The Kingdom of the Wicked (16 page)

       'I apologize 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 inquiries 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 halfnaked 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 armtwisting 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 openair 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.

TWO

I began this chronicle in an unusually rainy late spring and have laboured at it, with what little result you have already been able to judge, through an unusually hot summer. I have suffered bitterly from the bite of the insect we call in Greek kounoupi and in Aramaic yitusch, so that my right hand, scratching its Greek and Aramaic letters under the lamp, has swollen to a red ball and my bare ankles have bled with the scratching of my left. I have had difficulty in breathing, waking gasping in the dark and begging for some god or demon to fell me with a heavy club, quelling not so much life as the agony of trying to sustain life with lungfuls of invisibility. My stomach has been out of order too, so that wine, the stomach's cheerer, has turned sour on me, sending me off groaning to a particular bubbling fountain in Savosa that, as I should have expected, has dried up this dry summer. I have eaten little except broiled lake fish and honey and black bread bought in the market at Lucanum, and not much of that simple diet has stayed down. Today the ninth month, termed the seventh, starts in a ferocity of heat with no promise of autumnal mellowness, but doubtless soon I shall be complaining of morning and evening chill. Neither heat nor cold pleases us; afflicted with the one, we long for the other. I dream of opening death's gate on to a quiet green field under a mild April sun, there to lie undisturbed for ever with a donkey grazing companionably by.

       It is without doubt unseemly for an author to impose on his readers reports of his bodily condition, since the writer's hand is to be considered a mere abstract engine, along with the complexities of nerve, muscle, blood and digestion that have some part in the driving of that hand. The writer's words alone count, though even they may be begrudged as a barrier (though, in grumbling concession, a necessary one) between the reader and what he is reading about. The writer as a living and suffering being is set, as it were, in parallel to what he writes. We do not inquire into the condition of Virgil's bowels when he wrote this or that line of The Aeneid, nor do we seek to relate the love poems of Catullus to the love pangs of Catullus. Still, the engine can break down, as the hydraulis broke down last year in Rome at the games, to the fury of Domitian. Any author who has undertaken a lengthy enterprise must wonder if he will see the end of it. If he has sense, he will put himself out of the way of danger for the work's sake, refusing to swim lest he be caught by cramps and drown, avoiding tavern brawls and shellfish. But death, somewhat like God, is a great joker and can lurk in a speck of dirt on the table's edge. The unwary author, shut safe in his writing cell, chokes on the stone of the plum he sucks for refreshment or finds that life, suddenly grown bored with the monitoring of the drum of his heart, leaves him as he stands to stretch. He falls for ever, seeing bitterly as his head sinks below the level of the desk an unfinished sentence that will not now be finished.

       This is gloomy stuff, and I apologize for it. I would do better if, instead of expending an hour's writing on the prospect of leaving this chronicle incomplete, I pushed on with the chronicle itself, seeing all time as precious. But, as I observe now, I am reluctant to write of the Emperor Gaius Caligula (whose birthday yesterday was, I should surmise and hope, universally forgotten or, if remembered, remembered with a shudder). I have summoned my own dyspepsia, philosophical gloom, disenchantment with an oppressive summer as a pretext for deferring a necessary account of a wretched reign. Let me then postpone until tomorrow our first visit together to the bloody city on the Tiber, rendered bloodier still by its new master, and swelter with you briefly in a village not far from Jericho, where two decent young men, fired by opposed ideals, by chance or not chance encounter each other.

       Philip the flamehaired Greek Jew Nazarene was ready to start his evangelical mission in Samaria. He arrived weary at the village of Mamir, a league or two from Jericho, shortly before noon, the day a scorching one, glad to find shelter under a widecrowned raintree near a small tavern. He sat, dropped his scrip to the dust and, from the largebreasted serving girl who came from the open kitchen, ordered a small loaf and a mug of wine. She wondered at his golden handsomeness and at his accent, which combined Judaea and the ancestral Greek islands. While he broke his bread and sipped his wine, conducting his own service of unity with his divine master, Caleb the Zealot came from the interior of the tavern, saw Philip, thought he knew him at least by sight, walked boldly up to the sunwarped table and bench and, after a shalom, sat. The two looked at each other with some wariness. Philip at length remembered the name. Caleb's reported work of subversion in Samaria had been driven out by more recent and privier events. Caleb had seen Philip around in Jerusalem but did not know who he was or what he did. Jerusalem was a great city crammed with citizens. 'What news in Jerusalem?'

       'Persecution,' Philip said, 'of the Greekspeaking Nazarenes. I was lucky to get away. I'm taking the gospel to Samaria. By that twisting of your lips I guess you disapprove."

       Who are persecuting — the Romans? No, of course not. The Nazarenes bow down to the Romans. The other cheek. Love your enemies.'

       One particular Roman. Who is also a Jew.'

       'Saul of Tarsus. My old fellow student. He was hot against the Nazarenes. And now he's persecuting them. Well. Do you know a man named Stephen?'

       'I knew a man named Stephen.'

       'A good man. I suppose I owe my life to him. Knew, you say knew.' 'Stephen is dead. He was stoned to death. For being a Greekspeaking Nazarene.'

       'Saul did this?'

       'Yes. You could say that.'

       'And what happened to Stephen's family?'

       'The mother and father are good children of the Temple.' Philip spat out the word with some bitterness. And then: 'Ah yes, ah yes. You ask very obliquely and discreetly and with fear perhaps. You mean your sisters. The soldiers took them to the procurator Pilate. Pilate sent them as a gift to the Emperor. Along with camels and horses and dried dates and figs.'

       'And,' Caleb said, his colour not yet changed, 'my mother?'

       'I heard something from Stephen about the mother of Caleb being dead. And very quietly buried. Your eyes and changed colour tell me you blame yourself for all this.'

       'I should have thought.'

       'If thought always had to precede action there'd be little done in the world. Though most of the things done are hardly worth doing. We heard of your inciting the Samaritans to rise. And of the crushing of the rebellion. The outcome of which you will know, perhaps. Pilate's no longer procurator of Judaea. Vitellius summoned him —’

       'Who's Vitellius?'

       'The legate of Syria. Pilate's been forced into premature retirement. It was a mistake, apparently, to try to sack that temple on Mount Gerizim.' 'You've been learning something about Samaria.'

       'It's as well to know something about the people one proposes to convert.'

       'Your friends or overseers have made a good choice from one point of view,' Caleb said. 'You don't look like a Hebrew.'

       'Whatever a Hebrew looks like.'

       'They detest the Hebrews. They accepted me because of the stripes on my back. They spit at mention of the Temple in Jerusalem. Go carefully.'

       'It's a strange thing,' Philip said. 'And I wonder if our master foresaw it.

       The Nazarene faith is already splitting into two. Stephen was condemned because he diminished the worth of the Temple and the whole hieratic order of the Temple. But Peter and the rest still look like good sons of Abraham and Moses.'

       'You split already,' Caleb nodded. 'You will split more yet. There's no health in you, no unity. There's no grip at the centre. You react to Rome in the wrong way. You're as bad as the Sadducees.'