The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘Isn’t the fish ready yet?’

  ‘It’s being caught now. You said you wanted it fresh.’

  ‘Watch your manners.’

  ‘Aaargh’ (leaving, clearing his throat).

  ‘I wouldn’t have that man’s temper for ten thousand sesterces.’

  Let us now look at this new Caleb, with his Roman crop and strong blue jaw, bare legs plentifully flued, bare feet firm to grip the deck, girt like a scullion, tending the wood fires in their iron prisons in the galley, frying eggs taken aboard at Tyrus, gutting fish caught off the coast of Cyprus, slicing the hard bread of Aspendus. He is wide of shoulder and very muscular. He is a temporary cook, and soon he hopes to earn his bread on Italian soil as a wrestler. He knows Greek holds, Judaean feints, points on the human frame which, if pressed, can induce temporary paralysis. He has always seen himself as a frustrated warrior, training for the day of liberation. He has worked at the use of dagger, sword and rope for garotting. He has a clear mission, the liberation of his sisters, and a cloudier one, the liberation of the Jews from the Roman heel. What he can do in Rome to further this he is not yet sure. He has vague dreams of collecting bands of young Hebrews who will so terrorise the Roman population that they will cry out to the Senate to let God’s people go. But the fulfilment of such dreams lies very much in the future, for he tingles with quiet excitement at the prospect of seeing and living in Rome. He sees himself wrestling to Roman applause, hailed as the great Metellus. This, of course, is unworthy, since as a good fighting Jew he wants nothing from Rome except the withdrawal of the armed tax collectors (procurators are nothing more) from the sacred territory. But, like his sister Sara, whom temperamentally he much resembles, he feels it is better to be impelled by great misfortunes to the seeing of the world than to sit at home immersed in the narrow universe of Jewish law and custom. Our glands take precedence over our ideals. It was ever so.

  ‘Hurry up with that fish soup,’ the overcook cries. ‘The captain’s belly’s arumble. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Metellus.’

  ‘If you’re Metellus I’m Marcus Antonius. You look like a Jew to me.’

  ‘How,’ and Caleb shows all his teeth, agleam in the marine sun as they draw near to Crete, ‘would you like this fish soup poured all over you, you insolent bastard?’ And he takes the handles of the iron pot in ready hands. The Calabrian sees the snaking of the muscles and says something about some people being unable to take a joke.

  In the Aegean Sea a storm strikes up and drives the vessel towards the Achaean coast. Caleb is sick in his bunk and is jeered at. He recovers on the smoother run to Syracuse and wrestles with the bulkier of the jeerers, a man of mixed ancestry from Pergamum. Roman order converts the snarling violence into a formal match on the foredeck. Caleb hurls the Pergaman overboard. He cannot swim but Caleb can. He dives with grace and to cheers, and both are hauled up in a net. A patrician named Aureus Gallus or some such name, a treasury official who has been enquiring into allegations of peculation in Alexandria and Petra, speaks words of praise and admiration to the dripping Caleb. He seeks to work in the arena? Can he memorise the name he is now to give him? His is a manly trade; sybaritic Rome, that is becoming effeminate, needs to see muscle at work, recalling more primitive glories. I thank your honour, says Caleb.

  They spend three days in Syracuse, where Caleb and the lout from Pergamum get drunk together. Then they sail north through the straits and hug the Italian coast. Soon they meet in the roads of Puteoli a mass of mercantile ships awaiting orders to ease in to the quays and start unloading. There is much grain from Egypt; Rome is forgetting the agricultural arts memorialised in Virgil’s Georgics. The Heavenly Twins has a lading of troops and imperial functionaries and thus claims priority. Soon Caleb steps ashore; his now sandalled feet grip the earth of Italy. There is a grinning statue of the Emperor Gaius looking out to sea. Bales are rolled massively in and out of the godowns. Vessels strain at the lines secured to the bollards. Standing on a heap of bales a bearded man seeks the attention of sailors from Israel. He cries out in Aramaic:

  ‘You who sail the seas, you have come to your harbour. But what of the harbour of the soul which all men seek? It is to be found in the bosom of Jesus Christ, Son of the one God, Saviour of mankind, who died and rose again.’

