The Kingdom of the Wicked Read online

  The voyage to the mainland was brief. Puteoli, the port adjacent to Neapolis, was normally crammed with shipping, but all had been sent out to hover in the roads that the imperial trireme be unencumbered. As it put in, festive music of horns, trumpets, drums and cymbals erupted on the quayside. It made Tiberius’s head throb, but Gaius greeted it with waves and smiles. Dockmen caught flung hawsers and drew the ship into the wharf, making fast their lines to stone bollards. Others rushed with a gangway empurpled and gilded and eagled with tacked cloth, others again with Alexandrian carpeting that should soften the brief imperial walk from ship to waiting litter with its tall and brawny German slave bearers. From a great height near the godowns the statue of Tiberius looked down on the arrival, its heroic cast bronze mocking solemnly its all too frail original. The Praetorian Guard saluted to braying brass and thumping drums, and Tiberius raised a feeble arm in answer. Under the dutiful cheers he could sense the undertone of satisfaction that he was sicker and had aged more than most had thought. For the son of the loved Germanicus the greetings were without doubt more robust. He, Tiberius, should not have come back. He had come back once before, many years ago, then merely to sail up the Tiber and view the city walls from a distance, troops stationed along the banks to warn off the populace, and then swiftly departed back to Capri. Now he was committed to a slow and solemn progress up the Appian Way, a noisy entrance into the city, ceremonies, addresses, banquets. He could not do it; he was a dying man, seventy-seven years old; he had earned his peace. No, he had not; hence he had elected this final suffering. No meanest slave sweeping the quay could be more wretched.

  He was carried in procession then along the leafy Appian Way, the ornate cushioned litter swinging gently like a cradle. On his left arm his pet snake Columba slept: it was torpid, perhaps made sick by the voyage. ‘My beloved,’ he crooned, ‘hiss your love for me,’ but it coiled loosely in lethargy. At the seventh milestone he ordered a stop. He pulled the curtains aside in time to see Gaius whipping a slave who had dropped the roped impedimenta he had been entrusted to carry into the road’s dust. ‘Nursing a viper for the Roman people. Who said that, Columba?’ The consuls Gnaeus Acerronius Proculus and Gaius Pontius Nigrinus appeared at the little window. Tiberius said: ‘I will go no further today.’

  ‘As Caesar wishes,’ Pontius Nigrinus said. ‘We are close to the villa of Pomponius Naso. Caesar may wish to repose the night there.’

  ‘Is Pomponius in residence?’

  Proculus looked strangely. ‘Pomponius Naso was executed five years ago. On your imperial majesty’s orders.’

  ‘Is there – some other place?’

  ‘A mile back. The former hunting lodge of the late Sejanus.’

  Tiberius trembled as with ague. ‘Pomponius’s villa will do. Will all be ready for me there?’

  ‘The imperial household anticipated your imperial majesty’s wishes.’

  ‘What do you know of my wishes?’ he said with sudden anger. ‘What do any of you know of my needs?’

  There was a crowd of people, mostly rustic folk who gaped at the trembling lord of the world, standing near the gates of the villa. A bearded man in gooseturd homespun, carrying a wand, boldly spoke out as Tiberius alighted from his litter:

  ‘Beware the power of the mob, Caesar.’ Then, schooled in needful agility, he ran away before a lictor’s whip could reach him. Tiberius went straight to a bed that had been warmed with hot stones wrapped in wool. He asked for gruel. Then he slept, and he dreamt an old dream, one that had maimed the drunken repose of his last birthday. The gigantic statue of Apollo of Temenos, which he had had brought from Syracuse to erect in the library of the new temple to the deified Augustus, spoke to him from a mobile mouth:

  ‘You, sir, will never dedicate me.’

  He woke to thunder in the middle of the night. He feared lightning. He called feebly and asked that he be given a laurel wreath. A slave at length brought one (there were several in his baggage), and the Emperor tremulously donned it in wretched and pitiable apotropaic defiance. The lightning did not strike him; the trick had always been efficacious.

