The Kingdom of the Wicked

  ‘And the first step to the faith?’

  ‘Baptism, Caesar. The washing away of past sins.’

  ‘Washing?’

  ‘In water, water transfigured into a sign of redemption.’

  ‘Ordinary water?’

  The old man who had been stitching canvas looked uncomfortable. Nero nodded, put on his wig, sketched a kind of confused imperial blessing, then left. He walked rather shakily towards the Imperial Forum, his cloaked guards before and behind. An old woman in a shawl turned and grinned at him. It was Agrippina with blackened teeth, her hair scorched, back from that place. Hell. And then it was not. There was no need for his mother to come back in brief visitations from the outer blackness. Nor Britannicus. Nor Octavia. Nor all the others whose names he had forgotten. The vision of fiery emptiness was probably enough. Stain the illimitable candour of eternal beauty or goodness or whatever it was with splashes of crimson. The pure white screams aloud in pure white pain.

  It might be said that Paul sowed certain notions in the mind of his Emperor. That there was an ultimate creator seemed totally logical, maker of Jupiter and Apollo and Mars and Priapus and the rest of the comic pseudopantheon: it always had seemed so, having much to do with the deathless principle of beauty. But that there should be an eternal principle of goodness and an everlasting system of reward and punishment was not so acceptable. Seneca had droned on about it or something like it, but he had never propounded the possibility of an elected damnation. Nero found it easy enough to see this as eternal fire. He saw it: an eternally blazing city full of the screams of the blazing. But the property of destruction which did not destroy was hard to accept. It seemed more logical to pass from earthly time to a region which might be termed parachronic but not achronic: the fire could burn out guilt and the purged being rise from it to the purity of the eternal vision: beauty, the Platonic idea of it personalised, deified into a kind of work of art that moved and breathed as a deathless organic being, never-ending music that offered also a never-ending act of love. Absurd perhaps. Certainly indeed absurd. There was time and there was not time. In not time you went to bliss or to eternal punishment. Nero did not at all like the notion that there were in his Empire perhaps thousands who already had an image of him, the Emperor, burning in hell. For ever and ever. While slaves with names like Felix and Chrestus leered down at his fiery screaming from a cool abode that was all poetry and music. It was not right, it was not just, it was a situation of laesa maiestas and he was not going to have it. Rid yourself of the believers and you were rid of the belief. He saw the fire and then, through the grace granted only to the artist, he saw the phoenix rising from it. That was different, that was encompassable. And then again he saw the pure illimitable candour. It was offended. It screamed and its scream filled eternity. It was all nonsense.

  Tigellinus thought so too. ‘Goodness. The summum bonum. Each man has his own. Each living thing has its own. There is no single summum bonum. What is the summum bonum of the hungry lion? The lunge at the throat of the helpless hind. Goodness as divine order? Balderdash. Order is expediency. Order is a dead body. For the common people it means tomorrow being no worse than today. The exceptional break order in order to see the blinding light. You don’t understand me? The sharp truth of pleasure in the act of outrage. Tonight, say, we deflower the Vestal Virgins—’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Oh no? A new thing and a shocking thing. The fires of another power breaking out of the destructive act. A door into a reality the generality of men cannot know. Only through certain modes of destruction can the new visions be attained.’ He paused, then he said: ‘We didn’t build the Empire on notions of tolerance and brotherly love. And yet is not the Empire the greatest good the world has ever seen? There are forces ready to break it not through action but through inaction. Love one another, and that means those unwashed tribes on the Rhine and the Danube. Let’s have them in, taking Rome, toppling the gods. The Jews, the Chrestus people – they’d let it happen.’ And then: ‘The Empress is too friendly with the Jews.’

  ‘She’ll get money out of them yet. Rome needs Jewish money.’

  ‘She doesn’t want Jewish money. She’s fascinated by their dark eyes and olive skin and their sexual knowledge and magic handed down by their desert prophets. The child she is carrying is certainly not yours.’

  Nero, enraged, hit out and left red ringmarks on Tigellinus’s left leathery cheek. ‘That’s outrageous. That’s treasonable.’ Tigellinus always found it a good thing to see how far he could go. Then, as now, he prudently drew back.

  ‘I’m probably wrong. My devotion to Caesar is such that I sometimes see harm where there is none. Think no more of it. She’s an estimable lady. I beg pardon for my unworthy suspicions.’

