The Kingdom of the Wicked (43 page)

       'He said,' she said in a voice modulating to the innocently childish, 'that he'd hand his gardens over to me. He knew I wanted them. Then he changed his mind.'

       'What?'

       'Wealthy Roman citizens should sometimes show their gratitude for being allowed to remain wealthy. And they certainly should not insult their Empress by reneging on their promises. The gardens are very beautiful. You must walk them with me sometime. The pinescented air will be good for your weak chest.'

       He breathed very deeply the closer air of his sickroom. 'Pallas,' he said and then, more characteristically, 'Pppppallas. I see. The efficient minister of finance is more your servant than mine. Are you exerting your witchcraft on him?'

       'What do you mean — witchcraft?' she said, not without a faint note of anxiety that Claudius would be too deaf to catch.

       'Your charms. That ppppungent odour of sensuality which ccccaptivated your old uncle and tttturned him into the ffffool he is..

       'Pallas is devoted to you. He takes as much off your hands as he can to leave you free for your higher concerns. He consults me, as is right. I am the Emperor's helpmeet.'

       It was Pallas who urged my ttttransferring the impppperial inheritance from my son to yours.'

       'He had only the welfare of the state at heart. Britannicus is a good solid soldier, which means a bit of a fool. My son is ready even now for high office. He studies hard, and with the best teachers. He is intelligent, sensitive —’

       'Insuffffficiently so to the sound of his own sccccrannelpipe voice. Your son may sing and dance his way round the Emppppire for all I ccccare, bbbbuying apppplause, but he is not going to wear the ppppurple if I have anything to do with it.' He tried getting out of bed, but his migraine issued contrary orders. He collapsed on his pillows again. Agrippina nodded kindly.

       'Sleep,' she almost sang. He had mentioned witchcraft, too much the enlightened intellectual to apply the term other than metaphorically. But real witches existed, and they practised a real craft. There was one who lived in the Suburra, her name Locusta. Agrippina had used her services before. Sudden, you say? It must not be too sudden. The art of the sleepbringer lies in the imitation of nature. You know how to — administer? Sleep, silence: admirable euphemisms. She made a derisive gesture at Claudius's groaning bulk and then left.

Paul came to Caesarea not only with Luke but with a convert of Ephesus named Trophimus. This Trophimus was a fairhaired youth, son of a goldsmith slower to be converted: his final words to Paul as he saw his son off were that he would think about it. He believed young men should see the world, preferably in the company of older men who would keep them out of taverns and brothels, and of Paul's continence and sobriety he was in little doubt. In Caesarea they went to call on Philip, the Greek who had converted a black eunuch and still felt uneasy about it. He had four chattering daughters who were always prophesying the end of the world and seemed to have little time for the work of the household. Still, Philip's fat wife cooked well and they would all have eaten a pleasant meal together — the daughters, when not prophesying, were good silent trencherwomen — if another regular prophesier had not called, well remembered from Antioch, his name Agabus. He began prophesying about Paul while they were still eating. He said:

       'I was right about the famine in Palestine, was I not, yes I was. So watch me carefully now and listen with both your ears. Give me that girdle you have round your middle.' Paul, mystified, unknotted it and handed it over. Agabus said, taking it: 'I follow Holy Writ in miming what I prophesy. Did not Ahijah the Shilonite foretell the disruption of Solomon's kingdom by rending his new cloak? Yes, he did. Did not Isaiah walk naked to prophesy the Assyrian captivity of the Egyptians? Most certainly. So now Agabus ties his feet and hands together — with some little difficulty, I confess — to signify that the Jews of Jerusalem will take the owner of this girdle, bind him hand and foot, and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. The only Gentiles in Judaea are the Romans, am I not right, so stay away from Jerusalem. Enough.' He handed the girdle back. Regirding himself, Paul said:

       'I have to go.' The four daughters of Philip started to wail in unison. 'Quiet, girls,' Paul said sharply. 'I beg your pardon, Philip, I should have left that to you, but I am growing a little sick of people consulting my safety. I had a similar prophecy delivered to me in Tyre, less cogent perhaps than Agabus's, for it was purely verbal. Much more to the point is the question of a safe lodging in Jerusalem for these two Gentiles who have come so far with me. I know hardly anybody there now, except my sister, and she has no love for me any more. Any Jewish lodging house will be dubious about letting the uncircumcised in. Where can we go?'

