The Tongues of Men or Angels

Three Years after the Crucifixion

Saul and the guards leave by the Damascus Gate, the opposite end of Jerusalem’s walls to where they murdered Stephen. No, not murdered: executed, righteously and lawfully executed.

The four ziggurat towers of the Antonia Fortress — named for Roman warlord Mark Anthony — obscure the sky as they pass by. Beneath its guileless fortifications — each stone-carved block as heavy as a hundred hungry urchins — are lines of spread blankets, baskets and handcarts of the traders who sell to the legionaries. There are also scarlet-canopied whore tents, sweaty delights hidden beneath cloth that sieves the daylight. Even now soldiery laughter erupts from one. Some trooper probably cups a pomegranate breast and strokes the wet pelt of a Judaean girl. The Romans snatch the best of everything from this life. But what is this life? Is it just a prelude or a waking dream? Is a new age soon to dawn, as the Nazarenes say? Saul no longer feels he knows these things; he feels his certainties slipping away from him, along with a once hopeful future. There is a hole in the fabric of things, a gap that can be filled only with blood.

The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, the Torah says, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Blood sacrifices, blood circuses, blood feuds, blood libels, blooded warriors, bloody hands. Blood marks us and keeps us. With blood we end and start. And only in blood is there absolution: For the life of a creature is in its blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls …

Saul will have his atonement from the Nazarenes; Saul will have his blood.

A knot of Romans sit, proudly polishing their armour. Dark-eyed boys stare at them from a distance, loathing them, yet longing to be like them. A feeling Saul knows something of.

Saul has learned much about the Nazarenes through his persecutions of them. People of The Way. Mystical, ignorant, nonsensical followers of a self-evidently failed messiah; believers that the end time will shortly arrive. They must be eradicated. That much is clear. Surely that at least is clear. The rest of their beliefs are indistinct, like looking through a veil.

These streets around the Antonia Fortress are little Italy. The Romans are visibly in control here. But they only ever traverse the dense and narrow alleys of lower Jerusalem mob-handed. Too many quarter-turn stairwells and alley doorways where Sicarii daggers can lurk. Too many flat roofs for collecting rainwater that can become ambush platforms. Dead ends that can be barricaded in an instant, leaving seven-foot spears and armour impotent. Where the mightiest soldier can be killed by dropped building blocks. Go in too light and Roman soldiers might die. Go in too heavy and they might provoke a riot. So day-to-day patrolling of Jerusalem is still best left to the Temple Guard and the vestiges of self-rule, the pretence of self-rule. A pretence that fools no one, but is nonetheless a mutually beneficial fraud. A lie that almost everyone can take part in trying to believe. Isn’t it better at least to try to believe in what you cannot change in any case? You have to attempt to hear some harmony in the clangs and crashes of the world.

Not everyone subscribes to this view. As Saul and his men leave Jerusalem’s walls behind, some of the non-subscribers are visible: those who think that this land must be changed. They hang, part-rotted, from a row of crosses. Flesh turned shades of rancid green. Heads lolled forwards, as if at rest. But eyes long since pecked free by the hooded crows. The hooded crows are black-cowled and dark-winged, but tabarded in grey, like Temple Guards. They prize the eyes, moist and globular; the eyes and the genitals are always the first to go. The hooded crows caw and hop their springing half-flight lope between the wooden scaffolds that uphold the dead. The crows stay off the ground; the ground belongs to the dogs. The dogs yelp as they dance and stagger, unstable on hind legs, trying to reach ever higher up. The flesh and bone that dogs and jackals could readily stretch to have gone already; the ankles of the dead are jagged. The bodies are cut-offs now: footless, faceless and emasculated, like damaged statues from some abandoned Alexandrian town. This is the fate of those fools who oppose Rome. And Deuteronomy says that anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed. How can the idiot Nazarenes believe that a man who ended like this could be the Messiah? Those of The Way are wrong, like Stephen was. They deserve to die, like Stephen did.

Saul has a scroll from the high priest to give him legitimacy for the extraordinary rendition on which he is embarked. Annas has no legal jurisdiction outside Jerusalem, but he is still a high priest, so the letter should impress the Jewish population of Damascus, where some of the leaders of The Way have fled. The Jewish population may be swayed, perhaps, but the authorities won’t. So Saul and his men are dressed like traders, daggers at their belts, their swords secreted in packs on the mule that carries their provisions. Mules are mixed creatures, prohibited by Torah, but the high priest seems happy to overlook this instance. Saul has the high priest’s scroll tucked safely inside his tunic, the stiff parchment pressing into his side, like a comforting wound. How can there be such a thing? How can a wound be comforting? How can the freaks and fools of The Way think that a dead man can be a messiah? It makes no sense. And yet so many of them refuse to recant the belief. So many of them take the whippings and beatings with smiles on their faces. Smiles like those of the idiot child who sits in the midday sun on the Temple steps: unconflicted; contented.

