The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  Claudius took the skin of water offered to him by Calpurnia, and drained it. Herod pointed towards the distant speckle of movement on the shoreline, and they left the road and began to pick their way across the mudflats. Claudius had seen the tower of Migdal, the next town along the coast in a hollow in the hills, but now it was lost in the haze that rose up and obscured the shoreline like a shimmering veil. Then the sun broke through and reflected off a myriad shallow pools across the flats. To Claudius the view seemed to fragment, like a shattering pane of glass, the sunlight reflecting blindingly off each pool, and then regain its whole again in the haze. A hint of a rainbow hung in the air, a suspension of colour that never quite materialized, that stayed just beyond reality. Soon all he could see was the movement around the boat ahead of them, and even that seemed to waver and recede as they walked further on. Claudius wondered if it was real after all, or a mere trick of the eye, like one of the phantasms that Herod said he had seen in the desert, a reflection of some distant, unattainable reality.

  Herod strode up and pushed him playfully, his voice big, booming, his breath smelling of last night’s wine. ‘Do you remember the Aramaic I taught you in Rome, when we were boys?’

  ‘My dear Herod. How could I forget? And these past years while you’ve been playing the rogue, I’ve been teaching myself Phoenician. I’m planning a history of Carthage, you know. You just can’t get by without reading the original sources. I don’t trust anything a Roman historian has to say about barbarians.’

  ‘We’re not barbarians, Claudius. It’s the other way round.’ Herod pushed Claudius again, almost toppling him off balance but catching him just in time, with his usual tenderness. ‘Anyway, I don’t trust Romans, period. With one noble exception, of course.’ He shouldered Claudius again, then embraced him to stop him from falling, and they both laughed.

  ‘Does he speak Greek, this man?’ Claudius asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let it be Greek, not Aramaic. My dear Calpurnia is a real barbarian, you know. Her grandparents were brought as slaves by my great-uncle Julius from Britannia. A fascinating place. Calpurnia tells me such amazing things. One d-day I will go there. I believe the Phoenicians reached those shores, but I do not believe they left the Britons any knowledge of their language.’

  ‘Very well then, my dear Claudius. For your lovely Calpurnia. Greek it is.’

  They came closer to the shoreline. Claudius was walking ahead again, and could now see that the boat was real, not a mirage, and was drawn up a few yards from the edge of the water. It was a good-sized boat, with an incurving stem and a single high mast, a bit like the one Claudius had sailed on the Bay of Naples as a boy and still kept in its shed at Herculaneum. He looked more closely. Under an awning behind the stern sat a woman, heavy with child, working at something on her lap. Beside the hull were loose pieces of wood, fragments of old boats, and a plank with a careful arrangement of tools, a handsaw, a bow drill, chisels, a basket of nails. Claudius realized that this was the origin of the tinkering sound he had heard. Then the carpenter came round from the other side, holding a plane. He was lean, muscular, wearing only a loincloth, his skin a deep bronze, with crudely shorn black hair and a full beard, just as Herod had looked when he came back from a hard season’s campaigning. Claudius hobbled up to the boat, keeping his eyes on the man. He could have been one of the gladiators in Rome, or one of the escaped slaves from the marble quarries who Claudius had befriended in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, where his mother had tried to abandon him but where he had been taken in, befriended by outcasts and others afflicted as he was.

  ‘I am C-Claudius,’ he said in Greek, clearing his throat. ‘My friend H-Herod has brought me here from Rome, to seek your help. I am ailing.’

  The woman smiled up at Claudius, then looked down and carried on with her work, mending the cotton strands of a fishing net. The man gazed at Claudius full in the face. His eyes were intense, luminous, like nothing Claudius had seen before. The man held his gaze in silence for a few moments, then looked down and pushed his plane forward and backward, carrying on working the wood. ‘You are not ailing, Claudius.’ His voice was deep, sonorous, and the Greek was accented in the same way as Herod’s.

  Claudius made as if to reply, then stopped. He was dumbfounded, could think of nothing to say. The words when they came were stumbling, inconsequential, instantly regrettable. ‘You are from these parts?’

  ‘Mary is from Migdal,’ the man said. ‘I was born in Nazareth, in lower Galilee, but came here to this lake as a youth. These are my people, and this is my vessel.’

  ‘You are a boatwright? A fisherman?’

  ‘This sea is my vessel, and the people of Galilee are my passengers. And we are all fishermen here. You can join us, if you like.’

  Claudius caught the man’s gaze again, and found himself nodding, and then looked back and gestured at the others. Herod bounded up, the mud spattering against his bare shins, and embraced the Nazarene in the eastern fashion, murmuring greetings in Aramaic before turning to Claudius. ‘When Joshua comes with me to Tiberias for an evening in the taverns we call him Jesus, the Greek version of his name. It trips off the tongue more readily, especially after a few jars of Galilean.’ He guffawed, slapped the Nazarene on the back and then knelt down beside Mary, gently putting his hand on her belly. ‘All goes well?’ he said in Aramaic. She murmured, smiling. He leapt back up, then caught sight of someone on the shoreline towards Migdal, a distant figure waving, then loping on. Claudius followed Herod’s gaze, and saw a man with black skin, tall and slender, wearing a white robe, carrying a stringer of fish.

  ‘Aha!’ Herod guffawed, slapping the man again. ‘You have a Nubian slave!’

  ‘He is Ethiopian, from a place called Aksum,’ the man replied. ‘He is a free man. And he is a good listener.’

  ‘Everyone listens to you, Joshua. You should be a king!’

  The Nazarene smiled, then raised his hand in greeting to Calpurnia and Cypros as they came walking towards him across the mud, barefoot. He passed beside them wordlessly and heaved over a crude stone anchor which had been mooring the boat, then detached a thick hemp rope which had been looped through a hole in the centre of the stone. Herod and Calpurnia and Cypros placed the baskets they had been carrying in the boat, and Mary made as if to lift a pitcher beside her, but the Nazarene quickly took it off her and placed his hand on her belly, smiling. He coiled the anchor rope and tossed it over the sternpost, then braced himself against the stern and heaved, every muscle in his body taut and bulging. As Claudius watched him work, the Nazarene seemed like the bronze statues of Hercules and athletes he had seen in the villa of his friend Piso below Vesuvius. The keel slid along the mudflat until it was half in the waves, and the Nazarene stood back, glistening with sweat, while the others splashed past him and clambered on board. Claudius came last, awkwardly pulling his leg up and over. A few more heaves and the boat was afloat, and the Nazarene quickly leapt up over the gunwale and released the square sail from its yard, while Mary sat by the tiller oar.

  Claudius and Herod sat side by side in the middle of the boat, each with an oar, and began to pull in unison as the wind took the sail and pushed the boat beyond the shallows. The hull and the rigging creaked, the water gurgled and crackled under the bow. Claudius relished the exercise, his face flushed and shining. If only he had been allowed into the gymnasium in Rome before the palsy took hold, then he might have led the legions in Germania just like his beloved brother. But now, in this boat, as they slipped further offshore, until the line of the coast was all but lost in the haze, the pain and unhappiness that had begun to cloud his life seemed to slide away, and for the first time he felt whole, no longer battling against himself and others, those who would rather have seen him never return when he was pushed towards the mouth of the underworld as a frightened little boy.

  They drifted for hours, blown along by wafts of breeze, talking and dozing in the shade under the sail. The Nazarene cast his ne
t, and caught only a few fish, but enough for him to cook in a pot over a small brazier. ‘Oh prince of fishermen,’ Herod had joked, ‘you tell us your kingdom is like a net that is thrown into the sea and catches fish of every kind. Well, it looks as if you have a pretty small kingdom.’ He guffawed, and the Nazarene smiled, and continued to prepare the food. Later, Mary played the lyre, making music that seemed to shimmer and ripple like the surface of the lake, and Calpurnia sang the haunting, mystical songs of her people. They ate the food they had brought with them, bread, olives, walnuts, figs, and a fruit Claudius had never eaten before, produced by the thorn tree, all washed down with pure water from the springs of Tiberias. Afterwards they played dice, and arm-wrestled across a loose plank, and Calpurnia made diadems for them out of the twigs of the thorn tree, solemnly crowning Herod a king and Claudius a god. Herod kept them entertained with a stream of stories and jokes, until his thoughts began to turn to the evening. ‘They say you can work miracles, Joshua son of Joseph,’ he said. ‘But you can’t turn water into wine, can you?’ He guffawed again, then scooped up a handful of water from the lake and splashed it over the man’s head. The Nazarene laughed along with him, and the two men jostled playfully, rocking the boat from side to side. ‘Anyway,’ Herod said, sitting back. ‘We can’t stay out here much longer. I’ll die of thirst. Anyone for the taverns?’

