‘Soldiers of the Empire. Your brave hearts and fine bodies have come to the northern shore of our province of Gaul. From here you will embark and sail to the shores of Britannia. Britannia will fall to us and be ours. This is an exceptionally solemn occasion. The last province of the Roman Empire awaits our acquisition. But first – there is an important thing to do. You see these shells spread all along the shore as far as eye can reach? They are Roman property. Hence they must go back to Rome. Gather them.’
No one there could believe what he had heard. The Emperor repeated pettishly:
‘Gather them. Gather them. Quickly. Put down your arms and gather them.’
Cornelius Sabinus’s voice was near inaudible.
‘All of them, Caesar?’
‘Gather them. Gather them.’
Incredulous, trembling, the great disciplined force was reduced to a horde of children gathering seashells on the shore.
‘Where – where shall they put them, Caesar?’
‘Let them gather them in their helmets, which might have been made for the gathering of shells. And then empty their helmets into those transport wagons.’
‘This will do it. This,’ panted Marcus Julius faintly, gathering shells.
‘What?’ white-faced Rufus Calvus asked.
‘He can’t survive it. The humiliation of the army. The shame of it. He can’t he can’t—’ Gathering shells. All along the coast. Shells being gathered. The dry rustle of the shellfish market in Neapolis multiplied abominably. Gaius Caligula examined a single shell with minute attention, saying:
‘Beautifully made, aren’t they? Exquisite workmanship. That old god, whoever he was, had remarkable creative gifts. But the new god gets the benefit of them. That’s as it should be.’
The knuckles of Cornelius Sabinus whitened and whitened as he gripped and gripped the hilt of his sword.
But Gaius Caligula was still a god. His effigy was being manhandled out of one of the dock warehouses, ready for dragging to Jerusalem, while Paul was stepping aboard the ship that would carry him to Tarsus in Cilicia. His head had, true to Peter’s prophecy, been split, he had bruises on his jaw, and he limped. It was Peter and Thomas who had accompanied him to Caesarea, safe for the Nazarenising mission in the hands of Philip, this not being too far beyond Joppa, whither Simon Peter had been summoned by another Simon, a tanner, who had found some as yet undisclosed aspect of his evangelical work beyond him. The wind already filled the sails and the tide was flowing. Peter and Thomas saw the ship glide with pagan grace into the roads. Peter said:
‘I ought not to say this perhaps, but I say it.’
‘Ye mean thank God we’re done with him?’
‘We ought not to think it let alone say it.’ He took in some lungfuls of sea air as though he would not again have the opportunity, though Joppa was on the coast. ‘He’s a difficult sort of a man. Has his own ideas too. Best to leave him in Tarsus, see what he can do there. I certainly wouldn’t want him back in Jerusalem.’
‘Ye know what I think’s the matter with him? He thinks too much.’
‘Well, it’s the place he comes from. I’ve heard tell plenty about Tarsus. Big colleges there, people go there to study. And have done so for a thousand years, so they tell me. He’s read a lot of books and now he’ll have the time to read a lot more. We’ve not had much bookishness so far.’
‘There was—’ Thomas did not like to mention the name: it tasted bad in his mouth. ‘You know who I mean.’
‘Yes yes, look where his book learning got him.’ Peter thought a space. ‘Poor lad, though. Too innocent to live.’
‘So he died,’ Thomas said brutally. ‘Are we to go and call on the Greek lad Philip?’
Paul paced the deck, his feet flat to its rolling, and savoured the aches in his body. He had been punished, though not yet enough. He foretasted the next punishment. For my sake a man must leave his father and his mother. So be it. The neat house of a man grown prosperous on sailcloth would be sullied by the very presence of the sole son of the house. There had always been a bust of the Emperor set on a voluted pedestal. Now it would be the bust of a god, perhaps with a votive lamp before it. Don’t talk to me of heresy, father. You’ve joined the Roman pagans. You have your god in the sitting-room. And his father blustering: That is no more than respect. I remain a good Jew and a good Roman. And I, sir. Except that I accept the Jewish Messiah and have too much respect for Roman order to wish to see it collapse under a madman. You speak thus of the Emperor? I acknowledge only one master now, father. I abjure the world’s madness, whether of Gaius Caligula or the man who was Saul of Tarsus.
