The Kingdom of the Wicked Read online

  ‘And we …’ Cleopas began to choke on a fishbone. The stranger who was no stranger hit him kindly thrice on the back. Cleopas spat out the bone on to his trencher. ‘Thanks. We, I was trying to say, are the first to know. We’re the least, we’re nothing, and this place is on the road to nowhere.’

  ‘Casualness, you can say,’ Jesus said. ‘Life being a matter of the casual. You’re not quite the first to know. There was a reformed prostitute firsthand then—never mind. No trumpets, so to speak. No flamboyance, except in that sunset over your shoulder. There’s something Roman about a sunset. Never despise the casual. You are custodians of the truth and sowers of the word as much as any of them. You, your toothache is a warning of worse pain—’

  ‘Zachaeus is my name, Zachaeus.’

  ‘I know your name and I know your trade, you smell of it. The bad time’s coming, the time when you’ll be questioned about love. Let’s finish this jug and have more.’

  ‘Love?’ Cleopas gulped.

  ‘Of course. You will preach love to the world and the world will think there’s a catch in it. For love you will be whipped, flayed, clawed, burnt, nailed to a tree. I preached nothing but love.’

  It grew dark. Zachaeus shivered as the night wind rose. ‘You had skill in it,’ he said. ‘Preaching the word, that is. Have skill still, I mean, in preaching, that is. What will you do? Lord,’ he added.

  ‘I’ve done my work,’ Jesus said. ‘I leave the world soon. Your world. A whisper of encouragement, there is no death and so on, and then – best not to ask where I go. Go, yes, but in a manner stay. I am on this table.’ They saw that his hands were but saw that he meant more. ‘In the bread, brickhard though it is, and in this wine where, see, the vinegar-making mother is already at work. It’s all quite simple. Believe, when you take both, that I am in them. I am on this table, in your mouths, dissolved in your stomachs, becoming your flesh and the spirit the flesh serves, excreted, yes, but daily renewed. When wine ends and bread ends the world ends. Till then I’ll be there. That is a truth as love is a truth, but more important than the truth is the game you will play. The game of taking bread and wine and tasting me in your mouths. The game of trying to love, because love is not easy. But it is the only answer.’

  ‘What now?’ Zachaeus asked. His tooth sang viciously. ‘Tonight, I mean. I don’t like the look of this darkness.’

  Jesus understood. ‘Yes, the enemy lurking in it, the eyes of bad beasts in the woods and carrion birds untimely awake in the branches. Nothing to fear. The beasts will roll at our feet to be tickled and the enemy will know love. Stay the night here and then go back to Jerusalem. I have to go, there are others to see. They too must be sent back to Jerusalem.’

  ‘So they are near here?’ Cleopas said.

  ‘Yes, in an old farmhouse. I must have words with them. They are to go to Nicodemus’s house in Gethsemane, if they can bear the smell of treachery there. I will pay the reckoning for you and go. Though, as I told you, I also stay. In that bit of hard bread that is left and these red dregs. So take my blessing while I take my leave.’

  Both Cleopas and Zachaeus felt that the night whose falling had all their lives been a friendly summons to sleep had now become a malevolent visitation bearing no seeds of sunrise. ‘Stay with us,’ Cleopas said urgently. ‘Don’t leave us, Lord.’

  ‘I stay and I go.’ And he went, paying the reckoning on the way. Who had given him money? The reformed prostitute?

  It seemed to Zachaeus, though he recognised the unworthiness of the thought, that it would have been a good gesture on the part of the resurrected to ease that flaming tooth. Meditatively and with his fingers shaky, he probed his dry mouth. The tooth was loose and, as he finger and thumbed it, it grew looser. He rocked it like a screaming child in a cradle. He felt confident that by morning, if morning were ever to come, he might well have it out. There were things that a man could sometimes do for himself.

  ‘Questioned about love,’ Cleopas brooded. ‘I don’t like it.’

  The kinds of love enacted on the island of Caprae were not of a sort that anyone durst question. This refuge of the Emperor Tiberius was also called Capri, but it was nicknamed Caprineum, meaning a place of goatish lust. Here let us meet Tiberius Claudius Nero, called from his youth Biberius Caldius Mero, meaning boozer of neat hot wine. A man of orgies, who would hardly accept a dinner invitation unless assured that the waiting girls would all be naked, who promoted a nobody to the quaestorship because he could down a quart tankard without taking breath, who made Flaccus governor of Syria and Piso prefect of the city of Rome because they were all-night guzzlers and swillers, he is, in his seventies, aware of failing appetites, especially in the area of what he would call love, and needs a variety of stimulants.

  See him now waking late in the presence of a large picture of Atalanta and Meleager performing the rite of fellatio, whimpering because he cannot attain a swift fore-breakfast emission with a catamite whom he has lashed for his failure to arouse the requisite rush of lust, gulping cheese, wine and the feathery bread his baker has learnt from the Arabs, then going to look upon his spintriae. These are boys and girls garnered from all over the Empire for their skill in unnatural coits, and he sets them to copulating in triads to whip up his difficult desires. Then he visits the woods and spinneys, where there are Pans and Syringes beckoning him into their caves with the lewdest gestures. Now he goes to the sacrifice, there to conceive instant lust for the bearer of incense and his brother the holy trumpeter, haling them out of the temple before the end of the ceremony so that he can bugger them both. It is a dry and fruitless process and he groans. The brothers protest feebly at being so ill used, so he has their legs broken. He hears then that his chief cook’s wife has had a baby, so he has the blind suckling brought to pull on his flaccid penis with its boneless gums, what time the mother wails and is beaten for wailing. Then it is time for him to swim in his warmed marble piscina, with the little boys he calls his minnows darting between his spread legs to nibble at his shrunken genitalia. This, O Romans, is your Emperor, successor to the great Augustus.

  Dried and wrapped, he sits in the imperial garden, full of stony magnificence. Naked boys and girls from all the provinces save one serve him cooled white wine and morsels of salt fish. Curtius Atticus, an ageing and respectable patrician, comes and is permitted to sit with his Emperor. Curtius has always averted his eyes from Tiberius’s excesses. He is here on Capri to exert what good influence he can on the old goat, but he knows the task is hopeless. It is above all things necessary, in his view, that there should be a ruler in Rome, but there is none, and the Senate is corrupt and impotent. Curtius has recently taken to Stoicism. Tiberius says:

  ‘You have some more gloomy wisdom for me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it gloomy. The aim of the Stoic philosophy is to dispel gloom.’

  ‘Only the pleasures of the senses can ease the pains of the spirit,’ Tiberius says in the Greek of Rhodes, where he was once in exile. He nods to one of his secretaries, a fresh-faced clever Greek slave who smiles inwardly at the Doric accent. He has transcribed this same trite maxim at least a dozen times before. The attendants, boys and girls, now strip naked and, to the music of the thrushes in the pines, perform a chaste enough ballet, PNS F TH SPRT, writes the slave.

  ‘The senses fail,’ Curtius says justly. ‘At your age, our age.’

  ‘Speak for yourself. And I think you may keep your philosophy to yourself. I was looking at my spintriae earlier this morning, and I note that there is only one race unrepresented among them. I mean the Hebrews. Why,’ he quavered petulantly, ‘does not our procurator at Caesarea send me little presents like the other governors?’

  ‘Last month there was a shipment of dates and a couple of camels.’

  ‘The Hebrews are all for truculence and incorruption. That isn’t human, Curtius. I’ve a mind to see some of the younger incorrupt corrupted. We have enough corrupting agencies here. I would like to see some little handsome Jews, boys and
girls, wrested slowly of their incorruption. That would be a new pleasure.’

  ‘May I mention the word duty, Caesar?’

  ‘You may not. I’m not going back to Rome.’

  ‘Well, at least perform some of the essential duties from Capri. There are no governors of consular rank in Spain and Syria. The Dacians and Sarmatians are plucking Moesia like a ripe plum. The Germans are in Gaul. In Armenia the Parthians—’

  ‘Shut up, Curtius. I forbid you to mention these things. Talk to me of the duties of rule when you’ve experienced the burden of rule and the nightmare of treachery. My only concern now is self-preservation. That’s why I’m here. A natural fortress of rock with one well-guarded landing beach. I’m safe. I’ve made sure of that.’

  He was indeed safe, but the rocky island was not so impregnable as he thought. Down below, rocking on blue calm, on the other side from the Villa Jovis, a small fishing boat rode a chain’s length from the wall of rock. A hardworking fisherman, gnarled and lean and black with sun, was dragging his netted catch inboard. It was a huge sea perch or morone labrax being nipped by angry crabs. ‘Row in,’ the man said to his boy.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ He slammed with his fist at the mad despairing eye of the bass, which leapt in its confines like a man on a cross. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this afore?’

  ‘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 judgement.

  ‘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 realise, 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 Juli
us 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.’