The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  9.

  The merchant’s daughter and her slave left the house early one morning. Once, before her marriage, she had walked short distances, such as the trip to the marketplace or to the temple. But her husband expected her to travel in the incognito of the palanquin, now that she was married. Her parents made no comment, but they were not surprised by her appearance in state on the ordinary occasion of her visit. She took the palanquin, both she and the slave inside, she sprawling at full length, her slave kneeling. The house porters were expert, with no tossing or pitching. She liked to see the life of the street through the chinks in the curtain. On the corner, there was a familiar beggar. His face was rotted away, a sad black hole in the place where the nose would have been. She had no idea what his name was, and had never heard anyone refer to him in any way. She rapped on the wooden roof of the palanquin, painted with stars, and the porters set it down. Inside, she quickly wrapped her face and head in a veil, and held her hand out for the shawl that her slave always brought, in case of evening chills. It was a beautiful, fine, expensive shawl in a pale green; it would slip through a ring. It had been given to her by her mother, whose shawl it had originally been. Now it was folded up. She thought how uncomfortable the beggar must be, unable to veil himself from the hot wind and flung fine sand. And if he did not need it, he could sell it for food. In a moment, she slipped out of the palanquin. She was out of a world of shadows and dimness, where nothing was clearly seen, and into the world. She was veiled in the heat, but there was still much more of the world there for her, and she was standing in it among humanity. She shocked herself with the feeling of joy. She stood before the beggar, who must have seen that she was a great lady, and kept his eyes lowered as if in shame. ‘Take this,’ she said, and handed the beautiful green shawl to him. She did not wait to hear his thanks or gratitude. She turned quickly and slipped back into the shadowed light of the palanquin, not looking to see what the porters thought of her gift. She rapped again on the ceiling, unveiling herself. Her slave bowed her head as if expecting a beating. The palanquin was raised, and lumbered on.

  10.

  ‘The problem in the household,’ her husband said one evening, ‘the problem in the household is solved.’

  ‘What problem was that?’ his father said. His father and mother, a brother and his wife and a visiting administrator from Carthage with his secretary were dining. Her father-in-law the governor, especially, wanted the evening to go well. He was not in good odour, she gathered. The administrator and the secretary had spent the previous three days going through the governor’s books, and had arrived at tonight’s dinner without having refreshed, in a perfunctory mood. They talked mostly to each other, waving away delicacies one after another. The food had been carefully ordered – it was not always what could be wished, but tonight, she thought, it was good.

  ‘There is a spread of Christians in the town,’ her husband said.

  ‘The Christians!’ her husband’s mother came in. ‘They take children out to desert caves and sacrifice them. They drink their blood. It terrifies the children – my grandchildren, I should say.’ She emphasized each word at the end, raising herself upright on her elbow. She was hardly looking at all with her purple-painted eyes at the visiting administrator, who was not paying attention.

  ‘It has come into our house,’ the merchant’s daughter’s husband said. Against cries of shock from his mother, he went on, ‘My man Copreus warned me of it, and with my authority, he investigated. It is lucky, in a way. They are a secret sect, but they wish always to recruit new members. So they grow, but for the same reason, they risk always being discovered, when their persuasion falls on stony ground. Copreus found a gardener’s boy weeping in the shade, and when he asked him why, the boy said that the Christians had found him. I think he thought they would sacrifice him in time.’

  ‘As very well he might,’ the governor’s wife said.

  ‘The Emperor has passed a decree, which seems to be working well. Even here. They have been stopped in this house,’ the merchant’s daughter’s husband said. In the room, the musicians began to play a dance of some sort, as if in celebration of his words. ‘I took immediate action, this evening, when he told me what he had discovered, and the culprit has been taken away. My dear …’

  He turned to the merchant’s daughter. She had known what he was about to say: she had known it since the men came into her house, and a housemaid had come to arrange her hair rather than her usual maid.

  ‘You will just have to manage for the time being,’ he said. ‘It was your maid who was so hard at work. I hear from the courts that it is really occupying half of their time. These things come and these things go.’

  She noticed that the visiting administrator had stopped talking to his secretary and, for a minute or two, had been paying some attention.

  ‘What a dreadful shock,’ her mother-in-law said. ‘You must be dreadfully shocked, my dear. What did you do tonight? How did you manage? You look so pretty,’ she went on, dropping into the undertone she always used when feminine trivialities were the subject.

  ‘A housemaid did my hair,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘It was quite all right, really. I don’t suppose it is as hard as all that.’

  ‘I think tomorrow we are going to have to talk about the cost of the marble in the forum,’ the administrator said, his voice harsh and unmodulated. The governor turned to him and smiled, his head nodding as he tore a roasted blackbird with his teeth.

  11.

  That night, the merchant’s daughter dreamt. She was alone in the desert. The light was murky and obscure, and her eyes struggled against it. Something moved, gracelessly, from side to side, coming towards her slowly. She stood and did not move. The shape approached, and it was a man; it was a great slab of an Egyptian, stripped and huge, his hands spread out against her like the seats of stools. She knew that she would have to fight him when he came to her. In a series of movements, agonizingly slow, he raised his hands to her face, and she brought her hands to him. They were so small, her hands, and white against his dark rough ones. The touch of his hands was shocking, overwhelming, crushing, and she pushed against them as one might push against a wall. There was such pain in her hands and wrists that she almost cried out. But there was nothing in her throat to cry with. She pushed again, and with a feeling of righteous rage, she pushed a third time. The mouth of the naked Egyptian gaped open, and quite suddenly they were fighting. She felt a great power falling through her like the blaze of the sun. All at once it was quite over and the Egyptian fell away from her.

  She woke alone, and on her knees gave thanks for what she was about to do. The next day, early in the morning, she dressed and went to the gates of the town’s prison and, after some difficulty and confusion, was admitted to the prison and to the company of four Christians, including her maid. The gates were shut and locked behind her, and in the dark, they taught her to sing. The Holy Spirit descended upon them, like a sea eagle hovering above its helpless screaming prey.

  12.

  The next day they were led from the prison to the marketplace. News of the trial had spread in the town, and there was a crowd in the bright light of the dusty day. It might have been the news that the daughter of an important merchant had surrendered herself willingly that had encouraged the crowds and the town’s curiosity and baffled fervour. Of course the crowd would be bigger when they were torn apart by wild beasts, in the arena.

  They walked, tied by ropes at the wrists, and did not look anywhere but directly ahead. A man in the group immediately before her sang as he walked, his voice quavering. It seemed to her that she had seen this scene before, to prepare her. Above her she felt the Holy Spirit. It was merciless and clawed and supervisory. It blessed them. It would descend upon them, and would descend, clawed, upon the unbelievers around them, screaming and howling. They would die and be cast into the pits of Hell. She and the others would pass through suffering and into bliss. She saw them, their faces and hands only
emerging from a blaze of pitch, their faces terribly distorted with pain – her father, and husband, and mother, and sisters and brothers, and the governor and his wife, and Copreus. She saw herself looking down as if from the wall of a high garden, green and watered, a fountain playing. The Holy Spirit descended on them, shrieking, and would tear the liver from Copreus’s chest once a day, like Prometheus. She saw him screaming for mercy, and she would turn her head away and smile at the angels and the blest and at God the Father.

  A voice called from the crowd, and she looked. Pushing to the front, there was her father.

  ‘What is this?’ he was shouting. ‘That is my daughter. What has she said? She is lying. Her husband will deal with this. Daughter –’ and now he was walking alongside them, pushing the crowd and the soldiers out of the way, trying to speak to her ‘– daughter, how can this be?’

  The words came to her, and she said that just as a water vessel could not be called under any name but what it had, and just as it could hold only water, so she could not call herself anything but what she was, a Christian, and what she now held within herself was the truth. Her father flung himself on her with rage. His fingers tore at her face, and she was glad of it. She knew now what the Egyptian in her dream was. He was pulled away from her by the guards, and the crowd laughed – shrill, joyous, animal cries.

  Then she could look at the crowd. The worst had happened and she no longer needed to look ahead, seeing nothing. There she saw faces she knew; she saw, even, her husband, and his expression was inscrutable, but unsurprised. They passed on, and now all of them were singing: she was singing too. She understood that there were those in the crowd who would never forget what they saw this day, and she understood that in this blazing heat and desert dust, it was not just her who was thirsty and suffering, it was those around her who would know no relief.

  13.

  They were brought to the forum, and led up to a platform that had been erected before the chair of judgement. There was a sea of yelping humanity about them. They stood, tied together with ropes, and waited while the procurator ascended to his place. Below her, her father appeared again, but now he was holding a child. It was her son.

  ‘It is not too late,’ her father said. ‘Think of me in my old age – the shame of this – and think of your son. Do you think that—’ But he was carried away, he and his grandson, and she was not sure that she had heard what he had to say.

  The procurator began to ask questions of them. They each confessed that they were Christian. At each confession, the procurator moved on, making no gesture of disgust or disapproval. He came to her. The crowd, which had been howling with disapproval at each question and answer, now quietened. The procurator made a kind of gesture at the base of the platform, and her father appeared again, holding the child. He ascended two steps and, turning to her, said, ‘Have pity on the child, at any rate.’ At that, he seemed to believe that he had said enough with the child in his arms, and he passed the baby to a womanservant who was standing behind him.

  The procurator made a silencing gesture with his flat hand. ‘For Heaven’s sake, your father is old. Your child is very young. Look, just be sensible. Make some kind of sacrifice to the Emperor.’

  ‘No,’ she said. It was an easy answer.

  ‘Very well, then,’ the procurator said. ‘I am going to ask you the question that I am required to ask you by the Emperor’s decree. Are you a Christian?’

  It was the formal question he had put to the others, which they had answered easily, though not always very resonantly. Her maid had almost shrieked the answer; the man who had begun the singing had had to be asked to repeat the answer, so quietly had he replied. ‘I am,’ she said.