  Dusk was colouring the sky red an hour later when Claudius again pulled the oar, this time sitting alongside the Nazarene. They had landed, and Herod had set out on the road back to Tiberias, eager to seek out the young bloods in the officers’ mess for an evening’s cavorting. The three women had gone back to Migdal, to Mary’s home. But Claudius had wanted to stay on with the Nazarene, to make this day last for ever, to ask more. He had offered to help the Nazarene set his seine net, a few hundred yards offshore from the mudflat where they had first set out.

  The Nazarene rowed silently alongside him. Then he stopped, and gazed at the deep red sky where the sun had set, the colour of spilt blood. ‘The weather will be fine tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The net will be safe here overnight. Then, tomorrow, it will be time for the autumn sowing of the fields. The autumn wind will blow up from the west, bringing heavy downpours, coming over the Judaean hills and cleansing the land. The Sea of Galilee will once again be filled, and where we once stood there will be water.’

  ‘Herod says you are a prophet,’ Claudius said.

  ‘It does me good to see Herod,’ the Nazarene replied. ‘I have that same fire within me.’

  ‘Herod says you are a scribe, a priest. He says you are a prince of the house of David.’

  ‘I minister to the ha’aretz, the people of this land,’ he said. ‘But I am no priest.’

  ‘You are a healer.’

  ‘The lame and the blind shall walk the farthest and see the most, because it is they who yearn most to walk, and to see.’

  ‘But who are you?’

  ‘It is as you say.’

  Claudius sighed. ‘You speak in parables, but where I come from our prophets are oracles of the gods, and they speak in riddles. I go to the Sibyl, you know, in Cumae. Herod thinks she’s an old witch, but I still go there. He doesn’t understand how much better it makes me feel.’ Claudius paused, self-conscious. ‘Virgil also went there. He was our greatest poet.’ He closed his eyes, declaiming from memory, translating the Latin verse into Greek:

  ‘“Now is come the last age of Cumaean song;

  The great line of the centuries begins anew.

  Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns,

  Now a new race descends from heaven on high.

  Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child,

  Under whom the iron brood shall at last cease

  And a Golden Age spring up throughout the world!”’

  The Nazarene listened intently, then put his hand on Claudius’ shoulder. ‘Come on. Help me with my net.’

  ‘Have you ever seen Rome?’ Claudius said. ‘All the wonders of human creation are there.’

  ‘Those are things that stand in the way of the kingdom of heaven,’ the Nazarene replied.

  Claudius thought for a moment, then picked up a chisel with one hand, the edge of the net with the other. ‘Would you renounce these?’

  The Nazarene smiled, then touched Claudius again. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘about my ministry.’

  Half an hour later it was almost dark, and the boat had gently grounded on the foreshore a few miles from where they had set out. The burning torches of Migdal and Tiberias twinkled from the shore, and other faint lights bobbed offshore. The Nazarene took a pair of pottery oil lamps from a box beside the mast step, filled them with olive oil left over from their lunch and deftly lit the wicks with a flint and iron. The lamps spluttered to life, then began to burn strongly, the flames golden and smokeless. He placed them on a little shelf on the mast step and then turned to Claudius.

  ‘Your poet, Virgil,’ he said. ‘Can I read his books?’

