The Kingdom of the Wicked (7 page)

       John, once the beloved disciple, woke everybody before dawn with his loud voice (to be accounted a curse to him, according to the Book of Proverbs) and said he had invented a sign, or rather a sign had come to him in a dream. This sign, made with the thumb on brow, breastbone and shoulders, combined the cross Jesus died on with the Father, the Son and the other one. It made things clearer. It also imported into the simple faith an element which the fisherman Peter, who had never heard the word mustikos, considered dangerously fanciful. But let them now all ride on chance, dreams, visitations from the Holy Spirit, and the actions of their enemies. Amen.

       At dawn, while the new faithful or merely curious were picking their various ways over stones, roots, dry ground towards the ravine, the Zealot Caleb arrived at a hill on which simple stone dwellings had been roughly reared. He was cloaked and staffed and boneweary. In his ears faintly sang certain words of Stephen: 'I pray you'll rethink your philosophy while you're there. If God made the world, he made it for more than the Jews. The end of life isn't the proclamation of the free Jewish nation.' Caleb had said: 'The end of my life.' Stephen had responded: 'It nearly was.'

       It had been a rough night journey under the moon, with God's night creatures rasping or barking or hooting signals, words from some unreadable book that God could read well enough, along with owls and foxes. He had sat on a stone and munched some bread and salt fish, washed down with Jerusalem water. If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand lose her cunning. Now, with the sun starting to wash white stone, he heard a thin hymn: the faithful of the sect that had abandoned Jerusalem, Temple, Sanhedrin, all, were saluting another day presided over by the solar spirit. Caleb climbed rocks among which a few thin goats pulled at yellowing grass and saw an open gateway. Within were men in bleached garments ready to sit at an openair breakfast. Water was being called up from a well and new bread was being borne in in a basket from a bakery. There Was a man who had clearly been expecting him. But how had a signal reached here? Had this all been foreseen at the time of the Pentecostal festoonings? The man was in early middle age, and he wore a white robe that was dingier than that of the gaunt Essene who summoned Caleb to break his fast. Caleb said: 'Anias?'

       'Ananias. I was told you might come here.'

       'When? How?'

       'The young man who gave me lessons in Greek in Jerusalem said there was some scheme afoot. I came here only four days ago. I am not yet one of the brotherhood.'

       Caleb sat at a thin feast of bread, water, roots, dried figs and shrunken grapes. His presence was neither questioned nor welcomed.

       He had come from Jerusalem because he had rejected Jerusalem, and that was enough. Caleb could not understand the prayers said over the breaking of the bread. A kiss on the cheek was passed about the table from left to right. Caleb kissed the shaven cheek of a bloodless epicene youth without relish. After breakfast Caleb was permitted to visit Ananias's cell and wash in a ewer, wiping himself after on a bleached towel. He said:

       'Everything white. No blood in it. Even the bread's white.'

       'The very elixir of the faith,' Ananias said. 'Here it attains the limits of purity. Dung and make water, and you must bury the ordure in the ground, wearing white gloves. No marriage, no fornication — bodily pleasure is sinful. The body is made of dirt and red mud. Men must transcend it and live in the spirit.'

       'It's not easy to forget we have bodies,' Caleb said. 'So these men never take a woman in their arms. How do they breed?'

       'They don't breed. After all, the end of the world has been prophesied and soon it will come. Not much point in breeding. What is needed is purification.'

       'I was taught that the world was beginning, not ending. The new world of the free Jewish nation.'

       'A flippant dream, they would say. Purification is the one serious thing. Then pure soul is lifted up into heaven.'

       'And you're joining them?'

       'Well, I've been doing a certain amount of searching for the right way. That's why I wanted to read Greek. I see these Essenes as the final posting house on the journey. John the Baptist was one of them, you know. And then he was led to something different. I don't believe the world is going to end. I think it's wrong to be cut off from a world in which much wrong has to be put right. I'm here to ponder the new doctrine. You've met the followers of Jesus?'

       'My uncle Matthias has just become the twelfth of the dead man's disciples. Absurd, isn't it? A disciple of a dead man.'

       'The message is only just beginning to be born.'

       'And it says you have to submit to the Romans. It won't do.'

       'The point is that the Romans will burn themselves out sooner or later. We ought not to waste breath or muscle on them. The important things happen outside the politikon.'

       'Stephen taught you that?'

       'Of course, Stephen. I'm bad at names. No, I read that in a book.'

       'They say,' Caleb said, 'that John the Baptist is buried in Samaria. They say that he appears to them and cries that the hour of deliverance is at hand.'

       'And what do the Samaritans think deliverance means?'

       'What /mean by deliverance. Herod the Great built solid fortifications there. It may be in Samaria — not Judaea, not Galilee — that the great blow is struck. That came to me in the night, wandering, missing direction, finding it and the thought of Samaria at the same time. You know Samaria?'

       'I know that the Samaritans are supposed to be a bad lot. They shovelled shit once on to the steps of our Temple. And dead men's bones. They're not real Jews — halves and halves —’

       'Does that matter?'

       'Oh, I don't doubt there are good Samaritans. There's even a story about one.'

       Caleb's morning of rest was a time of labour for the disciples, listening to sins, degged with tears of repentance: there was enough water about. High above, on either side of the ravine, troops from Jerusalem stood. There was even an Italian centurion from Caesarea, the real thing, no Syrian nonsense. Beware of Jewish crowds was a fair Palestine watchword. All that these Jews seemed to be doing there in the river was saying a few words and then getting ducked. Some of them carried leaves and fronds of the season. There seemed to be no harm in it, but you never could tell.

       Thaddeus, a clumsy baptizer, had composed a song based on the prophetic words of Joel:

              Daughters with a prophet's tongue,

              Visions, visions with the young,

              Dreaming dreams for the old,

              And dreams and visions will have told

              Of Jesus Christ

              Sacrificed.

       He taught this but, teaching it, held up the baptizing business. It was strenuous work. The heads of the disciples swam with other people's sins, most of them to do with cheating and robbing and having sexual desires for the wrong person. Meanwhile, in a Jerusalem quiet after Pentecost, a maniple searched for Ruth, Sara and their mother. They eventually found their lodgings, where a potter's wheel and dried clay were kept still in widow's remembrance. Elias the mad greeted the troops with laughter and spoke of the coming of the whiskered achbroshim. They tried to knock him about, but he was spry and wiry. His lodgers, he said, had been eaten by rats. The soldiers asked people on the streets where the three women were, but none knew.

       They were, in fact, now lodged in the house of Stephen and his parents. The father, a retired schoolmaster called Tyrannos, had given up the Jewish faith but was tolerant towards his son's learned devoutness. Tyrannos had decorated the house with scenes out of Homer and was eager to teach the girls Greek. Sara, who had the seeds of scholarliness in her, was quick to start tracing the alphabet and was reciting autos, auton, autou, auto. Ruth and her mother helped Maia, the crow-haired lady of the house, with the cleaning and cooking. They sobbed sometimes in fear. Stephen said:

       'You'll be safe enough. We have this deep cellar. Safe, that is, if you can talk of safety these days. You'd be safer still with the Nazarenes.'

       'With an uncle,' Sara said, 'who's giving his money to the poor. Not to his own family.'

       'The Nazarenes have a different concept of family. They say their family's the world.'

       'Are you becoming a Nazarene?' Sara asked.

       'I'm sick of the wrangling of the sects,' Stephen said. 'I'm sick of the shrieks of the Zealots.'

       'Yet you saved Caleb.'

       'In spite of his zealotry.' Outside the dining room where the three young people, their elders already having eaten, lingered over dates and olives and flat thin bread, came the wailing song of an old beggar being led somewhere by a boy who said, bored: 'Alms for the love of heaven.' He was being led to the Temple because the ninth hour was coming up, time for prayer and oblation, and a few coins were regularly thrown to the blind and crippled by the worshippers — less real generosity than a token of it.

       Peter and John were also going to the Temple for the ceremony of the ninth hour. The other disciples were sleepy; the baptizing of a thousand or so had been hard work. So Peter and John mounted to the Court of Israel through the Court of the Gentiles, passing the notice which said in Greek and Latin that the unbeliever would be stoned to death if he went any further. There were nine gates from the outer court to the inner, and one of these, which led to the Court of the Women, was called the Nicanor Gate or the Gate Beautiful. It was made of Corinthian bronze and was skilfully crafted. It had, of course, cost a pretty penny. As Peter and John approached this gate, they saw a cripple on a cart, a boy with him. The beggar had a strod or thumb — stick with a crossbar. He said to Peter and John:

       'In the name of the Lord, give. For the sake of the love of the Lord —’

       Peter saw the cruciform shadow of the beggar's stick on the square right post of the gate. He was being told something. Peter looked the beggar in the eyes and waited for the capricious Holy Spirit to rush in. 'Look at me,' he said. And then: 'We have no gold nor silver, being poor men like yourself. But what I have I now give you. Get out of that cart. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.'

       The beggar made a grotesque mime of walking, to show that he could not, and then, to Peter and John's surprise as much as his, got up on his useless feet. Peter held out his right hand and he took it. Then he found he could walk.

       'Always knew he was a cheat,' a Sadducee said. 'The same with too many of them here. He's certainly kept it up for a long time.' The beggar allowed indignation to usurp the place of fear, wonder, gratitude, regret at the loss of his trade: ask, and you always get too much or too little, never enough. He said:

       'I know you, Zadok the fat, and you know me. I'm coming up to forty-one and I've had no use of the ankles since I was born. Now, look at that bone and muscle and praise the Lord's goodness before you start sneering.'

       'You'll have to dance for a living now,' the Sadducee sneered. 'Watch me.' And the beggar began to leap and cavort. A Pharisee nodded in awe and said:

       'Isaiah thirty-five six. "Then shall the lame man leap as a hart".'

       'Come in with us,' Peter said, embarrassed. 'Pray. Attend the sacrifice.' So the beggar leapt the way along to the candled gloom within and merely walked in a decorous fashion down to the place of sacrifice. When he and Peter and John came out again, they were followed by a large crowd towards Solomon's colonnade. Peter knew he had to say something, so he waited for what he took to be an inflation from the Holy Spirit, a bird fluttering in his lungs and fire on his tongue, and he spoke.

       'People of Israel, what you see you truly see, no trickery. What has happened to this leaping beggar here has not come out of any power or goodness that I have, or that John here has. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob who is the God of our fathers has glorified the Lord Jesus his servant. Don't forget that it was you who delivered him up to what you called justice in your mealymouthed ignorance. You had him stretched on a tree and jeered at while you let a murderer go free to commit more murders. The Prince of Life is what he was and is, for we saw him rise up from the grave. Faith in his name turned into the strength which made this man whole. Now you see that what was prophesied was no foolery. Repent and be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Set your feet on the new road.'

       'Trickery,' muttered some of the Sadducees, 'for all his fine blasphemous talk. Ah — now we'll see.'

       For the crowd and the flying rumour of a miracle had brought to the colonnade of Solomon the chief of the Temple police, the sagan or segen, the man of the mountain of the house, whatever that means —’ish liar ha-bayith, I can render it no other way — leading a body of muscular Levites. The Sadducees and some of the chief priests, the lowlier ones keeping out of it, laid the usual charge — preaching resurrection, practising mountebank trickery, collecting a crowd and causing a disturbance — and the sagan or segen, in his fine breastplate and helmet, said: 'Under arrest, you and you and this leaping one also.

       You're to be locked up for the night. You'll be tried at dawn.'

       'We've things to do at dawn,' John roared. 'Baptism of the newly faithful.'

       'Well, you won't be available, will you? Come on.'

       The 'ish har ha-bayith and his dozen or so Levites with their ornamental daggers took Peter, John and the healed cripple to a small and holy prison (necessarily holy: it was not Roman) near the eastern end of the bridge that crossed the Tyropoeon valley. There they were shown into a cold cell with a heavy door and locked in with a heavy key that ground squealingly into a rusty ward. There was a seven — barred wind eye above standing headlevel. The beggar leapt up to see if he could see out of it. 'Stop that,' Peter said wearily. John bawled through the doorbars: