The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene (12 page)

Mary improved rapidly over the next several days. By the time Joseph was ready to depart for Jerusalem, she was walking about the house. She had sent to Demetrius for her lyre and strummed it off and on during the day, sometimes singing songs Joseph had never heard before, as if she were working to enlarge her repertoire. But he did not delude himself into believing this was the same Mary of Magdala he had first come to love. An evil spirit had taken possession of her, a demon of hate that would not let her rest until she had accomplished her purpose through the death of the man who had defiled her body.

As always on the few occasions when he had visited Jerusalem, Joseph stayed at the home of his uncle, the merchant, Joseph of Arimathea. Respected in the city for his piety and his kindness even more than for his wealth, the older Joseph, whose name the young physician of Magdala bore, was a man of influence in the ruling council, the Sanhedrin. Joseph dined with his uncle on the day of his arrival, and afterward the older man questioned him carefully about his relations with Pontius Pilate and his lady. When Joseph finished, the merchant nodded approvingly. “You have done well in making a friend of the procurator and his wife,” he said. “I can see that I was right in recommending you to him.” He pulled at his beard. “Did you ever think of coming to Jerusalem to work as a physician?”

Joseph smiled. “I suppose every leech or apprentice dreams of being a successful physician here,” he admitted. “But there are many here who treat the sick. I would be but a small pebble in a rock pile.”

“Perhaps so, perhaps not,” his uncle said enigmatically. “Now you had better get to bed. The judges will not be easy on you, so you must have your wits about you tomorrow.”

Actually, Joseph had little trouble convincing the judges at Jerusalem that his knowledge of medicine and his skill in surgery entitled him to be designated
rophe uman,
a skilled physician. Already his competence was far above that of most physicians, even in the temple city.

The examination was held before a board of judges and completed in one day. On the following morning the formalities of issuing the necessary certificates were completed, but when Joseph was leaving the chamber, the chief of the judges, a venerable doctor of the law named Elias, who was also a member of the Sanhedrin, called him back. “What are your plans, Joseph of Galilee, now that you are
rophe uman?”
he asked.

“I will work on in Magdala for a while,” Joseph told him. “At least until the procurator goes back to Caesarea.”

“It is good that Pontius Pilate has so much confidence in you,” Elias said. “And after that?”

“When I have saved enough, I hope to study further in Alexandria.”

“Why study more? You are more learned now than most of our physicians in Jerusalem.”

“It seems that there is no end to learning,” Joseph said with a smile.

“You speak truly,” Elias agreed. “It is written,
‘Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man and he will increase in learning.’”
He smiled then. “But it is also written
, ‘The wise man also may hear and increase in learning, and the man of understanding acquire skill.’
You could learn much here in Jerusalem.”

“I am sure of that, sir,” Joseph agreed, wondering just what this roundabout discussion could be leading up to.

“We of the council have known of you for some time,” Elias continued, “through the excellent physician of Magdala who is your preceptor and through your uncle, who is my friend. We have heard, too, of your success in treating the procurator Pontius Pilate and the Lady Claudia Procula. And since the blood of David flows in your veins, it is meet that you should serve in the temple of the Most High. If you will come to Jerusalem, Joseph, you will be given an appointment as
medicus viscerus
for the temple.”

Joseph was so startled that he could hardly believe he was hearing aright. The honor of serving as temple physician was usually accorded men of age and standing in their profession and not given lightly, even then. Nor did he doubt for a moment that his association with Pontius Pilate and his wife had influenced the offer. The procurator of Judea spent varying periods in Jerusalem in connection with his office, and it was well known that his temper was not good when he was in pain from his gouty toe. So it was perfectly logical for the Sanhedrin to want a physician who had been successful in treating the procurator to be in Jerusalem during these visits.

Whatever the reason behind the flattering offer, Joseph knew it was to his benefit to accept. As
medicus viscerus
he would be assured the patronage of the wealthiest and most important people in Jerusalem and Judea and his fortune would be assured. It was a prospect he could not lightly refuse, and yet, although he had been willing to give up Alexandria to marry Mary, he hesitated to cut himself off from it since she had refused him.

“I had planned to study at Alexandria for at least a year,” he said.

“No doubt that could be arranged at some future time,” Elias agreed amiably. “No man can be blamed for wishing to improve his competence in his chosen occupation. Will a month be long enough for you to arrange your affairs in Magdala?”

“It should be ample.”

“I will present your appointment to the high priest then. You will be notified of it in due course.”

More than a week had elapsed before Joseph finally returned to Magdala, but as he hurried home he was bursting with good news. Now that he had incurred such good fortune and would be given such a high place, he hoped Mary might look with more favor on his suit for her hand in marriage. But at his home he learned that she had returned home on the very day he had left for Jerusalem, and his mother had not seen her since.

