caleb said. ‘And I laid on the whip myself. I enjoy that sort of thing.’ He showed. John whistled. Caleb said: ‘How many men do you have?’
‘I can gather two hundred. Good raiding material. Trained in knifing, garrotting. Outposts mostly, of course. We’ve been quiet lately. We’re a bit slack. A raid on the prefecture, the city barracks is next door. Not ready for it. I don’t know, though. We can’t wait for ever. Gracchus has to be crucified.’
‘You mean that?’
‘A knife in his throat – too easy. Crucified and then burnt.’
‘You’re a hard man, John,’ Caleb grinned.
The raid was daring and God, or something, was on their side. They invaded the city barracks before daybreak, strangled the guard, knifed a sleeping centurion and a couple of decurions who were already awake. They attacked naked men fearful in barrack dormitories, then they set the wooden building afire. They had difficulty in firing the stone prefecture, but they smashed all within, burnt documents, killed the watchmen and set off for the suburban villa of the prefect. Gracchus appeared in his nightgown. A Samaritan succuba tried to escape, still warm from his bed, but she was held and her hair set alight. The guards had their throats slit. Then Gracchus was hauled sobbing down the road to the city centre. The entire town was awake, and men with buckets of water were trying to stop the spread of the barracks fire to innocent homes and shops. Smoke and flame made a good background for the enactment which John personally supervised. The Samaritans had found enough wooden crosses – the new kind with crosspiece already nailed to upright, upright sharpened to a stake’s sharpness at the foot end – in the barracks yard. Gracchus was lovingly nailed naked to one of these, and he sobbed and howled in a dialect which none present knew – a form of Oscan or Umbrian, perhaps, from his native village. He cried at one point for his mamma, and everybody registered the word without compassion. The hole was speedily and sweatingly dug for the crosspoint, and the burdened cross was set in, swaying, unfirm, but that did not matter. Before the casting of burning pitch on the still-living body, John cut off the genitalia in a single swish with a cobbler’s knife. Caleb to his shame vomited.
Tiberius’s scream was less desperate but it inspired fear. The messenger who had brought dispatches from Syria through Rome stood sweating in the manner of all who bring bad news. Tiberius’s pet snake, wreathed round his shoulders, responded to her master’s mood by hissing. Tiberius banged with his fist on the wooden table of the arbour and sent winecups flying. Gurtius Atticus stood grimly by. Tiberius got words out at last.
‘How much more shall we tolerate? Have I not done more for these Jews than than than—’
The repetition of quam became manic. Curtius said:
‘Yes, Caesar. You gave them back their own property. Some of it.’
Tiberius hissed like his snake. ‘Don’t try your stoic sarcasm on me, Curtius. Your white hairs grant you no immunity—’
‘Have me killed, Caesar, if it will ease your frustration. Frustration you’ve brought on yourself. This revolt in Palestine is only one symptom of a total sickness. Armies in revolt on the Rhine. Thugs in the Senate. I say again though I am sick of saying it—’
‘I will not go back to Rome. Let’s see what the fool has done.’ He read the dispatch once again. ‘The Third Legion moved in from Syria. He wants the Miliara division recalled from Egypt. Roman rule. Roman order. Roman blood spilt in Samaria – wherever Samaria is.’
‘It’s a part of your Empire, Tiberius. Read on and you’ll see what his real foolishness was. A raid on a native temple. Wagons loaded with sacred vessels. The temple treasury ransacked. He officially entered Samaria to restore order, not provoke more disorder.’
A couple of naked boys, playing and giggling, got unawares into the path of the tigerpacing Tiberius. He tore at them with his bare hands. A servant shooed and beat off the children but was himself beaten. Another servant proffered a refilled winecup (a beautiful one made in Herculaneum, the handles naked bronze bodies and the cup itself like a pregnant belly) and had it knocked out of his hand. ‘Fetch more, you clumsy fool,’ he cried. He cried to Curtius: ‘Pilate has to go. Send an immediate dispatch recalling him—’
‘He comes under the Syrian governor. We should leave that sort of thing to Flaccus.’
‘Get Marcellus sent out in his place. Another fool, corrupt and incompetent. Who can we send?’
‘The Empire,’ Curtius said, ‘is forgetting how to breed administrators. Perhaps you’d be wiser to put the whole province under one of the native princes.’
‘Another fool, if you mean this Herod Agrippa. A whole family of corrupt and cruel idiots—’
‘Well, they’ve been brought up on the Roman example, Caesar.’
‘My heart,’ Tiberius whispered dramatically. His lips had now turned noticeably blue. ‘The palpitations are coming back. Are they trying to kill me, the fools and ingrates? Take me to my bedroom. Fetch me a litter. And you’re the biggest fool of them all. I can hardly crawl, and you want me to go back to Rome.’
On the other side of the island Gaius Caligula and Prince Herod Agrippa played ball. It was a simple game of throwing and mostly missing. Lithe naked female slaves retrieved the taut silk globe stuffed with duckdown. A wasp alighted on Gaius’s bare arm. He cried extravagantly, much in the manner of his imperial great-uncle: ‘It’s bitten me, it’s stung me, I shall die. Got you.’ He held up the insect to the setting sun and carefully tore off its wings. Herod Agrippa wearily fell on to a pile of cushions. A slave’s breasts swung over him as she wiped his sweating forehead. Gaius limped over to join him. He took a breast in his left hand and examined it curiously, as for blemishes. Then he withdrew his hand and let it bounce to rest. Gaius was not handsome. His neck was thin and his legs spindly. His brow was broad but his scalp very nearly bald. He made up for his lack of head-hair with a thick pelt over his chest and big belly. His complexion was of the colour of rancid lard. As he reclined he kicked off his little boots. Herod Agrippa said:
‘You need a larger size.’ And Gaius said:
‘The Emperor Littleboots.’ He giggled. ‘The army loves me, Herod. They’ll never be disloyal to Littleboots.’
‘Emperor sooner than. Judging from.’
‘It’s his heart, Herod. An old man’s heart. He’s lived too long. Still, we’ll leave it all to nature, I think. It’s your people that brought this on, you know. The talons of the imperial eagle shall dig into the heart of the Jewish nation. Hard words, Herod. And then he had to be put to bed.’
‘Only a Jew understands a Jew,’ Herod said. ‘You people made a big mistake. Roman procurators hardly willing to mouth a syllable of Aramaic. Telling the Jews about Jupiter and Venus and Mercury and the divine Emperor. No wonder the Jews laugh when they don’t cry.’
Gaius gave him a steady look and spoke very softly. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you don’t like the idea of a divine emperor?’
Herod Agrippa grinned but felt, as it were, the single kick of a little boot in his entrails. ‘For you, my dear, of course I become a true Roman with all the right pagan attitudes. I shall worship at your altar. I shall make your divine divinity cough with excess of incense. But you can’t blame the Jews for finding all these little gods rather childish and tiresome. After all, we thought of it first. One God, the creator and sustainer of the universe. The Romans and the Greeks as well are rather slow in grasping that concept, aren’t they?’
‘Oh, I’m not slow,’ Gaius said, ‘your royal Jewish lowness. I think the idea of one God a very attractive one. To be totally totally totally in control.’
‘Meaning?’ The little boot kicked harder.
‘You see, once the universe has been created, what is there left to do?’
‘The universe must be maintained. God watches over it.’
‘Very tiresome and boring for God, I would say. The act of creation was his great thrill, and he can find a – what’s the word – commensurate one only in destroying it. Wouldn’t you say that’s reasonable? Pull it to pieces and then start again. Got you, you silly thing.’ He meant another wasp – Capri was full of them this season – which had made itself drunk on a patch of spilt wine on the marble table. He squinted at it, dewinging it with care. ‘Oh, we’ll have great games when I’m installed in Rome and you’re in your palace in Jerusalem. Visiting each other, you know, playing games. But I shall have to win always, Herod Agrippa, because I’ll be Emperor, you see, and you’ll just be a little king. But a little king is bigger than even a big prince, isn’t that so? I hope you’ll be duly grateful, your prospective Jewish majesty.’
‘Lord of the universe, I abase myself.’ But Herod Agrippa felt a certain nausea, playing these games with an Emperor designate he was fairly sure was moving swiftly from silliness to dementia. After all, he was in his forties and growing paunchy and grey. It was unseemly to be playing games with a boy of twenty-five or so, even though this boy was soon to become lord of the, if not the universe what the Romans thought of as the universe. He should be back there with his people. It was all his mother’s fault, sending him to Rome as a mere infant, there to be brought up as a Roman. His father Aristobulus, whom he had never known, brutally and perhaps unjustly executed. Look to the safety of the son. For what end? He would not be king, of that he was sure; there would always be a Roman governor in Judaea. He felt weary, overfed, coated with honey that had a curiously fecal smell. Gaius said:
‘You told me once there’s a secret Jewish name for the Lord of the universe. The ineffable name. What is it, Herod? Do tell me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t. Only the priests know that name.’
‘Well, you must beat the priests till they tell you, mustn’t you? And if they won’t tell you, you must line them all up, then off with their heads, eh? Oh, we shall have great times together.’
He then began languidly to pummel Herod Agrippa with his feeble fists.
The whole twelve of them were now lined up facing the Sanhedrin. Annas grinned terribly at them and said: ‘Let’s have those names again. You two I know already, here before, weren’t you, never listened to the solemn words of sacerdotal admonition, most disobedient, very unwise. Point them out, you, one by one.’ He meant Saul, temporarily appointed, in the absence of Ezekiel, who was sick with belly cramps, a sort of clerk to the court. ‘Two Jameses, I see. Who’s that old frowning one? Don’t frown at me, sir, we do the frowning here. Matthias I know well, you were a secular pillar of the faith, Matthias, sorry to see you arraigned on this charge, the charge being the same as before. A very ordinary-looking crew, I would say. Let’s get on with it.’
‘One moment,’ Rabban Gamaliel said. All prepared to listen with grudging respect to the great Pharisee, chief of the school of Hillel, rabban, no mere rabbi. ‘There has been too much talk about the allegedly disrupting influence of the Nazarenes. I think it ought to be made clear that, though they are undoubtedly a cause of the impaired tranquillity of the leaders of the Jewish people, they have been in no wise an inflammatory element in our public life. There is too much talk, I say, about their supposed connection with John the Baptist and zealotry. They have not been shouting the need for the breakdown of the established order and the need for insurrection. What happened in Samaria and could happen here, I mean insurrection and the brutal frustration of insurrection, has been wholly political. The followers of the man Jesus seek the cultivation of charity to all, what we may term a quite unpolitical quietism.’
‘Nobody has made the connection,’ Caiaphas said.
‘Are you sure? Am I not right in saying that the Sanhedrin has become very eager to convince the Roman power that it is the willing agent of the pax Romana, and that it abhors both zealotry and the Nazarene cult as cognate manifestations of unrest and unreason?’
The Romans,’ Caiaphas said, ‘are unable to see much difference between the enthusiasm of religious heretics and the ah furor of political activists. However, let us stick to the point at issue, which is that these twelve here arraigned have been preaching heresy and performing blasphemous acts.’
‘Healing the sick, for instance?’ Gamaliel said.
‘Whether they heal the sick or not,’ Caiaphas said, ‘is hardly to the point. They foment superstition. There are some who seek to have their ailments cured by standing in the shadow of this man Peter, a common fisherman. As for their teaching, they have already been warned not to preach in the name of the proven criminal Jesus. Can you,’ he said to Peter, ‘deny that you have gone contrary to our ordinance? You have filled the synagogues with your blasphemies.’
‘They want to bring that man’s blood upon us,’ muttered a Sadducee named Jonah.
‘Enough of that,’ Caiaphas rasped. ‘You,’ to Peter, ‘what do you say?’
‘This, sir,’ Peter said. ‘We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus. As for you, you killed him. You nailed him to a tree.’
‘We did not,’ Jonah cried. Others cried too, others murmured, some went aaargh as though blood were mounting into their throats.
‘God,’ Peter said, ‘exalted him at his right hand to be a prince and a saviour – to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.’
‘With such blasphemy,’ Caiaphas cried, ‘you put yourselves in peril of the final penalty—’
‘The final penalty, as you call it,’ Peter said, ‘is in the hands of the Romans. As you know well. The Romans find no fault in us.’
‘In that you challenge the authority of this sacred assembly, which is answerable to the occupying power—’
‘That,’ Peter said, ‘is not good thinking. All you can do is to set men with stones on us. Kill us if you want to. As you killed him. You can’t kill the divine word.’
‘Look,’ Jonathan said. ‘You’ve been telling everybody that an angel opened the door of the prison and let you all out. And you said that anyone who’s lawfully put in jail may expect the same, God help us, angelic intervention. That strikes at the very roots of order and law and legal punishment.’
‘Nobody said that,’ Thomas growled. ‘Ye’re too quick, the lot of ye to put words in folks’ mouths. Somebody opened that door in the dead of the night and nobody knows who. It might have been one of yon prison guards that had come to the right way of believing. It might have been some decent quiet man that got the message of the Lord.’
‘A messenger of the Lord, you say? That’s blasphemy.’
‘I did not say messenger of the Lord.’
‘Mal’akh, you said. We all know what that means.’
‘In my youthful days,’ Annas said, ‘it meant a messenger. The same as angelos.’
‘Used of the spiritual attendants of the Most High.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Look,’ Thomas cried, ‘if the Lord sent a messenger to get us out of yon jail the Lord and his messenger both need their heads looking at, for it was clear we’d be back to the preaching and curing of the sick and get ourselves picked up by yon captain of the Temple guard or whatever he’s called and where would be the reason in it?’
‘You can’t help blaspheming, can you?’ Jonathan said. ‘Blasphemy is stitched into your very skin.’
‘A good phrase,’ Thaddeus said. ‘Sacrilegious sin. Stitched in your very skin.’
‘Stop this,’ Peter cried, as though he were chief of the Sanhedrin, ‘and keep to the point. Somebody opened the door and we got out. But here we are, calm, roaring, in our innocence. Let’s get the business over with. We have work to do.’
‘Ah no.’ Caiaphas shook his head. Rabban Gamaliel said:
‘Listen to me.’ They listened. ‘It has been said, and it will be said again, that every assembly formed in the name of God will stand established, and every assembly not so formed must needs perish. Now we have had in recent years two notable instances of self-styled prophets. Theudas rose up some thirty years ago and won four hundred followers, but where is he now? He did not have God on his side and so he perished. Then there was Judas of Galilee, whom some of you may remember well enough. That was at the time of the Roman census to assess the amount of our tribute, and this Judas said that God alone was king of Israel and it was both blasphemy and high treason to pay tribute to Caesar. Rome crushed him, and now he is no more than a name. We have had many failed insurgents and many false prophets. Now take these Nazarenes. My advice is that you leave them alone. For if their counsel or their work is merely that of men, it will of its own nature be overthrown. But if their counsel or their work is of God – if – you will not be able to overthrow it. And those who attempt to overthrow it may find themselves in a very unhappy position. Even all unknowing, they will be fighting against the Lord our God.’
There were murmurs at that, but most of the Pharisees nodded at the good sense. John, little James, Thaddeus and Bartholomew cautiously beamed, but Peter and Thomas frowned, considering: good sense but had to be a catch in it somewhere. Caiaphas deliberated with his father-in-law. At length he said: ‘Thus speaks the spirit of moderation that is a legacy of the great Hillel. Sometimes we may be moderate, sometimes not. Now is such a time. Our judgement is that you cease your preaching and practice alike—’
‘So,’ Thomas said, ‘those that lie sick in our spittle have to take up their beds and walk? No more doing good works? Ye’re flying in the Lord’s face.’
‘Oh yes,’ Caiaphas said, ‘one other thing. For insolence and stubbornness and truculence you will receive the punishment laid down in the book of Deuteronomy. A flogging. Forty strokes less one.’
‘Ye mean,’ Thomas said, ‘thirty-nine? Why not say what ye mean?’ The other disciples made noises of rejoicing not well understood by the holy assembly. Jonathan said:
‘We’ll hear less of your alleluias when they bring out the whips, my friends.’
‘You’ve played into the Lord’s hands, bless you,’ Peter called. ‘Now we share in what you did to him.’ And, without waiting for a word of dismissal, he led his eleven towards the enclosed punishment yard near the lishkath ha-gazith.
‘Weakness,’ Saul said to his master. ‘You see the weakness. And you, rabban, abet the weakness.’
‘I hear the harshness of authority in your voice, Saul. You seem to be outgrowing your studentship.’
‘Oh, I respect and honour you as ever, rabban. But I must be permitted to make my own judgements.’
‘Read more. Judge less.’
‘The whole of Israel,’ Saul said, ‘is imperilled by false doctrine. And they’re to be given a lick of the whip and told to go.’
‘Look, Saul, I find little fault in these men. I was not uttering mere rhetoric.’
‘They subvert truth. They preach a known Messiah, rejected by the high priests who are the voice of Israel.’
‘Read your scriptures, Saul. We were promised a Messiah. It’s wrong to accept without further evidence, true, but it would be foolish wholeheartedly to reject. They do no evil. They do nothing but good. You’ve seen it.’
‘Sheer cunning. They buy followers with good works. They cram the poor first with bread and then with false doctrine. You must speak against them.’
‘Must, Saul? Must?’
‘I’m going to see the flogging. I want to hear them howl.’
‘A moment, Saul.’ Gamaliel pulled at his party beard, troubled. ‘I’m interested in you. Not in your devotion to the faith but in the strength of vindictive feeling you bring to those whom you consider are its opponents. The feeling is excessive, obsessed. You snarl. You frown as if you had a perpetual headache. Are you well?’
‘Well enough. The epilepsia has left me alone these eighteen months and more. God keeps me well.’
‘You have a powerful persecutory instinct in you. Remember that the desire to persecute is negative. It promotes fear. It promotes it even in myself. You make me wish to search my conscience for smuts of heresy or unpurposed blasphemies. This, dear Saul, has little to do with religion.’
‘But,’ Saul said, ‘the undoing of centuries of endeavour. To come out of the desert at last and set up the Temple. The Temple is our home and our stability. And this man sneered at it. The human body is the true Temple. Destroy it and it can be rebuilt in three days. You ought to shudder as I shudder.’
‘These days,’ Gamaliel said, ‘I shudder only with the cold. Well, the Temple may be our home and our stability and it may house the Holy of Holies, but it’s still a work of human hands. The body is God’s work and very wonderfully made. Old as I am, I glory in my flesh and anticipate, as you do, resurrection in it. That belief makes us Pharisees what we are. Now I see you really shudder. Most unpharisaic. Do you dislike the human body?’
‘A tent,’ Saul said, ‘for housing the spirit.’
Gamaliel forbore to say something about the tent pole: Saul deserved to be shocked, but not perhaps with an unprepared obscenity. Instead he said: ‘What is your view of a text we have never considered in class, I mean the Song that is Solomon’s?’
‘A well-made epithalamion. Somewhat vulgar. He strips his beloved and shows her flesh to the world. Like a slave market. The flesh is best kept hidden.’
‘Except, of course, for flogging.’
Saul had no capacity for blushing. But he did not go to the punishment yard, where the disciples were being lashed in threes. James the Little stood with folded arms awaiting his turn while Peter and Thomas and Bartholomew had their wrists tied in a posture of embracing as with love the stone post of punition. A little wiry man named Esra was, out of supposed deference to the criminal’s age, whipping half-naked Thomas but feebly. ‘Go on, man,’ James bellowed. ‘Lay it on. Do you want me to do it for you?’ Thomas said:
‘Ye’re Esra, right? The brother of Jephtha. Jephtha’s doing well with us. Join him, ow, that hurt. This seems a poor way of earning a living.’ Thaddeus improvised a whipping song like a sea shanty, and all who could sing sang it with glee and false notes:
Beat us and bash us
Lick us and lash us
Forty less one
Then when you’ve done
Give us one more
Making two score.
Whipped, Matthew said: ‘We’ll have to sleep on our bellies tonight, lads.’ All laughed at this typical piece of Galilean fortitude, humour, whatever it was. But they had to sleep on their bellies, and they did not sleep much, for more than one night.
The Emperor Tiberius had slept this night on his back, and he woke before dawn with his mouth open and his throat dry with snoring. He wondered at the wetness of his hand, agleam in the tiny night light. Then he knew that he had been scratching at the running sores on his face. He had been dreaming of his dead son Drusus, whom he had seen for the hundredth time lying in dried blood and a feast for the Roman flies in an alley near the Tiber. And yet he was not sure now whether he had died from dagger wounds inflicted in a kind of animal candour. A story had at last emerged about a eunuch named Lygdus, dead now of course, garotted and his penis sliced off first, who had been administering small potions of some Egyptian poison to the Emperor’s son he served, year after year, on the orders of Sejanus. Who was alive to tell the truth about anything? Running sores. The marble body of Rome pitted and scored. Truth was dead along with honour and honesty, and history was a battle of lies. He, Tiberius, had begun well enough, though aware always that his stepfather the divine Augustus had chosen him as the dim foil of his own brightness. A bad fanfare to the reign, though, Augustus’s grandson Agrippa Postumus murdered. That had not been on the orders of him, Tiberius, but he would have done better to institute a larger inquiry, have the assassin centurion questioned under torture rather than given the immediate axe. That was Livia, of course, the imperial mother, hated the boy, dull and slow though he was, as a possible focus of disaffection. He, Tiberius, should have spoken out, not preserved a grim silence which seemed to many like the dumbness of guilt.
There were a large number of things he should have done and had not done. Looked after the army in Pannonia, paid those justly growling veterans at least as much as the Praetorian Guard. Inhibited his jealousy of Germanicus. Not appointed Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso as governor of Syria. Germanicus had been right to censure Piso for mismanaging the province. Piso had been wrong to think that he, Tiberius, would be delighted to learn that Piso had had the dagger put in, or poison dripped in slow droplets into the clawfoot cup from the Rhine that had been Germanicus’s childish pride (the Germans good craftsmen, intelligent, worthy the conquering). No, when a man rose deservedly high and was dangerously loved of the multitude his destruction had to be encompassed by subtler means: the amassed false documents of bribery and conspiracy, gross evidence of sexual irregularities. Germanicus had been obscenely pure and incorruptible, as well as sickeningly competent. Such men were dangerous.
And yet what manner of men were required in a state which had been swift to deify Augustus and not slow in muttering ‘Tiberius to the Tiber’? Men like Sejanus (dead), Macro (still alive), Piso (drainer of the wealth of Syria)? The provinces were atrociously governed. He, Tiberius, had joined with the divine Augustus in considering a dirt heap like Palestine hardly worth the exportation of administrative competence, and yet one could not close one’s eyes to the massive inefficiency of this Pontius Pilatus, a man Tiberius did not know, a protégé of the butchered, rightly, Sejanus. Not enough to have this Pilatus tonguelashed in Syria and let him sneak off into opulent retirement in Corinth or Ephesus. Bring him back to Rome, lay bare before the Senate and the judges evidence of peculation, disloyalty, the cynical fleaing and clipping of the aquiline potestas. That deputy of his, Quintus or Sextilian or some such name, not appointed by Sejanus, had sent sly letters forwarded to Capri, unread by him, Tiberius, but mentioned occasionally by the stoic Curtius, wearisome voice of imperial conscience, as further evidence of provincial mismanagement. Well, he, Tiberius, had done his share of judicial investigation and had been adjudged impartial and unvindictive. He could still flare briefly in the imperial firmament as a just princeps before retiring into the, what was the phrase, una nox dormienda.
Well, that was all there was. There were gods and avatars in the provinces which promised eternities of bliss for the just as well as the victims of injustice, but Rome sternly commanded a brief daylight of virtus and then the brave march into endless blackness. The just and unjust alike slept together in the nox that was wide as the universe but narrow as the grave. There was, it had to be admitted, a certain injustice in this shovelling of the unjust and the just under a common mound: not literally, of course, since the unjust usually had the final injustice of funerary magnificence. There perhaps ought to be compensation after death for living misery: he, Tiberius, had had misery enough, the gods knew, and he was to be bundled with filthy slaves who had never known the agonies of responsibility into the una nox. The gods, of course, were a quite farcical invention, though necessary for the as it were marmoreal exaltation of the civic virtues. You sacrificed to Jupiter after or before the bath or the games or the fruitless wrangle with debauched and asinine senators. Chance was the only goddess. He saw Chance looking down on his lonely bed, shaking dice but not yet throwing them. She had the lineaments of his detestable and detested imperial mother. He said aloud:
‘Mother, you unkillable bitch, I am going to Rome.’
Lonely bed, yes, with no healthily snoring catamite sprawled across it. Banished, banished, all. He grasped the imperial penis, flaccid as a depleted kidskin moneypurse, and it did not awake to the prospect of its stimulation. His mother looked at it very sourly. Unkillable but officially dead. Dead in her bed at eighty; he had refused to go to the bitch’s funeral. She had caught him at the age of twelve in the act of mastupration. Unseemly, unroman, Greekish, Jewish. Well, in a sense he had done nothing but mastuprate since taking the purple. The amatory images of boyhood, becoming ever more extravagant, had been transubstantiated into flesh and blood, but the wraiths of the heated brain above the frotting right hand had, in retrospect, more reality. Inadequate, eh? You are inadequate, Biberius Caldius Mero.
‘I am going to Rome, you dead bitch, and I am going to spit on your grave,’ he said to the dawn inching up over the mainland. He snuffed out the night light, and the imperial penis settled back to its torpor. On the table was a bell. He raised it and the little clapper gave its regular morning tongue. It was answered by a bigger bell and then a bigger bell still, somewhere off. A couple of naked slaves, Felix and Tristis, came running with his morning potion, a chilled posset of wine and goatmilk. Then he got up.
On the terrace of the Villa Jovis he saw the guard being changed. The junior centurion on his dawn inspection checked the dress of the incoming maniple. That sandal badly buckled. You need a haircut, Balbus. Tiberius watched. The junior centurion saw and stiffened and handed him a morning ave. ‘Here,’ Tiberius called. The junior centurion ran towards the terrace on light feet. Handsome enough, brawny, well made. ‘I knew your name,’ Tiberius said, ‘but I have forgotten it. An old man’s memory, as they say.’
‘Marcus Julius Tranquillus,’ the young man said, ‘Caesar.’
‘Julius? Julius? Julius? This is some joke. It is too early in the day for jokes.’
‘No joke, Caesar. I belong to the plebeian branch.’
‘There is no plebeian branch of the Julian line.’
‘That may be so, Caesar, though my father and grandfather believed otherwise. Julius is certainly my middle name.’
‘Well then, Marcus Julius, you have much to do today. I leave to you the details of the embarkation.’
‘Embarkation, Caesar?’
‘Yes, we are going to Rome. In a day or so. I must, of course, consult the sacred entrails. But the sacred entrails are a mere formality. And I suppose you ought to find Apemantus for me.’
‘Apemantus, Caesar?’
‘Yes yes, my astrologer. Apprise your men of the need for the utmost efficiency in the carrying out of their duties. We have enemies. They must be on the alert. I am going to Rome. Caesar is going to Rome. There is much to do. Messages must be sent. Every possible precaution. These are dangerous times we are living in, Marcus Julius.’
‘Indeed, Caesar.’
‘And tell me, young man, you may speak in all confidence, a dawn converse between man and man, what is your view of the future of the Empire?’
‘A very large question, Caesar. I wish continued life to Caesar and rejoice that he is to show himself in Rome. Rome, after all, is the Emperor.’
‘Come now, boy, you know I cannot last much longer. Your duties here have made you acquainted with my grand-nephew?’
‘I have seen him occasionally. But only from a distance.’
‘And you have no opinion of him? I mean – as the imperial successor.’
‘Caesar has chosen him. What else can I say?’
Tiberius felt anger spurt like bile. ‘And if I said to you that I have been nursing a viper?’
‘Caesar’s devotion to his pet serpent is well known.’
‘I’ve bred a race of sycophants and dissimulators and evaders of the truth. I can blame only myself. You can say what you wish to me, man. I won’t order your crucifixion.’
‘The prince Gaius,’ the junior centurion said, ‘is the son of the lamented Germanicus. We naturally expect the best from him.’
Tiberius wished now to void his morning posset. ‘Oh, get out of my sight. Fetch Apemantus. You Romans will get what you deserve. You always have.’
His snake Columba was sleepily coiled on his left arm as he sat listening to the astrologer’s interpretation of the stellar configurations. They would never be more auspicious.
‘They will never be more auspicious,’ Curtius said.
‘I catch your sardonic tone, Curtius. I listen to soothsayers but not to stoic reason. But you ought to be pleased – the result is the same.’
‘Praise be to God or the gods,’ Curtius said. ‘When do we start?’
‘The winds are set fair,’ the astrologer said. He was a sly man in middle age, Graeco-Roman, his eyes unwavering when trained upon his charts but shifty in human contacts. He had contrived a distinctive dress for himself to show the world that he was an astrologer – blue robe with cutout golden stylised stars sewn on and, also to hide his baldness, a turban in the eastern style. He wore seven rings, one for each of the major heavenly bodies. Onyx, amethyst, moonstone, ruby, opal, sapphire, plain gold. ‘And the auguries for Caesar’s health are truly excellent.’
When Tiberius took his mid-morning swim in the piscina one of his minnows took a vicious bite at his shrunken testicles. Tiberius naturally had him whipped, though not to the point of extinction. Then, as the whip was handy, he had the astrologer whipped. He trusted nobody.
Bartholomew came out of the darkened bedroom to tell the two girls that their mother was fast wasting, unresponsive to herbal decoctions, unable, indeed, to keep even water on her stomach: they had better prepare for the worst. But, of course, if they required another opinion—
‘We trust you,’ Sara said, sighing. She put down her piece of stitching and added: ‘No Nazarene miracles, then.’
‘One never knows. They can never be predicted. And sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a miracle and an act of faith in the confidence of the healer. Nobody will ever properly understand the human temple.’
‘The—?’
‘Human temple. A metaphor. I’ll come again tomorrow. But I think you must—’
‘We know,’ Ruth said. She looked at a painted cloth hanging of Odysseus straining his bound muscles to get at the sirens. A naked man anxious to add his bones to a mound of others. Greek. There was loud Greek being spoken in the neighbour room. ‘If only,’ she said, ‘mother could see Caleb once more.’
‘It’s enough,’ Sara said, ‘for her to know that Caleb is still alive. She clutches that little note like life itself.’
‘She’s not overanxious to live,’ Bartholomew said. ‘And that has to mean no miracle. I’ll leave you now.’ And he went, a little man with a neat beard, dressed in rusty black.
‘You should have asked him,’ Ruth said, ‘about that poor woman.’
‘Saphira?’ Sara said. ‘That would have been embarrassing. Her husband dead and she left all alone to die and be eaten by the rats. These Nazarenes are just like everybody else. Preaching love and charity and letting one of their own be eaten by rats.’ She added: ‘Most of them.’
‘Will we ever be back in our own little room with Elias going on about the rats taking over the whole world?’ Ruth said. ‘I don’t like these Nazarenes.’ She added: ‘Except Stephen and his family.’
‘One religion’s as bad as another,’ Sara said. ‘Religion is a lot of nonsense. What good has it ever done? Beatings and crucifixions and sanctimonious balderdash. Men make religions so they can threaten other men. And women too. Hypocritical rubbish.’
Ruth looked at her sister with fear and awe. ‘That’s terrible, Sara. God could strike you down. He hears everything. He could turn you into a pillar of salt.’
‘Let him. Anyway, he’s too busy at the moment. It must be hard work splitting yourself up, even if you are God. One bit for the Jews, another bit for the Nazarenes. And then there are all the other religions in Egypt and Syria and the other places.’
‘You can’t say that about the Jews and the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes say they’re good Jews,’ Ruth said. ‘They don’t say anything about a different God.’
‘Oh, it’s not really worth discussing. One God has a son and the other one hasn’t. It’s as simple as that.’
Loud Greek was still coming through from the next room: many voices, something important from the sound of it. ‘Something important from the sound of it,’ Ruth said. ‘What are they saying?’
‘I don’t know enough Greek to tell you,’ Sara said. ‘Something about religion.’
‘They’re Greek and yet they say they’re Jews.’
‘So they are. Greek Jews.’
‘How can that be?’
‘Oh, it’s a long story, Ruth. Israel has been all split up. The diaspora, they call it.’
‘Where do you learn all these big words?’
‘Some Jews went to Rome, some to the Greek islands. And then a lot of them decided to come to Jerusalem. Coming back home, they call it.’
‘Listen to them.’
In the next room Tyrannos, the father of Stephen (I am convinced that his name was really a nickname given by the students he had taught), Stephen himself, and other Greek Jews – Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus, others – were conducting a hot discussion over an amphora of resinous wine from Mytilene. Philomena, the only woman present, poured it into stone cups with an incised Greek key pattern. Nicanor was saying:
‘As I’ve always said. They think themselves to be the only real Jews. And Aramaic the one true Jewish language. So we speakers of Greek are left out of it. Very well, we can accept that. But when it comes to a matter of genuine injustice—’ Nicanor was in early middle age and was, by trade, a maker of metal, mostly silver, candlesticks. To say that he had Grecian features would be to assert that such features were measurably different from those of the other children of the Middle Sea. For all the sons and daughters of its mild sun (mild, I should say, in comparison with that which has burnt black the children of Ham) are alike in possessing skin that is of the hue of the olive, swart hair that in men defies the comb, a shortness of stature not to be found among the pale tribes of the north and west, and a generosity of nose that, so says the myopic Hebrew folk legend, was granted by God for the sniffing out of evil and fleshmeat not ritually slaughtered. Yet sometimes among these Greeks gold flared in hair and body flue, a gift from Aphrodite a pagan might say, and Philip had such a metallic crown, and the sun nested in the thick brothy tangle on his bare forearms. It was Philip who now said:
‘Neglect more than injustice, Nicanor.’
