Defender of Rome

XXXI

The next morning, Valerius went downstairs to discover a package had been delivered for him. It was of a type only rich men sent to each other, wrapped in waxed calfskin and stitched to ensure the contents wouldn’t be damaged in a rainstorm. He studied it suspiciously. In the current circumstances it was as likely to contain an angry cobra as anything more welcome.

A bright red seal fixed to the leather confirmed his suspicions. The imprint was a mirror image of the golden bauble he kept on the chain beneath his tunic. It meant the package was from Nero.

He reached for it… but drew his hand clear. Why? Five days had passed since the Emperor pronounced his suspended sentence of death. Each minute without progress represented another step towards the execution block. At first he had been energized by the challenge, but with every setback the road became steeper and the weight he carried heavier.

First Lucina Graecina, then Ruth. Two channels to Petrus sealed for ever. Without Petrus he could not save Olivia. His father, brave fool that he was, now appeared to provide his only hope, but he sensed that Lucius had revealed as much as he was ever going to. He had never felt so tired, or so defeated.

A voice he hadn’t heard for almost four years whispered inside his head. Can’t take it, pretty boy? I always said you were too soft. Just a rich boy playing at soldiers.

Valerius laughed, short and bitter. Seneca had once said that the greatest battles are fought within oneself, but Seneca had never seen a real battle. Valerius had been in more fights than he could count and he knew that there came a point when it was easier to give up than to stay alive and make the next sword cut. That was when true heroes were made. He was a Hero of Rome, though he had never wanted or deserved it. Now was the time to prove he was worthy of the honour. He picked up a fruit knife and began working on the stitching.

It wasn’t until he had the package open in front of him that he remembered Torquatus’s promise more than a month earlier to send him what he knew about the Christus sect.

On his desk lay four scrolls, cracked and ragged with age and use, and twice as many scraps of parchment.

The first scroll he picked up was a Greek transcript of the trial and conviction of Jesus Christus by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. He scanned through it and found that it contained little of interest. The charges of sedition against the Roman Empire were far from conclusive, but it was clear the man had caused unrest among the Judaean community and in the end the priests of the temple had competed to condemn him. Even so, Pilatus had been reluctant to convict, but the defendant’s outrageous claims and conduct in court had given him little choice.

Valerius unrolled another of the scrolls and found himself reading an earnest and rather dull treatise on the Jewish religion and its offshoots, of which the Christus sect was only one of a remarkable number. It outlined the history and practices of Judaism in substantial detail, but, disappointingly, gave little space to the new and rather obscure Christians. The writer’s conclusions were given in a dismissive tone, as if he had no doubt the sect would fade away in its own good time now that its leader had been disposed of. On the face of it, there seemed few differences and many similarities between the Jewish and the Christian religions. When the document was written, Christus worship had been practised exclusively by Jews, who clung to many of the old religion’s rites. It was said that the coming of a Messiah had been foretold by Jewish prophets, although the man Jesus was only one of three or four possible candidates. The main distinction between the two religions appeared to be the question of sacrifice, which played a central role in Judaism but was abhorred by the Christians, who carried it out only symbolically through the substitution of wine and bread for the blood and body of Christus.

He discovered more of interest among the fragments of parchment, which had plainly been cut or torn from scrolls of much greater length. They contained intriguing insights into the early life of Christus and highlighted a number of contradictions which Valerius found fascinating. There was little doubt that he had been born in Galilee, probably in the village of Nazareth, although another account had Bethlehem, an unlikely seventy-five miles away, laying claim to him.

The only reference to his childhood was a torn and crumpled scrap of poor quality parchment which had evidently been cast aside and picked up by someone’s spy or passed through many hands until it reached the Emperor’s intelligence services. It had apparently been written in good faith as evidence of the child Jesus’s power, but Valerius doubted it would ever find its way into any Christian account of their hero’s life. Petrus would hardly want to claim that the Messiah had either killed another boy or been responsible for his death when he was just five years old.

Little more was recorded until his mid-twenties when some transformation had taken place in his life. Now he was a healer and a teacher — a man who believed he was the son of a god — travelling across Judaea and preaching against the temple authorities, railing against sacrifice and the worship of idols. According to the source you chose, Christus could be a man torn by his desires and overcoming them, or one untouched by earthly temptation. Confusingly, his supporters seemed to be unsure whether he was man, god, or some mixture of both. In fact, this Jesus Christus appeared to be a remarkably convenient shape-changer who could dazzle and bewitch at will. A man — or a god, if he so chose — capable of being all things to all men. Unless your name was Simon Petrus.

Petrus and the brothers John and James had been the constants in Christus’s early life, and though they were later joined by other acolytes it was they, as far as Valerius could ascertain, who had been responsible for creating the Jesus legend. First-hand accounts of miracles came from either one or all of the trio. They and they alone had witnessed the anointment of Christus by his father, God — the only discernible evidence that he fulfilled the Messiah prophecy. From what Valerius read, without Petrus, Jesus Christus would have remained an obscure mystic wandering through the desert in search of his next meal.

It was Petrus who had built up and organized a following of thousands who believed in Christus and his God, and had so terrified the Judaean authorities that they had convinced Pilatus to kill him. And it was Petrus, his organization disintegrating around him, who conveniently witnessed the unlikely resurrection of Christus and restored the nerve of his few remaining followers. And Petrus who, with most Jews unwilling to continue their support for a dead Messiah, received a message from God that the time had come to bring Gentiles into the Christian fold.

Valerius could barely believe what he was reading. True, much of it was the work of government agents with a talent for dissembling and an interest in exaggerating the organization they had been sent to infiltrate, but even so Petrus’s accomplishments were astonishing. Jesus Christus might be the figurehead, but the sect which worshipped him was the creation of one man. Simon Petrus.

He shook his head, half admiring and half in frustration. It was all very interesting, but it wasn’t bringing him any closer to his man. He turned over the last piece of parchment, another learned discourse on the Christian rituals, and he was about to cast it aside when one passage caught his eye: The Christian rite of baptism involves full immersion in running water, whereas the Judaic is merely a washing or cleansing. The Christian Messiah is said to have been baptized beneath a waterfall in the upper reaches of the River Jordan and each of his followers must undergo a similar ritual before they can gain entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. Since the Christian faith has been proscribed, baptismal rites have generally been carried out in larger groups and in great secrecy.

For a moment he was back by the pool on his father’s estate. Ruth had been baptized in her homeland and he hoped she had been welcomed into the Christian heaven. But where were Petrus’s Roman converts baptized? Not in the filth of the Tiber, that was certain. And not in any public place; it would attract instant arrest. Ruth had said that where possible Petrus would seek out a waterfall, and Petrus hadn’t struck him as someone who would be diverted by a minor difficulty such as the fact that none was available. So what would he do? Gradually an idea formed in his mind. He remembered the ornamental waterfall in Nero’s reception hall. Not there, certainly. But for a man of enterprise like Petrus an artificial waterfall would not be too difficult to find… or perhaps even create. The problem was, in a city that accounted for each and every drop of its water, where would he source the volume needed to supply it?

The answer came from a harsh, braying voice that echoed through his head. Thousands of gallons a day from the water castle up on the Cespian Height. A veritable river siphoned off somewhere between there and the Subura.