The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  ‘It’s not going to change in a hurry.’ They stood on deck, watching the crew bring skins of fresh water in the launch from the little quay with its highcharging chandlers. The ship laboured at anchor. Paul said:

  ‘Centurion, captain, if I may speak. The bad time for sailing’s already begun. This is the month of Tishri.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘October. I may be a landsman, but I’m not unfamiliar with the seas of these parts. You’ll have to winter here.’

  Philos grew redly truculent. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t need the advice of a lump of Jewish jailfodder—’

  ‘You’ll take that back,’ Luke said.

  ‘I think you’d better take that back,’ Julius suggested. ‘You’re speaking of a Roman citizen appellant to Caesar.’

  ‘All right, I take it back. What none of you gentry seem to know is that this is a bad winter port.’

  Julius surveyed the small islands that half ringed the harbour. ‘Those break the wind, don’t they?’

  ‘It’s more open than you think. Broadside on, smack – look at those rocks, all teeth. What we’re going to do is make for Phoenix, or Phineka as some call it. See it there on the chart.’ He sniffed as at a good dinner cooking. ‘There’s a change on the way, I’m getting it in both nostrils. With a decent southerly we’ll make Phoenix with no trouble. One step at a time. We’ll think what to do next when I’m anchored safe at Phoenix.’ And without waiting for the approval of the Roman state he gave his orders and the boatswain whistled them. Paul smelt the softness of the south wind. Soon they were coasting gently westwards, and the sailors sang to the wind as to a fickle woman, spoke tenderly to it, prayed that it waft them safe across the mouth of the Gulf of Messara. And, Paul asked himself, was the prayer idolatrous? God was up there, the wind here; you had to pray to something that behaved with the capriciousness of a god and a woman but was palpably down here. Monotheism was not for the anxious daily woodtouching business of the world. A luxury like art?

  Then the wind changed. Swiftly, without advance notice. East by north-east – anemos typhonikos, typhon, typhoon. He heard a sailor curse the woman that had changed into a beast called Eurakylon. Greek Euros and Roman Aquilo conjoined into a hybrid like a centaur, though this one winged. They could not head up to the gale. Clouds rolled against each other from opposed quarters of the sky and lightning wrote a brief signature. For those who could not read thunder gave hollow voice some instants after. They went scud before Euraquilo twenty or more sea miles, under ink clouds and the rain’s first bucketloads. He held to the rigging with Julius; Luke fumbled his drunken way below. That island dimly descried to leeward? Cauda. Some called it Gavdho. Thank God or the gods for the shelter of the lee. All hands to the securing of the dinghy. This they had still been towing astern, full of water. The forward sloping foremast served as a derrick; all hauled the lines and helped with the belaying of the boat. Then came the undergirding with the frapping cables.

  Paul watched fascinated as the work was done. The cables were dragged out of their locker, hypozomata, a word he had not heard before. Hardy sailors dived overboard and passed the cables under the garboard strake and up again, binding the timbers like a magistrate’s fascis. That wind would smash spars and hull and all if left unbraced. The captain said seriously to Julius: ‘This wind’s going to drive us to Big Syrtis. You know what that is? No. Well, it’s those quicksands west of Cyrene. We’re going to drop the tophamper and set the stormsails. Then we’ll lay to on the starboard tack and do a slow drift north-west.’ He looked fiercely at Paul and said: ‘You a religious man?’

  ‘You mean a praying man, I suppose. I’ll pray.’

  ‘Pray to the right gods. Poseidon and Aeolus and the rest of them. We don’t want that Jewish one. He never did the Jews any good and he won’t do us any either. We’re going to need all the help we can get from up there. And,’ he flapped his hands helplessly, ‘all round here.’

