The Kingdom of the Wicked (35 page)

       'Well, then,' Peter said through his winewet beard, 'somebody must have bribed somebody or killed somebody. Not that I saw any corpses around.'

       'Friends of the faith have no money,' John Mark said, 'and they don't kill. It's divine intervention or some such thing.'

       'I'll believe that when I see it.'

       'How do you know you haven't seen it?'

       'It's a damned mystery, that's all I can say.'

       'Not damned, surely?'

       John Mark's mother was a cunning woman reputed to be a devout daughter of the strict faith; she was known for her loud denunciations of the Nazarene heresy and her rich choice of epithets in the regard of its adherents. She would call them desert dogs, whelps of dugless bitches, walking chunks of maggoty cheese, corrosive pilgarlicks, costive beggars, ambulant diseases and the like. Some of her terms of opprobrium were, even by members of the Sanhedrin, considered to go too far, particularly those which attributed sexual perversion to the Nazarenes, such as stuffers of their lousy heads up their mothers' cunts, defilers of the arses of the unblemished sons and daughters of Jerusalem and so on. Still, nobody could ever be sure of being wholly safe from the investigations of the religious police: her excesses of objurgation might one of these days be seen through. She said now: 'I hope to God you wiped the name off the door.'

       'Do you take me altogether for a fool?'

       'Well, then,' she said. 'Even so, we have to be careful. You'll have to stay in the cellar here for a while. It's cold but it's safe. We've plenty of blankets. James is down there.'

       'Little James?'

       'There's no other, is there, since your old fishing friend was done in by his majesty. God knows how long it will have to be, but we'll get you away in time. James is stubborn, though. He says his place is here and here he stays.'

       'James doesn't know yet?'

       'About you getting out? How can he know? Unless, of course, that stupid Rhoda is down there now trying to shake him awake to tell him. A heavy sleeper is James the Little. That girl's stupid and she blabs. She'll have to go.'

       'If she blabs, mother, that's all the more reason why she ought to stay. Anyway, she's one of us.'

       'So she says. But she doesn't know her backside from her little finger, forgive my language. You can never tell with young girls these days. Their heads are stuffed with a load of nonsense, love stories and young men and popular songs. She doesn't know what she is.'

       Peter, according to a falsified record later unfalsified, was duly beheaded the following morning. It was not, of course, the real Peter who laid his head on the block but a substitute Peter, a greybearded criminal long incarcerated on a purely secular charge (killing his son-in-law in a drunken quarrel about the ownership of a small silver cow made by one of the fine workmen of Ephesus, itself stolen by one or the other from someone or other) and now given a delayed quietus drunk and heavily blindfolded. The king was, it was already known, incapable of attending the execution, groaning in his bed as he was, and it was not thought necessary to have a speech delivered on the Nazarene horror and the justice of the dispatch of its leading exponent, since all this had been exhaustively and exhaustingly taken care of at Peter's trial. Head and body were speedily buried and all concerned — guards, captain of guards, prison governor and his assistants — breathed huge relief. If news of Peter's baffling release were ever to get outside the prison and, through the channels of the department of internal security, to the ears of Herod Agrippa, then the Codex Criminal is would be invoked, this being one of the king's Romish importations, and the entire prison staff would suffer beheading. There were a few quiet lashings, with tongue and thong, within the prison precincts, and then everybody agreed to forget the matter, though attempts to explicate the inexplicable went on for some time in the guards' wet canteen.

       King Herod Agrippa, feeling a little better, forced himself out of bed to travel to Caesarea, there to preside in his new silver robes over the festival held every five years on the anniversary of the founding of that city, in honour of the living Caesar whose title shone from the city's name. A few Roman officials came down from Syria and one or two senators on a travelling commission attended the games which bloodily attested the spread of Roman culture. There would not have been such games in Jerusalem, but Caesarea was a Roman city, meaning that it was full of Greeks, and considered to be the true capital of the province. As well as Romans there were Phoenicians present, a couple of fearful emissaries of princely rank from Tyre and Sidon, towns on the Phoenician seaboard which, though prosperous enough ports, were slow in paying for recent grain imports from Galilee. The amount of grain sent was much smaller than was usual, and there were Galilean grumbles about grain being sent at all, since this was a time of severe shortage and the feeding of Palestine came first. But Tyre and Sidon had depended on these imports ever since the time of Hiram and Solomon, and the royal treasury in Judaea received a sizable commission from both the Galilean factors and the Phoenician agents. The emissaries from Tyre and Sidon desired an opportunity to explain to Herod Agrippa why payment had not yet been rendered and why it could not be rendered for some time (a long story which could not be expected to interest the king, something about pecula tions, the failure of a docking project, a mining investment that had gone wrong) and they had a word with the king's chamberlain Blastus the evening before the ceremony in which Caesar and Caesar's city were to be honoured and the king to declare the opening of the games.

       'He's sick,' Blastus said, 'and in a perpetual foul temper. Soft words and promises aren't going to do any good. He's not been too happy about you people for a long time.' He spoke slow Aramaic which, cognate with the tongue of Phoenicia, the emissaries understood well enough.

       'We've brought presents.'

       'Good presents?'

       'The best. Fine Phoenician workmanship. Gold and silver bangles and breastplates and the rest of the nonsense.'

       'The rest of the —?'

       'Well, he'll still demand heavy interest on the unpaid bill, and we like to deal with businessmen not monarchs weighed down with jewels and the rest of the nonsense. Flattery's not in our line.'

       'You'll have to flatter him just the same. It's meat and drink to him these days, practically his only meat and drink.'

       'How much interest do you think he's going to charge?'

       'He'll go to the limit. If I were you people I'd start thinking about getting grain from Egypt. They understand business there better than he does. He's lived too long in Rome.'

       It was while Herod Agrippa was writhing in bed with an intolerable resumption of his pains that his daughter Bernice lightheartedly gave him bad news. 'That man's still alive,' she said.

       'Which man, child?'

       'The man that was supposed to have his rosch cut off.' She had the habit of mixing her nurse's Aramaic into her Greek. 'The one who used to catch dagim and then preached, the one with the white sakan,' stroking her pretty smooth chin.

       'Speak plainly, child.' Her father was up on his elbow, looking at her fiercely.

       'Well, they were all talking about it in the schuk, so old Miriam said, they knew the old yeled whose rosch was really cut off, some of them saw it after it was done, the rosch I mean, and said that's old whatsisname. And the other one, he got away, and he's alive in somebody's cellar, there was a naarah who saw him, she thought it was his ghost at first but it wasn't. There's been a bit of trickery, old Miriam said, and it's a king's job not to be tricked, she said. That's what I heard in the kitchen,' Bernice said.

       The king furiously rang the bell by his bed and at length Blastus came in. Blastus looked at the king without deference: it was plain to him that Herod Agrippa I was not long for this world; Blastus was only thirty and he had a non-monarchical future to think about. The king let his daughter tell the story again. 'Have you heard the like from anyone?' Herod Agrippa asked, fierce and wincing. Blastus had to admit that he had. 'Get back to Jerusalem,' the king ordered; 'get the police on to this. I want that man's head on the block and everybody else's head who covered up the truth from their king. I want blood, and by God I'm going to have it.'

       'After the ceremony? The opening of the games, that is?'

       'Now. Take horse now.'

       When Herod Agrippa appeared amid clamouring Caesareans and distinguished visitors and the clangour of sounding brass and thumped drums he looked not only in robust health but unutterably majestic, for he wore his glittering gown of silver that the early sun caught, he shone like a planet. His face had been farded and he had been fed an energizing drug and, when he spoke, it was with the deliberate articulation of one who is slightly drunk. He met his Roman visitors in the gaudy anteroom to the royal box of the circus, saying: 'We welcome the honourable senators Auspicius and Cinnus to our royal port of Caesarea. We trust that they will find their entertainment satisfactory. We have arranged — what have we arranged, Blastus?' But Blastus was on his way to Jerusalem. The under chamberlain said:

       'Wild beasts, majesty. Gladiators.' One of the two emissaries from Phoenicia got in quickly then with an open box of bright jewels and the cynical language of courtiership, saying:

