The Kingdom of the Wicked (54 page)

       At dawn Paul brought out not only the remains of the hard unleavened bread but a basket of hard tack he had discovered nestling behind the last of the amphorae.

       'You're going to need your strength. Eat. Drink.' In the sick light, the rocky shore ahead of them, the wind anxious for its morning work of pushing the ship to its last disaster, he broke his own bread and said: 'Thanks, God, for this gift. Lord, we are children in your hands. We trust, we love, we hope. Amen.'

       'Amen,' Julius repeated.

       Now they saw the shore more clearly. It was the western side of the bay that was rocky, and to this they had been driven. To the east was a creek with a sandy beach. Philos called his orders: 'Slip your anchors. Jettison what's left of the cargo. Foresail up to the wind. Unlash the steering paddles. I'm going to run her aground.'

       Julius's under officer said: 'The prisoners, sir. They'll get away. We'll have to kill them.'

       'Kill?'

       'The prisoners, sir. Starting with this one here.' And he nodded at Paul without menace.

       'What sort of a man are you?'

       'It's the regular thing, sir.'

       'Get out of my sight.'

       The man was puzzled. 'Sir?'

       'No, wait. Pass on this order. Prisoners and troops alike. Let those who can swim get overboard now. The rest — Ah. It's happening.'

       They struck. The foreship hit not rock but a bottom of thick mud which grasped it fast. The stern was left to the pounding of the green dragons with the wind riding their scaly backs, salivating rabid foam in the rancour of the kill. Paul leaped, Julius, Luke, stout as Julius Caesar with his chronicles encased in a leather roll lashed to his waist with part of a ship's line. Others screamed soundlessly, grabbing at splintering beams. Rani nantes. Vergil's phrase. Strange, Julius thought swimming, how the brain can remain aloof and pick at the past, the boring schoolroom, coolly testing old useless knowledge in the light or dark of crisis. The rare swimmers fought for the shore. Those who could not swim and thought they were drowning were borne with rough care loving and vicious to the beach, offered couches from which, panting, they could watch the spine and entrails of their ship torn by the sea's teeth and go into the green maw, while the foreship burrowed deeper and deeper into deep clay. All were saved.

Pauline time, Neronian time — they will not come together, not yet. No matter. That company of stricken voyagers may not even have seen the marine disintegration of marble below or about or above them at the time when Nero was addressing the Senate about enduring monuments of marble. 'What I seek I seek for Rome only. The city as it is affronts my artistic soul. I would leave behind me — you know what. The expenditure can be furnished from many sources. The people are ready for an increase in taxation after so long a period of fiscal clemency. There is gold lying unused in the city temples. That fine device of the late Empress Messalina, of offering Roman citizenship for sale, could be revived with even larger profit — to the state, I say, to Rome, to Rome, I must make that clear. Moreover, there are communities within our cities that reject Rome, its virtues, its gods. I refer to the Jews and the sect that follows Chrestus or Christus. It would be a gesture of Roman clemency to permit these groups to continue with their barbarous rituals and insolent beliefs — but, of course, to make them pay for such permission with heavy imposts. There are various ways in which the financing of the building of a new city worthy of its citizens could be effected. I put them to you as a matter of imperial courtesy — reminding you that power rests where it is meet that it should rest but that, as a good son of Rome, I acknowledge senatorial wisdom and experience without necessarily having to abide by senatorial advice.'

       Gaius Calpurnius Piso stood, a young steely man breasting the muffled response to imperial insolence without fear. The Emperor's artistic ambitions are well known to this assembly. To rebuild Rome in his own image is an ultimate ambition some of us have long expected. But I would remind the Emperor that there are greater urgencies which cry for his attention. I refer particularly to the situation in Gaul and Spain, where the loyalty of our armies is now being openly attached to their provincial commanders and being removed from Rome. The situation in Britain is appalling, with seventy thousand of our Roman citizens slaughtered by the barbarians and no punitive act yet undertaken —’

       Nero was outraged. 'No! No! It is not for this august body to act as the Emperor's conscience. The Roman provinces are mere discardable extensions of Rome which may drop off, for all we care, like lizards' tails. Rome first, Rome last —’

       An ancient senator, C. Lepidus Calvus, stood to say: 'Rome is the provinces. Rome is her Empire. Rome is the imperial world peace and the great flower of order. Rome is not sickly songs and obscene dances and degrading spectacles and a city rebuilt according to the emetic tastes of a mediocre would-be artist. I speak out, Caesar, without fear of the consequences. An old man whose physicians have granted him short time to live has little to fear. But for once the Emperor shall listen to the truth and not the sycophancies of toadies and catamites.'

       'I will accept many affronts,' Nero said indulgently. 'But I will not tolerate an attack on the divine spirit of beauty which in my short life I have ever endeavoured to honour. You will see your new Rome whether you will or not. Greybeards, tottering imbecilities, impotent hypocrites — who needs you? I speak for Rome. You speak for outworn notions of civic and imperial virtue grey and tattered like old sackcloth. I speak for the new age. Gentlemen — you're dead — all of you.' He swept out in his frilled purple between his two lines of guards, Tigellinus after him. Part of his retinue stayed behind to perform the dumbshow drama of frowning menacingly at the assembly.

'Refuge,' Paul said. 'Nothing to do with honey.' He was referring to the name of the island that had given them shelter — Phoenician or Canaanite with a Hebrew cognate. They watched from the deck of an Alexandrian ship called Dioscuri or The Heavenly Twins as it nosed out of the harbour. Golden rock in the sunlight, golden buildings. Publius, the Roman governor, stood with his old father and waved vale from the quay. Luke and Paul together had cured that old man of a fever. All the Roman help imaginable in the brisk conversion of a good part of the island. And Julius himself converted in an inland pool of salt water, Paul explaining: 'A symbol of cleansing, no more. But symbols are important. The human spirit lives in the world of water and fire and bread and wine. We must not be cut off from the world. The world of things. But things are sanctified by faith. The water of the sea is sanctified by your baptism.' He waved at a waving group of Maltese or Phoenician converts, squat brown people, quick with their gifts of fire and hobz and ilma.

       In calm weather they reached Syracuse after a day's sailing. The southerly wind which had carried them now fell. They tacked in a northwester towards Rhegium, Italy's toe. Julius said:

       'I had a strange thought last night. Here stands a soldier who never expected to be converted to the faith. What could happen to one pagan Roman could happen to many. And Rome, without knowing it, makes things easy with her roads and her sealanes between province and province. We never know the true purpose of what we do. An empire maintained without swords. I suppose it's a preposterous idea.'

       Paul said: 'We're all instruments. My great desire was to go to Rome — voluntarily, a free instrument of the faith. Yet I come to Rome in chains.' He did not mean that literally, though he knew that real chains were waiting for him, a kind of decorative symbol of an appellant's bondage to the law.

       'They mean nothing. You're still a free voice. A prisoner who converted his jailor. Could anything be more improbable?'

       'What will happen in Rome? How will my case be judged? How long must I wait? What will be the outcome?'

       'If you want my opinion, the case will go by default for absence of accusers. You'll be a sort of prisoner still. But then the courts will wash their hands of you.'

       'Yes. That happened before. Very ominous, this talk of judges washing their hands.' Julius did not understand. A south wind rose after one day in Rhegium and bore them towards Puteoli, the main port of the south, well sheltered in the bay of Neapolis. Their ship was one of the Alexandrian grain fleet. It had precedence in the crowd of mercantile vessels that crammed the roads. They had to strike their topsails or suppara, the wheat ships not. It was a sign watched for from the quays. The Heavenly Twins eased into its moorings. 'Italy,' Paul said, unnecessarily. Luke too looked at Italy, less impressed: he was a provincial Greek but still a Greek. The quay was busy, and the work of the loaders and unloaders, the port officials with their manifests, seemed somehow obstructed by the great statue of the Emperor as the seagod, pointing his trident out at the bay. But the plinth of the high bronze edifice was home to the beggars and the women who sold bruised fruit. The gangplank was lowered. Julius's troop waited for his orders. Julius said:

       'I have to report to the office of the frumentarii. Then we have a long march.'

       'Is there time to contact the local Christians?'

       Julius was apologetic. 'I'm afraid you have to stay with the rest of the prisoners. We march you in chains and the march starts soon. You can't go into the town, I'm afraid.'

       'I can,' Luke said. Whereas most of his fellow voyagers had lost weight, Luke seemed to have put on quiet muscle and his neck had grown somehow taurine. It was as if he had to show these Romans what a Greek kin of Odysseus, who had also been shipwrecked, was supposed to look like. 'There's a bunch of Jews over there. They'll know.' There was indeed a group of bearded men in striped robes, flashing rings in the sun as they chaffered over carpets and ingots.

       Elders of the Neapolitan faithful took the Appian Way with Paul, his fellow prisoners, the military escort. Paul said: 'One must always question motives. A slave becomes a Christian because he has no hope from this life. He dreams of a heavenly kingdom, a kind of perpetual soothing bath with somebody handing him grapes. He has nothing to lose, everything to gain. I'm more encouraged to hear of the rich giving all to the poor, men in high places risking all, even the Emperor's displeasure. What's the official attitude?'

       Old Simon, whose family had come to Neapolis from Galilee at a time unrecorded, stroked his brown beard and said: 'The faith is tolerated. Chiefly because it's mainly a faith of the poor. There are absurd stories about our cannibalism and incest. We set ourselves free from the constraints of civilized society — so men like to believe. I foresee danger.'

       'When?'

       'Every society has to have an outcast minority to blame — for floods, famine, low wages, the rheumatism of the praetorian prefect. The priests of Rome don't like to see defectors from the worship of the old gods. Conservative senators grumble about unroman activities. It's still a faith of upper rooms, cellars, dark corners. But it germinates.' They had reached Appii Forum. 'Those look like members of the Roman church. The message got to them — how, God knows.' There was indeed a knot with welcoming arms, and not all Jews by the look of them. And there, their agedness a mirror of his own ageing, were Aquila and his wife Priscilla. They had come in a cart drawn by an old donkey. Aquila said:

       'In the Tiber, you remember? God, man, you're in chains. Why?'

       The Roman faithful, being, after all, of the metropolis, were greeted with both deference and resentment by the Neapolitan faithful. It was after all, to the Romans that Paul had written three years back, promising a fiery and loving visit sometime, not to the Neapolitans. But Simon and his contingent, politely taking wine with them all and Paul at a waterside tavern, the soldiers standing aloof and wondering with their wondering jailmeat, affirmed Italian Christian unity before being glad to take the road back. The road forward brought Paul and the Romans to the place called Tres Tabernae where, in fact, there were five taverns and more joyous Christian Romans waiting. Julius was divided: what was he — an official of the state or one of this exuberant party, mostly Jewish, extravagant in gesture, full of jocular buffetings and smacking kisses? He decided that he would not properly be a Christian until he had told his wife, and that would not be until the morning after their reunion. She might be annoyed, derisive, indifferent. It made no difference: a man's soul was not his wife's property as his body was.

       They entered Rome by the Porta Capena, and Julius marched his prisoners to the Caelian hill, headquarters of the stratopedarch or princeps peregrinorum, who was in charge of the imperial couriers. The criminals were sent to jail pending trial; Paul, pending his hearing, had a young soldier literally attached to him by means of a thin long chain and then was told to find his own lodgings. He knew where he was going to stay: with Aquila and Priscilla in the Suburra district. Julius saluted him, Paul sketched a blessing. They would see each other again soon. Meanwhile Julius would himself, on the orders of the princeps, deposit the procuratorial papers concerning Paul with the imperial legal department. Paul dragged his soldier to the Vicus Longus and introduced him to his host and hostess:

       'This young man is Sabinus. He finds this chain as embarrassing as I do, but the law is the law. I understand that you'll receive a lodging allowance if you'll take him in. Sabinus, these are Jews. Do you have any objection?'

       'All one to me,' in the Greek of Calabria. 'But I don't like Jewish cooking. I'll cook my own rations.'

       'Back to the old trade,' Paul said.

       'Not tents here,' Aquila said. 'Canopies. Much more delicate.'

       The elders of the unreformed faith were quick to visit him. He sat chained to gawping Sabinus, who understood not one word of Aramaic, while he told them his situation: 'Brothers, I did nothing against the Jewish faith or the Jewish people, yet I was delivered a prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans at Caesarea. The Romans set me free because they found no cause of death in me. But the chief men of Jerusalem were against me, and I was forced to appeal to Caesar. I have to make it clear that I have nothing against my nation. I'm in chains, as you see, or rather bound with a chain because of the hope of Israel.'