Gaius Silius held back a sigh and said: ‘I’m flattered but, forgive me, corcordium, somewhat sceptical. Tell me, how many men have you had in your short life?’
‘How many? I can’t count. Their names would make a book, I suppose, even just those I remember. A woman,’ she said fiercely, ‘is entitled to her pleasures. Few men can do more than touch the fringes of a woman’s satisfaction. You, honeycomb, are quite exceptional. You are tireless. I think that’s your only talent. You’re far from bright in many ways, but you have that. As well as fantasy and ingenuity. You know how important the life of the body is. That’s rare. I’m not going to let you get away. You and I are going to be married.’
He nearly leapt out of the bed at that. ‘Married? You mean – divorce from Claudius, divorce from Paulina? That’s impossible.’
‘Two long dark divorces. With no actuaries or notaries or whatever those legal gentlemen are called. Don’t ask me any more about it now. There’s much to be done, dear Gaius, but there’s no great hurry. As you see, the sun’s a slow climber.’
She seized him with inordinate appetite. The next hour was consumed in a remarkable variety of embraces and penetrations. She was succuba and incuba, mare and rider. They left the bed for the floor, the wall, even for the edge of the open casement, and even then she was not satisfied, though Gaius Silius thought she must grow hoarse with her screams of attainment. Back on the bed, she achieved at last the consummation of her need and her lovely face glowed with a rapture only to be described as saintly. This is, all of it, quite disgusting.
Peter, on his prison pallet, had, though proleptically a saint, no such glow. He slept well, though this night had been announced to him as the last before his execution. He had been brought out of jail daily during the last week for a slow trial whose conclusion had never been in doubt. He had been interested to note that the heretical aspects of his master’s messiahship had been dwelt on rather less than the opening up of the new faith (which some of the deposing priests had been prepared to regard, for argument’s sake, as an almost legitimate expansion of orthodoxy) to the uncircumcised Gentile. The conversion of the centurion Cornelius had been presented as an unauthorised act of pollution; the willingness to relax the basic hygienic and dietary regulations of the Jewish faith in deference to Gentile prejudice was presented as a brutal act of deracination, not, as with the imputation of messiahship, a tearing off of bark or a lopping of branches. The arboreal similitude persisted: the Judaic tree must be pruned by its own designated tenders, which meant getting rid of Peter and depriving the upstart sect of its head. It was in vain for Peter to protest that his innovations had come directly from God: that only made matters worse. In the closing speeches the vigorous piety of Israel’s monarch, absent during the trial, confined to his bed with atrocious stomach pains, had been commended; his high place in the history of Israel’s struggle to sustain the ancient purity of the faith was assured. Peter was then solemnly condemned to death. In his innocence he requested crucifixion in a form not identical with that of his master, for which he professed himself unworthy: let him be nailed to a Greek chi or on a regular Roman T inverted. Roman, he was told, Roman, he was demanding a Roman punishment when Rome no longer ruled the land. Properly he should be stoned to death, like the Greek heresiarch Stephen, but the precedent of the sword for the execution of James was acceptable as a clean, easy and somewhat apposite mode of dispatch: there had been much talk of symbolic lopping; let there be a literal and, it was hoped, final lopping. With the cutting off of Peter’s head the limbs of the detestable new faith would lose all power of locomotion. Amen and alleluia.
Peter slept well because he had been given a cup of drugged wine. He snored heartily, but an angelic visitant might have noted a pallor as of sickness: in spite of his acquiescence in the death sentence and even a demand that the mode of death be excruciating, he was still something of a coward, and his sleeping colour showed this. A light passed the window and a cock, thinking the dawn had come, sang loudly. This woke Peter: even his deeply sleeping mind was sensitive to the crowing of cocks. He smacked a dry mouth. The crowing had ceased. Now a dog somewhere bayed at the moon. Peter was surprised to see that the two guards appointed to his person lay on the stone floor asleep. He felt a certain indignation at this: men should do what they are paid for. And then he saw that the cell door was open. This was more than warders’ carelessness. There was a trap here somewhere. The sleeping guards snored loudly and not in unison. Had they drunk too of the drugged wine, thinking it to be undrugged? When a door was open it represented an invitation to go through it. He took the old cloak he had used as a coverlet and wrapped himself warmly. Then he cautiously peered out into the corridor, which was illuminated with two wall torches, and found it empty. There was something terribly irregular here, unless, of course, he was still really asleep and dreaming of escape. But a glance back into the cell showed him that his pallet was empty. Someone was engineering his escape, but who and how?
He then saw, scrawled on the outside of the cell door, the name Ioannis Markos or John Mark in yellow chalk. That was the name of the cousin of Barnabas, who was supposed to be lying low, along with Saul or Paul as he now was, in Caesarea. A right instinct told him to wipe off this name from the door with his cloak. Then, with little confidence, he went on soft feet along the corridor and came to another open door. This opened on to another corridor, right-angled to the one he had left, and a few yards down it, on the left, he heard the noise of what he took to be boisterous drunkenness. There was an open door and light, the only light of that corridor, beamed out of it. Guards having a party. Something told him that furtiveness would not be in order now, so he trod with some confidence and even a loud chest-clearing cough towards the light. Someone inside, hearing him, called ‘Everything all right then?’ in bad Aramaic and he replied, taking care to use Judaean and not Galilean tonalities, that everything was. Then he passed the light and came to a gate of rather thin metal, open as he had expected and, in a part of his brain, not really wanted to expect, and found that this led to a narrow stairway going down. He then found himself in the open air in an ill-tended garden with stunted shrubs and a young Judas tree. At the end of a weedy path there was a very massive iron gate. He walked towards it under the moon, which more than one hound now howled at, fully expecting to be picked up at any moment by boisterous troops and perhaps even a thin intellectual officer saying ‘Thought we’d let you have a last taste of hope, old man. Fine thing, hope. I’ve had lots of it in my time. Never came to anything, though. All right, boys, bundle him back in.’ There was indeed a presence, but only of a rising wind. This rose so violently that it clanged open the left half of the gate. Peter hurried through and came to the seven steps he had often observed from below and only once before, looking back to lost freedom, from above. He now went down them and found himself in the deserted street. Herod Agrippa’s police would be waiting round that corner. The game was up, and a cruel one it was, so he walked staunchly towards their hidden arms. They were not there. There was nobody there. His liberty was the real thing. He ran into it, meaning in the direction of John Mark’s mother’s house.
He turned into a dark alley. He heard drunken singing begin to resound down it: two late revellers taking a shortcut home. He found a back door open and got into a yard in which cats intent on a courting ritual took little notice of him. The singers passed: their song was a banal popular one that had recently taken the fancy of the Jerusalem young, something about a girl being as straight as a dikla tree. He was out again just as the cantorial part of the feline courtship, perhaps encouraged by the human caterwauling, began to wake the sleeping household above it: a male groan, the threat of the throwing of an old boot. He left the alley and got on to a wider street, then he turned right to a tree-lined residential quarter where, he knew, the house of John Mark’s mother lay. There were lights on in that house: perhaps there was a prayer meeting concerned with the repose of his soul; more likely they, having co
ntrived his escape in a manner still inexplicable, were waiting for him to come there.
But the outer gate which led to the forecourt of shrubs and flowers, well tended, was locked. A little bell on a chain was affixed to an iron staple on the wall. This he shook. Its tintinnabulation was tiny, but it seemed to him likely to wake the street. Light still blazed from an upper casement. He rang again, deafeningly it seemed. This time the front door of the house opened and a young fat girl appeared. He knew her; her name was Rhoda. ‘Rhoda,’ he called in a loud whisper, ‘it’s me, Peter. Let me in.’ Rhoda’s response was to shriek and slam the door shut. Stupid fool of a damned girl. He rang the bell again and this time did not care if he woke the whole damned street. Damned idiotic imbecile of a stupid girl. The front door opened again and he saw John Mark’s mother come down the path with a key. She let him in. She relocked the gate. They entered the house together.
John Mark lay in bed. He was supposed to be a genuine imbecile immune from the probings of the law which, at the time of Saul’s persecutions, had been interested in the Nazarene philanthropy of his father, now dead of starvation in one of the camps that Saul had set up. His imbecility was now so taken for granted in the city that he could drool around the market, steal apples unmolested, and giggle obscenities like ‘Jesus lives’. He was supposed to have picked up the slogan from his father without knowing its meaning. In fact he was a learned young man who said now, as Rhoda hugged the wall, fearful of the thing that said its name was Peter: ‘She still takes you for a fravashi.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a Zoroastrian term I find useful. Not quite an angel, not quite a ghost. A fravashi. Touch her, go on, hug her, kiss her, show her you’re real.’ Peter made for her grimly and she screamed and ran out, falling over things. ‘A good girl but silly. Her name means rose but she doesn’t smell like one. Welcome to liberty.’
Peter sat down heavily and was given, by John Mark’s mother, a cup of wine, not drugged. ‘What I want to know is,’ he said, ‘how did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Get me out of that place.’
‘I had nothing to do with it.’
The cell door was open and your name was chalked on it.’
‘There’s more than one John Mark in the world.’
‘Perhaps,’ his mother said, ‘there’d been another prisoner there with the name John Mark.’
‘Well, then,’ Peter said through his winewet beard, ‘somebody must have bribed somebody or killed somebody. Not that I saw any corpses around.’
‘Friends of the faith have no money,’ John Mark said, ‘and they don’t kill. It’s divine intervention or some such thing.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’
‘How do you know you haven’t seen it?’
‘It’s a damned mystery, that’s all I can say.’
‘Not damned, surely?’
John Mark’s mother was a cunning woman reputed to be a devout daughter of the strict faith; she was known for her loud denunciations of the Nazarene heresy and her rich choice of epithets in the regard of its adherents. She would call them desert dogs, whelps of dugless bitches, walking chunks of maggoty cheese, corrosive pilgarlicks, costive beggars, ambulant diseases and the like. Some of her terms of opprobrium were, even by members of the Sanhedrin, considered to go too far, particularly those which attributed sexual perversion to the Nazarenes, such as stuffers of their lousy heads up their mothers’ cunts, defilers of the arses of the unblemished sons and daughters of Jerusalem and so on. Still, nobody could ever be sure of being wholly safe from the investigations of the religious police: her excesses of objurgation might one of these days be seen through. She said now: ‘I hope to God you wiped the name off the door.’
‘Do you take me altogether for a fool?’
‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘Even so, we have to be careful. You’ll have to stay in the cellar here for a while. It’s cold but it’s safe. We’ve plenty of blankets. James is down there.’
‘Little James?’
‘There’s no other, is there, since your old fishing friend was done in by his majesty. God knows how long it will have to be, but we’ll get you away in time. James is stubborn, though. He says his place is here and here he stays.’
‘James doesn’t know yet?’
‘About you getting out? How can he know? Unless, of course, that stupid Rhoda is down there now trying to shake him awake to tell him. A heavy sleeper is James the Little. That girl’s stupid and she blabs. She’ll have to go.’
‘If she blabs, mother, that’s all the more reason why she ought to stay. Anyway, she’s one of us.’
‘So she says. But she doesn’t know her backside from her little finger, forgive my language. You can never tell with young girls these days. Their heads are stuffed with a load of nonsense, love stories and young men and popular songs. She doesn’t know what she is.’
