The Silver Chalice (21 page)

Aaron inclined his head toward the medical attendants. “It is in their hands,” he said.

The oldest of the trio of doctors took it on himself to act as spokesman. He was a gray-bearded veteran named Isaac ben Hilkiah, whose reputation was based on a tumor he had opened on the head of Herod Agrippa thirty years before and who had done more than anyone to fill the family sepulchers of Jerusalem. “The Lord’s will be done,” he intoned. “Your master is old and filled with honors. It is our opinion that Joseph of Arimathea will be gathered this day to his fathers.” He raised a hand in solemn admonition. “Pray for him. It is a matter of hours.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a woman whimpered. “God be kind to him, the old master!” cried another hysterically. A wave of distress passed over the watchers and spread rapidly throughout the house. In less than a minute a sound of loud wailing reached them from the quarters of the slaves. A young woman in an expectant condition cried out in shrill grief: “Bitter is the day that takes the master from us! My son will not be born in time to look on his kind face!”

Abraham, the waiter, his broad face as white as the marble on Solomon’s Porch, plucked Luke respectfully by the arm. “The master asks for you,” he said.

They left the main hall, which now resounded with loud wailing and lamentation, and took a side passage leading to the back door of the sick chamber.

“He has eaten nothing for two days,” whispered Abraham. “There was this morning a melon from the hot lands beyond the Dead Sea. He has always been partial to it, but it is still beside his bed untouched.”

As soon as he entered the room and caught a glimpse of the head of the household, Luke knew that Joseph was indeed a sick man. He lay without motion and looked very small and wasted in the wide expanse of his great bed. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. The fan above was creating enough breeze to stir the linen hangings, but his face remained flushed and hot.

“Is it you, Luke?” asked Joseph in a tired voice, without moving his eyes.

“Yes, Joseph.”

“Come closer. I have things to tell you.”

Luke seated himself beside the bed. He laid a hand on the brow of the sick man and then pressed a finger on a vein in his neck where the blood throbbed sluggishly.

“Luke,” whispered Joseph, “I have no illusions. This is the end.”

The physician laid both hands on those of the head of the household. “My good old friend,” he said.

“I am not going to ask you,” went on Joseph in a low voice, “if you agree with those—those black crows.
Ahay!
I know I am going to die, but they are sure I have only a few more hours to live. How wrong they are! I cannot let myself die as soon as that.”

“No, Joseph, no. We cannot spare you yet.”

“I have been a good Christian.” The sick man was speaking with great difficulty and had to pause often between words to catch his breath. But the urge to tell what was on his mind was lending him the strength to go on. “To a Christian there is no moment in all eternity to compare with the first vision of Jehovah seated on His throne with the beloved Son at His right hand. I know this, but—Luke, I stand on the threshold and I must confess to you my innermost thoughts. I am loath to leave this life! It has been pleasant to live with so much wealth and power. It is still pleasant to wake of a morning and see the sun shining on the Temple, to feel capable of attending to my affairs, to know that my granddaughter, who has always been like a butterfly in my house, is here to tend lovingly to my comfort. I have been a great man in the life of Jerusalem and of my own people. Luke, there will be more concern here over my death than in paradise over my arrival.”

Abraham had been busying himself in the room, doing small things and keeping an ear tuned to the low murmur of his master’s voice. Luke turned now and motioned him to leave. The servant frowned in dissent but, after adjusting the hangings to admit more air, left the room on reluctant tiptoe.

“If I had my way,” whispered Joseph, “I would elect to tarry a while longer. I would like to see my granddaughter married and settled down.
Ahay
, there are so many things I should like to see! But it is not to be. I must resign myself to the end of all my earthly blessings.” There was a long pause. It continued so long that Luke wondered if the dying man had reached the end of his strength. Finally, however, the whispering was resumed on a note of almost passionate intensity. “I must go on living still. My granddaughter cannot return yet. There would be too much
danger in it, and I must not send for her. But I cannot die without seeing her again. She is all in all to me, my little Deborra. I must find the strength to go on living so that when I die it will be with my hand in hers.”

Luke leaned closer to the recumbent figure on the bed. “The Lord is listening, my good old friend. Perhaps He will grant you this strength you beg.”

“Make me a promise. That you will come to me every day. I shall need your help if I am to fend off the hand of the angel of death who beckons me even now.” There was another long pause. Then he regained his breath sufficiently to voice a passionate wish that there be no more medical ministration. “Tell my son I will not see those prophets of doom again, those wailing Jeremiahs he brings to my bedside! My resolution wanes when I see their long faces and listen to their lamentations. They can be of no further help, save perhaps to speed my parting.”

“It shall be as you wish. Aaron will be told they must not return.”

The tired eyes, which had been fixed steadily on the ceiling, turned now and rested on the face of his friend. “I can find more strength in your smile, O Luke, than in the tamarisk leaves steeped in vinegar and left under the stars, in the hydromel and hyssop they force on me. I believe I can find the resolution I shall need if you will promise to sit thus by my side. I know this is—not going to be easy. No, it is going to be the hardest struggle of my whole life.”

Basil was pacing up and down with furious strides when Luke, bending double, came through the aperture that served as an entrance. Basil came to an immediate stop.

“I have been hoping you would come,” he said in an excited voice. “I need your help! I am possessed of an evil spirit!”

The physician raised the lamp the better to see his face. “It would indeed be strange,” he said, “if you did not have some such wild fancy in a fetid hole like this.”

“It is not a fancy,” responded Basil in a somber tone of voice.

Luke smiled reassuringly as he replaced the lamp on the table. “All my life I have been hearing this talk of evil spirits and the need to have them cast out. My boy, it is a foolish and evil fiction. This much, of course, is
true: there are evil spirits in all of us. But it is no more than the baser side of our natures taking the upper hand. There is no need for incantations and the burning of candles and the ringing of bells to get rid of these personal devils. All we have to do is to keep the better side of our natures in control.”

Basil was not convinced. “It is said that Jesus cast out devils,” he declared.

Luke touched a finger to his forehead. “What Jesus cured was the madness,” he said. “What prompts you to these fears, my son? Have you been having strange dreams?”

“At first I thought them dreams. Now I think they were not dreams at all. That they were real.”

“Tell me about them.”

Basil recounted the story of the visit he had received from the spirit of his father and of the voice that had spoken up, seemingly from the depth of his own mind. Luke listened attentively.

“I have given some study to dreams, believing them an indication of the state of one’s mind,” he said. “There was a Roman who wrote seriously about them and who propounded the belief that dreams are the work of one’s soul. If this is true—and I incline to think so—then indeed dreams are of the utmost importance, because through them we may read of the state of the soul.

“Every dream has a meaning,” he went on. “You saw your father, and that may be good or it may be the opposite. It means, at least, that he thinks of you with affection in the place to which he has been sent. On the other hand, to dream of him, now that he is dead, is a sign of trouble to come, of afflictions to be visited upon you.

“But let us consider first what it means to see a ghost, for you most certainly have been visited by one, perhaps by two. To see a ghost in your dreams is a sign of disaster. It means that evil influences hedge you about, that the fingers of malignancy are reaching out of the darkness. But first, tell me this: did you see them vanish? Did they betake themselves elsewhere?”

“My father was still talking when I dropped back into sleep, but I am sure that the evil spirit had gone.”

Luke shook his head with satisfaction. “Then we may consider that the worst consequences have been averted. The evil spirit had sensed defeat and had left. The comforting spirit of your father remained.”

“But I do not think I was dreaming!” cried Basil. “I have had proofs
since to the contrary. The evil spirit prompted my fingers to destroy something I prized most highly. I did not know what I was doing—but suddenly my hands mashed it to nothing! I did not will them to do it.”

Luke placed a hand on his forehead. “You have a touch of fever,” he declared. “At least I am able to cure
that
.”

He proceeded to take some herbs from a bag attached to his belt. These he mixed with a sure and skilled hand, stirring them afterward in a cup of wine. The finished potion he handed to Basil, saying: “Drink this. It will take some of the disturbance out of your mind, my son.”

Basil drank the medicine, which had a bitter but not unpleasant taste. He felt better almost immediately.

“That will make you forget your evil spirit, I trust. Has the headache gone?”

“Yes,” said Basil, shaking his head with a sense of deep relief. “The ache has gone. But not what caused it in the first place. No, my benefactor, I cannot dismiss the conviction from my mind. I have had proofs. I tell you, it has been shown to me that something evil is lurking in my mind. I am so sure of it that I am no longer certain it will be possible for me to finish the Chalice.” There was a moment’s pause, and then he asked, “Would it be allowed me to watch Simon the Magician tonight?”

Luke regarded him thoughtfully. “It will be dark and there will be a great crowd at the Gymnasium.” He nodded his head. “I am sure it would do you good. You would get some fresh air, and that is what you need above everything. You will have a chance to stretch your legs and you will acquire some new interests to occupy your mind. If you see this trickster perform, you may even forget this idea that seems to weigh so heavily on your mind.”

T
HE PEOPLE OF JERUSALEM
had always gone unwillingly to the Gymnasium because it had been built by the hated Herod. On this occasion they went with no reluctance and in great numbers. The open space where the youth of the city were supposed to be trained in sports and acrobatics (in point of fact, they seldom went there) was densely filled, and it seemed to stir and ripple like a pool of water. When Luke and Basil arrived they had to stand so far in the rear that they could not see the platform on which the Cuthean magician would perform.

“It cannot be denied,” said Luke unhappily, “that evil appeals more directly to the human mind than good. Peter and Paul speak to small groups in side streets. This man Simon is a Samaritan, but because he has a reputation for evil everyone wants to watch him.”

Benjie the Asker, circulating busily, materialized beside them for a moment to say: “They are all frightened of the devils he brings with him. That rustling sound you hear is the quaking of a thousand unwashed hides in flea-infested garments. But nothing could make them stay at home.”

A moment later the magician appeared on the platform. The hum of voices ceased. No one moved. The Bad Samaritan gazed about him for a moment and then raised an arm in the air.

“I, Simon of Gitta, called by men the Magician, give you greetings, citizens of Jerusalem.” He spoke in a voice that carried easily and naturally to the far corners. “You have come to witness with your own eyes the feats I have been performing up and down the land and of which you have heard much. You are going to ask yourselves, when I am through, were they miracles or merely magic tricks? The answer I shall leave to you.”

He was well advanced in years, but his age had not given him a stoop; in fact, he carried his cadaverous frame with some of the spirit and resiliency of youth. There was nothing of the usual about him: he was curiously ugly; his nose was so bulbous at the end that his nostrils seemed to be hiding away like a camel’s, and his skin was not dark but inclined to gray, as though years of poring over strange books and searching at midnight tombs had given it an unnatural hue. His eyes were intensely alive.

He was attired in a white tunic with crossed bars of other colors, a garment that seemed unseasonably padded; as well it might, because a maker of magic must carry the instruments of his trade concealed about his person. The tall cylindrical hat, rising to a peak, which was accepted as the badge of the trade, was missing, however. Above the closely muffled robe, his head was as bald as the egg of the mythical roc.