The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  It was by chance next day that he passed a baptism ceremony in brilliant sunlight on the left bank of the Orontes. He saw the little bald man at work, the drenching of the patient as he might be called, the announcement of the hope of a cure. Barnabas was with him; Barnabas he vaguely knew. Magic, a sort of. He rode on to the village where he had been treating a child ineffectually for a hydatid cyst. Larvae of tapeworms lodged in a swollen belly. They could not be purged. The child grew thinner. He saw the baptisers still busily at work when he rode back. There was, he supposed, no harm in it. A ceremony, a gesture of faith and hope, outward sign of inner grace, whatever that was.

  An elderly man named Agabus came to Antioch. He was large and muscular and he had the exophthalmic gaze of the prophet. He wore a drab long shirt that left bare his hairy shins. Around his neck on a string he carried a cross, saying ‘The emblem of shame is transformed to a sign of victory. Alleluia.’ He sat with a Christian group in the house of the converted widow Agatha, a former pagan, where Barnabas and Paul shared a room, and ate heartily and, for the most part, silently of what was put before him. He smacked his lips over the sweetish Syrian wine, belched discreetly and said:

  ‘He told you to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty. Am I not right? I am. Well, there are going to be enough of the hungry in Judaea, I can tell you. I never, to be honest, thought that this giving drink to the thirsty was more than a verbal flourish in a land where there is no shortage of water. Am I right? I think I am. Not only dreams, my friends, but factual reports. Three bad harvests in a row and corn already rising in price beyond the reach of the purses of the people.’

  ‘Not only Judaea,’ Barnabas said. ‘Even Italy. The Emperor Claudius is going to have his hands full. Empty, rather.’

  ‘Let him feed his own,’ a middle-aged man named Asaph said. ‘And his own ought to include the people of Judaea. With the Romans it’s all take and no give.’

  ‘Judaea has her own king now,’ Agabus said. ‘But he is above such petty matters as the feeding of the people. Am I not right? I am.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Let your new Gentile Christians learn about corporal works of mercy. There’s plenty of money here. Get it to Jerusalem. You and Barnabas here talk of going back there.’

  ‘For fresh instructions, yes,’ Barnabas said. ‘But only when we’ve finished our work here in Antioch. We’re still short of deacons.’

  ‘You’ll find no better work for the moment than taking money to Jerusalem. There’s corn to be bought in Egypt and figs in Cyprus. The price is high, but what can you expect? It’s going to get higher, get in there before it does. Am I not right? Let your Antioch faithful think of their Judaean brethren. This is a rich town.’

  ‘How are the grain stores in Judaea?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Enough for two months if there was a just distribution. But the rich are hoarding and Herod Agrippa counts his gold. You’ve an urgent business on your hands. I’m right there about the priority, I think. I know I’m right.’

  The brown blotches around the genitalia of the temple prostitute Fengari had yielded less to Luke’s medicaments than to time and nature’s own secret curative juices. Luke left the temple with his couple of silver pieces and was surprised to find bald Paul standing some ten yards away from the façade, looking up at the goddess in no posture of worship. Luke could not forbear to say:

  ‘Drinking your fill of the enemy?’

  Paul looked sharply at him. ‘Those too many breasts make her a very unseductive one. Have we met?’

  ‘Luke the physician. I heard you one day in the synagogue on Aish Lane, as they call it. Where the flour stores are.’

  ‘I think I saw you one day on the riverbank, looking like a man who would like to swim but fears the water may be cold.’

  ‘I wasn’t too happy,’ Luke said, ‘about that thaumaturgical cure of yours, if I may call it that. The old man who believed he couldn’t use his left arm. Then I thought: well, a cure is often a matter of confidence, which you would probably call faith.’

  ‘And what is your faith, Luke the physician? You have just come out of where I would not for the life of me go in.’

  ‘I was practising my skill, such as it is. One of the diseases of love.’ Paul winced at that, but the term eros was distinct from agape: still, in marriage, which might be called the licensing of the gifts of that goddess up there, one was supposed to be expressed through the other. Luke said: ‘You have walked all this way to frown at the polycolpous one? I rode and I ride back. There’s my bad-tempered nag Thersites. You’re welcome to ride behind me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Paul said. ‘As for the polycolpous one – a grotesque term but it has a kind of Homeric ring – she is both the enemy and not the enemy, if you understand me. I was thinking of our mother Eve, who brought us into the world and, with woman’s curiosity, meddled where she should have not and made the discovery of sin. Fleshly embraces are here glorified in a manner that goes against nature. Eve is somewhere behind all this. I fear the enemy but I too had a mother.’ He stood there brooding while Luke’s horse, finding no grass here and fretting, gnawed at the hitching post in the temple’s forecourt. ‘I do not,’ he said, in a manner somewhat defiant, as though countering an accusation, ‘wish to make war on women. The goddess, however, is no wraith or fiction – she is real enough. She has to be fought. There is the desert all beyond her, as you can see. She presides over no grass or trees or cornfields.’ He sighed. ‘The goddess is a great nuisance.’

  They rode together into town, Paul’s hard tent-making fingers digging into Luke to keep his balance. Paul said: ‘You did not answer my question. About your faith.’

  ‘I’m not yet ready to step into the water,’ Luke said. ‘It’s still too cold.’

  ‘Some need time to think. Others are very briskly assaulted and thought hardly comes into it. Well, take your time. When I come back you may have taken it.’

  ‘You’re leaving Antioch?’

  The moon was coming up, gibbous like the fractious Jew Amos. ‘The goddess,’ Paul said, ‘is only dead metal. But dead metal buys food. Yes, leaving for Jerusalem with Antioch money. But I shall be back.’ And then, entering the town, lively with the unregenerate, ‘I wish to God that were true. About her being dead metal, I mean.’

  Marcus Julius Tranquillus was transferred from the Praetorian Guard to the Ninth Legion; this could be interpreted as a sly gesture from the Emperor himself: if Julius wished to draw blood he had better do it with barbarians. For Claudius, whom the Senate had offered triumphant regalia, scorned such a bestowal without a genuine triumph, and he sought such a triumph in Britain. The Emperor whom Julius’s family claimed to have been a kinsman, though on the patrician side, had invaded Britain but achieved no conquest. Of Caligula’s sham you already know. Claudius sailed from Ostia, Julius with him in an officer cadre which would be assimilated into the Ninth Legion, at that time stationed in northern Gaul. It was not an easy voyage. They were twice nearly wrecked off the Ligurian coast, and there was a close shave when a storm suddenly broke off the Stoechades, but they made Massilia safely enough and then marched north to Gesoriacum. Thence, in clear weather, they crossed the water sleeve of the Channel and found the barbarians waiting for them. They were easily subdued.

  Claudius set himself up in an ornate tent on rich downland and admired the agricultural potential of southern Britain. But the time for intensive colonisation was not yet: now the simple aim was to collect barbaric loot and cart some yellow-locked prisoners back to Rome to grace an imperial triumph. Marcus Crassus Frugi, an experienced general officer, ordered the burning of a few native encampments and the slaughtering of their inhabitants, regardless of sex and age. On to Roman carts were loaded a great number of native artefacts which demonstrated that intricate art was not necessarily an index of high civilisation. The shields, swords and vessels were of bronze and iron and most elaborately ornamented with curlicues.

  Julius�
��s active military career did not last long. Two miles from the coast he and his raiding party chained up a line of prisoners and started to march them to the boats. Out of a thicket a pair of lone British warriors peered, saw a barelegged Roman officer giving orders, then launched spears at him. One of the spears went nowhere; the other, razor-sharp and well aimed, struck him deeply in the right leg. He cursed and tried to pull it out with both hands, but it was profoundly embedded. He had to call a common soldier. This soldier clucked commiseration and wrenched out the shaft, leaving the point in. Julius fainted. He came to to find himself lying in a barge, at the prow, with a misty vista of chalk cliffs receding. Disdainful brawny British prisoners looked at his agony and expressed no satisfaction. There was an orderly there staunching the blood with white wool whose fibres stuck to the lips of the wound.