‘Very well,’ Nicanor said. ‘Take the case of poor Philomena here. Widowed for six weeks and not one leaden as out of the fund. And yet they were quick with the showy funeral of what’s her name—’
‘Saphira,’ Philip said. ‘That was inevitable. Shameful at their neglect. So with the money paid out to that crippled daughter living with the aunt up in Galilee.’
‘I could give you other instances,’ Nicanor said. ‘And not only as regards money. But the money part is the most blatant and shameful. It’s time the Greek Jews spoke up.’
‘Would,’ Stephen said, ‘you like Philip and me to speak to—’
‘Do that,’ Nicanor said. ‘Lash out with it. Speak fishermen’s language. And remind him of something in the Book of Genesis. “God shall give beauty to Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem.”’
‘Meaning?’ Parmenas of the heavy oiled beard asked.
‘That the word of God is as good in Greek as it is in Hebrew.’
So Philip and Stephen went out into the hot noon and walked two streets to the house that had formerly belonged to Matthias but was now, in place of the upper room that had smelt of betrayal, the headquarters of the twelve. They kept the premises, the fastidious Philip noticed, in a state of dust and disorder; unlike their master they feared the distractive presence of women. It was old Thomas who was bringing a dish of beans, sliced onions, olives, oil and vinegar to the table as the two Greeks entered. Bartholomew, the two Jameses, Matthew and Peter were seated at the grease-smeared board; Little James was carving a loaf so stale it required much of his muscle. ‘Come to eat, have ye?’ Thomas beetled at them. ‘Good Galilean fodder, none of your Greek fripperies. Come on, get seated.’
‘Beans,’ Bartholomew said, shaking his head sadly. ‘A terrible maker of wind.’
‘An Aeolus among vegetables,’ Stephen flippantly said, putting his leg over the bench. ‘May we discuss an important matter while we eat?’ He addressed Peter. Peter said:
‘It’s about the widows, is it?’
‘So you heard.’
‘Hard not to, with you Greeks jabbering away about injustice. All right, such things are bound to happen, though I’ll be the first to say that it’s wrong.’
‘Bound to happen,’ Philip, fingering the beans and finding them underboiled, said, ‘because you Palestine Jews think that we people of the dispersion are a race set apart and inferior. I’d remind you – What’s that out of Genesis, Stephen?’
‘“God shall give beauty to Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem.”’
‘Meaning?’ Thomas asked.
‘It’s up to you to tell us what it means,’ Philip boldly said. ‘You’re the great explicators of the word. But I’ll do your work for you. The language of Japheth is not like the language of Shem, but if we read the word of God in it God blesses us as much if not more than he does you when you read it in Aramaic. In other words the Hellenised Jews, as you people call us, are not inferior in rights to the Jews of Palestine. But this is daily flouted in the handings-out to orphans and widows. We want matters put right.’
‘What ye mean,’ Thomas said, ‘is that the Hebrews are favouring the Hebrews.’
‘He’s right, God knows,’ Peter sighed, letting a sliver of onion blow out on to his beard. ‘And there’s only one solution. Let’s see how you Greek Jews get on with the day’s handreaching. I’ll wager all the complaints will come now from the other side. Besides, the twelve have other things to do than serve tables.’
He spoke Aramaic. Philip said: ‘What’s that phrase?’
‘Diakonein trapezais.’
‘He means,’ Thomas said, ‘that we’re spending too much time dishing out bread to the poor and clanking down bits of hard money. We’ve other things to do than be, to speak your own language, what do you call them, diakonoi.’
‘So the Greeks become the deacons?’ Stephen said.
‘Put it that way if you like,’ Peter said. ‘If a diakonos – if that’s the right word – is a servant, then we’re all servants or deacons, but you can be this special sort of deacon. So now there’ll be no more trouble from the Greeks.’
‘How many of us?’ Philip asked.
‘Well, not twelve, but there are other holy numbers, seven, for instance. Can you name seven?’
‘Yes,’ Philip said. ‘Myself and Stephen here. Then Prochorus, Timon, Parmenas, Nicanor, Nicolaus.’
‘They’re very outlandish names,’ Little James said. ‘They don’t sound a bit Jewish.’
‘That ought to mean something,’ Stephen said. Peter said:
‘Yes, it means the Greek Jews look after the money and the Hebrew Jews look after the gospel.’
‘Doesn’t it really mean,’ Stephen said, ‘that Greek and Jew and Hebrew have no more meaning? That we’re all united in the Christ and forget what we used to be? That the gospel is ready to be heard by men and women with names more outlandish than ours?’
‘We’re not ready for that yet,’ Peter said.
‘The Samaritans are ready,’ Philip said. ‘The Romans have been teaching them the gospel of suffering. The next stage is to teach them the meaning of suffering.’
‘That will come in time,’ Peter said. ‘The Samaritans are a sort of Jews, and they’re entitled to hear the word—’
‘And this Greek is a sort of Jew,’ Stephen smiled. ‘Ready to go to the Greek islands and speak the word in Greek.’
‘Not yet,’ Peter said. ‘If you want to preach, preach in the synagogues here. Go to that synagogue where the Libertines go—’
‘Libertines?’ Philip frowned. ‘Fleshly sinners?’
‘No no no no. I don’t know why they’re called Libertines.’
‘A libertinus,’ Bartholomew said, ‘is a freedman or the son of one. They like to keep together. They’re from Alexandria and Cilicia and such places. You can talk to them in Greek.’
‘Cilicia,’ Matthew said. ‘That’s where Saul comes from.’
‘There you are,’ Peter said. ‘Try and convert this Saul. You’ll have your work cut out, I can tell you. Ah, gentlemen,’ he said, rising, ‘brothers. You’re heartily welcome.’ To the surprise of Stephen and Philip two men in priestly garb walked in. ‘Forgive the clutter of the table here. We’re humble men who have to fend for ourselves.’
‘We’ll go,’ Philip said, ‘giving thanks for what you’ve granted.’
‘Bring the others here tomorrow,’ Peter said. ‘We have to perform a little ceremony. You’ll have the hands of blessing laid on you in the sight of a houseful of the faithful, and then you’ll know you are officially what you are. God be with you. Sit, brothers.’ The two priests, astonishingly to the two Greeks, bowed to Peter before sitting. Conversion of the enemy? Well, these priests were poor men by the look of them, ready to give up what little they had in the Lord’s name. It would be different with men like Annas and Caiaphas. Still, the new faith had breached the stone wall of the orthodox. Miracles, less spectacular than giving sight to the blind perhaps, but miracles none the less were proceeding quietly in the realm of the spirit. Yet Stephen felt a prick of unease. The faith was being kept in the family whose house was the Temple. Surely it had been intended that it should be part of a ship’s lading, breathe new air. The Temple sat complacently at eternal anchor.
Tiberius had spoken of starting for Rome in a day or so, but the preparations for the imperial journey took more than three weeks, time enough for the fretful princeps to change his mind thrice and once again. At last, on a glorious day with the sea and sky mirrors of each other’s serenity, the trireme sent from the mainland weighed anchor to return thither, the huge eagled mainsail bellying due east in the warm wind and assisting the labour of the three banks of slave rowers who, in their ill-smelling dark with its brutal whipwielders and timekeeping drummers, heard the bucina up there in the world of the living signal the boarding of Tiberius and his entourage. There was a considerable staff, including three physicians, for the Emperor was far from well, though his running sores had been cleansed and his cheeks farded into a semblance of health. Gaius was insincerely solicitous. Herod Agrippa, to whom even the calmest of seas was prides of toothy lions, kept to his cabin and wondered all the time whether the Emperor designate would keep to his promise: he thought not. Not numbered in the ship’s company were the minnows of the imperial piscina, nor the young schooled perverts of the venerean grots. These stood silently upon the beach and the headlands to watch the vessel leave, knowing their future more clearly than Herod Agrippa knew his: fresh slavery, their youth abused till bones broke or youth passed. The more innocent dreamt of a manumission kindly bestowed by the new Emperor as one of a number of acts of justice and clemency proper to a new reign. Those who had caught sight of Gaius rejoicing in the bumping and trundling of maimed bodies down the cliffside hoped for nothing.
The voyage to the mainland was brief. Puteoli, the port adjacent to Neapolis, was normally crammed with shipping, but all had been sent out to hover in the roads that the imperial trireme be unencumbered. As it put in, festive music of horns, trumpets, drums and cymbals erupted on the quayside. It made Tiberius’s head throb, but Gaius greeted it with waves and smiles. Dockmen caught flung hawsers and drew the ship into the wharf, making fast their lines to stone bollards. Others rushed with a gangway empurpled and gilded and eagled with tacked cloth, others again with Alexandrian carpeting that should soften the brief imperial walk from ship to waiting litter with its tall and brawny German slave bearers. From a great height near the godowns the statue of Tiberius looked down on the arrival, its heroic cast bronze mocking solemnly its all too frail original. The Praetorian Guard saluted to braying brass and thumping drums, and Tiberius raised a feeble arm in answer. Under the dutiful cheers he could sense the undertone of satisfaction that he was sicker and had aged more than most had thought. For the son of the loved Germanicus the greetings were without doubt more robust. He, Tiberius, should not have come back. He had come back once before, many years ago, then merely to sail up the Tiber and view the city walls from a distance, troops stationed along the banks to warn off the populace, and then swiftly departed back to Capri. Now he was committed to a slow and solemn progress up the Appian Way, a noisy entrance into the city, ceremonies, addresses, banquets. He could not do it; he was a dying man, seventy-seven years old; he had earned his peace. No, he had not; hence he had elected this final suffering. No meanest slave sweeping the quay could be more wretched.
He was carried in procession then along the leafy Appian Way, the ornate cushioned litter swinging gently like a cradle. On his left arm his pet snake Columba slept: it was torpid, perhaps made sick by the voyage. ‘My beloved,’ he crooned, ‘hiss your love for me,’ but it coiled loosely in lethargy. At the seventh milestone he ordered a stop. He pulled the curtains aside in time to see Gaius whipping a slave who had dropped the roped impedimenta he had been entrusted to carry into the road’s dust. ‘Nursing a viper for the Roman people. Who said that, Columba?’ The consuls Gnaeus Acerronius Proculus and Gaius Pontius Nigrinus appeared at the little window. Tiberius said: ‘I will go no further today.’
‘As Caesar wishes,’ Pontius Nigrinus said. ‘We are close to the villa of Pomponius Naso. Caesar may wish to repose the night there.’
‘Is Pomponius in residence?’
Proculus looked strangely. ‘Pomponius Naso was executed five years ago. On your imperial majesty’s orders.’
‘Is there – some other place?’
‘A mile back. The former hunting lodge of the late Sejanus.’
Tiberius trembled as with ague. ‘Pomponius’s villa will do. Will all be ready for me there?’
‘The imperial household anticipated your imperial majesty’s wishes.’
