By and by Nathan died suddenly, in the sun by the roadside, smiling, and Eleazar went on alone. But he was beginning to get more easily tired, and his beard was streaked with white; often he saw angels and other strange beings both by day and night. Sometimes he came back to villages where they had taught earlier, and people remembered them and welcomed him, but, so strong is the force of habit and every day, that few had changed their way of life much. If they had done so, they would usually form a little community rather apart from the rest of the village where they lived. So it was that Eleazar came back to a village in the hills near Beth Zanita and found just such a community; he was tired, and when they asked him to stay he said he would for a time, and then it seemed as though one of the angels gave him leave to stay for always. So he stayed.
There were about twelve families in the community and most of the land had belonged to two or three of them, but now they held it all in common and all worked on it, digging, sowing, leading the water in little channels to the roots of the crops and then shutting it off, gathering fruit or grain. The boys herded the goats and sheep of the community and the women spun and wove and made pots, and once a week they all met and said the prayer and talked about what had to be done, and Eleazar or another spoke about the Kingdom; but mostly they asked him to tell them stories about Jesus-bar-Joseph, how He had looked and what He had said and, above all, what He had done in love or anger or doubt or eagerness. The children were dipped in running water for their purifying and rebirth, as soon as they were old enough to want it, and so were any adults who joined them. There was little money used, except what they needed for paying the yearly taxes.
They were only ten miles or so from the sea, but it was out of sight behind the hills, and even when you got there the fishermen of Achzib were not friendly. So they got little news of the outside world. But one year all the villages heard something terrible. The Emperor of the Romans had decreed that his statue was to be set up and worshipped in Jerusalem, perhaps in the Temple, and two legions had been landed to force this thing on the people. It was the time of the autumn sowing, but no one could work; those who had swords brought them out and sharpened them; others had axes or metal-pointed hoes which would make spears; the streets were full of the crying of women. In the community they talked this way and that; it was the first time there had been very hard words and even blows, for some said that even this must be forgiven, and others said that the forgiving of enemies meant the enemies of one’s own village or at least nation, and that it never could have been said of the Gentiles. In the end nothing came of it, and the Emperor was killed in Rome and went to the everlasting fire and the Temple was safe, and in the community they went on saying the prayer, but it meant different things to some and to others.
Things were unsettled after that, in Judaea and all about the coasts. Now and again some man would get followers and arm them and call himself King, and those who hated the Romans would follow him, and it would be weeks or even months before the legions could put down the rebellion. The flocks and the crops would suffer and it was bad for everyone. It was a difficult Province, and whenever anything went wrong there, the Jews in Alexandria and Asia Minor sent letters or deputations to Rome, for they never forgot their country. There were armed brigands, too, who frightened the small villages into giving them food, and sometimes raided them and even carried away women and children.
One band of these brigands was often in the hills above Beth Zanita, and one winter they raided the community and carried off five children. There was no money to ransom them, and they were taken up the coast to Tyre. Two of them were girls, for whom there was always a market; they were sold at once. The other three were boys. Josias was a husky twelve year old who had fought them till he was beaten and tied down; he still seemed quite intractable, so he was sold to a dye-works where they could do with plenty of cheap boy-labour; he would last a year or two. Melchi was a strong boy too, and more easily frightened; he was sold as a house servant. The third, Manasses, was rather younger, a lovely little creature; he had not fought. At first he had cried a great deal, and then something out of the prayer had come back into his head, and he had really tried to forgive his enemies. They knew they could sell him well, and they kept him till they could get his price. The three boys promised one another, sobbing, that they would try to keep in touch. They would all say the prayer at the first and last light and think of one another, and perhaps … After the other two were sold, little Manasses spent some bad days. He remembered the community and tried now to think why it really was that his father and mother and the others were trying to live a different kind of life from the rest of the village. He thought of the stories old Eleazar used to tell and he turned them over in his mind. He wondered whether it had made any difference, his trying to forgive the brigands who had carried him off and hurt him; perhaps they had been kinder to the other two. Or perhaps it just hadn’t made any difference, but yet it was a good thing to do. Perhaps it made him, even by himself, nearer to the Kingdom. Though he felt far enough from it now, with no one in all Tyre to be his equal in trust and amity.
He went on thinking about the Kingdom and never speaking about it for months and months, and twice a day he said the prayer and remembered the other two. He had been bought by a dealer who prepared slaves for a better market, and here he was taught miming and dancing, as well as Greek. They were quite kind to him and he learnt docilely; he was fond of music, though it often made him cry, even when he was moving in time to it. He had better food and no more fleas than at home; he was not allowed out in case he should run away, but he was not beaten or knocked about, because his body was very saleable. But they wanted him cheerful and at last someone asked him what would stop his moping; he told them he had two brothers and two sisters—in the community they were always brother and sister to one another—somewhere in Tyre, and he wanted to see them. But he did not know the names of the masters to whom the two little girls and Melchi had been sold, and no one was going to take much trouble about tracing them. He did know the name of the dye-works where Josias was, and one day his master went over and bought what seemed to him a very wretched, coughing, limping piece of cheap human material, its hands and face covered with the sores they mostly got in the Tyrian dye-works.
Manasses fell on his master’s neck with an enthusiastic gratitude which made the old man feel quite silly, and set to work washing Josias’s sore hands and face; the sores healed in time, but left him slightly scarred, and he was always rather lame where a truck had gone over his foot. He would never be worth much and could only be used for rough work, but most of the fight had been knocked out of him. Lying in the straw at night with Manasses’s arms round him, Josias told about those months at the factory where a new boy was at everyone’s mercy, where it was no good trusting anyone or anything, where one was burnt with hot irons and splashed with hot acid of the dye-base, and worse—much worse—things he wouldn’t ever tell Manasses—things that no Jew—and he shuddered all over with the horror of it, poor little country boy who had not even heard much evil as a child.
After a time Josias got well and strong enough to want to run away, but each boy was told what penalties that would involve for the other, and they were never allowed out together. There was more and stricter mime training for Manasses, and sometimes now he did his dancing to an audience. He might be sent out for an evening, petted and given sweets by Tyrian merchants, and sometimes by their wives, for he was young enough to be allowed in and out of the harems. Sometimes he was petted more than he liked, and once all the women in a harem stripped him and dressed him up in girls’ clothes and did his hair, which was now in long dark tresses, and painted his face like a bride’s, and everyone said things which made him stamp and scream with rage. It was not until a long time afterwards that he could forgive those fat, stupid, cruel women, jeering at him, holding him with sharp nails, touching him all over, till he couldn’t bear to be touched, even by Josias, for days afterwards. There were l
ittle henna marks all over his skin from the women’s fingers.
The boys wondered whether these merchants made their money, and kept their wives, out of dye-factories: most likely. There was plenty of luxury industry of all kinds in Tyre, as well as shipping, and most of the big merchants had interests in other cities as well. They looked very fine, great, bearded, dark merchant-adventurers, with gold rings in their ears and gold bracelets on their arms, striding about the docks or across the market squares of Tyre, men who could laugh at Emperors and legions, who would not bow to a Roman Governor or to any travelling king, descendants of the men who had defied Alexander. But that did not make them any nicer to deal with or any easier to forgive if you were a dancing boy hired from your master for an evening’s entertainment.
But one day Manasses was made to dance during the morning for someone he had never seen, and then handled and priced, and told he was now going to Rome. He said gently that he would kill himself if Josias was not bought with him, for he knew that if Josias was left behind he would probably be sold back into the factory. After some grumbling, his purchasers agreed, and a few days later the two were on board ship, for the first time in their lives, sailing west.
During the next few years they were bought and sold several times, but were only separated once, and then Manasses found Josias again in the Jewish Quarter of Rome, where he had been kindly treated. Of course, Josias was always sold rather cheap, because of his limp and scars, but he was quiet and strong and didn’t grumble so long as Manasses was treated properly. Sometimes they both asked in the Jewish Quarter whether anyone had a slave called Melchi, but they never found him; they wondered how long he had gone on saying the prayer.
In the meantime Manasses went on learning; sometimes he was one of a dozen or more dancers, but he did not make friends much. The rest were usually Greeks, and somehow he still did not care for the smell and touch of Gentiles. It was difficult to keep the Law; often they lost count of the days and never knew when it was Sabbath for weeks at a time, until they met another Jew who knew; but they tried not to eat forbidden food. Ordinarily, slaves got very little meat, but, of course, a dancer was different; he might be as valuable as a racehorse and had to have his oats! Manasses was gradually saving up a little bag of money, but he knew it would cost him a lot to buy his freedom. He learnt to speak bad Latin, but Greek was almost a second language in Rome.
Rome was a great and horrible city; you could not think of the Kingdom there; it had become impossible, something not even to be hoped for. They usually said the prayer still, once a day at least, but mostly it meant no more than, say, touching an amulet. They did not talk any more about Jesus-bar-Joseph.
They were aware of large and evil forces moving over their heads, of masters not all-powerful, but themselves terrified. There was a time when Manasses was about fifteen. It was a big household; his master was a senator, a thin, nervous man with an odd habit of jerking his head about. Manasses was to dance Ariadne to the Bacchus of a rather older boy, a Greek. He was making up, darkening his eyes and powdering his cheeks and arms, while one of the others tied back his hair with a woman’s fillet and Josias massaged his legs, pushing up the long, flame-coloured girl’s tunic, that would swirl about in the dance. ‘Who’s going to be there?’ he asked, but the overseer put a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t you ask tonight, boy.’
That made him all the more curious, and when he went in he wondered who was the handsome, rather soft-looking young man, with only the beginnings of a beard, to whom everyone was paying so much attention. It was fairly obvious that it was this young man who was to be danced to and glanced at, and Manasses did his best. In the end the young man beckoned him up, gave him a piece of gold and then explained very seriously that in one movement he had not interpreted the music as he should have. To Manasses’s great surprise, the young man rose, throwing aside a most beautiful purple cloak, clapped his hands for the musicians and proceeded to give his own interpretation of the passage. He certainly danced well for an amateur, allowing himself to be clasped in the most realistic way by the Bacchus, who was overacting through sheer nervousness, and everyone applauded tremendously, including Manasses.
