“She’s still got an interesting life!” Posides exclaimed. “Every morning it is her who gives the password!”
“What password?” Uri asked.
“The guards’ password, of course! They come over in the tunnel and Kainis makes one up on the spot! Sometimes a devil gets into her and she spouts whole lines of poetry, but the dopes can’t remember those!”
“Are you the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, then?” Uri was astounded.
“Nominally Tija is,” said Kainis, “but the poor fellow has picked up so many ailments that in practice I substitute for him…”
“And how is our friend Titus these days?”
“He’s growing old too,” said Kainis, “but he’s still got the old sense of humor… The three of us have loads of laughs — him, Tija, and me.”
“Has his wife died, then?”
“She died fairly early on in Britannia,” Kainis said. “Not being loved can kill, and I can’t deny it, my Titus did not love his wife. After she died he sent me a message that I should hotfoot it to Britannia, but I chose not to. I was deeply offended,” Kainis giggled. “I sent him a message that he should come back here. He wasn’t able to do that for a fair time, what with having adventures with all sorts of British amazons… But then when he was made proconsul for Africa I went with him… I also followed him to Alexandria… You had told me such a lot about it, Uri, that I rather fancied having a look around myself…”
Uri laughed.
“I’ve heard that he healed by a laying on of hands.”
“I was there too! That was something to see!” Posides squealed. “I was standing there on the platform next to the Square Stoa, in the gardens of the Gymnasium, a tremendous crowd around it, Tija was also there on the platform, and the astrologers Barbillus and Seleucus in their ornamental cloaks… ‘Healer! Healer!’ the people were roaring, and he was healing all kinds of maladies: the blind saw again, the maimed started to run, the deaf to hear… With his own hands he draped a cloak over naked, jabbering, babbling lunatics and they instantly began to extol him eloquently… A superb to-do it was! Tija organized it marvelously… He even went so far as sending genuinely sick people up before Titus, not just the pretend-sick. Not knowing that they were genuine, he went through exactly the same hocus pocus for them too — and now listen to this! — he cured several of them as well! Not all, but some for sure! Those he didn’t went on making a fuss, and there was nothing he could do about it! He raged afterward that he would rip out Tija’s guts with his own bare hands, have him broken on the wheel! We just roared with laughter.”
“It must have been fun,” Uri acknowledged.
“But then of course when he raised the taxes, the people switched soon enough to detesting him… They found it hard to swallow the tax of one drachma per capita… but what they took to worst was that he sold them the imperial properties in Egypt — that was also Tija’s wheeze — which meant that they were made to pay a staggering amount — forty million sesterces Titus squeezed out of them, but they didn’t dare resist: if Tija is capable of having fifty thousand Jews slain, then he can put easily dispatch five times as many Greeks… They weren’t calling him ‘Healer’ then, but ‘Salted Fish Vendor.’”
“We had a lot of laughs,” said Kainis dispassionately. “We were still in Egypt and we got news that Domitianus was behaving excessively like an emperor in Rome, so Titus wrote him a very polite letter which was full of sentences like: ‘Many thanks, son, for not dethroning me yet!’”
Uri laughed out loud.
“Tiberius also had a wit,” he said. “There was the time a Greek delegation that was visiting him about a year after his mother’s death expressed condolences, to which he responded by expressing condolences to them on the death of Helena.”
All three of them chuckled.
Posides clambered to his feet.
“Would you like anything to eat or drink, my dear Gaius?”
Uri gestured that he didn’t. Posides shook his head to indicate that he would very much prefer to leave them to their own devices but squatted back down at Kainis’s feet, with her patting the crown of his head.
“What do you need my help with?” Kainis asked.
Uri kept silent for a while before sighing:
“Originally I wanted to ask for money for the Jewish captives,” he said, “but something has come up in the meantime… I’ve had my library sold off behind my back… It was an extensive library with a great many books of rare Judaica…”
Kainis’s eyes grew darker; she remained still before saying:
“What do you need the library for?”
“I want to write an account of what happened, and also why it happened.”
“We already have a Jewish historian,” said Kainis. “He’s from a family of high priests and was also a military leader; he came across to our side at the right time… What he is writing is the official account.”
“You mean no one else may write one?”
“One of them is plenty.”
There was a pause.
“But who checks that he has dressed it up in the right language? Who carries out the role of censor? The emperor in person?”
“My dear Titus hasn’t read a thing in a long while,” Kainis brushed that aside. “I run through everything.”
She chuckled.
“Just imagine, most recently I read that our legions were besieging Jotapata, and what should I see in it but that Titus — my Titus’s son Titus — was the very first to scale the walls!”
Posides giggled with her.
In the textbook literature there did not exist a commander who did not direct a siege from the rear. Uri joined in the laughter.
“Do you scratch out anything like that?” he asked.
“No way do I scratch it out,” Kainis chortled. “Readers like adventure-story twists. I even showed it to young Titus. He was delighted to be portrayed as such a big hero!”
Posides snickered.
“Kainis showed me the passage where this Jewish leader of priestly descent writes about how he hid himself in a certain deep pit, adjoining a large den, along with the remaining defenders after the castle has been occupied. He wanted to defect, but his Jews wouldn’t let him, so he hit upon the idea of drawing lots to determine who should kill the others. This proposal prevailed, so they drew lots, but by the providence of the Jewish god each time this priestly leader drew a lot to be left alive to the very last… Now, Kainis calculated the probability of that happening…”
“Yes,” said Kainis, “because earlier on he had written that sixty persons of eminence remained alive, so doing it that way, the probability of his remaining alive would have been so near zero that I told him at least to leave out the numbers…”
They all laughed.
“And have the casualties been added up?” Uri asked.
“Most certainly!” Kainis replied. “Two million Jews died — that was the number I agreed with the author in advance, but the funny thing is that there must have been roughly that number in reality. It does not lie in Rome’s interest to decrease the number of victims. On the contrary.”
Other nations would quake even more. Smart thinking.
“And what is the emperor doing?” Uri asked.
“Everything. He can do whatever he wants, but it’s me who gives the orders.”
Uri looked at the fragile old lady, mistress of the empire of the world, and was amazed.
“Ask for anything else,” Kainis crooned softly. “Anything you want you’ll get — though not me, of course.”
Posides giggled.
“Ask for some monopoly!” he prompted in a loud whisper. “That’s the best! An absolutely safe bet! You can’t imagine how much people are prepared to pay us for a good monopoly! We’ll give you one for free!”