The Kingdom of the Wicked Page 8

  ‘I can’t.’

  Tell me, tell me, tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. Only the priests know that name.’

  ‘Well, you must beat the priests till they tell you, mustn’t you? And if they won’t tell you, you must line them all up, then off with their heads, eh? Oh, we shall have great times together.’

  He then began languidly to pummel Herod Agrippa with his feeble fists.

  The whole twelve of them were now lined up facing the Sanhedrin. Annas grinned terribly at them and said: ‘Let’s have those names again. You two I know already, here before, weren’t you, never listened to the solemn words of sacerdotal admonition, most disobedient, very unwise. Point them out, you, one by one.’ He meant Saul, temporarily appointed, in the absence of Ezekiel, who was sick with belly cramps, a sort of clerk to the court. ‘Two Jameses, I see. Who’s that old frowning one? Don’t frown at me, sir, we do the frowning here. Matthias I know well, you were a secular pillar of the faith, Matthias, sorry to see you arraigned on this charge, the charge being the same as before. A very ordinary-looking crew, I would say. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘One moment,’ Rabban Gamaliel said. All prepared to listen with grudging respect to the great Pharisee, chief of the school of Hillel, rabban, no mere rabbi. ‘There has been too much talk about the allegedly disrupting influence of the Nazarenes. I think it ought to be made clear that, though they are undoubtedly a cause of the impaired tranquillity of the leaders of the Jewish people, they have been in no wise an inflammatory element in our public life. There is too much talk, I say, about their supposed connection with John the Baptist and zealotry. They have not been shouting the need for the breakdown of the established order and the need for insurrection. What happened in Samaria and could happen here, I mean insurrection and the brutal frustration of insurrection, has been wholly political. The followers of the man Jesus seek the cultivation of charity to all, what we may term a quite unpolitical quietism.’

  ‘Nobody has made the connection,’ Caiaphas said.

  ‘Are you sure? Am I not right in saying that the Sanhedrin has become very eager to convince the Roman power that it is the willing agent of the pax Romana, and that it abhors both zealotry and the Nazarene cult as cognate manifestations of unrest and unreason?’

  The Romans,’ Caiaphas said, ‘are unable to see much difference between the enthusiasm of religious heretics and the ah furor of political activists. However, let us stick to the point at issue, which is that these twelve here arraigned have been preaching heresy and performing blasphemous acts.’

  ‘Healing the sick, for instance?’ Gamaliel said.

  ‘Whether they heal the sick or not,’ Caiaphas said, ‘is hardly to the point. They foment superstition. There are some who seek to have their ailments cured by standing in the shadow of this man Peter, a common fisherman. As for their teaching, they have already been warned not to preach in the name of the proven criminal Jesus. Can you,’ he said to Peter, ‘deny that you have gone contrary to our ordinance? You have filled the synagogues with your blasphemies.’

  ‘They want to bring that man’s blood upon us,’ muttered a Sadducee named Jonah.

  ‘Enough of that,’ Caiaphas rasped. ‘You,’ to Peter, ‘what do you say?’

  ‘This, sir,’ Peter said. ‘We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus. As for you, you killed him. You nailed him to a tree.’

  ‘We did not,’ Jonah cried. Others cried too, others murmured, some went aaargh as though blood were mounting into their throats.

  ‘God,’ Peter said, ‘exalted him at his right hand to be a prince and a saviour – to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.’

  ‘With such blasphemy,’ Caiaphas cried, ‘you put yourselves in peril of the final penalty—’

  ‘The final penalty, as you call it,’ Peter said, ‘is in the hands of the Romans. As you know well. The Romans find no fault in us.’

  ‘In that you challenge the authority of this sacred assembly, which is answerable to the occupying power—’

  ‘That,’ Peter said, ‘is not good thinking. All you can do is to set men with stones on us. Kill us if you want to. As you killed him. You can’t kill the divine word.’

  ‘Look,’ Jonathan said. ‘You’ve been telling everybody that an angel opened the door of the prison and let you all out. And you said that anyone who’s lawfully put in jail may expect the same, God help us, angelic intervention. That strikes at the very roots of order and law and legal punishment.’

  ‘Nobody said that,’ Thomas growled. ‘Ye’re too quick, the lot of ye to put words in folks’ mouths. Somebody opened that door in the dead of the night and nobody knows who. It might have been one of yon prison guards that had come to the right way of believing. It might have been some decent quiet man that got the message of the Lord.’