Painful, painful. His mother, dressed as a Roman matron, crying: To abandon your own name. The name you answered to when dinner was ready or it was time for bed. Oh, Saul, Saul – Sha’ul Sha’ul ma ’att radephinni? (You always had to persecute someone.) I will not believe it, will not, moans his father. You must, father. And you must be reconciled to it. Things change. History ordained it. An empire broken from within, the faith torn by its contradictions. Double heresy, double. Don’t talk to me of heresy, father.
You must know there is no room for you here. Paul, as you now call yourself. I expected that. Disinherited and disowned. Your grandfather served Rome when Julius Caesar was in Egypt. I served the faith of our race from the very first day when I could recite the verses of the Torah. A good Jew and a good Roman gets his reward. And you will get yours some day perhaps soon – the headman’s axe or the stones of the outraged faithful or the shame of the cross. Not shame, father. Don’t speak of shame. And his mother: Sha’ul, Sha’ul, lama sabachthani?
He foresaw all. His homecoming and homeleaving for ever would be mere ritual. Well, Tarsus was as much his city as his father’s. He would go to old Israel (entitled to the name, he would say, having been given the name of Jacob) who had taught him the tentmaker’s trade. He would sit in the sun outside the shop and wrestle not with God but with tough canvas and bodkin. A man with a trade was a free man. He would not disrupt the gatherings at his father’s synagogue. Filial piety was a vice with sharp claws. It would be, he thought, a matter of waiting. He could wait, stitching in the sun. He was, though bald, still young.
It is not, since Paul and he will some day be in close contact, as inapposite as it would appear to set down now the filioparental dialogue of Marcus Julius Tranquillus’s imagining in the bath or on his hard military bed or, on the square of the barracks, awaiting a tribunal inspection. The sitting-room of a neat little house on the Janiculum, a bust of the Emperor on a voluted column, his father saying: ‘This will be the end of your career. A career, I may remind you, that the family has followed since the days of the republic. It was always our intention that you marry into the family of Callidus Marcellus, a family with a fine tradition of loyalty to the Roman state. I have always hoped that you would beget sons who would carry on the tradition our families share.’
‘A tradition, if I may say this, father, of trimming to the wind. Policy rather than conviction.’
‘That is unseemly.’
‘Oh, the world is changing, father. The world is breaking down in order that it may be remade. I wish to be involved in the remaking.’
‘By marrying a Jewish girl,’ his mother says, her face a well-made mask of suffering, ‘a slave?’
‘Slavery, dear mother, is a status decreed by tyranny, not by blood or lack of talent. Our civil service is in the hands of slaves, or freedmen with the ring-piercing of their ears hard to hide even by the most effeminate growing of the hair. If a girl of good Palestinian family is, thanks to the vindictiveness of a Roman official, turned into a slave, she is not by that act rendered contemptible. It is the Roman system that is made contemptible.’
‘Strange words,’ his father says, ‘for a son of Rome.’
‘Rome is not what it was. God knows when it will be what it was again.’
‘What is this word God? Have you been learning something from the Jews?’
??
?The man who calls himself God is selling part of his household. The divine Caligula is heavily in debt and taxes can no more come to his rescue. I wish to buy a well-born Jewish lady out of slavery. Have we the money to do it?’
‘We? We? This is your own affair, son, not mine or your mother’s.’
‘There is such a thing as my patrimony.’
‘When I’m dead, not before. And it doesn’t amount to much. A professional soldier, as you’re beginning to learn, doesn’t become rich easily.’
Raising money to buy a bride. Talk about the world’s madness. It would be necessary to talk quietly with the tribunus militum who, it seemed, was well enough disposed. For had not Gaius Caligula emptied whole strongboxes into the regimental funds at the time of his accession, one of his acts of sanity? Was not the freeing of an imperial chattel whose sister had been flogged to death by her demented master a legitimate employment of funds that were no longer a pledge of loyalty? Let his dirty money go back to him. Marcus Julius Tranquillus, stiff on parade or relaxed in the bath, saw hope in that sentimentality which the tough military carapace often hid. The senior centurion is in love with a slave. Read your Lucretius: Venus strikes where she will. Empty the coffers to buy him his bride. Talk about the world’s madness.
Peter and Thomas rested outside a seaside inn in Joppa or Jeppa or Jeffa or Jaffa, the name was not at all clear when you heard the natives utter it. Thomas slipped off his sandals and flexed his stiff old toes in the sea’s breeze. ‘I’m getting too old for this foot travel,’ he said. ‘My bones creak.’
‘You needn’t have come,’ Peter said. ‘There’s work enough back home.’
‘Home. Aye, Jerusalem. I’ve a mind sometime to go back to real home. Across the big lake. Ye remember when we met there?’
‘It’s not so long ago, Thomas.’ The serving girl brought cups, a jug of wine and a small pitcher of water. Peter sadly watched her pert departing buttocks.
‘There I was working in this garden for this family, and then the poor girl goes into a decline and the whole world thinks she’s dead and then you come along, with him.’
‘Talitha cumi,’ Peter remembered. ‘Rise up, girl. And by God she did. And the big meal afterwards, with you helping to wait on. We were always hungry in those days.’
‘Still are. Not that an old man needs much. Good air is what I need and this is good sea air. They’re not too bad of people either.’
‘Simon’s a good man, but he expects too much.’ Peter looked into the winejug with a kind of sacerdotal concentration, as though inspecting entrails for auguries. His fingertip went in and brought out a fly. He dried the fly in the sun and then watched it wing off shakily into the blue sea air. The waves breathed like tired runners. ‘He thinks he ought to be able to work miracles.’
‘As I keep on saying,’ Thomas said, ‘it depends what ye mean by a miracle. It’s the other business that’s more worrying, especially after Philip’s story about the big black without ballocks.’
‘He can’t do it,’ Peter said. ‘There’s no argument about it. If the big black went off thinking he was saved, well, let him have his satisfaction till the day he gets disappointed. Because he will when the word gets through to him on his next Jerusalem trip. If I’m alive I’ll watch out for him. A big black with a high voice shouldn’t be easy to miss. That was Philip’s one and only mistake. But friend Simon has been pouring whole gallons of good blessed water on Gentiles, and it won’t do. There was never anything said about Gentiles. Nazarenes eating pork in their foreskins. No, it won’t do. And this other thing won’t do either, but we have to give them what comfort they expect.’
‘How long has the body been kept there?’
‘Too long, I’d say. But these women swear it’s still – you know, in what they call a state of purification.’
‘Meaning the opposite of putrefaction.’
‘I may have heard wrong.’ Peter took a good draught of wine and water, belched and said: ‘Better.’
‘Not stinking, to put it blunt and honest. More than can be said of Simon. He stinks of his trade. So does his house.’
‘Tanning’s a smelly trade,’ Peter said. ‘It’s done with camel dung, did you know that?’
‘Something I don’t want to know. Well, there’s plenty of camel dung around here. Look at that big roaring brute. I never cared much for camels. Well, we’d best get there and see if the stink’s started. It ought to be a decent sort of ladylike stink.’ They got up wearily and went off leaning on their staffs through a throng of fruit stalls and loud chaffering. Too much, I don’t pay that much down the road there. Lady, I’m losing money charging you what I do. Outside the gate of a house with closed shutters two women in black were waiting for them. They went into darkness but no smell of putrefaction. There were a lot of lilies about in pots. Two more ladies in black were sitting drinking some kind of hot herbal decoction. Stay seated, ladies.
‘Let’s have that name again,’ Peter said.
‘Dorcas, Dorcas.’
‘Or Tabitha.’
‘Aye,’ Thomas said. ‘Both names mean that sort of animal that runs fast.’
‘Gazelle.’
‘Gazelle, aye. Run off to the next world, has she?’
This callousness started them all off weeping. One woman wept while sipping her brew.