‘What do you know of my wishes?’ he said with sudden anger. ‘What do any of you know of my needs?’
There was a crowd of people, mostly rustic folk who gaped at the trembling lord of the world, standing near the gates of the villa. A bearded man in gooseturd homespun, carrying a wand, boldly spoke out as Tiberius alighted from his litter:
‘Beware the power of the mob, Caesar.’ Then, schooled in needful agility, he ran away before a lictor’s whip could reach him. Tiberius went straight to a bed that had been warmed with hot stones wrapped in wool. He asked for gruel. Then he slept, and he dreamt an old dream, one that had maimed the drunken repose of his last birthday. The gigantic statue of Apollo of Temenos, which he had had brought from Syracuse to erect in the library of the new temple to the deified Augustus, spoke to him from a mobile mouth:
‘You, sir, will never dedicate me.’
He woke to thunder in the middle of the night. He feared lightning. He called feebly and asked that he be given a laurel wreath. A slave at length brought one (there were several in his baggage), and the Emperor tremulously donned it in wretched and pitiable apotropaic defiance. The lightning did not strike him; the trick had always been efficacious.
He woke finally at dawn to find that his pet snake Columba was not coiled on his arm but lying stiff on the floor. Not all of it; at least half had been eaten by ants. He screamed at the tiny milling army and stamped on it with his bare foot. Beware the power of the mob, Caesar. He called: ‘We are going back to Capri! Cancel the journey to Rome!’
So the cortège turned about and snakeless Caesar went back to Campania. At Astura he fell very ill with bellycramps and dry vomitings. His chief physician Charicles gave him a posset of wine and milk and opium. He slept three days and awoke feeling stronger. Caesar was well. Caesar would show his recovered health at the garrison games of Circeii. Cheers but some murmurs for Caesar as he took his place in the hastily rigged imperial box. A wild boar was let loose in the arena, horrent and snorting. Give me a javelin. A javelin, Caesar? A javelin, curse you. And, to demonstrate his recovery, he hurled the proffered weapon at the beast, missed, hurled another, another, while some of the garrison cheered. Then: ‘Aaaargh.’ He had twisted the muscles in his side and seemed to bow grotesquely to the tiered assembly. He sweated with the pain and the brief exertion, then a cold wind started up and chilled him. ‘Let us go,’ he said hoarsely.
The party moved on the next day to Misenum, where a banquet was prepared. He knew few of the faces but smiled on all. It was a false rumour; see, Caesar is well. Another slice of the roast boar. Some of this gilded wheatloaf. Fill the cup to the brim; see, friends, I pledge you. Charicles the physician said: ‘Caesar, I must go to tend the potion in its crucible. Permit me to leave.’ Charicles took Caesar’s hand to kiss it. Tiberius whispered:
‘It’s my pulse, isn’t it? You’re feeling my pulse because I do not look well. Stay here with me, Charicles. Tell me, Charicles, tell the truth: am I well, do I seem well to you, can I last this evening out without collapsing?’
‘Take this powder, Caesar, in a little water. You will be sustained sufficiently. Do it covertly, let none see.’
Gaius, very drunk, shouted across: ‘My dear and great great-uncle, how well you look. You will outlive us all.’
He was given next day in his litter the transcript of recent proceedings in the Senate. He read that the three patricians he had ordered to be brought to trial for treason had been discharged without a hearing: they had, said the report, but been named by an informer. ‘Contempt,’ he tried to yell. He missed sadly the comforting squeeze of his serpent on his left arm. ‘It is contempt. Back to Capri.’ Then Gaius Pontius Nigrinus came with strange and terrible news. There had been a brief earthquake on the island, brief but powerful enough to send tumbling the lighthouse on the headland. ‘The eye of the world is out,’ Tiberius moaned. ‘Who played that trick with the fire at Misenum? You are contriving bad omens, all of you.’ For in his bedchamber at the villa in Misenum the dead fire had leapt to sudden life and watched him with its diffused vermilion eye the night long.
‘The country house that belonged once to Lucullus,’ Pontius Nigrinus said. ‘It is but half a mile off. Will your imperial greatness rest there?’
‘There is no rest anywhere,’ cried Tiberius.
All of the above would seem to have little pertinence to the life of Jerusalem, but the state of Tiberius’s health was known in Caesarea, and a rumour spread from there to Jerusalem that Gaius Caligula was soon to succeed to the purple, and that among his first acts would be the elevation of the prince Herod Agrippa to the kingship of Judaea, all this as a prelude to the liberation of the land from the eagle and the restoration of a Solomonic monarchy. It was time for the unity of the Jewish faith, the glorification of the Temple not merely as the house of the Holy of Holies but as the symbol of rule of the sacred soil of Israel. It was no time for the young Stephen to be standing up in the synagogue of the Libertines and preaching the new way. He stood and said to the frowning bearded:
‘Of the new gospel of love and forgiveness you must know two things before you know any other. First, that it supersedes the law of Moses.’
Saul was there. Saul stood and said:
‘Nothing supersedes the law of Moses.’ Stephen said smiling:
‘My old friend and fellow student Saul, I am glad to hear your voice. Let us argue the matter in amity as in the old days we disputed under our dear rabban. Would you not accept that the law of Moses was fitting for its time but not for the new age? For the people newly freed from the prisonhouse of Egypt needed the harshness of the lex talionis – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They were yet in no state to hear the milder doctrines of forgiveness and love of our enemies. Then there was no forgiveness for even minor infractions of the covenant. The desert life was brutal and the law brutal too. Moses would have scoffed to hear that we should forgive not merely seven times but seventy times seven. The time for the gospel of love was not yet, but now that love is revealed – love that proceeds from the love of the Father for his Son, the love of both for all mankind.’
‘You said there was another thing,’ Saul said. ‘What is this other thing?’
‘This,’ Stephen replied. ‘That the law rests not in the Temple nor in the ministers of the Temple. The true temple is not one made by human hands. I do no more than repeat the words of our Messiah, who was as devoted as any of you here to the holy edifice raised by Solomon but recognised a greater sanctity in a temple no human hands had designed and fashioned – a temple that such hands may indeed destroy but, as he himself showed in this very city, God’s grace may bid rise again.’ There were mutterings: He blasphemes against Moses. He puts the Temple and hence the nation in danger. Saul said with calm:
‘Proceed.’ Matthew and Bartholomew, who had been sitting silently as self-appointed monitors (here was the first Greek Jew to proclaim the gospel) silently got up and left the dark airless square building to gain God’s blinding air. They said nothing to each other until they were seated in the small dried up garden at the back of the wineshop of Zechariah the Sober. Here they slaked their drouth with water and then cheered their doubtful hearts with wine. Matthew said:
‘He does it better than any of us. It’s the Greek in him.’
‘How?’
‘The Greeks push things through to the limit. I’ve read a little in Greek, the old Greek, a tough language, and there was this Socrates who went to the limit with his logic as it was called and he was put to death with hemlock. No compromise in him. So with this Stephen. But the light was there, heavenly approval if you like. He was shining with more than sweat.’
‘He’s not a Greek,’ Bartholomew said. ‘He’s a Jew like the rest of us. He knows his texts better than this damned Saul who was looking daggers.’
‘It’s hard for me to explain,’ Matthew frowned. ‘We were brought up on the Jewish faith and nothing else, surrounded by Jehovah so to speak. In the Greek islands they’ve got to God, some of them, the hard way, arguing from first principles. All our writings are sacred, theirs not. They’ve got to God through logic. Another thing, there’s no real answer to his arguments, and they know it. Moses was good for his time, but not for ours, and they’re scared to admit it. As for the Temple – well, that’s where his logic is going to undo him. There’s too much vested in the Temple – priestly position, money, trade brought to the city. What he doesn’t have is discretion – Socrates didn’t have it either – and we lot, we Hebrews have learnt that you can’t preach the gospel in this city without being at least a little discreet. Wise as serpents, harmless as doves and so on. Christ fulfils Moses and makes his horns shine with a deeper gold. We preach at the Temple because the gold of the Temple door is brighter burnished with the messianic fulfilment. Damn it, we have two score priests in with us now. Stephen would scare them off.’
‘So what do we do – recommend that he stop preaching?’
‘We have to let God have his way. There’s nothing to be done. But I fear we’re going to have a death on our hands.’
Saul went straight from the synagogue to the house of Caiaphas. He said what he had to say and added: ‘It’s out of duty that I come, of course.’
‘I appreciate that. Though, to be honest, duty is too often, forgive me, my son, a cloak for vindictiveness. You boil at these Nazarenes as if you bore some personal grudge. Pardon my candour.’
‘It’s your duty to be candid,’ Saul calmly said. ‘I’ve examined my conscience on this matter. Stephen was a fellow student, even a friend, though never a close one. A first duty might well be to talk to him as a friend – point out his errors, lead him back to the right way. But, you see, he voices the belief of a whole sect. He’s encouraged to speak as he does. Also he’s eloquent, even in Aramaic, a language he regards as inferior to Greek.’
‘How,’ Caiaphas asked, ‘can one language be superior to another? All our languages were born out of the fall, equally confused in the destruction of Babel.’
‘The tongue of Shem, so he once said in the presence of our master Gamaliel, is tribal, enclosed, unwilling to meet the impact of the world of the pagan.’
‘God forbid that it should.’
‘He says that Greek has struggled to get at a truth unrevealed, and the struggle has made it subtle and muscular. However, this is not the matter at issue. See him, and you’ll see that he’s taken on the shining look of the fanatic. What the man Peter says can to some extent be tolerated. Indeed, did not my master Gamaliel preach tolerance to the entire assembly in respect of the heretical proclamation of the Messiah? But Stephen – he strikes deeper.’
‘How deeper?’
‘You had best hear for yourself.’
Caiaphas heard, standing at the back of the synagogue of the Libertines in the shadows, Saul standing beside him. He heard Stephen’s clear voice, weak on the Aramaic gutturals, rise over the murmurs of the orthodox:
‘Our fathers had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness, even as he appointed who spoke to Moses – which also our fathers, in their turn, brought in with Joshua when they entered on the possession of the nations, that God thrust out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David—’
‘Now it comes,’ Saul muttered.
‘But King Solomon built him a house – the golden house that is the glory of Jerusalem. Yet the Most High dwells not in houses made with hands. What does the prophet say? “The heaven is my throne. And the earth my footstool. What manner of house will you build me? Or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?”’
‘Now you hear,’ Saul said.
‘Yes yes, now I hear. God help the boy.’
‘I myself am prepared to bear witness.’
‘No need. There are enough here to do it.’
‘Shall I call in the captain now?’
‘You’re always too eager, Saul. I don’t think you quite realise the implications.’
‘With respect, holy father, I’ve thought of nothing but these implications. You wish to have clean hands. There are times when the Jerusalem mob is useful.’
Caiaphas looked on his shadowed eager face with a certain Sadducee loathing. Fanaticism was always a bad thing.
Saul strode up to the desk of the synagogue. Stephen said: ‘The people of God are not in one place, nor is the home of their worship.’ Seeing Saul, smiling he said: ‘I welcome argument. In the Greek islands we prized dialectic as the zigzag road to the throne. My friend and fellow student Saul has something to say.’ Saul said:
‘Indeed I have something to say. This man Stephen, who was once a friend but is a friend no longer, who learnt little when we sat together at the feet of Gamaliel, clothes in Greek eloquence a subversion terrible in its simplicity. He speaks against the law. He speaks against the holy place. I cannot put it more simply. This synagogue is defiled by his utterances. You know what action to take.’