       'There's this man Mnason,' Philip said. 'A Cypriot Greek, one of the first Jerusalem converts. He's here in Caesarea now, but he'll want to be back in Jerusalem for Passover. A matter of trade only. He sells unfermented grape juice, very popular with the children.'

       Mnason was agreeable to taking in three temporary lodgers. He was a sharp soldierly old man who rode a white horse. 'I'll be there well before you,' he said. 'Anybody will tell you where the house is. It's a pity you all have to walk. Sixty-odd miles and in this heat. As for you, sir,' he said to Luke, 'I'll be happy to sit down with you any evening and tell you all I know about the early days of the faith here. I always said someone should make a book out of it. Bloody reading it will be, though, a lot of it. Well, Jerusalem then, gentlemen. Look after your feet.'

       With sore feet Paul went alone to see James, once called the Little, now named, with some justice, the Just. He was the only one of the original disciples left in Jerusalem, the others dispersed about the world, some of them dead. He presided over a number of new Jewish converts who, somewhat timid and stayathome, looked on the great missionary traveller with awe. James, as on the other brief occasions of meeting him, felt his intellectual inferiority to Paul weigh on him like his own fat, for the muscle of his younger days, when he had emerged from country wrestling to follow the faith, had decayed to an unbecoming adiposity. It was absurd, he often felt, that such a one as he should have become the bishop of Jerusalem, but he had the right qualifications, which might be glossed as the wrong ones for an active mission: he preferred to stay where he was and, not wanting too much trouble either, compromised all he could with the orthodox Jews, seeming to present a new and revolutionary faith as a mere harmless annexe to the old. He paid his Temple dues, fulfilled the requirements of seasonal ritual, and gave Nazarene money to even such of the Jerusalem poor as said that rightly was that one hanged between two thieves. He was glad to see Paul hand over a small bag of coins of the Empire for the disbursement of the Mother Church. 'Go on remembering the poor' was a slogan that Paul seemed to have remembered. James said to him:

       'We're glad to see you well and safe. We shall be more glad to hear of your adventures and successes, though perhaps in the form of a formal discourse to all our elders. This house of poor Matthias is hardly big enough to accommodate them and you. Perhaps in the open air, on the Mount of Olives.' Paul looked round him: the house had grown shabby and seemed to have shrunk, and spiders, like little black Romans, were at the work of structural engineering in dark corners. Paul said:

       'You say poor Matthias.'

       'He's at work on the Italian mainland and has had, from what we hear, little luck and many buffets. Italy, I would say, needs a man like yourself.'

       'I have every intention of going to Rome. The dagger to the heart, so to speak.'

       'Yes. Good. Now there is something disturbing which these gentlemen here will confirm. There are some wicked stories going around, none of them, naturally, based on truth, which you will have to do something about confuting. I think you know what the stories are.'

       Paul shrugged. 'I take it that the Jewish converts are at it again. Alleging that I've said that circumcision is a lot of unnecessary nonsense. Well, so it is, in comparison with what we may term the circumcision of the spirit. There are some grumblings too about the new Sabbath — Dies Solis instead of Yom Rischon. That had to be. Now they're saying, according to Philip up there in Caesarea, that I'm turning Jesus into the sun god. Let them say what they wish.'

       James was unhappy about that. He shifted his bulk and made his chair creak. 'I've always been against rapid innovation.'

       'Rapid? I think we've been damnably slow. Life may be eternal, but it's not very long.'

       James had heard that before, perhaps too often. He said: 'There are thousands of Jews here in Judaea who've been converted to the faith, but they don't want to give up their zeal for the old law. Too many of them have been told that you've been persuading the Jewish Nazarenes who live among the Gentiles to give up Moses, which means chiefly to stop circumcising their sons. And then there's the matter of the food laws. A little song's been going the rounds. What is it, Remaliah?'

       A scarcebearded convert in a too clean white robe cleared his throat and warbled:

       'Paul's Sunday services are not all talk. They start with lobster and end with pork.'