‘Discretion, Thomas,’ Peter said. ‘Where is the er—?’ They led the two of them up a short flight of steps to a bedroom. The shutters were closed but the scent of nard was overpowering. Also (Thomas sniffed cautiously) camphor. A candle at her head and one at her feet. A quite young girl, a gazelle no longer footfleet, pretty too, not unlike that daughter of what was his name, Jairus.
‘Aye, she seems dead all right, but ye can never tell.’
‘What were his words? Yes, Talitha cumi.’
‘And now ye have to say Tabitha cumi. Ye have to do what he did, Peter. He said we had to.’
‘That’s not for us.’
‘Sometimes nature plays tricks like that Simon Magus did. Seems isn’t the same as is.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Peter said. ‘But there’s no harm in trying. Tabitha cumi. Rise up, girl.’
There was no response from the girl’s body. ‘It’s a lot to expect,’ Thomas said.
‘Too much. He was him. We’re just us.’
But Thomas, his eyes widening, put his hand on Peter’s sleeve. He muttered something like a prayer that what seemed to be happening should not happen. Both looked with mouths stupidly opening at a mouth gently opening to let out what seemed a small store of breath kept shut in there. One of the candleflames flapped. That old breath once let out, new breath possessed the body, its rhythm as feeble as in a body about to die. Both men dreaded the opening of the eyes, with their message of light from a world nobody wanted to visit if he could help it. So falling over each other they got out of that room. Having fallen downstairs, Peter said to the women: ‘You can go up there now.’ The herb decoctions were spilt on the worn Greek carpet with its key pattern. Peter now saw for the first time a gaudy bird in a cage that looked at him, head cocked, as though from another world. A flight of heavy black birds went up those stairs with black wings flapping. In a minute, in the manner of women, they would start wailing joy that sounded like grief. The two men got out of that house with the speed of robbers.
At that moment the centurion Cornelius was holding a meeting of the senior under-officers of his century. It was in his own house overlooking the bay of Caesarea. His wife was singing in the kitchen and his small son dribbled on to a toy centurion the garrison carpenter had kindly carved for him. ‘Look, lads,’ Cornelius was saying, ‘the situation’s not clear. No situation ever is these days as far as Rome’s concerned. We stay but he goes.’
‘No procurator?’ said the decurion Fidelis. ‘Ever again? Who are we responsible to?’
‘You’re responsible to me for the moment. And it looks as if I’m directly responsible to the man in Syria, Lippius.’
/> ‘Caius Lippius,’ young Junius Rusticus said, a boy given to needless pedantry.
‘But we also have to take orders from this Herod Agrippa who’s on his way from Galilee. The King of Palestine, as he calls himself. Sort that out if you can.’
‘So we get moved to Jerusalem?’ Fidelis said.
‘We’ll be needed more in Jerusalem than in Caesarea,’ Cornelius said. ‘Especially if he has that statue moved in.’
‘I can’t see that,’ the decurion Androgeus said, a half Greek and very olive-skinned, one who was on his third decurionate after two demotions for brawling. ‘I can’t see how a Jew can do that. Even if he calls himself like a king. The other Jews will cut his bleeding gorge for him,’ proleptically. Cornelius said:
‘It seems to be up to the Roman army to see that they don’t. Meaning us. And the lads from Syria, a mean lot. The god Caligula, eh? For Jews and Romans alike. I don’t think I can stand much more,’ he said, singing in unconscious unison with another centurion many miles away, ‘of the world’s madness.’ He went to his little balcony and looked out on the sea and the massed shipping. All that seemed sane enough. Then he turned and surveyed the room, not seeing his men. He was in his home, such as it was. Full of ornaments picked up in a variety of foreign bazaars, most of them cheap except for that bronze buffalo, all of them probably tasteless. He said: ‘You know where sanity lies, don’t you?’
‘You’ve said something about it, centurion,’ Junius Rusticus said.
‘We need somebody to talk to us,’ Cornelius said, eyes down. ‘The man I have in mind was here a couple of days ago. The Greek man in the chandler’s store, he said he’d gone off to Joppa or Jeffa, whatever they call it. He’s a fisherman, this man Peter I mean. He’s in charge. They say he’s done strange things. A humble man for humble men, just the same.’