Great Lion of God

by Taylor Caldwell

  The stench and noise and the press of bodies stunned Saul. Not even in Tarsus had there been this vivacity, this fury, this determined rapine, this feverish rage of sale and bargaining, this smell of rotting vegetation and dust and vinegary wine and resin and garlic and crowding animals and roasting meat. He forgot that the markets close to his house in the suburbs were of superior quality and decorum, and nothing at all like this turmoil of buying and selling. As he had never bought anything in a bazaar in Tarsus he thought the goods displayed here were abominable, and he wondered who bought them and who desired them. Merchants stretched forth hands to grasp his cloak or his arm, imploring him to buy, and he pulled away from them in disgust, and looked at the Roman soldiers with umbrage and bitterness. And when one or two, not entirely drunk as yet, paused in their guzzling of their wine or whiskey bottles, caught his eye they stared in astonishment at the hard blue fire of it, and nudged each other and winked uneasily. They saw his hatred, and it puzzled them. One or two were annoyed. They pushed back their helmets, with the crests of horsehair, and wanted to challenge this silent but angry young man, but their companions held them back and whispered in their ears, and they laughed and forgot him. They had been warned over and over by their captains and centurions that they were not to antagonize Jews, who, on occasion, could be very formidable and very troublesome.

  Saul, wishing to escape, ran down the last steps of the marketplace, dodging animals, men, women, children, beggars, soldiers. He emerged onto a large open place, paved with yellow gravel and surrounded on two sides by the yellow walls so prevalent in Jerusalem. It, too, seethed with people, but as it was big and broad the press was not too heavy, the animals not so ubiquitous. Here and there stone benches were scattered, for the benefit of the weary. Saul sank down on one of them and as he did so the clouds parted and the golden autumn sun emerged, warming and brilliant, bathing everything in a broad mass of brilliance, brightening robes and gravel and wall, turning the sky to the hard luminescence of blue and polished stone, making resonant with color every solitary thing it touched, shining on the dusty clumps of palms and cypresses, and outlining the city in shelves of light.

  Saul slowly became aware that some short distance before him a woman was sitting wearily on a stone bench, a spare peasant woman dressed in dull brown garments and a blue headcloth and with bare dusty feet in thonged sandals. Her head was bent; she appeared to be meditating; her hands lay slackly on her knees, the palms turned upwards in an ancient pose of exhaustion and resignation, as if her hands had worked hard and long and could work no more for a pace, and she had come here to rest. The autumn sun was tawny on her tired thin shoulders; it glistened on her lashes which drooped; it illuminated one pale cheek and gave it a semblance of healthy color. But the lower part of her face and her hair were concealed by the headcloth which she had drawn over her mouth and nose and brow against the bright but nimble wind.

  She was only a poor woman, probably from the hills of Samaria or Galilee or another of the farming provinces, but she caught Saul’s unwilling attention. He did not know why he stared at her bent head and why her depleted attitude attracted him. She had come a long way for the Holy Days. A basket stood near her knee and two doves were held there, for the sacrifice, all that such a woman could offer. She seemed a member of the Amaratzim, those who labored in meager vineyards or stony fields and milked goats or tended geese or picked fruit. Her feet were partly turned, as if to rest them. Saul guessed that she was a middle-aged woman about thirty-five years of age or somewhat younger, for her figure was not shapeless, even under that shapeless brown garment, and her ankles, he saw, were delicate and very thin. She appeared to be dozing in the warm brown-gold sunlight and her breath hardly raised the cloth on her breast.

  She was very insignificant in appearance and Saul was irritated by the fact that he was caught by something in her attitude. Jerusalem was filled with thousands of such women; the streets were restless with endless clusters of them. They carried baskets on their heads or their shoulders, or they came from afar to the Temple on such days. They were not extraordinary. Yet, Saul could not look away. Where were her children, her husband, that she sat in such mute abandonment and heavy drowsiness? Was she a widow, childless? The woman dozed, or brooded.

  He wished he could see her face so that he could guess if she were widow or maid, young or old. The wind lifted her headcloth and she raised her hand suddenly to catch it and restore it over her nose and mouth. And so Saul saw her face, full and turned toward him, and he was incredulous at her beauty. He thought of a waterlily, waxen and pale and smooth and fresh, open to the brilliant light of the day. Her mouth was softly rose and sad, yet full in contour, the lower lip indented like the lip of a very young girl. There was something Grecian in the long shape of her white nose with the delicate nostrils, and the still and unwrinkled calm of her broad brow. Her chin was rounded and dimpled, her cheeks fragile and without tint. He saw her eyes, very large and blue, with gilt lashes, and as her headcloth fluttered he saw that her hair was a clear soft gold, straight and shining. It was a regal face, serene yet touched with sorrow, thoughtful yet living, not placid but restrained and gentle, a face from Galilee.

  She is but a girl, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the light changed a little and she was old, as old as his mother would have been if she had lived, and that would be thirty-five. She was regarding him with a mild but steady interest, as if he had spoken to her and she was trying to remember him. Then her lips parted and she smiled gently and her blue eyes radiated a mournful but sympathetic recognition. He felt an almost irresistible urge to rise and go to her and tell her his name, and inquire of hers. Instantly, he was vexed. She was only a peasant woman, and she believed she knew him while he knew her not. He began to stir, readying himself for leaving before she spoke and embarrassed him by some simple boldness or impertinence.

  But her beauty, as beautiful as a statue’s, held him, and a kind of reluctant and angry awe touched him, for rude hills did not breed such women for all her dress. She had the aspect of a queen garbed as a peasant for her amusement. Her hands, he saw now, for all their work-worn appearance, were as delicate as her face, narrow and exquisitely formed. And her radiant eyes studied him, not in crude boldness, but with maternal interest and affection. Now the light about her changed once more and she appeared as young as his sister, Sephorah, and as untouched and fresh, and even younger.

  A young man approached her, as rudely clad in sand-colored garments, his feet shod as hers. He was, in appearance, some years older than Saul, a man in his first adult years, and Saul thought he must be the woman’s brother for he resembled her closely. His hair was the same color as hers, and his young beard also, and he seemed as worn with work and as weary. His feet and garments were dusty; the dust in the folds of the cloth had turned golden in the sunlight, and the leather purse that hung at his rope girdle was very lean. He was moving slowly, as if he, too, had come a long distance, and his cheeks were haggard with weariness. But he smiled down at the woman and now she raised her eyes to him and suddenly her face was shimmering with love and pleasure at the sight of him. He carried a large grape leaf in his cupped hands and it was filled with smoking spiced meat, aromatic and appetizing. He laid it in the woman’s hands.

  “Thank you, Yeshua, my son,” she said. She spoke in Aramaic and her voice was soft and ineffably sweet.

  Saul was astonished. It was incredible that this girl, this very young woman, was the mother of this man of at least twenty-one years or perhaps more. The man squatted on his heels and reached into the basket which contained the doves and he brought out a leather pouch and produced a spoon for his mother. Then he sat beside her and he looked down at her with benign dignity and answering love. “You are very tired, Mother,” he said. “Eat and be refreshed.”

  “Tinoki,” she murmured, the endearing word of a mother to her beloved child. He touched one of her hands and said, “Emi.” He took the spoon from her and, like a father, he
dipped it into the grape tear and lifted food in it and solicitously raised it to his mother’s lips. She ate obediently, smiling, her eyes fixed on his benevolent face as if she could not have enough of the seeing.

  “I thought you had—left me,” she said, and now her lips quivered and she was no longer smiling.

  “Not yet, Emi,” he said. Saul, watching in a fascination he could not help but which he vaguely resented, was struck by the young man’s voice, for it was deep and strong as a venerable rabbi’s with strange and moving undertones like half-heard music. “You will know when I must go. You will not be unprepared.”

  Tears appeared in her eyes. She bent her head to hide them as if ashamed. “Forgive me,” she said, almost inaudibly. “But I am weak today. Forgive me, Tinoki.”

  He lovingly and compassionately touched the side of her cheek with his fingers, the vibrant strong fingers of a workman. She humbly took the spoon from him and ate of the food he had brought and he watched her with a deep and wistful devotion as if he were pondering on some pain he had caused her or was about to cause her. His own pain was obvious, as if his very vitals had been wounded, and yet he smiled down at his mother and urged her to eat when she faltered.

  I have not been such a son to my mother, thought Saul, and it seemed to him that the pain of the strangers had reached out to him and had touched his own heart with a finger of fire. Deborah, in the light of the woman opposite him, took on a kind of radiance from her, as though she were the mother of all mothers, and women drew light from her. It was a foolish thought, Saul commented to himself, restlessly, but it held him. Deborah had been but a child who had never attained womanhood, a petulant beautiful child who had never been satisfied with her husband and her son and had complained in her pretty voice incessantly; the world had not given her her just deserts. Still, in this woman’s presence the memory of Deborah became sorrowful to Saul and he felt his first real grief for his mother, and he could not understand it.

  Saul thought, He is her son, and she is only a woman, yet he regards her with the respect the Greeks once gave their gods, and he is gentle with her and inexplicably tender, as if, above all women, and perhaps all men, she is the most beloved to him and the most precious and sanctified.

  Respect for mothers was implicit in the religion of the Jews, but Saul had often thought it too elaborate and very often undeserved. He said Kaddish obediently for Deborah, and often wondered where that child-soul reposed and in what flowery nursery it played, or if lit slept in the dust like a flower on which an iron heel had been imprinted. Yet, his mother had not been a plain woman such as this woman, and she had been born of a venerable and illustrious house, land had been a patrician and the name of her fathers was honored in the gates of the city. In her way, she had had some learning; she was no stranger to the arts of the Hellenistic culture if she were, indeed, less understanding of the religion of her fathers. Why had he not honored her as this probably unlettered workman from some scorching hill obviously honored his mother? Deborah had been almost as beautiful and certainly charming. I have been a son, thought Saul, watching the two near him, with a cold and obdurate heart. Forgive me, my mother. You did not love me and I did not love you wholly but I should have honored you. Am I less than this obscure man who regards his mother as the holiest and purest and sweetest of all creatures, and esteems her with every gesture and every glance of his eye? Alas, I am less. I am much less.

  The young man reached for the basket with the doves and drew out a leather bottle of wine and a brass cup. He opened the bottle and Saul caught a scent of the wine; it was poor and cheap and acrid. The young man filled the cup and held it to his mother’s lips with deference and she drank, her eyes again on his, blue and beaming. The attitude of the two, sitting in the hard and lonely sunlight, friendless and alone, was excessively touching for all its stately posture, its proud simplicity. Crowds hurried along the great courtyard; shadows were deep purple and sharp; voices and footsteps were noisy; children darted everywhere, and merchants with carts screamed and uttered imprecations. Yet these two sat in a mysterious isolation as if unseen by all but Saul, and unseeing except for each other, the one giving profoundly, the other taking with humility. Saul had seen the man’s arm as it had emerged from his garments. It was brown from the sun, and muscular and masculine, familiar with labor, endowed with the ability to lift and carry with ease. His ankles and feet, too, were brown. They had known the soil of pastures and stony places, of torrid noons and bitter winds.

  “We are all one, all sons before our Father, blessed be His Name,” Hillel ben Borush often repeated. As that was a doctrine of the Jews Saul had believed it, but only intellectually except for one short interlude. But all at once he truly felt a oneness with these people before Dim and he wanted to speak in spite of his pride.

  It was then, as if Saul had truly spoken, that the young man turned his kingly head to him and looked at him fully. Their eyes met, and it seemed to Saul that his heart raised itself and shook and all his limbs were disturbed. The azure of the peasant’s eyes seemed to advance on him, as if in truth he had risen and was approaching the youth, holding him powerfully with his gaze. All sound disappeared from Saul’s consciousness. Now he had been drawn into the circle of remote silence and isolation with these two, and they were alone together.

  To Saul, there came a sensation as of deep and unearthly fear as well as of massive force drawing him to the young man. All his mind was assaulted by something mysterious and compelling, yet terrible. Part of his soul said to him, “It is absurd, for you are Saul ben Hillel, of the Tribe of Benjamin, and learned and of a noble house, and your name is not despised even among the proudest and the most royal, and this man before you is nothing but a peasant and possibly cannot even write his name! Therefore, why should he draw you to him and why is your heart inflamed and troubled and bounding like a lamb?”

  But another part of his soul said to him, “Arise and go to him.”

  The young man was gazing at him quietly, his expression still and grave and curiously alert, and sad. Yet his lips were smiling faintly, as if he, too, had recognized Saul and knew him for what he was. The golden brows almost met above the large deep eyes; the wind ruffled the golden hair and beard. So clear was the light, so vivid the concentration of the stranger upon Saul, that Saul himself saw more intensely than usual. He saw the dim blue shadows below those pale cheekbones, as if pain dwelt there without surcease. He saw the veins in the white temples, and the throbbing of the browned throat.

  The woman, too, was gazing at Saul, the brass cup near her lips. Her hand trembled a little.

  They are sorcerers! thought Saul, and the terror increased in him for all a portion of his mind laughed at this superstition. So he sprang to his feet in disorder and he fled from that place and did not look back and did not cease his hurried steps until he entered the marketplace again. And the clamor and cries rose up about him and the masses of the people lurched against him, and he was free from his enchantment and the clangor of the world had never seemed so dear and safe to him as it did now, and so protecting.

  I have escaped! he thought. From what he had escaped he did not know, but he was sweating violently. He felt he had been in some awesome jeopardy, but the jeopardy was unknown. He bought a handful of ripe figs and ate them greedily. Then slowly, he began to laugh at himself and to wonder at the emotions he had felt. He walked on, looking at the little shops with a friendly contempt and amusement. He looked at the pretty dark-faced slave girls and felt aversion, and then a vague pity for their state. When he came out again into sunshine he said to himself, “I am alone, and lost, and I do not know why.”

  It was then that he heard or thought he heard a tremendous, familiar voice calling to him: “Saul, Saul of Tarshish!”

  He looked about him wildly, but only the market rabble and the merchants were about him and the asses and the camels and the screaming children as they raced up and down the broad shallow stone of the steps. I am going mad, he tho
ught. They have laid a spell upon me, and he ran again, murmuring aloud the prayers against the evil eye. And then he stood, trembling, the figs in his hand. He had heard that voice before, in his bedroom, in the holy Temple, and he was covered with a dread confusion.

  The house of Aulus Platonius and Hannah bas Judah was in an unpretentious section of the city not far, alas, from the Street of the Cheesemakers. Therefore, the air was permeated at all seasons, in all days and nights, with the odor of sour, ripe or new cheese. To Hillel, remembering it, it had a reassuring scent; it was sound and earthy and full of authority and permanence, unlike the graceful and perfumed gardens of Shebua ben Abraham and his sons, which seemed—to Hillel at least—to have the odor of decay and transience and graves, not to mention decadence.

  Aulus, as a rich man, and Hannah, as a rich woman, could well have lived on the heights of a mount in a fine villa with many slaves and servants, but they were frugal. They resembled each other in temperament; their tastes were simple, not out of deliberate ostentation or because of penuriousness, but because simplicity was of their nature. They had a fine library, the heritage Hannah had received from her father, and beautiful gardens of flowers and vegetables and fruit trees and palms, though the gardens were of necessity small in that crowded area. A single fountain stood in the center of yellow graveled paths, and in the shade of a karob or sycamore tree Hannah would work with her few women.

  In all this, Hannah also bore a resemblance to Clodia Flavius. Hannah, however, was of different attributes, soft of voice, deferential of manner, meek of gesture, gentle in speech, hesitant to advance an opinion, sweetly anxious to please, and of a will which made Clodia’s seem to be as bending grass. The large brown eyes in the shelter of thick black lashes might appear to be the eyes of a doe, but a certain glint in them could make the burly Aulus quail and daughters tremble. As an “old” Jewish woman she kept her hair covered, but sometimes a brown strand of it, as frail as silk, would drop over her calm forehead. Her face was as round as a coin and expressed absolute innocence and womanliness, and her lips were tender and her complexion pale gold, for though, like Hillel, her forebears had come from Galilee she had the darkness of the Judean. Hillel loved her dearly; she had been like an elder sister to him from his childhood. He also remembered the weight of her hand in less loving moments. If, indeed, “all her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace,” Hannah bas Judah was queen of the household and, Hillel often smilingly suspected, the king also.