       'Majesty — I say majesty inadvertently — deity, I would say. Your holy personage glows like a god. Your people need no god but Herod Agrippa. And here, holy one, are gifts unfit for a god but all that humble and erring humanity could contrive for the decking of one who already outshines the sun, the moon and a myriad constellations.' Herod Agrippa greedily dipped his heavily ringed right hand into the casket and raised a particularly finely wrought wristband to the light. Then he saw something fluttering in from the open casement. A bird. It settled on one of the ropes on which fresh flowers of the season had been festooned in the king's honour. A little white owl. It looked at him without deference. Then Herod Agrippa remembered something. Many years ago, when he had incurred the displeasure of the Emperor Tiberius, he had been put briefly into chains and made to share an openair prison with criminals of the common sort. He had been leaning against the bole of a tree, and in the branches of that tree were twittering birds. But one did not twitter; it hooted. A white owl, more mature than this. He had been frightened at first, believing owls to be birds of ill omen. But a prisoner from the Rhineland had laughed and gutturally said that this bird meant Herod Agrippa would be released soon, which he was. But the German had also, without laughing, said that next time Herod Agrippa saw a white owl it would mean that he had only five days more to live. 'Take that bird away,' he now shouted, then collapsed.

       He howled in agony and was borne swiftly away on a litter to the palace. Should not, muttered some of the bearded councillors, have accepted the Phoenician blasphemy as his due. He elevates himself to the divine, and the divine responds by striking him down. But Luke, had he been present and not awaiting the return of Paul to Antioch, there to baptize him into the faith, would have delivered a less fanciful diagnosis: the rupturing of a hydatid cyst, the writhing of tapeworms in the final royal stool confirming it.

       The death of Herod Agrippa I was nowhere regretted. Even his funeral lacked the extravagant gestures of mourning which the eastern territories are so cynically adept at furnishing. He was shoved into the tomb of his royal ancestors with minimal ceremony. He had blasphemed, though passively, and he had, after five days of condign suffering, given up the ghost with a cry that had sounded like a curse. The party of the Zealots, after a dissatisfied intermission of their plans for liberation from a foreign yoke, were now able to resume their secret meetings and their amassing of arms in secret places: things had reverted to the only situation most of them had known before the three-year reign (in Judaea that is; he had had rule of the neighbouring territories for seven) of one who, despite the gestures of autonomy, had been no more than a Roman puppet. Now they awaited the appointment of a procurator and some years of renewed but impotent disaffection, the only state in which they were really happy.

       The law promulgated at last by Claudius and the Senate by which no Jews, except those who had been able to purchase full Roman citizenship from the Empress Messalina, were permitted to remain in Rome brought shiploads of refugees to Caesarea, refuge being glossable as repatriation, but few of these Jews had ever seen Palestine or even wanted to see it. There were a great number of Nazarenes among them, and the Jerusalem church gloried in expansion. The high priests of the Jewish faith, sickened by Herod Agrippa's vindictiveness, which had no roots in genuine piety, guilty also at the execution of James, in which they had acquiesced uneasily, left the Nazarenes alone. Some converted Pharisees, speedily apostasizing under the brief monarchy, now dusted off the intermitted faith they brought out of the cupboard, and they were loud in their demands that its essential Jewishness be proclaimed and regularized.

       Peter, no longer in hiding, presided over a great meeting of Nazarenes in the open air on the Mount of Olives. He had carefully prepared his inaugural speech with the help of John Mark, and he spoke as follows:

       'Members of the faith, friends of the faithful, we are assembled in a time when little would seem to hinder the growth of this church in Jerusalem and the daughter churches of Asia. The rule of Judaea is, as you know, reverting to Rome after the unregretted death of its king. We expect a procurator appointed by the Emperor Claudius, and we anticipate a measure of Roman justice and a measure of Roman indifference. My brother and colleague James — whose name none of us can utter without sad but triumphant memories of his martyred namesake — has been granted the authority of head of the Jerusalem church. We may call him the overseer or episcopos or bishop of Jerusalem. My work lies elsewhere, as does that of so many of my colleagues — such as Paul and Barnabas, who are busily bringing the word to the Gentiles. We are met here to consider a particular problem — that of the relationship between these same Gentiles and those followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who, brought up in the Jewish faith, consider themselves still, despite so many radical changes, to profess that faith. The word is with Matthias.'