Herod strode up and pushed him playfully, his voice big, booming, his breath smelling of last night’s wine. ‘Do you remember the Aramaic I taught you in Rome, when we were boys?’
‘My dear Herod. How could I forget? And these past years while you’ve been playing the rogue, I’ve been teaching myself Phoenician. I’m planning a history of Carthage, you know. You just can’t get by without reading the original sources. I don’t trust anything a Roman historian has to say about barbarians.’
‘We’re not barbarians, Claudius. It’s the other way round.’ Herod pushed Claudius again, almost toppling him off balance but catching him just in time, with his usual tenderness. ‘Anyway, I don’t trust Romans, period. With one noble exception, of course.’ He shouldered Claudius again, then embraced him to stop him from falling, and they both laughed.
‘Does he speak Greek, this man?’ Claudius asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then let it be Greek, not Aramaic. My dear Calpurnia is a real barbarian, you know. Her grandparents were brought as slaves by my great-uncle Julius from Britannia. A fascinating place. Calpurnia tells me such amazing things. One d-day I will go there. I believe the Phoenicians reached those shores, but I do not believe they left the Britons any knowledge of their language.’
‘Very well then, my dear Claudius. For your lovely Calpurnia. Greek it is.’
They came closer to the shoreline. Claudius was walking ahead again, and could now see that the boat was real, not a mirage, and was drawn up a few yards from the edge of the water. It was a good-sized boat, with an incurving stem and a single high mast, a bit like the one Claudius had sailed on the Bay of Naples as a boy and still kept in its shed at Herculaneum. He looked more closely. Under an awning behind the stern sat a woman, heavy with child, working at something on her lap. Beside the hull were loose pieces of wood, fragments of old boats, and a plank with a careful arrangement of tools, a handsaw, a bow drill, chisels, a basket of nails. Claudius realized that this was the origin of the tinkering sound he had heard. Then the carpenter came round from the other side, holding a plane. He was lean, muscular, wearing only a loincloth, his skin a deep bronze, with crudely shorn black hair and a full beard, just as Herod had looked when he came back from a hard season’s campaigning. Claudius hobbled up to the boat, keeping his eyes on the man. He could have been one of the gladiators in Rome, or one of the escaped slaves from the marble quarries who Claudius had befriended in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, where his mother had tried to abandon him but where he had been taken in, befriended by outcasts and others afflicted as he was.
‘I am C-Claudius,’ he said in Greek, clearing his throat. ‘My friend H-Herod has brought me here from Rome, to seek your help. I am ailing.’
The woman smiled up at Claudius, then looked down and carried on with her work, mending the cotton strands of a fishing net. The man gazed at Claudius full in the face. His eyes were intense, luminous, like nothing Claudius had seen before. The man held his gaze in silence for a few moments, then looked down and pushed his plane forward and backward, carrying on working the wood. ‘You are not ailing, Claudius.’ His voice was deep, sonorous, and the Greek was accented in the same way as Herod’s.
Claudius made as if to reply, then stopped. He was dumbfounded, could think of nothing to say. The words when they came were stumbling, inconsequential, instantly regrettable. ‘You are from these parts?’
‘Mary is from Migdal,’ the man said. ‘I was born in Nazareth, in lower Galilee, but came here to this lake as a youth. These are my people, and this is my vessel.’
‘You are a boatwright? A fisherman?’
‘This sea is my vessel, and the people of Galilee are my passengers. And we are all fishermen here. You can join us, if you like.’
Claudius caught the man’s gaze again, and found himself nodding, and then looked back and gestured at the others. Herod bounded up, the mud spattering against his bare shins, and embraced the Nazarene in the eastern fashion, murmuring greetings in Aramaic before turning to Claudius. ‘When Joshua comes with me to Tiberias for an evening in the taverns we call him Jesus, the Greek version of his name. It trips off the tongue more readily, especially after a few jars of Galilean.’ He guffawed, slapped the Nazarene on the back and then knelt down beside Mary, gently putting his hand on her belly. ‘All goes well?’ he said in Aramaic. She murmured, smiling. He leapt back up, then caught sight of someone on the shoreline towards Migdal, a distant figure waving, then loping on. Claudius followed Herod’s gaze, and saw a man with black skin, tall and slender, wearing a white robe, carrying a stringer of fish.
‘Aha!’ Herod guffawed, slapping the man again. ‘You have a Nubian slave!’
‘He is Ethiopian, from a place called Aksum,’ the man replied. ‘He is a free man. And he is a good listener.’
‘Everyone listens to you, Joshua. You should be a king!’
The Nazarene smiled, then raised his hand in greeting to Calpurnia and Cypros as they came walking towards him across the mud, barefoot. He passed beside them wordlessly and heaved over a crude stone anchor which had been mooring the boat, then detached a thick hemp rope which had been looped through a hole in the centre of the stone. Herod and Calpurnia and Cypros placed the baskets they had been carrying in the boat, and Mary made as if to lift a pitcher beside her, but the Nazarene quickly took it off her and placed his hand on her belly, smiling. He coiled the anchor rope and tossed it over the sternpost, then braced himself against the stern and heaved, every muscle in his body taut and bulging. As Claudius watched him work, the Nazarene seemed like the bronze statues of Hercules and athletes he had seen in the villa of his friend Piso below Vesuvius. The keel slid along the mudflat until it was half in the waves, and the Nazarene stood back, glistening with sweat, while the others splashed past him and clambered on board. Claudius came last, awkwardly pulling his leg up and over. A few more heaves and the boat was afloat, and the Nazarene quickly leapt up over the gunwale and released the square sail from its yard, while Mary sat by the tiller oar.
Claudius and Herod sat side by side in the middle of the boat, each with an oar, and began to pull in unison as the wind took the sail and pushed the boat beyond the shallows. The hull and the rigging creaked, the water gurgled and crackled under the bow. Claudius relished the exercise, his face flushed and shining. If only he had been allowed into the gymnasium in Rome before the palsy took hold, then he might have led the legions in Germania just like his beloved brother. But now, in this boat, as they slipped further offshore, until the line of the coast was all but lost in the haze, the pain and unhappiness that had begun to cloud his life seemed to slide away, and for the first time he felt whole, no longer battling against himself and others, those who would rather have seen him never return when he was pushed towards the mouth of the underworld as a frightened little boy.
They drifted for hours, blown along by wafts of breeze, talking and dozing in the shade under the sail. The Nazarene cast his net, and caught only a few fish, but enough for him to cook in a pot over a small brazier. ‘Oh prince of fishermen,’ Herod had joked, ‘you tell us your kingdom is like a net that is thrown into the sea and catches fish of every kind. Well, it looks as if you have a pretty small kingdom.’ He guffawed, and the Nazarene smiled, and continued to prepare the food. Later, Mary played the lyre, making music that seemed to shimmer and ripple like the surface of the lake, and Calpurnia sang the haunting, mystical songs of her people. They ate the food they had brought with them, bread, olives, walnuts, figs, and a fruit Claudius had never eaten before, produced by the thorn tree, all washed down with pure water from the springs of Tiberias. Afterwards they played dice, and arm-wrestled across a loose plank, and Calpurnia made diadems for them out of the twigs of the thorn tree, solemnly crowning Herod a king and Claudius a god. Herod kept them entertained with a stream of stories and jokes, until his thoughts began to turn to the evening. ‘They say you can work miracles, Joshua son of Joseph,’ he said. ‘But you can’t turn water into wine, can you?’ He guffawed again, then scooped up a handful of water from the lake and splashed it over the man’s head. The Nazarene laughed along with him, and the two men jostled playfully, rocking the boat from side to side. ‘Anyway,’ Herod said, sitting back. ‘We can’t stay out here much longer. I’ll die of thirst. Anyone for the taverns?’