The Kingdom of the Wicked (50 page)

       'Preaching wouldn't get him far here. When there's a bad smell you run away from it, you don't try to hide it with civet.'

       'You can get used to a bad smell and call it roses.' They had both somehow got off the point. 'Like you with blood.'

       'Blood honestly spilt. Nobody orders a gladiator to open his veins. Blood's his trade.'

       'How about the Britons?'

       'Yes. That's giving me a few bad dreams. Untrained men and boys being hacked to pieces. But the crowd loves it.'

       'Because,' Priscilla said, bringing out some of their store of Corinth raisins which seemed to last for ever, 'the Emperor does. Corruption always starts at the top. Why don't you get out of it?'

       'And do what? I've a living to earn.'

       'You see how it works out, Caleb,' Aquila said. 'You start off by thirsting for Roman blood — oh, in a good cause, may God bless the Zealots. You end up by accepting the shedding of any blood at all — Roman, British, Syrian, anything.'

       'We're fed full of blood,' Priscilla said.

       'Saul's people,' Caleb said. 'Paul's, I mean — they drink it. And they eat flesh.'

       'That's horrible,' Hannah said. 'Let's change the subject.'

       'Now you talk like a scandalmongering Roman,' Aquila said. 'Look, neither Priscilla nor I is a Christian yet. But I made a bargain with Paul. If ever he got to the Tiber, I said, he can plunge us into it. Both of us. What I'm trying to say is that it's the body and blood of Christ they eat, but it's in a different form. Bread and wine. It's a very subtle and intelligent idea. You eat the soter and he becomes part of yourself.'

       'And then,' Caleb said coarsely, 'you void him.'

       'You're not with your circus friends now,' Hannah said. 'Can't we talk about Octavia's new hairstyle or something?'

       'Religion,' Sara said, 'is not merely useless. Religion is dangerous.' Aquila comically groaned, having heard this from her before. 'To get through the day without a headache is the important thing and to breathe a sigh of relief that you've made the long journey to your pillow.' The noise of juvenile disruption had been still for some short time. Now it began again.

       'It sounds as though they're —’ Priscilla began. 'Oh, no.' For there was loud fisting on the shutters of the shop, yells to open up, a grinding that suggested that crowbars were at work on the iron binding of the stout pinewood. Caleb's neck seemed to have thickened by a good two inches. He said:

       'You and I, Aquila, are going up on the roof. I get very tired of the Romans sometimes.'

       'And what do you propose we do on the roof?'

       'That tub of yours should be full of rainwater by now.'

       'Oh, no. It won't stop them, you know, what you seem to have in mind. They'll only come back again.'

       'I think I can manage that tub by myself.' And Caleb made for the stairway, more of a fixed ladder, that led to the loft. 'You stay there, Yacob.' He raised the hatch and found himself under Roman stars. Below, to the right, the yells and hammering continued. The wooden tub was only half full, but his muscles strained to the lifting of it. He carried it to the parapet, panted, paused, looked below. Stupid boys of the patrician class, one of them in a green wig. He tilted the tub on to them with care. There were screams and threats, round holes of mouths howling up at him. He picked up the emptied tub and raised it. He threw it down at the green wig and struck. The wig came off and its owner circled like a drunk howling before he fell. His companions, much concerned, bent over him. One of them looked up at the roof and cried:

       'Do you know what you've done? You fool, do you realize what you've done?' Caleb made a coarse noise with the back of his throat much used by gladiators to express contempt and loathing, wiped his wet hands on his buttocks, and then went down back to the company. He did not hear his victim, who had merely been stunned, emerge from blackness crying 'Hic et ubique, mater?'

       Nor, some weeks later, did he recognize that recovered victim in the Emperor who paid a courtesy visit to the performers in the games. Caleb, calling himself Metellus, stood to attention with the men he had helped to train when the pretty pimpled young man, no longer a boy, came down from the imperial box in his purple to the performers' well which debouched into the arena. From the arena came the noise of Rome seated, chewing sausages, waiting for blood. A number of exotic captives, not yet fully aware that they were to shed blood to please Rome, lay and sat around, paleskinned and fairer of hair than the Emperor, unresponsive to the games editor's barks that they should jump to their filthy feet in Caesar's presence. Caesar was much taken with a freckled boy of about fourteen years who stood bewildered by noise, fuss and his own ignorance; he embraced him lovingly. 'What do you think, Tigellinus?' he said. 'Much too pretty to be turned into mincemeat, wouldn't you say?'

       Where, Caleb wondered, was the prefect Burrus? Another one sent into exile for yawning during an imperial recitation? The man addressed as Tigellinus wore no uniform but he seemed to have come into a kind of praetorian authority.

       'Caesar is too softhearted. Caesar's subjects like to see young flesh torn to tatters. You,' he said to Caleb, 'what's your name?'

       'Metellus.'

       'If you're Metellus I'm Cleopatra. Does this one know enough daggerwork to make it look like a fight?'

       'He's a child. He doesn't stand a chance.'

       'He'll have armour on, won't he?'

       'They don't understand what armour is. And what chance is he going to have with Tibulus there?' Nero beamed at Tibulus, a chunk of handsome stone from Liguria, more massive than supple, ponderous to kill and too stupid to feel pain. The games editor said:

       'He'll hold back, Caesar. At least five feints before he comes in for the kill.'

       'Just like that,' Caleb said hotly. 'The kill. And this boy doesn't understand what's happening. He can't speak Latin and we can't speak British.' He made a coarse noise at the back of his throat much used by gladiators to express contempt and loathing. The Emperor was charmed by the sound, which he did not seem to have heard before.

       'They're only animals,' the games editor said. 'Great Caesar, we wait on your pleasure.' So the Emperor and his entourage climbed back to the imperial box and air unpolluted by rage, sweat, fear and kindred emanations. The Empress, stupid bitch, was there. She rose on Nero's entrance and, as he did, remained standing to bow to the loyal roar of the crowd. The crowd was huge: sure sign of a prosperous Empire, this massive afternoon leisure. The hydraulis or water organ was footed and growled chthonian thunder. It was the voice of a coarse and pampered citizenry wearing the collective blue cap of a flawless placid heaven. The weak voice of Vergil's ghost called them to collective virtue, but they wondered what team Curgil or Purvil had played for. Nero smirked and bobbed and said aloud but unheard of them: 'Filthy inartistic lot, what do they know of the agony of forging flawless hendecasyllables?' Then he sat. Britannicus came in late, mildly drunk from his complexion. Nero frowned, Britannicus beamed. When the bewildered Britons came on, hefting unfamiliar weapons against (at first) prancing playful professional opponents, he beamed less. He had a kind of proprietorial concern with these pallid naked northerners. 'A mockery,' he was heard to cry. 'They fought well in their own way. They're still fighting well and rightly after we've raped and beaten and burned them.' Nero heard all this treasonous talk with pleasure. He saw bare Britons hack unhandily, hacked back efficiently when the general howl for blood grew loud. Bare bloody Britons lay in blood and sand. Then the freckled boy of fourteen was pushed on, looking at his dagger with the puzzlement of one who handles his first lizard. Tibulus gave stolid acknowledgement of the crowd's welcome, which was to say he looked at the crowd much as the boy looked at his dagger. The boy, assuming he had to use his dagger against this one here, stuck it into his arm. A trickle of Roman blood primed a roar of patriotic affront, dirty little foreign bastard, even babes in arms in that northern mound of dogturds are trained to be treacherous to our brave boys. Tibulus watched the red drops trickle with the sincere interest the elder Pliny might bring to a march of fire ants, then he swished his sword terribly to the mob's delight. The boy now performed what this mob took to be a barbaric filthy wardance round and round the brave Roman and, which was totally against the rules of fair play, nicked him in the buttocks not once but twice. Nero was surprised not to hear Britannicus crying against the current; he looked round and saw that Britannicus was no longer there. Tibulus stood blinking at the dancing boy, then he downed with his sword at the lad's dagger. The lad seemed happy to be rid of it but seemed also to wonder whether, in the rules of a sport he was beginning dimly to understand with the crowd's help, he ought not perhaps to pick it up from where it lay at Tibulus's feet. He decided instead to run away from Tibulus's sword, which flashed unpleasantly in the sun at him, but this, according to the crowd's rage, was not in the rules either. Running, anyway, he stumbled over a British corpse, disclosed a tearful and impotent anger, and appeared ready to be hacked, that was the crowd's evident but mysterious need, best get it over. It was then that Britannicus appeared in the arena and stopped the fight. At first the crowd did not know who he was and they howled down what he was trying to say. Then, to the horrid amazement of the Emperor, Britannicus sang.

       Sang. Sang. Opened his throat and sang, in a clear and altogether audible and apparently trained tenor, two or three wordless measures which had the effect on the crowd of a minatory trumpet. The crowd hushed and heard what followed. 'I am Britannicus, son of the divine Claudius. Where, I ask, is the ancient Roman spirit of mercy to a brave enemy? I fought the Britons. I helped conquer them. It is enough. Let them not be humiliated as well.' And, as Nero had done previously but in the impulse of a very different velleity, he took the boy in his arms. The fickle mob howled its joy. You could never trust the mob. Caligula, Nero thought, was right in wishing the Roman people to have but one throat and himself the satisfaction of cutting it. After, that was, the duty of slashing more particular throats.

Any mob likes to howl, though it does not always know why it is howling, any more than a dog knows why it bays at the moon. The Jewish mob, away in Jerusalem or, having transferred itself segmentally to the mainly Gentile port, as near as it could get to his cell in Caesarea, still howled at Paul, having forgotten or never having known precisely why. It was time for the new procurator to be himself sure why this baldheaded one in chains had incurred both high and low displeasure, and what relevance this had to Roman governance.

       He was lucky to receive about this time a courtesy visit from King Herod Agrippa II and his sister Bernice. For this son of the dead and unlamented monarch of Judaea knew all about the Jewish law, so it was said. He had been ruler of Chalcis, which lay between Lebanon and Antilebanon, and afterwards took over the tetrarchies which Gaius Caligula had granted to his father before his elevation to the greater throne. Nero, in his early conscientious days, had added a few scraps of territory around the Galilean lake and, in gratitude, the little king had changed the name of his capital from Caesarea Philippi to Neronias. Bernice, or Berenice (that being the original or Macedonian form of the name), was a pretty young widow who had been married to her uncle Herod of Chalcis. There was a fair number of avuncular espousals in the Herod family, and it is curious that nobody thundered against them, the Jews being hot against violations of allowable marital limits, while the Roman Senate, not a notably moral body, had howled against Claudius's proposal to marry his niece, until, that is, his niece had stopped their howling with an assassination or two.

       The neatly bearded little monarch, in his fine black and gold thread, sat with his sister, recently groomed and coiffed in Alexandria, on little thrones set up on the procuratorial rostrum. It was a blue and gold day, and Bernice's sharp little ears were concerned with analysing the components of the birdsong about them more than with attending to the harsh Greek of the procurator's exordium.

       'We are met in order to clarify the issue yet again of the accusation brought by the Jewish people against the man Paul. The Roman law operates in the sphere of secular action. It is fitting that a monarch greatly experienced in the Jewish law should, of his graciousness, assist the Roman arm in the elucidation of the issue. King Herod Agrippa, here is the man.' There indeed was chained Paul, bowing slightly in the direction of Hebraic royalty. 'The Jews of Judaea have made suit to me, protesting that he must live no longer. I myself have found in him nothing worthy of death. He has requested appeal to the Emperor in Rome, and this has been granted. But the question is this: what must we write to Rome? Perhaps, at last, we shall find out. Let the prisoner speak.'

       The Jewish prosecution then clamoured to put their case in Aramaic, since probably the situation had not been made sufficiently clear in Greek, a pagan tongue, but Festus said that he was satisfied that the accused would make the accusation as clear as the defence. So Paul set sail on a wide sea of self-justification with an eloquence honed by enforced repetition. Marcus Julius Tranquillus listened with great care and, though he had made a Jewish marriage, his head swam with the Oriental subtlety of it all. That business of Paul's having desecrated the Temple no longer seemed to come into it. He was being set upon by the Jews for preaching heretical doctrine, and the Jews hoped to bring the Romans into it by laying at his door the disruption of public order which they themselves, rejecting the logic of what was not at all heretical, had caused. Paul appeared to give an elegantly concise history of the Jewish nation, their hope of a redeemer, the fulfilment of that hope in a form which, since they had got used to hope and did not particularly want its fulfilment, they stubbornly rejected. Paul quoted massively, and names like Ezra, Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai and Zechariah evidently registered as mere uncouth noise with Festus, who stared stonily in a Roman intellectual sleep. Paul ended by saying: