The Kingdom of the Wicked (29 page)

       'By Jupiter, now!' Chaerea cried. Marcus Julius Tranquillus drew his dagger and struck his Emperor in the ribs. The point seemed to meet resistant bone, but Gaius Caligula staggered and turned. Chaerea struck out and split the imperial jawbone. Sabinus brought two conjoined fists down on the Emperor's head. The Emperor fell, yelling through blood: 'You can't do it! I'm immortal!' Then the entire cohort drew swords and fought each other to get their thrusts in, thirty all told, the thirtieth in the genitals. The imperial litter bearers struck out in loyalty though feebly with their litter poles. The German bodyguard came in running, slashing whoever was in their way. Cornelius Sabinus was slashed to the wristbone. The Germans, howling from the pits of their throats, were fought off. Caesar lay in his blood. Chaerea pulled away the imperial purple robe, sending the corpse rolling. He looked for Claudius. All looked for Claudius. Claudius had taken shelter behind one of the painted drapes (the one of the rape of Lucrece) that lined the passageway. The Praetorians saw the drape that bulged tremulously and, violent impulses not yet abated, yanked it off its rod. It billowed about Claudius, who went kkkk. Chaerea went up to him with the purple.

       The news took less than a month to reach Caesarea. An officer had been sent from Syria to act as a temporary procurator pending the confirmation of Herod Agrippa's elevation to monarch of Judaea. He, Junius Saturninus, stood on the quay with Cornelius and a maniple. They expected one or two messages: the confirmation, the renewal of the order to trundle that statue into the Holy of Holies, under pain of instant execution for — names need not be specified. What was not expected was news of Caligula's assassination. After all, it had been a rule of merely three years and ten months, and the Emperor was only twenty-nine years old, with a lot of villainy still in front of him. An officer courier or frumentarius could be seen as the ship eased in, clearly fretful at the delay in fitting the gangplank. He ran down it and handed a sealed scroll to Junius Saturninus. 'Here, you open it,' the temporary procurator said to Cornelius. Cornelius read trembling and said: 'Thank God. Four men to ride at once to Jerusalem. You, you, you, you.'

       'What news?'

       'No more trouble about that statue.'

       Thirty miles from Caesarea to Jerusalem. At sunset the speared guard dispersed and left the smashing of the effigy to the Zealots. It crashed first into the dust and, when their hammers and cudgels got to work on it, it was found to be not pure gold but rather inferior stone with a beaten gold masking fitted on to it. This gold was melted into an ingot which was eventually turned into Temple money. That was no happy ending to a bad story, since there is no end to anything except doomsday. Zealotry became more watchful, better organized, spending Caesar's money on arms. The failure of the Jerusalem Nazarenes to betray more than a lukewarm concern about the proposed defiling of the Temple did them no good, and the appearance of Cornelius in the city, to bid farewell to Peter before his retirement from the service, signalled the growing separation of the new faith from the old. A dirty Roman, uncircumcised, kneeling for the blessing of one who had been born a good Galilean Jew. Herod Agrippa awaited a new Emperor's confirmation of his kingship and, having narrowly evaded one kind of blasphemy, learned that one of his tasks was to put down another.

THREE

To my shame I observe that it is just one year since I began this unhandy chronicle, and the new May is no better than the old. Rain, cold, rheum, and the grass too wet for scything. Of my bodily ailments I will say nothing, except to blame them for the long intermission of my task, for I had to travel to Mediolanum to consult a Sicilian physician reputed to have skill in healing diseases of the lower bowel, but he could do little for me except prescribe a blander diet than I am accustomed to and to advise that I not fight overmuch a chronic constipation which, he said, at least relieves through inaction the irritability of the nether tissues and — But what have you to do with this? You have your own troubles. Nevertheless, as body and mind are a unity, some deficiencies in my writing, and in the memory that serves it, have to be ascribed to an intestinal sluggishness that afflicts flesh and brain alike. I bring a headache daily to my desk, lowering myself delicately to the cushions of my chair, and the pain thrusts like a knife into my syntax. Also I suffer from failure to recall with the right precision the details of my multiple story, which is founded on what I have heard at one time and another and can hardly at all be checked through reference to documents of proven authenticity. And then I wonder about the utility of what I am doing, since I tell of a dead time and a dead faith and have no inner image of a possible readership. But, with a kind of hopelessness, I proceed.