  He woke finally at dawn to find that his pet snake Columba was not coiled on his arm but lying stiff on the floor. Not all of it; at least half had been eaten by ants. He screamed at the tiny milling army and stamped on it with his bare foot. Beware the power of the mob, Caesar. He called: ‘We are going back to Capri! Cancel the journey to Rome!’

  So the cortège turned about and snakeless Caesar went back to Campania. At Astura he fell very ill with bellycramps and dry vomitings. His chief physician Charicles gave him a posset of wine and milk and opium. He slept three days and awoke feeling stronger. Caesar was well. Caesar would show his recovered health at the garrison games of Circeii. Cheers but some murmurs for Caesar as he took his place in the hastily rigged imperial box. A wild boar was let loose in the arena, horrent and snorting. Give me a javelin. A javelin, Caesar? A javelin, curse you. And, to demonstrate his recovery, he hurled the proffered weapon at the beast, missed, hurled another, another, while some of the garrison cheered. Then: ‘Aaaargh.’ He had twisted the muscles in his side and seemed to bow grotesquely to the tiered assembly. He sweated with the pain and the brief exertion, then a cold wind started up and chilled him. ‘Let us go,’ he said hoarsely.

  The party moved on the next day to Misenum, where a banquet was prepared. He knew few of the faces but smiled on all. It was a false rumour; see, Caesar is well. Another slice of the roast boar. Some of this gilded wheatloaf. Fill the cup to the brim; see, friends, I pledge you. Charicles the physician said: ‘Caesar, I must go to tend the potion in its crucible. Permit me to leave.’ Charicles took Caesar’s hand to kiss it. Tiberius whispered:

  ‘It’s my pulse, isn’t it? You’re feeling my pulse because I do not look well. Stay here with me, Charicles. Tell me, Charicles, tell the truth: am I well, do I seem well to you, can I last this evening out without collapsing?’

  ‘Take this powder, Caesar, in a little water. You will be sustained sufficiently. Do it covertly, let none see.’

  Gaius, very drunk, shouted across: ‘My dear and great great-uncle, how well you look. You will outlive us all.’

  He was given next day in his litter the transcript of recent proceedings in the Senate. He read that the three patricians he had ordered to be brought to trial for treason had been discharged without a hearing: they had, said the report, but been named by an informer. ‘Contempt,’ he tried to yell. He missed sadly the comforting squeeze of his serpent on his left arm. ‘It is contempt. Back to Capri.’ Then Gaius Pontius Nigrinus came with strange and terrible news. There had been a brief earthquake on the island, brief but powerful enough to send tumbling the lighthouse on the headland. ‘The eye of the world is out,’ Tiberius moaned. ‘Who played that trick with the fire at Misenum? You are contriving bad omens, all of you.’ For in his bedchamber at the villa in Misenum the dead fire had leapt to sudden life and watched him with its diffused vermilion eye the night long.

  ‘The country house that belonged once to Lucullus,’ Pontius Nigrinus said. ‘It is but half a mile off. Will your imperial greatness rest there?’

  ‘There is no rest anywhere,’ cried Tiberius.

  All of the above would seem to have little pertinence to the life of Jerusalem, but the state of Tiberius’s health was known in Caesarea, and a rumour spread from there to Jerusalem that Gaius Caligula was soon to succeed to the purple, and that among his first acts would be the elevation of the prince Herod Agrippa to the kingship of Judaea, all this as a prelude to the liberation of the land from the eagle and the restoration of a Solomonic monarchy. It was time for the unity of the Jewish faith, the glorification of the Temple not merely as the house of the Holy of Holies but as the symbol of rule of the sacred soil of Israel. It was no time for the young Stephen to be standing up in the synagogue of the Libertines and preaching the new way. He stood and said to the frowning bearded:

  ‘Of the new gospel of love and forgive
ness you must know two things before you know any other. First, that it supersedes the law of Moses.’