       'A mere stupid song,' Paul grinned. He doused the grin and said: 'One of the big complaints of the Christians in Ephesus is that meat doesn't taste good any more. No blood in it. I've done my best to enforce dietary laws, but few of the Gentiles see what they mean. That dream that Peter had in Joppa seemed to me to be a very sound one, but I hear now that Peter's been denying that he ever had it. A great one for denying,' he added somewhat viciously.

       'The point is,' James said uncomfortably, 'that you've some explaining to do.'

       'Doing is better than explaining. I'll shave my hair off, not that there's much left, and go to the Temple with the mandatory menagerie. You'll have to give me some of that money back.'

       'A ram, two lambs, a quart of wine, white flour — I forget how much, I'll find out. You mean the purification rite.'

       'I need it, believe me.'

       'That will work with our own people.' And then: 'Need it? Why?’

       ‘Defilement. I say no more.'

       'I ask no more. The real trouble is the Jews who've come from the provinces — Antioch and so on. They didn't feel free in the lands of the Gentile. Now they'll feel all too free. Shadow of the Temple. Consecration of hate. You see what I mean? It won't do any of us any good if they start on you.'

       'You're sorry I came, James? Upsetting your cosy stability, am I? Shall I wait for night and take the road back?'

       'No no no no no. All I'm saying is that you have to watch out.'

       Before totally bald Paul went to the Temple for his purificatory rites, he took young Trophimus into its outer courts. Trophimus was awed by the magnificence but found it hard to reconcile with the noises of a meat market. There was a notice whose key words were Thanatos and Mors and Mavet. 'Thus far, no further,' Paul said. 'You see — death by execution to all nonbelievers who enter the inner Temple. An old law — not even the Romans can touch it. Indeed, a Roman was once misguided enough to disregard the warning. He was stoned to death on the orders of the priests. The Roman law couldn't save him. We'll turn back now.'

       Paul and his friend were closely watched. A couple from Antioch, Job and Amos, squinted through the sunlight with especial care. 'See him?' Amos said to a knot of strollers from the same town. 'Remember him? He's there, see, large as life, taking one of those fairhaired bastards with a hat on his prick into the Holy of Holies.'

       'No, he's not. He knows the rules. There, they're away now.’

       ‘Filthy defiler of the Most High, the bastard.'

       'You're going too far.'

       'Wait.'

       Paul's enemies got him when he was completing his ritual obligations in the Court of Israel. This was that part of the inner precincts reserved for lay sons of the faith: priests and Levites could go in to the limit, or nearly. To those under the law I became as one under the law though not being myself under the law that I might win those under the law. He tasted the phrase: it would go well in a letter to Corinth. He was surprised, looking up, to see what seemed to be a great portion of the Jewish population of Corinth glowering at him. Then somebody pointed a finger at somebody and said: 'There he is.' This latter stood in a shaft of light and was momentarily all gold. Then, seeing himself pointed at and probably having some reason to feel guilt, he moved into darkness and then out. 'Bringing Gentiles into the Temple of the Most High.' Paul made himself limp as he was grasped: he had expected this, though not yet and not here. Someone harmlessly slapped his bald head with a shoe. He was dragged down the steps into the outer court. He heard the gates of the sanctuary clanging to. There were some trying to get up there to grasp the absent Trophimus: the police of the Temple wanted no riot and did their own beating. A ready crowd poured into the outer court. A man recognized by Paul as a known troublemaker in Ephesus yelled: 'Come on, help smash him to pulp, men of Israel. He's defiled this place. He brought Greeks in,' pluralizing easily. 'He preaches against the law and the people'

       People and the Temple. Law and order. Justice. Knock his teeth in.' Paul was being kicked and thumped. One gross sweating man in old robes fisted him on the crown before saying: 'What's he done, then?' Then Roman troops arrived and stopped the riot.

       There was a cohort of armed Romans up there to the northwest in the fortress of Antonia. The military tribune had been quick. Two hundred men with their centurions poured in, happily beating the Jews with the flats of their daggers. They handcuffed Paul and were ready to drag him up the steps to the castle, criminal, thief, pickpocket, something, but he was ready to mount with dignity. The rearguard fought off the mob with kicks. This was a great day.