The Kingdom of the Wicked (3 page)

       'It's a big bastard right enough.'

       'Well, it's going up to him. His worship the Emperor. I'm off up that rockface with it. Plenty of tufts to cling on to. That'll give him a bit of a surprise that will. What I'll say is this: From the god of the sea to the god of the world. That'll show him I'm book read too. There's many a small man been made big by doing the unexpected. It's the spirit that made the Empire what it is.'

       'It's like intruding,' the boy said. 'There's soldiers all over.’

       ‘Row in, boy.'

       Not knowing he had a gift coming, Tiberius was saying: 'You've not seen your own son, heard him howling in his blood while the knives struck and struck and she there, grinning —’

       'With respect, Caesar, you did not see it either.'

       'I see it every night. I wake sweating.' Drusus, his own son, sitting at the cleared supper table, his wife Livilla playing the game of holding up fingers quickly for the guessing of how many. And then Sejanus, the one man in Rome the Emperor could trust, prefect of the Guard, came in with his killers, and Drusus crawling under the table while Livilla laughed. They dragged him out by the hair and then stabbed and stabbed. Livilla laughed because now she was going to marry Sejanus, and Sejanus was going to be Emperor. Sejanus, trusted master of Rome while his ageing master tasted an earned repose on Capri.

       'And what satisfaction did you find in revenge?'

       'It was retribution, it was —’

       'The whole family?'

       The daughter was a mere child, crying: 'I didn't mean to be bad. I won't do it again. Please don't hurt me.'

       And the captain of the detail said to the executioner: 'This girl's a virgin presumably. We don't execute virgins. That's the law.'

       And the executioner: 'I'll rape her. Then we can follow the law.'

       Tiberius now shakily drained his cup of white wine. Curtius said: 'Calm, Caesar. Refuse to be moved. Take a calm mind back to Rome. Rome has become a filthy shambles. Macro is worse than Sejanus was. Rome needs its Emperor.'

       'I will not go back to Rome. I will die here. In my bed.'

       'And the succession?'

       'The succession is assured. Gaius has the army behind him. Nobody is going to kill Gaius.'

       'A fish?' Curtius said. They both looked towards a grinning man, approaching with a monstrous sea perch in his arms. It was kicking still. He was between two guardsmen. They too grinned. The fisherman said:

       'From the divine Neptune a gift for the divine Tiberius.' He had been practising the new and improved form all the difficult way up the rockface. Tiberius approached, saying:

       'Not so divine if mortal men can climb his Olympus. You guards, you forget your instructions. Throw this man where he came from, fish and all. Then report to your commanding officer for disciplinary action. No — wait. For me, you say? A gift from Neptune? Strange that he doesn't deliver it personally.'

       And he took from the arms of the fisherman the huge fish, staggering under its weight but, despite his age, strong enough to bear it. He smiled, and the fisherman smiled back. Then Tiberius took the fish by its tail in his hands like a flexible club and began to lash the man with it. Sharp scales struck his face like flakes of flint. He screamed, he was wearing blood like a moving mask.

       'If fishermen can get in, so can hired murderers.' He threw down the battered fish, panting. 'What's he saying?'

       'He's saying, sir,' said one of the guardsmen, 'that he's glad he didn't give you his crabs as well.'

       'Take him,' Tiberius ordered, with a promptitude that bespoke well the imperial gift of swift decisions, 'to the fish tanks and set all the crabs upon him. Then throw him back the way he came.' Curtius held on to his stoicism and his breakfast. So, howling, the fishgiver was hauled off. Tiberius sat. Curtius remained standing. A servant came on flat bare feet bearing a black snake from Sabatum on a velvet cushion. 'My darling Columba,' cooed Tiberius, taking it to his bosom. 'My little pet. The only living creature I can trust. She's hungry, Metellus. Bring some frogs and mice. Make sure they're properly alive.' The snake hissed happily.

       Having hurled the screaming fisherman over the rocks, the crabs clinging to his face and head in indifferent viciousness, the two guardsmen reported to their centurion, Marcus Julius Tranquillus. He was a young and decent man, his family of the plebeian branch of the Julian line, in the army as a career, like his father before him, a junior centurion on detachment from the Praetorian Guard. He listened gravely to what they told him and delivered judgment.

       'He expects me to order your execution,' he said, 'so we will take it that this has already been done and that your bodies have been at once buried in the communal dump because of the great heat. Take over guard duty near the beach. I will arrange your immediate replacements. You realize, I hope, that you were very foolish.'

       'We knew the man, sir. Drunk with him in the bars. Not an ounce of malice in him. Climbing up those rocks at his age with a struggling fish on his back. Out of respect and love for the Emperor, as he put it. It strikes me nobody can do right these days, sir.'

       'That's how it strikes you, eh? So that's how it strikes you. Strikes you that way, does it? All right, dismiss.'

       He was a lonely and troubled young man, well built and not unhandsome. He had tried, throughout his brief career, to hold on to certain principles of virtus. A congenital incorruptness had brought few rewards. He had been fortunate enough to be one of the first to pick up certain hints that Sejanus had been responsible for the murder of Drusus, despite Sejanus's own eager prosecution of a case that at first proferred no solution — the Emperor's son hacked to pieces and found, a feast for flies, in an alley near the Tiber. Well, great men always had enemies. Farcical trials and executions, no shortage of informers and perjurers. And then a slave had said something to another slave — slaves, having nothing else, had become depositories of honesty; being in theory insentient machines, they heard and saw more than was available to free men — and a love note from Sejanus to the Lady Livilla had been found crumpled under the pillow of a bed that a slave was making, and one thing had led to another. Julius, as acting mess secretary, had been offered this note by a slave in the officers' kitchen for a hundred sesterces. One thing had led to another, including the rape and execution of an innocent child. The whole of the Praetorian Guard had been rewarded — ten gold pieces a man — for not following Sejanus in his revolt; the legions in Syria had received equal sums for refusing to set specially blessed effigies of Sejanus among their standards. And he, Marcus Julius Tranquillus, had been honoured for his loyalty by this present appointment, forced to warm his hands at the central fire of corruption, madness, danger. But Tiberius could not live much longer. The son of Germanicus was, it was certain, to inherit the purple. Germanicus, adopted son of Tiberius, great soldier, fine man, unfortunately dead untimely in Syria and everyone knew why and how, had no bad blood to transmit to the boy who had been the darling of the military camps. Always in soldier's boots; they had nicknamed him 'Little Boots'. Caligula, which meant that, was a name that already made one smile in referred affection. There could be nothing but good in a son of Germanicus.

In one of the outer courts of the Temple, upon which Syrian guards looked down indifferently from Antonia's Tower, the Rabban Gamaliel discussed with his senior class the dangers of zealotry and the virtues of compromise. 'Compromise,' he said. 'Some of you wrinkle your noses and curl your lips, as though compromise were a dirty word. But it is only through compromise that we may keep the faith alive. We have ruling here in the holy territory of Israel an infidel race with unclean habits and an undisguised contempt for our religious laws. With one stroke of the sword they could sever the silken cord that binds us into one people. With their battering rams they could destroy the Temple. We live uneasily with the Romans, but at least we live.'

       'That is Sadducee talk.' So spoke Caleb the son of Jacob.

       'What,' said Seth the son of Zachaeus not the fishman, 'is wrong with Sadducee talk? If it weren't for us Sadducees you'd be kissing the little toe of Tiberius's statue. You'd be burning incense before Jupiter and Mercury and the rest of the godless crew. Rabban Gamaliel is right. Diplomacy is the way. Jewish intelligence can always defeat Roman stupidity. You Zealots would have us all strung up on that hill over there.'

       'Nailed up,' Stephen shuddered. He was a Greek Jew.

       'Look,' Caleb said. 'The Zealots ask only for a restoration of the Jewish birthright. Jewish rule in a Jewish land. Rome grows weak and Rome grows frightened. An old mad Emperor and a Senate full of squawking chickens. Interim rule in Syria, and how long can they hold Syria? Strike at Rome in Palestine and the provincial structure would collapse. Rome wouldn't send out any legions. The Roman Senate would say good riddance to Judaea and then go off to dinner. Let the Jews rule themselves, they'd say; they were almost more trouble than they were worth.'

       'I think,' Gamaliel said, 'that you underestimate the Roman appetite for power. I see no sign of debility in Pontius Pilatus. His Syrian troops would rush in and eat your Zealots for breakfast.'

       'Some say,' Stephen said, 'that he saw the light.'

       'If you mean the Galilean,' Caleb said, 'it was a very shortlived light.'

       'A shortlived light for all his followers.' This was Saul, a young man already growing bald, his eyes in dark caves, the frontal lobes unnaturally bulging. 'We've had a succession of these false prophets, almost one a year in the last ten or so. Most of them knew the scriptures, I'll say that. The scriptures drove them mad. But this one was an ignorant carpenter burbling about love.'

       'A carpenter's trade,' Gamaliel said slyly, 'is not inferior to a tentmaker's.'

       'If I make tents,' Saul said, 'it is in accordance with our Jewish tradition. We must all work with our hands. But I think of myself first as a scholar.'

       'He was a scholar too,' Stephen said. 'The scriptures were never out of his mouth. And what was wrong with burbling about love, as you put it?'

       'I'll tell you what was wrong and what is wrong,' Caleb said. 'By love he meant submission, turning the other cheek, putting up with foreign injustice. He countenanced tyranny. He said nothing about a free Israel.'

       'Caleb, my son,' Gamaliel said, 'admit there was something in what he preached. We must change ourselves before we change our systems of secular rule. Man's soul comes first.'

       'A soul in chains,' Caleb said, as was to be expected, bitterly.

       'The chains are personal sin, not foreign oppression. Don't disparage love. Love is a thing we all have to learn, and through hardship and bitterness too. On a practical level, it may well be that love will save us. We Jews play into Roman hands by hating each other — Pharisee against Sadducee, Zealot against both. Sect against sect, tribe against tribe, division not unity.'

       'So you,' Saul said, 'are becoming a Galilean?'

       'Like you, Saul,' Gamaliel said, 'I belong to the Pharisees. At least I accept the doctrine of resurrection. As for the narrowness, the xenophobia of small farmers — that's another matter. But God forbid that I should approve the blasphemy of his desperate claim to be — the very thought of the words makes me shudder — I cannot utter them.'

       'The Son of God,' Stephen said. 'The Messiah. Well, a Messiah was prophesied.'

       'Is, Stephen,' Saul said. 'Is prophesied.'

       'An endless is, I see. We believe in the coming of the Messiah, but anyone who claims to be the Messiah is condemned and put to death. Must it always be so?'

       'Yes,' Caleb said. 'So long as you live under a foreign power that puts down free speech. So long as the holy Jewish council is in the control of a sect that loves the Romans.'

       'You will take that back,' Seth said with heat. 'That is a lie and a calumny. That is a gross insult to the guardians of the faith —’

       'Enough, enough,' Gamaliel said mildly. 'Can we discuss nothing in rational calm? Let us think always in terms of the things that unite, not divide. We are all Jews and we must stop these dissensions. You may sneer at love as you sneer at compromise — but find me some other answer.' And he dismissed the class.

       The class became a little mob of highspirited youths as soon as it touched the secular life of the street — a roaring camel, a donkey bonneted in flies, hucksters. Seth and Caleb wrangled still, however. Caleb said: 'You licker of Roman arses. God bless the Emperor Tiberius and all the little boys that he buggers. Kick us, your exalted divinity, lay it on real hard.'

       'That's stupid, and you know it,' Seth said. 'Do you really think I like these foreign louts with their spears and eagles and hairy legs? I stand for a free Israel too, but we won't get it by spitting at their shadows —’

       'May the Roman eagle spread its wings,' Caleb jeered.

       'Till it splits its —’

       'Sycophantic Sadducee.'

       'Xenophobic Zealot.'

       And then they began to push each other in high good humour. They started to wrestle. Saul held their coats, cheering on neither. A weary noncommissioned officer from the Italia legion in Caesarea, posted to Jerusalem to keep the Syrian troops in order, paused with his dusty maniple to watch the wrestling match. Disturbance. Jewish noise. One of those two Jewboys had got the other on the ground in the dust. What they called public disorder. There were onlookers roaring and cheering. Time to step in. He stepped in.

       'All right, enough of that,' he said in bad Aramaic. 'If you Jews want to fight join the Roman army. Not that we'd have you. Come on, get off home. You, get up.'

       He meant Caleb, but Caleb had twisted his ankle and made the ascent slowly and in pain. The noncommissioned officer grabbed him by the collar of his sweaty robe. Caleb spoke unwisely. He said: