John will hear the dogs even from the third tier. At opposite ends of the stadium handlers lean back against savage beasts straining at the leash, yowling, snapping, keening. John will supply his own visions to fit the sounds, but at the Circus Maximus he’ll also sense the feeling that’s growing among forty thousand spectators: Peter’s stadium meekness is unsatisfactory.
The bank of clouds is lower, darker. Peter refuses to defend himself and now this: no one wants rain.
Peter kneels in the centre of the arena. He prays. When dogs pull to within inches of his face, lunging at his eyelids, Peter doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t run and he doesn’t fight, which is curious then dull. The Circus crowd respects courage but Peter looks limp and timid, unlikely to provide a decent afternoon’s sport. He is a coward, and for the editor of the Circus Maximus Peter presents significant narrative problems.
An outbreak of booing, sporadic at first but increasing in volume. Slow handclaps. The editor releases a reserve of Christians, bundling them into the arena, about thirty women and children he’d been keeping back for later. He allows the crowd to settle, then gives the order: let loose the dogs.
His initiative is rewarded. These secondary disciples are less accepting of their fate than Peter, and half of them run. The runners survive, because the dogs leap at the faces and throats of the Christians who imitate Peter, those who fall to their knees and pray. Vicious, lazy, the dogs sate themselves on the sincere believers, but won’t move for the lesser Christians who, lacking in faith, run to save their lives. Everyone gets what they want.
The Circus today is misfiring. The production should feel like a show of strength, but on a darkening afternoon the prevailing mood is weakness. Horns. The editor has seen enough. Handlers with sticks beat the lethargic dogs and surviving Christians from the arena. In come the sweepers, who scrape bloodied sand into wheelbarrows and replace it with fresh. The renewed blondness of the arena is a promise of blood to come.
The editor needs to make Peter entertaining and the best he can do, with a performer Peter’s age who lacks fighting spirit, is crucifixion. But not a standard crucifixion, which would bore a knowledgeable crowd. The soldiers lay Peter down, and his lack of resistance allows them to arrange his arms and legs along the wood of the cross, which is flat to the ground. They nail him where he lies, and as the blood spurts, the booing fades. This is mildly diverting. A heavy bass drum beats time to the fall of the mallet. The editor wrests back control of the spectacle, though the crowd is familiar with the opening moves of a crucifixion. He will have to add value.
Oh that’s good, though, that’s an inspired variation. The Circus soldiers dig out a slot for the upright. Two of them haul on a rope, another crawls under the rising wood and pushes it up with his back until the cross, with Peter attached, is upright on its end and Peter is crucified upside down. Applause, from every section of the stands.
Excitement shivers through the stadium. A god worthy of esteem will have to react, if he has any pride, in front of forty thousand reasonable spectators who will be obliged to accept his existence. Come on, Jesus. You will never be offered a better opportunity than this. The veins swell in Peter’s inverted neck and head. His eyes, inches from the arena sand, roll into the top of the sockets. He lifts his head, tries to, but can’t reverse the blood pressure, the whites of his eyes filling out.
The stadium waits on god. Peter has an eleven-inch nail through each of his feet, Gallio notices, whereas for Jesus a single nail was enough. For Peter two nails are needed to take the weight. Peter’s knee-joints dislocate, and through curling toes Cassius Gallio feels for the underground warning of an earthquake, the tremble of the dead rising to welcome Jesus. For a bomb, an explosion, a terrorist atrocity. The spectacle is Peter crucified upside down, but the tension is in the wait for Jesus to intervene.
A low rumble, and Gallio looks to the heavy black clouds for Jesus descending. John clutches Gallio’s arm. Claudia keeps her eyes on the stands, scans for unusual movement in the tribunes. And again, a low rumbling sound, and Peter’s ankles pop, yes the undertone is louder and it is, Gallio now realises, the stomping of forty thousand pairs of feet acclaiming the editor’s work.
Peter’s head bangs against the wood of the inverted cross. His neck distends, ridged with obvious ligaments, and Cassius Gallio remembers, too late, that Peter is famous for botched miracles. He is the disciple who could not walk on water. He put his foot on the surface of Lake Galilee, waited a moment before applying some weight, saw his foot go under.
Peter is dying, and Gallio stares at a disciple’s public death, convinced he has a lesson to learn. He leans forward, and John holding tight is pulled forward with him. The upside-down crucifixion of Peter, Gallio speculates, reveals the mind of Jesus. This is the thought that Gallio allows to develop. Up is down and down is up. Right is left and the last are first. Death is life. Defeat is victory. Nothing in this world is as it seems.
He doesn’t understand. Nor do forty thousand paying spectators in the Circus Maximus. The distractions that follow, with upside-down Peter as the ailing centrepiece, seem trivial by comparison. Chariots race laps round the inverted cross, but the dying body of Peter holds the eye. The editor of the games has misjudged the audience, and his customers start to leave. At first single seats empty, gapping the stands, loners making for the exits. They ignore the gladiators and the talent contests. Then couples, excuse me please, coming through, before entire rows shift and break. Civilised people, educated to know how human instinct works, are unsettled by a victim who neither fights nor flees. This is unnatural behaviour. Why would anyone behave like this?
Before long Gallio has John on one side and Claudia on the other, but otherwise they’re alone in the stadium, watching Peter die. A crucifixion can take hours, and Cassius Gallio endures the death of Peter as an unforgettable picture, an eleventh grotesque killing to which Jesus doesn’t object. The floodlights click off, leaving a brief silver afterglow. Gallio waits for the end, and even from a distance he recognises the final moment when Peter’s limbs ease and his head relaxes and his chest ceases to heave. His body falls spent against the cross, and Peter the beloved disciple of Jesus is dead. He is dead.
So now they know. Jesus is not coming back, either in person or as code for a major event. A steward appears, the production is over, but they look beyond his official jacket at Peter’s body ignored in the scuffed centre of the arena. For Cassius Gallio reality is asserting itself, but for Christians, the no-show of Jesus is a shambles. Peter’s cross abruptly tilts in its slot, skews Peter’s feet sideways, refuses a neat alignment with heaven.
‘Where will we go?’ John says. ‘What will I do?’
Claudia stands up, but Gallio won’t be rushed. With Jesus he distrusts any sense of an ending, and none of the claims made by the disciples have yet been disproved. They never said where Jesus would come back, or specifically when. Gallio is disappointed by Jesus’s absence from the Circus Maximus, of course he is, but he can still think rationally. He turns towards John.
‘You’re the last of his disciples alive.’
Cassius Gallio touches the side of John’s face, runs his fingers over John’s eyebrow and along his boyish cheekbone. ‘You must be the one, the disciple Jesus loved.’
‘Enough now,’ Claudia says. ‘Nothing they say is true.’
XII: JOHN
THE GREEK ISLAND of Patmos smells of thyme and warm sea breezes. John the disciple of Jesus keeps hold of Cassius Gallio in his usual way, gripping him by the elbow, neither of them clear about who’s the guide and who the guided. They pass a mulberry tree where barefoot children laugh, climb a ladder, collect berries into baskets. Mulberry juice stains their arms and legs, and in their game of tag they leave blood-red handprints on exposed brown skin. John doesn’t see what Cassius Gallio, who was never chosen by Jesus, can see any day of the week.