The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  Under that same full moon, or another, the junior centurion Marcus Julius Tranquillus patrolled the borders of the estate that had belonged to Lucullus, keeping the seven guardposts alert, untrue to his cognomen, troubled, most unquiet. He had that day requested a posting to one of the active legions, in Gaul or Pannonia, but the tribunus militum had rejected his application outright. He was to remain with the detachment of the Praetorian Guard responsible for the security of the imperial person, whether here in Italy or elsewhere. Why, you young idiot, the tribune had said, you are in the first cohort of the Guard, and in a year or so, despite your youth, you will be promoted primipilus if you do nothing spectacularly foolish. Not of course (smiling somewhat contemptuously) that you will. Yes, he knew: integrity, old-fashioned concern with burnishing virtus like a piece of his equipment, something passed on by his centurion father who had never risen to primipilus. He was derided, this he knew too, for his primness, for what looked very much like unmanly chastity. But there had been enough unchastity on Capri, enough vomiting with excess of wine and grape syrup added round the imperial table: it had not been hard to be both chaste and sober. The corrupt laughed at him, the stiff centurion of old legends, without opinions, unskilled in exchange of wit and scurrility, but they had to be thankful that the corrupt had such guardians. A soldier’s duty was to protect the civic order, however rotten it was. But such hypocrisy had become more and more difficult. He had hoped, serving the hateful Tiberius at a distance, that all would change with the accession of the son of Germanicus. A young man, scorning a craven exile, ready to slice with the thrust of a young man’s muscle through the snaked roots of disease at the centre. This was, or should be, Gaius. Now Marcus Julius was not sure. He did not believe that Gaius was, like his dying great-uncle, a meditator of evil in deliberate and conscious choice, but he was beginning to believe that Gaius was mad. Was a mad emperor worse than a craftily malevolent one? Of the madness he had, he thought, been granted evidence this very night.

  Walking among the cypresses, he had heard a voice from above. He had looked for the source of the voice and, keeping well in the cypress shadows, had seen Gaius stark naked in full moonlight on the balcony of his suite on the second storey of the villa. Gaius, raising his arms to the moon, had cried: ‘My beloved, come to me. I love you, why do you not return my love? I want you so much. I want to embrace your shining body. Divine moon, soon I too shall be divine. An emperor is a god as you, my love, are a goddess. Do I call you too early, my beloved? Will you come to me only when I am in purple as you are in silver?’ And then he had taken his large upright member in both his hands and begun to frot it, crooning all the time of his passion for Cynthia, the pocked planet that gave the light of three large candles. Marcus Julius had watched in fascination and fear till the end. Gaius shivered in joy as he spurted lavishly into the silvered night. Then he giggled and went to his bed.

  It seemed certain to Marcus Julius that Gaius would kill the moaning Tiberius who, mortally sick, yet could not die. For Gaius refused to permit a guard to be mounted outside the imperial suite, saying that his beloved great-uncle had told him, the Emperor designate, that he wanted now none of the trappings of power, a naked man whom death would take in his own time, he would go when called on a plain bed, alone with his conscience. Marcus Julius had heard the colloquy of the physician Charicles and the patrician Curtius Atticus, walking together gravely under the figtrees:

  ‘He has nightmares about the earthquake on Capri. He seems to identify the ruined pharos with himself. The eye of the world. This troubling of the imagination weakens him.’

  ‘And the voyage to Capri?’

  ‘Too feeble. And the sea is far from calm.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A week at most. The eye of the world is out. Hm. Very poetical.’

  ‘The dying snake can’t hide himself in the greenery of Capri. The ants are waiting.’

  Saul was with Caiaphas and Gamaliel in the high priest’s chambers leading from the great hall of the council. Saul talked with sharp eloquence, walking up and down while the two older men, seated, watched him. When Saul was silent Caiaphas said: ‘Your zeal is, of course, commendable. But it is a zeal wholly destructive.’

  ‘We are taught to destroy evil. The tares choke the wheat. The tares must be pulled up.’