  There was a commotion from her father: he leapt forward, his arms outstretched, like those of the naked Egyptian in her dream. But the soldiers were quicker, and seized him. One soldier beat him back with a rod – the crowd roared with approval, some perhaps thinking that her father, too, was a Christian, not yet apprehended. Blood was beginning to flow from her father’s face. She looked away.

  ‘This is all madness,’ the procurator said. ‘I pass sentence. They will be placed in the arena with the wild beasts.’

  ‘We return to the prison with joy in our hearts,’ the man she was roped to said, as loudly as he could, with terror in his voice. She tried to feel joy. The heavens above her poured with light, and perhaps, then, as the rough rope tugged at her wrists and she was led down from the platform into the howling, spitting mob, she did begin to feel something in her heart that was joy.

  14.

  ‘You get a last feast,’ the gaoler said as he pushed them into the cell. It was filthy in there, and hot. The only window was high up in the wall, and the stench of bodies, of blood and excrement was heavy in the darkness. There was nothing to sleep on but some wretched blankets.

  There were five of them. The merchant’s daughter knew only her slave – but she could be thought of as free, now. The older man who had sung so uncertainly was a handler of grain, and he was there with his wife. They had converted separately, and without knowing it of the other. In the end, the wife had started to talk of it to her husband, convinced that she must die if she kept silent any longer, even if she died by speaking out. They clung to each other in the cell. There was the merchant’s daughter. And there was a very young boy whose voice was only just broken. He seemed too young to know what he was doing, but he spoke with great certainty. He longed for martyrdom, and talked of it in detail, lovingly.

  ‘We shall make a feast of love,’ he said of the gaoler’s last feast. ‘We shall break bread together, like our Saviour, and pass bowls between us, and smile and laugh through happiness. They will see us, and wonder. But the next day they will see us die in the arena through sword and wild beast, still in a state of joy, and realize that they have known nothing of joy until today. They will go away, and think, and come to Jesus on their own, through our example.’

  Someone paid for comfort for them, and they were moved to another cell, a larger cell, higher up. It was clean and well aired. They would live there until the time came, in three days’ time. They rejoiced at that. The feast of love was announced, and they each asked as many of their family and friends as they could. Her mother came and her sisters and brothers. Her father did not come. Her slave asked her sister, and others the merchant’s daughter did not know, and even Copreus, and they all came. They watched the five of them pass the bread and the meat and the mess of beans among them, laughing and talking without grief. The merchant’s daughter told stories of her childhood, and how she had loved to go out into the desert, and how vain she had been of the colour of her hair. Her slave talked of the day she had first met with the Christians. Others told of when they were first allowed to hunt with falcons, or smiled and wept at the coming reunion with family members they were parted from. The grain-handler took up the corner of his coarse blue robe and wiped his wife’s face lovingly. Around them, their families and friends watched, silent, with their own thoughts. At the end, the merchant’s daughter went about the circle with a rough wooden bowl filled with torn-up bread, and offered it in peace and love to everyone who had come to their feast. There were no larks’ tongues and sows’ udders at their feast. When the guests left, they carried each of them the beat of the wings of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Before long, they, too, would be put to death in the arena with joy and thanks.

  The merchant’s daughter lay down. She felt joy, she knew, but there was so much still to discover before she died. She knew about Jesus, and how he had died and how he was born, in the stable with the animals. She had read about his life, and she had heard people tell stories of him. She did not know what Mary his mother had been doing before he was born. She had asked when the world had been created, and she had been told. But it was more important to know that the world would end soon, perhaps this week, perhaps next week. She did not know what Heaven looked like. When she thought of it, she thought only of running wa
ter, and green fresh earth, and a cool wind with no sand or minerals in it, only the scent of water. But she did not know, and had felt as shy about asking as an heir about the exact sum of money that would certainly come to her. She hoped that her father and Copreus would remain deaf, and in their deaths lie in torments, the shrieking beak and claws of the Holy Spirit descending on them in vengeance for ever more.

  A small hand touched her shoulder. It was the woman who was once her slave.

  ‘They are all asleep,’ she said.

  ‘I am awake,’ the merchant’s daughter said.

  ‘I cannot sleep,’ the slave said. ‘All my life, I have slept easily. I worked in the days, and I was tired at night, and slept. But these days, I have had nothing to do. I have rested without moving, and I have had no tiredness at night. This is the last sleep of my life, and I cannot sleep.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’ the merchant’s daughter said.

  ‘I know that God loves me,’ the slave said. There was a choking sound in her voice.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘I will be with you.’

  ‘Will we go together?’ the slave said.

  ‘Yes, and I will hold your hand as long as I may,’ the merchant’s daughter said. ‘It will be so short a time, and then there will be for ever. There will be a breeze blowing, and birdsong, and fresh water, and cool shade, for ever.’

  ‘I shall eat dates in the shade, for ever, and my feet shall be cool in the running stream,’ the slave murmured. Together they heard a beat in the desert air, far away.

  15.