“Did you ever meet Kephas?” I asked.
The Presbyter sneered. “That enemy of the truth?” he demanded. “No and I never wanted to meet him. He opposed Paulus, opposed the spread of the Faith by every means possible. He denied the things that were revealed to Paulus without whom, none of my communities of faithful would exist. Don’t speak of Kephas to me.”
I wanted to pursue this but Drusus Longinus had appeared at the doorway. I rose when he beckoned and followed him out into the sun.
“I need to know why you protect that old goat,” Longinus said. “Every time I see him, he looks fitter than when he came here. What is it between you, if - as you insist - his beliefs are not yours?”
“There’s nothing between us,” I said. “He was an influential man when he lived in Ephesus; a leader of the Christians there. It concerns me that he should hold views so at variance with the teachings of men who actually knew that crucified Galilean they call the Christ. I imagined, sir - perhaps foolishly - that I might be able to discover a way of making him less troublesome when the Emperor eventually releases him.”
Longinus snorted. “Very laudable old man! Don’t hold your breath - the Emperor is more likely to leave him here until he dies.” Longinus folded his arms, stared at me. “And why is it that you permit the Ephesian to write? Where did you obtain the materials?”
“That boy, Giton - he brought me materials,” I said quickly. “I thought there was little harm in letting the Ephesian write although I told him there was little chance his letter would ever be copied, let alone delivered. And I thought the written statements might prove useful... Even the Emperor takes some interest in subversive Christian documents, sir.”
“The boy, Giton - I should have guessed.” Longinus wagged his head. “He never admitted to that when I had him brought in for questioning. Ah - you look startled, old man! What did you think I’d do - let him go on sneaking in here at night? I shook a few answers out of him then took a stick to him myself. He went back to his master with welts on his arse and a letter explaining what he’d done to deserve them. We won’t be seeing him again.”
“He could have brought you rabbits,” I said. “Other supplies. He could have been useful.” I heard my voice falter, looked at my feet through blurred lashes. “He did no harm.”
“He acted in defiance of imperial law - that’s always harmful.” Longinus poked me in the chest with one thick finger. “Go and get me that document. I hear you removed it from the Presbyter’s keeping. Be quick.”
I scurried off to my cell for the roll of cheap papyrus and carried it to him with sinking heart. He tilted it into the light, scanned it rapidly.
“What in the name of all the gods is this crap about?” he demanded. “Is it meant to be incomprehensible or is the man just completely mad?”
I was reluctant to speak of codes, concealed messages for a select circle of initiates. Roman administrators, however minor, are inclined to be over-zealous in securing their own interests.
“It’s typical of certain Christian scriptures,” I explained. “The writers tend to employ familiar imagery derived from the prophetic books of the Jews. They see in these symbols, allegories that express their faith.”
“Never had much time for oracular writings,” Longinus said. “What does that Galilean have to do with these ramblings?”
“Very little in my view, sir. But his followers see everything he stood for - much of what he is reputed to have done - prefigured in the visions of the ancient prophets. I admit much of it is far-fetched and certainly very obscure.”
Drusus snorted. “That’s the truth of it! Listen to this. ‘ ...and in the midst of the Elders stood a lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes.’ I ask you - is that an edifying religious concept among either the Jews or the oddest of their sects - these Christians?”
“The lamb,” I explained, “has become a common way of referring to their Jesus who died at Passover when - as perhaps you know - the Jews hold a ritual feast with roast lamb as the centre-piece. The Jews have always seen the blood of the sacrificed lamb as representing the covenant made with their God in the time of Moses, the founder of Judaism. Christians have appropriated the image, sir. For them, Christ Jesus is the Lamb of God - the pure and spotless sacrifice.”
“Bizarre!” Longinus grunted. “Yet the Christians despise all other faiths I am told and would have condemned that perfectly ordinary sacrifice to Cybele that we made a few days ago. Am I correct?”
I had to agree that he was.
“And what about these horsemen?” Longinus demanded.
I could see that he was anxious to uncover some morsel smelling of treason - something he could include in his written report that might win him imperial favour and help bring him back to Rome.
“This first one.” He peered closely at the Presbyter’s uneven script. “With a bow and riding a white horse... wearing a crown, going out to conquer. What do you make of that?”
“Very little,” I assured him. “It’s a familiar image in Jewish scriptures.”
More deception. It is, as I have said, a skill of mine to deceive and thus shield others from pain.
I could have told him how a crowned bowman implied an alliance of Parthian kings, bent upon the ageless dream of Rome’s provinces in the east being invaded, crushed, appropriated. Herod Agrippa had been seen as a potential ally of the Parthians: Rome knew it and struck him down with poison, I had become certain. No Parthian puppet could be tolerated, especially one who erected new defences for his city and did not discourage his subjects from hailing him as the Messiah-deliverer.
Longinus was muttering as he read. “Now, a red horse, if you please! Is that also some odd image found in Jewish oracles?”
“Absolutely,” I said, recalling the visions of the prophet, Zechariah but deciding against any explanation of their significance in those sacred writings. “Red is an appropriate symbol of bloodshed as you’ll appreciate, sir. The sword in the hand of that rider would have to represent war though the Ephesian is not specific... Further on, you’ll see there’s a rider carrying scales and on a black horse. He is an emblem of the food crisis, I believe, rather like that recent famine in Magna Graecia which I daresay affected the Ephesian as much as anyone else. I recall there was a maximum price set for wheat and that was in Antioch - so prosperous normally. Imagine what other places suffered....”
“Why write about it?” Longinus demanded.
I shrugged. “He keeps taking material from recent events because he knows his readers will recognise them and see in them some hint of the coming calamity...” The Roman shot me a piercing glance. “All prophets of doom think this way,” I assured him. “They thrive on famines and storms and earthquakes and wars as sure signs that God - or in your case, sir, the gods - will become so infuriated with the wickedness of mortals, He sets about smiting them with progressively worse blows in the hope that they’ll take notice and repent before He unleashes the full measure of His fury.”
