The Tongues of Men or Angels

Seven Months before the Crucifixion

What is vision, what is demon, what is insanity?

It was near noon when he first heard the voices, the sun at its highest, not yet it’s hottest. The voices held out promises. They told him what he could become. They said the whole world would honour him, that he had been set apart from his mother’s womb. The voices have rarely ceased since.

Legion. The voices are called Legion. Maybe they are emissaries of God, but there is one God and the voices are many, overpowering him as the Romans have overrun Judaea. A man in torment; a land in chains; both infested with legions.

The man, too, used to have a name. And back when he did it was Shuni.

There are pigs now. They did not exist round here when he was a child. The pigs forage through the sacred soil. Filthy, impermissible animals kept only for the Romans. Swine have skin like people, but are bristled like beasts. He slept with a whore once, in Capernaum, before the voices came. She wasn’t bristled, but she was cleft in the middle like a swine’s foot; she was pink and forbidden like the swine. Now Legion tells him he should take a pig like he took the whore. He tries, but the small ones are too quick and the big tuskers too fierce.

Sometimes he watches the pigs coupling with one another, shrieking swiny glee-pain. The noise hurts his ears, the sight offends his eyes: that such creatures should be here in the God-covenanted land. That such snouty demon-beasts, prohibited even as food to those who fear Yahweh, should be foraging among the tombs of the ancestors. Filthy animals, bred only for the occupiers, sows to feed the Roman blasphemers. Despoiling the soil. Cloven like whores.

The man who used to be called Shuni runs unclothed among the pigs, whipping them and himself with briars and sticks, raising welts and gashes on their backs and his own, the bristled and the bare. The swineherds sometimes try to chase him away, but they are afraid of him, because he is strong and he is wild and he is filled with Legion.

Once, his family had had him shackled. His cousins and his mother — the sow who bore you, Legion said — dragged him foaming and moaning to the wooden trammel they’d had a carpenter fashion. But it couldn’t hold him for ever. Eventually he smashed the stocks with a rock, dug with bleeding fingers from the ground. It was like the big round eye of a behemoth, the rock, staring into him. Black like the bottom of the nearby sea whose waters had soothed his feet as a child. The blows he rained to break the wooden shackles gouged and bruised his ankles, but he found he didn’t mind. Pain was at least sensation, something to bring him back to the world, away from the voices. After he had fled he continued to pound himself with rocks. But only round ones. Only ever round ones, like behemoth eyes.

Now he lives among the tomb caves. It’s dry there, dusty as the grave, since graves they are. Legion makes him curl up in there at night, naked with the dead. When the pigs try to come in, he chases them away. Or, at least, he chases them and then they run away. Is that the same thing? Is it the result or the intent that matters? How are we to judge and be judged?

The Pharisees say that there will come another age, a time in the future when the righteous will be raised; the Sadducees say that this life is all, that we have just one go. He is alone in the tomb caves. No one is resurrected, lending credence to the Sadducees.

Bats dangle from the hewn ceiling though, like strange cave fruits. Still as statues of jackal-man Anubis: dog-faced, furred like cats, winged like beasts of myth. The cloth of their wings, wrapped tight around their fronts like Egyptian funeral windings, is woven finer and tighter than Alexandrian linen; the spiny finger-bones that run through them look too spindle-thin to stand the force of a single flap. It is through their frailty that bats create fear: he is scared that they will tangle and break themselves upon him, that he will somehow become infected with batness. But the cave-dwellers never collide: the bats make their eerie aerial way in the night without ever touching him.

The days are his alone. Alone but for the voices. Alone but for this land — the red desert rocks and the gorse scrub. The Sodom apples and flat-topped parasol thorn trees, which lean like the broken old, tired from resisting the wind, strangling each other in the fight for a place near water-carved cuttings. Seams of softer rock have been eroded into false pathways, narrow but not straight. Wind terraces, as wrinkles on an old baba, ring the hillocks. Boulders lie marooned in the scrub, tumbled from above. Shale piles up against the cliffs, like Roman ramps built to storm a city. Waterless wadis, some still cloaked in hopeful plants. Piles of post-brown brush, dead, waiting to be reborn when the rains come. If the rains come. Just because something has always been is not to say that it always will be.

In season, he eats brittle-skin locusts, because these are allowed by Yahweh, so long as the wings cover their body and they walk on four legs, using two to jump. He uses two legs to jump as well and two hands to catch his prey. Sometimes he cooks his locusts on the embers left behind by the swineherds when they move their tent settlements. More often he cracks the mottled grey locust shells apart and licks out the beckoning inner, as a Gentile might with a shellfish. The one-God of the Israelites does not approve of shellfish, but He likes locusts. The mottled grey at least, and the yellow and the red and some of the white. But never green. Eaters of green locusts will not be revived to walk the earth again with the Pharisees. Though the Sadducees say that now is all there is. Just one turn each, like beggars at the wedding leftovers. Be your time short or long, it is all you have.

Sometimes he sees ibex. They could be eaten. But the males grow horns as long and curved as Babylonian scimitars. And their spry feet carry them onto steep cliffs away from him. Their hoofs sound like masons’ mallets as they scramble upon rock. White stockinged, dun as sackcloth. Brown patched, like robes repaired. Their eyes are amber, slit-pupilled and wise. Perhaps they see things on the mountaintops in the drear mists. Perhaps they know things that are hidden from man.

And oryx, they are allowed; they must be the pygarg then, for what else is?

These are the beasts which ye may eat. The ox, the sheep and the goat. The hart and the gazelle and the roebuck and the pygarg and the antelope and the mountain sheep.

Veins are visible on an oryx’s massy flank legs. Horns twisted, like the speech of a liar. Ears as long and mobile as a rabbit’s, flicking at the flies that buzz around its pale muzzle. Baby fringed with hair. Black marks descend from its eyes like tear-stains. Maybe the oryx mourns the Roman invasion of these lands. White-robed like a priest, maybe it prays in the desert sun that the legions will leave.

Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. Day. Rhythm as familiar and instinctive as the humping hips of the swine boars. Just as loveless. Cold in the tomb caves at night. Daily burned in the sun and self-bruised with round, behemoth-eye rocks.

Across the lake is Galilee.

The lake is too large really to be called a lake, so people call it a sea. But it is also too small and too land-locked to be a sea; still, it is the species of sea found here. Sometimes the sea seems to float above itself in the heat, a double body, a mirage of reality, so perhaps it can be sea and lake at once.

Somewhen, a boat puts to shore beneath the tomb caves. It comes from across the sea that isn’t. Maybe an unseen boundary is breached, as the boat beaches, or perhaps it simply serves to remind, but he who watches it land remembers that he is called Shuni. Thirteen men descend from the boat. Or else one man does, with twelve companions. Shuni recognizes the man, from his youth maybe, or from his dreams. Shuni charges down to the intruders from the tomb caves; his feet are grown hard as ibex hoofs, but still they hurt from the pace of his descent, shale stones sliding as he goes, oblivious to path and pain. He howls and flaps his arms about, to scare them or to call them, he knows not.

The man from the boat calms Shuni. The man holds him and rocks him, like a wave-lapped craft. The man talks to him. Lays hands upon him and brings him back into himself. The man is a peasant — Pharisee-learned and vagabond-ragged, barefoot — but the disciples with him say he is a prince.

After the ragged prince has calmed him, Shuni understands for the first time in a long time what nakedness is. So the ragged prince blankets Shuni with his own outer cloak.

The ragged prince gathers his followers and together they herd up the swine — perhaps two thousand of them — and drive them off the edge of a cliff into the lake. The swine defile the sacred soil. The pigs are there to feed the invaders. The man’s disciples say that the prince is appointed by God and that, as surely as he drives their pigs into the water, he will drive the invaders from the land. His followers swing their bill-hooks and iron-blades, to scare the swine and the swineherds. The pigs shriek like people as they fall to their deaths. Their screams are legion.

The swineherds flee to tell the townspeople of Gadara what has been done: what has happened to the demoniac and to the swine. A delegation comes and sees Shuni sitting there, clothed and in his right mind. The delegation is afraid. They are afraid of the ragged prince and his men and they are afraid of the sane demoniac, but most of all they are afraid of the Roman warriors whose pigs still bob on the lake, floated by bloating gases. The swineherds charged with the pigs’ care will have to go into hiding and the rest of the townsfolk are dread-full of Roman reprisal. The delegation begs the prince to leave the area. The prince does not bow to anyone save the one-God, but he loves his people, so he acquiesces.

As the prince is getting back into the boat, Shuni pleads that he might come with him. The prince refuses, and says to him, ‘Go home to your friends. Tell them what marvels have been done, and what mercy has been shown.’ And Shuni promises that he will return to the town of Gadara and will proclaim and that everyone will be amazed.

As if it had been summoned, a gentle wind draws the boat of the prince and his companions back onto the lake. Sparkling fish, every colour in the world, play about them. Things of the water that have both fins and scales can be eaten whatever their hue. God hates shrimps but He loves fish, be they bottom-feeder brown or as bright blue as the flowers of the dwarf chicory. The ragged prince crumbles a piece of bread over the boat’s side into the sea-lake’s water. And the fishes all eat, but not as gluttons, each has a piece.

The man who had been possessed by unclean spirits waves from the bouldered coast. And the disciples, who will never return, believe that the man’s attacks will surely never return either. The wind pulls the prince and his disciples back towards the dark uneven hills of Galilee, where they eventually put to shore, amid the thickets of poisonous dogbane oleander and the grunting of night frogs.