The Tongues of Men or Angels

Nine Hours before the Crucifixion

He breaks his nightly fast — at an ungodsly time, when by rights he should still be peacefully dreaming about chewing the nipples of some full-breasted boat-fresh slave — with a cutlet of pork, faintly gilled like the underside of a mushroom, served red-rare, still swampy in its own grume. There is pleasure to be taken in such small things. Don’t eat blood. Don’t eat pig. Don’t do any fucking thing on the Sabbath. These tiresome, touchy Judaeans. After all the expenditure, planning and petitioning for a chance to govern, of all the lands in the Empire, to end up with this one.

Pontius had only just arrived — four years back, this was — when he almost had his first full-blown riot. Over nothing. Nothing that would cause a problem anywhere else in the known bloody world anyway. You can’t put up statues in Jerusalem. He knew that, was advised of that — multiple times — before he left Rome. Not even in your own bloody apartments can you put a statue, never mind in the Temple, where there bloody well ought to be one of the emperor or Jupiter or some decent Roman god. But, no, the Israelites won’t even have a statue of their own bloody ‘Lord of Hosts’. But Pontius was grudgingly fine with it; it’s ridiculous pandering, of course, but if that’s how it’s always been done, then so be it.

The centurion, Gaius, enters.

‘The high priest is here with the prisoner, Prefect.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for? Bring them up.’

‘Prefect.’ The centurion looks uncomfortable.

‘What is it?’

‘The high priest won’t come up, Prefect.’

‘No, no. Why by the arse-of-Medusa would he enter such an unclean habitation as this?’ Pontius gestures about the mar-less palace, marble as white as Alpine snow, shining ivory that might have come from Hannibal’s elephants. ‘These people, Gaius, these fucking people.’

Pontius rises and spreads his arms so that a slave can place a thick wool cloak across his shoulders and fasten it by the two rings attached to the front of his breastplate; it hangs through them in twin puffs of scarlet cloth.

‘I have to keep the place statue-less, for their sensibilities — not so much as one image of Venus the Modest, half hiding her little titties — and they won’t come inside anyway. So tell me why I bother.’ The instruction is left to drift, not aimed particularly either at Gaius, or the slave, or any of the other attendants.

And, of course, Pontius knows full well why he bothers: so he doesn’t have another incident like there was when he arrived. Not that he even put up a statue back then. It was just some standards of the legions, placed around palace walls, that was all. But, of course, some of the standards have an image of the emperor’s head on them and the emperor is a god. And that was sufficient to have volley after volley of priests and merchants and Pharisees and Sadducees and Herodians all pleading and imploring for the standards to be taken down. Pontius should have been congratulated for uniting factions ordinarily in discord. But when he declined all of their entreaties as insulting to the emperor, he had found his palace surrounded. Not by warriors, but by people protesting. For five bloody days, great crowds gathered round, bringing commerce to a standstill and creating a hubbub and a spectacle that could not be allowed to go on indefinitely.

So, on the sixth day, Pontius had the assembled multitude all summoned to the stadium, as if he was going to answer them. But then, upon his signal, they were encircled by soldiers, three ranks deep, with swords already drawn, and ordered to desist protesting.

Whereupon the fucking Israelites only all flung themselves on the ground, extended their necks, and cried that they would rather die than transgress the Torah. Bloody hundreds, if not thousands of them, baring their napes so their heads could be cut off. What can you do with a people like that? Pontius could hardly massacre them all in cold blood, having only just arrived. The Emperor Tiberius might even have rescinded his appointment. So Pontius had to let them have their way in the end and take the standards down. Bloody incorrigible people.

Pontius and his entourage descend to the walled courtyard adjoining the palace, where Kayafa and several squads of Temple Guards stand before the dawn. The prisoner himself is framed by the rising sun; it glows around him, making his white robe look orange.

Four slaves place the prefect’s judgement seat on the paving. A skinny lizard — morning-slow — skips away from it into a crack.

Pontius sits and folds the two sides of his cloak across his bare legs. A large tan and white Mollossian mastiff ambles down the steps after the rest of the party and settles at his side. The toes of its paws are longer than a child’s fingers. Pontius smooths the shaggy mane around the loose-hanging fighting flesh of its neck.

‘You will forgive me for not entering your palace I hope, Prefect?’ Kayafa says, to break the silence. ‘We have the festival, as you know, and I have to be pure for it.’

‘Of course, of course, I understand, Kayafa. I have been having your laws and prophets read to me each night by one of my slaves. Do you know, I think I must be as well versed as most Judaeans by now? If you were somehow to incur uncleanness you would have to be purified again. A ritual that consists of … Remind me.’

‘The impure man must descend naked into the water of the mikveh and emerge again from the other side.’

‘So, like a bath?’

‘A bath, Prefect, correct.’

‘A bath, that’s right. And such baths are near impossible to find?’

‘The prefect knows that there are many mikveh in the Temple surrounds, but these would be exceedingly busy at festival time. They must be entered one at a time and the queues would be lengthy.’

‘Have you ever thought of having one installed in your own villa?’ Pontius asks. ‘I would have thought that could offer considerable advantages.’

‘I believe the prefect is aware that I do have one in my villa.’

‘Well, now, that sounds more convenient. And yet you still prefer to drag me outside my palace rather than use it?’

The high priest begins to say something but Pontius waves him to be silent. ‘Let’s just get to the business, shall we? So, this is the prisoner. Behold the man for whom I have to rise before dawn. His name again?’

The prisoner is many-named, Pontius is informed, as many people are, common and great. His given name, Kayafa says, is Yahushua bar Joseph. But apparently most people call him Yeshua. Yeshua of Nazareth; Yeshua the Nazarene; Yeshua the Rabban; Yeshua bar Joseph; Yeshua the Messiah; the rabble know him best as Yeshua bar Abba, perhaps from his habit of asking followers to call God ‘Abba’ — Father — in the special prayer he teaches. The words of people who know God personally, who speak with Him directly; an over-familiarity, in the view of Kayafa. Though possibly the prisoner is called bar Abba because Son of the LORD God is a royal title and he claims to have been anointed and adopted as king.

‘Presumably he’s not a Roman citizen?’ Pontius asks. It’s ridiculously unlikely, but best to check these things since Romans have the right of appeal to Caesar’s court.

‘No. He’s not even strictly a Judaean. A landless Galilean. He was at first a follower of the Baptizer John.’

Pontius was told about the Baptizer: executed for preaching dissent and for criticizing Herod Antipater’s incestuous marriage. Some stories blamed the bride’s daughter, painted her as a stunning little cunny — Pontius wouldn’t have minded meeting that one. It’s probably all a lie, though: these people are always blaming women for their sins … They say Baptizer John’s head was put on a plate when it was severed and a banquet held before it. They say it rolled around in the last of the blood, John’s long curls coated, then congealed in it. They say they had to put a cloth over it to stop the flies swarming on it. But still it drew them and eventually they moved it away from the food to the opposite end of the banquet hall. Wonder what happened to it afterwards? Probably no one knows. The bodies of the executed are given no ceremony. They are dumped in ditches and ravines or buried in hasty holes. They are never returned to their family: that is part of the punishment.

Thoughts of banqueting make Pontius hungry. But he is running a little towards fat these days, it must be said. So he resists the urge to call for food. He calls for wine instead. Anyway, best to keep the liquids up for the heat, which will certainly arrive later in the day, and the local water tastes to Pontius like it was bucket-bailed out of Charon’s leaking vessel of the dead. It is tainted, half cut with decaying flesh. And not surprising, when the hills all about Jerusalem are covered with tombs. The water flowing to the pool of Siloam must have percolated through every shrouded skeleton and rotted funeral winding and sack of part-decomposed flesh lumps of all the deceased of the land.

But you try to put up an aqueduct to get in fresh water direct to the city. You try to do that to help them and leave Jerusalem a better place than you found it and you have more riots on your hands. It is un-bloody-believable.

Quite recently, this was: Jerusalem needed more clean water and the Temple Treasury was sitting on huge piles of gold. Sacred money, yes, but Pontius had the high priest’s permission — albeit under some duress — and Jewish law permitted the use of the fund for social welfare and public works. Now, what is an aqueduct if not public works? And welfare at the same time, for that matter: not dying, squirting out your own innards of bloody dysentery, is bloody welfare, isn’t it?

You would have thought they would be grateful; but instead, at the next festival, Pontius had found a palace surrounded once more. By several thousands this time. They probably thought they’d repeat the offer-their-necks thing, which had worked over the standards, if he sent in the troops. But Pontius wasn’t about to be tricked like that again.

This time he had auxiliary soldiers — Samaritans, who look pretty much identical to Jews — dress up in civilian clothing and mingle with the protesters. And when the rabble refused to withdraw, the troops broke it up by force.

Pontius had forbidden them to use swords, permitting only quarter staffs and clubs, perhaps a few daggers, just to rough the crowd up and scare them a bit. But, of course, the soldiers had got carried away once the blood mist set in, as Pontius had half known they would. It’s about as optimistic as commanding a war dog to savage someone gently, to think that Samaritans would use restraint against Judaeans, the enmity between them being age-long and bitter. Any protesters who resisted were stabbed or beaten to death on the street and probably even more were trampled or crushed while trying to flee. Several hundred were dead by the finish, but it didn’t much matter because the result was good: order was restored.

Pontius’s wine arrives, a vintage from the hills of Alba. The gold beaker is richly blistered with amber and crusted with beryl; condensation glistens on cast stags. There’s a crack in part of the amber, Pontius notices. He’s never owned such a fine goblet before. And now he owns one with a fucking crack in it.

‘I won’t insult you by offering you a cup of my dirty idolater’s wine, of course, Kayafa,’ Pontius says, taking a sip so deep that his nose is wetted.

Kayafa manages to produce a look that a charitable man might possibly construe as a polite smile. Pontius is not such a man.

Pontius strokes the giant mastiff beside him. Judaeans don’t seem to like dogs, but as far as he knows they have no specific proscriptions against them. Obviously they can’t eat them, but who does? Except in times of siege, of course. It’s not like Romans eat dogs, but they still use them as companions and guards and for herding and hunting. Judaeans seem to despise canines and be extremely uncomfortable around them. Which is partly why Pilate likes to go everywhere accompanied by his favourite Canis pugnax. In the heat it often has long dewy strands — like the threads a witch might use to drip poison into a sleeping man’s mouth — swinging from its sagging maw. Pontius delights in seeing the Judaeans recoil from the sight. They visibly flinch if the beast should turn its crop-eared head too sharply, as if it were a madman flicking his own seed at passersby not a little bit of dog dribble.

Pontius takes a sip of wine and sucks air in through his teeth to feel the tannin on his tongue. ‘So that is the charge is it, Kayafa? The prisoner says he has been anointed as King of Judaea?’

‘As you know, Prefect, he caused uproar and stopped all trade in the Temple, but he also opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be the Messiah King, descended from David.’

‘Well, in that last regard at least he is probably correct.’

‘Prefect?’

‘Well, it struck me as I was having your books read to me. Solomon — King David’s son — had a thousand wives and concubines and this was a thousand years or so ago. Think of all those children over that number of generations. My mathematician confirmed it: there is probably not a Judaean alive today who is not descended from David. You and the prisoner and the gangly eunuch who brings me my fucking bedtime broth are all descended from David. Probably why this land is so interminably cursed with would-be messiahs …’

‘You are wise, as always, Prefect. The prisoner Yeshua, though, claims to be the rightful king, through a line of first-born sons.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. And who could doubt that such records were carefully and indisputably kept by illiterates, exiled, enslaved and decimated countless times over that thousand-year span? Not I. If a man states something so foolish as to say that he is king of a country that already has an emperor, then you would have to think that he truly believes it. And if he does, that’s good enough for me.’

Pontius flicks two fingers to summon the centurion. The mastiff, now lying at the prefect’s feet, looks up, hopeful that the movement beckons something of relevance to it. Disappointed, it settles down again.

‘Gaius,’ the prefect says.

‘Prefect?’

‘Crucify this man.’

‘Prefect.’

The centurion motions and his troops approach the Temple Guards. With the surly uncooperative look of a gang of street-tykes being forced to make peace, the guards surrender their prisoner and the legionaries lead him away.

‘What should we put on his titulus?’ the centurion asks, for the sign displaying the condemned’s wrongdoing.

‘Well, legally speaking, his crime is laesae maiestatis,’ Pontius says. Then he looks at the high priest and smiles. ‘But write “rex judaeorum”. That means “King of the Jews”,’ he translates, into Greek, for Kayafa, probably unnecessarily, with a further warm smile.

Kayafa protests: ‘Surely it would be better described as “He claimed to be the King of the Jews”?’

‘Write “King of the Jews”,’ Pontius repeats to the centurion. ‘And write it in Aramaic and Greek as well.’

Kayafa nods shut-lipped approval, clearly aware that he is being mocked. But, then, that is rather the point of mocking.

‘Have a good festival,’ Pontius says to the high priest. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’ He turns and begins to walk away, mastiff at his heel, its claws audible on the stone. But then Pontius pauses and looks back to Kayafa again.

‘You know, Kayafa, some of us have a bath every day. Next time you wish to see me, you come into my fucking palace, Passover or not. Or I choose myself another high priest …’

‘Prefect.’ Kayafa drops his head.

‘These people,’ Pontius mutters to himself, as he goes inside. ‘These fucking people.’

‘You don’t think I’m dominating and cruel like these silly Jews seem to think, do you?’ Pontius says, as he crouches and scratches the dog’s white-blazed chest. It wags its butt stump of a docked tail. ‘You know I’m trying to rule them as justly and wisely as I can, don’t you? And, of course, earn a little to put aside for my dotage, as any man would.’

The dog licks his face, seemingly in agreement. Which is about as much confirmation as is coming. Pontius is pretty much resigned to the ingratitude of these bloody Judaeans. But such are the sorrows of leadership and he can’t say he didn’t court them. Some men are born to greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them. And some are forced to claw it, howling to the empty heavens, from out of the bosom of mediocrity.