  ‘And some of the wheat with the tares,’ Caiaphas said. ‘I believe your dead enemy the carpenter said something about waiting for the harvest. Never mind. You seek a destructive commission. What does your master Gamaliel say?’

  ‘I say first that I regret I was not able to be present at the so-called trial of the Nazarene Stephen. He was, I remember, a good student. The rough transcript of his defence – if it is accurate – shows that his learning did me credit. I am shocked by what happened to him. Very well, blame the stupid mob. But do not let that happen again. Remember my former words. We don’t yet know whether we’re dealing with the work of men or the work of God—’

  ‘The young man Stephen,’ Caiaphas said, ‘spoke against the Temple and the leaders of the Jewish people. Some of the assembly was rightly angry. Things got beyond our control.’

  ‘Regrettable, very very regrettable.’

  ‘You are the great advocate of compromise, rabban,’ Saul said. ‘I myself propose compromise in dealing with this sect. I don’t seek its wholesale destruction, since I feel that many of its Palestinian members will, in good time, perceive their errors. Peter, Thomas, Matthew, others, are still good sons of the Temple, diligent at attending the services, active in healing and charity. It is the Greek Jews who worry me. The followers of Stephen.’

  ‘Had followers, had he?’

  ‘In the sense that he articulated a peculiarly Hellenistic heresy which appealed and appeals more than ever to his fellow Greeks.’

  ‘More than ever – that was inevitable, wouldn’t you say? You created a martyr, Saul. And don’t tell me you had nothing to do with the stoning. I know that a martyr is no more than a witness, but the term has taken on a new and dangerous meaning. You propose further handings over to the mob?’

  ‘No, rabban. Not at first. I propose rather a course of – may I call it re-education?’ Gamaliel smiled without mirth. ‘These Jews from the Greek islands could never have much reverence for a Temple that was so far beyond the seas. Here, living in Jerusalem, they have had time enough to learn that reverence. But they believe the Jews are still a wandering people with a travelling tent of the covenant, as Stephen put it. They will not learn. They have little respect for the priesthood since they have so little for the house of the Most High where the priesthood officiates. The Nazarene cult drives them much further from orthodoxy than is the case with the Palestinians.’

  ‘We had forty years of wandering in the desert,’ Gamaliel said. ‘The Greeks want to send us back to the desert. Is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘You speak my words for me, rabban.’

  ‘What precisely,’ Caiaphas asked, ‘does Saul of Tarsus propose?’

  ‘Saul of Tarsus,’ Saul of Tarsus said, ‘does not propose anything so brutal as a general massacre of the Greek Nazarenes. He merely proposes that they be prevented from spreading their heresy. Sequester them. Imprison them. Bring them back to the light. And, but only with the most obdurate cases, give them to the rough justice of the people.’

  ‘Meaning stone them,’ Gamaliel said.

  ‘We have our precedent. The people approved.’

  ‘The people, I gather, were even enthusiastic,’ Gamaliel said. ‘The people are always enthusiastic about destroying things. Even when they don’t understand what they’re destroying.’

  ‘I shall need,’ Saul said to Caiaphas, ‘a special detachment of armed Levites. And men skilled in interrogation.’

  ‘Meaning torture,’ Gamaliel said.

  ‘A great and holy end justifies the roughest of methods. That is laid down somewhere.’

  ‘Not anywhere that I know of.’

  ‘Go
then,’ Caiaphas said. ‘State your requirements to Zerah. We will see if your zeal works on these stiff-necked Greeks.’ Stiff-necked: he caught the Greek voice of Stephen saying it. ‘Go.’

  ‘In the name of the Most High,’ Saul said.

  ‘If you must have it so.’

  On the sixteenth day of the month of the wargod, thirty-seven years after the birth of, as he was called by many, the prince of peace, Tiberius breathed his last. He was seventy-seven years old and had reigned for almost twenty-three years. The manner of death is still unknown. Some say that Gaius gave him slow poison in possets he insisted on serving himself; others that Tiberius whimpered perpetually for food but was denied it. The philosopher Seneca, whom we shall meet later, writes somewhere of the Emperor, aware that his end was coming, removing his sealring as if to give it to another, clinging to it for a time and then replacing it on his finger, clenching his fist to hold on to the emblem of imperial power, then calling faintly for a servant to come. No servant answered, so he got out of his bed, staggered, fell, and died on the floor. Other tales tell frankly of Gaius stabbing Tiberius with a damascened dagger in the presence of a horrified freedman whom he then strangled with his own hands in the anger of a discovered assassination. More probable is the story of Gaius’s smothering his great-uncle with a pillow he had just polluted with semen offered to the glory of the moon goddess. We are, remember, in the kingdom of the wicked.

  The wickedness of Tiberius was not quickly forgotten. In Rome joy at the news of his death was qualified by a hatred and anger the more lively for not having to be stifled by fear. People prayed to our mother the earth and to the gods beneath it, Dis and his bride Persephone (or Pluto and Proserpina) to grant him no rest after death, rather to create a special hell for him furnished with fire and serpents less docile than his pet Columba. There were cries that his body should be dishonoured and quartered and the bloody bits flung on to the Stairs of Mourning. It seemed to many that his cruelty was able to flourish posthumously. The Senate, aware that his death was approaching, granted a ten-day stay of execution for all condemned criminals, assuming that his end would occur within that period, but Tiberius died on the very day of expiry of the term of grace. As Gaius had not yet been formally declared Emperor (it has to be remembered that in Tiberius’s will Gaius and Tiberius Gemellus, son of Drusus the younger, were named co-heirs; the Senate had yet to execute this testament in favour of the son of the loved Germanicus), there was nobody to whom an appeal could be made, so the criminals who had been filled with hope and were now drained of it were duly strangled and thrown on to the Stairs of Mourning. Rage abounded, and the mob attempted to seize the corpse when it was carried towards Rome for the funeral ceremony, but the guard, with Marcus Julius Tranquillus not alone in white-faced attention to duty, bore the already decaying body safely to its incineration. Soon the eyes of the Empire looked not to a bad past but to a shining future. And in Palestine there were strong hopes that, Gaius being necessarily a friend of the Jewish people since he was a friend of Herod Agrippa, the days of Roman extortion would soon come to an end and holy independence ensue. Herod Agrippa was no Solomon, but he was of the sacred royal blood, and that was everything. The kingdom must be cleansed of its heretics: Saul would help bring an Israel united in its orthodoxy neatly boxed in ornamental gold to the feet of the newly crowned monarch. Alleluia.

  So let us see Saul busily at work. One evening a number of Greek Jewish Nazarenes sat at their love feast in the house of Nicanor the maker of silver candlesticks. Parmenas was there, with his wife and children, and also Philip. Philip was, as it turned out, lucky that he was a three-year widower without children. We can all tolerate persecution for ourselves. Nicanor, as head of the household, took bread and broke it, saying in Greek:

  ‘For the night before he was put most cruelly to death, hanging on a tree that the sins of man be absolved through his sacrifice, he said to his disciples: This is my body. Take and eat. Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise he said: This is the blood of the new order, which shall be shed for the redemption of many. Take and drink.’ And then, while the broken bread and the single cup of wine were handed around, the door of the house burst noisily open, and Saul appeared with six Levites in polished light breastplates, armed with swords. The celebrants froze, some with bread still in their mouths. Saul said with great smoothness:

  ‘I apologise for disturbing your ceremony – with, if I may say so, so little ceremony. On behalf of the holy council of the priesthood and watchers of the Temple, there are certain enquiries that have to be made. You – what is your name?’

  He was looking at Parmenas. Parmenas answered: ‘Parmenas. You, of course, need not introduce yourself more than you have already.’

  ‘We can dispense with Hellenistic wordplay,’ Saul said. ‘I ask you one simple question. Would you say that it was idle and idolatrous to worship in a temple made by human hands?’

  ‘There is no harm in such worship.’

  ‘But no great good?’

  ‘If,’ Parmenas said, ‘you expect me to contradict the words of our brother Stephen—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The truth is the truth. Do you wish to arraign us, as you arraigned him, before the council of the priests?’

  ‘We can dispense with a trial. You condemn yourself out of your own mouth.’

  ‘I have said nothing.’

  ‘You have said enough.’ He turned to his guards and said: ‘Arrest this whole assembly.’

  The chief of his Levites said: ‘The women and children too?’

  ‘The women and children too.’

  The children were easier to seize than the adults. There were three of these present, the two sons of Parmenas and the daughter of Nicanor. The girl screamed piteously when the rough men handled her. Parmenas said:

  ‘These children are innocent.’

  ‘But their parents are not? So you admit crime. Take them all.’

  The Levites drew their swords and began to herd the sheep towards the way out of their pen. They meekly submitted, but then Parmenas cried: ‘Now!’ They had, it seemed, prepared for such an eventuality. Nicanor seized the sword fist of one of the guards and tried to wrest the weapon. Saul sneered:

  ‘So this is how you turn the other cheek?’

  Nicanor was pinked in the left arm. He cried: ‘Good. The others are coming.’ As Saul and his Levites looked towards the open front door Philip broke free of a hand brawny as a smith’s and ran towards the rear of the house. The chief guard cried ‘After him’, but Saul said:

  ‘No. He won’t get far.’

  Philip ran out of the back door, into the working yard, then leapt to the top of the wall. The street was empty, but the clump of his weight on the street cobbles set a dog to barking. He ran in the direction of the Temple, turned off near the house of the disciples and entered by their back door. The whole twelve were there, unusually. They had performed their communion ceremony and were mostly gnawing at bones. Philip sat, exhausted. They gave him a cup of wine. He said:

  ‘Saul. The persecution’s started.’ The disciples said nothing; they waited for more. ‘Men with swords. They’ve arrested—’

  ‘Who?’ Peter said.

  ‘It seems they’re after those who speak Greek.’

  ‘Aye,’ Thomas said. ‘Like Stephen.’

  ‘Nobody’s safe,’ Philip said. ‘Leave Jerusalem. The Greeks first, the Hebrews after.’

  Peter shook his head. ‘They can’t harm us. Not yet. They’ve no case against us, not while Gamaliel’s around. It’s different for you people. It’s you who must leave Jerusalem. Well,’ he said to all, ‘you can call this the prompting of the Holy Spirit. He uses the persecutors to make us carry the word abroad. This is the meaning of God bless our enemies. You, Philip, had best go to Samaria. Fertile soil, a battered people. The time for us here is not yet. Sleep in the cellar tonight. Leave at daybreak. We’ll give you money.’

  ‘So it’s the Greeks who carry the wor
d,’ Thomas said. ‘Who would have thought it?’

  ‘God works in strange ways,’ Matthew said. ‘God’s a great joker.’

  So Philip cheated Saul, but Saul was not cheated of others. He seized the house of Nicanor, though that house was due to be conveyed to the whole company of Nazarenes, and set up a centre of interrogation in a workroom whose floor was blobbed with points of silver. He had Timon there, a man vigorous but old. He had him, already bruised, upheld tottering in the arms of two half-naked Levites: torture was warm work. He said:

  ‘Ready to recant? Is Jesus the carpenter the Son of God?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Saul nodded. Timon’s right hand was seized and his arm twisted almost to breaking point behind.

  ‘Yes yes yes.’

  Saul with a gentle hand motioned that the torment should, for the moment, cease, saying:

  ‘Timon, this torture is unseemly. It is also unreasonable. But faith has so little to do with reason. You are a Greek Jew who has abandoned the faith of his fathers. You must be brought back to that faith. How can we best bring you back?’

  Timon panted for a half minute, then he said: ‘I have not abandoned the faith. It is you who have baked the faith and said the cake is done.’ Timon’s trade spoke in the image. ‘That was before Jesus the Christ came from the oven. I am a good simple Jew who has found the Messiah.’