The seed that generated this story, set in the ancient Rome that motivates my creative Muse more than any other venue or time period, was planted during my mid-teens in Scotland, when one of the members of my high school English class, who typified the kind of snooty, pontificating jerk that everyone loves to detest, came home from a weekend camping trip with some evidently benighted, moronic neo-Nazi friends and presented me (at third hand) with my very first conspiracy theory—which he presented as well-documented, undeniable fact—that a secret international cabal of Jewish bankers controlled the fiduciary affairs of the entire world. Even at the age of fifteen I knew better than to believe that or to let it pass unchallenged, and so I got into one of the few serious blood-drawing fist fights of my youth.
I never really thought about it again until the summer of 2009, when I heard another Scotsman spout the same unconscionably racist bigotry that had disgusted me so many years earlier. This time, though, the speaker was someone who, in my opinion, should have known much better and should have kept what were to us his unsuspected prejudices tightly stifled.
We had been talking idly over a cold beer that day—it was summer and we’d been playing golf—first about the trappings and then about the reality of power and how people perceive it and achieve it, and that’s when the garbage erupted. This time, however, instead of fighting over it, I wrote the piece that follows.
They were everywhere, Levi thought, everywhere he looked and everywhere he could not see. Romans. The entire country was in their grip, a pigeon in the mouth of a cat.
He turned away from the window, with its view of the drab, brown-clad legionaries on parade across the street, and looked back towards the man seated behind the table with his neat piles of rolled parchments. In the dust-covered street, a donkey brayed, its ugly hacking cough close enough and loud enough to cover even the sounds of the hawkers and peddlers.
Levi waited for the noise to subside, conscious of the deep stillness within the chamber. The only motion in the room was a mere suggestion: a stationary dance of dust motes in the one beam of bright light that blazed through the window, painting a bright slash across the floor and illuminating a corner of one rug and the edge of the table. Surrounding the shimmering brilliance of the sharp-edged swath, the rest of the room seemed dark.
It was a bare chamber, yet sumptuous. Two chairs faced the table side by side, and they were plain and uncomfortable high-backed sellae with their narrow, restrictive arms. A third chair, behind the table, was a curule, the classical Roman magisterial chair, backless, with a polished hide seat supported by curved cruciform ivory legs. The table itself, fully three paces in length, was made of solid slabs of citrus, the rarest and most expensive wood in the world, and the floor was one enormous, brilliantly coloured mosaic. One of the three rugs scattered casually on the floor was obviously Persian, its colours muted yet glowing still despite their antiquity, while another was from the fabulous Eastern Lands, silken and rich with vibrant blues and brilliant reds and yellows. The third was the entire skin of a gigantic white bear. Cured in such a way that its enormous head remained intact, this fantastic creature glared up from the floor directly in front of the table, its gaping jaws revealing teeth as long and thick as Levi’s fingers. Two marble busts, beloved of the idolatrous Romans, stood on plinths against the wall behind the table, flanking the man who sat in the ivory curule chair. He was leaning forward with his arms crossed, watching Levi closely, a small frown creasing his brow.
“You look amused, Master Levi. That’s the last thing I might have expected from a man who has failed to live up to his word and now sits before me as a delinquent debtor. Did I say something humorous?”
Levi sighed. “No, Caius Tullius. You did not. That is not within your capacity.”
The frown deepened instantly to a scowl. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Levi stepped forward and sat in one of the high-backed chairs. “It was not supposed to mean anything. It was a plain statement of fact, no more. I believe humour is alien to your nature, that is all.” His eyes were fixed on the sunbeam that stabbed through the gloom. “Look at the way the dust motes seem to dance in that beam of light.”
The other man’s eyes flicked towards the slanted golden column, then returned to Solomon Levi, betraying a spark of anger. “Have you heard even one word of what I have been saying to you, Master Levi?”
“Oh yes. I have heard and absorbed every word, including those you did not say.” The other man blinked. Levi clasped his hands over his flat stomach, interlacing his fingers. “Would you like me to repeat them? Or the sense of them as I understood them?”
Tullius’s head dipped sideways. “I would. I would indeed. Please. Surprise me.”
“You have been telling me,” Solomon Levi said, “that you are about to terminate my livelihood, casting me and all who depend on me into destitution, and inviting me to believe that you have no choice in the matter.”
The Roman’s eyebrows rose. “Did I say that?”
“Yes. Not in those precise words, but we both know that is what you’ve been saying for the past hour.”
“I see. Then why are you not angry?”
Levi stifled a sigh. “Why should I be angry? What would I achieve? There is nothing I can do to stop you, other than by acceding to your demands for more money, and I am powerless to do that.”
“Ah! Powerless. I see.” Tullius looked away, his gaze drifting towards the window and the street outside. “Tell me, Master Levi, do you understand what power is, what it represents?”
“Of course I do. It represents itself, for itself, by its very existence. I also know enough about it to know I am powerless to influence your evident decision.”
The straying eyes snapped back to Levi. “What decision? What have I decided? I spoke of no decision.”
“Words, Caius Tullius! Your words, spoken or not, would be pointless and specious in this instance. You did not use them, admittedly, but you had no need of them. Your nature speaks for you.” Levi rose to his feet. “I have no time for this. Enjoy your victory, Caius Tullius, before your mouth fills with the taste of the ashes you have just acquired. I must pay off my men, as far as I am able, and see them settled as well as I can before I conclude my affairs here and move on. Good day to you.” He moved towards the door.
“Wait!”
Levi half turned. “Why? There is no more to be said.”
“Perhaps not. But please, sit. Permit me to think for a moment.”
As Levi resumed his seat, his face expressionless, Tullius got up from his own chair and crossed slowly to the window. He was a handsome man, tall and still young enough to look youthful, although the weight of his responsibilities was beginning to show itself in the stoop of his wide shoulders and the slight but clearly graven lines on his face. Levi’s eyes missed nothing of the man, noting that the price of the clothes he wore so casually could have sheltered and fed whole families of the city’s poor for months.
“You are a strange man, Solomon Levi. One, I suspect, with few equals among those supposed to be your peers. I am tempted to . . . be lenient with you.” He swung away from the window, returned to his chair at the table, and looked Levi straight in the eye. “I almost said ‘to appease you.’ Now why would I wish to say that?” He paused, then resumed in a brisker tone. “On the matter of the moneys, unfortunately there is little I can do. As you so aptly pointed out, I, too, like every other man, have my masters, to whom I am accountable. On some of the other matters, however, we may be able to arrive at a compromise.”
“Such as?”
“We’ll come to that. But there will be a price.”
The merest hint of a smile touched Levi’s lips, then vanished. “There always is. But I have no more money.”
“I did not mean money. The price will be some of the contents of your mind. Payable immediately.”
“My thoughts, you mean? Interesting. And for what . . . commodity will I be paying?”
“Understanding. My understanding.” Tullius watched him. “That makes you smile. Why?”
Levi shook his head slightly. “Simply because of your need to believe that I have any need of your understanding. You Romans value understanding, Caius Tullius. Few others do—particularly in this land of ours. But Romans crave it. You lust after it, are obsessed by it. Why? Can you not simply accept that there are some things that defy understanding? Or that knowledge, in and of itself, is enough? Why are you driven to understand everything?” He brushed the matter away with a flick of his hand. “Fruitless to discuss that. Unless your understanding would permit me to continue with my craft—and you have already said you are powerless to influence that—then I have nothing to gain from any understanding you might have of me. But I confess I am curious nonetheless. About what would you have me speak? What portion of my mind interests you?”
Tullius stretched out his arm idly and thrust his hand into the beam of sunshine that now laid a brilliant band across the table. The hand leapt into prominence, painted with golden light. “The different part,” he said, turning his hand and admiring the play of light and shadow as it moved. “The part that makes you able to absorb what I have been saying to you, make a decision based upon it—a swift, drastic decision that radically alters your entire life—and allows you to remain outwardly unruffled as though you had not a care in the world. Those are Roman attributes. One does not expect such—what is the word? Sophistication, I suppose—from . . .”
“From a Hebrew?”
“From one who is not Roman, was my thought.”
“A barbarian.”
“A non-Roman.”
“Not of the blood.”
“What blood? Roman blood?” Tullius smiled. “There is no longer any such thing, Levi, you know that. The ideal did exist, once upon a time, when wealthy patrician Roman families took pride in being descended from Romulus and Remus. But it is more than a hundred years now since the so-called emperor Caracalla decreed that all free men in the empire, along with their wives, were to be awarded full Roman citizenship. That immediately made nonsense of the idea that anyone’s blood could seriously be considered Roman. So I have no hidden reason for requesting your opinion, merely curiosity.”
“What is it that you want to hear?”
The Roman gazed at him through narrowed eyes. “You said earlier you have an understanding of power, and you’ve shown me the power you have over yourself. Where most men would be raging, or crushed, or emotionally overwhelmed by the situation you now find yourself in, you remain completely calm. Placid. Is that your understanding of power, Solomon Levi? That it is the power of self-control?”
Levi’s expression was set and solemn. “Why should you care what I think of power, Caius Tullius, and why should I indulge your urge to know my thoughts?”
Tullius shrugged. “I care what you think because I see that you can and do think, Solomon Levi, and that in itself is unusual among the clients with whom I deal. Many of my clients function very well within the limited areas they choose to work in, and many have abilities that sometimes verge upon the uncanny in the matters of their trades, but there are very few I would ever think of as being thinkers. You, I perceive, are a thinker—a man who uses his powers of logic and deduction to govern his actions. And so I am interested in your opinion.”
“But that is ludicrous, Caius Tullius. I am a simple man, a craftsman. I have no wealth, no sophistication, as you so pointedly observed a moment ago, and I certainly have no power. The fact that I am here, at your bidding, at your mercy and at your disposal, demonstrates that, does it not? Why do you seek to humiliate me by asking me what I know about power?”
“Few equals among your supposed peers, I said. I take that back. It was inadequate and ill considered. You have no equals, and I am disappointed in myself not to have seen that before now. I called you here as a recalcitrant debtor, an unknown, delinquent nuisance to be dealt with firmly. But instead I find an opponent to be reckoned with—a client with a mind.” He rested his elbow on the arm of his chair, leaned his weight on it. “So be it. No more false modesty from you, Solomon Levi, and no more blind prejudice from me. Your speech alone, the way you hold yourself, your lack of fear of me and what I represent, all signify your sophistication. Now, again, tell me what you know of power. All of what you know.”
Levi shrugged in a way that no Roman could ever mimic with authority. “My grandsire’s grandsire used to say, ‘Be careful what you wish for, lest your wish be granted.’ Very well, then. What I have to say may turn you from an importunate moneylender into an implacable enemy, Caius Tullius. But then, since I know you are already such a foe—even though you may not yet realize it—I have nothing to lose by telling you what you wish, or do not wish, to hear.”
He stood up and stretched out his hands for Tullius to inspect. “Look at these.” They were big hands, dwarfing Tullius’s own, their palms hard-skinned and callused, with strong, thick, blunt thumbs and fingers, all with broken nails. “I am a builder. There is power in these hands, you agree? And in these arms,” he added, pulling up the sleeve of his robe to display powerful forearms corded with heavy muscle. “Look.” He stepped behind the table and, using only one hand, picked up one of the heavy marble busts by the neck, clamping his fingers around it easily. It rose as though weightless, and there was no sign of strain in any part of him. Tullius’s eyes widened slightly as he watched Levi replace the statue gently on its plinth and return to the front of the table.
“That is one kind of power, the kind you expect of men like me, no?” He shook his head. “But no. It is a spurious power, without substance, because without moving from your chair you could summon soldiers and have my arms and my hands broken into so many pieces I could never use them again for anything. What is the use of such power to a working man, except for lifting things? It even works against him, because it is useful to you and your like who can threaten to remove it by force, crippling him and leaving him truly powerless. So physical strength is not often worth much to its owner, is it? Where, then, is power?”
He waved an arm to indicate the chamber and its furnishings. “This room represents power, all on its own. When I came in, I was led in by a slave who never raised his eyes to look at me, yet let me know by his demeanour that I was less significant than he because he belonged here, whereas I had been ordered to attend. And then I was left waiting, left to be daunted by the richness of this chamber and to become aware of my own lack of worth. Consider that table at which you sit so grandly. Possession of that single piece would finance my entire enterprise and wipe out my indebtedness to you. That is as magnificent a piece of citrus wood as I have ever seen, but then, I have only ever seen three pieces. Yet I would be prepared to wager, in defiance of my creed, that it is as magnificent a piece as you have ever seen, too, no? And you—you are magnificent in your clothes and in your appearance and in your carriage. That too is power, is it not?
“But let us remain with the table. Your table is a symbol of power on its own, quite apart from its value or its substance. This table represents power in its very appearance. Look at it! All that flat, polished, empty space, waiting to be used for momentous things. And the parchment scrolls, so fine, so tightly rolled. So substantial! They are obviously very important documents, otherwise why would they be so carefully rolled and stacked so neatly? Who else but a financier, a merchant who deals in money, would ever take the trouble to roll parchment so tightly, so neatly, so impressively? And to treat each one with such care? And look, only one pen! Only one ink horn. This is the table of no ordinary man. This is the table of a man of power, and every lesser man who sits, supplicant, in one of these lesser, less comfortable chairs, facing this table, is aware of that. These are the trappings of power.
“And when you entered and sat in the curule chair behind the table, I knew who you are! Not to mention what you are. I wonder, however, whether you realize fully who and what you are.”
The noises in the street outside hardly seemed to penetrate the room. Tullius stirred. “Go on. I’m enthralled. Who, and what, am I?”
Levi gazed steadily back at the man behind the table. “Are you sure you want an answer to that? Do you not feel the slightest stirring of unease?”
“Yes to the first question and no to the other—not the slightest stirring of unease. Not at all. Should I?”
Levi shrugged his big shoulders. “Who knows? Tell me later. For now, I have to speak of power. I grew up in a village where the second most powerful man in the place—the second most powerful—was a carpenter called Ichabod. He was a bad carpenter and always had been, but in his youth, he married a woman called Mehitabel, and she bore him fourteen daughters. Fourteen! And not one son. He was a laughingstock, and perpetually impoverished. But his girls grew and worked hard to lessen their parents’ burden, and lo and behold, as they ripened, they grew astoundingly beautiful, each of them a pearl beyond price, as the saying goes, although none of them was beyond price. Ichabod sold them off wisely, marrying each to the highest bidder, one after the other. He accumulated a fortune, and he bought land and cattle, and his fortune multiplied. He became a power among our people because he grew rich, and those who had laughed at him soon grew to envy him.
“And one day Ichabod’s goats—by this time he had hundreds—attracted the attention of a richer man, from a nearby town, who ruined Ichabod simply because he was both jealous of him and richer than him, and was therefore able to ruin him. Ichabod killed himself, a great sin. By our village standards, you see, Ichabod was powerful, but by the other man’s standards, he was weak, because his power—his knowledge, his wisdom—was not great enough to protect either him or itself.
“So you see, riches do not constitute power—unless, of course, those riches are so massive that they become unassailable and inexhaustible, and by that time they have changed. They are no longer merely riches. They have become wealth, and wealth is an entirely different creature. Few men can accumulate real wealth unassisted in one lifetime.”
He squinted towards Tullius, whose face was half-obscured in shadow. “And that, I can see you thinking, is ludicrous. Of course they can. And they do. You have done it, have you not? Whereas I, I have not. Therefore your power over me is so absolute that I will not allow it either to surprise me or to anger me.” He stretched his own hand into the beam of light. “There. I have told you all you want to hear.”
“I think not.” Tullius clapped, and the doors opened instantly. “Wine,” he snapped to the slave on the threshold, then immediately raised his hand to detain the man, glancing at Levi. “Will you have some? Or is it against your beliefs?”
“It is.” Levi smiled. “But it is a lesser sin, a gentle weakness, in moderation. I will have some wine.”
The slave departed and Tullius sat for a moment, staring at Levi. “Your thinking interests me, Solomon Levi. Your logical processes. As I said, you are a far more intuitive man than anyone would guess from your appearance. But I think you are still not telling me what you truly believe. You’re holding something back, some understanding, or some conviction. Why? Do you judge me unworthy of hearing it because I am Roman?”
Levi laughed, a great, booming sound. “Unworthy, as a Roman? No, not at all!”
“Then why? Believe me, you may be open with me. This is between us alone. Your words, no matter how incendiary, will go no further than this room. If you do not judge me unworthy, then you do consider me an enemy. You have said so. Yet I sense no hatred in you.”
Levi shook his head slowly. “You sense no hate in me because I do not hate you, Caius Tullius. I do not even dislike you. You and I could never be friends, but our hostility is intellectual only. I know your function, you see—although you do not see—and I can appreciate it without admiring it, or condemning it, other than in principle.”
“What do you mean, you know my function?”
The slave returned at that point, and they sat in silence until he had poured each of them a glass beaker of wine from a magnificent glass flagon and departed, leaving the flagon on its salver on the table.
Levi raised his cup, sniffed appreciatively, and sipped. “That is delicious. And, of course, you are correct. There is something I am not saying. But you do not wish to hear what else I have to say.”
“Try me.” Tullius sipped at his own wine.
“So be it.” Another sip, then Levi stood up. “Here we are, you in your curule chair behind your table, me standing here. If I were to point now to the power present in this room, where would I point?”
Tullius blinked. “At me.”
“Correct.” He sipped again. “Now, a suggested change of circumstance.” He sat down in his high-backed sella. “Were you to come around and stand here”—he pointed to the chair next to his and waited while Tullius stood up and moved to stand beside him—“can you show me where the power in the room is now, with you standing and me sitting? Where would I point?”
“At me.”
“Wrong.”
Tullius stood stock-still, a frown clouding his face. “How can it be wrong?” he growled.
Solomon Levi pointed at the empty curule chair behind the table. “Because the power resides there, in that chair, behind this table. When you left it, you left the power behind you. Standing on this side, you are no more than a man, and you are powerless over me.”
Tullius scowled. “That is ridiculous.”
“You see?” Levi said tonelessly. “I was correct. You did not want to hear it.”
Tullius strode around the table and threw himself into his chair. “How could you even say such a thing? I had been listening to you with respect, Levi, but that is ludicrous. Laughable. Stupid!”
“Is it? Where did your personal wealth come from?”
“What concern is that of yours?”
“None, but you are young to have so much of it. You inherited it, did you not?”
“So?”
“So it is not yours.” Levi’s voice was hard, quite suddenly, and cold. “It belongs to your family, and they accord you the use of it, providing you do as you are told. That is your function!” The words hung in the air with the dust motes in the sunbeam. In a softer voice, he continued. “I know your family, Tullius. I know your clan. I know far more than you, or any of them, could suspect. If you were to demonstrate an unwillingness, or an inability, to carry out the wishes of your immediate family and their advisors, you would be removed from your post, no? That is why you said there was nothing you could do about the moneys. You are a functionary. The real decisions are out of your hands. Beyond your power.
“You sit upon the real power. That chair. Because—and let us be truthful here—that chair represents, along with every other inanimate thing in this room, the truly incredible power that your family has accumulated over centuries, a wealth so colossal that its limits are indefinable. It is not your wealth, it is your family’s wealth. It is so enormous that no one person could own it or administer it, although there will always be one paterfamilias charged with the responsibility of administration. But even he will be removed immediately should he ever give cause for concern. Because the power of your family’s wealth is so vast that it demands strict patterns of behaviour from the people of the entire world to keep that power functioning. It demands the most rigid stability to keep the empire’s financial affairs from plunging into chaos. And that need for stability carries within it the awful potential for overwhelming destruction, for annihilation, for unprecedented cataclysmic changes that will accommodate predetermined change. And the responsibility for that pursuit of stability to maintain the wealth resides in the family, in the clan, in the bloodline. And no one who is not of the blood can be allowed to know that truth, because the realization would bring destruction on the clan, and chaos to the entire world.”
Caius Tullius was ashen, and his mouth worked aimlessly before he could articulate his next words. “How can you know this? Who told you this?” He looked crushed, physically wilted, and his voice sounded as though he had aged thirty years.
Levi emptied his cup and placed it on the ground by his foot. “No one told me. I worked it out for myself, when I was old enough to wonder why people like my father, and like me, and people far greater than either of us, could not survive without the support of people like you, the great moneylenders, even though God had qualified them to do what they do so well. So I began to ask questions. And I listened. And I read. And I looked carefully around me and asked more questions. And eventually I began to discern the beginnings of some answers that conformed, quite frighteningly, to the observations that had led to my questions.”
“‘Conformed quite frighteningly,’” Tullius said, almost in a whisper. “Explain that, please?”
Levi picked up his empty cup. He rolled it gently between his palms as he spoke. “When I was a boy, I overheard a conversation between my father and one of his greatest friends, a man I had always considered fabulously rich and powerful. That man said something that day that astounded me when I considered it later. Not merely later that day but throughout my life. He said that there are people in this world who are so staggeringly wealthy, and therefore so immensely powerful, that the laws that govern ordinary men do not apply to them, and further that the mass of ordinary men are not only unaware of this, but remain completely unaware throughout their lives that these people exist.
“Years later, when I was afire with the need to know, I went back to ask this man to explain what he had meant, but he had died years earlier, taking his knowledge with him. But from the moment I began to form my questions, I knew there were others who knew the answers.”
“And what were your questions?”
Levi grinned. “The one in my mind now is: ‘Why isn’t this man screaming for help and having me thrown into a dungeon as a raving madman?’” He shrugged. “My questions were legion, and they all terrified me because every one of them contained a challenge to, and a denial of, everything that I had been taught to believe from the moment I was old enough to think.”
Levi rose to his feet again and placed his empty cup on the silver salver. “Of course,” he said, looking down on Tullius, “as the answers began to materialize, I quickly came to appreciate an amazing truth: I had been searching blindly, in dusty, shadowy corners and secret places, when the answers were all in the open, plainly visible to any man who knew what to look for.”
“Nonsense.” The Roman’s voice was a whisper now. “Nothing is in the open.”
“Really?” Levi stood up again and moved away from the table, towards the window. “Nothing is in the open in the normal sense, and yet in quite another sense, it is. But the truth is transparently concealed behind one fact that hides it from men’s eyes.”
The soldiers who had paraded on the other side of the street were gone. The street was deserted now except for a few straggling pedestrians, and the dust had settled into a thick, warm blanket over the cobblestones. Levi turned, leaning his back against the sill of the window, seeing his shadow hard and black across a different stretch of flooring, the shape of his head askew against the far wall. He had lost track of time.
Tullius cleared his throat. “And what is that? That fact?”
Levi looked down and adjusted the drape of his long overgarment, then spoke from where he was, knowing that Tullius, no matter how hard he squinted, could not see his face against the glare of the light behind him.
“The fact is that the truth is so evident, and so monstrous, that ordinary men cannot bring themselves to believe the evidence that is in front of them. Your family name is Tullius, but you are directly related, by blood, to the Seneca clan, the richest on earth. They finance all of Rome! Everything! Nothing of note that happens in the Roman world, or beyond it in the barbarian lands, happens without the financial involvement, at some level, of the Seneca clan. That defies belief—and yet it is true, from all that I have found, even with the small resources I possess. And the clan’s wealth came to them from down the centuries, didn’t it? It came out of Athens and Troy, and out of Macedon, and Nineveh, and Tyre, accumulated by ancestors stretching back to the beginnings of time. Rome may rule the world in the eyes of ordinary men, but your clan rules Rome! And when Rome is finished, as Greece was, and Macedon, and Carthage, your clan will survive, with all its wealth, located somewhere else. Am I not right?”
“You were correct to wonder. I should have you incarcerated as a madman.”
“Too late, Caius Tullius. I know now what I know.”
“So to whom do you intend to tell this fantastic tale?”
Levi returned to his chair. “To all who would believe me. And I already have. They were few. Most men, were they to hear my views, would think me mad.”
“And the few who did not? What do these intend to do?”
“What can they do? They will live by the rules set up by you—live within the system. But they are aware, and knowledge is power.”
“Hmm! Power again.”
“Of course.”
“So, you would pit your power against this clan’s?”
“Caius Tullius! That would be folly. We will use our understanding to coexist within the system.”
“If you are permitted to live . . . possessing such knowledge, I mean, and assuming it to be accurate.”
“Now you are being provocative.” Solomon Levi smiled. “In any case, I will not die before I make my point, which you were at such pains to wrest from me. Certainly, you can have me killed. You have that power. But consider this: I could kill you now, before the help you might summon could arrive. I would die, but you would, too. And what end would be served? No . . .” Unhurriedly now, Levi stood and moved to refill his empty wine cup, then replenished Tullius’s, who made no move to pick it up.
“The power of life and death is not true power, Caius Tullius. Personal knowledge is unconquerable, yet there is nothing personal in your clan’s power, which is why it is powerless against people like me. My life’s true work is already done. I have passed on my knowledge. I have long since spread my ideas, and that is what will blunt your clan’s power, someday, if anything can, in the eyes of free men.”
“There are no free men.” Tullius’s voice was hushed.
“Ah, but there are. You have not been listening as closely as you ought. Freedom—true freedom—exists in the mind of the thinking man, and only there, and that is one place power like yours cannot penetrate. Can you not see that? Men who are thus free enjoy the freedom to ignore your power and to despise you, to defy you, and to expose you for what you are, if they so wish.”
He broke off, then continued. “You disappointed me, Caius Tullius. I told you Ichabod was the second most powerful man in our village, and I expected you to ask me who the most powerful man was.” He paused again, until he judged that Tullius would not rise to his bait. “My father was the most powerful man in our community. He was a builder, like me. A master builder, trained in the ancient crafts of the architects who built the great Temple on the plain behind us, erected by King Solomon, my namesake. And that is why you will not have me killed or thrown into a dungeon—because you know that people like you need people like me. You live in palaces, but you can’t build them, not with all the slaves in the world, because our lore, the craft of the master builders, is secret, held in the mind, and painstakingly acquired throughout a lifetime of learning and doing. You may extract the theory, by torture or by guile, but you can never extort the ability to design, or to gauge at a glance what is structurally correct and what is not. Your power requires the builders, the architects, the engineers, the contractors, the free men, in order to portray itself. In all things there is balance. Your great trading houses must be built—your temples to trade and commerce, to Baal, to wealth, wherein you wield your power—but you would be roofless without our skills, our tools, and our knowledge.
“Look closely at King Solomon’s Temple next time you pass by it. It was built by men like me.”
Tullius slammed his open palm down on the tabletop. “But it was paid for by men like me! Where do you think Solomon acquired the wealth to build it? From us! He had the dream of appeasing his god, but we, and only we, had the wealth to make his dream a reality. Just as we have the wealth to tear it down tomorrow should it suit our purpose to wipe it from the earth. The Great Temple of Solomon the Wise!” His voice quivered with anger.
“You do,” Solomon Levi agreed calmly. “But it does not alter the balance I spoke of. Your wealth can never wipe out the memory of the Temple, the fact that it once stood, that it was built. Nor can it purchase the skills and abilities to rebuild it—you will still need men like me, free, knowledgeable, and of good will. In that endeavour, Master Tullius, your mighty clan is not merely powerless. It is useless. You may have me killed now, but all your power would be useless in any attempt you might make to convince me to permit you to rule my thoughts, or to allow you to exist without condemning you . . . or understanding you! My life is nothing, but my skills, my abilities, and my knowledge already reside in the minds and in the hearts of those who will take my place. And not simply tomorrow, Caius Tullius, but down through the years and the centuries.”
He rose to his feet. “And now I will leave you. I have an enterprise to conclude, premises to close down, and a family to care for. No doubt you have letters to write, to your own family. I wish you well at their hands.”
Solomon Levi turned and left the room, a tall, broad old man with long, grey hair and a youthful, confident step. He made no attempt to close the door behind him, knowing that the servant posted there would do that without thinking, and he did not even glance again towards the window where, in his curule chair, the Roman Caius Tullius sat slack-jawed, a handsome, far younger man, bowed with the weight of his power, the lines in his cheeks now pronounced and deep-graven as he slumped on bent arms across the table’s polished top, his eyes staring straight ahead into some unknown depth.
After a long time, without looking, the banker groped for his cup of wine and his fingers displaced the symmetry of the pyramidal pile of tightly rolled parchments, sending them tumbling, some of them to the mosaic floor. Tullius ignored them, staring into some emptiness ahead of him. His hand remained flat on the tabletop, his fingers within inches of the cup he had been seeking. The cry of a human voice filtered into the room from outside and died away. The sunbeam faded gradually, free of dust.