Dusk was colouring the sky red an hour later when Claudius again pulled the oar, this time sitting alongside the Nazarene. They had landed, and Herod had set out on the road back to Tiberias, eager to seek out the young bloods in the officers’ mess for an evening’s cavorting. The three women had gone back to Migdal, to Mary’s home. But Claudius had wanted to stay on with the Nazarene, to make this day last for ever, to ask more. He had offered to help the Nazarene set his seine net, a few hundred yards offshore from the mudflat where they had first set out.
The Nazarene rowed silently alongside him. Then he stopped, and gazed at the deep red sky where the sun had set, the colour of spilt blood. ‘The weather will be fine tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The net will be safe here overnight. Then, tomorrow, it will be time for the autumn sowing of the fields. The autumn wind will blow up from the west, bringing heavy downpours, coming over the Judaean hills and cleansing the land. The Sea of Galilee will once again be filled, and where we once stood there will be water.’
‘Herod says you are a prophet,’ Claudius said.
‘It does me good to see Herod,’ the Nazarene replied. ‘I have that same fire within me.’
‘Herod says you are a scribe, a priest. He says you are a prince of the house of David.’
‘I minister to the ha’aretz, the people of this land,’ he said. ‘But I am no priest.’
‘You are a healer.’
‘The lame and the blind shall walk the farthest and see the most, because it is they who yearn most to walk, and to see.’
‘But who are you?’
‘It is as you say.’
Claudius sighed. ‘You speak in parables, but where I come from our prophets are oracles of the gods, and they speak in riddles. I go to the Sibyl, you know, in Cumae. Herod thinks she’s an old witch, but I still go there. He doesn’t understand how much better it makes me feel.’ Claudius paused, self-conscious. ‘Virgil also went there. He was our greatest poet.’ He closed his eyes, declaiming from memory, translating the Latin verse into Greek: ‘“Now is come the last age of Cumaean song;
The great line of the centuries begins anew.
Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns,
Now a new race descends from heaven on high.
Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child,
Under whom the iron brood shall at last cease
And a Golden Age spring up throughout the world!”’
The Nazarene listened intently, then put his hand on Claudius’ shoulder. ‘Come on. Help me with my net.’
‘Have you ever seen Rome?’ Claudius said. ‘All the wonders of human creation are there.’
‘Those are things that stand in the way of the kingdom of heaven,’ the Nazarene replied.
Claudius thought for a moment, then picked up a chisel with one hand, the edge of the net with the other. ‘Would you renounce these?’
The Nazarene smiled, then touched Claudius again. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘about my ministry.’
Half an hour later it was almost dark, and the boat had gently grounded on the foreshore a few miles from where they had set out. The burning torches of Migdal and Tiberias twinkled from the shore, and other faint lights bobbed offshore. The Nazarene took a pair of pottery oil lamps from a box beside the mast step, filled them with olive oil left over from their lunch and deftly lit the wicks with a flint and iron. The lamps spluttered to life, then began to burn strongly, the flames golden and smokeless. He placed them on a little shelf on the mast step and then turned to Claudius.
‘Your poet, Virgil,’ he said. ‘Can I read his books?’
‘I’ll ask Herod to bring them to you. He’s supposed to be at Tiberias for the rest of the year, banished from Rome. Maybe he’ll even do a translation for you himself. It might keep him out of trouble for a while.’
Claudius dropped the dice he had been carrying, his habit for years now. Before reaching down he shut his eyes tight, unwilling to see the numbers, the augury. The Nazarene picked them up, placed them in the palm of Claudius’ hand, closed his hands around them. For a moment they remained like that, then he let go. Claudius opened his eyes, laughed, then tossed the dice overboard, not looking. ‘In return for Virgil, you must do one thing,’ he said. ‘You must write down what you have just told me. Your euangelion, your gospel.’
‘But my people do not read. Mine is a ministry of the spoken word. The written word stands in the way of the kingdom of heaven.’
Claudius shook his head. ‘If your kingdom of heaven is truly of this earth, then it will be subject to violence, and violent men will maltreat it. In thanks for this day, I will do all I can to ensure that your written word remains safe and secret, ready for the time when the memory of your spoken word has become the word of others, shaped and changed by them into something else.’
There was a silence, then the Nazarene spoke. ‘You have paper?’
‘Always,’ Claudius said, reaching for the slim satchel he kept slung over his back. ‘I write down everything, you know. I have one last sheet of first-grade, and some scraps. I had the first-grade made to my special instructions in Rome. It’s the best there is. You’ll see. Lasts for ever. I used up my gall ink on the voyage here, but I picked up some concoction that passes as ink in Tiberias.’
The Nazarene lifted up the board he had used to chop fish, cleaned it over the side and then dried it on a twist of his loincloth. He placed the board on his knees, then took the sheet of papyrus and the reed pen that Claudius offered him. Claudius opened a small pot with a wooden lid and held it out, and the Nazarene dipped the pen in the ink. He held the pen in his right hand over the upper left corner of the papyrus, poised for a moment, motionless.
‘The Sibyl writes her prophecies on leaves of oak.’ Claudius chuckled. ‘When you reach out for them, the wind always blows them away. Herod says it’s some demonic Greek machine, hidden in the cave.’
The Nazarene looked Claudius full in the face, then began to write, a bold, decisive hand, slow and deliberate, the hand of one who had been taught well but did not write often. He dipped the pen into the ink every few words, and Claudius concentrated on keeping the pot steady. After the Nazarene had started the fourth line, Claudius stared at the script, and then blurted out, spilling the ink on his hand, ‘You’re writing in Aramaic!’
The Nazarene looked up. ‘It is my language.’
‘No.’ Claudius shook his head emphatically. ‘No one in Rome reads Aramaic.’
‘I write these words for my people, not for the people of Rome.’
‘No.’ Claudius shook his head again. ‘Your word here, in Galilee, is the spoken word. You said it yourself. Your fishermen do not read, and have no need of this. Your written word must be read and understood far beyond the Sea of Galilee. If you write in riddles, in a tongue few understand, your word will be no clearer than the utterances of the Sibyl. You must write in Greek.’
‘Then you must do it for me. I speak Greek, but I do not write it.’
‘Very well.’ Claudius took the board with the paper and pen, and handed the ink pot over. ‘We must start again.’ He fumbled in his satchel, thought for a moment, then reached across and took a cut lemon from the fruit bowl. He squeezed the lemon over the writing, then rubbed it vigorously with a cloth from his bag. He held the paper up to catch the last rays of the setting sun, and saw the faded imprint of the Nazarene’s writing as he waited for the lemon juice to dry. A breeze wafted over them, making the paper flutter, and Claudius quickly took it down and pressed it against the board on his knees. He dipped the pen in the ink and tested the paper, inscribing a cross mark as he always did at the start of a document, to see whether the ink would spread. It had better not. The paper was his own first-grade. He grunted, then wrote a few words across the top, in the careful hand of a scholar conscious that his writing was usually legible only to himself.