The Tongues of Men or Angels

One Year after the Crucifixion

Saul has never seen Annas, the high priest, laugh before. But now his face is creased with it. He puts a palm upon his chest as if to stop a mirth so fulsome that it hurts him. His eyes are wide and watery, like a camel’s. He wheezes, as if the sudden humour has left him short of breath. He has a horrible laugh: screechy and repetitive; it echoes around the chamber. Saul hates that laugh. Saul hates being laughed at. And now every laugh directed against Saul for the rest of his life will take him back to this one.

Annas lifts himself upright, from where he was apparently bent over with the hilarity of the situation. He wipes his beard with the back of his hand, as though it must be drenched with saliva from such drollery. He makes a great and deliberate show of straightening his mouth, as if it was a trial of strength, and then he releases a final deep pant, heavy as a high noon dog’s.

‘Oh, Saul,’ Annas says, ‘when you made an appointment to see me, I was afraid you wanted your wages raised. But now you have quite made my day. Marry my daughter, you say.’ He looses another little chuckle. ‘No, I’m sorry to say that I can’t accommodate you there. Mariamme is a charming girl and I don’t doubt that she’s caught your eye, but I’m afraid I was rather hoping for a more equal match. You are a sturdy enough man, Saul. Not entirely without prospects. I’m sure that some father will be pleased to call you son, but not me.’

Annas pours himself a worked-stone beaker of water from a glass jug, with great ostentation. He does not offer Saul one.

‘Do you know who made this pitcher, Saul? Ennion of Sidon made it, one of the finest craftsmen in the world. Do you know how much it cost? No, neither do I, it was a gift, but it is probably worth more than you will ever see in your life. Do you understand? My daughter can’t marry you — in fact, I’m slightly taken aback that you thought she could. She will marry someone of her own station. She will live in a house a little like this one. Perhaps not quite so grand, but similar, and I don’t intend to pay for it. My line is of the Kohanim, greatest of the Levites, the only tribe of Israel still able to call itself such. I am a high priest. My son-in-law Kayafa is the current high priest. My son may well be high priest one day, if the Roman prefects continue to be as greedy and fickle. My family has been of priestly class since the days of Moses. And you? You are a guard, a guard from Tarsus. You would have been much better off, in fact, asking for a raise …’

And at this Annas doubles over again, roaring with laughter. Veritably bursting with merriment. Saul would like to take his sword and strike the high priest’s white-turbaned head from the shoulders draped in luxurious linen, but instead he retreats from the room. Walking demeaningly backwards as he does so, as convention dictates.

Saul’s chest feels tight about him, as he returns to the malodorous streets outside the mansion. It is as if some great force is crushing him. As if boulders were piled upon his ribcage. He loosens the straps that hold his leather breastplate in place. But it does nothing to ease the constriction.

He feels the loss of Mariamme as surely as if he had really known and possessed her; his mind is quite capable of fictive leaps. Her breasts like twin young roes; honey and milk under her tongue. Her garments scented like camphire and Lebanon, her hair of calamus and cinnamon. Her body a garden of delights, swollen with moist aloes and pink pomegranates. But Saul will never now go into that garden and enjoy those pleasant fruits. It is henceforth a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed. Or sealed to him at least. She will belong to another man, and this knowledge scorches Saul even deeper than the failure. Jealousy as cruel as the grave scourges him.

He used to wake hard and aching from Mariamme’s dream visits, so real he swore he still heard her breathing in the night and was unable to reclaim sleep for the sound. He would find himself smiling whenever he whispered her name. A name so strong and sacred, it carried a sense that it should not be spoken out loud at all: a half Yahweh; a djinn who mustn’t be summoned.

Mariamme was an oasis girl: the promise of safety and plenty. A store pile of harvest fruits, still ripening. Saul longed not just for her, but for what a match with her would have given him: position; station; connection. And so to lose her is a double loss.

He gulps back the bile that rises on burning acid wings within his throat.

Saul’s men, all nine of them, are waiting for him, lounging on the itchy, mange-bare, camel-hair cushions outside Ephron’s pothouse. They shouldn’t be drinking on duty, but the wine there is so weak and watered it hardly matters. They’re a dungy bevy, slope-backed and semi-subordinate. Most of them probably only joined the Temple Guard because the barracks offered somewhere for new recruits to sleep. Jerusalem is an expensive place to live and full of young men from the diaspora, whose journey to the Holy City cost them more than they had counted on; they arrive penniless and part-starved. Not that all of Saul’s men are young. Midian barely has a beard to speak of, but old Korach already has aches in his joints, which grow worse in the winter. Though he’s a bruiser, Korach: his knuckles may only hurt him so much through the number of men he’s punched in the skull.

Saul is their captain; he was never one of them. He always felt destined for bigger things, as though set apart as special from birth; but now his greatest advance has just been wrenched from him, trampled underfoot by that lofty bastard Annas.

There’s a man preaching on the Temple steps. His Aramaic has the guttural sound of a Galilean. Saul spoke Greek as a boy, but his Aramaic is good enough to be able to pick out strong accents, though in speech it is a little stilted and halting, and sometimes he’s forced to take a slightly circuitous route to what he would like to say. The preacher on the other hand is evidently eloquent: he’s gathered a small crowd about him. He’s one of the sect of the Nazarenes. Followers of a dead messiah. Often they travel shoeless, like this man. Wearing ostentatiously shabby and worn-out robes. Making a show of the poverty they should find shameful. They hold all their meagre goods in common and preach that all men should be equal. They speak out against wealth and privilege, and they also preach against the occupation. To talk of messiahs is to spread sedition, which leads to riot and decimation as surely as clouds come before a storm.

Saul struggles to understand why the Nazarenes take so hard against Roman rule. Judaea has not had it the worst: when Caesar captured Gaul, more than half of its people — two million souls — were massacred or sold into slavery. And through their long unbroken history the Jews themselves have experienced uncountable generations of enslavement. There is more freedom under Rome than they have sometimes known. But, anyway, the Nazarenes’ king died without freeing his people, was put to death by the Romans. Thus was self-evidently unsuccessful. The Romans are still here and he is not. It’s not blasphemy to believe that this Yeshua was the Messiah, it’s just bloody stupid.

Believing a man to be an anointed one, even a dead man, is no crime, but speaking out against the Romans, near enough calling for their overthrow on the very steps of the Temple, with the Roman Antonia Fortress in view just behind it, that is something else: that kind of dissent threatens peace and order. That is something which needs attending to. Some thing that needs paying for. Saul feels a very distinct sense just now that someone should pay.

Under Saul’s motion, the guards belt themselves around the preacher’s cluster, loose but encircling, like wolves about a lost sheep. Several of those who were listening notice and edge off. New spectators emerge, from stall sides and shaded spots, but stay at a distance, people more interested in what might happen now than in anything the Nazarene might have had to say.

‘What’s your name?’ Saul asks.

‘Stephen,’ says the Nazarene. He has uncut hair long as willow fronds, uncommon among Jewish men. And his beard is parted at the front, like the hoofs of a goat. His face flesh is thin, bones visible, perhaps because of the laughable deliberate poverty these people practise.

‘A Greek name, but you’re from Galilee, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am, from Tiberius — there are many Greek names there. But Jerusalem is my home now.’

‘Then if this is your home, treat it with respect. Cease and desist,’ Saul says. ‘Stop preaching against the peace. Your leader is dead. He failed. And if you bring more havoc to the Temple, the same will most likely happen to you.’ Saul pronounces this with monotone menace.

‘You say he’s dead, we say he will come again and lead us to victory and a new age, a real peace, beyond this present servitude.’

‘He was crucified, fool. Your king was executed by the Romans. He’s not coming back.’

‘Killed by the Romans, yes, but as much by you, the toadies and collaborators. The fearful and the lusters after wealth and advancement. The cowardly and the covetous. Will there ever come a prophet whom men like you wouldn’t kill?’

It is hard to know if this Stephen is brave through his beliefs, or plain sun-stroke stupid. But what is clear: he’s really picked the wrong fucking day to have a go at Saul.

Stephen’s dragged bare feet leave trails in the dirt of the street. After the first attempt, he does not struggle to get away, but neither does he assist them, even by standing upright. His toes, though toughened from sandal-less road-walking are bleeding by the time they get to the Dung Gate. The guards stationed there do not salute. Saul mentally notes who they are.

The spectacle of a captured miscreant gathered a small following as the guard party progressed through Jerusalem’s streets. Most of the followers are idlers and part-time porters by the look of them. But they’ll serve the purpose as well as the next man, if fired up sufficiently. Everyone’s fired up in Jerusalem; Jerusalem can always be relied upon to erupt.

