by Ryu Mitsuse
Suddenly, the prince heard laughter in his ears. The sound made his chest quiver as though he were a bow of silver and an archer had drawn him to full; his mind echoed with the noise.
“What are you laughing about, Maitreya? I am Siddhārtha, Prince of the Kingdom of Śākya. I came here to see you, our future savior. I’ve come all the way to the very root of Tuṣita.”
Instantly, the laughter stopped. All was enveloped in deep silence again, a silence more frightening than death.
“Look upon Maitreya, my prince,” Asura’s voice whispered by his ear. The prince started but stood his ground, staring upward from Maitreya’s massive foot.
Suddenly, he felt as though he had made some terrible mistake, though what it was he could not be sure. He peered around him like a frightened child. Something was wrong. He looked back up at Maitreya, the hope gone from his eyes.
It was not a man, but a statue—a giant, silvery statue, marred here and there by ugly gouts of rust. The statue sat silent as a mountain by the edge of the sea of pale blue light.
“Well, my prince? This is a statue of Maitreya. A statue of the great being who will come down to the world of men in 5,670,000,000 years to save us all.” Asura spoke in a singsong voice, mocking the prince’s faith.
The prince turned, slowly, as though he had suddenly aged another twenty or thirty years, and looked at her. “Where did Maitreya go?”
Asura shook her head. Her necklace gave a little death rattle across the slender, girlish lines of her neck.
“Where did Maitreya go?” the prince muttered, pressing his hand to his head. He had a splitting headache; cold sweat dripped down his back and chest.
“To tell the truth,” Asura said suddenly, “no one knows what the statue represents. The Brahmins gave it the name Maitreya. My prince, it was the men who came to play here in Tuṣita who made up that story about a god who would come to save them in the far future.”
“That is too cruel. Everyone believes in the coming of Maitreya. It cannot be a lie . . .” he said, his voice trailing off into a hoarse whisper.
“My prince, look again upon the statue. This giant statue was built to an exact likeness.”
“An exact likeness? So there truly is a Maitreya, then?”
Asura shrugged her shoulders and stepped in front of the prince, staring deep into his eyes. The breath that passed her ruby lips carried with it a fragrance of flowers, and it brought him back to his senses. “Asura! Which is it?”
“Have you understood, my prince? Do you know whose statue that is? Not even Brahmā, ruler of this world, does. The great god after whom that statue was modeled was a resident from another world who visited this region and claimed it for his own. This world is to be ruled from without, you see. Five billion six hundred seventy million years from now, he will once again appear in this world and determine the fate of all who remain here. That is what they call Maitreya.”
“What of salvation? What of salvation in the time of the last dharma?” The prince shook with rage. It was too cruel. The truth was the exact opposite of everything for which mankind was waiting.
“Let us go, my prince. We can stare at the statue all we like, but no salvation will come of it. Do not worry. You can be like Brahmā and still believe if you want to. It’s all right. This god will visit Jambudvīpa, your world, at the appointed hour. He will be born to a mother, Brahmavati, and a father, Subrahmana. That is all true. But what will Maitreya do in your world when he comes?
“Brahmā did not listen to my warnings. I doubt you will accept the reality of the situation either. The sutra that the Brahmin like to read about Maitreya and Tuṣita tells a compelling story. One always likes to hear about paradise. What would you give to secure that paradise, I wonder? Your wisdom? Your life? Your heart? There is still time. Plenty of time to think, my prince.”
Asura’s voice grew increasingly distant and faint.
The dry, barren sea of sand spread beneath a dark sky. The scattered remnants of life and the fragmented ruins of buildings visible in all directions were ample proof that nothing lived here anymore.
“Prince Siddhārtha?”
Asura stood, the flickering aurora at her back.
“There’s one more thing I wish to ask you.”
Asura stared intently into the night. “I think I can guess.”
The prince looked around and saw a giant, fiery orange sphere rising massively toward the top of the sky. Its brilliance scorched the night, vaporizing a vast expanse of sand below. A wave of heat and radiation moved across the plain like a tsunami, leaving nothing in its wake.
“You want to ask why I still fight with Brahmā, my prince?”
Strangely shaped ships cut silently across the arc of night, appearing from the darkness of one horizon, vanishing into the darkness of the other.
“My prince, as the Brahmin tell it, I was spurred to invade this Tuṣita by past karma and have been fighting Śakra’s armies for some four hundred million years. Past karma, my prince. Have you thought about what that might mean? How did this past karma come about in the first place?”
Brilliant flashes of light erupted from the horizon where the strange ships had disappeared. Siddhārtha had no idea what form Asura’s armies might take, but he imagined that the armada of ships in the sky might well be part of them.
“We will meet another day, my prince. You should go. The Brahmins will be worried.”
Siddhārtha thought he should say some word of farewell to the beautiful girl, but no words came to mind. And he felt certain that Asura was right—they would meet again, some day far in the future.
The prince put his hands together and bowed to Asura, then silently turned and began to walk away. After he had gone a short distance, he turned to look back and found that she, the flickering aurora, and the brilliant lights that cut across the sky were all gone without a trace.
An icy wind blew from the empty dark.
Was it all an illusion?
The prince stared long into the darkness, trying to see beyond it. The image of that girl who could not possibly be Asura, and yet who was Asura beyond a shadow of a doubt, was forever burned like a brand into his heart.
In the beginning was the Word.
And the Word was with God.
And the Word was God.
The large scallop shells hanging in the corner of the room rattled like dry bones as the air stirred.
“Come in,” Pontius Pilate called out as he tossed his writing quill down on the desk.
What a grating racket those shells make, he thought. I’ll have to have them replaced. They had hung from his ceiling ever since a merchant from the East had given them to him as a gift many years before—and Pilate had hated them for almost as long.
A hand brushed aside the curtain in the doorway and his advisor, Ceint, entered, catching his breath. “Prefect!” he huffed.
“What is it, Ceint? I don’t think I’ve seen you looking so agitated in my life.”
“Well, it was most unexpected,” the advisor grumbled, brushing back his cape and folding his thick arms across his chest.
“What was?” Pilate leaned forward.
“That carpenter fellow, Jesus of Nazareth—Yeshua, the locals call him. He’s come to Jerusalem.”
“Made his move at last, has he? That complicates matters.” The wrinkles deepened on Pilate’s brow. The carpenter from Nazareth had already been giving him headaches for the past four or five days; he could only imagine what it would be like now that the man was sharing the same city.
“What about the Jewish priests—what do the kohanim have to say about all this?”
If there was anything that gave Pilate bigger headaches than prophet carpenters, it was the kohanim.
“Plenty. They’ve been gathering in the courtyard in front of the hall since a short while ago.”
Pilate cursed under his breath and looked in the direction of the courtyard—though several walls stood between it and his quarters. Th
e white petals of a large dragon-tongue orchid that sat in the window swayed in the breeze.
“Well? Drive them off, Ceint!”
His advisor frowned uneasily. “Er . . . I’m afraid that if we ignore the kohanim’s feelings on this matter we’ll pay dearly for it later.” Ceint knew as well as Pilate that governing Israel without the support of the priesthood would be an exercise in futility. It was his acceptance of this fact that made him such a valuable advisor. “Which is to say,” he continued, “it’s almost tax collection time, and their requests for exemption grow louder with each year.”
This Pilate knew without being told. The Jewish clergy’s tax payments accounted for a good four tenths of his entire income from the Roman territories of Israel. It was one of his most important duties as Prefect of Jerusalem and representative of Rome in Israel to badger the kohanim into coughing up a portion of the coin they received from their congregations.