  ‘A messenger of the Lord, you say? That’s blasphemy.’

  ‘I did not say messenger of the Lord.’

  ‘Mal’akh, you said. We all know what that means.’

  ‘In my youthful days,’ Annas said, ‘it meant a messenger. The same as angelos.’

  ‘Used of the spiritual attendants of the Most High.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Look,’ Thomas cried, ‘if the Lord sent a messenger to get us out of yon jail the Lord and his messenger both need their heads looking at, for it was clear we’d be back to the preaching and curing of the sick and get ourselves picked up by yon captain of the Temple guard or whatever he’s called and where would be the reason in it?’

  ‘You can’t help blaspheming, can you?’ Jonathan said. ‘Blasphemy is stitched into your very skin.’

  ‘A good phrase,’ Thaddeus said. ‘Sacrilegious sin. Stitched in your very skin.’

  ‘Stop this,’ Peter cried, as though he were chief of the Sanhedrin, ‘and keep to the point. Somebody opened the door and we got out. But here we are, calm, roaring, in our innocence. Let’s get the business over with. We have work to do.’

  ‘Ah no.’ Caiaphas shook his head. Rabban Gamaliel said:

  ‘Listen to me.’ They listened. ‘It has been said, and it will be said again, that every assembly formed in the name of God will stand established, and every assembly not so formed must needs perish. Now we have had in recent years two notable instances of self-styled prophets. Theudas rose up some thirty years ago and won four hundred followers, but where is he now? He did not have God on his side and so he perished. Then there was Judas of Galilee, whom some of you may remember well enough. That was at the time of the Roman census to assess the amount of our tribute, and this Judas said that God alone was king of Israel and it was both blasphemy and high treason to pay tribute to Caesar. Rome crushed him, and now he is no more than a name. We have had many failed insurgents and many false prophets. Now take these Nazarenes. My advice is that you leave them alone. For if their counsel or their work is merely that of men, it will of its own nature be overthrown. But if their counsel or their work is of God – if – you will not be able to overthrow it. And those who attempt to overthrow it may find themselves in a very unhappy position. Even all unknowing, they will be fighting against the Lord our God.’

  There were murmurs at that, but most of the Pharisees nodded at the good sense. John, little James, Thaddeus and Bartholomew cautiously beamed, but Peter and Thomas frowned, considering: good sense but had to be a catch in it somewhere. Caiaphas deliberated with his father-in-law. At length he said: ‘Thus speaks the spirit of moderation that is a legacy of the great Hillel. Sometimes we may be moderate, sometimes not. Now is such a time. Our judgement is that you cease your preaching and practice alike—’

  ‘So,’ Thomas said, ‘those that lie sick in our spittle have to take up their beds and walk? No more doing good works? Ye’re flying in the Lord’s face.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Caiaphas said, ‘one other thing
. For insolence and stubbornness and truculence you will receive the punishment laid down in the book of Deuteronomy. A flogging. Forty strokes less one.’

  ‘Ye mean,’ Thomas said, ‘thirty-nine? Why not say what ye mean?’ The other disciples made noises of rejoicing not well understood by the holy assembly. Jonathan said:

  ‘We’ll hear less of your alleluias when they bring out the whips, my friends.’

  ‘You’ve played into the Lord’s hands, bless you,’ Peter called. ‘Now we share in what you did to him.’ And, without waiting for a word of dismissal, he led his eleven towards the enclosed punishment yard near the lishkath ha-gazith.

  ‘Weakness,’ Saul said to his master. ‘You see the weakness. And you, rabban, abet the weakness.’

  ‘I hear the harshness of authority in your voice, Saul. You seem to be outgrowing your studentship.’

  ‘Oh, I respect and honour you as ever, rabban. But I must be permitted to make my own judgements.’

  ‘Read more. Judge less.’

  ‘The whole of Israel,’ Saul said, ‘is imperilled by false doctrine. And they’re to be given a lick of the whip and told to go.’

  ‘Look, Saul, I find little fault in these men. I was not uttering mere rhetoric.’

  ‘They subvert truth. They preach a known Messiah, rejected by the high priests who are the voice of Israel.’

  ‘Read your scriptures, Saul. We were promised a Messiah. It’s wrong to accept without further evidence, true, but it would be foolish wholeheartedly to reject. They do no evil. They do nothing but good. You’ve seen it.’

  ‘Sheer cunning. They buy followers with good works. They cram the poor first with bread and then with false doctrine. You must speak against them.’

  ‘Must, Saul? Must?’

  ‘I’m going to see the flogging. I want to hear them howl.’

  ‘A moment, Saul.’ Gamaliel pulled at his party beard, troubled. ‘I’m interested in you. Not in your devotion to the faith but in the strength of vindictive feeling you bring to those whom you consider are its opponents. The feeling is excessive, obsessed. You snarl. You frown as if you had a perpetual headache. Are you well?’

  ‘Well enough. The epilepsia has left me alone these eighteen months and more. God keeps me well.’

  ‘You have a powerful persecutory instinct in you. Remember that the desire to persecute is negative. It promotes fear. It promotes it even in myself. You make me wish to search my conscience for smuts of heresy or unpurposed blasphemies. This, dear Saul, has little to do with religion.’

  ‘But,’ Saul said, ‘the undoing of centuries of endeavour. To come out of the desert at last and set up the Temple. The Temple is our home and our stability. And this man sneered at it. The human body is the true Temple. Destroy it and it can be rebuilt in three days. You ought to shudder as I shudder.’

  ‘These days,’ Gamaliel said, ‘I shudder only with the cold. Well, the Temple may be our home and our stability and it may house the Holy of Holies, but it’s still a work of human hands. The body is God’s work and very wonderfully made. Old as I am, I glory in my flesh and anticipate, as you do, resurrection in it. That belief makes us Pharisees what we are. Now I see you really shudder. Most unpharisaic. Do you dislike the human body?’

  ‘A tent,’ Saul said, ‘for housing the spirit.’

  Gamaliel forbore to say something about the tent pole: Saul deserved to be shocked, but not perhaps with an unprepared obscenity. Instead he said: ‘What is your view of a text we have never considered in class, I mean the Song that is Solomon’s?’

  ‘A well-made epithalamion. Somewhat vulgar. He strips his beloved and shows her flesh to the world. Like a slave market. The flesh is best kept hidden.’

  ‘Except, of course, for flogging.’

  Saul had no capacity for blushing. But he did not go to the punishment yard, where the disciples were being lashed in threes. James the Little stood with folded arms awaiting his turn while Peter and Thomas and Bartholomew had their wrists tied in a posture of embracing as with love the stone post of punition. A little wiry man named Esra was, out of supposed deference to the criminal’s age, whipping half-naked Thomas but feebly. ‘Go on, man,’ James bellowed. ‘Lay it on. Do you want me to do it for you?’ Thomas said:

  ‘Ye’re Esra, right? The brother of Jephtha. Jephtha’s doing well with us. Join him, ow, that hurt. This seems a poor way of earning a living.’ Thaddeus improvised a whipping song like a sea shanty, and all who could sing sang it with glee and false notes:

  Beat us and bash us

  Lick us and lash us

  Forty less one

  Then when you’ve done

  Give us one more

  Making two score.

  Whipped, Matthew said: ‘We’ll have to sleep on our bellies tonight, lads.’ All laughed at this typical piece of Galilean fortitude, humour, whatever it was. But they had to sleep on their bellies, and they did not sleep much, for more than one night.

  The Emperor Tiberius had slept this night on his back, and he woke before dawn with his mouth open and his throat dry with snoring. He wondered at the wetness of his hand, agleam in the tiny night light. Then he knew that he had been scratching at the running sores on his face. He had been dreaming of his dead son Drusus, whom he had seen for the hundredth time lying in dried blood and a feast for the Roman flies in an alley near the Tiber. And yet he was not sure now whether he had died from dagger wounds inflicted in a kind of animal candour. A story had at last emerged about a eunuch named Lygdus, dead now of course, garotted and his penis sliced off first, who had been administering small potions of some Egyptian poison to the Emperor’s son he served, year after year, on the orders of Sejanus. Who was alive to tell the truth about anything? Running sores. The marble body of Rome pitted and scored. Truth was dead along with honour and honesty, and history was a battle of lies. He, Tiberius, had begun well enough, though aware always that his stepfather the divine Augustus had chosen him as the dim foil of his own brightness. A bad fanfare to the reign, though, Augustus’s grandson Agrippa Postumus murdered. That had not been on the orders of him, Tiberius, but he would have done better to institute a larger inquiry, have the assassin centurion questioned under torture rather than given the immediate axe. That was Livia, of course, the imperial mother, hated the boy, dull and slow though he was, as a possible focus of disaffection. He, Tiberius, should have spoken out, not preserved a grim silence which seemed to many like the dumbness of guilt.