  Saul was there. Saul stood and said:

  ‘Nothing supersedes the law of Moses.’ Stephen said smiling:

  ‘My old friend and fellow student Saul, I am glad to hear your voice. Let us argue the matter in amity as in the old days we disputed under our dear rabban. Would you not accept that the law of Moses was fitting for its time but not for the new age? For the people newly freed from the prisonhouse of Egypt needed the harshness of the lex talionis – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They were yet in no state to hear the milder doctrines of forgiveness and love of our enemies. Then there was no forgiveness for even minor infractions of the covenant. The desert life was brutal and the law brutal too. Moses would have scoffed to hear that we should forgive not merely seven times but seventy times seven. The time for the gospel of love was not yet, but now that love is revealed – love that proceeds from the love of the Father for his Son, the love of both for all mankind.’

  ‘You said there was another thing,’ Saul said. ‘What is this other thing?’

  ‘This,’ Stephen replied. ‘That the law rests not in the Temple nor in the ministers of the Temple. The true temple is not one made by human hands. I do no more than repeat the words of our Messiah, who was as devoted as any of you here to the holy edifice raised by Solomon but recognised a greater sanctity in a temple no human hands had designed and fashioned – a temple that such hands may indeed destroy but, as he himself showed in this very city, God’s grace may bid rise again.’ There were mutterings: He blasphemes against Moses. He puts the Temple and hence the nation in danger. Saul said with calm:

  ‘Proceed.’ Matthew and Bartholomew, who had been sitting silently as self-appointed monitors (here was the first Greek Jew to proclaim the gospel) silently got up and left the dark airless square building to gain God’s blinding air. They said nothing to each other until they were seated in the small dried up garden at the back of the wineshop of Zechariah the Sober. Here they slaked their drouth with water and then cheered their doubtful hearts with wine. Matthew said:

  ‘He does it better than any of us. It’s the Greek in him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The Greeks push things through to the limit. I’ve read a little in Greek, the old Greek, a tough language, and there was this Socrates who went to the limit with his logic as it was called and he was put to death with hemlock. No compromise in him. So with this Stephen. But the light was there, heavenly approval if you like. He was shining with more than sweat.’

  ‘He’s not a Greek,’ Bartholomew said. ‘He’s a Jew like the rest of us. He knows his texts better than this damned Saul who was looking daggers.’

  ‘It’s hard for me to explain,’ Matthew frowned. ‘We were brought up on the Jewish faith and nothing else, surrounded by Jehovah so to speak. In the Greek islands they’ve got to God, some of them, the hard way, arguing from first principles. All our writings are sacred, theirs not. They’ve got to God through logic. Another thing, there’s no real answer to his arguments, and they know it. Moses was good for his time, but not for ours, and they’re scared to admit it. As for the Temple – well, that’s where his logic is going to undo him. There’s too much vested in the Temple – priestly position, money, trade brought to the city. What he doesn’t have is discretion – Socrates didn’t have it either – and we lot, we Hebrews have learnt that you can’t preach the gospel in this city without being at least a little discreet. Wise as serpents, harmless as doves and so on. Christ fulfils Moses and makes his horns shine with a deeper gold. We preach at the Temple because the gold of the Temple door is brighter burnished with the messianic fulfilment. Damn it, we have two score priests in with us now. Stephen would scare them off.’

  ‘So what do we do – recommend that he stop preaching?’

  ‘We have to let God have his way. There’s nothing to be done. But I fear we’re going to have a death on our hands.’

  Saul went straight from the synagogue to the house of Caiaphas. He said what he had to say and added: ‘It’s out of duty that I come, of course.’

  ‘I appreciate that. Though, to be honest, duty is too often, forgive me, my son, a cloak for vindictiveness. You boil at these Nazarenes as if you bore some personal grudge. Pardon my candour.’

