The Emperor Waltz (43 page)

12.

The next day they were led from the prison to the marketplace. News of the trial had spread in the town, and there was a crowd in the bright light of the dusty day. It might have been the news that the daughter of an important merchant had surrendered herself willingly that had encouraged the crowds and the town’s curiosity and baffled fervour. Of course the crowd would be bigger when they were torn apart by wild beasts, in the arena.

They walked, tied by ropes at the wrists, and did not look anywhere but directly ahead. A man in the group immediately before her sang as he walked, his voice quavering. It seemed to her that she had seen this scene before, to prepare her. Above her she felt the Holy Spirit. It was merciless and clawed and supervisory. It blessed them. It would descend upon them, and would descend, clawed, upon the unbelievers around them, screaming and howling. They would die and be cast into the pits of Hell. She and the others would pass through suffering and into bliss. She saw them, their faces and hands only emerging from a blaze of pitch, their faces terribly distorted with pain – her father, and husband, and mother, and sisters and brothers, and the governor and his wife, and Copreus. She saw herself looking down as if from the wall of a high garden, green and watered, a fountain playing. The Holy Spirit descended on them, shrieking, and would tear the liver from Copreus’s chest once a day, like Prometheus. She saw him screaming for mercy, and she would turn her head away and smile at the angels and the blest and at God the Father.

A voice called from the crowd, and she looked. Pushing to the front, there was her father.

‘What is this?’ he was shouting. ‘That is my daughter. What has she said? She is lying. Her husband will deal with this. Daughter –’ and now he was walking alongside them, pushing the crowd and the soldiers out of the way, trying to speak to her ‘– daughter, how can this be?’

The words came to her, and she said that just as a water vessel could not be called under any name but what it had, and just as it could hold only water, so she could not call herself anything but what she was, a Christian, and what she now held within herself was the truth. Her father flung himself on her with rage. His fingers tore at her face, and she was glad of it. She knew now what the Egyptian in her dream was. He was pulled away from her by the guards, and the crowd laughed – shrill, joyous, animal cries.

Then she could look at the crowd. The worst had happened and she no longer needed to look ahead, seeing nothing. There she saw faces she knew; she saw, even, her husband, and his expression was inscrutable, but unsurprised. They passed on, and now all of them were singing: she was singing too. She understood that there were those in the crowd who would never forget what they saw this day, and she understood that in this blazing heat and desert dust, it was not just her who was thirsty and suffering, it was those around her who would know no relief.

13.

They were brought to the forum, and led up to a platform that had been erected before the chair of judgement. There was a sea of yelping humanity about them. They stood, tied together with ropes, and waited while the procurator ascended to his place. Below her, her father appeared again, but now he was holding a child. It was her son.

‘It is not too late,’ her father said. ‘Think of me in my old age – the shame of this – and think of your son. Do you think that—’ But he was carried away, he and his grandson, and she was not sure that she had heard what he had to say.

The procurator began to ask questions of them. They each confessed that they were Christian. At each confession, the procurator moved on, making no gesture of disgust or disapproval. He came to her. The crowd, which had been howling with disapproval at each question and answer, now quietened. The procurator made a kind of gesture at the base of the platform, and her father appeared again, holding the child. He ascended two steps and, turning to her, said, ‘Have pity on the child, at any rate.’ At that, he seemed to believe that he had said enough with the child in his arms, and he passed the baby to a womanservant who was standing behind him.

The procurator made a silencing gesture with his flat hand. ‘For Heaven’s sake, your father is old. Your child is very young. Look, just be sensible. Make some kind of sacrifice to the Emperor.’

‘No,’ she said. It was an easy answer.

‘Very well, then,’ the procurator said. ‘I am going to ask you the question that I am required to ask you by the Emperor’s decree. Are you a Christian?’

It was the formal question he had put to the others, which they had answered easily, though not always very resonantly. Her maid had almost shrieked the answer; the man who had begun the singing had had to be asked to repeat the answer, so quietly had he replied. ‘I am,’ she said.