       I am now into the imperiate of Tiberius Claudius, who came to the purple at the advanced age of fifty and seemed to have little to recommend him except the referred glory of his brother Germanicus, for he was weak of body, shivered even in the heat, limped and stuttered and had cocooned his mind for too long in useless scholarship, as he cocooned his cold body in wool. What amazed the people and the Senate on his accession was the rigour of his sense of justice, which demanded open trial and subsequent execution for the assassins of his predecessor Gaius Caligula. Marcus Julius Tranquillus, who had struck the first blow, was for a time in mortal terror, but it was conceded that what he had done he had done under instruction, was a mere limb obedient to the controlling intelligence of his superiors, and so punishment was not truly in order. But Julius suffered in other ways.

       Many a night he dreamed of the terror stricken face of Gaius as the dagger was raised, of the stuck-pig scream as the point pierced and the blood oozed, and he sometimes awoke his wife with his yelling. He and Sara were living in a small rented house on the Janiculum, from whose tiny garden the whole of the city could be seen. It was on a January morning that he had his twentieth nightmare and was glad to awaken from it to the wintry light and the protective arms of Sara who, despite her unfailing sympathy, was growing a little sick of these dreams.

       'The same?' she asked, and he nodded, scooping sweat from his forehead. 'But you had to do it,' she said.

       'It had to be done. It was the only thing to do. So why should I have bad dreams? Perhaps I was never intended to be a killer.'

       'Meaning a soldier.'

       They lay quite naked, holding each other under the loosely woven wool coverlet. 'To kill barbarians isn't quite the same,' Julius said. 'Not that I've ever killed any. Part of Rome's civilizing mission.' He spoke with irony. She did not understand the Latin phrase he used. Though now a sort of Roman, the Roman tongue was still a foreign dress to her, like the belted long kirtle she wore out of doors and the upcombed hairstyle she disdained: her black hair flowed over the white wool. 'We have to discipline the lesser breeds.' Those words she understood: she had heard them in Jerusalem. She said:

       'To kill is to kill. Life is supposed to be sacred.'

       'All life? The life of a Gaius?'

       'The Nazarenes would say that even Caligula's life was precious to God.' She thought about that and shrugged it away. Julius kissed her brown shoulder. He said:

       'Soon I may have to kill Britons.'

       'What are Britons?'

       'Tribes who live in a northern land, twenty sea miles off Gaul. I saw its chalk cliffs. What Gaius wished to pretend to do Claudius says he will do in all truth. Men with yellow hair and long moustaches. Barbarians. Their speech is all bar bar bar. They have to be brought under Roman rule and made to take baths.'

       'Palestine to the east and these people to the north. Everything under Rome.' She yawned. He had wakened her too early.

       'This is your destiny, 0 Romans — put down the arrogant, spare the meek. Vergil wrote that. And yet the peoples we conquer and rule are sometimes less of children than we are. The Greeks have philosophy and you have a religion. All we have is troops, games, roads and orgies.'

       'I trust you don't voice these ideas in the officers' mess.'

       'I was never cut out to be a soldier perhaps. I just follow the family tradition. But what else can I do?'

       'What time are you on duty?'

       'Noon.'

       'Today is our Sabbath. I'd forgotten. You make me forget too much. Another Roman conquest.'

       'Hardly.'

       For it was she who proffered the first embrace. Jesus Naggar was said to have sanctified the coupling of man and woman not only through the institution of what he termed holy matrimony but in the affirmation of its essential privacy: 'Even God himself,' he once said, 'turns his eyes away from the embraces of lovers.' Have I then the right to look on as these two kiss, stroke and moan beneath the coverlet? Yet I find that the contemplation of their ecstasy is, in a manner, therapeutic: it draws the blood away from my suffering zones and feeds glands too long sunk in hebetude. At it, then. Mingle your salivas, happy pair, feel the excitation of the membranes of your lips provoke, as in the sympathy of the unstruck lyre string for the string struck, the tingling of other membranes and soon a demented act of obedience to the goddess which culminates in a vocable of prayer in a universal language. This is religious enough: the fire of a sort of beneficent hell transformed into a heaven from which God is absent, and then the coolness of a limbo whose name is gratitude. Venus exists, whatever the rabbis say. This was as good a celebration of the Sabbath as any.

       Those who took the Sabbath more seriously, that is to say devoted it to God, were at their synagogues, which were mostly decent edifices built in the Roman style out of the wealth of Jewish merchants and the pennies of the Jewish poor. In more than one synagogue that day there was trouble. The Nazarenes were at it, preaching the gospel of God's fleshly son and his doctrine of universal love. In the synagogue that stood not far from the Theatre of Marcellus there was a particularly eloquent votary of the Christ, probably that Matthew who had been a tax gatherer. There were the usual cries of blasphemy, stone him, this is an abomination before the Lord, but one distinguished and moderate Jew named Eliab bar Henon stood, prayed silence in a loud voice, and said:

       'Brothers, what you call blasphemies and abominations are no new thing to us whom exile has driven to Rome. For we are surrounded by worse blasphemies and abominations than have been spoken. These are still, I would suggest, a matter for debate and cogitation, whereas the horrors of Roman paganism are the furniture of our daily lives. We tolerate them and, tolerating them, we ourselves are tolerated. But there have been instances lately of unseemly brawls and stonings outside our sacred edifices, of harm offered to what to many of the orthodox seem to be the diabolic agents of a heterodoxy so harmful that the very archangels must stuff wing-feathers in their ears so as not to hear. Now how must all this seem to the pagan Romans? It must seem that the Jews are become an unruly lot who have outlived their welcome. And how will the Romans respond to what they will term Jewish disorder? They will, at best, exact heavier taxes, at worst proscribe our faith as inimical to Roman order. Therefore I beg you to listen to these heretical doctrines, as you will name them, in calm of spirit and the desire to offer no more than intellectual or theological opposition. Let these men say their say, and let them be answered in a cool spirit of debate. Then let them depart in peace. I speak thus not to the end of saving their skins but rather to the end of saving ours. I have done.' Then he sat down again.

       His reasonable words had little effect among the hotter and less tolerant of the assembled brethren. These resumed their vilifications and some of them went outside to gather stones. But Eliab bar Henon spoke sense and better truth than he knew. One thing he could not know was that a respectable pagan senator named Licinus Novatus, taking the air not far from the Ara Pacis on the Campus Martius, was shortly to be mobbed by a gang of young Jewish reprobates, who swore he was the heretic teacher Azaniah bar Jeshua. If there was a likeness it could only be most superficial, for Licinus Novatus was beardless and short-haired and wore no Jewish garment. But a number of Nazarenes had put off the habiliments of the Jewish people, and some of these renegade Jews were Greeks, who had been indifferent to matters of external distinction. The mob of bearded youth had been driven off and trounced, but Licinus Novatus, who had not been seriously hurt and despised the vindictiveness of the law, a Stoic too and a friend of Seneca, had not wished to take the matter further. But when, outside a synagogue at the foot of the Janiculum, there was an antinazarene riot that resulted in the accidental breaking of the head of a Roman child out walking with his nurse, this question of the unruliness of the Jews became a matter for senatorial debate.

       The Emperor Claudius had his enemies in the Senate. One of them, a certain C. Silvius Rusticus, delivered a long speech against him in his presence, before a packed house, but his chief theme was more radical than the one of the obstreperousness of the Jewish community. He said:

       'It is well known that the imperial designate has bribed the army into the sustention of his irregularly conferred status. The Senate has still to confirm it, and I doubt if the Senate will. Our recent experience with emperors leads many of us — and I would say a majority — to a wholly reasonable desire for the restoration of the republic. As a republic Rome flourished and will flourish again. As an imperial monarchy it has been disgraced, bathed in the blood of the innocent, and its slaughterous stink will not easily be expunged.'

       There was loud applause, as also a noise of objection. The Emperor rose and was greeted with some boos, but the thrust-out jaws and bristling spears of his military escort silenced the more timid. Claudius said: