The journey to Damascus is eight or nine days’ travel on foot, a hard trek even for the fit and strong, like Saul and the men of his guard troop. All of them have made long journeys before, though. None of them was born in this land. They are all Greek speakers, Jews from the diaspora. Rolling stones that have gathered little by way of moss from their time in the hated Temple Guard. But, then, there is no moss in this land. Even the northern faces are too hot for moss. There is no place in Judaea to hide from the sun.
On the deceptive downhill of the first day they are often overtaken on the road, usually by ox-pulled wagons with solid wood wheels; occasionally by chariots with spokes. But the guards’ pace is fast for pedestrians; they are travelling light, nothing to trade but their swords, nothing to give but the orders contained in a scroll.
They pass a gang of prisoners: Judaeans, probably enslaved for unpaid taxes, on their way to the province of Syria, where people fetch a better price: Leviticus states that Hebrews must be freed after seven years’ service, so Jews do not often buy their fellows. The prisoners are roped together through iron neck collars, hands bound, trudging in a line, guarded by Roman freebooters. They are new slaves, but already carry themselves with the cowering of the broken. They wear identical short tunics of camel hair, the coarsest, cheapest cloth, impossible to rid of parasites. Their own clothes must have been sold. Their heads are recently shaved and pale, their hair gone to become wigs for the wealthy. The ropes that join them swing as they make their slow progress, rocking in a pendulum rhythm. Saul tries not to catch any of their eyes, he is not sure why: some indistinct fear that abjection is contagious. He need not worry: they stare only at the section of time-formed road upon which they must take the next step. They have no future but that. No thoughts but the eternal question of the Israelite: why do Your Prophets say You love us, my God, yet You let Your children be taken in chains?
The next four legs are through desert, sands strewn with black rocks, as dense as seed on bread, and the domes of scrubby, struggling rimth plants. Saul and the nine guards rest through the hottest sunders of each day, wherever they can find shade to do so. Making strongest pace from dawn through the morning. Throwing up their night-time camp, which is just fire and blankets, as the light begins to fade.
On the fifth day, as they prepare to eat midday food beneath the canopy of a spiral acacia, Korach seems to think that Saul serves himself too large a share. Perhaps he does.
‘You need to watch your manners out here, Saul,’ Korach says. ‘We’re not in Jerusalem now. If someone were to have an accident on the road, no one would know.’
Saul’s breath is filched from him. He fissures his eyes and puts a hand to his dagger’s pommel, looks around to the others of his men to be sure that they will be with him as he deals with this insubordination. And realizes, with spinning disbelief, that they will not.
Midian is chuckling openly; the others meet Saul’s eyes without glancing away, follow his gaze as he turns to the next face and then the next. Korach nods and takes a shovel-fingered scoop of bulgur gruel from Saul’s bowl and adds it to his own.
‘You don’t command any more, Saul. You politely request, at best. Remember that. You are in charge by our consent. You were only promoted because you’re a lickspittle with a little learning. You think because you can read and write you’re a scribe. You think because you can quote some Torah and have a smattering of Hebrew you’re a Pharisee. You think because you bought a fancy uniform and a breastplate you’re an aristocrat? We all know you were laughed out of marriage into the aristocracy. Word gets around. We all know how that one ended. You think because you’re in charge that you can look down on the rest of us. But you are no different from us, except that we know our station and you think you’re some great thing. They used too much leaven in making you. You are puffed up, Saul. Too puffed up.’
There are a few cairns of rock behind Korach. Probably only the idle tossed way stations of generations of travellers, but they could equally be bandit burials of the murdered. Saul does not reply. He looks down to his cracked bulgur gruel and tries to eat it; he chokes it down, though his mouth is dry as a potsherd and his tongue sticks to his jaw.
Korach makes a great show of licking every last grain of the sticky beige goo from his fingers after each mouthful, making loud sucking noises, at which the others laugh, mirthlessly.
Saul drops his bowl to the floor when he has finished, saying nothing. Feigning something. Fooling no one. Thoughts imploding. The sky is falling.
Cattle pass by, back on the road, hump-backed and horned. The herdsman forces the stragglers on with his goad: a man-length stave, sharpened to a spike. Sometimes recalcitrant creatures kick back at him with dirt-caked hoofs, but they cannot reach him at the end of his goad and only earn further punishing stabs for the attempt. The man has no dog with which to steer the herd, only pain.
It is Korach who decides when the guards have rested long enough and Midian hands the rope reins of the pack-mule to Saul.
‘About time you took a turn leading the beast,’ Midian says.
The mule is aged and mange-wretched. Muzzle pocked with infected flea bites, fur missing clumps where some leprous equine skin disease has forced an untimely uneven moult. Flies flock about it, as though it is already dead. They swarm like a mist, like black dots upon the eye that you cannot get rid of. Like smears from staring at the sun.
The mule is a gelded male, doubly cursed to unfruitfulness. Sterile child of horse and donkey. Not one thing or the other. Saul feels like a mule himself: neither Greek nor Jew; neither Pharisee nor Sadducee; not Roman but still living in a Roman world, obeying Roman rules; not a slave or truly free; the servant of Annas, a man he despises, obeying orders to destroy people he can’t help admiring; commanding men that he no longer commands, a band of rough vagrants, slouching towards Damascus.
And with each passed hour on the road, with each further mocking rejection from his men under the melting sun, with each time the mule halts to snatch a mouthful of rimth, or kicks back at the stick Saul is forced to use to goad it, there is a further dizzying descent. It feels as if the world is in motion. Everything is getting blurred, like the flies that swaddle the mule; like peering through a veil of cloth.
Saul barely sleeps that fifth night, his mind struggling with the unravelling of what has occurred. Not just what has happened that day but with this life: a destiny for greatness that is being robbed from him, rubbed from him. Saul, who was struggling to settle himself to the possibility of mediocrity, finds himself staring at dejection and failure. He doesn’t even have the respect of his own men, his only friends. Not only do they not honour him, they don’t even like him. They despise him. He came to Jerusalem to be a leader of esteem, an eminent Pharisee; to astonish and be admired for his erudition and wisdom. He finds himself runt-captain of a pack of perfidious rats, hated by them and by the populace as a whole. And as each of the bitter-gall humiliations of his life burns through his sleepless addled mind, it is replaced in turn with a newer, fiercer, humiliation that came after.
Things are out of kilter; his mind is weighted all to one side. And he searches for but cannot locate something to even it out again. To make the centre hold. He pictures the scales that a spice merchant would use to weigh out his precious commodities. Saul needs something like that, something to correct the tilt of mind and life.