‘No,’ smiled Slovo. ‘Nothing so minor. They’re still tucked safely away. I looked in on them not so long ago.’
Piqued by such blasphemous levity, the Vehmist spoke more coldly. ‘It turned out to be an even greater issue, if such there could be. It was the day, the one day, that you were born for. We – and the rest of creation – had to hold our breath and await your kind decision.’
Admiral Slovo looked at the continuing, living world around him; his home and children, the birds and the sea, and he pondered the attractions of Apocalypse now. ‘I wonder,’ he thought aloud, ‘if I decided right?’
The Year 1520
‘A LIGHT TO (AND FROM) THE GENTILES: In which I decide the fate of the Universe and become Lord of the Isle of Capri.’
‘The clockwork is being wound,’ said the flamboyant young dandy, smiling as he spoke. ‘Your presence is required.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ replied Admiral Slovo, shocked, even here in this wayside wineshop, at the invasion of his privacy. But the dandy had already gone – vanished most unnaturally into nothing.
‘Fires are being stoked high,’ added a dark, lascivious merchant from another nearby table. ‘Matters are near to the boil. Your presence is required.’
‘If you do not desist, I will stab you,’ answered the Admiral gently but firmly. After all, what point was there in his present vertiginous position if he could not socialize unaccosted? Slovo, sad to say, no longer had any leeway of patience for humans. In this case, none was needed, however, for the merchant was also … gone.
‘Desist from what?’ queried the Admiral’s companion, the Rabbi Megillah. He was unsettled by the intrusion of knife-talk – Rome’s ubiquitous, third-favourite topic. ‘To whom are you speaking?’
The Admiral turned back to his flask and goblet, the merest ripple on his ocean of composure now smoothed. ‘To no one, I suspect,’ he replied. ‘Kindly overlook the matter.’
His long years as ghetto-leader had trained Megillah not to distinguish between gentile request and gentile command.
‘… though, of course, we aspire to reunion with the Land in Messianic times,’ he continued, faultlessly from the break in the conversation, ‘where an even greater number of mitzvah – relating to the Temple and farming and so on – will be available for performance. This will further enhance the degree of sanctification and holiness amongst the children of Israel, which is the pre-requirement for the Messianic presence.’
Admiral Slovo nodded his understanding. ‘Whereupon,’ he prompted, ‘you will presumably be the foretold “light to the gentile nations” and history (being merely the record of the deeds of the wicked) will equally presumably cease …’
‘Er … perhaps,’ answered Megillah, a trifle nervously and brisker than his normal style. ‘The issue impinges upon the eschatological beliefs of your own faith and could be construed as, er … contradictory at certain points. One likes to leave the subject unexpounded and rely on divinely ordained goodwill to permit co-existence in God’s good time.’
Admiral Slovo was born half a millennium before such declarations could be taken at their face value and so construed it (only partly correctly, as it happened) to be a reference to the Inquisition.
‘Just so,’ he said, waving a calming, gauntleted hand over the theological difficulties of his friend. ‘Time will tell, I always say. Our dust will answer to one call or another, I’m sure.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Megillah diffidently, obliged by the age to fear traps even from the friends of his comparative youth.
‘I do so … enjoy our talks,’ said the Admiral slowly, surprised at his own use of such an emotional term. ‘They quite counter an equal number of hours spent attending to His Holiness’s Babylonian travails. One naturally suspects the survival of pockets of good faith and idealism, but it is refreshing nevertheless to actually encounter them. I recall that …’
‘Your presence is required.’
‘Can you see him? Is he real?’ Slovo asked Megillah calmly.
When the Rabbi cautiously nodded his white-topped head, the Admiral turned to face the voice. ‘Yes, you’re real, enough,’ he said, prodding a Swiss guardsman in the chest. ‘So I will listen – but no more than that.’
The guard had seen a great deal in a short life and certainly too much to worry about honour or insults. On duty, he could not be offended. ‘Your presence is required,’ he repeated evenly.
‘By His Holiness and now?’ Slovo helpfully expanded.
The guardsman’s eyes glittered slightly in assent. ‘My message is delivered,’ he said. ‘Make or mar as you will.’ Three steps backward and he was gone as suddenly as he’d arrived.
‘You should go,’ advised Rabbi Megillah, as gently as he could. ‘We are doing nothing here—’
‘Precisely!’ said the Admiral, smiling tightly. ‘I am increasingly attached to nothing, whilst the calls to something grow dimmer by the day. And when that something is the murky labyrinth of His Apostolic Holiness’s world, the sentiment is infinitely multiplied.’
Megillah recognized the mental state all too well, but naive friendship still caused him to shake his head and tut-tut.
‘I know, I know,’ said Admiral Slovo, levering himself up and dropping some coins on their table, ‘but what can he do to me? What can he take that I value? My disposition makes me a free man in a world of slaves. Disappearing messengers and Swiss escorts, both be damned; come and walk with me awhile. Tell me some more about your end of the Universe.’
The two old men pottered off.
At the end of the Via Sacra, on the point of leaving the old Roman Forum, they paused before the ancient Arch of Titus.
‘Everything is there,’ observed the Rabbi, ‘recorded in stone by Emperor Titus’s craftsmen. The spirit of rebellion, human strife, the loss of all that we held dear manifested in the structure of our Temple.’
‘But the triumph shown,’ interjected the Admiral, ‘is that of a dead Emperor of a dead Empire. Whereas you, the vanquished tribe, are still extant. Who then is the actual victor? There is that comfort to be drawn here.’
Rabbit Megillah nodded. ‘I concede,’ he smiled, ‘there might, on reflection, be a multiplicity of lessons contained within this monument.’
‘They may have your Menorah,’ said Slovo, pointing to the scene of the sacred Temple candelabrum being borne aloft by exulting Romans, ‘but what good did it do them, eh?’
The Rabbi was never given the opportunity to answer.
The carved images and decorations of the Arch began to boil and writhe, rising in and out of the depth of the stone like tiny figures in a snake-pit.
Slovo heard Rabbi Megillah gasp and thus knew that he was not alone in this between-world. However, since his companion was by profession and birth a natural victim, there was precious little comfort in that.
Suddenly, from deep inside the Arch’s interior, a life-size head and torso burst forwards with enormous force. As the stone strained and bulged, a man’s face broke through into the open. He screamed and his eyes were full of horror.
A second and third figure joined the first in similar manner, as if they’d been hurled against a permeable membrane. They struggled fiercely, striving to be fully free, howling horribly all the while, but could get no further.