A Pillar of Iron

by Taylor Caldwell

  Noë reflected. “As I have told you before, from the prophesies, it is more likely that we shall not recognize Him at all. He will be known by an act of faith only.”

  “‘By an act of faith, only,’” Marcus repeated bitterly, and shrugged. “That is too much to ask, of mankind. We are exhorted, in our pain and despair, our loneliness, in our cloud of unanswered questions, in our sorrow, our bewilderment, and with our feet plunged deep in the clay of earth, to rise like a bird and arrow into a light as yet unseen, to fling ourselves on the winds of the firmament, and trust only. So the priests exhort us. But it is too stupendous an act for mere men.”

  “I understand that it has been done before,” said Noë.

  “To what avail? What voice replies to us from the tomb? What sign is there in the heavens signaling our vast leap into the silence? Aristotle trusted with explicit ecstasy. He has not returned to enlighten us. There is only a void.”

  Noë turned his head and discreetly examined his friend’s weary face, and noted his exhaustion of spirit which had turned his cheeks ashen. Noë said gently, “If we knew all that was to be known, how could we bear this life of ours another day? We should fall on our own swords, panting to join the glory beyond our sight. Or, we should sit idly, waiting for our deliverance from life. Trust in God is surely not vain. I have seen the transfigured faces of the old men in Jerusalem, when they speak of Him, and they are men worn by living and full of sorrow. Too, there were our prophets. There was Moses, who gave us the Law. These were not foolish men, enchanted by their own invented dreams. They had been given revelations. Aristotle compared God with a perfect crystal, glowing with light, the Giver of life to which all life must return. Were all these deceived, mad, enamored of fantasies?”

  “You speak eloquently, for a realist,” said Marcus. “As for myself, I have come to the end of hope, as all men must come at last.”

  “There is no end to hope, for there is no end to God,” said Noë, distressed at Marcus’ words and what they implied.

  “Then, you believe?” said Marcus with a faint smile of sadness.

  Noë hesitated. Then he said resolutely, “I must believe, or I must die. I am not insensible to the world’s agony. I cannot look upon it with complacence, though my father thinks me facile and without depth. I laugh so I may not weep. I trust, so I may endure. And,” added Noë, marveling, “I did not know how much I believed until this very instant!”

  He paused, then said, “If you wish, you may withdraw your promise to buy one-third of Roscius.”

  Marcus stared at him, then burst out laughing, the first laughter he had uttered for a long time. “Ah, virtue and honesty seize you, out of your faith! Noë, dear, beloved friend, I insist on my one-third purchase of that living divinity, Roscius! We shall be rich, if nothing else.”

  Helvia, still with her women, heard the young men’s laughter as they approached the farmhouse, and she closed her eyes a moment to thank her patroness, Juno, for this mercy. Quintus, returned from the fields, stopped to listen with disbelief as he stood in his rough herdsman’s tunic of gray cloth. His strong brown feet were dusty. His valiant spirit shone in his beautiful eyes; his arms were like bronze from the sun. He nodded happily and thought, My brother has returned to us. He smiled, pleased, at the red sunset.

  Some peace had come to Marcus from the hours at the river with his friend. However, he knew that this was a different peace from any he had ever known before, and he also knew that never again would he know the rapture he had known, the joy, the sudden start of delight at the sound of a name, the passionate wonder at the world. All this had forever gone from him and it would never return. As Noë had said, he could endure. What more could be asked of a man?

  Noë thought, as he lay in his country bed: The dead has risen, God be thanked. I thought him prepared to end his life when first I came, and there was a fatality in his eyes, a deathliness on his lips. He had abandoned living, and turned from existence. Now he has returned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Noë ben Joel’s play, The Fire-Bearer, was a magnificent success in Rome. This was, to a great extent, due to the vast popularity and adoration which Roscius enjoyed.* Women of all ages regarded him as their divine idol; homosexuals yearned after him without success. Husbands derided him and called him rude names. Fathers declared he was a corrupter of their daughters. Young men and youths imitated his delicate swagger, his poses, and abandoned the Roman way of cropping their hair very short and stiff on their skulls for Roscius’ style of gleaming waves and ringlets on the nape of the neck. As Roscius favored soft purples and glowing yellows, every man his age, and younger, favored them also. He loved jewelry; therefore virile Romans wore Egyptian necklaces like his, and intricate armlets of spun gold and embroidered sandals and shoes. He was watched for every idiosyncrasy of manner, dress, or speech, by the public and by merchants and jewelers.

  Lucius Sergius Catilina was noted for his Roman beauty, strong and manly. Roscius had a different beauty, graceful, lithe, and extremely refined. He was tall and slender, and his every movement was poetry. His hair was black and shining, his brows like painted silk. His eyes were an enchanting violet color between lashes as thick and long as a girl’s. His features, in his smooth olive face, were clear and sardonic, his mouth like a plum when it is ripe. Women wrote poems to that mouth, and to his dimpled chin and exquisite ears. He had the supple dexterity of a dancer, the strength of a lion, the aspect of a Hermes about to take flight, and a smile so beguiling that even the surliest man was forced to respond to that glow of white teeth and full lip. He was, in addition, a man of natural wit and intelligence and irony, and an actor of immense powers. He had only to speak in his rich and rolling voice to command instant attention from the most reluctant.

  Actors were not regarded with much esteem in Rome. Men of sports were lauded far more excessively. Displays of strength and power and crude force and blood-thirstiness were flattered and rewarded. A gladiator could ask his own price; a wrestler had statues cast in his honor. A boxer of stamina could be assured of as many mistresses as he lusted from among the great families of Rome, and all the gold he could desire. Actors were not so fortunate. Roscius was the exception. Roman men could deplore the fact that their ladies had become debased in worshiping an actor rather than a gladiator, wrestler, or boxer, but that did not disturb the ladies nor decrease the lavishness of their gifts to their idol. When Roscius declared he was a patron of the arts, the ladies, and young men, of Rome discovered much merit in Grecian artistry and Egyptian subtlety. If he bought a statuette from some unknown sculptor that sculptor became famous overnight and his wares bought up at once.*

  Roscius was also sharp and penurious. Knowing the shortness and fickleness of public favor, he shrewdly invested his money in the best enterprises. Roscius never appeared, feeless, in honor of anyone, not even Sulla, and never graced a banquet without recompense in some form or another. Yet he was always the first to decry avarice and declare his love for the people.

  “Words cost nothing,” he would say with cynicism. “Charitable deeds are expensive and despised.” Therefore, he wisely kept all his works of generosity—and they were enormous—a secret to himself. He was considered a scandal, and he sedulously spread that lie, knowing that it made him irresistible to women and an object of envy to men.

  The Fire-Bearer was based on the Promethean legend of the Titan who had stolen fire from the chariot of Apollo and had brought it down to earth for the use of men, and who therefore incurred the rage of the gods who wished man to be a mere creature and not like themselves. Prometheus’ punishment was dire; ravens ate eternally of his liver, and it was eternally renewed. The aspirations and pain of man: the theme had excited Noë. He had decided that the Greek tragedies were too ponderous, the large, wailing choruses tiresome. Therefore his play became the concentrated tragedy of mankind, intense, central, and individualistic. Prometheus had seized the illumination and life of light and desired to place the gift in the
hands of his dark-souled fellows, whom he had made. Then the play became symbolic. Maidens flitted about the stage in a frail and poignant dance like blind moths. But Prometheus placed lamps in their hands, and the maidens cried out in joy as the lamps glowed upon their faces, and their eyes opened, and they passed the lamps from hand to hand, and to dancing young men also, and it was like a chain of light. They relinquished the gift to others who ran upon the stage, and they then put on masks depicting decrepit and dying age, and sank into shadow and obscurity, signifying death, and out of those same shadows leaped youth, eager and calling and singing, to receive the gift in turn, to pass it on, and then to die.

  And always in the background, the towering and vengeful and silent gods, surveying the creature who had become immortal, the frail and death-stricken animal who had attained a soul. But Athene said, “Man has become like unto, us. Therefore, I will give him wisdom.” Mars said “He has become like unto us. Therefore, I will give him hate and war.” Vulcan said, “He has become like unto us. Therefore, I will give him labor.” Venus said, “He has become like unto us. Therefore, I will give him lust and love.”

  Apollo said, “He has become like unto us. Therefore, I will give him the glory of the arts and the knowledge of the body, and the power to create beauty from the dust.”

  But Prometheus said, as he writhed in his agony, “We have become greater than the gods, for we have acquired pain.”

  Roscius imparted grandeur and suffering and dignity to his role. Never had he been so acclaimed. He received the laurel crown. Some said that in his part as Prometheus, always on the stage and skillfully garbed and illuminated at night by cunningly placed lamps, he portrayed Sulla. Roscius refused to deny this, though he winked at his intimates. Artists were above politics, which was a low occupation. “Money,” suggested Noë, “is an even more ignoble quality,” but with this Roscius did not agree.

  Within two weeks Marcus had been repaid some of his share of Roscius and was receiving a pleasant sum in addition. He decided to retain what he “owned” of Roscius, and as Noë’s imagination was constantly expanding to produce new effects and new dancers, the play grew in power and beauty. Before the first snow fell Noë could say exultantly, “We are a success!” and he proceeded to write an even more ambitious play.

  When the first snow fell Quintus, restored to full health, returned to the army.

  Marcus’ editor and publisher was one Atticus, a stout young man with jovial eyes and a solemn face and a round head. He affected togas even in the privacy of his family, and he was always scented with verbena, an astringent perfume which in some manner was meant to convey the loftiness of books. He invariably wore a harassed air, which was only partly hypocritical. He loved writers, for once he had aspired to be one, and he also detested them, which was eminently natural. In their turn his authors pretended that they considered him a thief and a man who had no reverence for the arts, and they respected his scholarship and his integrity. In short, Atticus and his authors were typical of themselves.

  He thought that Marcus was wasting his time at law, for was he not a distinguished poet already acknowledged by the intelligent gentlemen of Rome, and was he not an essayist of formidable powers whom politicians regarded uneasily? Marcus should devote all his days to writing. “Excellent,” Marcus would say, “but how, then, shall I live and support my family?” Atticus would wave all this away with a superb gesture. “When the gods endow, they should be obeyed.” “Let the gods, therefore, pay my taxes,” said Marcus. They usually parted with expressions of love and admiration, after some small prodding on the part of Atticus concerning another book, and some mention, on the part of Marcus, that he had not discovered his last volume of essays in certain bookshops.

  Just before the Saturnalia Atticus was announced to Marcus as he labored over briefs in his office in the house of Scaevola. Marcus greeted him with pleasure. “Have you some royalties for me, dear friend?” he asked. “I have just received a very disagreeable notice about my taxes.”

  Then he saw that Atticus was distressed. Marcus helped him to remove his cloak, a cloak of deep blue wool lined with soft fur. He called for wine, then sat opposite his publisher and looked at him with fond intentness. “You seem like a man in trouble, Atticus,” he said. “Have you and the law collided?”

  Atticus sighed. It was not the usual sigh of a persecuted publisher when confronted by an author. It was a sigh from the heart, and today the jovial eyes were not smiling. They were filled with pain. He did not speak at first. He drank Marcus’ wine, and so disturbed was he that he refrained from remarking on its ordinary quality. He drained the cup immediately. Marcus refilled it.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Atticus, absently playing with the long gold and jeweled chain that hung about his neck. “However, I am not in much danger.”

  “You have published a book which one of Sulla’s grim censors have pronounced a danger to youth?” said Marcus, thinking of the lightlessness of the dictatorship.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Atticus, sighing again. “But the book is not lewd, which would have been the lesser crime. It was merely honest.”

  “Therefore,” said Marcus, “unpardonable.”

  “Unpardonable,” assented Atticus. His eyes, light blue and protuberant, remained distant and wretched. “It was written by an old soldier, a captain under Sulla.”

  Marcus became interested at once, and sat up in his chair and smiled joyously. “Ah, Captain Cato Servius! The great blind soldier who lost his sight while fighting with Sulla, and also his left arm. I have read his book. An old Roman, an Honorable man of many virtues, Servius. The book was unpolished in many places, and often rude in its expressions, but it was written with fire and passion in behalf of the Roman virtues and against oppressive and all-powerful government. It also demanded a return to national solvency and pride and industry and patriotism—old virtues all, but also vanished. I thought, when I read it, ‘Rome is not yet dead when such a man can write and be published and his book can be bought in the bookshops.’”

  Atticus gave Marcus a glance of weariness and irony. “That is what I thought also,” he said.

  “What!” cried Marcus. “Who has objected to it?”

  “It is said, Sulla himself.”

  Marcus was incredulous. “Servius was one of Sulla’s most beloved and decorated generals, Atticus! They were schoolmates together. Not once did he denounce Sulla in that book.”

  “Let me refresh your memory,” said Atticus, who had brought a copy of the book with him. He turned a number of pages, then read aloud in slow and emphatic words. Marcus listened, nodding, his melancholy face slowly lighting with appreciation and approval. Atticus closed the book. “That enraged many about Sulla, Marcus.”

  “That is ridiculous,” said Marcus. “We all know—”

  “Who?” said Atticus. “Even those who probably know refuse to admit it.”

  “Sulla is not an ignorant man,” said Marcus. “He knows.”

  “Sulla is not everywhere. He has his captains and his servants and his soldiers about him, and his vile politicians and Senators and bought tribunes. He must, of necessity, leave much in their cruel hands. It was into those hands that Servius’ book has fallen.” Atticus paused, looked at Marcus sadly. “Cato Servius is now in the Mamertine, charged with treason against the state, charged with subversion, charged with seeking the overthrow of lawful government, charged with insurrection and incitement to riot, charged with violent and extreme prejudice against the people of Rome, charged with contempt of society and authority, charged with incontinent madness, charged with disrespect of the Senate! and, of course, charged with malice against Sulla. These are but a few of the charges.”

  Atticus smiled drearily. “The Senate has been ordered to try his case, and not the magistrates. And the penalty asked is death. The prosecutors are two, Julius Caesar, your dear young friend, and Pompey, whom Sulla has named Magnus. They will speak for the government against Servius.�
��

  Marcus was silent. But his pale face paled even more with wrath and indignation. Then he said at last, “I still forget. I still thought, at moments, that Rome was a free nation, and that books are sacred.”

  Atticus nodded. “My dear Marcus, you will never forget how dangerous it is to speak the truth, how unpardonable. A liar leads a most comfortable life under any form of government, and dies peacefully in bed. The speaker of truth—”

  A nameless sense of calamity and desolation came to Marcus, as if he had heard words of doom which pertained to himself.

  “I have come to you,” said Atticus, “to ask you to defend Servius. I am not a rich man; I am only a publisher,” he added quickly.

  “I?” said Marcus. He suddenly thought of his brother, who had returned to Sulla’s service. He said, “Quintus, my brother, is commanding a legion in Gaul at the present time. The hand of tyrants is a long hand.”

  “I had forgotten your brother,” said Atticus. He reached for his cloak. “I should have remembered. You dare not jeopardize him.”

  “Quintus is a soldier,” said Marcus, drawing the cloak out of the publisher’s reach. “He would have me do what I will. I will visit Servius in the Mamertine at once.”

  Atticus’ eyes filled with tears. “You are a brave and resolute man, dear Marcus,” he said.

  “Not so brave, not so resolute,” said Marcus. “I have, all my life, walked the prudent way, the way of lawyers. So, in many respects, I have betrayed my country, for he who does not speak out when honor and anger command is as guilty as any traitor. Cowardice is often the companion of lawyers.” He repeated, “I will go to Servius at once.”

  “I do not know how they dared to denounce and imprison him,” said Atticus, sorrowfully, “for he is greatly beloved of the people of Rome, and the foot soldiers whom he commanded, and the old soldiers who were his companions and who are veterans like himself of many combats in the name of their country. He is known for his gallantry and uprightness, for his bravery and steadfastness, for his courage, for all the things which make a noble soldier loved by his countrymen. He shared Sulla’s exile. His fortune was confiscated under Cinna and Carbo, and his lands. His two sons died in the wars, under Sulla’s command, and Sulla loved them also. Sulla restored the lands to Servius, and the fortune, in a speech before the Senate, itself, and embraced the old soldier publicly and kissed him on the cheek and called for all the honors Rome could bestow. Yet, they dared to imprison and denounce such a man—such a man!—for writing an honest book which exposed corruption and despotism in the government today.”