Caiaphas was appalled. Fists shook, the nearest to Stephen let the sleeves of their garments fall back to show arms with tensed muscles ready to seize. Stephen merely smiled. Saul cried: ‘Not here. This is holy ground.’
Outside the synagogue it was the chief priest himself who had to hold off righteous anger while Saul hurried off for the ’ish har ha-bayith and his armed Levites. For, naturally, Stephen’s protection. A mob had collected by the time the police arrived. What has he done? Nothing, but he’s said a lot. Said what? That the Temple is a rubbish heap and the priests of the Temple a lot of timeservers. That’s bad, is it? Bad, you say bad? Stephen was marched off to jail. The two Jameses, carrying figs and bread for the brethren, saw. They saw but knew better than to interfere. They ran home, that is to the confiscated house of Matthias.
Peter shook his head in great sadness. Thomas said: ‘I had a feeling deep in my bones that there’d be nothing but trouble once ye gave in to the Greeks.’
‘We’re all one, all one,’ Peter moaned.
‘Ye’ll not deny that he’s been saying the wrong things. Just when things were going so well. Ay, too well I’ve been thinking. What will ye do about it?’
‘Things,’ Thaddeus said, with the prophetic insight he, the small artist, sometimes showed, ‘will proceed to their end. He’s in God’s hands. Things will be done that have to be done and they’ll cry to heaven for vengeance. But there’ll be no vengeance, only a greater glory.’
‘Go on, make a song of it,’ Thomas jeered. ‘Play it on yon flute.’
There was a considerable crowd outside the council chamber the following morning. Said the Temple was a load of rubbish, cursed the priests, said that Moses was a juggler, I always said the Nazarenes were a bad lot, a Godless load of bastards, here he is now, a Greek, the Greeks were always a rotten crowd, my sister married a Greek and where did it get the poor bitch?
Annas wrinkled at Stephen, a clean-looking boy despite his night in a dirty prison, his beard sparse, his eyes wide but unfrightened. He stood in the heart of the half-circle the seated Sanhedrin made. The morning sun from the wall of high windows bathed him. Annas said: ‘More trouble from you Nazarenes. I quote.’ He quoted from the papyrus handed to him by his son-in-law, quoting: ‘“This man does not cease to speak words against the Temple and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy it and shall change the customs that Moses delivered unto us.” Are these things so?’ Stephen looked at the grim assembly, noting a preponderance of Sadducees. One Pharisee, clerk to the court, leant against the wall without windows, grimmest of all there. Stephen smiled at him and spoke.
‘Brothers, holy fathers, this is a grave accusation and perhaps I may be permitted to answer it by means of a recapitulation which to many of you will seem supererogatory, but I beg your patience: my logic will, granted a little time, shine clearly enough with God’s help.’
‘We do not require logic,’ Caiaphas said. ‘We can manage without such Greekish importations.’
‘Very well, nothing Greekish. Merely the truths of the holy texts. As you all know, God in his glory spoke to our father Abraham at the time when he dwelt in Mesopotamia, before he moved to Haran, saying to him that it was to Haran that he must move. So he left the land of the Chaldaeans and dwelt in Haran in the upper valley of the Euphrates, staying there till the death of his father Terah. Thereafter, under God’s direction, he travelled as far as Canaan. Note that this was not his land, nor did he have any part of it. He was, as it were, a resident alien there.’
‘Come to the point,’ Jonathan said. ‘We know all this.’
‘The point is already before your eyes,’ Stephen said boldly, ‘if you will but look. Abraham had no land but believed the Lord’s promise that there would be a land for his descendants. There would be oppression, exile, slavery for many generations, but the exile would not last for ever. In time God would avenge the injustices done to his children and bring them back to the land of Canaan where in peace they would worship him. A sign was given to Abraham, the sign of circumcision, the outward emblem of an inward grace and a divine promise. When Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him on the eighth day, and this sign was passed on from generation to generation, from Isaac to Jacob and from Jacob to his twelve sons, these twelve being the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.’
‘Look,’ Alexander said, ‘we’re priests and sufficiently, I believe, instructed in the scriptures. We await the answer to the grave charge that has been made.’
‘Patience,’ Stephen said patiently. ‘For those with ears to hear the answer is already unfolding. I shall not, I promise you, detain you long with this recital of ancient history. Now note that even in those old days of the patriarchs there were men opposed to God’s will in the guiding of the children of Abraham. For Jacob’s sons sold their brother Joseph as a slave in Egypt. But, by God’s grace, he did not long remain a slave. He rose to be grand vizier to the Pharaoh and, when famine struck Canaan, he was able, through his foresight in hoarding corn in the granaries of Egypt, to sell a sufficiency of grain to his brethren. Joseph saved men who at first did not even recognise him as their own brother. They had dealt harshly with him but he forgave and there was a reconciliation. Surely there is a lesson here. As a result of that reconciliation the whole seventy-five members of the family of Jacob came into Egypt to settle and prosper.’
‘The correct number is seventy,’ Annas said. ‘You are citing a corrupt Greek text.’
‘Pardon me,’ Stephen said. ‘Not corrupt. Your text mentions Jacob and Joseph and the two sons of Joseph. Ours omits Jacob and Joseph but mentions Joseph’s nine sons. If you wish to spend some time with me now on the comparative arithmetic—’
‘We want nothing Greek,’ Caiaphas bawled. ‘And we want no arguments with the high priest.’
‘As Father Annas well knows,’ Stephen said, ‘his title is honorary. An arithmetical interlude would be a fitting irrelevance. Pardon me for that unwilled pertness. May I continue?’
‘Keep it short, man,’ Annas cried, though grinning.
‘Very well. The Israelites prospered in Egypt, but there was still the question of reaching the promised land. It was necessary for God’s purpose that a tyrant arise in Egypt, to persecute them, to make them long for deliverance. By God’s grace and human cunning the child Moses, who should have perished with the rest of the male children of the Israelites, was saved and brought up in the house of the princess. His sense of justice, whereby he slew a brutal Egyptian overseer of the Israelite builders, drove him into exile. Now note this carefully: his exile took him to the northwest of Arabia, to the wilderness of Mount Sinai – far far far from the holy land. Here God spoke to him and rendered that piece of Gentile territory holy. Now you will see, I trust, an important truth: that no place is holy of itself, that sanctity comes where God reveals himself. You may now legitimately question the claim of the city of Jerusalem to possess an innate holiness.’
There were the expected cries of blasphemy and heresy, but Annas held up his hand for silence. ‘He is cutting his own throat,’ he said. ‘Why do you hinder him? Let him continue.’
‘Another thing,’ Stephen said, unflustered. ‘As Joseph’s brothers repudiated Joseph, so the children of Israel repudiated Moses. There came in each instance a second time when they were forced to accept their saviour. There they were in the wilderness, far far far from any promised land, but they had the covenant, the living oracles which spoke through Moses, the Angel of the Presence. They had the qahal or ekklesia, there in the wilderness, but they were not content. They wanted a visible tangible god of gold. They refused the authority of Moses. I am accused of speaking blasphemous words against the prophet, but who accuses me? The children of those who rejected the prophet. They longed to go back to Egypt to chew onions and leeks and garlic and breathe foul air in the invisible face of the Most High. And, once out of Egypt, their idolatry continued. Prophet after prophet was rejected, stoned. As the prophet Amos puts it, they took up the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of the god Rephan. But there was not lacking the tabernacle of the one true God, the trysting tent of the wilderness. Yet they disregarded, in their rebellion, the shrine which spoke to them of God’s indwelling presence – not in one place but wherever their wanderings led them. I speak of the ark of the testimony, which we Greeks term skene toumartyriou, in Hebrew ’ohel mo’ed, which may be rendered the tent of God’s meeting. My old schoolfellow Saul, chief of my accusers to my sadness, knows all about tents. The place of the Most High is a tent. David spoke of building a mere habitation, a bivouac, a tabernacle. It was left to his son Solomon to erect an immovable bayith or oikos of stone faced in gold and silver, but this did not fulfil the intention of his father. Solomon himself spoke of the insufficiency of his edifice, saying: “But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, how much less this house that I have built.”’
‘We respect your learning,’ Caiaphas said with some sarcasm, ‘but you have not deployed it to make your point.’
‘Have I not?’ Stephen cried. ‘Is not my point now clear? I do not blaspheme against the Temple that is Solomon’s, but I inveigh against the stiffness of mind that can grant a special holiness to a building of stone and forget the glory of what was housed in a tent of skins. For was not such a tent as pleasing to God as the temple that Solomon built? Is not the faith the faith of a pilgrim people, scattered by the winds of oppression all over the earth, scattered often in the past and without doubt to be scattered again? What will your Temple here avail you when you join, as my own people joined, the company of the dispossessed? The earth is the Lord’s and the Lord’s people are of the earth, not of a fixed and stony place in a populous city. I say again what I have often said, citing the Lord’s own word: “The heaven is my throne, the earth my footstool.” When he makes his own temple with his own hands, what right have men to mock him by saying: This that we have built is the Lord’s place?’
Caiaphas raised both hands to quell the rising gale of fury and said: ‘So the Temple is nothing and the priests of the Temple are less than nothing?’
‘Now,’ Stephen said, ‘you put words into my mouth. There is no need. I have words enough of my own.’ Then he raged, for the first time, lion-like, yelling: ‘Stiff-necked leaders of the people, uncircumcised in your hearts and in your ears, you resist the Holy Spirit now as your fathers did before you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? Any that prophesied of the coming of the righteous one you slew without mercy. You received the law as the angels ordained it, but you did not keep it. Did you not saw Isaiah asunder in the reign of Manasseh? Did you not slay Jeremiah by stoning? Oh, there will be some of you to say: we are not our fathers; had we lived in their day we would not have partaken with them in the blood of the prophets. Yes, you now honour the prophets you killed and build monuments to grace their memory, for those prophets being dead cannot stir you to thought or right action. Now your fathers did no more than slay the messengers of the Righteous One – but you mocked the Righteous One himself and delivered him to the slayers. You accuse me. It is you who stand accused.’
Annas and the other priests had great difficulty in restraining the outraged fathers of the law who, having no words but blasphemy and outrage and to the death with him, made up for their bawling dumbness by putting out their long claws and stumbling in their blindness to seize and tear Stephen. Then Caiaphas, seeing the matter was outside control, said to Annas: ‘We can do nothing. It is as well it is happening like this. His blood is not on our heads and hands.’ Stephen, seized and rent, raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried:
‘The heavens are opening. I see the Son of Man standing on the right hand of the Almighty.’
Now the doors had been pushed open and Stephen was pulled and clawed by the mob waiting outside. Peter was restraining the muscular James. Stephen, seeing the group of disciples, cried that they should withdraw, there was nothing profitable that they could do. And then he roared in anguish as he saw his father Tyrannos and his mother Maia and, insisting on coming too to their evident danger, the two sisters of Caleb. ‘Away,’ he cried. ‘Go home and pray for those who have reverted to the beast. Let them be forgiven. They do not know what they are doing.’ This was both true and untrue. The Jerusalem mob gloated at the prospect of an act of righteous violence, though they did not know why it was righteous, the pious mental state which ennobles briefly the bestial act usually referring itself to sources it would be dangerous to examine, since this would allay the awakened brute. Saul was there with a rope, and with this he bound the hands of Stephen behind him, so that the victim could not wipe the spit out of his eyes. So bound, Stephen was hurried towards the city gates, outside which was a patch of ground hallowed by custom to acts of punition fulfilled, God being in the people, by the people. Stephen’s friends and fellow workers in the faith were thrust to the periphery, where they moaned and prayed, though some cursed. A few Roman soldiers looked on, at first with apprehension and then in relief that this was a wholly Jewish matter, they could keep out of it. But a man that had once been crippled and now earned his bread as a leaper and dancer, his boy assistant playing unhandily on the flute, pointed out to the under-officer of the maniple the two Jewish girls that had once lived near him, in the house of Elias the mad, saying that at last they had come to light, these were the ones that had been sought on the orders of the procurator, seize them quickly and (hand out) do not forget those that are on the side of the law. He had a few bits of metal thrown at him which he scampered under feet to pick up. The two girls saw what was coming and tried to run, but one of the mob hit the praying Stephen on the mouth and Sara, seeing the blood, could not forbear hurling herself at the grinning fool and beating him with her fists. Thus she was easily taken and her sister Ruth with her. Thank God their mother was dead.
When Stephen had been delivered to the rough place of punishment outside the walls the mob began with righteous eagerness to pick up the stones that lay there in a heap, ever convenient for the chastening of prostitutes, women taken in adultery, alleged blasphemers and the like. Saul expressed himself willing to hold the coats of the throwers; he would not himself throw, having fulfilled his own act of piety and being no vindictive glutton. Stephen said:
‘Untie my hands, Saul. A small request from a friend. I do not propose to defend myself. I merely wish to join my hands in prayer.’ Saul surlily unbound him and then, a stickler for correct procedure, spoke to the mob:
‘According to Deuteronomy, the hand of the witnesses shall strike first, and afterward the hand of all the people. Seventh chapter, seventh verse. Back, all of you, ten cubits, for that is the law too. Now, four cubits from the place of stoning, let him be stripped.’ So Stephen’s garments were ripped off and he stood naked, thin, his body not much more than a boy’s, his shame, according to the obscenity of the custom, exposed. A worshipper and disputant of the Libertines’ congregation was glad to come forth as chief witness. He took a sharp flint and hurled. Stephen’s lip was split and it bled. Then came the other stones. Stephen’s nose broke and blood drained on to his joined hands, deforming the words Lord Jesus receive my spirit. That praying mouth had to be closed, as also the eyes that drank the sky and the birds in it that were blessedly above the enactments of men fired, as they would say, by faith. Soon the whole face was a bruised ruin, and an ear drooped unsecured by its cartilage. Stephen fell to his knees and cried, though only Saul could hear: ‘Let this sin not be laid to their charge.’ Those were his last words, for his skull was split thrice and the spirit left its seat or perished with the bone and tissue whose workings had seemed to raise it. But the stoning continued. Stephen lay quite motionless on his belly. Following custom, he should now be rolled on his back and three or four men should raise the greatest of the stones and break the ribs as an emblem of smashing the heart. But it was certain that he was dead. Saul put out a hand of authority (that of one who could cite the Second Law verse and chapter about the ritual of holy killing) and the mob looked with some awe at its handiwork. He handed back the coats he had held while Peter, John, Andrew and the two Jameses came forward. Peter said:
‘I take it that nothing in your interpretation of the holy law hinders our taking the body of our brother and preparing it for burial?’ Saul sneered and said:
‘Skene tou martyriou.’ None understood his reference, but John caught the last word and said:
‘Protomartyr.’
‘There will be others,’ Saul said. The poor torn body with its mouth open showing broken teeth was raised on four shoulders and carried off to the house of the grieving parents. Saul walked away towards his sister’s house. On the crowded Street of the Loaves he fell. He was lucky that Bartholomew, whose morning had been busy with the splinting of a broken arm, was hurrying towards whence Saul came, to what he was appalled to have heard was proceeding and could hardly believe. Recognising Saul, he divined that all was over, and then Saul became merely one who had collapsed with the falling sickness. He saw the twitching limbs, heard the high scream. He took from his robe a small wand he used for depressing tongues and examining ulcerated throats. This he quickly placed between Saul’s teeth lest, in the spasm of the muscles of the jaw, this particular tongue be deeply bitten. Around him were people talking of possession by devils, but Bartholomew said:
‘Nonsense. This is called epilepsia. Help me to lift him. It’s a few steps only to the place of healing.’
Saul shortly after opened his eyes to wonder what he was doing here on a rickety pallet, one of a row of a dozen, all laden with the broken and sore. Two men were talking about him, so he shut his eyes to listen.
‘You know the man?’
‘I know him. And I know what he has done. But the physician may have no feelings. Remember that, Joseph Barnabas. He must desire merely to make his patient well.’
‘Well enough to do evil again?’
‘Or good. Men can always choose. Look at the face. There is a strong pressure behind the forehead, like dammed water trying to break loose. A great power for good or evil, and to this brain it perhaps does not matter which. It is the power that matters. Nothing lukewarm there.’
Saul opened his eyes, raised himself from the bed, said: ‘Doing good to your enemies. I see.’
‘Do you?’ Joseph Barnabas said. ‘You’re welcome to stay longer. But also well enough to go home.’ Saul, weak but standing, saw a number of Nazarenes around him. They looked at him with wonder and a certain pity. He scowled in bitter humiliation and tried to stalk off with the gait of authority. But he tottered somewhat.
It is not certain where the body of Stephen was entombed. His parents had a family plot, but an artist’s inspiration welled up in Thaddeus. Joseph of Arimathea, no longer in the city, had left a tomb to the brethren, and that tomb, though cheated of its freight, was available still. Nobody thought that Stephen would rise again, but no tomb could be more appropriate for the first martyr or witness in blood of the faith. But whether Stephen’s body, made fragrant with ointments and wrapped in clean linen, was placed there is a thing unknown. It is, however, known that his interment took place that night, under a full moon that set the desert dogs to baying. There was, in the perhaps admirable perverseness of this new faith, more rejoicing than mourning.
Under that same full moon, or another, the junior centurion Marcus Julius Tranquillus patrolled the borders of the estate that had belonged to Lucullus, keeping the seven guardposts alert, untrue to his cognomen, troubled, most unquiet. He had that day requested a posting to one of the active legions, in Gaul or Pannonia, but the tribunus militum had rejected his application outright. He was to remain with the detachment of the Praetorian Guard responsible for the security of the imperial person, whether here in Italy or elsewhere. Why, you young idiot, the tribune had said, you are in the first cohort of the Guard, and in a year or so, despite your youth, you will be promoted primipilus if you do nothing spectacularly foolish. Not of course (smiling somewhat contemptuously) that you will. Yes, he knew: integrity, old-fashioned concern with burnishing virtus like a piece of his equipment, something passed on by his centurion father who had never risen to primipilus. He was derided, this he knew too, for his primness, for what looked very much like unmanly chastity. But there had been enough unchastity on Capri, enough vomiting with excess of wine and grape syrup added round the imperial table: it had not been hard to be both chaste and sober. The corrupt laughed at him, the stiff centurion of old legends, without opinions, unskilled in exchange of wit and scurrility, but they had to be thankful that the corrupt had such guardians. A soldier’s duty was to protect the civic order, however rotten it was. But such hypocrisy had become more and more difficult. He had hoped, serving the hateful Tiberius at a distance, that all would change with the accession of the son of Germanicus. A young man, scorning a craven exile, ready to slice with the thrust of a young man’s muscle through the snaked roots of disease at the centre. This was, or should be, Gaius. Now Marcus Julius was not sure. He did not believe that Gaius was, like his dying great-uncle, a meditator of evil in deliberate and conscious choice, but he was beginning to believe that Gaius was mad. Was a mad emperor worse than a craftily malevolent one? Of the madness he had, he thought, been granted evidence this very night.
Walking among the cypresses, he had heard a voice from above. He had looked for the source of the voice and, keeping well in the cypress shadows, had seen Gaius stark naked in full moonlight on the balcony of his suite on the second storey of the villa. Gaius, raising his arms to the moon, had cried: ‘My beloved, come to me. I love you, why do you not return my love? I want you so much. I want to embrace your shining body. Divine moon, soon I too shall be divine. An emperor is a god as you, my love, are a goddess. Do I call you too early, my beloved? Will you come to me only when I am in purple as you are in silver?’ And then he had taken his large upright member in both his hands and begun to frot it, crooning all the time of his passion for Cynthia, the pocked planet that gave the light of three large candles. Marcus Julius had watched in fascination and fear till the end. Gaius shivered in joy as he spurted lavishly into the silvered night. Then he giggled and went to his bed.
It seemed certain to Marcus Julius that Gaius would kill the moaning Tiberius who, mortally sick, yet could not die. For Gaius refused to permit a guard to be mounted outside the imperial suite, saying that his beloved great-uncle had told him, the Emperor designate, that he wanted now none of the trappings of power, a naked man whom death would take in his own time, he would go when called on a plain bed, alone with his conscience. Marcus Julius had heard the colloquy of the physician Charicles and the patrician Curtius Atticus, walking together gravely under the figtrees:
‘He has nightmares about the earthquake on Capri. He seems to identify the ruined pharos with himself. The eye of the world. This troubling of the imagination weakens him.’
‘And the voyage to Capri?’
‘Too feeble. And the sea is far from calm.’
‘How long?’
‘A week at most. The eye of the world is out. Hm. Very poetical.’
‘The dying snake can’t hide himself in the greenery of Capri. The ants are waiting.’
Saul was with Caiaphas and Gamaliel in the high priest’s chambers leading from the great hall of the council. Saul talked with sharp eloquence, walking up and down while the two older men, seated, watched him. When Saul was silent Caiaphas said: ‘Your zeal is, of course, commendable. But it is a zeal wholly destructive.’
‘We are taught to destroy evil. The tares choke the wheat. The tares must be pulled up.’
‘And some of the wheat with the tares,’ Caiaphas said. ‘I believe your dead enemy the carpenter said something about waiting for the harvest. Never mind. You seek a destructive commission. What does your master Gamaliel say?’
‘I say first that I regret I was not able to be present at the so-called trial of the Nazarene Stephen. He was, I remember, a good student. The rough transcript of his defence – if it is accurate – shows that his learning did me credit. I am shocked by what happened to him. Very well, blame the stupid mob. But do not let that happen again. Remember my former words. We don’t yet know whether we’re dealing with the work of men or the work of God—’
‘The young man Stephen,’ Caiaphas said, ‘spoke against the Temple and the leaders of the Jewish people. Some of the assembly was rightly angry. Things got beyond our control.’
‘Regrettable, very very regrettable.’
‘You are the great advocate of compromise, rabban,’ Saul said. ‘I myself propose compromise in dealing with this sect. I don’t seek its wholesale destruction, since I feel that many of its Palestinian members will, in good time, perceive their errors. Peter, Thomas, Matthew, others, are still good sons of the Temple, diligent at attending the services, active in healing and charity. It is the Greek Jews who worry me. The followers of Stephen.’
‘Had followers, had he?’
