The Kingdom of the Wicked (34 page)

       There was a couple in a bedroom of the manor house of Laturnus, now away in Sardinia, not yet ready for breakfast. It was not a luxuriously appointed bedroom; it had something rustic about its furnishings. But the bed was huge and deep. The naked Messalina lay with her lovely arms entwined about the nakedness of Gaius Silius, a patrician young man of rather empty handsomeness. He said:

       'Why do those soldiers have to tramp around outside? I feel — well, watched.'

       'The Empress requires protection. From her numerous enemies. Don't worry, dear Gaius. They say nothing. They daren't. For that matter, they see nothing. The Empress Messalina pays her social visits. Business visits too. They're quite in order. There's nothing to feel frightened or guilty about.'

       'You, my love,' Gaius Silius said, more at ease, 'are one of the eternally innocent. You don't know what guilt feels like. Your skin's untouched by the lines of — oh, you know, remorse, compassion —’

       'Cruelty? Am I cruel?'

       'Sometimes.'

       'Cruelty,' she said, having read this somewhere and at once recognized the truth of it, 'is one of the sharp sauces of love. All the rest is just — well, policy, self-protection, being the Empress.'

       'The Emperor too,' Gaius Silius said somewhat primly, 'he has his right to self-protection. How would the Emperor feel if he knew he was being cuckolded?'

       'At least,' she said, catching something of his primness, 'I don't flaunt it, do I? Claudius makes sheep's eyes at his own niece, puts his gouty fingers in her bosom when he thinks no one's looking. Ugh, an old man's lust. The Emperor is above taboos like incest. I think Agrippina will have to drink something that disagrees with her. And perhaps her dribbling uncle could share the cup.'

       'Sometimes, meum mel, you — what can I say —?'

       'Revolt you? Frighten you? Never be frightened of clear thinking, Gaius. And never enter on anything you're unwilling to pursue to the end. I sometimes think that you thought you could get into the Empress's bed without having to pay for it. Messalina is a whore, but she's different from all the other whores. She costs nothing. The stupidest slut of a village and the first lady of the Empire have that in common. But the Empress Messalina, my dearest heart, costs everything. As you're to find out. How is the beauteous Lollia Paulina these days?'

       'I don't know. She's at Herculaneum. She lives her own life. I say nothing. She says nothing.'

       'If she ever were to say anything,' Messalina said tenderly into his right cheek, 'her jewels would be stuffed down her throat. She'd be crammed like a goose with them. I'd have her before me covered with them, like starlight as that stupid poet said, and then she'd be stripped to her buff, link by link of pearls and amethysts, and they'd be rammed down her throat.' Gaius Silius could sense the excitement in her hot breath. She then said: 'Certain things have to be done, dearest Gaius. You and I are to be together for ever and ever, or as near that as makes no difference. This is one bed you don't steal away from with a couple of coins on the coverlet and your fingers to your lips. I want you for myself, and by Castor and Pollux —’ (she grasped with sharp nails that part of his body which they had so jocularly named) —’I don't let you go.'

       Gaius Silius held back a sigh and said: 'I'm flattered but, forgive me, cor cordium, somewhat sceptical. Tell me, how many men have you had in your short life?'

       'How many? I can't count. Their names would make a book, I suppose, even just those I remember. A woman,' she said fiercely, 'is entitled to her pleasures. Few men can do more than touch the fringes of a woman's satisfaction. You, honeycomb, are quite exceptional. You are tireless. I think that's your only talent. You're far from bright in many ways, but you have that. As well as fantasy and ingenuity. You know how important the life of the body is. That's rare. I'm not going to let you get away. You and I are going to be married.'

       He nearly leapt out of the bed at that. 'Married? You mean — divorce from Claudius, divorce from Paulina? That's impossible.'

       'Two long dark divorces. With no actuaries or notaries or whatever those legal gentlemen are called. Don't ask me any more about it now.

       There's much to be done, dear Gaius, but there's no great hurry. As you see, the sun's a slow climber.'

       She seized him with inordinate appetite. The next hour was consumed in a remarkable variety of embraces and penetrations.She was succuba and incuba, mare and rider. They left the bed for the floor, the wall, even for the edge of the open casement, and even then she was not satisfied, though Gaius Silius thought she must grow hoarse with her screams of attainment. Back on the bed, she achieved at last the consummation of her need and her lovely face glowed with a rapture only to be described as saintly. This is, all of it, quite disgusting.

Peter, on his prison pallet, had, though proleptically a saint, no such glow. He slept well, though this night had been announced to him as the last before his execution. He had been brought out of jail daily during the last week for a slow trial whose conclusion had never been in doubt. He had been interested to note that the heretical aspects of his master's messiahship had been dwelt on rather less than the opening up of the new faith (which some of the deposing priests had been prepared to regard, for argument's sake, as an almost legitimate expansion of orthodoxy) to the uncircumcised Gentile. The conversion of the centurion Cornelius had been presented as an unauthorized act of pollution; the willingness to relax the basic hygienic and dietary regulations of the Jewish faith in deference to Gentile prejudice was presented as a brutal act of deracination, not, as with the imputation of messiahship, a tearing off of bark or a lopping of branches. The arboreal similitude persisted: the Judaic tree must be pruned by its own designated tenders, which meant getting rid of Peter and depriving the upstart sect of its head. It was in vain for Peter to protest that his innovations had come directly from God: that only made matters worse. In the closing speeches the vigorous piety of Israel's monarch, absent during the trial, confined to his bed with atrocious stomach pains, had been commended; his high place in the history of Israel's struggle to sustain the ancient purity of the faith was assured. Peter was then solemnly condemned to death. In his innocence he requested crucifixion in a form not identical with that of his master, for which he professed himself unworthy: let him be nailed to a Greek chi or on a regular Roman T inverted. Roman, he was told, Roman, he was demanding a Roman punishment when Rome no longer ruled the land. Properly he should be stoned to death, like the Greek heresiarch Stephen, but the precedent of the sword for the execution of James was acceptable as a clean, easy and somewhat apposite mode of dispatch: there had been much talk of symbolic lopping; let there be a literal and, it was hoped, final lopping. With the cutting off of Peter's head the limbs of the detestable new faith would lose all power of locomotion. Amen and alleluia.

       Peter slept well because he had been given a cup of drugged wine. He snored heartily, but an angelic visitant might have noted a pallor as of sickness: in spite of his acquiescence in the death sentence and even a demand that the mode of death be excruciating, he was still something of a coward, and his sleeping colour showed this. A light passed the window and a cock, thinking the dawn had come, sang loudly. This woke Peter: even his deeply sleeping mind was sensitive to the crowing of cocks. He smacked a dry mouth. The crowing had ceased. Now a dog somewhere bayed at the moon. Peter was surprised to see that the two guards appointed to his person lay on the stone floor asleep. He felt a certain indignation at this: men should do what they are paid for. And then he saw that the cell door was open. This was more than warders' carelessness. There was a trap here somewhere. The sleeping guards snored loudly and not in unison. Had they drunk too of the drugged wine, thinking it to be undrugged? When a door was open it represented an invitation to go through it. He took the old cloak he had used as a coverlet and wrapped himself warmly. Then he cautiously peered out into the corridor, which was illuminated with two wall torches, and found it empty. There was something terribly irregular here, unless, of course, he was still really asleep and dreaming of escape. But a glance back into the cell showed him that his pallet was empty. Someone was engineering his escape, but who and how?

       He then saw, scrawled on the outside of the cell door, the name loannis Markos or John Mark in yellow chalk. That was the name of the cousin of Barnabas, who was supposed to be lying low, along with Saul or Paul as he now was, in Caesarea. A right instinct told him to wipe off this name from the door with his cloak. Then, with little confidence, he went on soft feet along the corridor and came to another open door. This opened on to another corridor, right-angled to the one he had left, and a few yards down it, on the left, he heard the noise of what he took to be boisterous drunkenness. There was an open door and light, the only light of that corridor, beamed out of it. Guards having a party. Something told him that furtiveness would not be in order now, so he trod with some confidence and even a loud chest-clearing cough towards the light. Someone inside, hearing him, called 'Everything all right then?' in bad Aramaic and he replied, taking care to use Judaean and not Galilean tonalities, that everything was. Then he passed the light and came to a gate of rather thin metal, open as he had expected and, in a part of his brain, not really wanted to expect, and found that this led to a narrow stairway going down.

       He then found himself in the open air in an ill-tended garden with stunted shrubs and a young Judas tree. At the end of a weedy path there was a very massive iron gate. He walked towards it under the moon, which more than one hound now howled at, fully expecting to be picked up at any moment by boisterous troops and perhaps even a thin intellectual officer saying 'Thought we'd let you have a last taste of hope, old man. Fine thing, hope. I've had lots of it in my time. Never came to anything, though. All right, boys, bundle him back in.' There was indeed a presence, but only of a rising wind. This rose so violently that it clanged open the left half of the gate. Peter hurried through and came to the seven steps he had often observed from below and only once before, looking back to lost freedom, from above. He now went down them and found himself in the deserted street. Herod Agrippa's police would be waiting round that corner. The game was up, and a cruel one it was, so he walked staunchly towards their hidden arms. They were not there. There was nobody there. His liberty was the real thing. He ran into it, meaning in the direction of John Mark's mother's house.

       He turned into a dark alley. He heard drunken singing begin to resound down it: two late revellers taking a shortcut home. He found a back door open and got into a yard in which cats intent on a courting ritual took little notice of him. The singers passed: their song was a banal popular one that had recently taken the fancy of the Jerusalem young, something about a girl being as straight as a dikla tree. He was out again just as the cantorial part of the feline courtship, perhaps encouraged by the human caterwauling, began to wake the sleeping household above it: a male groan, the threat of the throwing of an old boot. He left the alley and got on to a wider street, then he turned right to a treelined residential quarter where, he knew, the house of John Mark's mother lay. There were lights on in that house: perhaps there was a prayer meeting concerned with the repose of his soul; more likely they, having contrived his escape in a manner still inexplicable, were waiting for him to come there.

       But the outer gate which led to the forecourt of shrubs and flowers, well tended, was locked. A little bell on a chain was affixed to an iron staple on the wall. This he shook. Its tintinnabulation was tiny, but it seemed to him likely to wake the street. Light still blazed from an upper casement. He rang again, deafeningly it seemed. This time the front door of the house opened and a young fat girl appeared. He knew her; her name was Rhoda. 'Rhoda,' he called in a loud whisper, 'it's me, Peter. Let me in.' Rhoda's response was to shriek and slam the door shut. Stupid fool of a damned girl. He rang the bell again and this time did not care if he woke the whole damned street. Damned idiotic imbecile of a stupid girl. The front door opened again and he saw John Mark's mother come down the path with a key. She let him in. She relocked the gate. They entered the house together.

       John Mark lay in bed. He was supposed to be a genuine imbecile immune from the probings of the law which, at the time of Saul's persecutions, had been interested in the Nazarene philanthropy of his father, now dead of starvation in one of the camps that Saul had set up. His imbecility was now so taken for granted in the city that he could drool around the market, steal apples unmolested, and giggle obscenities like 'Jesus lives'. He was supposed to have picked up the slogan from his father without knowing its meaning. In fact he was a learned young man who said now, as Rhoda hugged the wall, fearful of the thing that said its name was Peter: 'She still takes you for a fravashi.'

       'A what?'

       'It's a Zoroastrian term I find useful. Not quite an angel, not quite a ghost. A fravashi. Touch her, go on, hug her, kiss her, show her you're real.' Peter made for her grimly and she screamed and ran out, falling over things. 'A good girl but silly. Her name means rose but she doesn't smell like one. Welcome to liberty.'

       Peter sat down heavily and was given, by John Mark's mother, a cup of wine, not drugged. 'What I want to know is,' he said, 'how did you do it?'

       'Do what?'

       'Get me out of that place.'

       'I had nothing to do with it.

       'The cell door was open and your name was chalked on it.’

       ‘There's more than one John Mark in the world.'

       'Perhaps,' his mother said, 'there'd been another prisoner there with the name John Mark.'