Joseph withdrew into a corner and did his best to make himself as inconspicuous as possible; Uri stood beside him and, eyes blinking, stared into thin air. They were waiting until Gaius Lucius worked his way around to them. Uri would have made a start on filling his sportula, but his father growled; Uri stopped, and Joseph shook his head. Uri did not understand but shrugged his shoulders and waited beside him.
Accompanied by a gaggle of clients, the knight, freshly bathed, freshly shaven, and clothed in one of his marvelous silk togas of shifting color, smiled benevolently at them.
“Ah! My dear Joseph! Uri, my dear boy!” he declared, pulling them in to embrace them. He prided himself on knowing the names of all his clients without fail, and not just the office they filled but also the nickname by which they were called within the family, and he never had to resort to the help of nomenclatures — that is, slaves who prompted him with the names.
Unbearable wafts of rare salves swirled around them, with Uri picking out balsam among the scents, which he particularly loathed — not because it was a product from Judaea but simply because his eyes did not tolerate it.
His father departed from custom in announcing to the parting knight, “Sire, my son will be absent from your hearth for several months: he is setting off for Jerusalem tomorrow.”
Gaius Lucius swung around in surprise:
“Jerusalem, indeed? That is a long way off.”
“He is being sent there for the big feast,” his father carried on.
“That’s as it should be,” said Gaius Lucius, and turned away to move on.
“Sire!” Joseph addressed the knight again. Gaius Lucius, now astonished and fast running out of patience, turned back once more. “May I ask you, Sire, not to mention this to anyone else; my son’s trip is of a confidential nature. He is making the trip for the feast of Passover.”
“Yes, of course,” Gaius Lucius said distractedly, and it was clear that he had no idea what Passover was, and that he was dithering for a second before asking, but seeing the pack that was with him, he chose to go onward. Joseph’s request was superfluous: the knight had already forgotten the whole thing.
Uri kept quiet. He had inferred correctly that he was going to be a delegate, that’s what his father had said. His father also kept quiet, but then he spoke:
“Bring him a gift — most definitely! Some unusual specialty. Don’t forget!”
“I won’t,” said Uri.
Some people stepped up to Joseph. Uri respectfully greeted them, and on Joseph’s face appeared a smile of forced attentiveness, as always when he had to speak to people with whom he had no business. It started off with household gossip, with servants and clients earnestly expounding and Joseph smiling, nodding, and feigning interest. Uri could see from his face that he was very tense; it must be something serious, he supposed. What is he worried about, and why do I have to go to Jerusalem?
A plump, jovial, slit-eyed, bald man joined the group. Uri looked across at him with loathing: this was Pancharius, also one of Gaius Lucius’s freedmen, a slave-trader. Unwanted children — especially girls, who were worthless, but also a good numbers of boys — would be turned out of families by Romans, Italians, all kinds of peoples, with only the Germanic races and Jews forbidding this. That is how the unwanted progeny of wealthy citizens, equites, and senators became slaves and never learned about their true descent. Ever since peace reigned in the world, because Augustus had abandoned further invasions and set his sights on maintaining the imperium’s borders, a policy that Tiberius, his son-in-law and successor, had wisely adhered to, prisoners of vanquished peoples no longer flowed into Rome like Uri’s ancestors of old had; indeed, people were now even willing to pay parents money for surplus children.
Pancharius slapped Joseph familiarly on the shoulder, but before he could utter a word Joseph growled at Uri, hurried over to the nearest table, opened his sportula, and started to pack food into it. Uri followed his example. Joseph, atypically for him, crammed food indiscriminately into his sportula; Uri tried to be a bit more selective and went over to a nearby table to pick some fruit, but his father went after him and grabbed him by the arm.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Uri squeezed a couple of dried figs into the basket and followed his father.
The guards at the entrance gazed at them in astonishment; on such occasions no one left this early.
In the street Joseph almost broke into a run so that Uri, who had become used to idleness, had a hard job keeping up and panted. Joseph came to a halt, wheeled around to face his son and, staring into the distance past his ear, announced, “The day before yesterday, Agrippa sent for me and saw me. He told me he had heard that several years ago I scraped together a few hundred thousand sesterces. He asked me to scrape together for him two hundred thousand sesterces as a matter of urgency.”
Joseph fell silent; Uri, feeling dizzy, held his peace.
Agrippa!
Agrippa was a notorious individual, a grandson of Herod the Great, a favorite of the senators — he would invite them to his carousals where he would scatter gifts around. Indeed, the emperor was in the habit of having him as his guest on the island of Capri.
“So what did you say?” Uri queried.
“What could I say?”
“So what happened?”
“I scraped it together. I handed it over to him yesterday morning.”
The world went into a dizzy spin around Uri.
His father had run up an immense debt. Who could say when Agrippa would pay off the loan, and how much interest would have accumulated by then on the money that his father had borrowed. No doubt the loan that was given to Joseph would have a fancy high-interest tag attached to it; his father would be paying off the capital and the interest on it to the end of his days, and the family would do without.
“Agrippa asked the bankers for a loan, but they refused; after some deliberation they suggested me, and that’s when he sent me word. No one would dare have asked Agrippa to pay interest; they are too scared of him, but me they are not scared of.”
Uri shivered.
“How much is the interest?”
“Twenty percent.”
They might well have crewed the interest even higher, but even so it was a full eight percent above the officially allowed rate.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be possible,” Uri started off, “to ask the knight for the money…?”
“No!” Joseph groaned and threw a sad glance at his son. “A reputable man doesn’t do things like that.”
He ought to ask for a loan from Gaius Lucius at ten percent interest and use that to pay off the bankers, but his father had already taken the hint. Uri blushed: the idea must have crossed his father’s mind, he could guess what Uri had been intending to say: “And I’m disreputable! It’s Agrippa who’s disreputable, always in debt!”
They fell silent. The whole thing was unbelievable.
“I don’t know who your companions on the trip will be,” Joseph said, “but they’ll know about the loan, and they aren’t going to like you for it. Be prepared for the very worst.”
After a short pause, he added, “I can’t help it, son. I had no choice.”
Uri wanted to say that Agrippa should have been given what he wanted, otherwise he would have his revenge, but he did not even bother because he saw that his father was paying no attention to him.
Joseph sat on the ground and, hunched over, started nibbling on a date. Uri took a seat beside him, and it ran through his mind that his father must have asked Agrippa in return that his son be made a delegate. Agrippa must have sent a message to the Elders and they quickly forgot that someone from the same clan had gone to Jerusalem no more than five years before. Agrippa was a big wheel, and bankers feared him.