The Kingdom of the Wicked (21 page)

       'Gaza is on my way home. I go to Napata in Ethiopia. I have been visiting the holy city.' He waved to the driver and they clopped on.

       'Holy,' Philip said cautiously, 'surely not for your people?' The text on the man's knees was Greek. Philip read: Hos pro baton epi sphagin ichthi . . .'

       'You know my people?'

       'I know that your king is worshipped as an offspring of the sun. That he is too holy to be permitted to rule. That rule is in the hands of the queen mother. Whose name is always the same. I have forgotten it.'

       'Candace. It is always Candace. My uncle served the old Candace and I serve the new one. He was court treasurer and so am I. My nephew will doubtless follow me.'

       'You do me great honour.' And then: 'So the office passes through a nepotic line? Not from father to son?'

       The Ethiopian gave a laugh like a neigh. 'The court treasurer must always be a eunuch. You did not know that? Court officials must not breed and thus form dynasties. But we have learned to think of our nephews as surrogate sons. My nephew has already been castrated in expectation of his succeeding me. He becomes barren like me to serve a barren commodity. As Aristotle said, money does not breed.'

       'You seem, from your scroll here, to be a Greek scholar. This looks like the prophet Isaiah.'

       'I wondered whether you might not be a Gentile like me. You look Greek. And yet from a few words you know it is the prophet Isaiah.'

       'I'm a Greek Jew who follows the new law of Jesus the anointed. I go to Gaza and thence to Caesarea to spread the word.'

       'I saw this new way being persecuted in Jerusalem. I took it to be an aberration from the true faith.'

       'You worship the scion of the sun and yet you talk of the true faith? Tradition says you're one of the children of Ham, cut off from the family of the chosen.'

       'Well,' the Ethiopian said, whisking his peacock feather fan. 'This doctrine of heliolatry is a mere convention with most of us. We're an ancient people and not foolish. I cannot be a Jew but I can be what is termed a Godfearing Gentile. According to the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy eunuchs are not admitted to the society of the faithful. But Isaiah seems to promise a change.'

       Philip closed his eyes and quoted: ' "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths and hold fast to my covenant, to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters." '

       'Good,' the Ethiopian said. 'You are a better scholar than I. I know little by heart. I do know, however, what the priests of your temple have hammered into my skull: "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord." They say that Isaiah merely fantasizes and that stern edict of Moses cannot be superseded.'

       Philip took the scroll from the Ethiopian's knees and said, smiling: 'Ara ge ginoskeis ha anaginoskeis?'

       The Ethiopian laughed and said: 'The Greek language is graceful. It makes the word to read almost the same as the word to understand. The tongue of the Romans captures the same grace. Intellegis quae legis? But in my coarser language it would be bluntly: "Do you understand what you read?" Well, my answer is simple: No, I do not. Read the passage to me, and I will see if in your Greek mouth it makes more sense.'

       So Philip read to him about the suffering servant. ' "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth." '

       'Who does he mean? Does he refer to himself or to somebody else?'

       'The prophet,' Philip said carefully, 'is being truly a prophet. He is speaking of someone who, in his day, was yet to come. But now he has come. Killed, as Isaiah predicted, three days silent in the tomb, then alive again, the marks of the executioners upon his body to show himself truly suffering man, yet also the Son of God and the everliving witness to — But the story is long to tell.'

       'There's time enough. There's nothing to see except desert. Tell me all.'

       There was a wadi northeast of Gaza. Children playing by it at sunset, women filling their pitchers with water squinting against the dying blaze, saw with some surprise a young man with hair like a flame and a large black man in robes as of the sunset alight from a carriage drawn by two bay horses and walk together to the place of running water. They had not heard the words spoken before the drawing tight of the reins and the grinding of the wheels: 'Here is water. Is there anything to prevent my being baptized here and now?'

       'If you believe with your whole heart nothing hinders.'

       'I believe the Son of God to be Jesus Christ.'

       Philip baptized by aspersion not immersion, murmuring the words of the ceremony. Then the Ethiopian, now a Nazarene, resumed his journey towards the first cataract of the Nile and Philip walked towards Gaza. It was fitting, both felt, that they part now. They did not wish an anticlimax of either talk or prayer or exegesis of Isaiah. Both hearts were full. But that night in a wretched inn in Gaza Philip awoke from deep sleep clutching a pain in his side. Had he done the right thing? This stoneless man was uncircumcised, unacceptable on two counts, said Deuteronomy (and both centred on the genitalia), in the company of the faithful. Christ had come to redeem Israel, not Ethiopia. And yet to assume circumcision before baptism — was not that a manner of grim joke to play on one who had known the knife of a more demanding if less spiritual covenant? Come, cut all off while your hand is in. And why had God decreed that the snipping of the foreskin, and not say the tip of an earlobe, should be the condition of entry into the army of the chosen? Because the foreskin capped the tree of generation, human procreation being the moon that reflected divine creation's solar light. This eunuch born in Meroe and travelling to Napata (and Philip had already forgotten the name he had murmured in the ceremony of baptism) possessed no tree of procreation, only a limp conduit for the discharge of bodily waste, unworthy of the blade of the covenant. Uncircumcised, uncircumcisable, hence unbaptizable? As he trudged from town to town northward on his mission, Philip half expected some gesture of displeasure from God, a bolt for the blasphemer (for to conduct a surely empty ceremony was — surely — blasphemy?), yet God did no more than he usually did, that is hauled the sun to the zenith and then let it slide slowly down, let grass grow at the rate of the growth of a fingernail (which he also let grow), killed some and allowed others to live.

       When Philip arrived in Caesarea, he was half inclined to vow never to set foot in Jerusalem again, except muffled and anonymous for Passover, for he did not dare put the question to the leader of the Nazarenes. He did not know that the baptizing of an uncircumcised Ethiopian eunuch would later be seen by some as God's first intake of breath for a gust of silent laughter. For the sons of Ham and Japhet were to partake of the patrimony of the sons of Shem, and many of the sons of Shem were to be excluded. It was not by coincidence that Saul was, a day or so after Philip's chanceseeming encounter with a black eunuch, to suffer an epileptic revelation and, a month or so after, Peter have a shocking dream about food.

       Philip married one of his converts in Caesarea, a handsome girl named Deborah whose father was a ship's chandler. Philip entered the trade and preached the word now only in his spare time. God denied him sons but granted him four daughters with black married brows, all of whom became most talkative proponents of the new way.

About three miles from Damascus, one of Saul's escort, a glum wiry man named Esra, had a vivid dream in which an angel of the Lord told him that his wife and daughter were to be ravished by Syrian troops of the Roman procurator and that he had better hurry back to Jerusalem to forestall the outrage. In agitation he recounted this dream to Saul, who nodded and nodded impatiently over the morning breaking of bread in a frowsty inn. He said:

       'Your heart doesn't seem to be in this mission.'

       'They should have given us horses. Or camels,' one of the other men said, Enoch, who had limped ostentatiously all the previous day. 'It's not a question of heart, it's a matter of feet.'

       'I heard the voice clear as the chirp of a grasshopper. Go back, for the heathen will shoot seed straight as an arrow into the vessels of election.'

       Saul said: 'You three have grumbled ever since we left Jerusalem. Doubtless Seth and I will find honest Jews enough in Damascus. Men whose hearts will be in the holy work of persecution. You three may go back, though it baffles me why you should wish to go back now when you have come so far.'

       'We were told we had to get you to Damascus free from harm, since you have enemies who might be lurking in the bushes, not that we see many bushes. Well, Damascus is there ahead, quivering in the haze of the heat. We have performed our mission.' This was Jethro, a longfaced man whom the flies got at.

       'That was not the way your mission was put to me,' Saul said. 'Nevertheless, go back. Enoch will limp but Jethro will support him. You, Jethro, have had a face that would turn milk sour all through our journey. You, Esra, had better run.' And he and Seth turned their backs on the three and proceeded in good heart to Damascus.

       Neither had ever visited the city before, but the priest Zerah had briefed Saul sketchily on its history and present condition. It was a very ancient city, having been the capital of the fierce Aramaean kingdom until its overthrow by the Assyrians some eight centuries back. It had been part of the Roman province of Syria since Julius Caesar's time, but the Romans more or less left the rule of the city to the king of the Nabataean Arabs, whose realm stretched from the Gulf of Akaba to the outskirts of Damascus but who insisted, because of the large number of Nabataean nationals within the city walls, that he possessed full rights of dominion there. The Romans did not seriously contest this claim, but they showed a fresh polished eagle occasionally and demanded friendly tribute. This was sometimes the Roman way. Zerah had emphasized to Saul that it was by Godgiven right that he, Saul, was going to harry and torture the Nazarene heretics among the Damascene Jews, he being an agent of the high priest, but in truth it was by virtue of a treaty made by the Romans with the Jews in the ancient Hasmonean times that the high priest in Jerusalem could claim the right of extradition in respect of Palestinian breakers of the laws who had sought refuge in other Roman territories. The Romans, well over a century and a third thereof before the birth of Jesus, had given instructions to Ptolemy Euergetes II of Egypt and other allies in Asia to hand over to the jurisdiction of the high priest, Simon as he was then, all such offenders, and this privilege had been freshly ratified by Julius Caeeeeeeeeee

       Seth was shocked nearly out of his skin by the high scream, the sudden eruption of froth at the mouth, the going down of Saul on to the dusty road at high noon. The falling sickness. He saw that the open mouth would soon close and the teeth bite off the blade of the tongue, so he fell to his knees and placed lengthwise in Saul's mouth the thin staff he had been carrying, so that Saul now had the ludicrous appearance of a dog struck with hydrophobia while fetching the thrown stick of his master. Saul tossed to and fro as in desperately uneasy sleep, but the ends of the staff set a limit to his rolling. Soon he was still, eyes closed, staff gripped in strong teeth, snoring and when not snoring groaning. God help us Seth kept muttering over and over in distress but also in a kind of relief, for Saul might take this when he came to as a sign from heaven that he had better intermit his persecutory activities, of which Seth had always had a qualified approval. He went too far too often, and there was, when you came to think of it, something a little unseemly about haling dissident Jews out of their beds in a strange city where one could claim no right of residence nor even possessed a minimal knowledge of topography, custom, or secular law. To Seth it was an embarrassing commission, but his admiration of the energy of Saul, let alone his devoutness, had led him to a vaguely reluctant acceptance of an invitation (which, if unaccepted, might soon have turned into an order) to help him haul back Jewish Nazarenes from Damascus to Jerusalem, there to consider their crime in an already crammed camp of other wailing defectors.

       When Saul came to he said nothing: all his attention was being given to an aftermath of the attack that he evidently could scarcely believe. His eyes were dead as stones. They rolled about as though sight had been snatched from him only to be playfully hidden in one quarter or another of the fierce noon sky, thence to be with ease retrieved. Seth said: 'Saul, Saul, how are you?' The staff fell from Saul's mouth.

       'You heard? He has brought the night on me. Help me to rise.' On his feet he turned and turned clumsily as though, in some game, the withholder of vision were ever slyly at his back. 'You saw nothing? Heard nothing?'

       'I heard you scream and saw you fall. It was an attack of the falling sickness.'

       There was thunder and lightning and a voice said Sha'ul Sha'ul ma'att radephinni?'

       'It spoke Aramaic?'

       'And in Aramaic it said something about a horse and a rider. God has the reins and he dug the spurs in. You must lead me, Seth.'

       'Back to Jerusalem?'

       'To Damascus.'

       'Are you sure?'

       'The voice said Damascus.'

       'Well, then, if I tie this girdle of my robe to yours Seth did it with trembling hands. 'Perhaps the blindness will not last. Perhaps it's just part of the falling sickness.'

       In total blackness Saul, led by the tautness of a cord, a dog on a leash, saw, as in a preternatural sunlight, the rooms and corridors of his own brain. It was the same brain as before, though the voice still echoed in it. The knowledge was the same, as also the banked ferocity, but the knowledge was presented as it were from a new angle of vision, which cast light and shadow not seen before. The ferocity was still in the service of destruction of great wrongs, but the wrongs had changed. He was everything he had ever been, except that now he must promote where formerly he had persecuted (the voice had thundered the accusation with a kind of glee), and yet he recognized now that the fury of persecution had always been the fury of belief. He had always known that no compromise was possible, and he had been the chief agent of Stephen's bloody witness against compromise. He was the same man that he had always been, and he recognized that the blindness was the bandage of some game in which he was turned about and about, finally emerging sighted as before to confront the world from a new angle. The same world and he who viewed it the same, but the light different. The God of the new faith wanted the zealot of the old but, with a flick of divine thumb and finger, the cause had been transformed. Yet in a way it remained the same cause, for between the old and the new there was no true division, one flowed into the other.