“Like the old yarn of Deucalion and the flood that destroyed all people,” Longinus said.
“Precisely. Look down here.” I pointed to a passage. ‘Behold, a pale horse and his name that sat on him was Thanatos’ darkest death, no less! - ‘and Hades followed with him.’ Well, the ruler of the kingdom of the dead would have to be there, I suppose.”
“Do Christians believe in Hades?” Longinus asked. “I thought they had rejected all the old gods.”
“They have,” I explained, “but many of their converts were reared with such beliefs and there is a degree of borrowing from such concepts as Hades or Pluto. The Christians have identified Hades with the Great Adversary of Jewish folk-lore, a monstrous spirit of evil who goes under a variety of names such as Beli’al or Lucifer or Satan.
“Just as the simple and the uneducated believe that there is a lowest zone in the kingdom of the dead, full of fire and torment...”
“Ah; Tartarus!” Longinus snorted. “I was often frightened with threats of it when I was a child.”
“Tartarus has been adopted by the Christians too, sir. It is the place where all the wicked will suffer but especially those who persecute Christians.”
Longinus looked slowly up. “Men such as our beloved Emperor, for instance?”
“Oh, no,” I said, “I’m sure he’s not referring to…”
“There you go again,” the Roman said. “You’re a sympathiser and still trying to protect that old crow. If he’s alluding to the divine Flavian, I need to know.”
I thought quickly. “It’s as I said before, sir, if we give the man enough rope, he’ll hang himself. Let me return the document to him, encourage him to complete it! That could be to your advantage and perhaps to mine too. Believe me I have no regard for him.”
Longinus stood very still, gazing at the sea. In his mind, he was aboard a galley, heading for home - I knew it.
“It’s true that he’s really too old for the quarries,” he mused. “If I say he’s unfit for work, then that is that.”
“Exactly, sir. And as medical superintendent, I would, of course, endorse that view.”
He rolled up the book, thrust it at me.
“See that he’s well fed then. Let him write all he wishes. Tell the orderlies to leave him alone.” He flexed his locked fingers, clicked his knuckles. “I’m glad we’ve had this little chat. Would you like a drop of wine?”
Astonished, I followed him. The principia was not a building I was often invited to enter. Longinus strode into his tablinum, poured me wine and tipped a splatter from his own goblet in perfunctory libation. It was sharp stuff which the soldiers drink, better than the scouring fluid given the workers.
I sipped it appreciatively, puzzled by his sudden benevolence. There was a plump eagle embossed on the jug, just under one of the handles and in a coronet of leaves, the Emperor’s name in shortened form.
Drusus Longinus lifted his goblet.
“To the Great Beast!” he said, showing all his teeth.
I nearly dropped my cup. Shock rendered me speechless.
“Oh, don’t pretend you’re outraged, old man,” Longinus said. “You can’t pretend you never heard the Emperor’s nick-name when you were in Rome. The whole city calls him that.” His finger poked at the incised emblem I had just been observing. “His mark’s on everything: amphorae, ships’ helms, public buildings, slaves’ backsides and foreheads if they’re unfortunate enough to belong to the state and are branded. You can’t get away from it. Divi filius - son of a god! Everywhere a man looks.”
He belched and poured himself more wine. “It’s a bad joke, when you think about it, wouldn’t you say?”
I suddenly realised why he was happy to share my company. Among his own men, he would never dare this degree of candour.
“It’s certainly hard to take a god-man seriously,” I agreed.
Longinus gave me a quizzical look. “Where were you educated?” he asked.
“Caesarea Maritima, under my own father, a grammaticus of the city. And later in Jerusalem. Half Greek, half Jewish - I expect you knew that.”
“Never thought about it,” he said. “Wouldn’t take you for a Jew of any kind, the way you talk though you have a good beak on you. Your father raised you a skeptic?”
“Towards the gods, yes. He was an Epicurean so his views were typical of that philosophical school. Gods have little or no effect on the world - that is what he taught me - and they should be no more feared than death which is to say, not at all, since death is a blessing.”
“Christians don’t fear death either.” Longinus sat down, waved me to a folding stool. “I remember how my father described them dying in the purge of Nero. He said Christians were the worst possible entertainment because they usually sang when they faced the wild beasts and some of them would even laugh and shout with anticipation when they were faced with a slavering wolf or a lion. Death a blessing? I’ll stay cursed then.”
He was no scholar: I refrained from further details of the Epicurean way. There was a pleasant warmth seeping through me as I sat opposite him. We were like two old comrades, meeting in a tavern. I found it in me to pity him. He could have been a decent enough man in a different place.
Christ Jesus, I prayed as I tipped my cup, let Drusus Longinus find his way home and be received again by those who love him.
“You’re not listening, are you?” Longinus was saying. “By Jove’s bollocks - what have I come to, eh?” He belched, banged down his goblet. “Sitting up over wine with a slave and a Christian apologist at that. No more for you, old Kleitos! Your eyes are glazing. Take that ludicrous document with you and get about your duties before I come to my senses and have you put into the quarries yourself.”
I thanked him profusely, took my leave. The letter to the Christians of the east went into the bag on my cell wall, along with my small but precious collection of books. With boils to lance and poultices to prepare, I could spare the believers of Ephesus no further thought.
“Your prayers have been answered, Presbyter,” I said. “You can thank me for the fact that you not only stay out of the quarries in the meantime but I have also managed to persuade the commander to let you write. Oh, yes, you might well look amazed! But it’s not so much a miracle as an ability to love one’s enemies.”
The Presbyter scowled. “Spiritual pride is a sin,” he muttered.
“So is judging other men. Judge not that you be not judged - the Christians of Rome are fond of that line. It’s in the Collected Sayings.”
“I know that,” he said tersely. His face softened. “I am grateful. Thank you. To God be the glory. Now, what have you done with my letter?”
“You’ll have it this afternoon,” I said. “I haven’t finished reading it yet and I’m far too busy to bother with it now.
In the blaze of noon, I quickly read his last entry.
There was little doubt that he had been hinting at a coming war with Parthia. In his coded ramblings there was also a burning desire to see Rome punished so severely, every Christian soul would have the satisfaction of revenge against that power which had ridiculed them, burned them, made them raw meat for wild animals.
The love of Christ Jesus who urged forgiveness of one’s enemies, was, of course, nowhere to be found.
The Presbyter had arrived at a grand total of those who would be saved at the end of time. One hundred and forty-four thousand, taken from the tribes of Israel, were to have the seal of salvation stamped into their foreheads by an obliging angel from the east. His strong right arm would mark them as righteous.
I was struck by the fact that non-Jews were apparently excluded from this select company in which the Twelve Tribes all provided the exact quota of twelve thousand each. So much for the good and virtuous converts of Ephesus, Rome, Smyrna, Pergamos!
He had realised his error. The saved of Israel were to be supplemented by a great multitude from all nations, he had written. He had described this host, offering praises to the Lamb and made it clear they were nearly as good as those Jewish Christians - of which he was one - who enjoyed a full measure of divine favour, observing both the Law of Moses and the teachings of Jesus as proclaimed in the cities of the east that he knew best.
“White robes washed in the blood of the Lamb?” I queried, giving him the document and his writing materials. “Isn’t that carrying the Passover tradition a little too far?”
He drew breath. “By blood the Israelites were saved when the angel of death passed over Egypt before the Exodus. By blood, shed for us on the sacred earth of Calvarius, we are saved from death again. Christ Jesus has become the sacrificial lamb - can’t you see that?”
I shook my head, turned to leave him.
“That is why no more sacrifices can be offered in the temple at Jerusalem. That is why the temple has been destroyed. Don’t you understand that? It’s no longer needed! There is only one sacrifice of any value and he is the Lamb who...”
I could not bear his convoluted rambling. I could not stand to hear this quasi-mystical nonsense without having the desire to shout at him, ‘Listen, Ephesian! What do you know about what happened at Calvarius? Did you see him die? Were you there afterwards when the greatest of deceptions was accomplished?’
All men have secrets.
I went to the dispensary and barked at the assistants who were slow in the heat of the day. I plunged my hands in steeping herbs and squeezed the Presbyter’s scrawny throat in extracting the vital juices.
Light was fading when I went to supervise the serving of the evening meal to my patients. There was a miserable ration of barley mash thickened with garlic and goats’ cheese. The Presbyter was not at the table where the walking ill were fed.
I found him at his usual perch, hunched over that flat-topped boulder that he had made his desk. His bony elbows held down the papyrus against a gathering evening breeze. As I approached, I realised he was not writing.
“How can you read?” I asked. “The light is gone. Enough - come in now and eat.”
A peculiar humming sound came from the back of his throat. I put a hand to his shoulder and he toppled onto his side and lay curled, his knees up to his chest, like a grotesque child, crippled with belly-ache.
His eyes were wide and staring. I knelt by him to lift his head. His lids were fixed. Had he made no sound, I might have assumed he was dead. The high whine emanating from his mouth had the rise and fall of those litanies intoned by the Levite choirs on the steps of the Court of Israel.
I shook him, slapped his thin face but the stuttering anthem ran on.
Two of the boys came running when I shouted for assistance. I had him carried to his mat and gave instructions that one of them was to sit with him and sponge his face since the fever had apparently returned.
Soldiers and quarry guards propped themselves up to glare at him and swore at the prospect of another disturbed night. It was suggested to me that I should put a purgative in his next meal and let him shit himself to death.
“He likes being in the latrine!” one of my patients jeered. “Old bastard spends half his time sitting in there, talking about the pit! Since he’s so fascinated with the pit, why don’t you stick him down one of them and leave him there to rot? That’s what they did with a Christian fanatic when I was stationed in Neapolis.”
“Be warned,” I said, “that Drusus Longinus has given specific orders for this man to be left well alone. Pester him and you can answer to the commander for it - I’ll not accept responsibility for the consequences.”
They fell quiet then. Longinus was notorious for his reliance on the whip to impose order. I took the unfinished letter back to my cell.
His writing was deteriorating yet was still quite legible. His catalogue of miseries to come ran on, unabated.
Seven, seven: seven angels, seven trumpets. There were recollections of the temple ceremonies that he had witnessed as a boy - incense burning in the halls of heaven and an altar there but golden, not constructed of uncut stones.
He had created a new realm without a temple which was the heart of the Perfect Kingdom. That ancient longing was returned to here, now that both temple and kingdom - the realm of Agrippa - were long gone.
I could have wept for those things lost but I read on.
Seven trumpets. I heard again the wail of the shofar, each instrument of twisted ram’s horn, uplifted against the spiralling smoke that rose from the Place of Burnt Offering.
Then hail and fire and blood - a burning mountain, a sea of blood. Oh, Presbyter, I thought - you should have been there the day the temple died. How might you have written then? Had you known the hail of arrows, javelins - the rock missiles of the catapults shattering the temple walls - would you have found it necessary to have recourse to the minor horrors so overworked in ancient prophecy?
A sea of blood. Ankle deep it was, when the troops of Titus hacked their way towards the Holy House, that greatest of burning mountains.
I read on. The star, Apsinthos - wormwood - was to fall to earth and turn a third of all rivers bitter.
I knew what had inspired that. Our water supply was running low and tasting increasingly foul. I wondered if some contagion in the water was affecting him but if it were so, there should have been more men squirting into pans in the night, unable to reach the latrine.
Sun, moon, stars - all were to be darkened when the Most High rolled up the scroll in which He had written His creation, just as the prophet, Joel had described. The Presbyter’s memory of those scriptures he had once studied in Jerusalem was sharp enough for him to reconstruct the lurid imagery.
I rolled up his own scroll and went to my bed to dream of angels tipping burning coals from the gilded shovels of the temple hearth, to burn up all the earth. The Presbyter sat laughing on a cloud and swinging his feet like a child promised honeyed figs if he will be good.
He wandered again that night. I found him as before, seated on his favourite hole in the latrine, uttering a sound that seemed to have the hollow misery of an owl in winter.
“Woe! Woe! Woe!” he lamented, swaying from side to side and shivering in the cool of dawn. “Woe to the inhabitants of the earth...”
I recalled a mad-man in Jerusalem who spoke nothing but woe in the weeks before that dreadful, final siege. A rock missile tore his head from his shoulders, still mouthing doom, I was told, as it flew in a drizzle of hot gore to bounce off the rear battlements.
“Woe indeed,” I said through clenched teeth as I hauled him to his feet. “It’s woe for you if this damned nonsense doesn’t stop. What are you staring at?”
He was rigid, his eyes fixed on something in the reeking aperture below. He leaned over his vacated seat and pointed. I looked in, thinking he might have dropped something of value.
“It is a pit that never ends,” he whispered in tones of wonder. “A vent that serves as a chimney for the infernal realms below - did you know that? Out of it - smoke and locusts and creeping things - the stink of death....”
“Flies and maggots, yes,” I said. “Smoke - no, except when every man crowds in here on a winter’s morning. Now, let’s have an end to this or you won’t see that letter of yours again.” I shook him. “Back to your mat now.”
He gibbered to himself all morning. He spoke of scorpions in armour which made me certain he was speaking again of the Parthian cavalry: I had seen their war-horses sheathed in armour, their heads protruding out of a thorax of ornate breast-plating.
When he muttered of horses with human faces, I recalled those wheeling contingents of cavalry, every man working in such unison with his mount the effect was like watching immortal creatures going into battle.
“Abaddon, abbadon, abbadon,” he grunted, lapsing back into priestly Hebrew. “The place of destruction - kingdom of the dead. It is waiting.”
“Are you particularly anxious to be there?” I demanded, tipping a little goats’-meat broth into his sagging mouth. “There are a good number of men here who will happily help you on your way, Presbyter.”
His eyes rolled; he swallowed half a spoonful and spluttered the rest onto the front of his tunic. “I saw Abbadon, the angel of the abyss, coming up to bring destruction,” he groaned. “Abbadon, abbadon - the lyre-player leads the forces of destruction.”
I sighed with exasperation. Now he was dragging in the widespread and ludicrous rumour that Nero, the lyre-playing Emperor, had not died, or worse, had returned from the dead, and was in Parthia, ready to lead a vast host against Rome and reclaim his throne from the usurping Flavians.
I had seen enough of Nero’s coins when in Rome: that bloated exhibitionist depicted as Apollo Kitharoedus, the god of music. There had been astrological predictions made at the time that he would rule over the east - that he would even establish a new kingdom with Jerusalem as his capital.
Nero Redivivus! That ridiculous muddle of flattering prophecy, rumour and fear never died, even though Nero has long been dead and his mutilated corpse buried.
Nero the Returning God! In a world where gods incarnate - the off-spring of fantastic couplings between immortals and their chosen women - is it surprising that he, the Beast more bestial than Domitian, even he should be regarded as such a being?
I recalled the outrageous reports of Nero’s statue being erected on the rostrum in the Form Romanum - the way his degenerate friends and supporters continued to circulate his edicts, insisting he was still alive. The murder of great Apollyon was a hoax, they claimed - a lie! He would soon return to crush his enemies.
The Parthian king had helped foster this lunacy, it was said, by sending ambassadors to ratify a supposed alliance with Rome. They took it upon themselves to urge the Senate to honour great Nero’s memory.
Flowers had been heaped on his grave - we heard it, even in Jerusalem! Bullocks were slaughtered to nourish his detestable shade! There was so much incense burned to the glory of his name, the perfumed vapour had billowed to blot out the gables of Jupiter’s temple on the Capitoline hill.
Nero Redivivus!
“Listen, my poor fellow,” I said, forcing open the Presbyter’s mouth with the bowl of the spoon. “You may write it all down if you wish but shut up about it, will you? Just shut up. You’re disturbing my other patients - you’re disturbing me. Enough - do you understand? Now, lie down and be quiet or I’ll have you put on such a purge, you’ll liquify and run down that pit back there, in one steady stream until there’s nothing left but a husk to bury.”
He trembled, chilled under his blanket despite the day’s heat and muttering to himself soon fell asleep which meant he stayed mercifully silent until after noon. I found him then, as diffident as a child reprimanded. He asked me politely for his wretched letter and writing materials.
“Scorpions!” I scoffed. “Horses with men’s faces! Do you remember what you were babbling about this morning?”
“Oh, yes,” he said mildly. “It’s all very clear to me.”
“And what good will all that be to the people who look to you for guidance?” I asked. “Strange comfort for the faithful of Smyrna or Ephesus!”
“They know I am a prophet,” he said primly. “Give me my letter. Please.”
I went to my cell, brought him the scroll, the stylus, ink, but held them firmly.
“Tell me,” I asked, “are you familiar with the writings of the Prophet Enoch?” He nodded, reaching for his letter. “Do you recall,” I asked, “a passage which goes, ‘And in those days’ - Enoch meant the End Time, of course - ‘the angels shall return and hurl themselves upon the Parthians and the Medes. They shall stir up the kings so that a spirit comes upon them.’ He meant the kings of Parthia and his satraps. Do you remember the passage?”
He frowned, shuffled one foot. “No, I’m not familiar with the exact text...”
“You surprise me,” I said, “since most of your writing is derivative, isn’t it? Without the prophetic scriptures - especially the apocalyptic - you would be writing very little.”
“The scriptures support what is revealed to me,” he retorted. “My visions are given me...”
“Your visions suggest you are still far from well, Presbyter. I had visions too, once - not so much now that I am old - but I did not behave so badly that I disgraced the doctrines in which I believed.”