  ‘It’s your duty to be candid,’ Saul calmly said. ‘I’ve examined my conscience on this matter. Stephen was a fellow student, even a friend, though never a close one. A first duty might well be to talk to him as a friend – point out his errors, lead him back to the right way. But, you see, he voices the belief of a whole sect. He’s encouraged to speak as he does. Also he’s eloquent, even in Aramaic, a language he regards as inferior to Greek.’

  ‘How,’ Caiaphas asked, ‘can one language be superior to another? All our languages were born out of the fall, equally confused in the destruction of Babel.’

  ‘The tongue of Shem, so he once said in the presence of our master Gamaliel, is tribal, enclosed, unwilling to meet the impact of the world of the pagan.’

  ‘God forbid that it should.’

  ‘He says that Greek has struggled to get at a truth unrevealed, and the struggle has made it subtle and muscular. However, this is not the matter at issue. See him, and you’ll see that he’s taken on the shining look of the fanatic. What the man Peter says can to some extent be tolerated. Indeed, did not my master Gamaliel preach tolerance to the entire assembly in respect of the heretical proclamation of the Messiah? But Stephen – he strikes deeper.’

  ‘How deeper?’

  ‘You had best hear for yourself.’

  Caiaphas heard, standing at the back of the synagogue of the Libertines in the shadows, Saul standing beside him. He heard Stephen’s clear voice, weak on the Aramaic gutturals, rise over the murmurs of the orthodox:

  ‘Our fathers had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness, even as he appointed who spoke to Moses – which also our fathers, in their turn, brought in with Joshua when they entered on the possession of the nations, that God thrust out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David—’

  ‘Now it comes,’ Saul muttered.

  ‘But King Solomon built him a house – the golden house that is the glory of Jerusalem. Yet the Most High dwells not in houses made with hands. What does the prophet say? “The heaven is my throne. And the earth my footstool. What manner of house will you build me? Or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?”’

  ‘Now you hear,’ Saul said.

  ‘Yes yes, now I hear. God help the boy.’

  ‘I myself am prepared to bear witness.’

  ‘No need. There are enough here to do it.’

  ‘Shall I call in the captain now?’

  ‘You’re always too eager, Saul. I don’t think you quite realise the implications.’

  ‘With respect, holy father, I’ve thought of nothing but these implications. You wish to have clean hands. There are times when the Jerusalem mob is useful.’

  Caiaphas looked on his shadowed eager face with a certain Sadducee loathing. Fanaticism was always a bad thing.

  Saul strode up to the desk of the synagogue. Stephen said: ‘The people of God are not in one place, nor is the home of their worship.’ Seeing Saul, smiling he said: ‘I welcome argument. In the Greek islands we prized dialectic as the zigzag road to the throne. My friend and fellow student Saul has something to say.’ Saul said:

  ‘Indeed I have something to say. This man Stephen, who was once a friend but is a friend no longer, who learnt little when we sat together at the feet of Gamaliel, clothes in Greek eloquence a subversion terrible in its simplicity. He speaks against the law. He speaks against the holy place. I cannot put it more simply. This synagogue is defiled by his utterances. You know what action to take.’

  Caiaphas was appalled. Fists shook, the nearest to Stephen let the sleeves of their garments fall back to show arms with tensed muscles rea
dy to seize. Stephen merely smiled. Saul cried: ‘Not here. This is holy ground.’

  Outside the synagogue it was the chief priest himself who had to hold off righteous anger while Saul hurried off for the ’ish har ha-bayith and his armed Levites. For, naturally, Stephen’s protection. A mob had collected by the time the police arrived. What has he done? Nothing, but he’s said a lot. Said what? That the Temple is a rubbish heap and the priests of the Temple a lot of timeservers. That’s bad, is it? Bad, you say bad? Stephen was marched off to jail. The two Jameses, carrying figs and bread for the brethren, saw. They saw but knew better than to interfere. They ran home, that is to the confiscated house of Matthias.

  Peter shook his head in great sadness. Thomas said: ‘I had a feeling deep in my bones that there’d be nothing but trouble once ye gave in to the Greeks.’