They drop Stephen to the ground outside the walls. Robe a little more torn. Hair a little more dishevelled. Nose a little more broken. Blood runs from it, down the divide of his beard, congealing into blackened tufts. They tie his hands to his feet, behind his back, so he is forced to sit in an awkward semi-kneel. His shoulders slump, head bowed. When he looks up it is directly at Saul. His eyes bore into Saul’s. Like they can see inside. Saul doesn’t hold the gaze; he turns and spits onto the bare dirt. It is little better than desert out here: generations of tethered camels, donkeys and goats have consumed or trampled every sapling, shrub and blade of grass that dared try to grow. Nothing is left now but dust and rocks.

It is hot work collecting stones. The guards leave their cloaks at Saul’s feet while they gather, worried that the street trash who have accompanied them through the Dung Gate might try to take off with one otherwise. They pile the stones in a line of slack cairns, facing the now muttering Stephen. Perhaps he is praying. He is drawn white with fear, but does not sob or beg.

Judaea is a vendetta land under vendetta law. An eye might be gouged out for an eye lost. Relatives can seek retributive vengeance. But stoning means no one man is responsible for the death. It is the community enforcing the law. And here, outside the walls, the guards and the dreg riff-raff they’ve gathered on the way are the community and the law.

Stones can’t be too big, or death will come too fast, nor too small, or the killing could take hours. The perfect stone, like the perfect orange, is the size of a woman’s fist.

Saul counts them down and they throw the first stones together: nine from the guards and another ten or twelve from the rabble. Most of the volley misses. A few stones hit the man on the body, making him grunt with pain and knocking him more completely to the ground onto his flank. Though his hands are still tied to his feet, he seems to be trying to move away, in strange erratic twists like a broken-spine snake. The throwers pick another stone each. Their speeds are different now. Some stones thud onto the baked ground around the man’s head. A stone hits him on the thigh. Another on the shoulder. He wails. He pleads, in Aramaic then in Greek. A stone hits him on the forehead: it opens and blood runs sideways down it straight to the ground. More stones hit him on the body. More stones hit him on the legs, the arms, the ribs. It is impossible to imagine the pain he is in, but he deserves it. Surely he deserves it. Someone has to keep the peace. Still the stones come. Even when the soil around him is covered with blood and his head is gashed open, a mangled mess, the man still writhes. Panting. Backwards hands clawing at the soil he supposedly wanted to free from Rome. The throwers run out of stones. They have to go further in, to collect the stones they’ve already thrown. Some are coated with blood. It gets on their hands. They wipe them on their tunics. Grey tunics of the guards. Rough cloth of the porters and idlers. In the pause the man raises his head. He stares into Saul again. ‘God forgive you,’ the man says. ‘God forgive you.’ It sounds more like a curse than a blessing. His teeth are broken and his mouth bubbles blood. For the second time today Saul feels queasy. But this man deserved it; he deserved what he got. Like his so-called Messiah leader did. Saul and his guards are the real holy ones. Preserving what is good for Judaea. Saul, who has not cast a stone, but stands with the cloaks of his men at his feet, ordering and approving it all. And guards like Korach, who now throws a big rock, which hits the man directly in the centre of his face. Smashing what remained of it flat. Blowing blood out from it, as if from a child’s toss into a puddle. He no longer looks like a man, the man who deserved this. But sometimes brutality is necessary to preserve the peace. A little bloodshed can prevent a tide of blood. Someone has to take responsibility. Someone has to act. Someone has to face up to what is needed. We can’t all escape into fantasies to flee the horrors of this world. It would be nice if we could. But we can’t. We have to deal with life as it is. Stones bounce from the man’s body. It does not even twitch now, as each fresh blow lands. Occasionally a low moan comes. The throwers’ arms are tired by the time the moaning stops. Some of the makeshift mob have left. One of them vomited as he did so. Already dun sparrows peck at the vomit he deposited. The birds are too nervous to make their way to the blood-food that oozes from the man lying in the middle, but they would like to, you can tell they would like to. ‘Stephen’ he was called, the man. A Nazarene. A dead man who believes in dead men. And he deserved what he got, for that. He must have deserved it. Because that was what he got. And people get what they deserve in this life, so the Sadducees say at least. But Saul didn’t. Saul hasn’t. Saul deserved Mariamme, but he didn’t get her. So what does that mean? And Stephen’s bubbling lips won’t shift from his mind. Is that face going to replace Mariamme’s now, in his dreams? ‘God forgive you,’ Stephen said. ‘God forgive you.’ Why would Saul need to be forgiven? Stoning means no one man is responsible for the death. And, anyway, the man deserved it. And, anyway, all Saul did was hold the cloaks.