The Kingdom of the Wicked (53 page)

       'I'm not adept at using friendships. The Jews trust me.'

       'Do, do they? Ah, marvellous beasts. And so intelligent.'

       The elephants had come lumbering on, grey, wrinkled, clumsy. They began to dance very heavily, whipped and cursed by their mahauts, as they are called, to the elephantine music of the hydraulis. The Romans chewed their sausages. Grain, sand, elephants.

It was slow going from Myra. The smell of the grain from the hold was sickening, but not so much as the ship's roll. The sea, Luke thought, when he had given breakfast to the waves, was like dissolving marble, as though Rome had melted in Tiber. Still something of the poet. Paul lay groaning on his bunk. They shared the cabin with a certain Aristarchus from Thessalonica, who had embarked at Myra and proposed leaving the ship at Cnidus on the Carian promontory of Tropium, if they ever reached there. He was a man of strong stomach who talked much of the kitchen of Tropium, which was said to be exceptional. He also had the grace to be curious about his messmates, and was ready, when Paul's stomach allowed him to be rational, to hear all about the great Christianizing mission. The eating and drinking of the soter seemed to him to be excellent doctrine. 'A good religion,' he pronounced, 'itself eats and drinks of what it supersedes.' He seemed to have no religion. 'I've heard from certain travellers about what is called anthropophagy in certain primitive places which the Romans have still to colonize. People eat people. Crunch their bones, chew their flesh. Cooked, of course, probably with herbs of the country

       'Please. Not now.'

       'My belief is that it's the salt they're after. The human body contains salt. If you're far from the salt of the sea the corpses of your friends and relations, enemies too of course, may well be the only source of that vital mineral.' He felt he himself at that time had no particular need of a religion. 'What I need now is cheaper labour and higher profits.' But he would, when he retired, take a close look at the claims of this new faith. He had the impression that it was popular among slaves, which was no recommendation to free men. While he snored and Luke tossed out of phase with the ship, Paul lay on his back and heard the timbers creak and the waves lurch and wash. He tried to conduct a colloquy with Christ, but Christ was coy and would not come. Only when at length he slept fitfully did answers flow out of a kind of inner marine phosphorescence.

       'What will happen to me in Rome?'

       'Unseemly to ask. Time is a road that is all high gates. Even I had to engage them.'

       'Are you satisfied with what I've so far done?'

       'You chose the easier way. You have not sufficiently hammered at the Jews. Seeing me turned into a Lord of the Gentiles, they will the more readily reject my messianic function. It is all a great pity.'

       'Do you still consider me to be a murderer?'

       'Of course. That will not be forgotten. But your murderous energy was needed.'

       'I think I am going to be sick.'

       'You will find a canvas bucket hanging on a peg at the foot of the companionway.'

       It took several queasy days to reach Cnidus. Here, hale and crackling with energy, Aristarchus of Thessalonica descended by a net to one of the passenger boats that bobbed in the roads. His packages were hurled down at him; one went into the water and was boathooked out. Then he waved his way to shore. The captain, who had the simple and engaging but not altogether suitable name Philos, for he was misanthropic and had a vile temper, debated with Julius the advisability of putting into one of the two harbours, the eastern one being the larger, among the massed Egyptian shipping, there to await a change of wind. Julius, though a soldier, was granted a certain authority by virtue of his representing the Roman state, while Philos was a mere concessionary, and he prevailed when he said: 'I see what you mean. Cythera lies due west, but it may take weeks for the wind to veer. My instructions are to consult speed more than safety.'

       'And how about my ship? And my crew? And the cargo? And the passengers who pay out of their own purses not the almighty Roman state? I know how it is, you want to get those bits of jailmeat off your hands and into bed with your everloving. In this trade you go careful.'

       Julius jabbed his forefinger on the chart and slid it to the right. 'We make for the eastern end of Crete.'

       'Cape Salmone.'

       'Is that what it's called?'

       'I don't like this one little bit.'

       Philos grumbled that he had been right, that the damned northwester was going to crack them like a walnut against those rocks there as they crept south of the thin wide island. By dint of yelling and appealing to thirty years of seamanship, fifteen of them as owner-master, he got his way and steered into Limeonas Kalous or Fair Havens, the first sheltered bay they came to after rounding the cape, there to wait till the wind changed. Julius said:

       'It's not going to change in a hurry.' They stood on deck, watching the crew bring skins of fresh water in the launch from the little quay with its highcharging chandlers. The ship laboured at anchor. Paul said:

       'Centurion, captain, if I may speak. The bad time for sailing's already begun. This is the month of Tishri.'

       'Of what?'

       'October. I may be a landsman, but I'm not unfamiliar with the seas of these parts. You'll have to winter here.'

       Philos grew redly truculent. 'Look,' he said, 'I don't need the advice of a lump of Jewish jailfodder —’

       'You'll take that back,' Luke said.

       'I think you'd better take that back,' Julius suggested. 'You're speaking of a Roman citizen appellant to Caesar.'

       'All right, I take it back. What none of you gentry seem to know is that this is a bad winter port.'

       Julius surveyed the small islands that half ringed the harbour. 'Those break the wind, don't they?'

       'It's more open than you think. Broadside on, smack — look at those rocks, all teeth. What we're going to do is make for Phoenix, or Phineka as some call it. See it there on the chart.' He sniffed as at a good dinner cooking. 'There's a change on the way, I'm getting it in both nostrils. With a decent southerly we'll make Phoenix with no trouble. One step at a time. We'll think what to do next when I'm anchored safe at Phoenix.' And without waiting for the approval of the Roman state he gave his orders and the boatswain whistled them. Paul smelt the softness of the south wind. Soon they were coasting gently westwards, and the sailors sang to the wind as to a fickle woman, spoke tenderly to it, prayed that it waft them safe across the mouth of the Gulf of Messara. And, Paul asked himself, was the prayer idolatrous? God was up there, the wind here; you had to pray to something that behaved with the capriciousness of a god and a woman but was palpably down here. Monotheism was not for the anxious daily woodtouching business of the world. A luxury like art?

       Then the wind changed. Swiftly, without advance notice. East by northeast — anemos typhonikos, typhon, typhoon. He heard a sailor curse the woman that had changed into a beast called Eurakylon. Greek Euros and Roman Aquilo conjoined into a hybrid like a centaur, though this one winged. They could not head up to the gale. Clouds rolled against each other from opposed quarters of the sky and lightning wrote a brief signature. For those who could not read thunder gave hollow voice some instants after. They went scud before Euraquilo twenty or more sea miles, under ink clouds and the rain's first bucketloads. He held to the rigging with Julius; Luke fumbled his drunken way below. That island dimly descried to leeward? Cauda. Some called it Gavdho. Thank God or the gods for the shelter of the lee. All hands to the securing of the dinghy. This they had still been towing astern, full of water. The forward sloping foremast served as a derrick; all hauled the lines and helped with the belaying of the boat. Then came the undergirding with the frapping cables.

       Paul watched fascinated as the work was done. The cables were dragged out of their locker, hypozomata, a word he had not heard before. Hardy sailors dived overboard and passed the cables under the garboard strake and up again, binding the timbers like a magistrate's fascis. That wind would smash spars and hull and all if left unbraced. The captain said seriously to Julius: 'This wind's going to drive us to Big Syrtis. You know what that is? No. Well, it's those quicksands west of Cyrene. We're going to drop the tophamper and set the storm-sails. Then we'll lay to on the starboard tack and do a slow drift northwest.' He looked fiercely at Paul and said: 'You a religious man?'

       'You mean a praying man, I suppose. I'll pray.'

       'Pray to the right gods. Poseidon and Aeolus and the rest of them. We don't want that Jewish one. He never did the Jews any good and he won't do us any either. We're going to need all the help we can get from up there. And,' he flapped his hands helplessly, 'all round here.'

       Next day Philos ordered the jettisoning of the cargo. The gale was fierce and vindictive. Nobody's gods had been listening, or perhaps they had. The first thing to go was the bags of sand for the Roman arena. These were dragged from the hold and hurled into the wind, whose cunning fingers picked holes in the sacks and threw the sand back. The grain went over ungrudgingly. The day after the spare gear had to go. 'Spare gear?' asked Paul. He soon discovered what that was: the mainyard, a spar as long as the ship. All hands, crew, passengers, prisoners all united to cast it over. There was no more that they could do. The storm did not abate in days. There was no east nor west nor north star, the whole firmament blacked out as with coarse sackcloth, and the sea sloggering and churning and buffeting the bound oaken staves of the ship. The entire company was assembled on the messdeck, battened down but leaks in the bulkheads showing the sea's impatient intention to establish full possession, a sloshing mate first, then master, god, all. Philos was hopeless about their situation:

       'If I knew where land was, I'd run us ashore, wouldn't I? But I don't know where land is. If this goes on we founder, so make up your minds as to that.' Some of the passengers wailed. Paul said:

       'Forgive my saying I told you so, but if we'd wintered in Fair Havens —’ Philos would have raged thoroughly at that had he not been exhausted. 'As things stand,' Paul said, 'I think we all ought to eat something. It's been days now, and if we have to meet God we'd better do it on full stomachs.' Julius would have smiled if his risor muscles had been capable of action: this ageing baldheaded man had been sick in what would pass now for fair weather; he seemed now, near the limit of their desperation, to be in good health and humour. Paul said: 'One thing I know is this — that I shall reach Rome. You may scoff at dreams, but experience teaches me that dreams are God's way of breaching the wall. If I am to reach Rome the rest of you will certainly see land. We are, so to speak, all in the same boat. Let's see now what provisions the sea has left us.' The ship's cook, a greatnosed Phoenician, rolled in nausea like the rest of them, but there was nothing more to come up. Two of the company tried to heal the leaks in the starboard bulkhead with bits of soaked sacking. Another baled incoming water into a cask which sloshed over the deck.

       Paul and Julius found in the store next to the adjoining galley a sack of wheaten flour whose top half was unsoaked though infested with weavils, a sealed tub of stale water, dried beans no longer dry. The livestock — poultry and two sheep — had long been washed overboard. With flint, dry tinder and green wood they got a fire going. Rough dry unleavened bread and boiled beans. The pitchsealed amphorae of wine were broached. With many the food stayed down, the wine enlivened to more lively fear of what was to come. Paul sang a cheerful hymn in Aramaic. The comfort of the Lord's love, his infinite goodness: it was all an outlandish metaphor of men's obdurate will to survive. 'Oh, shut up,' the captain moaned when Paul got to his fifth verse.

       Some friends I have had knowledgeable in sea matters have told me that the mean rate of drift of vessels laid to in such weather is something like thirty-six miles in a day and night. Thirteen days and something over an hour would take this ship from Clauda to Koura, which is a point on the east coast of Melita or Malta. With a slight abating of the gale, Philos and his boatswain opened the battens to find scudding cloud and the roaring song of shore breakers. They were drifting in to rock, the breakers told them. Philos ordered a sounding.

       'Twenty fathom.' Very faint on the contending winds.

       Paul and Julius had followed the captain up to night wind which was sweeter than the closed-in odours below. Julius said: 'I think I believe. If we get through this water I'll be ready for a drop more.'

       'Baptized? You? But you know nothing of what you have to believe.'

       'Oh, yes, I do. A God who accepts pagans as well as Jews. A fellowship of all people caught in a storm. You broke the bread and poured the wine and said what they'd become. I believed. What more must I do?' He howled the question over the gale.

       It was not a true question. Paul said nothing and listened to the new sounding:

       'Fifteen fathom.'

       That meant they were closing in to the unseen rocks. They could smell stale driftweed. The captain shouted for the dropping of four anchors from the stern. Clutching the taffrail, Paul saw the two cables pour from the port hawseholes: they would keep the prow pointing shorewards. Four of the crew then began furtively to cut the lines holding the launch to the deck. He called: 'What are you doing?'

       'Laying out anchors from the bow.'

       'I didn't hear the order.'

       'Never you mind about orders.' They were clearly intending to make for that shore in a safe company. Paul called Julius. Julius called his troops. The troops grappled with the sailors and sent the dinghy splashing overboard to go adrift. That was unwise: they would need that dinghy. For the moment the ship would hold by its stern anchors. They tried to get some sleep, but it was difficult.