  There were a large number of things he should have done and had not done. Looked after the army in Pannonia, paid those justly growling veterans at least as much as the Praetorian Guard. Inhibited his jealousy of Germanicus. Not appointed Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso as governor of Syria. Germanicus had been right to censure Piso for mismanaging the province. Piso had been wrong to think that he, Tiberius, would be delighted to learn that Piso had had the dagger put in, or poison dripped in slow droplets into the clawfoot cup from the Rhine that had been Germanicus’s childish pride (the Germans good craftsmen, intelligent, worthy the conquering). No, when a man rose deservedly high and was dangerously loved of the multitude his destruction had to be encompassed by subtler means: the amassed false documents of bribery and conspiracy, gross evidence of sexual irregularities. Germanicus had been obscenely pure and incorruptible, as well as sickeningly competent. Such men were dangerous.

  And yet what manner of men were required in a state which had been swift to deify Augustus and not slow in muttering ‘Tiberius to the Tiber’? Men like Sejanus (dead), Macro (still alive), Piso (drainer of the wealth of Syria)? The provinces were atrociously governed. He, Tiberius, had joined with the divine Augustus in considering a dirt heap like Palestine hardly worth the exportation of administrative competence, and yet one could not close one’s eyes to the massive inefficiency of this Pontius Pilatus, a man Tiberius did not know, a protégé of the butchered, rightly, Sejanus. Not enough to have this Pilatus tonguelashed in Syria and let him sneak off into opulent
retirement in Corinth or Ephesus. Bring him back to Rome, lay bare before the Senate and the judges evidence of peculation, disloyalty, the cynical fleaing and clipping of the aquiline potestas. That deputy of his, Quintus or Sextilian or some such name, not appointed by Sejanus, had sent sly letters forwarded to Capri, unread by him, Tiberius, but mentioned occasionally by the stoic Curtius, wearisome voice of imperial conscience, as further evidence of provincial mismanagement. Well, he, Tiberius, had done his share of judicial investigation and had been adjudged impartial and unvindictive. He could still flare briefly in the imperial firmament as a just princeps before retiring into the, what was the phrase, una nox dormienda.

  Well, that was all there was. There were gods and avatars in the provinces which promised eternities of bliss for the just as well as the victims of injustice, but Rome sternly commanded a brief daylight of virtus and then the brave march into endless blackness. The just and unjust alike slept together in the nox that was wide as the universe but narrow as the grave. There was, it had to be admitted, a certain injustice in this shovelling of the unjust and the just under a common mound: not literally, of course, since the unjust usually had the final injustice of funerary magnificence. There perhaps ought to be compensation after death for living misery: he, Tiberius, had had misery enough, the gods knew, and he was to be bundled with filthy slaves who had never known the agonies of responsibility into the una nox. The gods, of course, were a quite farcical invention, though necessary for the as it were marmoreal exaltation of the civic virtues. You sacrificed to Jupiter after or before the bath or the games or the fruitless wrangle with debauched and asinine senators. Chance was the only goddess. He saw Chance looking down on his lonely bed, shaking dice but not yet throwing them. She had the lineaments of his detestable and detested imperial mother. He said aloud:

  ‘Mother, you unkillable bitch, I am going to Rome.’

  Lonely bed, yes, with no healthily snoring catamite sprawled across it. Banished, banished, all. He grasped the imperial penis, flaccid as a depleted kidskin moneypurse, and it did not awake to the prospect of its stimulation. His mother looked at it very sourly. Unkillable but officially dead. Dead in her bed at eighty; he had refused to go to the bitch’s funeral. She had caught him at the age of twelve in the act of mastupration. Unseemly, unroman, Greekish, Jewish. Well, in a sense he had done nothing but mastuprate since taking the purple. The amatory images of boyhood, becoming ever more extravagant, had been transubstantiated into flesh and blood, but the wraiths of the heated brain above the frotting right hand had, in retrospect, more reality. Inadequate, eh? You are inadequate, Biberius Caldius Mero.