  Next day Philos ordered the jettisoning of the cargo. The gale was fierce and vindictive. Nobody’s gods had been listening, or perhaps they had. The first thing to go was the bags of sand for the Roman arena. These were dragged from the hold and hurled into the wind, whose cunning fingers picked holes in the sacks and threw the sand back. The grain went over ungrudgingly. The day after the spare gear had to go. ‘Spare gear?’ asked Paul. He soon discovered what that was: the mainyard, a spar as long as the ship. All hands, crew, passengers, prisoners all united to cast it over. There was no more that they could do. The storm did not abate in days. There was no east nor west nor north star, the whole firmament blacked out as with coarse sackcloth, and the sea sloggering and churning and buffeting the bound oaken staves of the ship. The entire company was assembled on the messdeck, battened down but leaks in the bulkheads showing the sea’s impatient intention to establish full possession, a sloshing mate first, then master, god, all. Philos was hopeless about their situation:

  ‘If I knew where land was, I’d run us ashore, wouldn’t I? But I don’t know where land is. If this goes on we founder, so make up your minds as to that.’ Some of the passengers wailed. Paul said:

  ‘Forgive my saying I told you so, but if we’d wintered in Fair Havens—’ Philos would have raged thoroughly at that had he not been exhausted. ‘As things stand,’ Paul said, ‘I think we all ought to eat something. It’s been days now, and if we have to meet God we’d better do it on full stomachs.’ Julius would have smiled if his risor muscles had been capable of action: this ageing bald-headed man had been sick in what would pass now for fair weather; he seemed now, near the limit of their desperation, to be in good health and humour. Paul said: ‘One thing I know is this – that I shall reach Rome. You may scoff at dreams, but experience teaches me that dreams are God’s way of breaching the wall. If I am to reach Rome the rest of you will certainly see land. We are, so to speak, all in the same boat. Let’s see now what provisions the sea has left us.’ The ship’s cook, a greatnosed Phoenician, rolled in nausea like the rest of them, but there was nothing more to come up. Two of the company tried to heal the leaks in the starboard bulkhead with bits of soaked sacking. Another baled incoming water into a cask which sloshed over the deck.

  Paul and Julius found in the store next to the adjoining galley a sack of wheaten flour whose top half was unsoaked though infested with weavils, a sealed tub of stale water, dried beans no longer dry. The livestock – poultry and two sheep – had long been washed overboard. With flint, dry tinder and green wood they got a fire going. Rough dry unleavened bread and boiled beans. The pitch-sealed amphorae of wine were broached. With many the food stayed down, the wine enlivened to more lively fear of what was to come. Paul sang a cheerful hymn in Aramaic. The comfort of the Lord’s love, his infinite goodness: it was all an outlandish metaphor of men’s obdurate will to survive. ‘Oh, shut up,’ the captain moaned when Paul got to his fifth verse.

  Some friends I have had knowledgeable in sea matters have told me that the mean rate of drift of vessels laid to in such weather is something like thirty-six miles in a day and night. Thirteen days and something over an hour would take this ship from Clauda to Koura, which is a point on the east coast of Melita or Malta. With a slight abating of the gale, Philos and his boatswain opened the battens to find scudding cloud and the roaring song of shore breakers. They were drifting in to rock, the breakers told them. Philos ordered a sounding.

  ‘Twenty fathom.’ Very faint on the contending winds.

  Paul and Julius had followed the captain up to night wind which was sweeter than the closed-in odours below. Julius said: ‘I think I believe. If we get through this water I’ll be ready for a drop more.’

  ‘Baptised? You? But you know nothing of what you have to believe.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I do. A God who accepts pagans as well as Jews. A fellowship of all people caught in a storm. You broke the bread and poured the wine and said what they’d become. I believed. What more must I do?’ He howled the question over the gale.
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  It was not a true question. Paul said nothing and listened to the new sounding:

  ‘Fifteen fathom.’

  That meant they were closing in to the unseen rocks. They could smell stale driftweed. The captain shouted for the dropping of four anchors from the stern. Clutching the taffrail, Paul saw the two cables pour from the port hawseholes: they would keep the prow pointing shorewards. Four of the crew then began furtively to cut the lines holding the launch to the deck. He called: ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Laying out anchors from the bow.’

  ‘I didn’t hear the order.’

  ‘Never you mind about orders.’ They were clearly intending to make for that shore in a safe company. Paul called Julius. Julius called his troops. The troops grappled with the sailors and sent the dinghy splashing overboard to go adrift. That was unwise: they would need that dinghy. For the moment the ship would hold by its stern anchors. They tried to get some sleep, but it was difficult.

  At dawn Paul brought out not only the remains of the hard unleavened bread but a basket of hard tack he had discovered nestling behind the last of the amphorae.

  ‘You’re going to need your strength. Eat. Drink.’ In the sick light, the rocky shore ahead of them, the wind anxious for its morning work of pushing the ship to its last disaster, he broke his own bread and said: ‘Thanks, God, for this gift. Lord, we are children in your hands. We trust, we love, we hope. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ Julius repeated.

  Now they saw the shore more clearly. It was the western side of the bay that was rocky, and to this they had been driven. To the east was a creek with a sandy beach. Philos called his orders: ‘Slip your anchors. Jettison what’s left of the cargo. Foresail up to the wind. Unlash the steering paddles. I’m going to run her aground.’

  Julius’s under-officer said: ‘The prisoners, sir. They’ll get away. We’ll have to kill them.’

  ‘Kill?’

  ‘The prisoners, sir. Starting with this one here.’ And he nodded at Paul without menace.

  ‘What sort of a man are you?’

  ‘It’s the regular thing, sir.’

  ‘Get out of my sight.’

  The man was puzzled. ‘Sir?’

  ‘No, wait. Pass on this order. Prisoners and troops alike. Let those who can swim get overboard now. The rest—Ah. It’s happening.’

  They struck. The foreship hit not rock but a bottom of thick mud which grasped it fast. The stern was left to the pounding of the green dragons with the wind riding their scaly backs, salivating rabid foam in the rancour of the kill. Paul leapt, Julius, Luke, stout as Julius Caesar with his chronicles encased in a leather roll lashed to his waist with part of a ship’s line. Others screamed soundlessly, grabbing at splintering beams. Rari nantes, Vergil’s phrase. Strange, Julius thought swimming, how the brain can remain aloof and pick at the past, the boring schoolroom, coolly testing old useless knowledge in the light or dark of crisis. The rare swimmers fought for the shore. Those who could not swim and thought they were drowning were borne with rough care loving and vicious to the beach, offered couches from which, panting, they could watch the spine and entrails of their ship torn by the sea’s teeth and go into the green maw, while the foreship burrowed deeper and deeper into deep clay. All were saved.

  Pauline time, Neronian time – they will not come together, not yet. No matter. That company of stricken voyagers may not even have seen the marine disintegration of marble below or about or above them at the time when Nero was addressing the Senate about enduring monuments of marble. ‘What I seek I seek for Rome only. The city as it is affronts my artistic soul. I would leave behind me – you know what. The expenditure can be furnished from many sources. The people are ready for an increase in taxation after so long a period of fiscal clemency. There is gold lying unused in the city temples. That fine device of the late Empress Messalina, of offering Roman citizenship for sale, could be revived with even larger profit – to the state, I say, to Rome, to Rome, I must make that clear. Moreover, there are communities within our cities that reject Rome, its virtues, its gods. I refer to the Jews and the sect that follows Chrestus or Christus. It would be a gesture of Roman clemency to permit these groups to continue with their barbarous rituals and insolent beliefs – but, of course, to make them pay for such permission with heavy imposts. There are various ways in which the financing of the building of a new city worthy of its citizens could be effected. I put them to you as a matter of imperial courtesy – reminding you that power rests where it is meet that it should rest but that, as a good son of Rome, I acknowledge senatorial wisdom and experience without necessarily having to abide by senatorial advice.’

  Gaius Calpurnius Piso stood, a young steely man breasting the muffled response to imperial insolence without fear. ‘The Emperor’s artistic ambitions are well known to this assembly. To rebuild Rome in his own image is an ultimate ambition some of us have long expected. But I would remind the Emperor that there are greater urgencies which cry for his attention. I refer particularly to the situation in Gaul and Spain, where the loyalty of our armies is now being openly attached to their provincial commanders and being removed from Rome. The situation in Britain is appalling, with seventy thousand of our Roman citizens slaughtered by the barbarians and no punitive act yet undertaken—’

  Nero was outraged. ‘No! No! It is not for this august body to act as the Emperor’s conscience. The Roman provinces are mere discardable extensions of Rome which may drop off, for all we care, like lizards’ tails. Rome first, Rome last—’

  An ancient senator, C. Lepidus Calvus, stood to say: ‘Rome is the provinces. Rome is her Empire. Rome is the imperial world peace and the great flower of order. Rome is not sickly songs and obscene dances and degrading spectacles and a city rebuilt according to the emetic tastes of a mediocre would-be artist. I speak out, Caesar, without fear of the consequences. An old man whose physicians have granted him short time to live has little to fear. But for once the Emperor shall listen to the truth and not the sycophancies of toadies and catamites.’

  ‘I will accept many affronts,’ Nero said indulgently. ‘But I will not tolerate an attack on the divine spirit of beauty which in my short life I have ever endeavoured to honour. You will see your new Rome whether you will or not. Greybeards, tottering imbecilities, impotent hypocrites – who needs you? I speak for Rome. You speak for outworn notions of civic and imperial virtue, grey and tattered like old sackcloth. I speak for the new age. Gentlemen – you’re dead – all of you.’ He swept out in his frilled purple between his two lines of guards, Tigellinus after him. Part of his retinue stayed behind to perform the dumbshow drama of frowning menacingly at the assembly.

  ‘Refuge,’ Paul said. ‘Nothing to do with honey.’ He was referring to the name of the island that had given them shelter – Phoenician or Canaanite with a Hebrew cognate. They watched from the deck of an Alexandrian ship called Dioscuri or The Heavenly Twins as it nosed out of the harbour. Golden rock in the sunlight, golden buildings. Publius, the Roman governor, stood with his old father and waved vale from the quay. Luke and Paul together had cured that old man of a fever. All the Roman help imaginable in the brisk conversion of a good part of the island. And Julius himself converted in an inland pool of salt water, Paul explaining: ‘A symbol of cleansing, no more. But symbols are important. The human spirit lives in the world of water and fire and bread and wine. We must not be cut off from the world. The world of things. But things are sanctified by faith. The water of the sea is sanctified by your baptism.’ He waved at a waving group of Maltese or Phoenician converts, squat brown people, quick with their gifts of fire and hobz and ilma.

  In calm weather they reached Syracuse after a day’s sailing. The southerly wind which had carried them now fell. They tacked in a northwester towards Rhegium, Italy’s toe. Julius said:

  ‘I had a strange thought last night. Here stands a soldier who never expected to be converted to the faith. What could happen to one pagan Roman could hap
pen to many. And Rome, without knowing it, makes things easy with her roads and her sea-lanes between province and province. We never know the true purpose of what we do. An empire maintained without swords. I suppose it’s a preposterous idea.’

  Paul said: ‘We’re all instruments. My great desire was to go to Rome – voluntarily, a free instrument of the faith. Yet I come to Rome in chains.’ He did not mean that literally, though he knew that real chains were waiting for him, a kind of decorative symbol of an appellant’s bondage to the law.

  ‘They mean nothing. You’re still a free voice. A prisoner who converted his jailor. Could anything be more improbable?’

  ‘What will happen in Rome? How will my case be judged? How long must I wait? What will be the outcome?’

  ‘If you want my opinion, the case will go by default for absence of accusers. You’ll be a sort of prisoner still. But then the courts will wash their hands of you.’

  ‘Yes. That happened before. Very ominous, this talk of judges washing their hands.’ Julius did not understand. A south wind rose after one day in Rhegium and bore them towards Puteoli, the main port of the south, well sheltered in the bay of Neapolis. Their ship was one of the Alexandrian grain fleet. It had precedence in the crowd of mercantile vessels that crammed the roads. They had to strike their topsails or suppara, the wheat ships not. It was a sign watched for from the quays. The Heavenly Twins eased into its moorings. ‘Italy,’ Paul said, unnecessarily. Luke too looked at Italy, less impressed: he was a provincial Greek but still a Greek. The quay was busy, and the work of the loaders and unloaders, the port officials with their manifests, seemed somehow obstructed by the great statue of the Emperor as the seagod, pointing his trident out at the bay. But the plinth of the high bronze edifice was home to the beggars and the women who sold bruised fruit. The gangplank was lowered. Julius’s troop waited for his orders. Julius said: