The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  What Herod Agrippa has is the title king and the tetrarchies that once belonged to Philip and Lysanias in southern Syria, as well as, newly bestowed, the territory comprising Galilee and Peraea, once the domain of his uncle Antipas, now, with arbitrary wielding of a stylus, deposed by Gaius. But Herod Agrippa says:

  ‘My throne should be in Jerusalem.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be tiresome,’ Gaius says. ‘Judaea remains a Roman province under Roman rule. The Senate says so and sometimes I listen to the Senate. Don’t I, Uncle Claudius?’

  Claudius sits some way down the table: sits, I say, since he is too tense to be able to recline. He is in middle age, with a shock of hair prematurely white. He nods at his nephew’s question tag.

  ‘Don’t I, Uncle Claudius?’

  ‘Occccasionally.’

  ‘Entertain us, Uncle Claudius. Stand up and recite us some poetry. A little Quintus Horatius Flaccus.’

  So Claudius tremulously stands as well as he can, since his couch is right up against the table, and emits the following:

  ‘Pppppone sub cccccurru nimium pppppropppppinqui—’

  ‘Oh, sit down, you old fool,’ the Emperor cries. ‘My friend King Herod Agrippa the Little will oblige us with a little Hebrew poetry. Won’t you, your majesty?’

  ‘All our Hebrew poetry is sacred, Caesar. The Psalms of David are not to be recited over lobster and sucking pig.’

  ‘Why is everybody so tiresome? Why is everybody so glum? Why are the musicians silent? Aufidius,’ Gaius says to a near-naked freedman who stands ever behind him, ‘Lash those pipers and drummers into life.’ Aufidius always carries a whip, the imperial whip, many-thonged and with lead pellets, its handle of the most chaste elephantine ivory. The players hear the threat and, though they finished their last piece a mere three seconds ago, at once throw themselves into a galop of Parthian provenance. There are four flutes, a harp of twenty strings, a mournful shawm, and a number of drums of oxhide, some to be struck, others spanked.

  We, in our secure invisibility, may look with pity and a certain contempt on the great half-circle of guests, who peck at the food, drink sparingly, and fear for their lives. Is life so great a gift that a man or woman should so feast in humiliation at the feet of a mad emperor? They are no better off, any of them, than the slaves who scurry in with new dishes, or the Praetorian troops who, in festal kirtles which hide protective daggers (what madman may not rush in to kill a mad emperor?) stand watchful on the marble staircase that leads down to the great vestibule or line the corridor that connects the banqueting hall and the imperial kitchens. Some of these troops remember an occasion when, in public too, they were ordered to strip naked and then line up to bugger the imperial person. The first buggering was enough. The Emperor screamed at the third or fourth thrust and cried that he was being murdered. But the buggering was being done on orders, the senior centurion insisted, and punishment of the overthrusting guardsman was out of order. Oh, very well, but don’t let it happen again. That slave there has an undeferential smirk on his face. Whip him, whip him, Aufidius. The senior centurion was, and still is, Marcus Julius Tranquillus, who has again applied for transfer to a fighting legion but whose application has been rejected. Let me thrust (ha) all that is now to happen into the perfect tense. It is done, it is long finished, it belongs to the bad past.

  Marcus Julius Tranquillus was much, though distractedly, taken by the looks of a Palestinian girl who brought dishes from the open fires and ovens to the servery counter. She was handsome but, more, she was unsubdued. She wore no anklet of servitude on, as it were, her fierce spirit. She had equal contempt for the screaming cooks and the timorous popinjays whom they fed. She was, however, most tender in her solicitude for another Palestinian girl, like her, younger, tremulous, totally subdued. This bangled fellow slave seemed to be her sister. Marcus Julius did not understand the language they spoke, but he caught the passage of charming exotic names – Ruth, Sara, as brief as birdcalls. The elder girl was Sara. She wore the grey of slavery with an apron cynically over it. Ruth, the younger, was, as a waitress, more becomingly dressed in silver-painted sandals, a white smock to the ankles but her thin brown arms bare, her black hair in a fillet. Marcus Julius’s gorge rose, as mine rises in the telling, to see the object, presumably esculent, that Ruth had to bear to the table. It had the look of a human head, moulded pastry of some sort with Jupiter knew what filling, hard-boiled eggs with grapes set in them for eyes, hair of spun candy, and it was set on a dish awash in a fruit sauce that looked like blood. There were twelve of these monstrosities all told, and all the faces were different: one or two of them looked familiar to Marcus Julius – surely that was Cremutius Cordus and that the lady Lollia Paulina?

  ‘If,’ Gaius was saying, ‘you will not entertain your Emperor, then your Emperor must entertain you. The imperial whip, Aufidius.’

  He took the whip at the moment when the girl Ruth was nervously approaching the table with her swimming head of pastry. With glee and some skill Gaius let the lash fly and trepanned it. There was a gush of what looked like heavy brown cream which bespattered three grave senators. Gaius laughed high; some of the guests laughed too, though low. The frightened Ruth dropped her dish. Dropped her dish. Smashed head and crimson gravy and a heavy silver dish on the marble. Gaius spoke with great kindness, saying: ‘Clumsy, clumsy. Where are you from, my little pigeon?’ The girl did not understand. Herod Agrippa translated.

  ‘Ayeh?’ she repeated. And then, in Latin, ‘Judaea.’

  ‘Jewish,’ Caligula said, ‘but not one of your subjects, Herod Agrippa of my heart. Tell me, your majesty, what was the name of your grandmother?’

  ‘Salome.’

  ‘I thought so. She was a dancing girl, was she not?’

  ‘That was another Salome – stepdaughter of my uncle.’

  ‘She danced naked, did she not?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  ‘And she was given a prize for dancing, was she not?’

  ‘The head of—’

  ‘Somebody’s head, yes. Good. Princely entertainment. Dance, girl. Whose head shall it be? We will decide after. Dance, girl. Music.’

  Drums began to thump in a variety of rhythms. The flautists were not sure what to play. The shawm began to skirl. Ruth stood bewildered. ‘Rikud,’ Herod Agrippa said. Gaius climbed over the back of his couch and confronted the girl at the mouth of the tabled C.

  ‘Rikud, as his majesty ordered. Dance.’ And he whipped her to it. She began tearfully and clumsily to move stiff limbs. ‘Faster, girl. Faster.’ He stood back, granting her space and his whip too. He lashed.

  At the servery counter Sara saw. She went over to the carvery and grasped a knife. Marcus Julius was ready. He took it from her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It will do no good.’ Her ferocity was astonishing. Her eyes lamped the scene and her mouth snarled deep gutturals. ‘No,’ he said, and he held her. ‘We are living in madness, we can do nothing.’ Dangerous words from a servant of Caesar.

  ‘Dance, Salome. Ah, I see. Your dress hampers you.’ Gaius very neatly whipped off the upper part of her garment. She shrieked in more shame than pain, her arms protecting her breasts from eyes more than from the whip.

  ‘Dance, Salome. Like this.’ And Gaius clumsily turned and turned, crying: ‘Applause! Applause! Plaudite! There was some feeble clapping. ‘Dance, girl.’

  ‘Lo, lo,’ she howled.

  ‘Very well. I will make you dance.’ He lashed her about the floor. She was all rags and bloody weals. Marcus Julius was strong, but soon, he feared, he would not be strong enough. The girl in his arms raged like a lioness in toils and, like that beast, bit at her constraining ropes, the tense muscles of Marcus Julius.

  ‘You can do nothing,’ he wished to cry, but instead he uttered a Roman obscenity at the sudden pain and the welling of blood. He impelled her to the safety of the seething kitchen. The Greek eunuch officer of imperial catering saw his territory invaded by one of the military clutching a fighting
girl and squealed protest. ‘Out of my way,’ Marcus Julius snarled. Then, the sardonic Roman supervening, he said with taut reasonableness: ‘This girl’s sister is being whipped to death. Part of the imperial entertainment.’

  Ruth now lay quite still on the floor, not yet dead, weals and blood and rent garment. Gaius handed the imperial whip back to its warden, saying: ‘Now, dear Salome, you shall have a severed head as a reward for dancing so well. Whose shall it be? Whose? Whose? Whose? Choice is so tiresome a thing. Whose? Ah, yours.’ He meant an old senator who had seen everything and was now a retired student of the Stoic philosophy. He had been surprised to find himself on the guest list, probably some mistake, his younger brother perhaps, now in exile at Mytilene, had been intended, but the guest list was a very arbitrary compilation. He had been, during the whipping of that poor slave girl, trying to induce in himself a coldly stoical attitude: life is evil, we cannot change it, to show compassion may result in more evil. He had been meditating earlier on the nature of absolute power: no power can be absolute if it is expressed solely through the enactment of evil, since there has been a limitation of choice self-imposed; in becoming a mere agent of evil the Emperor Gaius had forfeited his own freedom and was no better than a slave. ‘When shall it be, you, whoever you are?’ Gaius was baying. ‘At the end of our banquet? Or perhaps now, as the crown of our entertainment?’ The old senator showed no fear. He raised his cup to his lips and, with a straight face, pledged the Emperor. Whereupon the Emperor said: ‘Oh, I’m so bored.’ The boredom of forfeited choice, the senator said to himself. ‘You,’ Gaius suddenly said, pointing at a young officer of the municipal board, who was protectively embracing a handsome young woman clad in simple linen with a rather ornate headdress in the form of a thickly populated thrush’s nest, bequeathed by her dead mother. ‘You – take your hands off my wife.’

  ‘With respect, Caesar,’ the young man bravely said, ‘she is my wife.’

  ‘Oh, she can be yours again tomorrow, if the gods – I mean the god – kindly permits her to live. But tonight she’s for me.’ And he advanced grinning on the young woman, more a bride than a wife. She could not forbear screaming, nor her husband, or groom, tightening his protective arm. Gaius, with the swift changeability of a dog, seemed to lose interest in her. ‘I’ve forgotten who it was we decided to behead. Never mind,’ he smiled pleasantly at the young man. ‘You’ll do.’ He clicked his fingers for the guard, crying: ‘The banquet’s over. Thank you all for coming.’

  Let us breathe a sweeter air, though the air of Jerusalem is as it were baked, the flesh of the city seething under a crust of heat and the pie brutally spiced with the odours of the unwashed and of camel dung. We are in the city only to observe certain personages leaving it. Saul, with an entourage of four armed men, one of whom is his old fellow student Seth, is at the market buying some fruit for the journey to Damascus. The Greek Philip has evaded Saul’s last spectacular arrest of Jewish Hellene Nazarenes and is on his way to Gaza. In a day or so he is to meet a man on whom Saul and his companions are just now looking with curiosity. The man is big, muscular, very black, brilliantly dressed in the Ethiopian manner, and he is riding in a covered carriage drawn by two bay horses. He has a driver black as himself in costly livery, and the driver does not hesitate to use his whip to clear the way through the gawping crowd. The Ethiopian, if that is what he is, ignores totally his surroundings. He has a scroll from which, in the manner of that day, he is reading aloud. There are indeed, even now, very few who see reading as a silent activity. Saul catches certain words. Greek. He catches a whole phrase: As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb – Saul grins at Seth and says: ‘So one of the black tribe reads the prophet Isaiah. You see how the holy word may spread. Come. Ten miles before sundown.’

  Philip was on a road opposed to that of Saul and his escort. He was on his way to Gaza, and had spent a flybitten night in Eleutheropolis. The Gaza he was going to was not, despite what Peter had said, the town where blind Samson, dreaming of old circuit judgements and abiding the regrowth of his shorn locks, had, under the lash, ground corn for the Philistines. That town had been destroyed a century before the birth of Jesus by the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus. Its ruins were still to be seen, an abode of snakes and lizards, and the name Desert Gaza applied to them. There was a new Gaza by the sea, erected some thirty years after the razing of the old by Gabinius. It was to this Gaza that Philip, his hair near white with sun and dust, was sorely trudging. The road was empty and so was the sky, except for far wheeling vultures, and the view on either side was of sand.

  When Philip heard an octopudium of hoofs and a rumbling of wheels behind him and, turning, saw a nimbus of dust, he at first thought that Saul, expensively equipped from the high priest’s own stables, was in extravagant pursuit. He shrugged (the game is up) and waited by the side of the road. Soon the carriage drew up with a snorting and stamping of two sweating bays. A black man dressed in crimsons and purples hailed Philip cheerfully in Greek of, considering his muscular bulk, a strange shrillness. His round face shone with sweat and amiability. On his head was a scarlet cap intricately patterned with gold thread and in his hand a fan of peacock feathers. He was sheltered from the sun by a white linen canopy. On his knees was an unrolled scroll. ‘To Gaza,’ Philip said. He was invited to climb into the carriage and sit on yellow cushions. Black but comely. Philip sat smiling.