‘In the sense that he articulated a peculiarly Hellenistic heresy which appealed and appeals more than ever to his fellow Greeks.’
‘More than ever – that was inevitable, wouldn’t you say? You created a martyr, Saul. And don’t tell me you had nothing to do with the stoning. I know that a martyr is no more than a witness, but the term has taken on a new and dangerous meaning. You propose further handings over to the mob?’
‘No, rabban. Not at first. I propose rather a course of – may I call it re-education?’ Gamaliel smiled without mirth. ‘These Jews from the Greek islands could never have much reverence for a Temple that was so far beyond the seas. Here, living in Jerusalem, they have had time enough to learn that reverence. But they believe the Jews are still a wandering people with a travelling tent of the covenant, as Stephen put it. They will not learn. They have little respect for the priesthood since they have so little for the house of the Most High where the priesthood officiates. The Nazarene cult drives them much further from orthodoxy than is the case with the Palestinians.’
‘We had forty years of wandering in the desert,’ Gamaliel said. ‘The Greeks want to send us back to the desert. Is that what you’re trying to say?’
‘You speak my words for me, rabban.’
‘What precisely,’ Caiaphas asked, ‘does Saul of Tarsus propose?’
‘Saul of Tarsus,’ Saul of Tarsus said, ‘does not propose anything so brutal as a general massacre of the Greek Nazarenes. He merely proposes that they be prevented from spreading their heresy. Sequester them. Imprison them. Bring them back to the light. And, but only with the most obdurate cases, give them to the rough justice of the people.’
‘Meaning stone them,’ Gamaliel said.
‘We have our precedent. The people approved.’
‘The people, I gather, were even enthusiastic,’ Gamaliel said. ‘The people are always enthusiastic about destroying things. Even when they don’t understand what they’re destroying.’
‘I shall need,’ Saul said to Caiaphas, ‘a special detachment of armed Levites. And men skilled in interrogation.’
‘Meaning torture,’ Gamaliel said.
‘A great and holy end justifies the roughest of methods. That is laid down somewhere.’
‘Not anywhere that I know of.’
‘Go then,’ Caiaphas said. ‘State your requirements to Zerah. We will see if your zeal works on these stiff-necked Greeks.’ Stiff-necked: he caught the Greek voice of Stephen saying it. ‘Go.’
‘In the name of the Most High,’ Saul said.
‘If you must have it so.’
On the sixteenth day of the month of the wargod, thirty-seven years after the birth of, as he was called by many, the prince of peace, Tiberius breathed his last. He was seventy-seven years old and had reigned for almost twenty-three years. The manner of death is still unknown. Some say that Gaius gave him slow poison in possets he insisted on serving himself; others that Tiberius whimpered perpetually for food but was denied it. The philosopher Seneca, whom we shall meet later, writes somewhere of the Emperor, aware that his end was coming, removing his sealring as if to give it to another, clinging to it for a time and then replacing it on his finger, clenching his fist to hold on to the emblem of imperial power, then calling faintly for a servant to come. No servant answered, so he got out of his bed, staggered, fell, and died on the floor. Other tales tell frankly of Gaius stabbing Tiberius with a damascened dagger in the presence of a horrified freedman whom he then strangled with his own hands in the anger of a discovered assassination. More probable is the story of Gaius’s smothering his great-uncle with a pillow he had just polluted with semen offered to the glory of the moon goddess. We are, remember, in the kingdom of the wicked.
The wickedness of Tiberius was not quickly forgotten. In Rome joy at the news of his death was qualified by a hatred and anger the more lively for not having to be stifled by fear. People prayed to our mother the earth and to the gods beneath it, Dis and his bride Persephone (or Pluto and Proserpina) to grant him no rest after death, rather to create a special hell for him furnished with fire and serpents less docile than his pet Columba. There were cries that his body should be dishonoured and quartered and the bloody bits flung on to the Stairs of Mourning. It seemed to many that his cruelty was able to flourish posthumously. The Senate, aware that his death was approaching, granted a ten-day stay of execution for all condemned criminals, assuming that his end would occur within that period, but Tiberius died on the very day of expiry of the term of grace. As Gaius had not yet been formally declared Emperor (it has to be remembered that in Tiberius’s will Gaius and Tiberius Gemellus, son of Drusus the younger, were named co-heirs; the Senate had yet to execute this testament in favour of the son of the loved Germanicus), there was nobody to whom an appeal could be made, so the criminals who had been filled with hope and were now drained of it were duly strangled and thrown on to the Stairs of Mourning. Rage abounded, and the mob attempted to seize the corpse when it was carried towards Rome for the funeral ceremony, but the guard, with Marcus Julius Tranquillus not alone in white-faced attention to duty, bore the already decaying body safely to its incineration. Soon the eyes of the Empire looked not to a bad past but to a shining future. And in Palestine there were strong hopes that, Gaius being necessarily a friend of the Jewish people since he was a friend of Herod Agrippa, the days of Roman extortion would soon come to an end and holy independence ensue. Herod Agrippa was no Solomon, but he was of the sacred royal blood, and that was everything. The kingdom must be cleansed of its heretics: Saul would help bring an Israel united in its orthodoxy neatly boxed in ornamental gold to the feet of the newly crowned monarch. Alleluia.
So let us see Saul busily at work. One evening a number of Greek Jewish Nazarenes sat at their love feast in the house of Nicanor the maker of silver candlesticks. Parmenas was there, with his wife and children, and also Philip. Philip was, as it turned out, lucky that he was a three-year widower without children. We can all tolerate persecution for ourselves. Nicanor, as head of the household, took bread and broke it, saying in Greek:
‘For the night before he was put most cruelly to death, hanging on a tree that the sins of man be absolved through his sacrifice, he said to his disciples: This is my body. Take and eat. Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise he said: This is the blood of the new order, which shall be shed for the redemption of many. Take and drink.’ And then, while the broken bread and the single cup of wine were handed around, the door of the house burst noisily open, and Saul appeared with six Levites in polished light breastplates, armed with swords. The celebrants froze, some with bread still in their mouths. Saul said with great smoothness:
‘I apologise for disturbing your ceremony – with, if I may say so, so little ceremony. On behalf of the holy council of the priesthood and watchers of the Temple, there are certain enquiries that have to be made. You – what is your name?’
He was looking at Parmenas. Parmenas answered: ‘Parmenas. You, of course, need not introduce yourself more than you have already.’
‘We can dispense with Hellenistic wordplay,’ Saul said. ‘I ask you one simple question. Would you say that it was idle and idolatrous to worship in a temple made by human hands?’
‘There is no harm in such worship.’
‘But no great good?’
‘If,’ Parmenas said, ‘you expect me to contradict the words of our brother Stephen—’
‘Yes?’
‘The truth is the truth. Do you wish to arraign us, as you arraigned him, before the council of the priests?’
‘We can dispense with a trial. You condemn yourself out of your own mouth.’
‘I have said nothing.’
‘You have said enough.’ He turned to his guards and said: ‘Arrest this whole assembly.’
The chief of his Levites said: ‘The women and children too?’
‘The women and children too.’
The children were easier to seize than the adults. There were three of these present, the two sons of Parmenas and the daughter of Nicanor. The girl screamed piteously when the rough men handled her. Parmenas said:
‘These children are innocent.’
‘But their parents are not? So you admit crime. Take them all.’
The Levites drew their swords and began to herd the sheep towards the way out of their pen. They meekly submitted, but then Parmenas cried: ‘Now!’ They had, it seemed, prepared for such an eventuality. Nicanor seized the sword fist of one of the guards and tried to wrest the weapon. Saul sneered:
‘So this is how you turn the other cheek?’
Nicanor was pinked in the left arm. He cried: ‘Good. The others are coming.’ As Saul and his Levites looked towards the open front door Philip broke free of a hand brawny as a smith’s and ran towards the rear of the house. The chief guard cried ‘After him’, but Saul said:
‘No. He won’t get far.’
Philip ran out of the back door, into the working yard, then leapt to the top of the wall. The street was empty, but the clump of his weight on the street cobbles set a dog to barking. He ran in the direction of the Temple, turned off near the house of the disciples and entered by their back door. The whole twelve were there, unusually. They had performed their communion ceremony and were mostly gnawing at bones. Philip sat, exhausted. They gave him a cup of wine. He said:
‘Saul. The persecution’s started.’ The disciples said nothing; they waited for more. ‘Men with swords. They’ve arrested—’
‘Who?’ Peter said.
‘It seems they’re after those who speak Greek.’
‘Aye,’ Thomas said. ‘Like Stephen.’
‘Nobody’s safe,’ Philip said. ‘Leave Jerusalem. The Greeks first, the Hebrews after.’
Peter shook his head. ‘They can’t harm us. Not yet. They’ve no case against us, not while Gamaliel’s around. It’s different for you people. It’s you who must leave Jerusalem. Well,’ he said to all, ‘you can call this the prompting of the Holy Spirit. He uses the persecutors to make us carry the word abroad. This is the meaning of God bless our enemies. You, Philip, had best go to Samaria. Fertile soil, a battered people. The time for us here is not yet. Sleep in the cellar tonight. Leave at daybreak. We’ll give you money.’
‘So it’s the Greeks who carry the word,’ Thomas said. ‘Who would have thought it?’
‘God works in strange ways,’ Matthew said. ‘God’s a great joker.’
So Philip cheated Saul, but Saul was not cheated of others. He seized the house of Nicanor, though that house was due to be conveyed to the whole company of Nazarenes, and set up a centre of interrogation in a workroom whose floor was blobbed with points of silver. He had Timon there, a man vigorous but old. He had him, already bruised, upheld tottering in the arms of two half-naked Levites: torture was warm work. He said:
‘Ready to recant? Is Jesus the carpenter the Son of God?’
‘Yes.’
Saul nodded. Timon’s right hand was seized and his arm twisted almost to breaking point behind.
‘Yes yes yes.’
Saul with a gentle hand motioned that the torment should, for the moment, cease, saying:
‘Timon, this torture is unseemly. It is also unreasonable. But faith has so little to do with reason. You are a Greek Jew who has abandoned the faith of his fathers. You must be brought back to that faith. How can we best bring you back?’
Timon panted for a half minute, then he said: ‘I have not abandoned the faith. It is you who have baked the faith and said the cake is done.’ Timon’s trade spoke in the image. ‘That was before Jesus the Christ came from the oven. I am a good simple Jew who has found the Messiah.’
Saul nodded. The arm twisting was renewed. Timon gasped and then cried aloud.
‘The Messiah has not yet come. Has he, Timon?’
‘Yes yes yes.’ The arm broke and he fainted.
‘He’s a hard one,’ the torturer said.
There is no name in any language for the open-air centres of detention which Saul devised for his dissident Greek Nazarenes. Rough palissades were erected on Temple land outside the city gates, and within them were herded whole families of Christ-following Hellenes. There was no shelter from the sun, save for that afforded by arms and cloaks, brief tents sheltering the sick and old. There was not enough water and the only food was stale bread. Families with wailing children were quick to defect from the new faith and could hardly, even by the most rigorous Nazarene patriarch, a kind of Saul of the new, be blamed for their denial of the Messiah. When they were freed again, their faith could be tested by willingness to suffer exile or by the ingenuity of subterfuge. But some children died and very many of the old. The Temple shone in the distance and none expected a voice of protest to come from beyond the veil.