Walking back to the couch, the young man stopped and fondled the kneeling Manasses, who thought he had the usual Gentile or Roman smell of overeating. ‘I hope the boy is being seriously trained,’ he said. Someone else said, ‘Not so well as he would be at the Palace!’ And then the host began, ‘Oh—allow me—if I might offer him as a small gift—the honour would be mine—’ It only then occurred to Manasses that the young man was Nero Caesar, the new Emperor.
Manasses did not mind being given to Nero, so long as Josias was included, and they were sent off to the Palace, where, as a matter of fact, he only saw the Emperor half a dozen times. He was one of several hundred slaves, many of whom were dancers, actors, acrobats or musicians. Sometimes he was part of the background for the great dancer Paris, who did him the honour of kicking him one day. Usually he had to entertain the more important slaves or freedmen; he trusted no one and was sometimes nasty to Josias, who, in turn, grew sullen. And he got to know some useful things about poisons. Also he got to know by sight the Emperor’s mistress, beautiful, discreet Claudia Acté, the Greek freedwoman, a little older than the boy Nero, approved of by his friends but not by his mother.
One evening there was a row. Old Pallas, the financial secretary, was beating up a girl who didn’t want to sleep with him, and, if you knew what he was like, you couldn’t blame her, but still she’d been sent in by her Madam, and she was a slave, so she didn’t have any choice. But she kept on screaming that she was a dancer and not a whore, and he kept on answering the way that sort of man answers that sort of woman, and at last he got in a kick that knocked her out, and there she lay, bleeding a little, and Pallas stalked out. Some of the slaves had been watching behind the curtains, but they weren’t going to interfere. The girl groaned a bit and flopped her hands, but it was none of their business to pick her up. It was a kind of passage room, that you went through if you didn’t want to go through the public courts, and by and by Claudia Acté slipped in, with a veil over her head and shoulders. She saw the girl on the floor and went straight and knelt beside her and lifted her head, and spoke to her in Greek. Then she looked up and saw the slaves in the doorway and called sharply, ‘Here, one of you, come and help me!’
Most of them just dissolved away, for they were more afraid of Pallas than of Acté, and anyhow why should they help? But it came to Manasses that he was a Jew and therefore braver than these Greeks and Bithynians, and besides he had once believed in the Kingdom and all that went with it, so he came. Acté asked him where the girl could be put safely, and Manasses thought of an attic where there would probably be an old mattress; they carried her there between them and for the moment he did not care if Pallas was told. Then he got water and some rags to wash her. When he came back, Acté was holding the girl’s hand and praying, her eyes shut. Manasses listened and heard words of the kind he knew and a name he used to know very well, by virtue of which Acté meant to put calm and healing into the hurt girl on the mattress. He said nothing, but bathed her head, and soon she opened her eyes and smiled at Acté; there was a cut on the corner of her mouth that kept on bleeding a little, but it was not deep and would not scar her. Then the girl began to twitch and look frightened, and tried to get up. Acté stopped her and said, ‘He will not get you. Keep quiet.’
‘But when they hear—’ said the girl, her voice sticky with fear of her Madam.
Acté said, ‘I will see to it. You know who I am.’
‘Yes, Claudia Acté, we all know,’ said the girl simply, and Acté blushed and looked a little troubled, but after a time the girl began to fidget and cry again, though there were no bones broken.
Acté laid one hand on her forehead and the other on her twitching fingers. ‘In the name of Jesus, rest,’ she said. And, as Acté bent over her, still and intent, the girl calmed down and shut her
eyes. But Manasses, looking at Acté thought of her not as a Gentile woman, but as someone in the Kingdom, and he became full of excitement and a hot desire of worship, with her and towards her. He began under his breath to say the words, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name …’ and for the first time for many months they began to mean something again. He was saying them aloud now and Claudia Acté joined in, saying them almost the same and at the end she looked very happy and said, ‘I did not know you were one of us, brother. What is your name?’
Manasses told her and said, ‘But I did not know that the Kingdom could happen in Rome. How did you come to it, Claudia Acté, seeing that you are a Greek?’
‘But many Christians are Greeks,’ said Acté, ‘and a few, even, are Romans. Did you think it was only for the Jews? Are you from the Church at Jerusalem?’
‘No,’ said Manasses, ‘I have never been as far as Jerusalem’—for Jerusalem had seemed a very long way from Beth Zanita when he was a child— ‘and why do you say Christians?’
‘Because Jesus was the Christ,’ she said, ‘the Redeemer. Surely you know that?’
‘I know that the things He said were the truth,’ Manasses answered slowly, ‘and that He lived to show the truth.’
‘And died to show the truth.’
‘Because the rich would not let Him live. Because the things He said were against the rich and powerful.’
‘Because He had to die the slave’s death to show that He was our brother as well as the Christ.’
‘But what is it to you, Claudia Acté? He was one of us; we have always had prophets. But the Gentiles never heeded them.’
‘He spoke for the world, for all who would take what He said. Why should you try to keep Him from me? Paul of Tarsus made it clear that He was for all!’
The Blood of the Martyrs Page 5
