The Kingdom of the Wicked (23 page)

       'Nor I. And I mean that in a wider sense. The madness grows worse.’

       ‘You could go.'

       'Go? Family tradition. Service to the Emperor. My father and my grandfather too. Their emperors were different. There were free men in those days.'

       'How will it end?'

       'It will end with someone sticking a dagger into the divine Gaius. As he stuck a dagger into Opsius this morning. No, don't ask me about that. It happens all the time.'

       'Why are things as they are?'

       'You need to ask why — when you saw what happened to your sister? Power divorced from reason. I call that madness. When I strike there will be reason in the point of my dagger -

       'You?'

       'Someone like me. It will be the army, certainly. He thinks the arm, loves him. Pathetic. The army may well be the striking arm of the people.'

       'I don't understand these things. Rome isn't real.'

       'The torture and death are real enough. So is the bankruptcy. Mil lions spent on temples and shrines to the divine Caligula. The people taxed to the limit. You've been sold into Roman madness. And we were always taught you Jews were the mad ones. You had to learn the virtues of Roman stability.'

       'Oh, there's madness enough in Judaea. Agh — look who's coming.

       She referred to a middleaged woman once one of a family brough in chains from the Rhineland, gross, with greying strawy hair in plaits in the blue gown of a slave overseer of slaves. This woman growled ii bad Latin: 'You — whatever your name is — didn't you hear me call?'

       'If you don't know my name, madam, how could I know you called?'

       'There are a hundred fowls to pluck. Come on, get to it. Yoi Jewesses are an idle lot.'

       'You, whoever you are,' Marcus Julius said, 'are interrupting private conversation.'

       'Slaves don't have private conversations — whoever you are.'

       'I am Marcus Julius Tranquillus, senior centurion of the Praetoriai Guard. Learn your place, woman.'

       'Don't,' Sara murmured in distress. 'I'll go.'

       'And,' Marcus Julius said, 'mind your behaviour to this lady here Yes, lady. Slave means nothing. Queens have been slaves before now 'It will do no good,' Sara said, going.

       'Things will change. Things will have to change,' he said. 'I'll try to see you tomorrow.'

       Tomorrow had a different meaning for Caleb, the brother of Sari who was in training as a wrestler at the foot of the Palatine hill, in on of the gymnasia which fed the imperial games. 'Metellus,' he had saic mentioning also the name of that patrician sponsor whom he ha impressed on the voyage hither. Strip off, he had been told by the games editor. Stripped off, he had been grinned at, though not unkindly, by all there present. Nullum praeputium. If you're MeteIlus I'm the ghost of Julius Caesar. Let's see what you can do, lad. Aye naked, balls all adangle. Testibus ponderosis, to quote Cicero. An Caleb had faced up to a lithe wiry oneeyed half-Greek half-Aral whose body was already sleek with olive oil. Caleb knew that trick an Arab one. He grabbed a towel and bade the man wipe himse unslippery and grippable. No, who was he, the Jew, to give orders?

       Metellus took him in his slipperiness by the long strangely ungreasy hair and flung him to the sand of the wrestling pit, rolling him over and over with his foot like fish for the frying in flour. Then, when the sandy Greek Arab rose protesting, Caleb showed some of his Palestinian holds. You'll do, lad. In time, that is. Style, grace are needed. You can't feed Roman audiences just anything. Come now, let the German giant knock you into shape. Or out of it. We all have to learn. This German giant was a Goliath with a wart in his brow like an embedded stone from a sling. He was strong but slow. His body was sown with sandy flue like a lawn, except for his wide chest, which was thick with hairs like three housebrooms. He tossed Caleb about like a mealsack and threw him down to grovel at his great flat German feet. Caleb sank his teeth in the left little toe and would have bitten it off had the giant not dealt him a nape chop, howling. The chop hurt Caleb sorely and lighted a rage which he knew must be subdued: rage was liquid, calm a stone. With the twin stones of his clenched fists Caleb leaped to smash the German's nose, whose thyrls sprouted hairferns like twin cornucopiae. The German went mad and flailed, shaking blood from his upper lip. Caleb leaped to gouge out his pale German eyes. Caleb was smashed in the jaw and felt bone seem, with surprise, to change its place. He took two seconds off, dancing away from the wind of new blows, to resmash his jaw back into position. He dove for the great mossy treetrunk of a right leg and held it in an embrace he refused to allow thwacks and fistthumps to dislodge. He would have him over, by the Lord God of Hosts he would. And did. He danced on the huge bare belly. Enough, lad, you've shown what you can do. Make reverence to your opponent. Move into barracks tomorrow.

       Tomorrow in the other sense meant the day of reckoning, but with whom or what was not yet clear. Fire the palace. Arm the Jews. Hold the Emperor in an excruciating armlock and cry: Let my sisters go. One thing at a time. Tomorrow would come, though not tomorrow.

'Tomorrow?' Paul said. 'But he may be dead tomorrow. I say tonight, I say now.'

       'I don't speak as a Nazarene,' Seth said, 'because I'm not a Nazarene, at least not yet. But I take it you still regard me as a friend.'

       'Friend and brother. And you're concerned for my life. Well, I'm also concerned for it — I've much to do and I start late. But the cause isn't helped by cowardice.'

       'The streets,' Ananias said, 'are always dangerous at night. It's madness to go out.'

       'Who,' Paul asked, 'is the danger from? The Jews or the Arabs?’

       ‘As far as you're concerned,' an old man sitting by the fire said, 'both.' Paul nodded: that seemed reasonable. He had been out of the city into Nabataean territory. He had even made a pilgrimage to Mount Horeb, thinking things out, but the God of Moses and Elijah had proffered no special signal, unless signally evil weather meant such: lightning had flashed about the summit like bad temper. The Nabataean Arabs he had preached at outside the town limits had understood his Aramaic but had responded rather viciously to his message about the Son of God. They wanted to be left alone with their bleating kids and cooking pots. They did not like baldheaded strangers dropping by and disturbing the decent monotonous day with new ideas. The ethnarch of the city, responsible to King Aretas, a most conservative man, was undoubtedly willing to side with the Damascene Jews when they shrieked against the turncoat blasphemer. The doctrine of love was highly subversive. Paul looked into the fire that Ananias's mother had lighted: it was a chill evening. In the fire, which spat like Nabataean Arabs and their camels, he saw no good auguries. He said:

       'A fellow Nazarene lies dying because he was beaten by these thugs of the man Rechab. He needs my comfort. Am Ito skulk here because of a few bravos with breadknives? Besides, I have a bodyguard. Have I not?' He smiled but got no answer from Seth, Ananias, and the burly but not notably brave twins Adbeel and Mibsam (if those were really their names). These last two were always biting their lips. Paul rose from the fire and said: 'I'm going.'

       The house of the dying Nazarene lay not far from the city wall. The lane which skirted this wall was a narrow curve; labyrinthine alleys made twisted radii to it. The moon was near the full but had to fight with sluggish rainclouds. Paul strode, and his friends had to trot to reach him. They were in no position to guard him against daggers, being votaries of love and hence unarmed. But Seth, mercifully as yet unconverted, still had his knife. When three cutthroats sprang out of the shadows with foul cries that were oblique expressions of holiness, it was Seth who struck out. Paul saw Ananias, he was sure it was Ananias, go down gurgling. In the throat, true to their name. Paul stumbled against some stone steps to his right. At the top of them someone was swinging a lantern. By its light he saw Seth held struggling by two while the third swung his dagger back for a stroke in the belly. Then the lantern swung away. The one holding it called down: 'Paul! Paul! Here! Quick!' Paul mounted stumbling and found the steps led to an open door. A house whose walls were part of the wall of the city. 'In! Quick!' He heard a gasp below, which he assumed was Seth dying, and the feet of men running away, the lipbiting twins no doubt.

       Paul panted and looked about him in the shadowy house. Its master, whom his swinging lantern dramatized into red and gold facets with inky shadows, seemed to be a robust man in middle age. With his free hand he shot three screaming iron bolts. This house had been perhaps a sentinel's post in the days before Rome had pacified the region. Paul heard dagger hefts and ringed fists hammering at the tough wood of the bolted door. We want him, Saul the renegade, cut his throat, give him to God's good justice though summary. The householder yelled: 'Rebecca! Leah!' Two old women came from a dark hole of a room with one little lamp between them. The man came up to Paul and breathed on him the comfort of home and safety — goat's cheese and onions for supper. 'I'll have to open up to them. Come quick with me.' Leah and Rebecca went up to the door, nodded to each other, then began a loud gabbled curse on evil men who disturbed good women in their naked beds. Paul was led to an opening with shutters drawn back, beyond it the gloomy night, beneath it, the lantern showed, a precipice of stone wall, that of the city, with no toeholds. He shook his head. 'Wait,' the man said. He brought, yelling 'Wait wait' to the hammerers, a network bag of the kind called by the Greeks a sagrane, used for hoisting bales of hay. There was a rope already affixed to it. The two old women cursed heartily but with headshakes towards each other: this cursing was proving of little avail against godly persecutors. Paul got into the bag. 'Now,' the man said, 'easy does it.' And tugging on the rope while at the same time easing it free with the rhythmic giving of his hands, he watched Paul descend. Paul saw him high above, plying his tug and slack, and he waved when he felt earth bump benignly. The man could not see but he could feel the emptying of the bag. Paul got into the shadow of a buttress, listening. Where is he? Not here, your worships. Where do you have him hid? Very elusive these Nazarenes, slippery customers you might say. Grumbling and the slamming of a door, shouts and more grumbling and then silence on that peripheral lane. There was a whistled tune from above in the shape of a question. Paul whistled back the shape of an answer. Then he was left to the night and his tears of rage.

       In the Hebrew manner these tears had to be deferred, along with the shouts to high heaven, until he had walked some way from the city. He rested, shivering also from the night wind, in the lee of some haystooks in a field. Cows lowed from their byre and an ass gave him a brief lesson in braying. He brayed an anger that no Nazarene could have taught him. What was the difference between the stoning of Stephen and the cutting into the flesh of Seth and Ananias? He had been responsible for both. He was the same man as always, a death-bringer, and the bringing of death had hardly begun. Better not to have been born, so clucked some far off fowls. Words of his own, spoken in bitterness during his studies under Gamaliel of the holy word. No man had ever been able to do right by that dyspeptic and capricious God. The smell of burned flesh pleased him, as well as the snipping of infant foreskins. He gave wholly irrelevant answers to the just plaints of suffering Job. How far had he changed under the humanizing influence of his blessed son? I have chosen you, Saulpaul, for your deathbringing rigour. Owls hooted, hunting for mice. The night world breathed the terror of pursuit. There was no unity, there was only a bitter division, and the division was the work of a creator who, secure in his own unity, was amused by the spectacle of pain, doubt, the law of eating and being eaten. The clouds had scudded off above the southwest road to Tyrus, leaving the moon full and veined like a bloodshot eye. The moon gave the flat fields and the hills beyond a mock blessing of silver.

       Love. He would have given much to be in a woman's bed, she faceless as Eve and with Eve's body to comfort him, our first mother, our first mistress, her mind removed, impenetrable as God's, in the dreams of betrayal, her brain a maze of caprice. But the love of a woman's body was but God's cunning device to breed more creatures for suffering. He wished, of course, to be back in bed with his mother, comforted to sleep out of the bad dreams that had brought her to his cot, a mother's sleep ever quick to be disturbed by the cry, even the almost soundless whimper, of her child caught in the snares of nightmare, God's gift to the innocent. But he knew now he was totally alone with the burden of a very different and perhaps useless love. No woman's body would ever comfort him. That vision of acceptance had been the work of his nerves and muscles, announcing that the incubus of the falling sickness was at an end. Pain was henceforth to arrive from without. He was strong and girt and ready for teaching that all men have the falling sickness, a gift from Eve. He had a strange presentiment that it was against Eve that he must do battle. Eve stood silvered on that near hillock, her body sprouting breasts like monstrous warts. He dried his tears on the sleeve of his robe. Then, trying to fill his brain with love for the loveless world, he began to walk, staffless and scripless, the long road to Jerusalem.

In Caesarea early the previous day the first thing to be unladed from the merchant ship from Puteoli was a huge crate. Marcellus the procurator and the senior centurion Cornelius knew what it contained. They stood on the wharf and watched it dragged from the hold and set, with wholesome cursing from the stipatores or stevedores, beneath the hook of the crane which would lift it, swinging from its copper binding, to the shore. Marcellus said:

       'What do I do, Cornelius?'