The Kingdom of the Wicked (6 page)

       'You hear them, mother? This is the noise I wanted to hear. I regret nothing. Leave me.'

       At this moment young men leaned from the roofs of the houses and set torches to the festoons of dry leaves and flowers that stretched across the street. Acrid smoke got in eyes and nostrils, as much those of the Syrian escort as of the crowd, most of which read this as a new and somewhat brutal mode of rejoicing. Young men, cushioned from yelling Syrian military by staid and bewildered visitors to the city, got at Caleb's roped wrists and freed them with a pair of knives, and the crosspiece fell and caused stumbling. A rope ladder rolled down from a roof. Caleb began to climb. The Syrian under officer yelled and prodded with an impotent spear, whose shaft had been grasped by two youths who showed fine white teeth. Burning and smoky festoons still fell. Caleb reached roof level, the ladder was drawn up with remarkable speed. By Jupiter, there was going to be trouble for somebody.

       By now it could be said that a great part of Jerusalem, natives and visitors, had found its way to the open courts of the Temple, where Peter, as leader of the twelve, had fixed on a pillar with a plinth that afforded room for two bare feet and volutes on the column that granted a handhold. From this he was to speak. The Syrian escort, holding on to the remaining two prisoners, were diverted from the straight road to execution by their need to find Caleb. He had got on to a roof, meaning that he could now be anywhere. The under officer frankly wept, waving his spear in gestures of desperation. By Castor and Pollux, there was going to be trouble.

       Priests in the courtyard were chanting: 'We offer you, Lord God of Hosts, these first fruits of your planting and nurturing, as also this holy bread baked from the first of the new barley grain But they had but a small attendance. They turned at the babble of many voices. A brawny Nazarene, no longer young, was bawling:

       'Men and women of Judaea, and all that are dwelling in Jerusalem, give ear to my words.'

       What language was he speaking? Some say that a miracle had been performed, whereby he spoke the primordial Adamic tongue and his listeners had been granted an instant course of highly skilled lessons in it. It is safer to believe that he spoke not Aramaic, nor a bizarre amalgam of all the tongues of the dispersal, but a pure Hebrew with no Galilean accent (the Galileans always had difficulty with the gutturals). That the language of the sacred texts should now become the medium of immediate discourse may be taken as miracle enough, as also an eloquence Peter had not previously possessed and, indeed, rarely possessed thereafter. A Thomasian kind of sceptic (I refer to what Thomas had been; there was danger now of his becoming over — credulous) stood near to Peter and, hearing the careful enunciation of one who must consciously control the movement of tongue and lips, as well as the tonalities of enthusiasm, was heard to say:

       'He's drunk. They're all drunk. They've been at the new wine.'

       I must cast some doubt on the new of his accusation. The vintage of the year was still some months away. He may have said sweet instead, knowing, as we all know, that if you put new wine in a jar and cover the stopper with pitch and then place the jar in a fishpond, your removal of the jar after thirty days will ensure that your wine will stay sweet the year long.

       Peter laughed and said: 'I heard that. I'm not drunk, nor are any of my friends here. It's only the third hour of the day and the taverns are hardly open. No, this is no drunken talk but the giving forth of the good news. You know, some of you, what was said by the prophet Joel: "I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh. And your sons and your daughters will prophesy. And your young men shall see visions. And your old men shall dream dreams. And I will show wonders in the heavens overhead, and signs in the earth beneath, blood and fire and the vapour of smoke." 'Some there had certainly seen that. "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before the day of the Lord comes, that great day, that notable day." Well, that great and notable day is upon us. Jesus of Nazareth, approved of God by mighty works and wonders and signs — Jesus, crucified, slain by lawless men — him has God raised up, having loosed the pangs of death.'

       Dangerous talk. Priests listened grimly.

       'This Jesus,' Peter repeated, 'did God raise up. Of this all we twelve assembled before you are witnesses. Being therefore exalted by the right hand of God and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured forth these words which you hear and of which I am the vessel. Let all the House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ — this Jesus whom you crucified.'

       Some of the Sanhedrin were now present. Saul, who should not have been here but tending his fellow student Caleb, hovered near them, showing a proper horror.

       'Save your souls,' Peter yelled, 'men and women of Israel — for the wonders and signs are upon you.'

       The impressed ones in the crowd cried: 'How?'

       'Repent. Be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Save your souls — save yourselves from this crooked generation.' And, the die finally cast, he pointed towards the back of the crowd, where the priests were. Some of them stalked off. Saul, blazing and silent, stayed.

       Matthew, the former tax collector, trained in practicalities like sums due on what dates, cried to the crowd that baptisms would start next day at dawn on the banks of the Kedron.

       On a rooftop which granted a distant view of a huge gathering being addressed in tones that, their words being indistinguishable, had a flavour of zealotry and showed also a lack of retaliatory preparation on the Tower of Antonia, the Zealot Caleb was having his wounds washed in white wine and then soothed with a grassgreen ointment. Stephen, no Zealot, performed these tasks while six true young Zealots, Joshua son of the Sabbath, Tobias, the younger Elias, Joseph bar Joseph, Jonathan Levi and Abbas Barabbas, watched for Roman action. There was none save for the due and unusually vicious execution of the two who had not escaped. They had not been theological students. Stephen said:

       'Wait for nightfall. Then go to Qumran. You'll get there by dawn. I have a friend there, Ananias. He'll take care of you.'

       'One of us?'

       'He's no Zealot, if that's what you mean. He's trying to become an Essene, but he's not sure about it. Whatever you'll think of the Essenes, and you probably won't think much, they're against the Romans.'

       'The smoke and the ladder — all that was your idea?'

       'It wouldn't have worked without that crowd. It looks, by the way, as if the Nazarenes have come out of hiding. You ought to be grateful to Jesus.'

       'You're not one of us. And yet you did it. Now you'll be in danger. Let's go to this place together.'

       'No. I help you as a friend, not otherwise. I think the Zealots are wrong, or should I say impractical. You won't prevail. The true road lies somewhere else.'

       'The Sadducee way? The Pharisee way? The — who are these people I'm to go to?'

       'They live the life of the spirit. Cut off from the flesh. That's as impractical a way as yours. I'm a Greek Jew, Caleb, not a Palestinian one. We think differently. My idea of God isn't yours. I can't accept a bellowing tribal Jehovah protecting his own — rather inefficiently, if I may say so.'

       'Saul would call that blasphemy. I suppose it is.'

       'Let Saul call it what he likes. Saul, by the way, wasn't very helpful. Other things to do, he said, than confirm fools in their folly. I notice you show no concern about your womenfolk. Something vaguely Nazarene about the Zealots. Give up your family and follow the right. Very unjewish.'

       'I know. I thought about them too late. But the Romans don't know them, won't find them, unless somebody like Saul gives them away.'

       'Saul's Roman citizenship doesn't go so far. Quintilius knows them. They visited Quintilius but got nowhere. But Quintilius won't find them. They've already gone to my place. Besides, I have a feeling that Pontius Pilatus isn't going to last much longer. The Romans are supposed to be an efficient people —'

       Caleb smiled faintly at that.

In the praetorium the procurator hit out at the flies with his whisk. The flies seemed busier today, bit more. They were like Jews who did not disdain to enter a Gentile dwelling nor suck at honey unblessed by priests. When Quintilius showed in prisoner and escort, Pilate did a thing unseemly in a Roman officer: he struck the wretch twice on the face with his flywhisk. 'You're a damned Syrian but you're still in the Roman army. You're going to answer for your crime in the accepted Roman manner, so get the point of your sword sharp. There'll be songs tonight in the taverns about an eagle that lost his claws. You have disgraced my procuratorship and disgraced Rome. Don't botch your suicide as you botched — Ah, get him out of my sight.' The guards led him off wailing in the Syrian manner. 'I presume,' Pilate said to his deputy, 'that you've found the man by now.'

       'Totally impossible, procurator. These Jews all look alike, and the town's crammed with tourists. How could we ever find him, and what would be the point of making an arbitrary arrest and saying that was the man? Best to talk about last-minute mercy if there's to be any talk at all. Two of them are hanging up there on Golgotha, and that ought to be enough to show the authority of Rome's ah plenipotentiary. Of course, we could declare war on the city, but that would mean bringing in legions from Syria and the sudden interest of the Emperor. They got the better of you, so best, sir, just to shrug it off. It's not the end of the world.'

       Pilate gave Quintilius a good long look. 'Got the better of me, did they?' he said. 'I left all that business in your hands.'

       'Yes, sir, but I remain merely the one who takes orders.'

       'I smell insolence.' Quintilius shrugged and said nothing. Pilate said: 'I take it you've already delivered Roman justice to whatever family that Jew has.'

       'Not yet, sir. A mother and two sisters. The girls presumably are virgins. Roman law doesn't allow —’

       'Well, get them deflowered, man, and then shove the sword in. Go on, what are you waiting for? No, wait — lash them till the skin comes off and then put them on the next boat to Puteoli. Tiberius may relish a little Jewish flesh for what he calls his love games.'

       'Do we,' Quintilius asked, 'have to report this — unfortunate humiliation to Syria? Or to Rome?'

       They looked at each other. Pilate said:

       'I don't think, Quintilius, anyone will care one way or the other. A very minor incident, such things happen. On the other hand, you may be already preparing your report for the authorities, suggesting that the procurator of Judaea is ripe for replacement —’

       'I would never dream, sir, of so disloyal an act.'

       'Of course not, Quintilius. But, listen, Quintilius, if I fall, you fall with me — remember that. Now — get on with the prosecution of Roman justice.' Quintilius rather ironically saluted, then marched away slowly, as from a funeral.

       It was a long day, unseasonably warm, with full taverns but not many arrests. The twelve disciples stayed quietly in their upper room, some of them lying on their pallets, while they unpicked the fabric of the morning. Euphoria had passed and there was a slight sense of crapula. Peter said little, having already said enough. Bartholomew the country doctor, learned in little except medicinal herbs, was yet enough of a thinking man to raise the business of the Holy Spirit, a term used freely by the oratorical Peter but not yet defined. 'As I see it,' he said, 'this is the wind that blew and the fine Hebrew Peter spoke and everybody understood, and I would say it was also Thomas's nightmare of a tongue split and on fire.'

       'Those,' Simon the former Zealot said, scratching his cheek, 'are what you might call appearances of this Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit seems to be the power coming out of the two of them. The Father and Son get on with the business of whatever has to be done up there, and they leave this Holy Spirit down here.'

       'Ye fail to see,' Thomas said, 'a very peculiar change that's come over things. There used to be one God, and now it looks as if there were three.'

       'There can't be three,' John, so mild and yet with so inordinately powerful a voice, put in. 'The Father and the Son are the same, and so is this Holy Spirit.'

       'The same as what?'

       'The same as these two that are one. Three in one. So tomorrow, if anybody turns up for the mass baptizing, we have to say something like "I baptize you in the name of the three." That's going to upset some people.'

       'There'll be a lot turning up,' Matthew said. 'Especially from those who've come from a long way off. Something free to take home with them. You're right in a way, John. Things have got a bit complicated. God has a son now, and they've sent down a sort of bird.'

       'Bird?' Peter said, rousing himself from counting over his narrow stock of pure Hebrew. He was also watching his performance of the morning as though he were one of the crowd. 'Let us have no nonsense and no blasphemy. What has a bird to do with anything?'

       Matthew turned in surprise. 'I saw the bird up on the ceiling when the wind started blowing. Like a pigeon only big as an eagle.'

       'What wind?' Andrew asked.

       'Is everybody going mad?' Peter cried.

       'Well, yes, it could be put that way,' Matthew said. 'We were all a bit mad this morning, else we wouldn't have done what we did. And that's how it's going to be in future. It's another name for being touched by the Holy Spirit.'

       They ate little and went to rest early, for the next day would, they thought, be a busy one. Nor was the Kedron, set in its steep ravine, at all like the Jordan. Steep banks, no true shore, and the river flowing fast and hostile. A difficult day beckoned, and after it a difficult future, what with the Holy Spirit descending and withdrawing with the capriciousness of the Jesus who had promised it or him or her, a wind or bird or the fiery tongue of Thomas's dream. It is said that