The Last Gospel (55 page)

They drifted for hours, blown along by wafts of breeze, talking and dozing in the shade under the sail. The Nazarene cast his net, and caught only a few fish, but enough for him to cook in a pot over a small brazier. ‘Oh prince of fishermen,’ Herod had joked, ‘you tell us your kingdom is like a net that is thrown into the sea and catches fish of every kind. Well, it looks as if you have a pretty small kingdom.’ He guffawed, and the Nazarene smiled, and continued to prepare the food. Later, Mary played the lyre, making music that seemed to shimmer and ripple like the surface of the lake, and Calpurnia sang the haunting, mystical songs of her people. They ate the food they had brought with them, bread, olives, walnuts, figs, and a fruit Claudius had never eaten before, produced by the thorn tree, all washed down with pure water from the springs of Tiberias. Afterwards they played dice, and arm-wrestled across a loose plank, and Calpurnia made diadems for them out of the twigs of the thorn tree, solemnly crowning Herod a king and Claudius a god. Herod kept them entertained with a stream of stories and jokes, until his thoughts began to turn to the evening. ‘They say you can work miracles, Joshua son of Joseph,’ he said. ‘But you can’t turn water into wine, can you?’ He guffawed again, then scooped up a handful of water from the lake and splashed it over the man’s head. The Nazarene laughed along with him, and the two men jostled playfully, rocking the boat from side to side. ‘Anyway,’ Herod said, sitting back. ‘We can’t stay out here much longer. I’ll die of thirst. Anyone for the taverns?’

Dusk was colouring the sky red an hour later when Claudius again pulled the oar, this time sitting alongside the Nazarene. They had landed, and Herod had set out on the road back to Tiberias, eager to seek out the young bloods in the officers’ mess for an evening’s cavorting. The three women had gone back to Migdal, to Mary’s home. But Claudius had wanted to stay on with the Nazarene, to make this day last for ever, to ask more. He had offered to help the Nazarene set his seine net, a few hundred yards offshore from the mudflat where they had first set out.

The Nazarene rowed silently alongside him. Then he stopped, and gazed at the deep red sky where the sun had set, the colour of spilt blood. ‘The weather will be fine tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The net will be safe here overnight. Then, tomorrow, it will be time for the autumn sowing of the fields. The autumn wind will blow up from the west, bringing heavy downpours, coming over the Judaean hills and cleansing the land. The Sea of Galilee will once again be filled, and where we once stood there will be water.’

‘Herod says you are a prophet,’ Claudius said.

‘It does me good to see Herod,’ the Nazarene replied. ‘I have that same fire within me.’

‘Herod says you are a scribe, a priest. He says you are a prince of the house of David.’

‘I minister to the
ha’aretz
, the people of this land,’ he said. ‘But I am no priest.’

‘You are a healer.’

‘The lame and the blind shall walk the farthest and see the most, because it is they who yearn most to walk, and to see.’

‘But who are you?’

‘It is as you say.’

Claudius sighed. ‘You speak in parables, but where I come from our prophets are oracles of the gods, and they speak in riddles. I go to the Sibyl, you know, in Cumae. Herod thinks she’s an old witch, but I still go there. He doesn’t understand how much better it makes me feel.’ Claudius paused, self-conscious. ‘Virgil also went there. He was our greatest poet.’ He closed his eyes, declaiming from memory, translating the Latin verse into Greek:

The Nazarene listened intently, then put his hand on Claudius’ shoulder. ‘Come on. Help me with my net.’

‘Have you ever seen Rome?’ Claudius said. ‘All the wonders of human creation are there.’

‘Those are things that stand in the way of the kingdom of heaven,’ the Nazarene replied.

Claudius thought for a moment, then picked up a chisel with one hand, the edge of the net with the other. ‘Would you renounce these?’

The Nazarene smiled, then touched Claudius again. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘about my ministry.’

