The Kingdom of the Wicked (11 page)

       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 dorrnienda.

       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 110X 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 nightlight, 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 grandnephew?'

       '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 stylized 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 midmorning 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 — 7'

       '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.