They prayed together then breakfasted together.
During the meal, Uri recited a passage of Latin verse from memory:
Of old, when Titus Tatius ruled the land, the Sabine women
Tended their land and never themselves.
Among them the hale and hearty, good mother, seated on a high bench
Quickly wove the raw thread with her dexterous fingers,
While her daughter closed the flock in the sheep-fold,
She herself laid billets on the brushwood fire.
The residents of the house laughed nervously before it dawned on Uri that they did not speak Latin.
Though a couple of his companions might have had a smattering, there was little chance that they knew whom the poem was by, and they stayed silent.
Uri laughed apologetically, his ears reddening.
That too had been unnecessary.
The next day the delegation got up and started off again.
Life must be good for them, the thought went through Uri’s head. It disappointed him that he had not spoken with a single member of the family in the course of the evening.
Everyone had been shouting, talking all at once, cutting one another off, laughing, joking, nudging. They were used to everyone yelling, otherwise no one would have paid attention, and they were a bit deaf as a result, which particularly appealed to Uri. Life must be good for them, he thought, the dank gloom, the tense quiet of his own home in mind.
One day I am going to have family like that, he resolved. He also resolved that if he made it to the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem, he would make a solemn vow to that effect, cost what it may, because one had to pay for a vow there.
His good cheer gradually dissipated as the walking continued. His rectum was at times seized by cramps, and his feet also gave the occasional pang.
He tried to think back on the good that the Sabbath had brought, but a dark suspicion came over him: Matthew might well have asked him to interpret the text into Aramaic as a test, a chance for him to fail. After all, none of the party apart from Matthew spoke Aramaic; he had not believed that Uri spoke other languages.
But I said that I did, Uri reflected despondently, so why did he not believe me?
The walking was tedious and hard; Uri would have liked something to read while they progressed.
For instance, the Acta Diurna.
The day’s Acta Diurna was something he read habitually at his patron’s house while the others gorged themselves like pigs; a reader enjoyed a measure of protection, with idiots being less likely to pester him with chatter. At the age of five, he had already pounced on this handwritten daily newspaper, several copies of which were delivered to Gaius Lucius by entrepreneurs who specialized in copying and distribution. In the paper were Senate proceedings, laws passed, court decisions, and all sorts of other official announcements — and Uri adored it. Gaius Lucius noticed the boy’s passion for reading and proclaimed that one copy was to be reserved solely and exclusively for Uri. That had been forgotten over the years, of course, but Uri still scanned the day’s Acta Urbis virtually every other day and, if still available, the previous day’s, the imperial decrees, the actions taken by the municipal administration, any news about the foundations run by the wealthy, the marriage notices and the deaths, because everything was in that newspaper, the first in the world, that there ought to be, with only the sports news missing, which Uri did not understand. If he were to edit the Acta, then he would publish daily reports on the competitions that were going on in the stadium, which would boost the circulation many times over. There were also times that he was angry because the hand of the copyist that day was careless, and the paper was barely legible or teeming with spelling errors.
While he was living in Rome, it seemed that the Acta Diurna spoke about him. Or so he felt, at least, even though the news was always reporting on important people he had never seen and was never going to see. Still, what was written about had happened in Rome and related to Rome — in other words, to him, too, as a Roman citizen. But now he had left Rome and was getting ever farther away from it, and the relevance of the Acta Urbis to his current location was zero. Uri walked despondently; there was no sense in moving farther from Rome when he wanted nothing more than to be back home.
But then the sea — that was a big deal.
He saw it for the very first time when they arrived in Rhegium to take the boat to Messana across the narrow straits that Homer referred to as Scylla and Charybdis.
It was not the actual sea, because Sicily appeared as a nearby massif off in the distance, the sea really just a large lake, but all the same it was a mighty stretch of water. As they waited for the boat, Uri paddled in the shallow and, despite the winter, still fairly warm water, gawking at the wriggling fish as he bent over its surface. His companions also took a dip; they said the midday prayers and got out quickly, dried themselves on their cloaks, and dressed. Uri stayed; he felt a yearning to set out on the sea and to merge into this mighty stretch of water, to be carried off, but he controlled himself, and anyway he could not swim, as was the case with virtually everyone in those days; so he just gazed in wonder at the miraculous fish and the luxuriant aquatic plants in the completely transparent water and hummed to himself. He was undisturbed that his companions on dry land might laugh at him; he was not out to earn their favor. He did not presume that they liked him, but they had gotten used to his presence, and he did not irritate them. He had lost weight through the rigors of traveling, his body becoming leaner and stringier, the untimely rolls of fat dropping from his hips and belly; it had been days since an acrid sourness had oozed up from his stomach, even the slight irritation in his throat had stopped. A thick layer of skin had formed on the soles of his feet, and his ankles, which had hurt him since he was a small child, were inured to the suffering and did not ache anymore.
As they alighted from the ferry onto the shore they met two Jews who were headed from Sicily to the Italian mainland. Seeing they were also Jewish, they greeted them and demanded with eyes burning that they should repent immediately. They spoke brusquely, holding forth on the now-imminent end of time, which had already begun in Caesarea, and that the Lord’s wishes were now evident to one and alclass="underline" He wanted the end…
But what had happened in Caesarea anyway?
Talking over one another, they explained that the prefect of Caesarea had apparently tried to smuggle some sort of military insignia into Jerusalem at night. He smuggled them into the palace on gilded shields, whereupon the people of Caesarea demonstrated for six days in front of the palace and then occupied the stadium. The prefect had sent in soldiers, who threw themselves to the ground with their arms outstretched and pleaded for death because they could not stand to see such lawlessness, so the prefect got scared, dismissed them, and removed the shields from Jerusalem.
“That’s the beginning! Strew ashes on your heads!” one of them cried out before they leapt onto the ferry.
It was amusing to watch these bulky, uniformly bearded and bald-headed men stir their short stumps. There was no reason to rush; they had only just started offloading the ferry, so it would take a good hour or two before the boat set back off. But those two wanted to be on board as early as possible; they were in a hurry.
The travelers watched them blankly. They could not take the return trip just to hear more about the details; they would have had to pay again for boarding the boat.