The Kingdom of the Wicked (31 page)

       At Daphne, on the borders of the Syrian desert, there stood a pagan temple well endowed with pagan money. It was dedicated to the goddess Astarte, whose effigy in gold, an opulent bas-relief twenty feet high, was nailed to the brickwork of the facade. This effigy was fanciful, and the ample body of the deity was studded with breasts supernumerary to the bountiful pair which linked her to her mortal votaresses and, indeed, to the blessed virgin Mary mother of the Christ. All round the building, twelve feet above the eye of the beholder, were incised representations of the erotic act, man with woman but never man with man nor woman with woman. The holiness of the act in its generative aspects might seem thus to be proclaimed, but only one image showed the frank thrust of male sword into female scabbard, the others glorifying a variety of fancies whose end was not natural fructification — anal, buccal, axillary, in tercrucial penetrations, kisses of gross ingenuity, appetites bordering on the cannibalistic. This was Greek and Syrian work, and it pointed the large difference between the Hebrew concept of the purpose of the divinely implanted sexual urge, which was to people the tribes and fill the land with soldiers and herdsmen, and the more sophisticated impulses of the cities of Asia and the Mediterranean, where the means was exalted over the end and the means was encouraged to exfoliate in a diversity of forms bounded only by the restrictions of anatomy. So that the goddess of many breasts, who had once stood for fertility, stood now instead for ecstasies unrelated thereto. She could not be Venus, who is, as Lucretius reminds us, the divinity of rutting beasts as well as of philoprogenitive humanity, and beasts know nothing of ecstasies which transcend the simple needs of biology. So the goddess was Astarte or Ashtaroth or was Hellenized to Artemis and Romanized to Diana. Diana, of course, was a virgin goddess, but virginity could be glossed as a state disdainful of the generative end of love. Love, as Barnabas had said, needed, in the Christian dispensation as Antioch now bids us call it, to be redefined. Paul, he thought, was just the man to redefine it.

       One day, a month or so after the arrival of Paul and Barnabas in Antioch, a young physician named Luke, a pagan Greek, dismounted from the horse he named Thersites (perhaps because of its ugliness and bad temper) and entered the sacred edifice. He was dark, small, well knit, not unprosperous, and he wore a golden bangle or two to proclaim the modest success he had achieved in his profession. He entered the temple soberly, a doctor called to the treating of a patient, and he sniffed the perfumed air, on which nard and sandalwood smoked, without even the faintest stir of erotic enchantment. A priestess tended the fire from which delicious scents arose to a smiling ivory icon of the goddess. All about the temple, whose floor was cunningly embellished with Graeco-Syrian mosaic work depicting the coupling of Apollo and Artemis (for the cult of Astarte had arisen out of solar-lunar myths of western provenance, on which an Asiatic mysticism had been imposed), were booths closed for delicacy's sake with silken curtains, and the priestess, a handsome dark woman past her first youth, pointed to one of these. Luke nodded and entered the booth thus indicated. On a bed he found a young girl lying in some distress. She was a temple prostitute, her favours available to such as would or could pay a handsome tribute in gold to the goddess whose power she evoked: initially these favours had been available to all and freely, but complaints of the secular professionals of the town, as well as the healthy acquisitiveness of the ruling priesthood, had imposed a rational limitation of availability. This girl, whose name was Fengari, was ink-haired, pale as her lunar namesake, exquisitely shaped, straight-nosed and with her great black eyes set well apart. She was naked and unashamed. Luke treated her nakedness as a clinical necessity and examined closely the brown blotches that, like mushrooms about a tree, encircled her pudenda.

       'They hurt when touched?'

       'Like fire.'

       'You've been in contact with a dirty man. This is not a clean occupation. Take this ointment, rub it in freely. Take this draught in water. And,' Luke added, 'give up this trade.'

       'It's not a trade. I'm a servant of the goddess.' She was indignant. 'I'm not impressed. I call this no more than a highclass brothel.’

       ‘The goddess will strike you down.'

       'It's you she seems to have struck down.' She pointed, pouting, at a couple of silver pieces laid ready for him on a cedar press. He took these and empursed them. Your service to the goddess is temporarily intermitted,' he said with mock gruffness. 'I'll call again in a week's time.'

       Riding back to town, he recited to the warm air the verses he had written that morning. Like many physicians, he desired to produce a book. He was not satisfied with what he had been writing: a kind of epic poem in Homeric hexameters about an Odyssean wanderer around the Greek islands who was searching for the Ithaca of philosophical truth. Where was reality? Did it lie in the invisible world of ideas or was it the crass tangibility of the natural order? He had read Plato. Plato would not have approved of the poem simply because it was literature, but could literature, meaning tales of wondering and strange adventures, properly encompass philosophy? Entering the town, he saw philosophy curl in the air like smoke and then get lost on the wind. For the material world shouted its primacy — traders and beggars and dirty naked children tumbling in the dust, above all women and girls with thrust breasts and haunches aware of their role in the world of pleasure, Daphnici mores. Juvenal had, in one of his satires, the third Luke thought it was, complained of the sewage of the Syrian Orontes, Antioch's river, polluting the Tiber. He read Latin as much as he read Greek. As though to provide a ready emblem of pollution, the horse Thersites stopped, as was his habit, to dung heavily on the cobbles. Finished, he responded again to the bit and clopped towards his stable. The stable was a rented one, two hundred yards from the little house which Luke also rented and where he lived alone. It was also on a lane at whose shady end, a four-storey warehouse leaning over it, stood the synagogue which Luke, an uncircumcised seeker of the truth, sometimes attended. Clutching his satchel, he walked to it, having spread hay for Thersites and locked the stable door, intrigued by the crowd outside it. They apparently wanted to get in but could not because of the many already congregated there. He knew the two Jews who complained to him. Amos, who had a hump like an ingrafted near empty mealsack, said:

       'When a reverent believer can't get into his own place of worship — crammed with Gentiles — no offence, doctor — catchpenny eloquence — foreigners too.' The other, who was oneeyed, they were brothers in deformity, cackled:

       'Keep out, you Greek heathen, if you don't want your innocence ruptured. Preaching resurrection and curing the sick. You'll be losing some of your patients.'

       'Who is it?' Luke asked.

       'The baldheaded runt from Cilicia.'

       Luke pushed through politely and saw a bald pate and pair of waving hands. He heard: 'He leaves us the truth of his immortality and that of all who believe in him. Our spirits came to earth and joined with our bodies even at the moment of conception. The spirit cannot be extinguished as the body can, but when it departs this life with our death it leaves in a changed state. We live eternally through him, who took back to heaven the transformed lineaments of man. If he returned pure angelic spirit he would not be one with the father, his substance would be indistinguishable from that of the father and hence could he not properly be termed the son. It was through his taking on of flesh that he became the son, and the son he remains. But we too are the sons of heaven, of an unangelic substance. He has conquered death and we are his partners in that conquest. You seek renewal, we all seek it. The beginning of renewal is the acceptance of a covenant with the divine whose symbol shall be the act of baptism. And what is baptism? Let me explain.'

       The oneeyed one was named Eliphaz. To Luke, leaving, he said: 'Impressed?'

       'He's powerful.'

       'Powerfully wrong. Why can't these people leave well alone? Why can't things stay as they are?'

       Why, thought Luke to himself, cannot all the world be oneeyed? He went home to his simple meal of boiled beans and broiled riverfish. He took out his much punished manuscript from its press — all deletions, rescrawlings, interlineations. He studied it, sucking his teeth free of an enrobing beanskin. 'I sing the search of one who, despised of his fellows, / Sought in the seas and islands, beneath an indifferent sun/ That gave no answers, answers to a single fevered question . . .' Perhaps he was not cut out to be a poet. Poetry was more than versification. Nor cut out to be a philosopher. And again, to write of a voyager when he himself had hardly moved ten miles from the Orontes. He needed to make the search himself. He was glued to a trade not over-respected in a city where magic and superstition paid better. He was growing stale.

       It was by chance next day that he passed a baptism ceremony in brilliant sunlight on the left bank of the Orontes. He saw the little bald man at work, the drenching of the patient as he might be called, the announcement of the hope of a cure. Barnabas was with him; Barnabas he vaguely knew. Magic, a sort of. He rode on to the village where he had been treating a child ineffectually for a hydatid cyst. Larvae of tapeworms lodged in a swollen belly. They could not be purged. The child grew thinner. He saw the baptizers still busily at work when he rode back. There was, he supposed, no harm in it. A ceremony, a gesture of faith and hope, outward sign of inner grace, whatever that was.

       An elderly man named Agabus came to Antioch. He was large and muscular and he had the exophthalmic gaze of the prophet. He wore a drab long shirt that left bare his hairy shins. Around his neck on a string he carried a cross, saying The emblem of shame is transformed to a sign of victory. Alleluia.' He sat with a Christian group in the house of the converted widow Agatha, a former pagan, where Barnabas and Paul shared a room, and ate heartily and, for the most part, silently of what was put before him. He smacked his lips over the sweetish Syrian wine, belched discreetly and said:

       'He told you to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty. Am I not right? I am. Well, there are going to be enough of the hungry in Judaea, I can tell you. I never, to be honest, thought that this giving drink to the thirsty was more than a verbal flourish in a land where there is no shortage of water. Am I right? I think I am. Not only dreams, my friends, but factual reports. Three bad harvests in a row and corn already rising in price beyond the reach of the purses of the people.'

       'Not only Judaea,' Barnabas said. 'Even Italy. The Emperor Claudius is going to have his hands full. Empty, rather.'

       'Let him feed his own,' a middleaged man named Asaph said. 'And his own ought to include the people of Judaea. With the Romans it's all take and no give.'

       'Judaea has her own king now,' Agabus said. 'But he is above such petty matters as the feeding of the people. Am I not right? I am.’

       ‘What do you want?' Paul asked.

       'Let your new Gentile Christians learn about corporal works of mercy. There's plenty of money here. Get it to Jerusalem. You and Barnabas here talk of going back there.'

       'For fresh instructions, yes,' Barnabas said. 'But only when we've finished our work here in Antioch. We're still short of deacons.'

       'You'll find no better work for the moment than taking money to Jerusalem. There's corn to be bought in Egypt and figs in Cyprus. The price is high, but what can you expect? It's going to get higher, get in there before it does. Am I not right? Let your Antioch faithful think of their Judaean brethren. This is a rich town.'

       'How are the grain stores in Judaea?' Paul asked.

       'Enough for two months if there was a just distribution. But the rich are hoarding and Herod Agrippa counts his gold. You've an urgent business on your hands. I'm right there about the priority, I think. I know I'm right.'

       The brown blotches around the genitalia of the temple prostitute Fengari had yielded less to Luke's medicaments than to time and nature's own secret curative juices. Luke left the temple with his couple of silver pieces and was surprised to find bald Paul standing some ten yards away from the facade, looking up at the goddess in no posture of worship. Luke could not forbear to say:

       Drinking your fill of the enemy?'

       Paul looked sharply at him. 'Those too many breasts make her a very unseductive one. Have we met?'

       'Luke the physician. I heard you one day in the synagogue on Aish Lane, as they call it. Where the flour stores are.'

       'I think I saw you one day on the riverbank, looking like a man who would like to swim but fears the water may be cold.'

       'I wasn't too happy,' Luke said, 'about that thaumaturgical cure of yours, if I may call it that. The old man who believed he couldn't use his left arm. Then I thought: well, a cure is often a matter of confidence, which you would probably call faith.'

       'And what is your faith, Luke the physician? You have just come out of where I would not for the life of me go in.'

       'I was practising my skill, such as it is. One of the diseases of love.' Paul winced at that, but the term eros was distinct from agape: still, in marriage, which might be called the licensing of the gifts of that goddess up there, one was supposed to be expressed through the other. Luke said: 'You have walked all this way to frown at the polycolpous one? I rode and I ride back. There's my badtempered nag Thersites. You're welcome to ride behind me.'

       'Thank you,' Paul said. 'As for the polycolpous one — a grotesque term but it has a kind of Homeric ring — she is both the enemy and not the enemy, if you understand me. I was thinking of our mother Eve, who brought us into the world and, with woman's curiosity, meddled where she should have not and made the discovery of sin. Fleshly embraces are here glorified in a manner that goes against nature. Eve is somewhere behind all this. I fear the enemy but I too had a mother.' He stood there brooding while Luke's horse, finding no grass here and fretting, gnawed at the hitching post in the temple's forecourt. 'I do not,' he said, in a manner somewhat defiant, as though countering an accusation, 'wish to make war on women. The goddess, however, is no wraith or fiction — she is real enough. She has to be fought. There is the desert all beyond her, as you can see. She presides over no grass or trees or cornfields.' He sighed. 'The goddess is a great nuisance.'