Peter, according to a falsified record later unfalsified, was duly beheaded the following morning. It was not, of course, the real Peter who laid his head on the block but a substitute Peter, a grey-bearded criminal long incarcerated on a purely secular charge (killing his son-in-law in a drunken quarrel about the ownership of a small silver cow made by one of the fine workmen of Ephesus, itself stolen by one or the other from someone or other) and now given a delayed quietus drunk and heavily blindfolded. The king was, it was already known, incapable of attending the execution, groaning in his bed as he was, and it was not thought necessary to have a speech delivered on the Nazarene horror and the justice of the dispatch of its leading exponent, since all this had been exhaustively and exhaustingly taken care of at Peter’s trial. Head and body were speedily buried and all concerned – guards, captain of guards, prison governor and his assistants – breathed huge relief. If news of Peter’s baffling release were ever to get outside the prison and, through the channels of the department of internal security, to the ears of Herod Agrippa, then the CodexCriminalis would be invoked, this being one of the king’s Romish importations, and the entire prison staff would suffer beheading. There were a few quiet lashings, with tongue and thong, within the prison precincts, and then everybody agreed to forget the matter, though attempts to explicate the inexplicable went on for some time in the guards’ wet canteen.
King Herod Agrippa, feeling a little better, forced himself out of bed to travel to Caesarea, there to preside in his new silver robes over the festival held every five years on the anniversary of the founding of that city, in honour of the living Caesar whose title shone from the city’s name. A few Roman officials came down from Syria and one or two senators on a travelling commission attended the games which bloodily attested the spread of Roman culture. There would not have been such games in Jerusalem, but Caesarea was a Roman city, meaning that it was full of Greeks, and considered to be the true capital of the province. As well as Romans there were Phoenicians present, a couple of fearful emissaries of princely rank from Tyre and Sidon, towns on the Phoenician seaboard which, though prosperous enough ports, were slow in paying for recent grain imports from Galilee. The amount of grain sent was much smaller than was usual, and there were Galilean grumbles about grain being sent at all, since this was a time of severe shortage and the feeding of Palestine came first. But: Tyre and Sidon had depended on these imports ever since the time of Hiram and Solomon, and the royal treasury in Judaea received a sizable commission from both the Galilean factors and the Phoenician agents. The emissaries from Tyre and Sidon desired an opportunity to explain to Herod Agrippa why payment had not yet been rendered and why it could not be rendered for some time (a long story which could not be expected to interest the king, something about peculations, the failure of a docking project, a mining investment that had gone wrong) and they had a word with the king’s chamberlain Blastus the evening before the ceremony in which Caesar and Caesar’s city were to be honoured and the king to declare the opening of the games.
‘He’s sick,’ Blastus said, ??
?and in a perpetual foul temper. Soft words and promises aren’t going to do any good. He’s not been too happy about you people for a long time.’ He spoke slow Aramaic which, cognate with the tongue of Phoenicia, the emissaries understood well enough.
‘We’ve brought presents.’
‘Good presents?’
‘The best. Fine Phoenician workmanship. Gold and silver bangles and breastplates and the rest of the nonsense.’
‘The rest of the—?’
‘Well, he’ll still demand heavy interest on the unpaid bill, and we like to deal with businessmen not monarchs weighed down with jewels and the rest of the nonsense. Flattery’s not in our line.’
‘You’ll have to flatter him just the same. It’s meat and drink to him these days, practically his only meat and drink.’
‘How much interest do you think he’s going to charge?’
‘He’ll go to the limit. If I were you people I’d start thinking about getting grain from Egypt. They understand business there better than he does. He’s lived too long in Rome.’
It was while Herod Agrippa was writhing in bed with an intolerable resumption of his pains that his daughter Bernice light-heartedly gave him bad news. ‘That man’s still alive,’ she said.
‘Which man, child?’
‘The man that was supposed to have his rosch cut off.’ She had the habit of mixing her nurse’s Aramaic into her Greek. ‘The one who used to catch dagim and then preached, the one with the white sakan,’ stroking her pretty smooth chin.
‘Speak plainly, child.’ Her father was up on his elbow, looking at her fiercely.