When the loan was due, Joseph did not have enough money to pay off both the Jews and the equestrian. He asked Gaius Lucius for a period of grace and a loan of a further thirty-thousand sesterces, which was granted, and from that and his earnings he paid off the Jewish banks, and it was only at the end of the third year that he was able to pay back his outstanding debt to Gaius Lucius. Until then, all he did was suffer and worry. He could not breathe easily for a single day, for the moment that the Jewish bankers pocketed the loan he had paid back, along with the interest, Joseph’s temporary protection came to an end and the Jewish silk mafia instantly leeched him. They demanded a cut of the trade, even though Joseph had already made a deal with the Arabs. He asked them too for a grace period, and after admitting the debt to Gaius Lucius, he was thereafter obliged to pay the Jews fifteen percent on every consignment, which meant that he barely made anything on the silk. Nobody believed him, of course; they thought he was rolling in it and was only so thrifty in the way he lived with his own family to hoodwink others. Admittedly, from that point on they did not pester him any longer, indeed there were even cases where his extortive co-religionists would take care of things when a particular shipment was held up.
Joseph struggled for years until he hit on a third route and had the silk delivered secretly from Parthia via Greece and Dalmatia, over dry land the whole way to avoid shipwrecks and even letting the proverbially unreliable Illyrians in on the business. Doing deals with the Illyrians was at least as calamitous as the worst storm at sea, but if a few shipments yearly by some miracle made it through, then it was worth it. The adolescent Uri was also let in on the plan, being sworn to secrecy, because he was taking a big risk if the news ever reached the ears of the Elders or the other Jewish merchants. The trade must have worked, to some extent, because from then on Joseph slept much more soundly at night.
It occurred to Joseph around that time that what should be imported from China was not the silk itself, but the plant from which those incredibly gossamer fibers were made. He started to poke around, but the Arab and Greek merchants simply laughed at him; he was not the first to come up with the idea, but the Chinese guarded the secret of the plant so closely that no one had yet managed to see it, and anyone who tried to get too close was killed for their trouble. There was a tale that a mad Syrian merchant from Antioch had tried to make silk from the threads of spiders, but he had not succeeded and in utter misery he had slashed his wrists; he left two million drachmas for his fatherless children. Multiplied by four that gives how many sesterces? Eight million! Even in talenta that was a staggering amount of 333⅓.
The knight was satisfied with the quality of the silk and muslin delivered by Joseph, and he even had his slave girls dress in these lavish materials, putting on short muslin robes to whip up his desires and those of honored guests. There was also a rise in the number of progeny among the slaves. It struck Uri that his grandfather was not necessarily descended from a Jewish father; Tadeus, the grandpa who had emancipated himself from slavery, might have been a bastard child, a mamzer, illegitimate. It could even be, Uri shuddered, that I am a third cousin to Gaius Lucius; maybe that is why he is so pleasant to all his former slaves and their offspring, because he suspects they might be his own blood relatives. When he tried to raise the topic with his father, all Joseph said was merely, “Slave folk are well advised not to speculate too much.” I’m half-Latin, half-Persian, and that’s how I came to be Jewish, Uri thought when he was around ten; there’s even a bit of me that is Etruscan, because Gaius Lucius figured on having some Etruscan ancestry.
Wise are the peoples that, in slavery, trace descent through the female line, concluded Uri when he was a child. There were such peoples in Rome, but the Jews were not among them. Uri was still glad that patriarchy was in force: he was horrified by his ugly and grumpy mother, much as his father was, and he did not love her, even though she was occasionally overcome by fits of affection and would slobber hysterically all over him with kisses, even when he was a teenager. He loved only his father, who gave up on him because his eyesight went bad.
So, early in the morning Joseph and Uri set off from home for the patron’s place, in their right hands an empty sportula to be crammed full, and they held their peace. The daily ration in a sportula could be exchanged for money, with a basketful being worth twenty-five asses, but the clients of Gaius Lucius waived that opportunity because they were able to stuff a basket with food that was worth a good deal more. The knight’s clients were in fact the objects of general envy, with many applying to be taken on as protégés, since a client was free to have more than one patron, and they would hold out promises of all sorts of return services, but the eques would turn all offers away, saying that he had no wish for any other clients other than the progeny of slaves who had served his ancestors. Mostly people did not know quite what lay behind this, but Joseph did, and he told Uri once: Gaius Lucius was not born to his father’s wife, because she was barren, but to a German slave girl. It was a big secret that Gaius Lucius learned from the lips of his dying father, Lucius. It would have been possible for Lucius to adopt the child born to the slave girl, and the child could still have inherited everything, but he felt there was more security in keeping it a secret. Gaius Lucius, of course, could have reacted by hating the offspring of slaves, said Joseph; indeed that would have been the natural thing, but as it happened he did not respond that way. Uri was perplexed by what his father said, but even more by the way he said it; he must know something about souls. So there is still Germanic blood in me, Uri supposed; perhaps that is why I have a shock of sandy hair.
His father trudged somberly, grave thoughts clouding his brow. Judging from his red-ringed, gummy eyes, he also had gotten no sleep the previous night. Uri would have liked to express his gratitude; some tasteful words of thanks to his father would have been for arranging his journey to Jerusalem, but the words escaped him. He was afraid of traveling.
They passed wordlessly over the bridge. The island was basically uninhabited, because floods frequently inundated it, so it provided optimal conditions for trees, shrubs, and, above all, mosquitoes to proliferate luxuriantly. A few centuries before, a temple to Aesculapius had been built to the south and its ruins still existed, but one would hardly say any healing power radiated from them. Uri had often felt an urge to climb down the gig stone flags of the old steps in the middle of the bridge and pitch a small tent to live quietly within the dense screen of vegetation. He even imagined catching fish in the river and eating them, but he was forced to recognize that even there he would not be on his own: vagabonds would install themselves on the island whenever it was not flooded, and they were in the habit of greeting intruders with a sharp blade.
They walked wordlessly next to each other, northeastward, toward the murkily dawning, mysterious, true Rome, among the huge blocks of its theaters, baths, and palaces looming darkly among the palm trees on the other side.