  That night Nero’s dreams were, as so often, of the next world, whose geography, climate and social organisation had been clearly defined by the epic poets. A thin place that lacked blood. He, Caesar, joined the thin phantoms. There was no rancour among ancient enemies. It was not a question of love or forgiveness. There was just not enough blood to feed the violent emotions of the living. Then he saw another next world and there was nothing thin or bloodless about it. Fire. Nerves strung like lyrestrings to the snapping point but unable to snap. Pain. The snow, maddened by its defilement, screamed. Nero screamed and liberated himself from the dream. That damned Christian.

  That damned Christian was informed that the writ of Liberetur had gone through. He and Sabinus were no longer chained to each other. Paul, having spoken to the faithful, many of them newly created in Tiber water, on the Esquiline, Caelian, Viminal, Aventine and Quirinal hills, and even on the Campus Martius, made ready to sail for Spain, ample travel money clanking at his girdle. A large crowd attended him on the quay at Puteoli – Jews, Gentiles, patricians, slaves, the miles Sabinus – and some wept, emotional lability being a property of the temperament of the peninsula. Luke told Paul he had come to the end of his story and had had ten copies made by professional scriveners. He needed a dedicatee, some fictional personage who might be imagined as requiring elementary instruction in the faith and the spread of the faith. ‘Any lover of “God”,’ Paul said. He grinned. ‘To the Emperor? No.’

  ‘I’ve become rather friendly with one of my patients – a poet named Gaius Petronius. Sincerely interested. He’s read my little book with flattering avidity. A former friend of Caesar’s, looking for the light he says. Call me Theophilus.’

  ‘Theophilus will do. Theophilus could be anyone.’

  Embraces, kisses, tears, women’s wailings. A song, pagan but appropriate: ‘Come back again, come back.’ Paul waved from the deck as his ship, bound for the Spanish port built by Hamilcar Barca, nudged its way out of the throng of shipping. He noted distractedly another ship easing its way in. An old gnarled man with an unkempt beard sat on a coil of rope on that ship, distractedly watching Paul’s ship ease its way out. ‘And where would that be off to?’ A sailor told him. ‘Aye, it’s a big empire they have. A big world altogether. I’ve seen little enough of it.’

  ‘I thought you’d been in this line yourself. You know the knots and the tackle.’

  ‘Boats on Galilee lake. Mending nets. Fish. My line.’

  So Peter came hesitantly down the gangplank, a knotted bundle on his shoulder and in his gripe a roughly cut stick of blackthorn. He was old and unwell and he had to get to Rome, wherever that was. There were a lot of people around, Jews, Gentiles, who seemed as though they might be Nazarenes, but they chattered in Latin or Greek, languages he had never learnt, and it was too late now. But ‘Rum?’ he asked a lounging dockworker, who pointed vaguely. All roads led to, they said. After an aching mile or so he came to what was called the Appian Way. Much traffic passed him – nobility or gentry in litters, slaves carrying bundles under the lash, maniples of sweating troops under barked orders. Covered in dust, he hobbled to the roadside and sat under a tree of a kind he did not know – beech, pine, plane? He ached, his joints creaked. He shoul
d have stayed in Joppa but James was urgent about this mission. The man he had to see in Rome was named Linus, a Graeco-Roman or something, a real foreigner but a Nazarene. Had to see him, and they didn’t speak each other’s language. Peter whimpered to himself. There was a ship leaving for Caesarea in a few days, and he had the money for the fare: the Jerusalem brethren had given him more than he needed. There was a curious sense in Jerusalem of things moving away, closing down, of the faith losing ground, of apostasies and a general slackness. It was all a matter of the Jews and the Romans now. The Nazarenes were outside it all, preaching peace when all the talk was of an impending struggle. Peter hungered for Joppa, where he combined leadership of the local church with membership of a fishing syndicate. But he was head of the whole church: he had been told that a long time ago. Not James. The man Saul who became Paul had been given no real instructions, and it was he who, with his fine Hebrew and Greek and Latin, had seemed to regard himself as in charge. He, Peter, was the rock, scared of cocks crowing, scared of his own dreams, his limbs weak and his head fuddled. From his scrip he drew the comfort of some dried fish and bread and a little flask he had filled at the fountain near the docks, spring water gushing from the grinning gob of a creature with horns in dull metal. He had to go on and would when he was rested. The dream he had had on shipboard had been as clear and as sunlit as that old one about goatmilk and pigs and lobsters which had caused so much trouble. He dreamt he sat under a tree like this and then made up his mind to go back to the port and wait for the ship back to Caesarea. Good summer weather and plain sailing. And then he appeared, he, jauntily carrying a crosspiece on his immense shoulders, smiling at Peter and shaking his head as if at his foolishness, crowing briefly like a cock and jauntily lightfooting it Romewards. That meant that he, Peter, had to go too, though on heavier feet. He sighed, rose, set himself to trudging north, seeing a foreign sun go down and a dangerous foreign night coming on with strange slowness, then he settled himself under trees, wrapped in his cloak, hearing owls and other tsiporim of the laylah, including one that poured out song as if its heart would break. He saw known stars but felt desperately homesick. The wrong man. He had always felt that.

  But he trudged another day and another. Nobody spoke to him. He bought food at stalls by pointing. At the place where the taverns stood he heard what sounded at first like Aramaic but turned out to be some other tongue, Phoenician probably. On his brain he had imprinted a name and a vague location. Linus. A fountain on a street near the Via Labicana to the east of the city. At length he saw the outskirts of a great town, bigger than Jerusalem, playing hide and seek with him through a grove of what he took to be pines. He asked a donkey-driver at once for the Via Labicana, but the man laughed at him and made wide arm gestures. A long long way away. He slept another night under trees. Hot dry weather, perfect for sailing home. In a morning that began faint green and oystershell with eventual gilding, he ate the breakfast he had bought of an overyeasted loaf and a half pint of thin and acid wine. He took breath and, under a company of quarrelling crows, limped towards the city.

  Breathtaking. Not a place for him. There was the faint smell of the brutality of nobody caring for anybody else. Via Labicana? An old woman emptying a bucket into the gutter of a street that was a dark valley to toppling tenements could not at first understand him. She pointed. He was no wiser. So people lived here, climbing stair after stair in order to dry their wet garments on the sills. And hurrying down, chewing hasty bread, to go to work. Everybody had to work.

  He walked squinting towards a sun still low on the horizon. He looked for fountains, finding one in every piazza, Rome’s benison of spring water to its citizens. Women were up early washing clothes, filling buckets to carry up all those stairs, though some ingenious families hoisted them by rope and pulley to the windowsills. There was quarrelling, very Jewish, with arms raised to heaven, over the price of the fish that a vendor slapped on his handbarrow. Peter asked a woman with a dribbling child on her hip his one-word question. She understood, a small morning miracle, and pointed.

  The same question again as he mounted in pain the many worn steps of the tenement. Linus? Sum Linus, ego. A youngish swarthy man, beardless, rather bald, looked down the stairwell. Petrus, Peter said panting, at least knowing his own name. He went up. Petrus the piscator in Rome, entering a single room seven storeys up, seeing a bed and a table and a dead oilstove. The two Nazarenes or Christiani looked at each other, a faith in common but no tongue. But Linus offered yesterday’s bread, watered wine, some cold thin slices of veal, garlic. He remembered something belatedly: he went down on his knees for Peter’s blessing. Then he went out for an interpreter. Peter was left looking at a tableload of scrolls, all in Latin. He looked for a place to void water, not fancying a trip down (and a struggle up again) to look for a public latrine. He found a bucket behind a curtain and emptied, with some little pain but more relief, his old bladder. Soon Linus came back with a young Roman Jew who was popularly known as Canis because of his bark. His real name was Shadrach ben Hananiah but he was used to Canis, call me Canis. It comforted Peter to hear his own speech again, the accent not far off the Galilean. He said:

  ‘Peter, head of the faithful, appointed by Christ. You are the man I was sent to see. What, by the way, is your trade?’

  ‘I work for a publisher of pagan books. Poetry, history. I copy. I am a good copyist. Why am I the man?’

  ‘James in Jerusalem showed me your letters. I couldn’t read them, nor could he, but there were some who could and they made translations. Rome is to be the mother. A mother, James said, hiding behind the skirts of a whore.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Right, I come to Rome, appointed father of the faithful but a fool who knows neither Greek nor Latin. But I’m old and it won’t be long for me. Age or the axe will do for me. I have dreams just as James does. He sees it all over there, and I think he’s right. The man Paul saw it too and he’s right, though I fought against it. But you won’t know this man Paul.’

  ‘Oh yes. He wrote a letter to Rome then he came to Rome. He’s been gone less than a week. Oh yes, I met Paul. Remarkable man.’

  ‘But not one of the twelve,’ Peter said. ‘A Jew who found no luck with the Jews. Well, so he was here. And now he’s gone.’

  ‘He’ll be back, he promised. What you say disturbs me. We look to the mother church in Jerusalem. Rome is just another pagan city.’