As he hurried to the house of the lyre maker, Joseph reviewed in his mind the arguments with which he would bowl Mary over and make her agree to marry him. He had even figured how to take care of Demetrius, as Jerusalem would be a large market for the instruments the Greek made, since hundreds of thousands of Jews flocked into the city on pilgrimages every year. And with his position, Joseph might even be able to arrange that Demetrius be designated instrument maker for the temple.

At first he could not understand what was changed about the lyre maker’s house when he approached it from across the Street of the Greeks. Then he realized that he heard none of the usual sounds with which the building ordinarily rang, the tapping of hammers on resonant woods, the plink of strings, the unsure notes of a pupil practicing, and, above all, a girlish voice of incomparable beauty lifted on the mountain air. His spirits suddenly doused by a sense of foreboding, Joseph crossed the street and came up to the house. It was then that he saw the bars nailed across the doors and windows.

An old man passing in the street stopped. “If you are looking for the maker of lyres,” he quavered, “he has gone. He and all his household.”

“When did they leave?” Joseph cried. “Where did they go?”

The man shrugged. “A week or so ago. I only know they traveled southward on the Via Maris.”

“Was the girl with them? The girl called Mary of Magdala?”

“The one with the red hair? Yes. She walked beside the mule that carried Demetrius.” And then he cackled. “Or was it two mules? The lyre maker is too big for one.”

Joseph could learn no more, either from the old man or from the neighbors, but all agreed that Demetrius’s party had gone southward, so he could be sure their destination must be Alexandria. The southward arm of the Way of the Sea led from Magdala through the mountainous country to the west as far as Joppa and the teeming coastal cities.

From there a traveler could take ship almost daily for Alexandria, reaching it in a few days’ sail. Or a caravan could travel by the longer land route to the same destination. Undoubtedly Mary had somehow persuaded Demetrius to go to Alexandria at once, and Joseph was sure the decision was tied up with her oath of revenge.

But why had she gone without telling him? And from whence had come the money for the trip? Even with the purses she had received for her dancing before Pontius Pilate, she would not have had enough to take herself, Demetrius, and the musicians, as well as the skilled artisans of the lyre maker’s household, to Egypt.

Joseph’s every impulse urged him to follow Mary. By buying or renting a fast horse or camel, he knew he could pursue them along the Via Maris and probably reach Joppa before they took ship. Not that he could hope to persuade her to return; he knew Mary too well for that. But she did not know of his fine prospects since he was to be appointed
medicus viscerus
to the temple at Jerusalem. Knowing this, she might at least promise to wait for him in Alexandria. And as Demetrius had suggested, after living in Egypt for a while, she might be more willing to return to Judea and Jerusalem as his bride.

He would follow them, Joseph decided, and hurried back across the city to his home. It would take money to hire a camel or horse—they were much more expensive than the slower mules—but the jar in which he kept his coins held more than would be needed. Shouting to his mother that he was leaving for Joppa in a few minutes, he went to the shelf where he kept the jar that contained his savings. As he lifted it down, the jar seemed lighter than he remembered. But only when he turned it upside down and saw that no coins fell from it did the truth burst upon him.

Joseph knew now where Mary had found the money to take her and the others to Alexandria.

The slaves at the carrying handles lowered the sumptuous sedan chair to the stone-paved quay. Joseph pushed aside the curtains and stepped out into a scene of bustling activity. The procurator’s own chair had brought him across the city of Caesarea to the harbor. As he stood beside it now, the sun gleamed on the golden eagles surmounting the standards at its corners, and the wind whipped the personal flag of the procurator, borne by a burly soldier of Pilate’s own guard. No one could doubt who ruled here—the stamp of Rome was upon everything—and for a moment Joseph was a little ashamed that he had given at least tacit approval of the conquerors by letting himself be carried in state, as it were, to the shipside.

The chair had deposited Joseph almost at the foot of the gangplank leading up to the deck of the great merchant ship—called “round” to distinguish it from the vessels of war, which were called “long.” Protected by the great half moon-shaped quay of massive stones with which Herod the Great had transformed an open roadstead into a protected harbor, the great ship hardly rocked at all as it rested quietly against the wharf. Slaves moved in long lines up and down the gangplanks, but there was no confusion, for almost every day a ship from Rome or one of the other great cities of the empire touched at Caesarea to load and unload cargo or bring messages and papers of state to the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.

Joseph had come from Jerusalem several days before for a last visit with the procurator and his lady before sailing to Alexandria for the year of study promised him five years ago, when he had accepted the position of
medicus viscerus
to the temple at Jerusalem. Much had happened in those five years. He was now a rich man whose fame as a physician had spread throughout Judea and Galilee, and even as far as the capital of the entire province of Syria at Antioch, where he had been called to treat the legate Vitellus.

