The Kingdom of the Wicked (2 page)

       'Do you know,' Cleopas asked, 'where the others are?'

       'Others? The one for each tribe bar one, you mean? Some say one thing and some say another. They reckon five or six of them went off to Emmaeus, that's that dungheap seven miles out of town. Lying low, sort of. The rest are sort of scattered. A sort of council of war, making up their minds what to do. It's not too healthy here in Jerusalem for those that knew him. They want that dead corpse and they want it quick.'

       A cart was being loaded with the uprights and crosspieces and a titulus with IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM scrawled on it. A bucket of water sluiced the area. A sponge, an empty wine flask, the skeleton of a fish, blood, evidences of life to be cleared away by the Roman passion for order. They yelled for free passage for the cart through the city gateway. Cleopas and Zachaeus took the road. They left the city in light rain which became briefly heavy, pushing through the crowds, jostled by police and crying chapmen with handcarts, avoiding donkeydroppings and cowdung and horsemerds, coming out into sweeter air and, soon, weak sunlight. On the road a Roman maniple swung by, sin dex sin dex, with a couple of chained and bloodied prisoners. Cleopas and Zachaeus hid, till it passed, in a clump of dead olives. It was more than halfway to Emmaeus that a big man in a hood and cloak came out of nowhere and gave them a cheery shalom. Where going then? I too. Walk together? Why not? What news then in the great city?

       Cleopas and Zachaeus looked warily at the man and at each other. A Roman spy, deliberately chosen for his bulk, face hidden, talking Aramaic like a foreigner. But knowing the scriptures as no foreigner should. They trained them well these days.

       'Well, if this was truly the Messiah prophesied in the sacred writings he had of necessity to rise from the dead. The prophecies have to be fulfilled. Believe he was what he said he was and you have to believe that he went into the underworld for three days, there to ransom the good men who died before he came to redeem them, and then in the flesh returned to the world of the flesh.' Cleopas and Zachaeus now knew that this was no spy but the man himself. How were they supposed to respond? This was one of his games, in which you were to pretend to be ignorant of his identity until he gave you the key. But he had given the key already. In his hood and cloak, marching towards Emmaeus at a pace they panted to keep up with, the stranger gave them many chapters and even more verses, citing all the prophets until the brains of Zachaeus and Cleopas whirled enough to make them forget the pains in the soles of their hurrying feet. But Zachaeus's bad back tooth did not forget its master and shot a twinge at him coinciding with Jeremiah IX iii. The stranger saw his grimace and said: 'This citing of scripture gives you pain?'

       'It's a back tooth, a grinder. I have to have it out.'

       'You seek a tooth surgeon in Emmaeus? You would have been wiser to have it drawn in the big city.'

       'In Emmaeus,' Cleopas said, 'we seek the chief of the companions of Jesus. Might we ask why you're going there?'

       'Country air and a country meal in an inn and a night's meditation. I am what you might term a thinking man.'

       'A reading one too,' Zachaeus winced.

       'You have to load your brain with the thought of the past before you can hatch thoughts about the future. So. Here it is.' Meaning Emmaeus, a miserable small town of naked children chasing scrawny hens. An old man sat outside a cottage door whence floated garlicky oil fumes. He watched their arrival, sucking few teeth. The inn had a collapsed thatch. The last drops of the late rain made the surface of the water in the bucket in the eating room set for the rain's indrip gently shimmer. Anybody from Jerusalem been around? Not that I know of, the landlord said. Had some troops in taking prisoners, spitting good wine on the floor and not paying for it. You say from? These were going to. What will it be then? A jug of red and fish on the coals. Bread's brick hard with there being no baking these last days. Take what comes is what I say.

       The three ate their supper not in the eating room with its melancholy raindrip but at a table set in the garden, a weedy neglected affair full of mewing kittens, the sunset a free show of crimson, green, purple, spilt eggyolk. It was when the talkative stranger reached for the winejug that Zachaeus saw. His tooth was not shocked into quiescence by the sight of the dark red wound. They had both known, of course. Cleopas said: 'So it really happened.'

       'Oh yes, it happened.'

       'And we.' Cleopas began to choke on a fishbone. The stranger who was no stranger hit him kindly thrice on the back. Cleopas spat out the bone on to his trencher. 'Thanks. We, I was trying to say, are the first to know. We're the least, we're nothing, and this place is on the road to nowhere.'

       'Casualness, you can say,' Jesus said. 'Life being a matter of the casual. You're not quite the first to know. There was a reformed prostitute first, and then — never mind. No trumpets, so to speak. No flamboyance, except in that sunset over your shoulder. There's something Roman about a sunset. Never despise the casual. You are custodians of the truth and sowers of the word as much as any of them. You, your toothache is a warning of worse pain —’

       'Zachaeus is my name, Zachaeus.'

       'I know your name and I know your trade, you smell of it. The bad time's coming, the time when you'll be questioned about love. Let's finish this jug and have more.'

       'Love?' Cleopas gulped.

       'Of course. You will preach love to the world and the world will think there's a catch in it. For love you will be whipped, flayed. clawed, burned, nailed to a tree. I preached nothing but love.

       It grew dark. Zachaeus shivered as the night wind rose. You had skill in it,' he said. 'Preaching the word, that is. Have skill still. I mean, in preaching, that is. What will you do? Lord,' he added.

       'I've done my work,' Jesus said. 'I leave the world soon. Your world. A whisper of encouragement, there is no death and so on, and then — best not to ask where I go. Go, yes, but in a manner stay. I am on this table.' They saw that his hands were but saw that he meant more. In the bread, brickhard though it is, and in this wine where, see, the vinegar-making mother is already at work. It's all quite simple. Believe, when you take both, that I am in them. I am on this table, in your mouths, dissolved in your stomachs, becoming your flesh and the spirit the flesh serves, excreted, yes, but daily renewed. When wine ends and bread ends the world ends. Till then I'll be there. That is a truth as love is a truth, but more important than the truth is the game you will play. The game of taking bread and wine and tasting me in your mouths. The game of trying to love, because love is not easy. But it is the only answer.'

       'What now?' Zachaeus asked. His tooth sang viciously. 'Tonight, I mean. I don't like the look of this darkness.'

       Jesus understood. 'Yes, the enemy lurking in it, the eyes of bad beasts in the woods and carrion birds untimely awake in the branches. Nothing to fear. The beasts will roll at our feet to be tickled and the enemy will know love. Stay the night here and then go back to Jerusalem. I have to go, there are others to see. They too must be sent back to Jerusalem.'

       'So they are near here?' Cleopas said.

       'Yes, in an old farmhouse. I must have words with them. They are to go to Nicodemus's house in Gethsemane, if they can bear the smell of treachery there. I will pay the reckoning for you and go. Though, as I told you, I also stay. In that bit of hard bread that is left and these red dregs. So take my blessing while I take my leave.'

       Both Cleopas and Zachaeus felt that the night whose falling had all their lives been a friendly summons to sleep had now become a malevolent visitation bearing no seeds of sunrise. 'Stay with us,' Cleopas said urgently. 'Don't leave us, Lord.'

       'I stay and I go.' And he went, paying the reckoning on the way. Who had given him money? The reformed prostitute?

       It seemed to Zachaeus, though he recognized the unworthiness of the thought, that it would have been a good gesture on the part of the resurrected to ease that flaming tooth. Meditatively and with his fingers shaky, he probed his dry mouth. The tooth was loose and, as he finger and thumbed it, it grew looser. He rocked it like a screaming child in a cradle. He felt confident that by morning, if morning were ever to come, he might well have it out. There were things that a man could sometimes do for himself.

       'Questioned about love,' Cleopas brooded. 'I don't like it.'

The kinds of love enacted on the island of Caprae were not of a sort that anyone durst question. This refuge of the Emperor Tiberius was also called Capri, but it was nicknamed Caprineum, meaning a place of goatish lust. Here let us meet Tiberius Claudius Nero, called from his youth Biberius Caldius Mero, meaning boozer of neat hot wine. A man of orgies, who would hardly accept a dinner invitation unless assured that the waiting girls would all be naked, who promoted a nobody to the quaestorship because he could down a quart tankard without taking breath, who made Flaccus governor of Syria and Piso prefect of the city of Rome because they were all-night guzzlers and swillers, he is, in his seventies, aware of failing appetites, especially in the area of what he would call love, and needs a variety of stimulants.

       See him now waking late in the presence of a large picture of Atalanta and Meleager performing the rite of fellatio, whimpering because he cannot attain a swift fore-breakfast emission with a catamite whom he has lashed for his failure to arouse the requisite rush of lust, gulping cheese, wine and the feathery bread his baker has learnt from the Arabs, then going to look upon his spintriae. These are boys and girls garnered from all over the Empire for their skill in unnatural coits, and he sets them to copulating in triads to whip up his difficult desires. Then he visits the woods and spinneys, where there are Pans and Syringes beckoning him into their caves with the lewdest gestures. Now he goes to the sacrifice, there to conceive instant lust for the bearer of incense and his brother the holy trumpeter, haling them out of the temple before the end of the ceremony so that he can bugger them both. It is a dry and fruitless process and he groans. The brothers protest feebly at being so ill used, so he has their legs broken. He hears then that his chief cook's wife has had a baby, so he has the blind suckling brought to pull on his flaccid penis with its boneless gums, what time the mother wails and is beaten for wailing. Then it is time for him to swim in his warmed marble piscina, with the little boys he calls his minnows darting between his spread legs to nibble at his shrunken genitalia. This, 0 Romans, is your Emperor, successor to the great Augustus.

       Dried and wrapped, he sits in the imperial garden, full of stony magnificence. Naked boys and girls from all the provinces save one serve him cooled white wine and morsels of salt fish. Curtius Atticus, an ageing and respectable patrician, comes and is permitted to sit with his Emperor. Curtius has always averted his eyes from Tiberius's excesses. He is here on Capri to exert what good influence he can on the old goat, but he knows the task is hopeless. It is above all things necessary, in his view, that there should be a ruler in Rome, but there is none, and the Senate is corrupt and impotent. Curtius has recently taken to Stoicism. Tiberius says:

       You have some more gloomy wisdom for me?'

       'I wouldn't call it gloomy. The aim of the Stoic philosophy is to dispel gloom.'

       'Only the pleasures of the senses can ease the pains of the spirit,' Tiberius says in the Greek of Rhodes, where he was once in exile. He nods to one of his secretaries, a freshfaced clever Greek slave who smiles inwardly at the Doric accent. He has transcribed this same trite maxim at least a dozen times before. The attendants, boys and girls, now strip naked and, to the music of the thrushes in the pines, perform a chaste enough ballet. PNS F TH SPRT, writes the slave.

       'The senses fail,' Curtius says justly. 'At your age, our age.'

       'Speak for yourself. And I think you may keep your philosophy to yourself. I was looking at my spintriae earlier this morning, and I note that there is only one race unrepresented among them. I mean the Hebrews. Why,' he quavered petulantly, 'does not our procurator at Caesarea send me little presents like the other governors?'

       'Last month there was a shipment of dates and a couple of camels.'

       'The Hebrews are all for truculence and incorruption. That isn't human, Curtius. I've a mind to see some of the younger incorrupt corrupted. We have enough corrupting agencies here. I would like to see some little handsome Jews, boys and girls, wrested slowly of their incorruption. That would be a new pleasure.'

       'May I mention the word duty, Caesar?'

       'You may not. I'm not going back to Rome.'

       'Well, at least perform some of the essential duties from Capri. There are no governors of consular rank in Spain and Syria. The Dacians and Sarmatians are plucking Moesia like a ripe plum. The Germans are in Gaul. In Armenia the Parthians —’

       'Shut up, Curtius. I forbid you to mention these things. Talk to me of the duties of rule when you've experienced the burden of rule and the nightmare of treachery. My only concern now is self-preservation. That's why I'm here. A natural fortress of rock with one well-guarded landing beach. I'm safe. I've made sure of that.'

       He was indeed safe, but the rocky island was not so impregnable as he thought. Down below, rocking on blue calm, on the other side from the Villa Jovis, a small fishing boat rode a chain's length from the wall of rock. A hardworking fisherman, gnarled and lean and black with sun, was dragging his netted catch inboard. It was a huge sea perch or morone labrax being nipped by angry crabs. 'Row in,' the man said to his boy.

       'Why?'

       'Why?' He slammed with his fist at the mad despairing eye of the bass, which leapt in its confines like a man on a cross. 'Have you ever seen anything like this afore?'