  ‘Two faiths in Jerusalem,’ Peter said, ‘and they can’t live together. It was a faith for the Jews we taught, but it wasn’t a faith that taught rebellion and bloodshed. The Romans have played into the hands of the Zealots. Slack, corrupt, cruel. There has to come a breaking point. This Nero you have here has let things collapse all over. Now the Jerusalem Jews want to get in and drive out the Romans. They think Rome will do nothing about it, and they may be right. But they don’t want the Nazarenes with their peace and love and strike the other cheek. Look, it’s obvious when you come to think of it. The faith has become a faith for the Gentiles. Some day the Gentiles will teach the Jews, but not yet. None of us ever thought it would be like that. And here you have the centre of the big Gentile Empire. This is where the mother church has to be. And you its first true father.’

  ‘I’m totally unworthy.’

  ‘No. You’re a Roman. You know Rome. It’s your city.’

  ‘A Greek in fact. But long in Rome.’

  ‘Right, you know the Rome of the streets and the squares and the fountains. And the Rome of the cellars and the dark places.’

  ‘We practise the faith in the sunlight. We’ve no need of the dark places.’

  Peter shook his head several times. ‘No. You’ll be glad of the dark places. I can feel it coming. Smash the Jews for revolting and smash the Nazarenes while you’re about it, the Nazarenes being only a kind of Jews.’

  ‘That’s not true any more.’

  ‘I know it’s not true. I know only too well it’s not true. Something went wrong somewhere.’


  ‘This is a great moment for us, your coming here. You must speak to the church.’

  ‘In Aramaic?’

  ‘The language of the master, the authentic voice. Heavens, it’s still hard to take in. You knew him, worked with him, saw him crucified in that place, on that hill—’

  ‘Golgotha. No, I wasn’t there. God help me, I wasn’t there.’

  The meeting was held in a disused gymnasium, not far from the Garden of Maecenas and the Mansion of Aulus, at the corner of the Via Labicana and the Via Tiburtina. Some of the Roman Christians were Jews and remembered their Aramaic; most of them were uncircumcised, some fair-haired; some were of the patrician class. The Gentiles looked with a little awe and a certain contempt hard to hide on this unkempt ancient, a pioneer from the mists, unable to explicate the mystery of the Trinity or relate the coming of the Messiah to an obscure prophecy in Vergil’s Eclogues, talking about the genesis of the Paternoster in a remote and uncouth tongue: ‘For Jesus himself taught me this prayer, me and my companions, common fisherfolk, when we were fishing in the lake of Galilee. A storm arose and we were afraid, but he told us never to feel fear. We must trust in the father who keeps us in his care, praying: “Our father, who are in heaven, may your name be blessed …” They joined in, some in Greek, most in Latin. But the Gentiles were all a little embarrassed.

  When the meeting broke up after the blessing and munching of the sacramental bread, those whose sense of smell was well developed sniffed at smoke coming from the south on a hot dry wind from the south. Peter could smell nothing.

  Nobody knows how the fire began, but there are still some who swear they saw Tigellinus setting a brand to an oilshop all of dry wood just north of the Servilian Gardens on the Aventine. Nearly all the dwellings there were of wood and, in that dry summer’s night heat, it was pure tinder. Accius owned the oilshop but did not live in it. Seeing it blaze from his door fifty yards away, he yelled for men to draw buckets from the fountain, to form a bucket emptying chain, but the yellow and blue tongues licked the water and asked for more. The heat brought sweat and the sweat blinded. Black flinders gyrated in the fiery air like bats. The fire climbed the hill and crunched the pines, ate the wooden summer house of Lucius Aemilius and grew fat on it. The family of C. Aeserninus was trapped in its small brick mansion when the fire entered and climbed the stairs, eating as it went. A child was thrown in mother’s panic from an upper casement and was brained on the stone surround. In District XI on the borders of the Tiber the tenements near the Circus Maximus sang a blazing song to high heaven, invisible in the smoke, and the hundred families within fought each other with claws out, coughing more than screaming, as they blocked the stairwell. Those who survived the desperate tearing saw the fire coming in for them at the main tenement entrance. Some yelled their way through it and then ran till they dropped, having turned into fire. The black flakes danced and rode on the wind and dissolved like black snowflakes into the river, what time men waded in the river with their canvas buckets and passed up water which was a mere dandelion in the jaws of a cow. A warehouse near the crossing of the Via Ostiensis and the Via Latina was crammed with jars of olive oil which burst their stoppers or cracked in the flames and sent out a fiery aromatic river with squeaking rats swimming on it, tails little torches, pelts singed. The library of the Aequiculi on the Aventine was housed in marble, but fire was puffed in through a casement whose wooden shutters were speedily devoured, and then a treasury of Greek and Roman history was a swift meal like frozen fruit juice to the thirsty jaws of the gang of flame. The librarian Bogudes made a longer snack, but he joined his manuscripts in ashes.