Much of his success, Joseph realized, had come because of his relationship to the rich merchant of Jerusalem, Joseph of Arimathea, and his sponsorship by Pontius Pilate and the Lady Claudia Procula. He was duly grateful, but although his relationship with Procula had always been a pleasant one, he had never been able to get really close to the procurator himself, except physically to treat his gout and the other ailments which constantly plagued the Roman ruler of Judea.

Pilate, Joseph had come to know, was a strange man, given to bouts of abject self-pity because his son was a cripple and because he was condemned to service in what he considered a barbarous country for whose inhabitants he had only contempt. As so often happens with the emotionally unstable, he swung sometimes to extremes. Then he could be cruel beyond belief, arrogant, haughty, trampling upon the rights of others, regardless of the freedoms that Rome guaranteed to those it ruled. Once he had marched the golden eagles of Rome into Jerusalem by night and confronted the people in the morning with the blasphemous spectacle of graven images at the very gates of the temple. And again his soldiers, their weapons hidden under ordinary clothes, had infiltrated among a crowd come to protest another of his indignities, then set upon the people and killed them without mercy. Knowing that some Jews conspired against him and hoped to make Herod Antipas king in Jerusalem, Pilate trusted no one.

The Jews had little cause to love Pontius Pilate, but he had always been kind to Joseph and by designating him as personal physician to the court at Caesarea and the garrison at Jerusalem he had enhanced Joseph’s fortunes immeasurably. If there was a good side to Pilate’s nature, Joseph knew, it lay in his consuming love for the boy Pila and the exquisite tiny patrician who was his wife. Only her influence over the procurator kept him from becoming a complete tyrant.

Claudia Procula’s asthma had brought Joseph to Caesarea frequently in the years since he had come to Jerusalem, although he had been able to help her but little. But the attacks had at least given him a welcome excuse to get away from the temple city every now and then and the tension that was palpable there. As much as the Jews hated the Romans and the man who was a symbol of Roman power in their country, there were always some who aped their Roman conquerors. In Jerusalem a small group called the Herodians wielded a considerable political power through allying themselves with the Sadducees, from whose ranks came the temple priests. The Pharisees, however, clinging stubbornly to the ancient customs and laws of Israel, had only contempt for both Herodians and Sadducees. Thus while the Pharisees swayed the mass of the people, who naturally clung to the old traditions and past glories of Israel, the Herodians and Sadducees were smart enough to see that, for the time being, the greatest future for the Jews lay with the Romans who were in power, although preferably with a Jewish king on the throne of Judea.

Now, as he looked about him at the bustle of activity on the great quay, Joseph felt a sense of relief that, for a year at least, he would be free of the constant bickering and tension of temple politics. He carried a letter from the high priest Caiaphas to Philo Judaeus, the acknowledged leader of the Alexandrian Jews, who actually numbered more than the population of Jerusalem itself. And Claudia Procula had also given him a letter of introduction to Cestus, Roman governor of Alexandria, a distant kinsman of hers. With these credentials Joseph knew he would have instant access to both Roman and Jewish society in Alexandria, but he did not plan to use the letters at once. It was as a student seeking knowledge that he was sailing to Alexandria, the greatest center of learning in the world of that day. Knowledge and something else—a girl whose hair was like a flame. And at the thought his pulse quickened again in the old familiar thrilling rhythm.

The captain of the vessel had not missed the arrival of a passenger in the personal sedan chair of the procurator. Hurrying down the gangplank, he bowed low in greeting. “I am Marcus Quintus, captain of this ship,” he said formally.

Joseph, too, bowed. “Peace be upon you, Captain Quintus,” he said. “I am called Joseph of Galilee, a physician.”

The captain was a stocky man with an iron-gray beard and the keen eyes of a master mariner. “Your modesty becomes you, sir,” he said as they climbed the gangplank together. “In the ports of Judea and even as far as Antioch, there are men whose lives have been saved through the skill of the physician named Joseph of Galilee. It is said that, although rich, you turn no man away from your door.” He opened a door into the deckhouse and stood aside for Joseph to enter. “You will not be lonesome on this trip. A physician from the coast of Malabar is returning to Alexandria from Rome. One of my sailors was stupid enough to break an arm. He is setting the bone now.”

Joseph had been looking forward to solitude and complete freedom from the problems of medicine during the short voyage to Alexandria. When he had arrived in Jerusalem from Magdala five years before, everything he owned was easily carried on the back of a mule. It had taken much longer, however, to set his affairs in order for this trip of a year’s duration, for he was a rich man now, with many interests and an estate at the edge of the city, complete with vineyards, fields, and gardens as befitted the leading physician of the Jewish capital. They had been busy, prosperous, and pleasant years, during which he had matured greatly and for a while had almost forgotten his earlier desire to study in Alexandria.

And then one day three months ago, a man had come from one of the banking houses of Jerusalem specializing in foreign exchange. With him he brought a purse of gold exactly equaling the amount Mary had taken from the jar in the house at Magdala, plus interest at the usual rate. Joseph could learn nothing about Mary from the banker, except that the money had been sent from Alexandria, but she had been constantly in his dreams and thoughts since. Finally, he admitted to himself that he must see her again, if only for the certainty that she had stopped loving him and had given up all intention of returning to share with him this good life he had made for himself in Jerusalem. And with that decision had come a resurgence of his desire to study in Alexandria.

The physician Bana Jivaka was a small, slender man dressed entirely in white, with a close-fitting turban upon his dark hair. His skin was a light brown, his features even and pleasant, and his dark eyes alert and intelligent. He bowed low when Captain Quintus presented Joseph, and acknowledged the introduction in excellent Greek.

The patient was a muscular sailor stripped to the waist. He was tattooed in the strange cabalistic designs favored by mariners who liked to boast that they had sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules far to the west, where the Mare Nostrum of the Romans met the great sea that washed the shores of distant Britannia. The fracture was already reduced and bandaged in much the same way that Joseph had treated Simon the fisherman. What startled Joseph was the way the injured man sat bolt upright in a chair, apparently unconscious of everything about him. “What medicine have you given him to produce such a state?” he asked curiously.

“It is a trance,” the dark-skinned physician explained, “produced by a method known to people in many parts of the world. We have used it in my own country for at least a thousand years, and in Egypt it has been known even longer.”

“Would he not feel a touch upon the eye?” This was the ultimate test of unconsciousness, the front of the eyeball being the last part of the body to become insensitive before death.

Jivaka took a wisp of linen and touched the unconscious man lightly upon the eyeball. There was no response, no blinking.

“Remarkable!” Joseph cried. “How do you achieve such rigidity?”

“Through the same trance,” the other physician explained. “If I desired, I could place him so deeply in a stupor that you would not be able to feel the beat of his pulse or see the movements of his chest. Only with a mirror before his mouth could you detect a film of moisture from his breathing. In India holy men have been buried alive for hours while in such a state,” he added.

Joseph shook his head. “Had I not seen it with my own eyes,” he admitted, “I would not believe such a thing could be accomplished.”

“I can teach you to do it later, if you wish,” Jivaka said courteously. Then he smiled. “There is a saying in my country,
‘The wagoner desires wood, the physician sickness, and the priests libation.’
If you will join me in emulating the priests, we can talk more of this.” He leaned over the sailor and whistled sharply in his ear. Instantly the man was awake, looking about him dazedly.

“I have set your arm,” Bana Jivaka told the seaman, “but see that you carry it carefully until the bandage is dry. And let me examine it tomorrow.”

Over a glass of wine the Indian physician asked, “Are you going to Alexandria?”

“Yes. I promised myself a period of study there years ago. Now I am going to claim it.”

“Good! We can be fellow students. I have another year in Alexandria before returning to Malabar.”

“Malabar?” Joseph frowned. “The fleets of our King Solomon sailed to a port called Ophir centuries ago.”

“Ophir is thought to have been either our city of Suppara or Muziris,” Jivaka explained. “Actually we of India have known the Jews for many years. I believe some of the precious woods used in building your temple at Jerusalem came from the coast of Malabar, and there were Jews among the learned men who accompanied the Greek general Alexander as far east as our inland city of Taxila, where I studied at the university.”

“Are not mariners afraid to sail such distances?”

“Why should they be afraid? Someday men will sail completely around the earth.”

“But the earth is flat!” Joseph protested. “In the ancient writings of our people God plainly said when he created the earth,
‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’”

“Perhaps there is another meaning to the words,” Jivaka suggested. “In Alexandria you will see the very place where a Greek named Eratosthenes not only proved the world to be round several hundred years ago, but measured its circumference as well.”

Startled, Joseph asked, “Could he walk upon the water?”

“The method of Eratosthenes was simpler,” Jivaka explained with a smile. “He learned from a traveler that at the city of Syene on the coast of Africa, the sun shines directly into a deep well at the time of the summer solstice, showing that it is directly overhead. At Alexandria, Eratosthenes next erected a vertical pole and measured the angle of its shadow at exactly noon on the day of the summer solstice, finding it to be the fiftieth part of a circle. Then according to the propositions of Euclid, he deduced that if perpendicular lines through the well at Syene and the pole at Alexandria were extended to the center of the earth they would form the same angle as the shadow of the pole at Alexandria, namely the fiftieth part of a circle. Therefore the distance between Syene and Alexandria is also the fiftieth part of the earth’s circumference. And since we know it is five thousand stadia from Syene to Alexandria, the circumference of the world is therefore fifty times that distance, or two hundred and fifty thousand stadia, roughly twenty-six thousand miles.”