  ‘Gaza is on my way home. I go to Napata in Ethiopia. I have been visiting the holy city.’ He waved to the driver and they clopped on.

  ‘Holy,’ Philip said cautiously, ‘surely not for your people?’ The text on the man’s knees was Greek. Philip read: Hos probaton epi sphagin ichthi …

  ‘You know my people?’

  ‘I know that your king is worshipped as an offspring of the sun. That he is too holy to be permitted to rule. That rule is in the hands of the queen mother. Whose name is always the same. I have forgotten it.’

  ‘Candace. It is always Candace. My uncle served the old Candace and I serve the new one. He was court treasurer and so am I. My nephew will doubtless follow me.’

  ‘You do me great honour.’ And then: ‘So the office passes through a nepotic line? Not from father to son?’

  The Ethiopian gave a laugh like a neigh. ‘The court treasurer must always be a eunuch. You did not know that? Court officials must not breed and thus form dynasties. But we have learnt to think of our nephews as surrogate sons. My nephew has already been castrated in expectation of his succeeding me. He becomes barren like me to serve a barren commodity. As Aristotle said, money does not breed.’

  ‘You seem, from your scroll here, to be a Greek scholar. This looks like the prophet Isaiah.’

  ‘I wondered whether you might not be a Gentile like me. You look Greek. And yet from a few words you know it is the prophet Isaiah.’

  ‘I’m a Greek Jew who follows the new law of Jesus the anointed. I go to Gaza and thence to Caesarea to spread the word.’

  ‘I saw this new way being persecuted in Jerusalem. I took it to be an aberration from the true faith.’

  ‘You worship the scion of the sun and yet you talk of the true faith? Tradition says you’re one of the children of Ham, cut off from the family of the chosen.’

  ‘Well,’ the Ethiopian said, whisking his peacock feather fan. ‘This doctrine of heliolatry is a mere convention with most of us. We’re an ancient people and not foolish. I cannot be a Jew but I can be what is termed a God-fearing Gentile. According to the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy eunuchs are not admitted to the society of the faithful. But Isaiah seems to promise a change.’

  Philip closed his eyes and quoted: ‘“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths and hold fast to my covenant, to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters.”’

  ‘Good,’ the Ethiopian said. ‘You are a better scholar than I. I know little by heart. I do know, however, what the priests of your temple have
hammered into my skull: “No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.” They say that Isaiah merely fantasises and that stern edict of Moses cannot be superseded.’

  Philip took the scroll from the Ethiopian’s knees and said, smiling: ‘Ara ge ginoskeis ha anaginoskeis?’

  The Ethiopian laughed and said: ‘The Greek language is graceful. It makes the word toread almost the same as the word to understand. The tongue of the Romans captures the same grace. Intellegis quae legis? But in my coarser language it would be bluntly: “Do you understand what you read?” Well, my answer is simple: No, I do not. Read the passage to me, and I will see if in your Greek mouth it makes more sense.’

  So Philip read to him about the suffering servant. ‘“He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”’

  ‘Who does he mean? Does he refer to himself or to somebody else?’

  ‘The prophet,’ Philip said carefully, ‘is being truly a prophet. He is speaking of someone who, in his day, was yet to come. But now he has come. Killed, as Isaiah predicted, three days silent in the tomb, then alive again, the marks of the executioners upon his body to show himself truly suffering man, yet also the Son of God and the everliving witness to—But the story is long to tell.’

  ‘There’s time enough. There’s nothing to see except desert. Tell me all.’

  There was a wadi north-east of Gaza. Children playing by it at sunset, women filling their pitchers with water squinting against the dying blaze, saw with some surprise a young man with hair like a flame and a large black man in robes as of the sunset alight from a carriage drawn by two bay horses and walk together to the place of running water. They had not heard the words spoken before the drawing tight of the reins and the grinding of the wheels: ‘Here is water. Is there anything to prevent my being baptised here and now?’