There was a commotion from her father: he leapt forward, his arms outstretched, like those of the naked Egyptian in her dream. But the soldiers were quicker, and seized him. One soldier beat him back with a rod – the crowd roared with approval, some perhaps thinking that her father, too, was a Christian, not yet apprehended. Blood was beginning to flow from her father’s face. She looked away.

‘This is all madness,’ the procurator said. ‘I pass sentence. They will be placed in the arena with the wild beasts.’

‘We return to the prison with joy in our hearts,’ the man she was roped to said, as loudly as he could, with terror in his voice. She tried to feel joy. The heavens above her poured with light, and perhaps, then, as the rough rope tugged at her wrists and she was led down from the platform into the howling, spitting mob, she did begin to feel something in her heart that was joy.

14.

‘You get a last feast,’ the gaoler said as he pushed them into the cell. It was filthy in there, and hot. The only window was high up in the wall, and the stench of bodies, of blood and excrement was heavy in the darkness. There was nothing to sleep on but some wretched blankets.

There were five of them. The merchant’s daughter knew only her slave – but she could be thought of as free, now. The older man who had sung so uncertainly was a handler of grain, and he was there with his wife. They had converted separately, and without knowing it of the other. In the end, the wife had started to talk of it to her husband, convinced that she must die if she kept silent any longer, even if she died by speaking out. They clung to each other in the cell. There was the merchant’s daughter. And there was a very young boy whose voice was only just broken. He seemed too young to know what he was doing, but he spoke with great certainty. He longed for martyrdom, and talked of it in detail, lovingly.

‘We shall make a feast of love,’ he said of the gaoler’s last feast. ‘We shall break bread together, like our Saviour, and pass bowls between us, and smile and laugh through happiness. They will see us, and wonder. But the next day they will see us die in the arena through sword and wild beast, still in a state of joy, and realize that they have known nothing of joy until today. They will go away, and think, and come to Jesus on their own, through our example.’

Someone paid for comfort for them, and they were moved to another cell, a larger cell, higher up. It was clean and well aired. They would live there until the time came, in three days’ time. They rejoiced at that. The feast of love was announced, and they each asked as many of their family and friends as they could. Her mother came and her sisters and brothers. Her father did not come. Her slave asked her sister, and others the merchant’s daughter did not know, and even Copreus, and they all came. They watched the five of them pass the bread and the meat and the mess of beans among them, laughing and talking without grief. The merchant’s daughter told stories of her childhood, and how she had loved to go out into the desert, and how vain she had been of the colour of her hair. Her slave talked of the day she had first met with the Christians. Others told of when they were first allowed to hunt with falcons, or smiled and wept at the coming reunion with family members they were parted from. The grain-handler took up the corner of his coarse blue robe and wiped his wife’s face lovingly. Around them, their families and friends watched, silent, with their own thoughts. At the end, the merchant’s daughter went about the circle with a rough wooden bowl filled with torn-up bread, and offered it in peace and love to everyone who had come to their feast. There were no larks’ tongues and sows’ udders at their feast. When the guests left, they carried each of them the beat of the wings of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Before long, they, too, would be put to death in the arena with joy and thanks.

The merchant’s daughter lay down. She felt joy, she knew, but there was so much still to discover before she died. She knew about Jesus, and how he had died and how he was born, in the stable with the animals. She had read about his life, and she had heard people tell stories of him. She did not know what Mary his mother had been doing before he was born. She had asked when the world had been created, and she had been told. But it was more important to know that the world would end soon, perhaps this week, perhaps next week. She did not know what Heaven looked like. When she thought of it, she thought only of running water, and green fresh earth, and a cool wind with no sand or minerals in it, only the scent of water. But she did not know, and had felt as shy about asking as an heir about the exact sum of money that would certainly come to her. She hoped that her father and Copreus would remain deaf, and in their deaths lie in torments, the shrieking beak and claws of the Holy Spirit descending on them in vengeance for ever more.

A small hand touched her shoulder. It was the woman who was once her slave.

‘They are all asleep,’ she said.

‘I am awake,’ the merchant’s daughter said.

‘I cannot sleep,’ the slave said. ‘All my life, I have slept easily. I worked in the days, and I was tired at night, and slept. But these days, I have had nothing to do. I have rested without moving, and I have had no tiredness at night. This is the last sleep of my life, and I cannot sleep.’

‘Are you afraid?’ the merchant’s daughter said.

‘I know that God loves me,’ the slave said. There was a choking sound in her voice.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘I will be with you.’

‘Will we go together?’ the slave said.

‘Yes, and I will hold your hand as long as I may,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘It will be so short a time, and then there will be for ever. There will be a breeze blowing, and birdsong, and fresh water, and cool shade, for ever.’

‘I shall eat dates in the shade, for ever, and my feet shall be cool in the running stream,’ the slave murmured. Together they heard a beat in the desert air, far away.

15.

The next day they were taken to the arena. There they stood, the men apart from the women. First the wild beasts were set upon them. A leopard was freed from the cages, and approached the men. But it prowled away. The well-armoured guard prodded it with a spear, but it took no action beyond a snarl. ‘It will not come until I ask it to,’ one of the men said. The guard paid no attention, but poked the animal again. It turned its head and hissed at the guard. ‘It will not come,’ the man said again, calling across bravely, ‘until I ask it to.’

‘Ask it to,’ the crowd called, and finally the guard nodded.

‘Come,’ the man said, and the leopard turned and leapt upon him. It tore his throat, and blood poured from it. A bear came from a different place, and as the young boy who had proposed the feast of love knelt and sang, he was cuffed and mauled and his face torn half off. Still he sang, as well as he could, until the bear fell on him and his soul left his body.

The merchant’s daughter and her slave were next. The howls in the arena were enormous. She felt that she was in the middle of a great storm of hatred as of the wind-flung small stones of the desert, flying in the air. She prayed for them; she tried to pray for them; the words would not come. ‘Holy Father,’ she said, but the words would not come. By her, the woman who had been her slave was trembling in terror. ‘Holy,’ she began, but no words more would come. ‘Holy Father,’ the merchant’s daughter said. The gates to the bestiary were flung open. The leopard and the bear had come out slowly, from darkness, but this time a maddened heifer ran out almost before the gates were open. ‘Holy Father,’ the merchant’s daughter said, but then the beast was upon them. Her face was pressed against the hot dirty sand, and sand and blood were in her mouth. Then, out of sequence, it seemed to her that a great wall of flesh and sharp bone and horn was hitting her, and punching the breath out of her body and, with a broken deflation, she was flying through the air. Again that wall of force, pressing her now into the sand, and the noise of something breaking. Her bowels emptied. She could do nothing about it. There seemed to have been silence, but now a wave of shriek and chant and the noise of hatreds. She wondered where the woman who had been her slave was. It was very important now to stand up, and not to die lying there in the sand. She placed her wrist on the sand, but then blackness came upon her. A time later she came to. She had not died. This time she raised herself on her other wrist, which did not hurt. In the middle of the screaming, she could hear singing. The heifer had gone. She hoped nobody wished it ill, poor beast. Over her stood the guard who had goaded the leopard, his sword raised. She could see that it was trembling, and in his eyes she could read wonderment and terror. She tried, so hard, to smile at him. His sword was lowered. Not far away, there was a woman kneeling, her hands at her face, held together. The merchant’s daughter felt that she knew who this woman was. She reached forward, and took the guard’s unwilling sword by the blade. It was very sharp. She brought it towards her neck, and she looked at the guard, and smiled as best she could.

With a gesture of grooming, her good hand smoothed back her red hair, a confident, flattening gesture, and brought it away from the side of her neck for the executioner to strike more easily.