Half an hour later it was almost dark, and the boat had gently grounded on the foreshore a few miles from where they had set out. The burning torches of Migdal and Tiberias twinkled from the shore, and other faint lights bobbed offshore. The Nazarene took a pair of pottery oil lamps from a box beside the mast step, filled them with olive oil left over from their lunch and deftly lit the wicks with a flint and iron. The lamps spluttered to life, then began to burn strongly, the flames golden and smokeless. He placed them on a little shelf on the mast step and then turned to Claudius.

‘Your poet, Virgil,’ he said. ‘Can I read his books?’

‘I’ll ask Herod to bring them to you. He’s supposed to be at Tiberias for the rest of the year, banished from Rome. Maybe he’ll even do a translation for you himself. It might keep him out of trouble for a while.’

Claudius dropped the dice he had been carrying, his habit for years now. Before reaching down he shut his eyes tight, unwilling to see the numbers, the augury. The Nazarene picked them up, placed them in the palm of Claudius’ hand, closed his hands around them. For a moment they remained like that, then he let go. Claudius opened his eyes, laughed, then tossed the dice overboard, not looking. ‘In return for Virgil, you must do one thing,’ he said. ‘You must write down what you have just told me. Your
euangelion
, your gospel.’

‘But my people do not read. Mine is a ministry of the spoken word. The written word stands in the way of the kingdom of heaven.’

Claudius shook his head. ‘If your kingdom of heaven is truly of this earth, then it will be subject to violence, and violent men will maltreat it. In thanks for this day, I will do all I can to ensure that your written word remains safe and secret, ready for the time when the memory of your spoken word has become the word of others, shaped and changed by them into something else.’

There was a silence, then the Nazarene spoke. ‘You have paper?’

‘Always,’ Claudius said, reaching for the slim satchel he kept slung over his back. ‘I write down everything, you know. I have one last sheet of first-grade, and some scraps. I had the first-grade made to my special instructions in Rome. It’s the best there is. You’ll see. Lasts for ever. I used up my gall ink on the voyage here, but I picked up some concoction that passes as ink in Tiberias.’

The Nazarene lifted up the board he had used to chop fish, cleaned it over the side and then dried it on a twist of his loincloth. He placed the board on his knees, then took the sheet of papyrus and the reed pen that Claudius offered him. Claudius opened a small pot with a wooden lid and held it out, and the Nazarene dipped the pen in the ink. He held the pen in his right hand over the upper left corner of the papyrus, poised for a moment, motionless.

‘The Sibyl writes her prophecies on leaves of oak.’ Claudius chuckled. ‘When you reach out for them, the wind always blows them away. Herod says it’s some demonic Greek machine, hidden in the cave.’

The Nazarene looked Claudius full in the face, then began to write, a bold, decisive hand, slow and deliberate, the hand of one who had been taught well but did not write often. He dipped the pen into the ink every few words, and Claudius concentrated on keeping the pot steady. After the Nazarene had started the fourth line, Claudius stared at the script, and then blurted out, spilling the ink on his hand, ‘You’re writing in Aramaic!’

The Nazarene looked up. ‘It is my language.’

‘No.’ Claudius shook his head emphatically. ‘No one in Rome reads Aramaic.’

‘I write these words for my people, not for the people of Rome.’

‘No.’ Claudius shook his head again. ‘Your word here, in Galilee, is the spoken word. You said it yourself. Your fishermen do not read, and have no need of this. Your written word must be read and understood far beyond the Sea of Galilee. If you write in riddles, in a tongue few understand, your word will be no clearer than the utterances of the Sibyl. You must write in Greek.’

‘Then you must do it for me. I speak Greek, but I do not write it.’

‘Very well.’ Claudius took the board with the paper and pen, and handed the ink pot over. ‘We must start again.’ He fumbled in his satchel, thought for a moment, then reached across and took a cut lemon from the fruit bowl. He squeezed the lemon over the writing, then rubbed it vigorously with a cloth from his bag. He held the paper up to catch the last rays of the setting sun, and saw the faded imprint of the Nazarene’s writing as he waited for the lemon juice to dry. A breeze wafted over them, making the paper flutter, and Claudius quickly took it down and pressed it against the board on his knees. He dipped the pen in the ink and tested the paper, inscribing a cross mark as he always did at the start of a document, to see whether the ink would spread. It had better not. The paper was his own first-grade. He grunted, then wrote a few words across the top, in the careful hand of a scholar conscious that his writing was usually legible only to himself.

‘I am speaking Greek to you now, but I speak my gospel to my people in Aramaic,’ the Nazarene said. ‘You must help me to find the words in Greek for what I have to say.’

‘I am ready.’

An hour later the two men sat motionless opposite each other in the boat, a silhouette that was growing darker in the moonless sky, and would soon be no more. The lamps spluttered between them, then one went out. The Nazarene shifted along the plank he was sitting on towards one side of the boat, then put his hand on the space beside him.

‘We must pull the oars together.’

Claudius looked up from the paper, and smiled. ‘I should like nothing better.’ He looked down one last time, scarcely able to see now, and read the final words the Nazarene had spoken, that Claudius had translated:

A
ccording to the ancient sources, the Roman emperor Claudius died in AD 54, probably by poison. He was succeeded by Nero, who ruled until AD 68, and then by Vespasian, who ruled until AD 79, the year that Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The idea that Claudius should have faked his own death, disappeared with his freedman Narcissus and survived in secret for all those years is fictitious, though in keeping with what can be surmised of his character. Claudius had been a famously reluctant emperor, sidelined for years because of a crippling condition, probably a form of palsy, and then dragged from behind a curtain to assume the royal purple in AD 41 when he was already well into middle age. He learned to accommodate himself to the role, and achieved much as emperor - public reforms, practical building projects, the invasion of Britain - but by the end had been worn down by corruption and a succession of scheming wives. He may have looked back wistfully to his earlier life as a scholar, to his histories of Rome, of the Etruscans, of Carthage - all now lost - and yearned for the same again, perhaps with a plan to write a history of Britain; he himself had visited Britain in the aftermath of the invasion, in AD 43. Had he survived, he would have mourned Calpurnia, his mistress probably also poisoned in AD 54, but he could have been driven on by the need to complete his account of his British triumph and maintain the family honour of his revered brother Germanicus and father Drusus - a reverence seen in the commemorative inscription on the coin in this book, a genuine issue of Claudius from the beginning of his reign.

Narcissus was Claudius’ freedman secretary, his
ab epistulis
. He reputedly amassed a huge personal fortune as only Imperial freedmen could do, with dealings in Gaul and Britain. He appears to have served his own interests, and sometimes Claudius’ wives’ interests, more so than he did those of his master, yet there was evidently a transcending bond that kept Narcissus in Claudius’ employ after the emperor must have been aware of his nefarious activities. It is not known whether Narcissus was a eunuch, though Claudius had several eunuchs at his court - one was his taster - or whether Narcissus had Christian affiliations, though it is possible. According to the sources, Narcissus’ reputation was such that he was forced to commit suicide after Claudius’ death, so my fictitious escape route would have been an attractive lifeline.

Pliny the Elder - the most famous encyclopedist from antiquity - was a young army officer on the German frontier when Claudius was emperor, and it is quite likely that the two men met. Before the end of Claudius’ reign Pliny had already written a history of the wars against the Germans, the lost
Bella Germaniae
, the result, his nephew claimed, of a vision his uncle had of Claudius’ father Drusus (Pliny the Younger,
Letters
iii, 5, 4). As a veteran Pliny would have cherished the memory of Drusus and Germanicus, and his mentions of Claudius in the
Natural History
are respectful, almost familiar, and rarely refer to him by the official designation
Divus
, which Claudius would have scorned. The
Natural History
was dedicated to the Emperor Titus, who had succeeded his father Vespasian on 23 June AD 79, so was completed only a short time before Pliny’s own death in the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August that year. It is entirely consistent with Pliny that he should already have been at work on additions to his great work; Pliny the Younger inherited 160 notebooks from his uncle, ‘written in a minute hand on both sides of the page’. He had watched from Misenum as his uncle departed by galley towards Herculaneum on that fateful day of the eruption, and was told of his final hours (
Letters
vi, 16).