  So, thinks Caleb, the new faith is spreading already. Strange that so passive a cult should show such energy. Then he bethinks himself of what he has heard of Saul’s work: it is Saul pushing the Nazarenes on to the sealanes, Saul, the pagans might say, doing the bidding of two opposed deities. A third deity, the grinning Gaius, seems to point his thumb towards Rome, so Caleb the Zealot takes a deep breath and the road to the heart of the kingdom of the wicked.

  The new procurator of Judaea rode with the senior centurion who was his temporary deputy from Caesarea to Jerusalem. A courtesy visit, call it. Marcellus, who had modelled his visage on masks and busts of Julius Caesar, frowned at something he saw on the Street of the Smiths – respectable-seeming citizens being dragged from their homes by armed Jews he took to be Temple guards. Mothers and children crying, men bruised. His horse snorted, as at some dim memory of battle under another owner, as the flats of swords smacked on backs and howls of pain rang. Marcellus heard the word meluchlach and asked the centurion what it meant.

  ‘It means dirty,’ Cornelius said, ‘and it’s being applied to these Nazarenes here.’

  ‘What are Nazarenes?’

  Cornelius forbore to say that it was the duty of a procurator of Judaea to have picked up at least a smattering of recent Judaean history.

  ‘They follow a new prophet and they’re being punished for it.’

  ‘Ah, the slave Chrestus who said he was a god?’

  ‘Not Chrestus. He was termed Christus, which means anointed. A confusion of vowels. And because Chrestus is a slave name it got around that the cult is a slave cult. These people, as you can see, are not slaves.’

  ‘Disorder in the streets, Cornelius. Roman discipline has got slack in the ah interregnum.’ He meant the period between Pilate’s dismissal and his own accession.

  ‘This is a religious matter, procurator, and we’re instructed not to interfere in religious matters. The Jews are permitted to exercise their own discipline.’

  ‘I don’t like it, Cornelius.’

  ‘He said he didn’t like it,’ Caiaphas said later, as he took wine with Gamaliel and the priest Zerah. ‘He pointed out that his duty was to keep the peace here. He wouldn’t interfere for the moment, he said, leaving the restoration of order in our hands. But I can foresee his eventual interference.’

  ‘Which, in a way, would be right,’ Zerah said, pulling out single hairs from his black beard; this fired a brief pain which to him was a pleasure: he was not a married man. ‘The Nazarenes are troublemakers. Let the Romans subdue them. If, as I suspect, there are some false arrests – that old Ezra turned out not to be a Nazarene, after all – that was a pity—’

  ‘He died of natural causes,’ Caiaphas said.

  ‘If,’ Gamaliel said, ‘you can call death by thirst and heat exhaustion natural courses.’

  ‘What I’m saying is,’ Zerah plucked, ‘that it’s always better to leave disciplinary action to the Romans, when, that is, the situation permits it. It leaves our own hands clean.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Caiaphas said, ‘the procurator Marcellus doesn’t see it that way. He sees Saul and his little army as the real troublemakers. After all, they spill blood. That camp he’s set up is, I must say, an affront to anyone with humanitarian principles.’ He did not smile, but Gamaliel did, acidly. ‘I watched an old man die yesterday. His family droned out the Nazarene formula about forgiving one’s enemies. Then they prayed rather a good prayer, nothing heretical in it, the one that begins Our Father. I think Saul has to be stopped.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Gamaliel said.

  ‘And yet,’ Zerah said, ‘his work may be glossed as good and holy. You will not persuade him to se
e it otherwise. Why not send him to do his good work somewhere else?’

  ‘That,’ Caiaphas said, ‘is rather a brilliant idea. Samaria, for instance?’

  ‘The Samaritans would tear him to pieces.’

  ‘He would be torn to pieces,’ Caiaphas said, ‘in a good and holy cause. But you’re right, to denazarenise the Samaritans would not necessarily mean that they’d grow closer to the heart of the faith. We need somewhere with a large Jewish settlement where the Nazarenes have achieved a proselyting success. How about Damascus?’

  ‘On foot, of course,’ Zerah said.

  ‘Oh yes, there need be no hurry about his getting there. On foot, certainly. But he ought to start soon.’

  ‘He will need a lot of persuading,’ Zerah said. ‘But the Jews of Damascus are children of the Temple here. They must be saved from themselves.’

  ‘By having their blood spilt?’ Gamaliel said.

  ‘I see no great harm in physical molestation,’ Zerah said. ‘It’s the salutary shock that matters. If these Damascus Nazarenes won’t listen to the warnings of the priests – well, Saul’s way is a good way.’

  ‘Efficacious,’ Gamaliel said. ‘Hardly good.’

  There were few of the original disciples now left in

  Jerusalem. No one knows whither they dispersed, though I am fairly sure that the preaching Jew Caleb saw on the wharf was Matthew. James, son of Zebedee, stoutly refused to leave his post; he was almost pedantic about his attendance at the Temple, he was scrupulous in his refusal to distinguish between true Jew and Nazarene in matters of charitable bestowal, he preached not at all, he dared the forces of persecution to arrest him but Saul was wise enough to leave him unmolested. The night before Thomas was due to be seized, the news broke concerning Saul’s new mission. Thomas left for Samaria none the less, having promised Peter and John he would join them there. It was he who, though difficult to understand because of his fierce North Galilee accent, planted unwittingly in the minds of the converted Samaritans the conviction that Christ had chosen them before he had chosen the Judaeans. ‘Ay, mark that, all of ye. The travellers from Jerusalem to Jericho ignored the poor bleeding man by the side of the road, the Levite ignored him, all ignored him except this Samaritan merchant. The good Samaritan, the Lord called him, and no doubt had he not been done to death by yon hypocritical forces of law and order, the Lord would have brought the word here himself, instead of leaving the duty to us his humble followers.’

  On a rainy morning Peter decided that Samaria could now look after itself. He had appointed an episcopos or overseer named Justin and a number of deacons. If what Thomas reported was true, there could soon be a general church assembly in Jerusalem to discuss the allocation of missions and also—There was a problem Peter found difficult to articulate. With a burst of sun Simon the magician appeared on the street. Peter, John, Philip and Thomas watched him from the open door of the tavern where they had broken fast. He had set up a small rectangular tent, and the girl Daphne, her eyes no longer red but her hair still a river of lustrous black, had entered it through a flap that Simon ceremoniously held open. ‘Now see,’ Simon told the crowd of idlers. He had a fistful of daggers which he drove into the canvas from all its four sides. Ample blood poured from the incisions. He reopened the flap and the girl reappeared unharmed.

  ‘Miracles, miracles,’ Simon cried. ‘Every day here you will see miracles. Can the Nazarenes bring the dead to life? No, they cannot.’

  ‘At least they don’t ask us for money,’ a one-eyed man in the crowd called. Then the rain poured out of a cloud, and the crowd ran. Simon sought shelter in the tent, but it was far from rainproof. Daphne, standing in a doorway, laughed at him. John felt the stirring of his glands again. Peter said:

  ‘A thing that troubles me, lads, is this. What are we really supposed to be doing – preaching the word or healing the sick? It’s the healing the sick that the people take to be the proof of the truth of our preaching, but shouldn’t the preaching be enough in itself? I mean, the truth is the truth and the doctrine’s either sound or it’s not sound. I mean, they’d believe anything you told them if you followed it up with what they call a miracle.’

  ‘It’s God’s truth,’ John said, loud over a thunderclap, ‘and he had to show them that he was the Son of God. No use in just saying it. The only way he could show it was by going against nature.’

  ‘Is healing the sick going against nature?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Of course it is,’ John said, ‘if nature does nothing to cure the sickness.’

  ‘But we,’ Peter said, ‘are very far from being the sons of God. And a lot of the things we’ve done – like that withered arm that began to fatten out when the girl said she believed – a lot of the things could be explained. Bartholomew said so, and he’s a man of physic. What I mean is I’d be a good deal happier if people didn’t bring their dropsical grandmothers and paralytic nephews along to the preaching. It’s not the preaching they care about. The real changes of heart are when nobody asks for anything. You see how that Simon over there, I’m cursed with having the same name, you see what he thinks it all is. And he’s one that worries me. I’d better go and have a last word with him.’ So Peter, a man used to water, strode sturdily into the vertical lake and put his head into Simon’s poor shelter, saying: ‘Your heart isn’t right with God, Simon. I can’t leave you like this. Repent of your wickedness and the Lord may forgive you.’

  Simon, wretched in the rain, began to snivel.

  ‘You,’ Peter said, quoting something he had read, he could not remember quite what, ‘are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.’

  Simon began to shake with hysteria or ague. ‘Pray for me then,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go to hell.’

  ‘You won’t if you repent. Do you repent?’

  ‘All I wanted was to do good in the world. All I wanted was the power.’

  ‘Ah, to hell with you,’ Peter said. He went back to his companions, soaked and sighing. ‘He still doesn’t understand,’ he said. ‘I wonder if he understood what I was saying. How is it that everybody could understand what I was saying at Pentecost and now I have trouble? I don’t know anything now except my mother speech, and there are plenty who don’t care for the Galilean twang. I’ll have to go around with a whatyoucallhim.’

  ‘Interpreter,’ Philip said. ‘I’ll give you Greek lessons on the way back to Jerusalem.’

  ‘I’m too old for it, that’s my trouble. Well, the rain’s clearing and we’d best move. There’s a fair number of Samaritan villages to visit on the way back. Then you, Philip, you’re a young fit man, you ought to go west to Gaza where Samson had his eyes put out.’

  ‘It’s all desert there,’ Philip said.

  ‘Then go north to Caesarea, where it’s all Greeks. There’s plenty for you to do.’

  I now (on, thank heaven, a September or Germanicus day of most grateful cool, with the first prickings of a delicate fall melancholy) have the agonising task of presenting to you a mad Gaius presiding over a mad imperial banquet for which few of the hundred or so guests have much appetite. Imagine the great hall of the imperial residence on the Palatine (whence the word palace is derived), with its pillars festooned with flowers and foliage, all the strong noon-light shut out with heavy samite curtaining to give a semblance of night (the Emperor is powerful: he has conquered the sun) and thousands of lamps reeking of oil scented with ambergris. A grinning statue of Gaius, or rather of muscular Mars with Gaius’s head, is garlanded as in triumph in the centre of this field of marble, but there are lesser ingenuities of the sculptor’s craft, all foully erotic: a donkey thrusts its member into the antrum amoris of a howling boy; two fat naked women, set head to tail like the fishes of the zodiac, suck at each other’s vulva; a virginal girl chokes on the phallus of a laughing Priapus; the goddess Venus, with Gaius’s head half-hidden in a flood of stone hair, is pedicated by a Gaified Jupiter. The huge marble table, C-shaped for Caligula, has strewn upon it, like c
asual sweetmeats, Alexandrian pictures showing specialities of the Alexandrian brothels – copulation with dogs and goats, with corpses newly beheaded, with corpses half rotted, and other enormities that make my gorge rise sufficiently to make me forbear to list them. The food served, seen let alone tasted, would induce a vow in a reasonable man to live henceforth on bread and water. Nothing is what it seems. Dog faeces and horse globes have been moulded to the appearance of delicate cakes with silver icing. Stewed pallid veal has been sculpted to the shape of human hands. Human hands, conceivably, are to be found nesting, along with more orthodox meat, inside huge smoking pies. Boiled lobsters crawl up an effigy of a crucified man. Rolled beef slices are crudely phalloid. Sucking pigs are, of course, sodomised by other sucking pigs. Wearisome, wearisome. There are limits to the most scabrous ingenuity. Here and there a guest may find a dish banally honest, though he little knows what sudden minor horror may lurk in the depths of the confection. The bread is gilded, but it tastes of bread. The wine at Gaius’s part of the table is served in small gold chamberpots. He reclines, the grinning Emperor, already tipsy at the start of the banquet, with his sister Drusilla on the same couch (her whom he ravished before he came of age, whom, when married to the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, he openly abducted), while the Empress Ennia Naevia (whom he stole from Macro, commander of the Praetorian Guard) is couched ignominiously alone below the salt. Lollia Paulina, starrily bejewelled, the wife of Gaius Memmius, a governor of consular rank not present, is there, though discarded, forbidden by imperial decree ever to sleep with another man. Opposite Gaius sits Herod Agrippa, bloated and sulking. Gaius says to him:

  ‘Never satisfied, are you?’

  Herod Agrippa is bold enough to say: ‘An emperor should keep his promises.’ Gaius says, though not dangerously:

  ‘Don’t you tell this emperor what he should and should not do. The whole point of being an emperor is the total freedom it confers. Total. And that includes the freedom to break promises. Be satisfied you have what you have, King Herod the Little.’