The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  What language was he speaking? Some say that a miracle had been performed, whereby he spoke the primordial Adamic tongue and his listeners had been granted an instant course of highly skilled lessons in it. It is safer to believe that he spoke not Aramaic, nor a bizarre amalgam of all the tongues of the dispersal, but a pure Hebrew with no Galilean accent (the Galileans always had difficulty with the gutturals). That the language of the sacred texts should now become the medium of immediate discourse may be taken as miracle enough, as also an eloquence Peter had not previously possessed and, indeed, rarely possessed thereafter. A Thomasian kind of sceptic (I refer to what Thomas had been; there was danger now of his becoming overcredulous) stood near to Peter and, hearing the careful enunciation of one who must consciously control the movement of tongue and lips, as well as the tonalities of enthusiasm, was heard to say:

  ‘He’s drunk. They’re all drunk. They’ve been at the new wine.’

  I must cast some doubt on the new of his accusation. The vintage of the year was still some months away. He may have said sweet instead, knowing, as we all know, that if you put new wine in a jar and cover the stopper with pitch and then place the jar in a fishpond, your removal of the jar after thirty days will ensure that your wine will stay sweet the year long.

  Peter laughed and said: ‘I heard that. I’m not drunk, nor are any of my friends here. It’s only the third hour of the day and the taverns are hardly open. No, this is no drunken talk but the giving forth of the good news. You know, some of you, what was said by the prophet Joel: “I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh. And your sons and your daughters will prophesy. And your young men shall see visions. And your old men shall dream dreams. And I will show wonders in the heavens overhead, and signs in the earth beneath, blood and fire and the vapour of smoke.”’ Some there had certainly seen that. ‘“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before the day of the Lord comes, that great day, that notable day.” Well, that great and notable day is upon us. Jesus of Nazareth, approved of God by mighty works and wonders and signs – Jesus, crucified, slain by lawless men – him has God raised up, having loosed the pangs of death.’

  Dangerous talk. Priests listened grimly.

  ‘This Jesus,’ Peter repeated, ‘did God raise up. Of this all we twelve assembled before you are witnesses. Being therefore exalted by the right hand of God and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured forth these words which you hear and of which I am the vessel. Let all the House of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ – this Jesus whom you crucified.’

  Some of the Sanhedrin were now present. Saul, who should not have been here but tending his fellow student Caleb, hovered near them, showing a proper horror.

  ‘Save your souls,’ Peter yelled, ‘men and women of Israel – for the wonders and signs are upon you.’

  The impressed ones in the crowd cried: ‘How?’

  ‘Repent. Be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins. And you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Save your souls – save yourselves from this crooked generation.’ And, the die finally cast, he pointed towards the back of the crowd, where the priests were. Some of them stalked off. Saul, blazing and silent, stayed.

  Matthew, the former tax collector, trained in practicalities like sums due on what dates, cried to the crowd that baptisms would start next day at dawn on the banks of the Kedron.

  On a rooftop which granted a distant view of a huge gathering being addressed in tones that, their words being indistinguishable, had a flavour of zealotry and showed also a lack of retaliatory preparation on the Tower of Antonia, the Zealot Caleb was having his wounds washed in white wine and then soothed with a grass-green ointment. Stephen, no Zealot, performed these tasks while six true young Zealots, Joshua son of the Sabbath, Tobias, the younger Elias, Joseph bar Joseph, Jonathan Levi and Abbas Barabbas, watched for Roman action. There was none save for the due and unusually vicious execution of the two who had not escaped. They had not been theological students. Stephen said:

  ‘Wait for nightfall. Then go to Qumran. You’ll get there by dawn. I have a friend there, Ananias. He’ll take care of you.’

  ‘One of us?’

  ‘He’s no Zealot, if that’s what you mean. He’s trying to become an Essene, but he’s not sure about it. Whatever you’ll think of the Essenes, and you probably won’t think much, they’re against the Romans.’

  ‘The smoke and the ladder – all that was your idea?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked without that crowd. It looks, by the way, as if the Nazarenes have come out of hiding. You ought to be grateful to Jesus.’

  ‘You’re not one of us. And yet you did it. Now you’ll be in danger. Let’s go to this place together.’

  ‘No. I help you as a friend, not otherwise. I think the Zealots are wrong, or should I say impractical. You won’t prevail. The true road lies somewhere else.’

  ‘The Sadducee way? The Pharisee way? The – who are these people I’m to go to?’

  ‘They live the life of the spirit. Cut off from the flesh. That’s as impractical a way as yours. I’m a Greek Jew, Caleb, not a Palestinian one. We think differently. My idea of God isn’t yours. I can’t accept a bellowing tribal Jehovah protecting his own – rather inefficiently, if I may say so.’

  ‘Saul would call that blasphemy. I suppose it is.’

  ‘Let Saul call it what he likes. Saul, by the way, wasn’t very helpful. Other things to do, he said, than confirm fools in their folly. I notice you show no concern about your womenfolk. Something vaguely Nazarene about the Zealots. Give up your family and follow the right. Very unJewish.’

  ‘I know. I thought about them too late. But the Romans don’t know them, won’t find them, unless somebody like Saul gives them away.’

  ‘Saul’s Roman citizenship doesn’t go so far. Quintilius knows them. They visited Quintilius but got nowhere. But Quintilius won’t find them. They’ve already gone to my place. Besides, I have a feeling that Pontius Pilatus isn’t going to last much longer. The Romans are supposed to be an efficient people—’

  Caleb smiled faintly at that.

  In the praetorium the procurator hit out at the flies with his whisk. The flies seemed busier today, bit more. They were like Jews who did not disdain to enter a Gentile dwelling nor suck at honey unblessed by priests. When Quintilius showed in prisoner and escort, Pilate did a thing unseemly in a Roman officer: he struck the wretch twice on the face with his flywhisk. ‘You’re a damned Syrian but you’re still in the Roman army. You’re going to answer for your crime in the accepted Roman manner, so get the point of your sword sharp. There’ll be songs tonight in the taverns about an eagle that lost his claws. You have disgraced my procuratorship and disgraced Rome. Don’t botch your suicide as you botched—Ah, get him out of my sight.’ The guards led him off wailing in the Syrian manner. ‘I presume,’ Pilate said to his deputy, ‘that you’ve found the man by now.’

  ‘Totally impossible, procurator. These Jews all look alike, and the town’s crammed with tourists. How could we ever find him, and what would be the point of making an arbitrary arrest and saying that was the man? Best to talk about last-minute mercy if there’s to be any talk at all. Two of them are hanging up there on Golgotha, and that ought to be enough to show the authority of Rome’s ah plenipotentiary. Of course, we could declare war on the city, but that would mean bringing in legions from Syria and the sudden interest of the Emperor. They got the better of you, so best, sir, just to shrug it off. It’s not the end of the world.’

  Pilate gave Quintilius a good long look. ‘Got the better of me, did they?’ he said. ‘I left all that business in your hands.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but I remain merely the one who takes orders.’

  ‘I smell insolence.’ Quintilius shrugged and said nothing. Pilate said: ‘I take it you’ve already delivered Roman justice to whatever family that J
ew has.’

  ‘Not yet, sir. A mother and two sisters. The girls presumably are virgins. Roman law doesn’t allow—’

  ‘Well, get them deflowered, man, and then shove the sword in. Go on, what are you waiting for? No, wait – lash them till the skin comes off and then put them on the next boat to Puteoli. Tiberius may relish a little Jewish flesh for what he calls his love games.’

  ‘Do we,’ Quintilius asked, ‘have to report this – unfortunate humiliation to Syria? Or to Rome?’

  They looked at each other. Pilate said:

  ‘I don’t think, Quintilius, anyone will care one way or the other. A very minor incident, such things happen. On the other hand, you may be already preparing your report for the authorities, suggesting that the procurator of Judaea is ripe for replacement—’

  ‘I would never dream, sir, of so disloyal an act.’

  ‘Of course not, Quintilius. But, listen, Quintilius, if I fall, you fall with me – remember that. Now – get on with the prosecution of Roman justice.’ Quintilius rather ironically saluted, then marched away slowly, as from a funeral.

  It was a long day, unseasonably warm, with full taverns but not many arrests. The twelve disciples stayed quietly in their upper room, some of them lying on their pallets, while they unpicked the fabric of the morning. Euphoria had passed and there was a slight sense of crapula. Peter said little, having already said enough. Bartholomew the country doctor, learned in little except medicinal herbs, was yet enough of a thinking man to raise the business of the Holy Spirit, a term used freely by the oratorical Peter but not yet defined. ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘this is the wind that blew and the fine Hebrew Peter spoke and everybody understood, and I would say it was also Thomas’s nightmare of a tongue split and on fire.’

  ‘Those,’ Simon the former Zealot said, scratching his cheek, ‘are what you might call appearances of this Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit seems to be the power coming out of the two of them. The Father and Son get on with the business of whatever has to be done up there, and they leave this Holy Spirit down here.’

  ‘Ye fail to see,’ Thomas said, ‘a very peculiar change that’s come over things. There used to be one God, and now it looks as if there were three.’

  ‘There can’t be three,’ John, so mild and yet with so inordinately powerful a voice, put in. ‘The Father and the Son are the same, and so is this Holy Spirit.’

  ‘The same as what?’

  ‘The same as these two that are one. Three in one. So tomorrow, if anybody turns up for the mass baptising, we have to say something like “I baptise you in the name of the three.” That’s going to upset some people.’

  ‘There’ll be a lot turning up,’ Matthew said. ‘Especially from those who’ve come from a long way off. Something free to take home with them. You’re right in a way, John. Things have got a bit complicated. God has a son now, and they’ve sent down a sort of bird.’

  ‘Bird?’ Peter said, rousing himself from counting over his narrow stock of pure Hebrew. He was also watching his performance of the morning as though he were one of the crowd. ‘Let us have no nonsense and no blasphemy. What has a bird to do with anything?’

  Matthew turned in surprise. ‘I saw the bird up on the ceiling when the wind started blowing. Like a pigeon only big as an eagle.’

  ‘What wind?’Andrew asked.

  ‘Is everybody going mad?’ Peter cried.

  ‘Well, yes, it could be put that way,’ Matthew said. ‘We were all a bit mad this morning, else we wouldn’t have done what we did. And that’s how it’s going to be in future. It’s another name for being touched by the Holy Spirit.’

  They ate little and went to rest early, for the next day would, they thought, be a busy one. Nor was the Kedron, set in its steep ravine, at all like the Jordan. Steep banks, no true shore, and the river flowing fast and hostile. A difficult day beckoned, and after it a difficult future, what with the Holy Spirit descending and withdrawing with the capriciousness of the Jesus who had promised it or him or her, a wind or bird or the fiery tongue of Thomas’s dream. It is said that John, once the beloved disciple, woke everybody before dawn with his loud voice (to be accounted a curse to him, according to the Book of Proverbs) and said he had invented a sign, or rather a sign had come to him in a dream. This sign, made with the thumb on brow, breastbone and shoulders, combined the cross Jesus died on with the Father, the Son and the other one. It made things clearer. It also imported into the simple faith an element which the fisherman Peter, who had never heard the word mustikos, considered dangerously fanciful. But let them now all ride on chance, dreams, visitations from the Holy Spirit, and the actions of their enemies. Amen.

  At dawn, while the new faithful or merely curious were picking their various ways over stones, roots, dry ground towards the ravine, the Zealot Caleb arrived at a hill on which simple stone dwellings had been roughly reared. He was cloaked and staffed and bone-weary. In his ears faintly sang certain words of Stephen: ‘I pray you’ll rethink your philosophy while you’re there. If God made the world, he made it for more than the Jews. The end of life isn’t the proclamation of the free Jewish nation.’ Caleb had said: The end of my life.’ Stephen had responded: ‘It nearly was.’

  It had been a rough night journey under the moon, with God’s night creatures rasping or barking or hooting signals, words from some unreadable book that God could read well enough, along with owls and foxes. He had sat on a stone and munched some bread and salt fish, washed down with Jerusalem water. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose her cunning. Now, with the sun starting to wash white stone, he heard a thin hymn: the faithful of the sect that had abandoned Jerusalem, Temple, Sanhedrin, all, were saluting another day presided over by the solar spirit. Caleb climbed rocks among which a few thin goats pulled at yellowing grass and saw an open gateway. Within were men in bleached garments ready to sit at an open-air breakfast. Water was being called up from a well and new bread was being borne in in a basket from a bakery. There was a man who had clearly been expecting him. But how had a signal reached here? Had this all been foreseen at the time of the Pentecostal festoonings? The man was in early middle age, and he wore a white robe that was dingier than that of the gaunt Essene who summoned Caleb to break his fast. Caleb said: ‘Anias?’

  ‘Ananias. I was told you might come here.’

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘The young man who gave me lessons in Greek in Jerusalem said there was some scheme afoot. I came here only four days ago. I am not yet one of the brotherhood.’

  Caleb sat at a thin feast of bread, water, roots, dried figs and shrunken grapes. His presence was neither questioned nor welcomed. He had come from Jerusalem because he had rejected Jerusalem, and that was enough. Caleb could not understand the prayers said over the breaking of the bread. A kiss on the cheek was passed about the table from left to right. Caleb kissed the shaven cheek of a bloodless epicene youth without relish. After breakfast Caleb was permitted to visit Ananias’s cell and wash in a ewer, wiping himself after on a bleached towel. He said:

  ‘Everything white. No blood in it. Even the bread’s white.’

  ‘The very elixir of the faith,’ Ananias said. ‘Here it attains the limits of purity. Dung and make water, and you must bury the ordure in the ground, wearing white gloves. No marriage, no fornication – bodily pleasure is sinful. The body is made of dirt and red mud. Men must transcend it and live in the spirit.’

  ‘It’s not easy to forget we have bodies,’ Caleb said. ‘So these men never take a woman in their arms. How do they breed?’

  ‘They don’t breed. After all, the end of the world has been prophesied and soon it will come. Not much point in breeding. What is needed is purification.’

  ‘I was taught that the world was beginning, not ending. The new world of the free Jewish nation.’

  ‘A flippant dream, they would say. Purification is the one serious thing. Then pure soul is lifted up into heaven.’

  ‘And you’
re joining them?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been doing a certain amount of searching for the right way. That’s why I wanted to read Greek. I see these Essenes as the final posting house on the journey. John the Baptist was one of them, you know. And then he was led to something different. I don’t believe the world is going to end. I think it’s wrong to be cut off from a world in which much wrong has to be put right. I’m here to ponder the new doctrine. You’ve met the followers of Jesus?’

  ‘My uncle Matthias has just become the twelfth of the dead man’s disciples. Absurd, isn’t it? A disciple of a dead man.’

  ‘The message is only just beginning to be born.’

  ‘And it says you have to submit to the Romans. It won’t do.’

  ‘The point is that the Romans will burn themselves out sooner or later. We ought not to waste breath or muscle on them. The important things happen outside the politikon.’

  ‘Stephen taught you that?’

  ‘Of course, Stephen. I’m bad at names. No, I read that in a book.’

  ‘They say,’ Caleb said, ‘that John the Baptist is buried in Samaria. They say that he appears to them and cries that the hour of deliverance is at hand.’

  ‘And what do the Samaritans think deliverance means?’

  ‘What I mean by deliverance. Herod the Great built solid fortifications there. It may be in Samaria – not Judaea, not Galilee – that the great blow is struck. That came to me in the night, wandering, missing direction, finding it and the thought of Samaria at the same time. You know Samaria?’

  ‘I know that the Samaritans are supposed to be a bad lot. They shovelled shit once on to the steps of our Temple. And dead men’s bones. They’re not real Jews – halves and halves—’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt there are good Samaritans. There’s even a story about one.’

  Caleb’s morning of rest was a time of labour for the disciples, listening to sins, degged with tears of repentance: there was enough water about. High above, on either side of the ravine, troops from Jerusalem stood. There was even an Italian centurion from Caesarea, the real thing, no Syrian nonsense. Beware of Jewish crowds was a fair Palestine watchword. All that these Jews seemed to be doing there in the river was saying a few words and then getting ducked. Some of them carried leaves and fronds of the season. There seemed to be no harm in it, but you never could tell.