Ceint was warming to his topic. “Prefect, the missteps of the Roman empire in recent years have made it very difficult to administer these provincial territories. Even the proud Roman army is mostly made up of foreign mercenaries these days. Should the unthinkable happen and an uprising against the Empire take place here in Israel, I do not think we can expect much support from the homeland. We must keep that in mind when dealing with the locals.”
This too, Pilate knew, and the knowledge gnawed at him. Just as the midday sun begins to descend toward the western horizon the moment it reaches its zenith, the Roman Empire had begun to weaken year by year, almost imperceptibly, yet with undeniable certainty. The word had passed from mouth to mouth in the markets, dispersing in every direction on the lips of Jewish pilgrims, until every scruffy-headed street urchin in the province knew it for a fact. This knowlege gave the kohanim more influence and made it easier for them to be openly defiant of Rome and her representative.
“Prefect!” someone shouted from outside the room.
“What’s that now?”
Ceint went out to check.
Pilate heard his advisor and another man speaking intently outside. His head felt heavy. They had thrown a banquet the night before for Tethias, the head of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, and it had left him exhausted. Tethias was a famous lover of alcohol, and the wine they had served, made from some grain grown in lands to the east, was heady stuff. The morning light had already begun painting stripes of light across the dusty cobblestones of Jerusalem’s inner streets when Tethias’s men had helped the inebriated prefect back to his quarters.
“Macillus!” he called. “Where’s Macillus?”
The door in the rear opened and the prefect’s servant came sidling out. “Yes, Master?”
“There you are, Macillus. I require a bath.”
“Very good, Prefect.”
Macillus shuffled from the room, his belt of silver chains clinking across his wine-colored sheepskin tunic.
Ceint came hurrying back in. “Prefect?”
“What is it now?”
“Simon has come with a request from the kohanim.”
“So? What do they want this time?”
Ceint leaned in closer. Pilate caught a whiff of scented oil.
“They want you to arrest Jesus and hand him over to the Sanhedrin . . . or execute him yourself.”
“What? Since when do the kohanim give orders to the representative of Rome?” He spat. “Fine. If it’s blood they want, then it’s blood they’ll get!”
Pontius Pilate picked up the longsword that rested behind his chair and strode out of the room, his face flushed with anger.
Ceint yelped. “Wait, Prefect, wait!” He scurried to stand in front of his chief, holding out both hands in desperation. “You must wait!”
Pilate paused, his jaw twitching with the embarrassment of being manipulated by the kohanim. How could one rule a people if you were forever frightened of angering them?
“Prefect! Er, I was thinking—what if we gave this Jesus a summons instead? It would look better than arresting him. After all, he has committed no crime.
“If necessary,” Ceint continued in that way he had of stating things so evenly that one might take them to mean whatever one wished, “I could do the questioning myself.”
Pilate considered. If they served this “prophet” with a summons now, they would always be able to jail him afterward under the pretext of incivility toward a Roman agent.
“Not a terrible idea,” the prefect admitted with a sigh. In truth, it was a great annoyance to him to have to question and try heretics. Prolocutors of faith had a way with words, but they always seemed to lack a basic grasp on logic—and yet pointing out their errors never seemed to have any effect, much to Pilate’s consternation.
“Perhaps, Prefect,” Ceint continued, sensing his master’s hesitation, “we should have a look at this Jesus fellow first. I will be happy to join you. We can watch him anonymously, then decide his fate.”
If they did so, Pilate knew, Ceint would be sure to slowly win him over to his way of thinking. But the realization did not upset him. It was often the case that Ceint’s stated plans were what the prefect had been unconsciously planning anyway—another reason that he was such a good and loyal advisor.
“Right. Let’s go see for ourselves what all the fuss is about.”
Pilate returned his longsword to its customary place behind the chair and stuck his head into the gallery behind the office.
“We’re going out.”
Pontius Pilate mounted his horse and Ceint walked beside him. Several guardsmen completed the entourage, one holding the horse’s bridle, the others bearing spears.
“Where do you think he is?”
“Preaching in the Plaza of the Dead, most likely.”
“He’s popular?”
Ceint looked up at Pilate with a frown. “Quite popular, strangely enough.”
“He’d have to be to get the kohanim so riled up.”
Ceint pulled his long robes more tightly around his body. “He came into Jerusalem last night. I hear he was proselytizing out to the west, saying something about receiving a revelation from God.”
Pilate squinted—a habit of his whenever he was particularly wary about something. “How have people been responding?”
“Apparently, many in the city knew of his imminent arrival half a month ago. Some disciples of his, a group of twelve or so from what I hear, came to the city ahead of time to do some publicity.”
“Aggressive, aren’t they?”
“He’s calling his arrival ‘The Entry into Jerusalem,’ ” Ceint said with evident derision.
“Fancies himself some sort of great religious leader, then?”
Ceint nodded. “This is what has gotten the Jewish priesthood so, as you say, riled up.”
If the man was as big a braggart as it sounded, Pilate thought the kohanim probably had the right of it. This carpenter turned preacher was a fool, and worse, a popular fool.
The entourage made its way down the cobblestone streets, turning into the arcade that led toward the Plaza of the Dead. The merchants there, who had spread their wares so thickly upon the street as to block all but a narrow stream of foot traffic, panicked at the sudden arrival of the Romans and hurriedly gathered their wares and took shelter beneath the eaves of the houses. One who was late in pulling up his blanket received a whack on the back from the haft of one of the guards’ spears.
It was then that a bundle of greens tied with a hempen cord flew out of the crowd and struck Pontius Pilate directly in the chest. Pilate’s face went red, but before he could react further, Ceint stepped to the leader of the guards and whispered an order in his ear. The guard captain took three of his men and plunged into the milling crowd. The two remaining pointed the tips of their long spears toward the throng that had gathered around the horse.
“Prefect, they have caught the man responsible.”
Pilate looked to see his guardsmen dragging a young man out of the crowd by both arms. The man was wailin
g something, a look of torrid fear upon his face. An old woman clung to his shirttail and howled. It was hard to see her clearly in the dim light of the stone arcade, but her despairing cries were clearly audible above the noise of the onlookers.
Ceint strode over to the captive. He said something to the guard captain, who pointed the gleaming tip of his spear at the young man’s chest. The unexpected silence that came over the crowd in that instant planted a sudden black fear in Pilate’s heart.
The guard captain tensed his muscular arms. In a moment, the spear would surely pierce the captive’s chest.
“Wait!”
A sharp and yet oddly calm voice sounded from amidst the crowd behind Pilate’s horse.
“What?”
The Roman prefect turned his horse around to look.
A lone man stood in the middle of the street.
His face was gaunt, framed by a long beard and long hair that was gray with ash. His eyes gave off a piercing light. He held a gnarled stick of wood in his right hand as a walking staff.
“Will you not spare the life of this young man? Lord Pontius Pilate, great emissary of Rome, humbly, I beg your pity,” the man said with a reverent bow. His face and body were soiled and his bearing no better than a slave’s, yet something in his manner struck Pilate as earnestly noble.
“And who might you be?”
The man lifted his face. The clear look in his eyes made Pilate swallow despite himself.
“I am Peter, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, son of the Almighty . . . He whom you call ‘Zeus,’ our Father and Lord in Heaven.”
Pilate gritted his teeth. He couldn’t have met a worse person at a worse time. “Are you aware that this young man threw a bundle of filthy leaves at my person?”
“Lord Prefect, are these green leaves that were thrown to you not a token of God’s blessing upon this very land of Israel which you govern? It is God, after all, who has given us these life-sustaining grains and vegetables. God’s love be praised!”
Peter intertwined the fingers of his hands and knelt upon the cobblestones in supplication. The members of the crowd mimicked his actions, falling to their knees and bowing to Pilate atop his horse.