The Emperor Waltz (41 page)

‘I was afraid we should die,’ the merchant’s daughter said.

‘I knew we should not,’ the slave said.

‘It is strange, that those Christians were put to death only yesterday,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘But if they had not been discovered, the Christian whose business was in the market, he would have been there and would have been killed, only by barbarians instead of by the magistrate.’

‘Yes, that is so,’ the slave said placidly.

‘Did anyone die that we know?’

‘Your mother sent a message to the Roman general enquiring after the health of the general and of all the members of his suite. She would not forgive herself if harm came to him or to them from his visiting our humble town.’

‘What happened?’

‘There was a reply saying that all the members of his suite and the general himself were quite well.’

‘Was it from the general himself?’

‘No, the general must have been very busy.’

‘That won’t have pleased her one bit. She wants to be great friends with the general, and he is here only for another two days. She looked so pretty and she smelt so delicious, too.’

‘It is all the same, in the end,’ the slave said. It was so unusual a remark that the merchant’s daughter lowered her veil. They were walking in the street. It had been forbidden them, but the merchant’s daughter had veiled herself and her slave, and they had slipped out. They wanted to see the disaster. All about them, there were interesting signs of blood on the walls, and splintered wood and scattered objects, the product of undisciplined destruction of the market.

6.

The daughter of the merchant was of an age to marry. She was aware of this. There were meetings between her parents and friends and acquaintances of theirs at which she was brought in and greeted. Sometimes there was a son as well; sometimes not. Her parents were sociable creatures, but all that winter they seemed to go out every night, oiled and perfumed.

‘It is because nobody wants you,’ the merchant’s daughter’s slave said, when they were alone.

But the merchant’s daughter believed that the process was protracted because her parents were being careful over her future. There were not so many families in the small marble town in the white and gold desert. Her parents would want to be sure of the right choice for her, as she was their youngest child living. The merchant’s daughter could remember the last time this had happened, and her sister had been married off. That had been no more than five years before. She remembered some of the same visitors, her sister being summoned to show herself, some of the same suitors, in fact.

Her mother went out in the afternoons to the temple, to make offerings. One of the elder daughters would arrive, perhaps the second, heavily pregnant and sweating in the heat of the desert town. They would retreat into her mother’s chambers and emerge some time later after nightfall, having discussed the suitors of the previous days. They would ladle themselves into the waiting palanquins by torchlight, and the pair of them would set off. The merchant’s daughter was not included in these outings, and she was not supposed to know about them. On past occasions, her mother had taken her to make the offering on behalf of an elder daughter. This time, too, there would be the incense; the smell of animals’ blood; the cool and gritty feel of the temple’s marble floor; the banging of drums and the wail of pipes and voices; and, to one side, the malevolent presence of the temple virgins, standing veiled and observant, their eyes full of resentment and malice. When it was done, they would nod sourly, pull back their wicker baskets inside their robes and watch the merchant’s wife and the merchant’s daughter retreat. When her mother and her sister departed, she could reconstruct the sequence of events. She hoped that the husband who came would not be too tall; she hoped he would not be as old as her father; she hoped that he would not be one of the two men that all her sisters and half of the town had turned down over the last twenty years.

‘You don’t talk about your religion,’ she said to her slave. The house had retreated, and was asleep or resting on their couches. Only she and the slave were awake, talking in low voices as the merchant’s daughter steadily took and ate plums from the red-and-black ceramic dish. She sat on the couch; the slave knelt on the floor.

‘I have talked too much about my religion,’ the slave said.

‘Oh, I won’t tell anyone,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘But is it a secret sort of religion? In caves, in the desert, sacrificing babies to their gods, and it is death to speak of the mysteries?’

‘My religion is not like that,’ the slave said. ‘One day, it will live openly and everyone will see everything about it. It is not a religion made for darkness.’

‘Why do you not live openly now?’ the merchant’s daughter said, but the slave had nothing but a gesture of the hands in response to that. ‘I can see, you would be killed if you did. But you don’t seem to mind being killed in the name of your religion. Those people, they were demanding to be put to death. If they don’t fear death, why are they living secretly?’

‘Some of us are not as strong as that,’ the slave said. ‘I fear death. I try not to fear death, but I fear death. I have hidden my light under a desert rock, and not one person has seen my light.’

‘Oh, that’s not true,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘And even if it were, you have followed the commands of your religion, I’m sure. Would anyone see your light in the desert, in the noonday sun? Are you a sort of temple virgin?’

The slave hissed, and warded off the comparison with a bold movement of the arm, like a wounded dog touched on his sore limb. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘Not like any of that. We are told not to hide our lights under a bushel, and that is what I have done. We are told to bring the good news to others. But I sit in silence and darkness and fear only death.’

The merchant’s daughter tossed away the stone of the plum, sucked clean. ‘It was brave of you,’ she said slowly, ‘to tell me anything. What was your Christ?’

‘As a man, I would say that he lived and died in Judaea seven or eight generations ago.’

‘And what sort of god is he?’

‘He is the only God, he and his Father and the Holy Spirit.’

‘That is three gods. I don’t understand.’

‘There is one God in three.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It is not important to understand.’

‘Oh,’ the girl said, put off by the self-regarding formality of the maid’s responses. She had not said it before: she had merely rehearsed this exchange, the first example of an exchange she had always wanted to have. ‘But what sort of god is he? Does he punish, or control the weather, or pass judgement over your fortunes? He can’t be that – the Christians never seem rich around here. Excuse me if I say the wrong thing.’

‘He stands for love,’ the slave said. ‘And I am to bring that message of love to everyone, even at the cost of my own death. But I am so afraid, so terribly afraid.’

‘Those people who were killed,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘They can’t bring a message of any sort to anyone any more. You could be being useful in any number of ways. They’re dead. I heard they were beheaded in the amphitheatre.’

‘That was their message,’ the slave said. ‘People will never forget their message. I am going to tell other people, as we are commanded to. And if it leads to my death, it leads to my death. It is so hard to die well, alone, but it makes no difference whether I die with terrible fear, or calmly and bravely. Listen.’

7.

Two years passed.

The merchant’s daughter was married to a man. He was the younger son of the governor. It was a better marriage than the sisters’ of the merchant’s daughter. Afterwards, a magnificent mosaic was installed in the house of the merchant and his wife. Such a marriage made clear what the family’s standing had become.

The daughter took her slave with her, and there were other slaves devoted to her appearance and her pleasure.

Her husband was a man of thirty-three. He had been married before to a girl who had proved to be barren. He had travelled a good deal, even to great Rome with his father, and liked to tell of what he had seen, in the evening, to their guests. The house they lived in was the house he had lived in for fifteen years, since his first marriage. She fitted into it, her red hair much commented on by the slaves, who had grown comfortable and confident; they listened to her suggestions about the food, and about other small matters, and sometimes took notice, and sometimes not. Her husband’s first wife lived in a small villa on the outskirts of the town, well walled, surrounded by nine steady old slaves, as if in widowhood. She had grown aged in appearance, it was said.

Six months after they married, she discovered that she was to have a child. The governor and his six sons rejoiced. It was born whole and healthy, a son. In its face she could see the governor’s cross and satisfied features, and her husband, a little, but herself not at all, and the sacred soul not one bit. It looked up at her and sucked angrily; the next time, she said to herself, it would be better and the child more agreeable.

Around this time, she asked her husband about the Christians. He explained to her that it was a cult of human sacrifice, like the cult of Baal Hammon. Somewhere in this continent, people still killed children to their gods, not goats and sheep. The Christians had taken it one step further, and presented themselves for sacrifice, like their god. The arena of the amphitheatre and the courtroom were as the sacrificial altar to them. And if we did not choose to sacrifice them? A town of two thousand people, not so far from here, had woken to discover that sixty citizens had self-slaughtered themselves in the night, and all of them Christians. The governor’s son laughed heavily, briefly, in the courtyard of their house. His wife sat listening on the rim of the fountain, in the morning sun.

‘These cults come and these cults go,’ he said. He passed his hand over his forehead, wiping the sweat away. ‘Why do you ask about them?’

‘I heard about them somewhere,’ she said. ‘They sound so very strange.’

‘People are drawn by the unfamiliar and the strange,’ her husband said. ‘There is no need to reintroduce human sacrifice. That was one of the reasons why we fought and razed Carthage.’

‘I see,’ the merchant’s daughter said. She did not believe that her husband knew anything whatsoever about the matter.

At the end of the week, her husband came to her in her rooms. As he was washing himself afterwards, he said, ‘You were speaking about the cult of Christianity. Does it interest you?’

‘No, not especially,’ the merchant’s daughter said. It was cold tonight: a wind from the desert brought a chill into the room, as well as the ordinary grit and sand that floated there. She reached for a blanket that lay on the floor where her husband had pushed it aside. Her wrist hurt where it had been twisted and pressed. The sensitivity of the flesh was something she remembered before, and she felt that she must be pregnant again. She would not mention it for a month or two. ‘It was something I heard about. I forget why I raised it with you.’

‘There is a spread of it in the town, my father said. There were some executions a year or two ago. It doesn’t seem to have put them off. If it came into the house?’

‘I don’t know,’ the merchant’s daughter said truthfully. ‘You make it sound like the sand the wind brings in. I don’t know what we should do if it did. Sweep it out, but sand always comes in again.’

‘I don’t know that it has come into the house,’ he said. He looked at her oddly, like a dog with its ears pricked, waiting for a command. In the first days of their marriage, when she made comparisons, such as saying Christianity was like the sand of the desert, he would take the trouble to laugh at her and say that she talked nonsense. ‘It may not be true, what Copreus told me.’

That was his way, to sound matters out without revealing what he knew, and when she had stated her opinion, to explain that Copreus had informed him of some state of affairs. She thought back with alarm; but she had not committed herself to there being Christianity in the house.

Her husband went on talking. There was a lot to follow about duty and standing. At the end of it, he did what he had come to do, for the second time. She submitted to it. He was a bull of a man, even at his age, even in a second marriage, his chest and shoulders like a cupboard, his bodily hair and his blood both thick and surging. She felt like a translucent piece of fish on a slab beside him. She felt that he must be able to see the child, tiny, within her translucent belly as he pushed up into her. Her pale arm under his grip was like the limb of a separate species.

She spoke to her slave about Copreus. Neither liked her husband’s manservant. He had been found on a dungheap and named for it, but now was a man of pained dignity and careful pronunciation. He looked dull in the face: his eyes did not go from side to side as he walked, carefully, through the villa with his burden of clothes or food. He barely greeted anyone, except his mistress: her he greeted with a deep, even reverential salutation, his eyes on her feet. His comments were servile and elaborate and verged, no more, on the impertinent. He was very clean, pale and shining in the face, wringing his hands as he walked, face downwards. He murmured his servilities and he murmured his impertinences. She had sometimes to ask him to repeat what he said, though her husband never. He had been used to Copreus since childhood. She would not speak to her husband about Copreus as he spoke to her, derisively, humorously, about her slave. When she had been married a month, it occurred to her that Copreus’s curious, mincing, precise, mangled way of talking had originated in an attempt to sound like the women of her husband’s family, their clipped words, the open sounds of their voices when heard across a fountain-centred courtyard.

‘He watches me,’ her slave said simply. ‘I think he watches you too.’

That was not an aspect that the merchant’s daughter had considered.

‘But he is a soul, as well,’ her slave said. ‘I should speak to him.’

‘Don’t do that,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘He would not hear what you had to say.’