The Tongues of Men or Angels

Forty-nine Years after the Crucifixion

Drusilla can feel a headache coming on. At least, let it be only that … For sickness is no respecter of wealth or station: the mal aria — the bad-air fever that comes with the muggy summer humidity — robs from palace and shack alike, and even here at the seaside one is not completely immune. Life is a near-death experience. If you get ill, one of two things happens: you get better or you die. Physicians can do little more than predict which of those it will be and charge for whatever quackery they prescribe, if they think you might survive. Only dreamers really believe that healers cure disease. In this world a tiny incision can cost a limb or a life in gangrenous creep. Or lock your jaw, spasms spreading, muscles seizing and arching in orgasmic parody until ceased by suffocation. Or that small cut can become a funnel to ease into the body a plethora of amorphous pestilences — small wonder that men so shy from circumcision — but there are any number of ways to die. Ways beyond counting. Life is hard and death is easy. That is to say, for most people life is hard. For Drusilla, that has rarely strictly been the case.

Drusilla claps her hands to summon the slaves, growing tired of the expectant emptiness on the table in front of her. The naked girl who brings in the wine is newly bought, and Drusilla is rather pleased with her. She speaks perfect Greek, but is very pale-skinned, as if she came originally from some northern province, even from Germania perhaps; the girl herself doesn’t know. Her breasts are pearls tipped with pink and her hair a white like gold in moonlight. She really was an awfully good purchase.

The girl fills Drusilla’s gilt-silver goblet, with timid attentiveness. Drusilla seems to recall it came from Lesbos, this batch of wine, as much of the best does, from the isle of Sappho. To look at this slave, Drusilla wouldn’t blame that girl-loving poetess for her preference. Drusilla could have half a mind to order this little one to her chamber tonight, in compensation for an absent husband, though she probably wouldn’t even feel like it by the time the dreariness of the dinner party is over.

The thought draws Drusilla back to the moment and she smiles at the two ladies beside her on the couch. One is the wife of the duoviri quinquennales, the most important politician of this little Italian coastal town. The other is from the Rufus family, among the oldest and wealthiest lines in the area. The three women arranged on the opposite couch are similarly consequential. Life has taught Drusilla that such alliances are important and often they must be paid for, not only with the expense of fine tipples and delicacies but also with boredom.

The gorgeous slave-girl returns with a platter of durum sweets, fried with oil and absolutely drenched in honey. Drusilla takes a syrupy handful and passes some words of chatter with her guests, but cannot help her eyes being stolen once more by the slave-girl’s effervescent rump and the heart-shaped gap where light shows between her upper thighs; she really is divine. She can’t be any older than Drusilla was when she first married.

Drusilla shudders at the memory of those days. One might suppose she would have been glad to marry a king. But when you’re born a princess, that is only what is to be expected, and Azizus was not a terribly kingly king.

He was a dreadful little man actually, all belly between his genitals and his beard. He barely passed ten words a day with her outside the bedchamber, and in it he huffed and puffed away, squashing her down like he was sealing a letter, yet was still quite convinced he was a lover to humble Apollo. As doubtless every courtesan and concubine had always told him it was so.

The slaves bring in bowls of warm water, muslin towels and oil of orris so that the diners may wash their sticky fingers. Though drawn from many races, Drusilla’s slaves are uniformly comely; she does like to look upon beautiful things. But not one of them, save perhaps the new girl, could have matched Drusilla in her youth. She was once a beauty who made even her own ravishing sister envious.

Ageing is tedious for one who has been radiant when young. But even now, at forty-two, Drusilla still draws admiring gazes when she goes into town. She is helped in that by fame, of course, but largely it is her looks; this Italian resort is full of the second homes of senators and patricians; people are accustomed to celebrity here.

Most of the town’s denizens are probably only dimly aware of who Drusilla is. Doubtless they have heard that she is some kind of Judaean princess, but it has been a tangled tale, this dynasty of the Herodians, even for those involved.

Drusilla’s great-grandfather was Herod the Great; he had ten wives, until he executed one, and even though he had three of his own children murdered too, he still left such a superfluity of descendants alive as to cause succession crises and confusion for generations to come. After Herod’s death, Rome divided his kingdom between three of his sons, but shortly reneged and deposed two. And Roman prefects ruled Judaea after that. Except, that is, for a brief spell when Drusilla’s father was tried out as a client king; this was around the time that Drusilla was born, so she didn’t know much about it until after the decision was revoked again. Later her brother, King Herod Agrippa, was given token rule over Galilee and Golan. But that, too, was annulled when revolt occurred, even though Agrippa naturally sided with the Romans in the war. The Herodians were Jewish up to a point, but certainly not to the point of suffering for it.

As if to underline Drusilla’s own practical approach to her religion, the next course the slaves bring is of oysters, scallops and sea urchins, cuttlefish and clams, all cooked in a mint and cumin sauce, a dish absolutely prohibited, of course, to those who adhere strictly to the Torah, but rather fine to eat for all that. And there are also stuffed sow’s wombs and barley cakes and honeyed mushrooms and lobster, with a little vinegared cabbage and dressed cucumber. All the lounging diners comment on what a marvellous spread it is and how they must repay Drusilla the compliment when they can.

And it is well to be entrenched with influential people because the Romans give and the Romans take away. Even as a princess married to a king, Drusilla was perceptive enough to realize where the real power lay. Her husband, Azizus, was king for precisely as long as Rome allowed it. Ruler of a small Syrian city state, client king of an anthill and a patch of sand.

Next the naked slaves bring in capon, filled with lamb brain and ginger, sprinkled with crushed pepper and pine kernels. A capon is a castrated cockerel; Drusilla has never really worked out how one would go about castrating something that doesn’t appear to have anything to cut off. Just another of those tiny mysteries of life, which would be simple enough to solve if one could be bothered to ask a slave.

Drusilla’s second husband had once been a slave himself. Strange thing, to exchange a king for a freedman. But when she had first seen Felix, he was no slave: he was prefect of Judaea. He came with a retinue of legionaries into her husband’s court, and by the way that fat Syrian flustered and abased himself in trying to ingratiate, it was apparent which man was the nobler.

Felix was handsome, in a rough-cast soldierly way, and he had the look of one who would be just as hard and commanding when he fucked; which Drusilla had thought might be rather nice. And she was so thoroughly bored with her little tin-pot king in that regard.

Drusilla herself barely spoke at that initial encounter, but she had made sure that Felix took in her best side. She had looked down, as if demurely, but really to lure his eyes to the shadow-slit between her breasts. And she crouched up on the cushions as she readjusted, curving up her back like a little cat. And she could see that Felix was glued as an ant in honey.

And why shouldn’t she have trapped him thus? That being all the power she had. Felix was a brute, the kind of man so domineering that he thinks he can plunder whatever he wants from the world. So Drusilla let him take what he wanted, without him ever realizing that the choice wasn’t truly his. Felix means ‘lucky’, but in spite of this, the prefect believed he carved his own path through life. He believed he made his own luck, as lucky people invariably do.

Drusilla snared Felix so utterly that in his entrapment he supposed himself to be the hunter. He sent a magician to the court to woo Drusilla secretly on his behalf, and she allowed them both to dream that her seduction was accomplished by their cunning. How is it that men can believe they rule the world when they would risk and lose it all for the chance to screw a beautiful girl? They don’t even rule their own selves. So Drusilla said farewell to her chubby, stumpy king and plucked herself a freedman Roman prefect. She eloped, like she was Helen of Troy, careless as to whether she would leave war in her wake.

And those first years together, Drusilla and Felix were almost like Adam and Eve, so often were they naked and alone. Maybe the fruit of that forbidden Eden tree was a metaphor for language itself, Drusilla thinks, because all words must have been sex noises in the beginning. When there were only those two first people, grunts and moans were all the communication required. But afterwards we had to learn to promise because we had invented lies. We needed words; we needed consonants and vowels and verbs in order to conceal our true selves and obfuscate real intentions. But in sex, we return to Eden.

The first murmurings of that headache coming on seem to have gone, to Drusilla’s relief. A few cups of wine invariably work better than anything a physician might prescribe. Opposite her, on the other couch, the wife of Lucius Caecilius Jucundus holds a ball of amber, rubbing it occasionally and smelling its delicate fragrance. It’s a bit of an affectation, to Drusilla’s mind. Noble ladies do that in Rome in order to mask foul stenches, but there is no need for it in a fine villa in a delightful little seaside town like this one and among such aromas of food. It is borderline insulting, in fact; Drusilla wonders whether she ought to strip the woman from her future invitations altogether. Her husband is only a banker, after all, a dreadfully vulgar occupation. A banker is no better than a goatherd, save for proximity to money.

Goat is the diners’ next delight, when the slaves bring it in. Or not goat, but a plump kid, as tender-fleshed and juicy as a peach, so young it must have had more milk in its veins than blood when it was slaughtered.

It has always seemed to Drusilla that the Torah rule, Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk, was probably supposed to be a reference to the age of the animal, rather than some vague prohibition about combining meat and dairy. For a people teetering near survival’s edge, to kill a beast still suckling makes no sense; much better to let it fatten up first and eat it once weaned. However it was, Drusilla is no subsistence desert-dweller and she has long since left off worrying about those Laws.

Her first husband, good King Azizus, had been obliged by her brother to convert to Judaism before marrying her. But Herod Agrippa made no such terms for Felix. How could he? No one but the emperor tells a Roman prefect what to do. The Jerusalem high priest Jonathan had rebuked Felix on how he was governing and Felix simply had him murdered. One did not even give unsolicited advice to Felix.

Though Felix had seemed to enjoy talking with that curious man, Paul. He was about the only Jew Felix much listened to; the one who said the Law of Moses was ended. It was almost as if Felix was looking for confirmation that he was right to ignore the Torah. Though, so far as Drusilla knows, no one was ever brave or foolish enough to suggest to his face that he ought to convert anyway.

That thing with Paul was a funny old business start to finish. They were at the Herodian palace at Caesarea, which had become the prefect’s residence; Drusilla had been asleep, curled around the hard-body form of Felix, when the messenger came. The slave who had been fanning them throughout the night must have stirred Felix to alert him to the news, because Drusilla herself woke to the noise of Felix saying, ‘Go on then, read it out.’

And a centurion cleared his throat as he broke a scroll’s seal and told how the man Paul had been seized in the Jerusalem Temple and was about to be killed, when the tribune of the cohort had saved him, having learned that he was a Roman citizen. The tribune wrote that although Paul was charged with questions about the Torah, there was no charge against him under Roman law. But reliable sources had informed the tribune that more than forty men had taken a Nazirite Vow, which would not end until they had killed Paul. Whether these men were of the sect of the Nazarenes or not, the tribune didn’t know, but the assassins were supposedly unafraid to ambush Paul even while he was in Roman custody. And the tribune must have taken this threat to be very real, because the prisoner Paul was immediately dispatched to Caesarea guarded by two hundred legionaries and a cavalry detachment of seventy, with a further two hundred light skirmishers to protect the flanks.

So Felix had ordered the centurion to hold Paul guarded in the palace, though under open arrest, to let him have some freedom and not to keep any of his friends from visiting or caring for his needs. And the funny thing was, over time, Felix had seemed to grow rather fond of Paul. He did have this way about him, hard to define; it wasn’t that he was terribly congenial, yet people were pulled towards him, like the tides to a shore. He was a man hard to ignore; his presence demanded one decide whether to love or hate him. He was quite a small man — in fact the name Paul even means ‘small’ — yet he seemed to occupy a great deal of space.

Deputations of Israelites from Jerusalem came asking for Paul to be delivered over to be dealt with by the Sanhedrin, but Felix would have none of it. And, anyway, the man had the right of appeal to Caesar’s court: Paul was a Roman citizen — he had the proof of it in twin inscribed bronze tablets, folded together and wax-sealed — and even if that citizenship was newly purchased, it was no less of a fact. And Felix himself being a freedman, he had a certain disdain for old lineages; he believed a new citizen to be every grain as much a Roman as a man who could trace his family line for five centuries; a point on which the law agreed.

So for two years Paul had stayed with them at the palace in Caesarea. Felix wouldn’t hand the prisoner to the Jerusalem council, but neither would he release him. It wasn’t only that Felix grew affectionate, of course: he also had hopes of a bribe from Paul. Felix’s informants had learned that Paul had access to a great deal of money. And it must have been a very large sum indeed to have maintained the attention of a man like Felix. A pro consul might earn four hundred thousand sesterces per year — a sum sufficient to keep eight hundred average families — in wage alone, never mind what he could wring from the province he ruled. Felix must have had strong evidence that Paul had substantial gold stashed away. But, so far as Drusilla knows, no bribe was ever paid. There might have been remuneration here and there for upkeep, but the big pay-off seems never to have arrived.

So Paul was still there, at the palace in Caesarea, when Felix was recalled to Rome. And Drusilla went with her husband, leaving the land of her ancestors and leaving their customs too.

The slaves bring in a large silver platter; it takes four of them to carry it, their buttocks jiggling as they take little shuffle steps so as not to shift the whole roast porker on the salver. It is lying there, on a back crinkled with salted crackling, sprawled as if asking for its tummy to be tickled, but that belly is slit open and inside it are baked thrushes, mussels, figs and sweetbreads, spilling over as if trying to escape.

‘Such ecstatic creations,’ says Alypia, one of the couched women. ‘You really are spoiling us, Drusilla.’

Alypia’s husband is in garum, the ubiquitous fish sauce that Italians seem unable to cook or eat anything without using. Alypia is a little excitable and young, but she at least seems fun, and her husband is obscenely rich. He staged a gladiator show in the town’s stadium with thirty pairs of fighters earlier in the summer, without even seeking election, just for the spectacle of it.

Hopefully Felix will shortly come down from Rome to join Drusilla in their seaside villa. She yearns for him; she aches when they are apart. Over the years, she has come to truly love him. And more than that, when you are with a man like Felix, a man who fears nothing and believes he can do anything, you feel so invulnerable; maybe Felix perceived that same quality in Paul. But Drusilla cannot bear Rome, even to see her husband; she goes there as seldom as possible. The summer stink is intolerable and disease is rife and everything is just so much more pleasant when you can look out across the sea.

After this last dish, she might command that pastel Nordic slave to perform an erotic dance, perhaps with one of the other slaves. That might be rather nice. See if it shocks the stuffy, amber-rubbing banker’s wife.

It is a little tedious to have to entertain, but not so bad, and one must try to ingratiate oneself with the influential locals. Drusilla is contented in this prettiest of Italy’s resort towns, cooled by gentle zephyrs of breeze, surrounded by farmlands and the plump grapes growing on the fertile slopes of Mount Vesuvius. A mountain that has started smoking of late, like the gentle breathing of a contented god; like the billows that once flowed up from the Temple at Jerusalem. The local wines aren’t nearly as good as those from Lesbos, of course, but still, it is a fine hideaway in which to settle and enjoy a blessed life: Pompeii.