  ‘Something seems to have got cut there, sir. Something inside. Have to leave it to nature, as they say. You won’t be on the march for a long time.’

  The imperial report spoke of no battles and no casualties, meaning Roman deaths. A great part of the southern section of the island had been subdued and garrisoned. The slow process of colonisation could, some time in the near future, be undertaken with right Roman seriousness. There was a splendid triumph in Rome, in which Marcus Julius Tranquillus did not take part. He was at home with his wife, who had just given birth to a daughter. This girl Sara insisted on naming Ruth, though the father wished to commemorate a loved aunt by calling her Flavia. Flavia or Ruth – one or the other, depending on circumstances. Julius limped round their bedroom, rocking the howling child. Sara looked from the bed, expressing no emotion. The noise of the triumphal bucinae could be heard even here on the Janiculum.

  Claudius beamed from his chariot, wearing the naval crown, which had a frieze of stylised ships’ beaks on it; it symbolised his conquest of the ocean, meaning twenty-odd miles of channel. Behind his chariot rode the Empress Messalina, beautiful as the moon. She had demanded that morning from her uxorious husband the gift of a military escort. She had, she said, enemies. Claudius had said that he would see what he could do. The victorious generals marched behind her, trouncers of bare-arsed barbarians who smelt like old dogs, wearing togas with purple borders which signified the honour they had won. Marcus Crassus Frugi, having earned the right to wear such a garment in a previous campaign – one waged against a real enemy, red-haired Danubians – disdained to wear one again. He rode a horse richly caparisoned, dressed in a tunic embroidered with palms, trees not native to the misty northern island he claimed, on the Emperor’s behalf, to have conquered.

  Back in Jerusalem King Herod Agrippa I was supervising the torture of a young Nazarene or (we had better stay with the Antiochian term) Christian, Simon the son of Cleopas, whom we have already met and abandoned. He said to the torturers:

  ‘Try again.’

  The two robed men – it was proper for torturers to go half-naked, but the royal cellars were cold – twisted the arms of Simon son of Cleopas round his back, upward till they neared breaking point. Simon yelled: ‘I don’t know, I tell you!’

  ‘The man Peter,’ Herod Agrippa demanded. ‘For the last time – where is he?’

  ‘They’re not in Jerusalem – any of them.’

  ‘Liar. They’ve gone to ground, haven’t they? I want to know where.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The king sat on a little stool and looked sternly at Simon. This was a historic cellar, and it still bore the marks of history – rusty bloodstains on the whitewashed walls. Here his grandfather, Herod the Great, had overseen the torture of servants of the Magi, those kings from the east who would not say where they were going. They knew, and the servants ought to have known too, but they had died of broken hearts or some such organ before disclosing their knowledge. What he, the grandson, was doing now had everything to do with Herod the Great’s failure to elicit the right response to his bone-cracking. That child had got away to Egypt but was, in a sense, responsible for the brutal deaths of all those innocents. If he had not been born those murders would not have taken place. Herod Agrippa now proposed more politic murders. He said:

  ‘You were seen with one of them yesterday. Who was it?’

  ‘I wasn’t – I didn’t—’

  ‘His name?’ The boy fainted.

  ‘Give him another baptism,’ Herod Agrippa ordered jocularly. A wooden bucket of Hebron water drenched the lad and brought him shuddering to.

  ‘Come on – his name.’

  This time a bone snapped, not at all audible in that wide empty cellar. Before the breaking of another, exacted more punitively than in the cause of interrogation, Herod Agrippa got what he was after. Then he went to a meeting with old Caiaphas who, these days, had to be carried everywhere, his legs having lost all power of locomotion. As they sat together in one of the royal parlours – its furnishings distressingly pagan to the old priest’s eyes – Herod Agrippa could see that Caiaphas was covertly disapproving of the swollen royal belly, which looked like a monstrous fruit of overindulgence rather than what it was – illness, illness, and grave illness. It would be cured, however. The chief physician was awaiting an infallible purge from Cyprus. Herod Agrippa thought much of death, but not for himself. He said now:

  ‘This James is by way of being the resident leader of the Nazarenes. But it’s Peter I’m really after. He’s the head of the whole body. Lop him off and the whole movement will die.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Well, whether I am or not, it will please the people. And one of my royal tasks is to keep the people happy.’

  ‘You could best please the people by giving them bread.’

  ‘Things will come right. We’re going to have a bumper harvest. To return to James. I’ve found out where he is. We could have a quick trial in which all the blame for the grain shortage could be laid at the Nazarene door. God’s displeasure and so on.’

  ‘James,’ Caiaphas said, ‘has not greatly offended against the Jewish law. Even in the conduct of Nazarene policy he’s been scrupulous in avoiding talk about the equality of Jew and Gentile. Most take him to be a good orthodox Jew who believes that the Messiah has arrived and departed. He has no enemies that I know of.’

  ‘All right,’ the king said. ‘But if it’s Peter we want, and such of his confederates as are still here, the beheading of James will smoke him and them out. But it’s him I have chiefly in mind. He’s the true blasphemer. James is merely available.’

  ‘I’m uneasy about this,’ Caiaphas said. ‘A little. The man about whom I have no scruple of conscience at all is the Saul who now calls himself by another name. There is a renegade self-confessed, and I understand he is now in Judaea.’

  ‘But very cunning. And ready to plead the rights of a Roman citizen. Too dangerous, too difficult. And anyway it wouldn’t be expedient to catch him even if we could. He’s brought money from Antioch to buy bread for the people. The people are stupid. It would be hard to persuade them that such a man is a criminal.’

  ‘Criminality is never expunged by good works.’

  ‘Tell that to hungry Jerusalem. I prefer to tell them that the present shortages are the fault of the Nazarenes. God’s displeasure at their heresy is visited on the whole of the Jewish people. The blood of James will gratify the Lord God. It will smell sweet in his nostrils.’

  ‘And yet your majesty, if I may speak boldly, believes none of these things.’

  ‘Oh, I believe in a single faith for a single people. That’s policy. And, of course, I believe in the godhead. I even believe in those human attributes we attach to the godhead. The Emperor Gaius, now rotting in hell if there is a hell, taught me some things. The king is the Lord’s anointed and therefore God’s visible representative on earth. When does my effigy go into the Temple?’

  ‘That cannot happen – this you know. The Sanhedrin is unanimously against it. For your majesty’s own protection. And, whatever your majesty wishes, we have a faith to uphold.’

>   ‘Oh, yes. The sacred eternal Jewish faith in the great unloving loving merciful vindictive father of the tribes. Forgive my private scepticism. I’ve lived in the great world. Rome, I mean.’

  James the son of Zebedee was picked up without much difficulty in the cellar of Cleopas. He was imprisoned without trial and led out to the forecourt of the Temple for his execution in the Roman manner – head on the block, decapitation by sword – a hefty broadsword sharpened on both its edges to an exquisite fineness. He came, hands bound before him, aware that he was the first of the apostles to meet a martyr’s end and perversely content accordingly. With him was his personal guard Ezra. These two and the executioner marched to a soft drumbeat towards the block. The crowd was murmurous but not loud. Herod Agrippa sat on a portable throne. He raised his finger for the drumbeat to cease and then he addressed his subjects, crying, and each impulse of his voice caused a stab in his vitals: ‘People of Judaea, brothers in the holy faith, we are met to witness a just act of execution. Our faith has been assailed by a noxious heresy. The heretics have met great tolerance, for the Jewish people are large of heart and unprejudiced of mind, but Gentile pollutions have sickened our stomachs and quelled our tolerance. Israel is a unity and must stand as a unity. We are one people and one faith and the strength of that faith must find expression not solely in passive piety but in the occasional flash of the sword of just punition. Especially, I may say, when the Lord God shows his displeasure. Has he not shown that displeasure by striking us with famine? The man James stands condemned. Executioner, do your work.’

  Ezra the bodyguard now spoke clearly. ‘King of Israel, if I may be allowed to speak, I have been the custodian of James since the moment of his arrest. I find nothing but good in him. I am become one of his faith. If he deserves to die I too deserve to die. But I will not die without denouncing the injustice of this butchery.’