The Tongues of Men or Angels

The Exaction of Penalty

Cloth is costly and the robe is fine and seamless, indivisible without irreparable rending, so the legionaries play dice, to see which of them will claim it. Strictly speaking, gambling on games of chance is illegal for Romans, though betting on contests of skill — gladiators or chariot racing — is a national pastime. But there is no one here to judge the soldiers. No one but the prisoner anyway, and who is he to judge? A crumpled mess, less like a man now than the skin of a shape-changer, something left after the creature itself has departed. But that’s just the way they get, following the half-death of the scourging. He has sufficient strength remaining to suffer awhile yet.

The soldiers were sent from a far-off country to be here. They are blood-sworn to serve Rome; many will not live to retire. They cannot marry while enlisted; they have no family now, save each other; no loyalty, save to their legion and its banners. They are hardened by regular war and constant fear: death is the penalty for nearly every and any infraction of military code. The soldiers probably think themselves no crueller than other men. It was not them who made the rules. They are just obeying orders. And those orders being as they are, what must follow is this.

The prisoner is raised to his feet. He is naked save for a loincloth. It is hot under this sun but he shivers. Whatever energy his body is using to keep him alive has not left enough to keep him warm. He shakes with pain and cold. Blood, some of it scabbing, some of it wet and weeping, coats him. He looks like a corpse pulled from a burned building, so riven is his skin from the scourging, so covered with black and red. Even his teeth are maroon glazed. His beard is matted like the wool of a Passover lamb, throat cut on the altar.

Two soldiers, in their breeches and their breastplates, with their beardless faces like clay golems, bring out the crosspiece beam. It is heavy even for two of them, but the condemned man must carry it on his own. They don’t make the rules. Other legionaries hold him up and they tie the olivewood rafter across his back. They fasten his wrists tight around it. If he keeps dropping it the walk will take all afternoon. It is not so far from this palace courtyard to Golgotha, but it is far enough. Being tied to the beam stops prisoners escaping or being freed in a crush of crowd. And it reminds those who watch the party pass of the fate of all who stand against Rome. The beam itself is stained with blood by the time the soldiers have finished fastening it; the wood and the ragged old ends of rope that hold it in place have been dyed, as if with madder.

And so it begins. Legionaries open the heavy palace gates and the procession leaves Rome and enters Jerusalem. Past the pedlars and the bread-sellers; the beggars and the lepers; the stockers of pots and cloth. Past baskets of mint, with their Elysium smell of soft meadows. Past the ragged, shadeless palms. Past marbled flanks of skinless sheep, swaying in the meagre breeze.

Most of the legionaries hold javelins and carry shields, as if going into battle. Two soldiers at the front use short whips to clear space through the crowds, steel-bladed gladii ready drawn in their free hands.

When the prisoner walks too slowly, he, too, is whipped; though he is struggling to walk at all. There are many faces in the Jerusalem crowd who love him. None of them jeer at him — why would they, who could? People wail and people weep. Not just because they know who the prisoner is, although some of them do, but because they would weep for any man being taken by the enemy to be tortured to death. Women cry and hold their hands up to the sky. Young men tense their young men’s muscles and measure distances with their young men’s eyes, as they try to calculate how many others might join them if they were to rush at these Roman guards. And the young men all arrive at the same total as always: insufficient.

The soldiers try to take the broadest streets — for their own sakes, because it is harder for their spears and swords and training to protect them in narrower passages — but even still there are points where the prisoner’s burden must be turned sideways to fit through. Where an arch or a cart or a stall blocks the way. There are places where the beam jams and the prisoner must be manhandled to advance.

At one such place he falls, having been dragged too fast past an obstruction. As he stumbles, the weight of the wood on his back drops him face first to the flagstone. Unable to put down his hands, the force of his jaw hitting the floor makes a crack, louder even than the dropped-log bong of the beam. The soldiers pull him up again swiftly. Eager to be gone from these narrow streets and to the open ground of Golgotha outside the city walls, where they will once more feel in full control.

The beam has a slot in it, behind the prisoner’s head. It has been auger-bored, chiselled and scraped by a carpenter, so that it will lock over the post at Golgotha. Perhaps they are each numbered and this beam forms part of a pair; or maybe they are all cut to identical size, so that any crossbeam will fit every post. Romans favour such standardizations.

Which is why these legionaries all look so similar, with the overlapping plates of their armour, which deflect blows; with pattern-formed javelins, designed to bend as they strike, so that they cannot be thrown back; with shields that lock into a barrier near impervious to arrows; and with pitiless eyes that know no other way, or other world.

Further times the prisoner falls. And each time he does, dust and dirt from the street stick to the blood, so that he rises again with skin like flour-baked fish, in agony from the grit in his wounds. And each time he does, the plaited diadem of thorn branches bites as his head hits the ground. And each time he does, Jerusalemites wail and mourn.

Once, as he stumbles, a man from the crowd catches the prisoner, holds him up, takes the weight of the wood. And for a moment each of them shares the strength that flows from the other. But a legionary pulls the man away and punches the side of his head for his effrontery in stepping into the soldiers’ line.

It is strange, perhaps, that the prisoner continues at all. What could the Romans do to him here that could be worse than what awaits him at the destination? Yet he does continue, as they always do.

The group hears the howling dogs of Golgotha before they even get there. The dogs stay away from the procession, wary of spear butts and boots, but they know what such spectacles mean.

Golgotha — the place of the skull — is a stony basin, with limestone-cliff walls. Once it was a quarry. Formerly men from Jerusalem took rocks from Golgotha. Now Golgotha takes men from Jerusalem.

The land has almost overrun the carved limestone in the years of unwork. Pitted earth rolling forwards, motionless to the eye, yet relentless. Faces baked hard by the merciless sun, pocked with the nest holes of birds for which the heat is a blessing, allowing them to soar on the thermals that scorch from the ground below.

The stones all around are tawny and blunt, good Judaean stones. But everything is brown and grey and tan. There is so little colour in this place. Only the sun and the blood of the prisoner break the veil of numb beige.

The ground is littered with broken bone fragments, marrow licked free by the dogs, all covered with dust now, all the same colour as the rocks. Even the dogs are sandy-coloured; sandy and skinny, with tails like ragged flags, not so far from wolves. Scavengers; predators without prey.

The dogs snarl and snap at one another. And the air is thick with the flies that have no imperative to leave this place. Their whole circle of life, emergence, maggoty crawling, feeding, mating, spawning and death, takes place within Golgotha.

The vast rock bowl is scattered with crosses, like the abandoned crutches of cured cripples. Numerous posts standing permanently in place; many of them suspending rotting corpses.

Two at least of those who dangle from the crosses are still alive. They periodically try to heave themselves up on the iron pinions with which their ankles are pierced. They both look as though they near the end now. But such things are hard to judge: some men look like that for days.

And hooded crows circle and hop and try to stay out of reach of the dogs. And jackals, too fearful of men to come down by daylight, watch from the hillsides. And a marabou stork — hunching its bald pink head into the grey shawl of its feathers, like an old man — sits upon the cliff edge, waiting; waiting as if it has been always waiting for this.

And if you could choose, you would never end it here. Not in this place, please, God, not here. But the prisoner cannot choose, so he is pushed to the earth next to a ground-lain post, either numbered or standardized. Where he drops, the dust rises, a puff of smoke as if a pot is lifted from a clay oven.

Some women, who have spent hard lifetimes lifting such pots from such ovens, have followed to Golgotha and they watch from a distance.

The Romans allow the women that place and no closer. They do not threaten them off, but their stares and spears prevent further approach. A single man is with the group of women, apparently unafraid that his presence might be seen as collusion with the prisoner. Most men are fearful of coming to Golgotha, entry into which, without permission, can in itself be seen as cause for capture. The soldiers do not arrest this man, though. Perhaps because he looks so clearly like the prisoner, because they are so obviously brothers. Seeing the two men like that is a reminder of how we all can fall: one brother clean and straight and tall; the other drenched in blood and ragged with cuts, shortly to be naked and nailed.

All men are crucified naked. They leave the world as they entered it: covered with blood, a mother howling. And so the legionaries strip the prisoner of his loincloth; they don’t make the rules. Though one of them laughs at the prisoner’s circumcised penis, the only part of him unstained by blood, where the loincloth formerly blotted and soaked.

‘Look at that,’ the soldier says. ‘Imagine doing that to a little baby. These people are fucking barbarians.’

And his friend nods agreement, as he fetches the hammer.

The beam is slotted into place on the post and soldiers hold the prisoner, while one of their comrades readies the nails. They are reused, these nails. This one has probably been through the arms or ankles of others already.

Can it even be called a nail, that crude, cruel spike? It is a nail, if siege engines and sling shots are both called catapults: it is a nine-inch dark-iron wedge of a nail. It is placed at the midpoint between the prisoner’s wrist and elbow, where flesh and bone are still strong enough to take the force of holding a man up without tearing free. Even so the soldier places a rough lump of wood on top of the arm as a wad; to stop the nail head, the size of a double sestertius coin, eventually pulling through. The wood also prevents that first spurt of blood going into the hammerer’s eyes.

Though the soldiers always try their best, occasionally one will inevitably spike an artery — nobody is perfect — and the condemned man will bleed out quickly. This prisoner is not that lucky. But, still, it is something of a kindness to be nailed at all. Prisoners who are only tied to the crucifix often survive for many days longer.

At the sound of the hammering the women in the near distance start to shriek and clutch one another and cling to the man in their midst. A man trying to be strong, but in danger of submerging, beneath his mother and the others and the horror.

The prisoner’s legs are restrained, held either side of the prone post, and spiked in turn through the heels; further bits of wood are used to ensure that they won’t tear free. The lumps of wood were found on the ground. Most probably, in this treeless quarry, they are bits of former crosses.

And, as regulation dictates, the plaque with the prisoner’s crime inscribed is also hammered in place. King of the Jews, it reads; in triplicate.

The whole mass — cross and man — is rope-hoisted and pole-pushed up by the soldiers, straining and hauling. It drops with a jolt when the post, fully upright, finds the slot of its hole in the rock. And the prisoner cries out, as that force multiplies the pain of his own weight, for the first time fully suspended from the nails. His hands are held up skywards. Fingers curled in pain, in the shape they formed at the instant the nails were struck. Frozen like that.

Now he has been raised, the prisoner beholds the woman and her son, his mother and brother. Though he has three other brothers, this one will be her eldest now; it is he who must take care of her. The prisoner mouths something to them, but he has not the strength left to hold up his head for long.

A few hours later, he loudly cries his last words, which are, Eloi, eloi lama sabachthani — ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’

Maybe he is trying to recite the psalm that begins with this line, using the final shreds of energy that remain to him; perhaps he is only asking what any man of faith might, in circumstances such as these.

If those who watch from a distance were still holding hope for a miracle, it has not come; at least not yet. When they realize that the prisoner’s spirit has left him, the women howl and shriek the shrill ring of Middle Eastern mourning.

The miracle didn’t come and the Romans did. The man died, as men will, when nailed up high, beyond the length their lungs can take. Though he died mercifully quickly: he survived only hours on the cross, when many last multiple days and some pitiable few can suffer for over a week.

Surprised at the speed of the prisoner’s death, wary of trickery, a soldier pierces his side with the long prong of his spear. The blood that flows is already sluggish and the prisoner makes no gasp or groan.

The half-death of the scourging must have carried too far, or perhaps the kindness of some poison was smuggled to the man in the mêlée of the crowds, an action not uncommon among Judaeans, trying to aid the condemned in the only way they can.

Normally the corpses are guarded and left where they hang. That is part of the penalty: for the condemned, while they still live, and their families to know that the birds and beasts will take what they can reach of the body and that the rest will rot. Fear of remaining without grave or pyre is a profound extra punishment in most of the societies that Rome has subdued, but especially so in Judaea. Crucifixion does not only consist of the public dishonour and the inhuman agony, but also this final assault: that even the corpse will not be given the proper rites.

But an admirer they call the Highlander, a wealthy and powerful Pharisee, has paid a large sum of money so that this last insult will not be so for the body of the prisoner. The Highlander couldn’t stop the execution, but he has begged and bribed the prefect, Pontius Pilate, for the right to take the corpse at least. That it might be given the proper ceremonies and a decent burial.

The women watch and follow the Highlander’s men, who take the body down and wrap it in a clean linen cloth and carry it to a newly excavated tomb. A tomb where no one has ever been laid, cut into a hillside not far from Golgotha. An honourable sepulchre, not the criminal cemetery, where those condemned by Jewish trial would be interred, and not the rotting shame of Rome. From a distance, the women carefully mark which grave-cave it is and watch the stone-carved tomb-cover being rolled into place over the entrance.

It is little comfort. But on such a day, it is startling to find any comfort at all. And at least the dead man can be given the proper rites. He can be gently washed of blood and tended with oils and spices. He can be shown the duties he deserves.

But not now: darkness is approaching. This is the day of preparation, tomorrow is Passover and the following day is the Sabbath: all other obligations must wait. Already the ram’s horn blows from the corner of the Temple, to warn the goatherds and the fieldworkers and all others outside the walls, these women included, that the double Sabbath approaches. The horn blasts remind devout people that they must cease all work, down all tools, return to their dwellings. Until three stars are visible at nightfall the day after tomorrow, nothing must disturb sacred rest, not even the honour of the dead.