He gave a half snarl and shifted his weight onto one elbow, avoiding my eye.
“If I were to dip this scroll in honey and give it to you to eat, I swear you’d try it,” I said. “The way you were this morning - it would have surprised no one. So when you go over there to your rock in the shade, keep silent, will you? That way the Romans will not regard Christians as complete imbeciles and your dignity might inspire respect.”
There was a sudden rumble of thunder. Out over the sea, summer storm clouds were heaped like mounds of unwashed wool.
The Presbyter took the scroll from my hand as I led him outside. “Eating the book!” he sniggered. “Did not the holy Ezekial once devour a scroll in a vision as a sign that he had taken the words of Adonai into his innermost being?”
“I wondered if you’d recall that,” I replied. “And Ezekial gives us much the same laments and dirges as you have here. Be original, man! Say something new to your flock!”
He eyed me strangely and like a child, daring to provoke, he lifted the scroll to his lips and licked it. His darting tongue was grey and mottled, sliding across the roll with a damp crackle. Thunder boomed again and the air smelt of rust. Around us, dry grass prickled in anticipation of a deluge.
“The rain will drive you in before long,” I said, giving him both stylus and ink-bottle.
He cocked his head, sniffed the stirring air.
“Angels walk in this place,” he said. “There! And there!”
I left him pointing at the void.
I was coming out of the pharmakeia, clutching a further supply of poppy syrup and balsam when I saw Giton. He was standing in the centre of the market-place, staring at me. I could not wave - my arms were full of cheap jars - so I grinned and tossed my head to beckon him.
He approached slowly, caution in his eyes. When I greeted him warmly, he studied his large, bare feet and stuck out his lower lip like a child reprimanded.
“You betrayed me,” he muttered. “I thought you were a good man.”
“Giton!” I cried as he turned to go. “I did all in my power to protect you. They were watching us that day I baptized you…I tried to cover up when...”
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, still sullen but he reached for two of the jars to lighten my load and walked with me to the shade of a dusty cypress. “I should have expected it. They’ll be watching us now I suppose - more trouble for you.”
“Talking to a young man in the market-place? Who cares? I have to wait while they unload the bullock carts - another consignment of fine stone to be loaded on some ship over there.” We were as formal as magistrates at a reception. “At least you’re still allowed out, Giton?”
“To run errands, yes.” He picked his nose reflectively. “I’ve been trying to find some fellow-faithful but there don’t seem to be many Christians in Skala.”
“Ah - you’re still a believer - that’s good,” I said. “Is the mistress leaving you alone?”
“Yes, but the master isn’t. He prefers me over the new boy, even though he’s given me a woman for myself. She’s a Thracian - sold when she was seven to cover a debt, she says. Sold again at fifteen and that’s when she came here. I like her. She has a fine body - very shapely - and she makes me laugh. One day, I will marry her.”
I did not have the heart to start reproving him for his fornication. In Giton’s life, there was little enough joy. Goodness was written large in him. Christ Jesus would have approved of him. By their works you shall know them.
“You’re half-Jew, aren’t you?” Giton asked. I nodded. “So what were you doing in Rome?”
I explained that thousands of Jews lived there and had done so since the days of Pompey and Caesar when the city filled up with foreign captives.
“But you told me that you grew up in Judaea. Why leave such a place, especially when it was where our Lord lived and died? I would have stayed.”
“So would I if the choice had been mine,” I said, remembering how Stephanos had screamed as they dragged him away - how Thalia had wailed my name when they wrenched her out of my arms. “I was sent to Rome as a prisoner. As a man enjoying Roman citizenship that I inherited from my father, I was entitled to appeal to Claudius Caesar and to receive a fair trial.”
“Trial!” Giton was transfixed. “What did you do?”
I told him. Sitting in the shade and flicking away flies, I relived that distant time. It did me good to speak of it.
I told him of the long sea voyage and how we came at last to the great port of Ostia and how I was taken in a barge with other state prisoners, up the green and reeking highway of the Tiber river which brought us into the clamour and squalor of the city’s docks; its markets; a thousand warehouses and towering granaries where cliffs of brick and tile were washed by the shifting crowds. A whole world of every colour and outlandish garment under the sun.
Giton gazed almost without blinking. “The trial!” he said. “You’ve never spoken of this. Tell me what happened.”
I told him. Claudius himself had presided, fascinated to see the man accused of plotting against his old friend and ally in the east, Herod Agrippa.
Claudius had found insufficient evidence to convict me. With fluttering eye-lids and drooling lips, he dismissed the case: the charges of conspiracy to murder and of treason were both unproven, he insisted. When I lifted my head from the deepest bow of my life-time, he was giving his odd, lop-sided smile like a bashful child.
I was a free man. Or so it seemed until the Emperor quickly pointed out that since I had held such high office in the service of Agrippa, I could be of some assistance now to my Emperor - helping him to settle the Jewish problem.
What could I say? Insist that I go back immediately to my beloved wife and child in Judaea? I was lucky to be alive. Gaius Caligula would probably have had me fed to his specially imported panthers.
Incredulous, I was led to simple quarters on the Palatine hill and instructed to report each morning to the imperial bureaucrats and their flunkeys - Greeks, all of them - who made tart observations on the ways of provincials and swept me towards the Emperor’s official tablinum whenever the call came.
The Jewish problem was something he often spoke of.
There had been riots in Alexandria and in Caesarea after Agrippa’s death as I quickly learned, with the local Greeks and Hellenised citizens desecrating synagogues, abusing Jewish Elders in the streets. It was a familiar catalogue of outrages and insults. The contagion had spread to Rome itself with pitched battles in the poorer streets of the Jewish quarter.
“Mm ..my own advisers give m.me conflicting views,” Claudius stuttered. “It’s p-p-possible that the J-J-Jews of Rome are out of touch with events in...J-J-Jerusalem whereas you…”
I had food, shelter, a little money. I had the kindly fool’s favour. Bar Abbas, I recalled, had told me I would stand next to kings.
I also learned that the Emperor was not the imbecile his staff whispered he was. His palsy made him appear idiotic but he was sharp-witted and questioned me closely when I spoke of Praefectae like Pilatus. He was keen to learn every detail of Jerusalem’s new defences. When I insisted that Herod Agrippa had never plotted against him to seize the east, he seemed satisfied but would double-check my answers, flapping his fingers at the secretaries as they recorded every word…
“Your wife!” Giton was saying. “And your son, Father - what of them?”
“Oh, I asked if they might join me in Rome,” I explained, “but Emperors are busy men with much to occupy them, Giton. Sometimes he would give me his crooked smile and talk vaguely of sending for them.
“They did not come. One does not push the ruler of the world for personal favours. I did my duty. I conferred with Jewish Elders and I received reports from the imperial spies placed throughout Judaea – made my own assessment of these, to keep the Emperor satisfied.”
Giton sat silently as I talked on, recalling how Claudius gave me hope.
He assured me one morning, that my wife and son were safe and well. He had ordered that they be traced and found they had been permitted to live with Thalia’s father.
Over-joyed, I wrote to them entrusting the letter to a courier setting out with dispatches for the newly-appointed Praefect. Agrippa the Younger at only seventeen, was not deemed ready to rule a troublesome province.
The courier returned many weeks later with no reply.
I fell to praying again. I appealed to the Holy One of Israel, that my wife and son should be returned to me - or I to them.
“Five years passed, Giton. Imagine it! So long without my family.”
“What is a family?” Giton grunted. He looked up quickly. “Were you saved by then, Father?” His eyes were bright. “Had you received Christ in baptism?”
“Oh, yes,” I said lightly. “There were Christians all over Rome. I had many friends among them.”
How easy it was to lie to you, Giton!
I never received baptism though the believers I met naturally assumed I had. How else could I be so familiar with the circumstances of Christ Jesus’ death - know his followers and even his family? I did not speak now to Giton of the few friends in the circle within which I lived and worked - men who were devoted to Isis, the virgin mother-goddess of Egypt whose cult flourished in Rome. Or the devotees of Mithras, that Persian personification of the sun - of Attis and Cybele; Dionysus and Demeter-Ceres.
The Mysteries had become so popular in Rome, there were ritual feasts and blood baptisms and codes and anagrams, wherever I went. The most cryptic of ciphers were the means by which one devotee might recognize another and enjoy that warm sense of exclusiveness that initiation seems to offer.
I recalled the sign of the bull and the sacred cow; the basket of scented loaves enriched with narcotics; the flail and sistrum and sceptred ear of wheat in gilded bronze. I had watched ecstatics who had dined on the food of the gods - those fragrant crusts speckled darkly with hallucinogenic mushrooms. I had seen them after they had sipped from the chalice filled with wine that they firmly believed was the blood of a slain deity.
And I had found it only slightly strange, that a fish might be sketched in dust or water – two curving strokes intersecting to proclaim that here might be met a follower of one of those holy boatmen from distant Galilee, insisting that a recently crucified Jewish rebel was the only God – supreme ruler of the universe – in human form.
How absurd it had seemed to the staff of the imperial household! How they had laughed at the very idea of an executed Jewish magician being a deity in disguise!
My father had always regarded the Mysteries with both caution and disdain. He was right to do so as I was to subsequently learn.
“But what was the Jewish problem in Rome?” Giton was asking. “That king - Agrippa, was it? What did he do to anger the Romans?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “Can you bear it, Giton, if I tell you that not everything about the Christians is good?”
He looked a little baffled then grinned.
“I’m not a child, Father.”
“No, indeed, Giton.”
Carefully, I explained to him that the sign of the fish and the theological oddities which were often expounded by the Fishers of Men as they termed themselves, led to public brawls with plundered shops and heads beaten on shutters.
Rome’s synagogues were in uproar when the Christian doctrine was expounded and began to win a few converts. Conservative Jews could not abide the blasphemous doctrines that liberal Jews - back-sliders and heretics - were propagating. There were fierce clashes that quickly attracted the Jew-haters, those ignorant Roman shop-keepers and Greek craftsmen and Syrian merchants - the kind of people who have always despised the cult of Yahweh with its dietary laws, its prohibitions against image-making; against working on the last day of the week; against bedding boys or eating forbidden meats or tolerating other religions.
“The Jews have always found it difficult to honour the Emperor,” I explained, “although sacrifices for his well-being were offered each day in the temple in Jerusalem. There came a point when Claudius had simply had enough of civil unrest.”
I remembered how swiftly he took action against the disturbances, his resolution permitting him to almost swallow his stutter and speak like any man.
“There’s nothing else for it, my dear, Kleitos,” he said one morning. “Your compatriots will simply have to g-g-go.”
“Go?” I echoed. “Go where, Excellency?”
“Anywhere,” he said, wiping a thread of drool from his lower lip. “S-s-s-so long as it’s out of Rome. They’ve brought it on themselves. When they can l-l-l…learn to live like civilized people, p-p-perhaps I’ll reconsider the policy. You’ll have to help me draft it for presentation to the Senate. S-s-sorry about this but there it is.”
There were exceptions to the expulsions. Men like myself were permitted to stay on as residents but thousands were compelled by edict to pack up what they could carry on their backs or load into wagons and out they went - great lines of them, weeping their hearts out and praying with upraised hands while the street urchins pelted them with rotten fruit, horse-shit, stones. The rabble of unemployed who loiter each day near Rome’s great gateways howled abuse and jerked their fists at the Jewish women.
Giton listened in silence as I recalled it then asked me where the Jews had gone.
“Anywhere they could. Some drifted into provincial towns and coastal cities with good harbours – places where they could set up as traders if they could survive the malice of other citizens. The Emperor was relieved and moved on to other reforms. I used to walk past synagogues with sealed doors and I would give thanks that I had been raised in the Hellenic tradition.”
“So where did you go to worship?” Giton asked.
“Roman Christians meet in each other’s’ houses,” I said. “Only devout Jews who became converts had continued to attend their synagogues. The Christians I mixed with then were city converts who were not Jewish - the poor, mostly - plebeians, Giton. Oh, there were a few converts from the patrician class and even a few military men. But slaves and tinkers and labourers - the outcasts of the city who found consolation, as I think you do boy, in the promise of entering Christ Jesus’ kingdom - they were the people with whom I consorted.”
He nodded, gazing at me enviously.
I wanted to say, “Giton, I never willingly entered a Christian home! Had they known what I knew, Claudius might have been forced to deal with a far greater crisis.” I said nothing.
“It’s hard being a Christian,” Giton said. “The other house slaves laugh at me. They say that any cult that worships a crucified Jew is only for mad men. They tell me that nothing good can come out of Judaea.” He frowned. “Is it true, Father, that when the temple existed in Jerusalem, it contained a statue of an ass made of solid gold?”
“That is an absurd lie, much enjoyed by Jew-haters,” I said quickly. “The temple contained nothing - no images, no likeness of God the Father.”
Giton shifted his haunches in the dust. “Then is it true that the Jews cut off the top of a baby boy’s penis?” He was grinning, incredulous.
“That is true, yes. They cut the loose skin only.”
He was aghast. “Why? It’s barbaric! Was it done to Jesus too?”
“Of course! It’s a very ancient rite, practiced in Egypt and adopted by Moses, the founder of Judaism. It was originally a hygiene measure and very sensible too if you ever had to endure the discomfort of months spent in the sandy wastes where Moses led the Israelites after they fled Egypt, fifteen hundred years ago.”
“I wish Jesus had been born in Athens,” Giton said. He caught my sudden stare. “Well, think of it, Father! If he’d been a Greek - not a Jew - he’d be much more acceptable to everyone, wouldn’t he?”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “But then you’d have all who believe in him, ransacking Greek literature for prophecies of him! They’d be insisting, Giton, that the tales of Homer and Hesiod and all the great spinners of fable, were factual - literal truth! As Christians, you and I would be compelled to believe that the Minotaur actually lived in the labyrinth on Crete! That Pegasus, the winged horse, actually flew and that Perseus did truly cut off the head of a monstrous woman with snakes for hair. Imagine it!”
He was looking at me blankly. “I always heard such things were true,” he said carefully. “How do you know they didn’t happen?”
Giton had found little use in his life for sovereign reason.
“A flying horse, Giton! Think - is it likely?”
He screwed up his nose. “I’ve never seen one, Father.”
“And you’re not likely to either.”
“So why should I believe that Christ Jesus is coming again to judge us all and divide the wicked from the blessed? And rule for ever in the perfect kingdom?”
I sighed and gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
There were times I deeply regretted having spoken to him of such longings. Giton would have done just as well with the tales he heard when he was rocked on his mother’s knee and it was Jupiter who rattled the storm clouds; the swelling of the sea-wave, proved beyond reasonable doubt that Neptune breathed deeply under his mantle of water.
“Believe it because it gives you hope, boy.” I said. His face fell. “And because it may in time make the world a better place in which to live, if we treat all men - and women too - as equals. That is what Christ Jesus did and it is why we call him, Adonai - Lord - since his love gives us a little of his power to rise above the cruelty and wickedness of life.”
“Oh, yes,” Giton said, smiling now. “Love is one of the best things.” He put a hand on my arm. “But what happened to your wife and son, Father?”
“The carts are coming back from the harbour,” I said, getting stiffly to my feet. “Go now, Giton. The Lord bless you and keep you.”
“And you, Father.” He shuffled his bare feet in the dust. “I’m sorry I can’t come up to the barracks anymore.”
“I miss that too. I miss the food! But I am well enough without. Go, boy.”
He loped away with one backward glance, a quick wave. I took my load of supplies towards the transports, recalling how I had first spoken to Giton in this place; been charmed by his wit and a spirit undaunted by slavery. I had not taken him seriously when he had told me he could bring me food at night if I would tell him what I knew about the Galilean god-man who had been crucified in distant Judaea.
Among the heaped sacks of grain, I found a nest and was borne in sweet-smelling comfort up the winding road to my allotted place, that fetid realm of poorly washed bandages drying in the hot wind and long bunk-rooms full of bored and sullen soldiers. Giton had been like a shower in mid-summer, tapping against the shutter of my cell.
“The commander thinks I am protecting you,” I said to the Presbyter.
He did not look up from the boulder that served as his writing desk. “You are a protector,” he said mildly. “You cannot help it. Christ Jesus commands it and therefore you are his instrument. You will be the link between me and the faithful - of the seven cities and with others too.” He glanced up, wide-eyed. “I am writing for generations to come. My visions will inspire many.”
I was not inclined to discuss his more fanciful hopes: Giton had been enough for one day. I watched the Presbyter’s thin hand trembling as he dipped his pen into the ink. It did not seem remotely possible that he could be writing for anything more than the kitchen furnace in which glowing embers create visions of their own.
His new sequence of scrawled lines caught my eye.
An angel commanded the measuring of courts for a new temple; a beast rose out of the pit - again, that never-ending pit - and Jerusalem was described as being spiritually both Sodom and Egypt.
The poor fool had evidently embraced that conviction, common among Christians, that Jerusalem was cursed because it had failed to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Well, fire was rained upon it - that much was true - but not from heaven. There had been such a deluge of it in the last days when the legions of Titus systematically burned and levelled every building, that one might well believe the Holy One Himself had sanctioned such destruction, sparing nothing, not even His own House.
“Where were you when Jerusalem perished?” I asked.
The Presbyter did not look up. “I was in Ephesus. Christ saw to that. Had I been in Jerusalem, I could never have proclaimed him among the gentiles, could I? No greater horror could befall our people, I thought when I heard of its destruction. Clearly, Christ must soon return as was promised. Even so, come Lord Jesus!”
“Returning to what?” I demanded. “A scattered nation - a city turned into a mound of embers and shattered stone?”
“He is coming to judge the living and the dead,” the Presbyter said. “To reward the righteous with everlasting life in the eternal kingdom he shall establish and to punish the wicked.” His lips twisted as a fox might show teeth, nibbling at a thistle. “To destroy all that is corrupt in undying fire.”
Some string that bound my heart snapped. “Yours is the old longing of the apocalyptics - nothing more!” I barked. “You have transformed Jesus from a personification of the love and mercy and forgiveness of the Holy One, into a baleful magistrate in the mould of the Beast himself, condemning all those who have offended him, to fire and torment!”
The Presbyter sat up, rigid with shock.
“What are you talking about? There is no similarity, you son of perdition! That creature clad in purple…”
“Rewards those he loves, tortures those he hates!” I was shouting now - heads lifted across the compound. “Your Christ is represented in this document as hating. What is the difference between Christ and Domitian?”
“Difference?” Spit flew from his lips. His eyes were wide with fury. “You dare to link them?”
“It is you who links them, Presbyter! Domitian delights in the suffering of those who have caused him offence. Your Christ seems to derive a certain satisfaction, does he not, from making the wicked endure every torment?” I jabbed at one line of his scrawl with a shaking finger. “There look! ‘…there was a great earthquake and seven thousand men were slain.’ I can’t quite see how a non-existent city can fall but supposing it could - a re-built Jerusalem shaken by an earthquake of the future, then Christ has become the vengeance of the Holy One Himself, as in the days of Abraham and of Moses and the prophets - given to slaughtering, the infliction of pain, all the barbarism of the primitive past!”
I dropped painfully into a half-crouch, lowered my voice. “Did Christ Jesus not command that we pray for our enemies? Forgive them? Did he not insist that by love, all people might find redemption?”
The Presbyter shook with such exasperation he spattered the lines with a blight of ink drops.
“That is a matter of opinion! Yes - he commanded love as Paulus of Tarsus made very plain but if his love is spurned - if men are given a chance and they reject it - then they have only themselves to blame when the penalty for their wilfulness has to be paid.”
“Ah! Now I understand,” I hissed at him. “Thank you! Carry on, John Theologos! This letter of yours will be a comfort to many who long for justice as you do - justice bearing a sword and flame and craving the sight of suffering!”
I left him then and went to tend men in need.
Two soldiers recovering from the flux, sat against a wall, tormenting an injured bird with flicked stones. Inside, others lay farting and swearing in the heat. I found there was no anger in me now but something resembling pity. They yearned for homes so distant - families so long unseen - the image of loved things was fading for them, like cloud-made statues, caught in high winds on the rim of the sea.
I knew I would have to answer Giton’s question eventually. My wife and son – what of their fate?
I had been like these guards despatched to a bare outpost of the empire, dreaming of them at night, longing for them by day. I grew accustomed to their absence but my longing for them had been a permanent ache that gnawed at me.
There came a day, I recalled yet again, when Claudius summoned me to his tablinum and informed me there were a number of delegates from Judaea for me to interview before he could receive them.
I had hastened to the great atrium of the palace and found a woman and a boy waiting for me. Their backs were turned to the opened doors - sunlight streamed across the mosaic floor and in the dazzle, they were made dark images.
I heard the woman wail. She darted forward and threw herself against me. Thalia’s scent engulfed me - her thick hair was greying but still soft and shining. The boy - half way to manhood, it seemed - I would have passed in a city street and never known.
When I looked up from the tangle of arms and wet faces pressed against my own, the Emperor stood with his secretaries, rocking with laughter at his carefully arranged surprise.
A good man, old Claudius. Beloved Emperor! I had tried to blurt my gratitude through a veil of tears but he waved me away and gave orders for the best food to be delivered to my apartment and that I was not to be disturbed for two days.
I could not keep my hands from my wife and son. I stroked their faces, their arms; shook with helpless tears and with laughter; blurted snatches of the thanksgiving psalms my mother had taught me when I was a child.
Thalia had lines I had not seen before but she was my beautiful Raven. Stephanos was long-limbed and wide-mouthed like some cheerful dog with eyes more bright than I had remembered. We clung to one another and for long periods, could remain silent, simply stroking well-loved flesh, remembering how we once had been.
Gradually, Thalia told me what had happened when they had been dragged away from me.
Kypros had kept them both under house arrest until she grew tired of waiting to hear that I had been found guilty then duly executed. She released them, dismissed them, bearing them no particular malice. Thalia had found refuge with her father as I had expected but he, desiring that the very memory of my name should perish, had intercepted my letters and destroyed them. When Thalia eventually discovered this from an indiscreet servant, she had taken Stephanos back to Galilee and the friends we had left in Tiberius.
She had earned money as a midwife. She had learned too, how to lay out the dead for burial or for the pyre. Working with other women, she had supported herself and had seen Stephanos educated at a city gymnasium where an excellent grammaticus had turned him into a young scholar of distinction.
I had found it impossible to take my eyes off Stephanos.
My son was tall and grave and coltish with his mother’s good looks yet so like me at his age, I was filled with a sense of wonder for the ways in which the divine Will blesses us when we least expect it.
“I hardly know you, father,” Stephanos used to say.
He recalled the tales I had once spun, of the Jewish and Greek heroes - of strong-men like Samson and Heracles. “You are stronger, my son!” I assured him. “You have survived and come to Rome - they never did that!”
“Your father could fall into a sewer and still emerge smelling of roses,” Thalia had said, hooking one arm around my neck. “He has a special arrangement with the gods, Stephanos! Once, he sat and spoke with one of them - it’s true! Tell him about the crucified god-man, Kleitos.”
“When he is older,” I had said. “God-men are not easily understood.”