The journey to Damascus is eight or nine days’ travel on foot, a hard trek even for the fit and strong, like Saul and the men of his guard troop. All of them have made long journeys before, though. None of them was born in this land. They are all Greek speakers, Jews from the diaspora. Rolling stones that have gathered little by way of moss from their time in the hated Temple Guard. But, then, there is no moss in this land. Even the northern faces are too hot for moss. There is no place in Judaea to hide from the sun.

On the deceptive downhill of the first day they are often overtaken on the road, usually by ox-pulled wagons with solid wood wheels; occasionally by chariots with spokes. But the guards’ pace is fast for pedestrians; they are travelling light, nothing to trade but their swords, nothing to give but the orders contained in a scroll.

They pass a gang of prisoners: Judaeans, probably enslaved for unpaid taxes, on their way to the province of Syria, where people fetch a better price: Leviticus states that Hebrews must be freed after seven years’ service, so Jews do not often buy their fellows. The prisoners are roped together through iron neck collars, hands bound, trudging in a line, guarded by Roman freebooters. They are new slaves, but already carry themselves with the cowering of the broken. They wear identical short tunics of camel hair, the coarsest, cheapest cloth, impossible to rid of parasites. Their own clothes must have been sold. Their heads are recently shaved and pale, their hair gone to become wigs for the wealthy. The ropes that join them swing as they make their slow progress, rocking in a pendulum rhythm. Saul tries not to catch any of their eyes, he is not sure why: some indistinct fear that abjection is contagious. He need not worry: they stare only at the section of time-formed road upon which they must take the next step. They have no future but that. No thoughts but the eternal question of the Israelite: why do Your Prophets say You love us, my God, yet You let Your children be taken in chains?

The next four legs are through desert, sands strewn with black rocks, as dense as seed on bread, and the domes of scrubby, struggling rimth plants. Saul and the nine guards rest through the hottest sunders of each day, wherever they can find shade to do so. Making strongest pace from dawn through the morning. Throwing up their night-time camp, which is just fire and blankets, as the light begins to fade.

On the fifth day, as they prepare to eat midday food beneath the canopy of a spiral acacia, Korach seems to think that Saul serves himself too large a share. Perhaps he does.

‘You need to watch your manners out here, Saul,’ Korach says. ‘We’re not in Jerusalem now. If someone were to have an accident on the road, no one would know.’

Saul’s breath is filched from him. He fissures his eyes and puts a hand to his dagger’s pommel, looks around to the others of his men to be sure that they will be with him as he deals with this insubordination. And realizes, with spinning disbelief, that they will not.

Midian is chuckling openly; the others meet Saul’s eyes without glancing away, follow his gaze as he turns to the next face and then the next. Korach nods and takes a shovel-fingered scoop of bulgur gruel from Saul’s bowl and adds it to his own.

‘You don’t command any more, Saul. You politely request, at best. Remember that. You are in charge by our consent. You were only promoted because you’re a lickspittle with a little learning. You think because you can read and write you’re a scribe. You think because you can quote some Torah and have a smattering of Hebrew you’re a Pharisee. You think because you bought a fancy uniform and a breastplate you’re an aristocrat? We all know you were laughed out of marriage into the aristocracy. Word gets around. We all know how that one ended. You think because you’re in charge that you can look down on the rest of us. But you are no different from us, except that we know our station and you think you’re some great thing. They used too much leaven in making you. You are puffed up, Saul. Too puffed up.’

There are a few cairns of rock behind Korach. Probably only the idle tossed way stations of generations of travellers, but they could equally be bandit burials of the murdered. Saul does not reply. He looks down to his cracked bulgur gruel and tries to eat it; he chokes it down, though his mouth is dry as a potsherd and his tongue sticks to his jaw.

Korach makes a great show of licking every last grain of the sticky beige goo from his fingers after each mouthful, making loud sucking noises, at which the others laugh, mirthlessly.

Saul drops his bowl to the floor when he has finished, saying nothing. Feigning something. Fooling no one. Thoughts imploding. The sky is falling.

Cattle pass by, back on the road, hump-backed and horned. The herdsman forces the stragglers on with his goad: a man-length stave, sharpened to a spike. Sometimes recalcitrant creatures kick back at him with dirt-caked hoofs, but they cannot reach him at the end of his goad and only earn further punishing stabs for the attempt. The man has no dog with which to steer the herd, only pain.