  ‘I’ll ask Herod to bring them to you. He’s supposed to be at Tiberias for the rest of the year, banished from Rome. Maybe he’ll even do a translation for you himself. It might keep him out of trouble for a while.’

  Claudius dropped the dice he had been carrying, his habit for years now. Before reaching down he shut his eyes tight, unwilling to see the numbers, the augury. The Nazarene picked them up, placed them in the palm of Claudius’ hand, closed his hands around them. For a moment they remained like that, then he let go. Claudius opened his eyes, laughed, then tossed the dice overboard, not looking. ‘In return for Virgil, you must do one thing,’ he said. ‘You must write down what you have just told me. Your euangelion, your gospel.’

  ‘But my people do not read. Mine is a ministry of the spoken word. The written word stands in the way of the kingdom of heaven.’

  Claudius shook his head. ‘If your kingdom of heaven is truly of this earth, then it will be subject to violence, and violent men will maltreat it. In thanks for this day, I will do all I can to ensure that your written word remains safe and secret, ready for the time when the memory of your spoken word has become the word of others, shaped and changed by them into something else.’

  There was a silence, then the Nazarene spoke. ‘You have paper?’

  ‘Always,’ Claudius said, reaching for the slim satchel he kept slung over his back. ‘I write down everything, you know. I have one last sheet of first-grade, and some scraps. I had the first-grade made to my special instructions in Rome. It’s the best there is. You’ll see. Lasts for ever. I used up my gall ink on the voyage here, but I picked up some concoction that passes as ink in Tiberias.’

  The Nazarene lifted up the board he had used to chop fish, cleaned it over the side and then dried it on a twist of his loincloth. He placed the board on his knees, then took the sheet of papyrus and the reed pen that Claudius offered him. Claudius opened a small pot with a wooden lid and held it out, and the Nazarene dipped the pen in the ink. He held the pen in his right hand over the upper left corner of the papyrus, poised for a moment, motionless.

  ‘The Sibyl writes her prophecies on leaves of oak.’ Claudius chuckled. ‘When you reach out for them, the wind always blows them away. Herod says it’s some demonic Greek machine, hidden in the cave.’

  The Nazarene looked Claudius full in the face, then began to write, a bold, decisive hand, slow and deliberate, the hand of one who had been taught well but did not write often. He dipped the pen into the ink every few words, and Claudius concentrated on keeping the pot steady. After the Nazarene had started the fourth line, Claudius stared at the script, and then blurted out, spilling the ink on his hand, ‘You’re writing in Aramaic!’

  The Nazarene looked up. ‘It is my language.’

  ‘No.’ Claudius shook his head emphatically. ‘No one in Rome reads Aramaic.’

  ‘I write these words for my people, not for the people of Rome.’

  ‘No.’ Claudius shook his head again. ‘Your wor
d here, in Galilee, is the spoken word. You said it yourself. Your fishermen do not read, and have no need of this. Your written word must be read and understood far beyond the Sea of Galilee. If you write in riddles, in a tongue few understand, your word will be no clearer than the utterances of the Sibyl. You must write in Greek.’

  ‘Then you must do it for me. I speak Greek, but I do not write it.’

  ‘Very well.’ Claudius took the board with the paper and pen, and handed the ink pot over. ‘We must start again.’ He fumbled in his satchel, thought for a moment, then reached across and took a cut lemon from the fruit bowl. He squeezed the lemon over the writing, then rubbed it vigorously with a cloth from his bag. He held the paper up to catch the last rays of the setting sun, and saw the faded imprint of the Nazarene’s writing as he waited for the lemon juice to dry. A breeze wafted over them, making the paper flutter, and Claudius quickly took it down and pressed it against the board on his knees. He dipped the pen in the ink and tested the paper, inscribing a cross mark as he always did at the start of a document, to see whether the ink would spread. It had better not. The paper was his own first-grade. He grunted, then wrote a few words across the top, in the careful hand of a scholar conscious that his writing was usually legible only to himself.

  ‘I am speaking Greek to you now, but I speak my gospel to my people in Aramaic,’ the Nazarene said. ‘You must help me to find the words in Greek for what I have to say.’