Great Lion of God (12 page)

He was certain, in his innocence, that no man had ever experienced such ineffable joy before, and he gave thanks to God for it. Yet, never once did Dacyl utter a profound word, not even the unconscious wisdom of the unlettered and ignorant. She did not touch his mind, but she touched secret places in him, which were wiser if more primeval, with the freshness of the first morning of creation. She regarded existence as a young lamb regarded it, or a bird, or anything else as simple and natural and serene. She was a rose and she spread her fragrant petals to the sun and gave of the divine essence of her perfume. She played with Saul as a child plays, and with all the fullness of a child, though she was older than he. She kissed him as openly as a child, and fondled his hands and neck. At these times he became delirious.

Best of all, she gave him an awareness of all other human creatures, an awareness that was never to leave him.

Chapter 4

T
ARSUS
, whom her inhabitants called “the jewel of the Cydnus River,” was essentially a Phoenician city, commercial, murmurous with business and traffic both by water and highways, possessed of excellent academies and schools, mercantile establishments, factories, perfumers, weavers, forges, endless shops, remarkable museums and music halls, the freedom of Roman citizenship, cursed with a bureaucracy, gleaming with temples to many gods, Hellenistic in attitude though Oriental in emotion, famed for her craftsmen, enriched by her pirates who lived respectable and respected lives in their fine villas, wineshops, baths, bakeries, carpet manufacturers, banks, stock markets, inns where Egyptian cooks served superb meals, brothels, licentious theaters, arenas for sports and gladitorial combats. Many were the natives who proudly called themselves “a little Rome,” for a score of races lived here and the narrow streets clamored with a multitude of tongues. Here lived Syrians and Sidonians, students from Asia Minor, Nubians and Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians, pale-eyed barbarians from the forests of Europe, slaves, Gauls, Britons, artists, jewelers and the owners of bookshops, scribes knowing a dozen tongues, physicians, and tens of thousands of the free mobs who idled, worked when hunger threatened, scrawled graffiti on the walls at night, vociferously adored some local politician and as vociferously derided him, haunted the arenas, hunted slaves, fought with the police on occasion, gave their measure of robbers to the streets, served any master, gambled, diced, pimped, labored, sweated, cheated and behaved as the market rabble has always behaved and will invariably behave. They adored actors and acrobats and gladiators, extolled them one day and put their very lives in danger the next, harassed unprotected young girls hurrying with messages for rich mistresses, and were emotional, passionate, dangerous, colorful, frightening, seething, amusing and lively, stinking and wildly generous, and in general heartily enjoyed their lives and hourly blasphemed the gods, and paid taxes only when pursued by a resolute publican accompanied by slaves with staves, or legionnaires carrying fasces. They were the terror and vitality of the night, the vehemence of the day, and like all who live by their wits and infrequent labor they were exceedingly clever and full of wit.

“Cities without a market rabble could not survive,” Aristo would tell his pupil, Saul. “They would expire of boredom, for respectability has a certain deadness and ennui about it, a certain lack of life. It is the market rabble, dexterously turning a drachma or a sesterce or a copper here and there, which enlivens and creates trade, inspires that greed which is the mother of ambition and fortune, raises temples, gives the gods changeful faces, stimulates fashions, removes the lead from the boots of soldier and police, forms a subject against which priests and teachers and lawmakers can inveigh—what else could they do?—and, if their lustre is garish and gaudy and cheap, at least it is lustre and should not be despised. Their charlatanry, their brazen robberies, their wit and their cavortings, their heedlessness and their lewdness, their cruelty and their frequent violent compassion, are closer to the real nature of man, my Saul, than are the sober-faced philosophers and the writers of books. It is the market rabble, in truth, which inspire theses and book-writing and the best of plays, for that which is raucous and furious and even vicious has more verity before the sun than all of the old Greek virtues of continence, reflection, modesty and the Stoic imperative. This is something,” added Aristo, “which you will find angrily denied by those who believe even the common man can be greater than he is, or that any man can become like the gods, but then these sad defenders of the public weal and these fantasy-weavers are far removed from knowledge and validity and reality, and one could pity them if they were not so dangerous.”

Saul thought that Aristo was merely conducting an exercise in perversity and contradiction, but since he had known Dacyl he was no longer certain. The girl, though a slave and protected, was of the market rabble also. He could not despise her. In truth, because of her, he saw mankind as it was and not as he had hoped it would be, and love filled him rather than repulsion. But he could not believe, with the smiling Aristo, that evil was as necessary as good, and that good without evil would be a veritable hell of listlessness and dankness. He explained, over and over, the glories and the sweetnesses of the lost Eden, and Aristo always replied, “One should be grateful to your Adam and Eve. Not only did they set men free from absolute virtue, but they made them wholly human. They bore in their loins the beauty and the madness of cities, the great sails of commerce, the delight of theaters and dancing girls, and all the infinite variety of life as we know it, and without which we would live in a world of a single color, like babes in their nurseries. They were also very wise: they forebore to eat of the Tree of Life before feasting on the Tree of Wisdom, for what man would be immortal?”

On this, they had always disputed, and Aristo, Saul would think, flourished on disputations, all cynical and full of skepticism, all sharp and laughing. But since the youth had known Dacyl he found himself listening more closely to Aristo who could give a keen edge to any discourse and fire the mind even if it disagreed with him.

“You will notice, in Tarsus, as you will notice in Rome and Alexandria and Athens in the future, that we Greeks have given even vice a refinement which grosser races could never attain,” said Aristo. “All men are vile, as your Solomon has said, and is he not considered your wisest king? But vileness should not be, among men, a muddy animal vileness—though I wrongfully denigrate the animals in this instance—but the vileness of the elegant and gracious gods. That which you Jews call sin has inspired more poetry than virtue, and certainly more temples! What would man be without danger and war and terror and harpies and furies and even death? A sad little languid creature munching fruit under a changeless tree in a paradise on which terrible winds never descended nor any wave rushed nor any thunder sounded. Without controversy there can be no wise argument; without dissension there can be no agreement; without disaster there can be no peace, in all the meaning of the words. In a deeper subtlety than you know, Saul, wickedness created virtue, and all the arts, and vitality. Contrast, Saul, is the only thing which makes life interesting. And wine and love, of course.”

Saul contemplated. He could never agree on a single point with Aristo, but Aristo, like Dacyl, awakened him to the many-faceted crystal of existence, and its endless colors. Hillel had attempted this, but as Saul did not respect his mind, he had not succeeded.

He was not attracted to the vice of Tarsus which he often saw. But he was less horrified and more saddened now at the sight of the tinted male whores he saw on the streets, and the cheap dissolute women in rough garments or in rich litters.

He no longer averted his eves from the incense-fuming “heathen” temples of a score of alien religions. It was true that all mankind seemed desperately, if joyously, determined to debauch the human spirit, especially in the hot streets of Tarsus, but Saul was less nauseated or made angry by this display of depravity. He pitied it, and pitied all its votaries.

Not to these had been given the Torah, the prophets, Moses and Solomon, and the promise of the Messias. Or, if the vision had been given—witness the Greek worship of the “Unknown God”—it had been nebulous and uncertain. Once Saul even entered a Greek temple and had looked at its marvelous and simple beauty and its heroic and graceful statues, and all the cloudy incense and the flowers and the charming vistas. There, too, he had found the empty altar, simple and plain and untenanted and inscribed, “To the Unknown God.” It waited for That which would give it significance and truth. For those who did not know what had been precisely promised the Jews, Saul felt bitter tears in his eyes.

Hillel had often told him, “A Gentile is not less in the sight of God than a pious and reverent and devoted Jew. He, too, is a child of God the Father, blessed be His Glorious Name. He, too, according to the prophets, will partake of the salvation of the Messias. No man must be despised, nor considered lesser than another. You must honor his manhood, his brotherhood before God, you must deal with him justly and in honor, you must give him your compassion and your hand—even if he reject it. Diverse though we are—for the Father loves diversity, as He created it—in a most strange and mystical way mankind is all one. It has been said by Egyptian scientists that light, which appears to us to have a thousand hues and tints and is composed of endless colors, is truly but one light. And that light is the Spirit of God, and of man.”

Saul had listened dutifully, and with the deep love he bore his father, but he had considered Hillel too simplistic and too devoid of the pride of a Jew whose fathers had been given a Covenant with God, and of whose flesh the Messias would be born. But now, as he daily walked the streets of Tarsus in the burnished autumn sunlight, he felt less pride than compassion, and he wondered why it was that other men had not been enlightened also. The Greeks had had their moral code, and so had the Romans and the Egyptians, but it had been a code rooted in some ethical principle and not in the Ancient of Days. Ethical principles devoid of a Source could be destroyed or abandoned by change, but principles established on Eternal Stone could never be moved.

Love, though he did not know it, had given him not only a sense of completely belonging to all humanity, but a tender and powerful pity for it. And, sorrowfully, in the end—because he was still very young and inexperienced and had no confidant—love brought him a terror and a wrath and a disillusionment from which he was never completely to recover, and which was to haunt all his life, and cause him agony, and confound and baffle those necessary to him.

In all his short life, Saul had never seen a morning so absolutely golden, so resonant with aureate tints and shades, so tawny and ebullient and life-compelling, though it was autumn and the dying year. The darkness of the cypresses emphasized the fiery yellow of other trees; tamarisks were still green but their boughs were gilded with the first topaz sun. Amber water poured smoothly with gentle thunder over the russet rocks and the pool itself was almost still and shiningly saffron. Crimson and lemon-yellow flowers bordered it and the tall grass was umbrous. The little rills and brooks which flowed from the pool quivered in bright copper over the land. The sky above was a deep purple still, pierced by shafts of bronzelike spears in the east, and beyond the very mountains appeared like lion-colored and writhing heaps of stone, pathed with the first thin snows.

Saul carried a basket of scarlet pomegranates in his hand for Dacyl, and the scent of them, mingled with the scent, rich and fruity, from the land, excited him strangely, and he felt his heart rise with promise and unknown excitement and it made him hurry along the empty and twisting road to the cataract and the pool. Once there, he surveyed it all with delight. His heart was still pacing rapidly, and he smiled exuberantly and a rejoicing in life filled him. The Psalms of adoration seemed too puny to him to express the rapture he felt, and the nameless anticipation. He looked about for Dacyl, but she was not there.

Then, suddenly, he trembled with fright. A jackal had appeared on the opposite side of the pond and the yellow creature had escaped his first notice for he blended so completely with the other natural tints about him. It was known that jackals carried rabies with them, and inflicted “the incurable wound” mentioned by Hippocrates, and Saul had watched a favorite young servant die, some years ago, choking with agony after the bite of a jackal.

Jackals were sly but cowardly creatures. Unless mad, they did not attack human beings. But once mad they were like tigers. Saul’s first impulse was to run, to find Dacyl and to keep her from approaching the pond if she were on the way. Then he was again affrighted. The jackal had seen him. Instead of slinking away, as was the nature of jackals, the animal’s legs stiffened, his fur bristled and his evil head appeared to engorge. His wild eyes glowed in the first light and from his throat there issued a terrible snarling. So, the creature was afflicted with the dread disease. Saul now saw the line of bloody foam along the jackal’s jaw.

Stricken with terror, Saul could not look away. He dared not flee for fear of pursuit. Holding the animal with his eyes he slowly bent and lifted a heavy and jagged stone in his hand. Then he shouted menacingly. The jackal retreated a pace or two, but his snarling was like the grinding of rocks and then he uttered a howl of madness and shook from head to foot. But he retreated no more.

It was then that Dacyl appeared, laughing, calling to Saul because she had heard his shout and she had believed that he was summoning her in impatience. There she stood, only a few paces from the jackal and on the mossy bank of the pool, looking across the water at Saul and smiling gaily, and waving.

Sweat rushed out upon Saul’s flesh, and he was dumb. Then as Dacyl continued her waving and was beginning to seem a trifle perplexed, Saul found his voice. “Go into the water, Dacyl!” he called. “Swim to me! Do not hesitate! There is a jackal near you and he is mad!”