It is Korach who decides when the guards have rested long enough and Midian hands the rope reins of the pack-mule to Saul.

‘About time you took a turn leading the beast,’ Midian says.

The mule is aged and mange-wretched. Muzzle pocked with infected flea bites, fur missing clumps where some leprous equine skin disease has forced an untimely uneven moult. Flies flock about it, as though it is already dead. They swarm like a mist, like black dots upon the eye that you cannot get rid of. Like smears from staring at the sun.

The mule is a gelded male, doubly cursed to unfruitfulness. Sterile child of horse and donkey. Not one thing or the other. Saul feels like a mule himself: neither Greek nor Jew; neither Pharisee nor Sadducee; not Roman but still living in a Roman world, obeying Roman rules; not a slave or truly free; the servant of Annas, a man he despises, obeying orders to destroy people he can’t help admiring; commanding men that he no longer commands, a band of rough vagrants, slouching towards Damascus.

And with each passed hour on the road, with each further mocking rejection from his men under the melting sun, with each time the mule halts to snatch a mouthful of rimth, or kicks back at the stick Saul is forced to use to goad it, there is a further dizzying descent. It feels as if the world is in motion. Everything is getting blurred, like the flies that swaddle the mule; like peering through a veil of cloth.

Saul barely sleeps that fifth night, his mind struggling with the unravelling of what has occurred. Not just what has happened that day but with this life: a destiny for greatness that is being robbed from him, rubbed from him. Saul, who was struggling to settle himself to the possibility of mediocrity, finds himself staring at dejection and failure. He doesn’t even have the respect of his own men, his only friends. Not only do they not honour him, they don’t even like him. They despise him. He came to Jerusalem to be a leader of esteem, an eminent Pharisee; to astonish and be admired for his erudition and wisdom. He finds himself runt-captain of a pack of perfidious rats, hated by them and by the populace as a whole. And as each of the bitter-gall humiliations of his life burns through his sleepless addled mind, it is replaced in turn with a newer, fiercer, humiliation that came after.

Things are out of kilter; his mind is weighted all to one side. And he searches for but cannot locate something to even it out again. To make the centre hold. He pictures the scales that a spice merchant would use to weigh out his precious commodities. Saul needs something like that, something to correct the tilt of mind and life.

When sleep finally arrives, it comes with the smashed face of Stephen. An image scorched into the very fabric of Saul’s skin, as if branded by white-hot iron. A burned flesh scarification of the forehead. Like the marking of a slave who has tried to flee.

The plains last for days, flat as the Galilee Sea, empty but for parched bushes in dry runs of the streambeds of the Jordan rift and balls of old dung, gone white like desert eggs. Wilderness should be yellow and green and blue and copper and russet. These plains are cinereous as the scorching of Sodom.

You see faces in the sands if you stare too long. A form of small blasphemy, perhaps, since it is against God’s law to depict animals or people and you have surely painted them in your mind’s eye. But Saul is sick of such small blasphemies, worrying about the motes of Pharisee rules, while nations and mountains fall apart.

The flies alone could send men insane, them and the southern wind. The flies sing in their hissed flight of the death and decay that you must keep pushing onward to evade. They land on you and on your meagre portions of food and they do not fear you as they ought.

When Saul washes his face in a pool, he doesn’t recognize the man who stares back at him. The man who looks back is sleepless and delirious. The man who looks back is a murderer. The man who looks back is close to madness. The man who looks back is a distorted fool who peers into a pool to see, as if in a glass, darkly.

This state of dissonance cannot go on for long. Collapse must come. And maybe what falls can be made better a second time. But before it can be built anew, it must be broken utterly.

They are finally within sight of the worry-lined walls of Damascus when Saul drops, non-resonant, to the dirt. He falls like a nest-tumbled swallow chick. Near motionless and staring at the sky. He wails about the brightness of the light.

If you stare at the sun you may go blind, but at least you don’t see the flies.

And one might say it was hunger, sunstroke and the wind. One might say it was malarial delirium. One might say it was the product of a mind somehow split from itself, a mind fraught with disorder, a mind damaged from external pressures, which it could no longer square with an aggrandized view of itself. One might even say that some grain or fungus, entangled in foraged food, contained hallucinogenic fervour. One might very well indeed say that it was temporal-lobe epilepsy, well proven to cause deeply experienced mystical visions and lingering but temporary blindness. One might say any or all of these things, and others have. But Saul believed he heard Jesus.

And Jesus told him to stop kicking against the goad. Jesus told him to come towards the light. Jesus said: what is sown in dishonour, can be raised in glory; what is sown in weakness, can be raised in power. Jesus said the least can be great.