The captain’s father had also been both an adept astrologer and a captain. He had reached the fourth degree or rank of the mysteries of Mithras but had been unable to advance, because he did not have the appropriate knowledge to do so; initiates were highly erudite people, astrologers all, and they knew everything, and they had ancient clay tablets and papyri from long ago, and they even knew, so his father related, that one time long ago the vernal and autumnal equinoxes were in Taurus, but Mithras decided to displace them to later in the year, and that had been a thousand years ago and more. The sages kept calculating when the equinoxes would be precessed back in Taurus, because if Mithras had displaced them, then he would also replace them, and that is when the initiatory state would set in. That duration was called an Age, and everyone had a different opinion about how long that lasted, how many thousands of years. Mithras was a great lord, in other words, who had conjured the North Star precisely to the north, because, so said the sages, it had not been situated there before, but Mithras wanted mankind to orient by this readily located bright star so that people would be able to sail in certainty.
These and other things were related by the captain to Uri, who found it hard to follow even half of it.
Uri wondered what the Creator said about Mithras’s activities, given that this suggested he was able to move fixed stars around.
The captain said that naturally God was unique and eternal; he was Jewish, like his father before him, but a Great Force had begun to operate after the creation of the stars, the sun, and the moon, and if that was able to operate, then it was not counter to the Creator’s intention, may His name be blessed. The Creator was in fact depicted as the sun, to which Mithras, lion-headed and firmament-mitered, humbly sacrificed. After some hesitation, the captain added that in these depictions the Sun-Creator was generally shown as being the same height as Mithras, who was actually also Perseus, because he had come from the Persians, but then he was not the only Jew in Tarsus who had Mithras to thank when he or a member of his family had stayed alive after a storm.
From then on Uri would occasionally climb down to see the captain, who would relate to him marvelous things about Mithras, the lord of the Upper and Lower Firmament, who was powerful enough to move the constellations. He decided that when he got back to Rome he would inquire with believers in Mithraism there to find out where one could find written traces of these splendid tales.
Around two weeks later they reached harbor on Crete.
Uri did not go on shore with the rest. Crete was of no interest: a rocky island, houses of white stone, and men who somehow made a living there. Plotius tried to tempt him by saying that Cretan Jews were most hospitable, and exceedingly rich, but Uri simply shrugged his shoulders.
Prior to that, Matthew and Plotius, who had sailed that way more than a few times, had enumerated the names of all the totally identical, rocky, desolate islands and the settlements on them. They would be helped out sometimes by Alexandros, who, being a merchant, had also often passed that way. Uri was amazed, because Roman merchants were not known for traveling. Some lines from Homer came to Uri’s mind, and he quietly intoned them. On these Greek islands, according to these lines, the gods and demigods were born, and immortal heroes roamed. Even with his eyes screwed up, however, he saw little: white rocks, some green, and in the distance some darker spots, which had an equal chance of being either tall mountains or clouds.
They were tied up for a whole day at Phalasarna, a port on the coast of western Crete. The slaves stowed away agricultural produce in the still-empty spaces of the hold, whereas Uri stroked the dog and talked to him, the dog occasionally looking as if he almost understood.
“Remus,” Uri would say, and the dog vigorously and happily wagged his tail. He at least recognized his own name.
“Uri,” he would say, pointing to himself. The dog would vigorously and happily wag his tail at this too, though judging from the dimming of his eyes Uri could see that he did not grasp the meaning. What a stupid dog! It could only love.
What sense is there in a dog’s life? What sense is there in a human life? What does the Creator want with us?
As he passed by, the captain would cast disapproving glances at them, the man sitting on the desk and the dog nestling on his lap. But he said nothing. Uri was one of the delegates from Rome, an important man; an idiot, but he could cause problems for the captain if he wanted to. The sailors that had stayed on the ship would tease him, sometimes in Greek, sometimes in Aramaic, “Your brood will be dogs,” but Uri paid them no attention.
He was a little disappointed that they had not stopped in Herakleion or Miletus, even though they were headed for Rhodes, where he too might disembark. But he had not disembarked even in Ithaca, where they had also stopped for half a day. He did not consider it to be his duty to retrace Odysseus’s steps, and anyway it was far from certain that this Ithaca was the Ithaca of the Odyssey, as was confirmed by Valerius, the armchair mariner, who had been seasick all the way: Homer’s Ithaca probably lay farther north, on the island of Levkas.
Uri understood less and less what he was doing on the ship. What would he do in Jerusalem? If his father had been looking to do him a favor, why had he not sent him to Athens? Knowing his son’s passion for reading, it might at least have occurred to him that Uri would be able to bury himself in the libraries there and listen to the academics. Besides, there were also Jews in Athens; he could live among them.
Or why not send me to Alexandria? The most enchanting city in the world — everyone knows.
His companions returned to the ship so drunk they could barely stand. Even Matthew and Plotius, the two men whose respect Uri most wanted to win, were reeling commendably. He did not censure them; it was more a case of his being ashamed that he had not gotten drunk with them.
There’s going to be a time when I get really drunk, he resolved. Much drunker than when I was sick in the sea at Syracusa.
After Rhodes and Cyprus, the next stop was Sidon, where part of the produce — some three quarters of the almonds — was unloaded. Uri asked where the almonds would be taken to, and Matthew gaped in astonishment.
“The whole lot ought to have been offloaded here,” he explained, enunciating deliberately so that Uri might understand, “but the captain lied that the price had gone up in the meantime, and he had only received what the merchant had given him in advance. The captain would sell off the remaining one quarter somewhere else; that was pure profit for him. The merchants yelled at him for a while, and the captain yelled back. All sides ended up pleased with themselves, but it was the merchants who broke off first; that was the custom, and it was calibrated into the calculations.”
In Tyre the cosmetics were unloaded. Here there were more prosperous towns, said Matthew, more so than any in Syria, Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea — Jerusalem and Caesarea excepted, of course.
None of them is wealthier than Rome, thought Uri, the Roman citizen, to himself.
They advanced southward right along the coast.
One week before Passover they arrived at Caesarea. It had once been called Pyrgos Stratonos, or Straton’s Tower. It had been reconstructed by Herod the Great, and he naturally had renamed it for the emperor, said Valerius, well informed as ever and happy that his stomach was no longer going to trouble him.
They were left with plenty of time to cover the two hundred stadia to Jerusalem, Matthew said cheerfully. He was thankful that the long sea voyage had reached an end and they were able to rest for a few days. Uri picked up on everyone’s sense of relief that Matthew was such an experienced seaman. Though maybe it was precisely on that account that Uri was surprised: he had never sensed any danger, even during the squall, but then he had been preoccupied with rowing, so he had no time to be alarmed. He entertained a boundless youthful confidence in his Creator, who had clearly marked him out for something if he was helping him stay alive and did not wish him to perish young.