‘This place should be a house of prayer, but you robbers run it as your private den,’ Yeshua roars now. And he pulls the bull-whip of cords from an oxen stockman’s hand and slashes it across the face of the Sadducee priest, who crouches and cowers.
One of the Temple Guards comes at Yeshua to grab the whip. But Cephas drops him to the floor. A punch from Cephas is as compelling as the hand of Fate. The guard is not a small man, but he is knocked down as if a child by a horse kick.
And havoc has been unleashed now. The followers of The Way, who had dispersed throughout the courtyard, all begin to smash tables, to shake free the doves from their split-wood cages and to drive the bigger beasts onwards into the chaos; they need little encouragement to try to flee, for dumb beasts are not so dumb that they cannot smell death. And the followers beat those who try to resist them and some of the richer merchants they beat even if they don’t resist. Because a new time is coming and the last shall at last come first.
The guard troop around the priest backs hastily away and the Sadducee himself scrambles up and flees with them. And the rest of the Temple Guards stationed there that day draw their swords, but only that they might safely escape: they make no attempt to intervene in the carnage. The numbers are unrealistically against them. They take flight through the western gate along the arched bridge that leads directly to the upper city, a route normally forbidden to anyone save the priests and the Herodians. But by the time the guards have forced their way to it, all the priests and Herodians have already fled.
The Romans who watch from the high towers of the Antonia Fortress do not intervene either. Not yet. Perhaps they think this is a Jewish problem, best left to Jews. Perhaps they rightly realize that such high blood will only be inflamed by Roman boots in the Temple. They cannot afford a full-scale eruption of Jerusalem at festival time. Or perhaps they just don’t care. Perhaps the only reason Yeshua is still alive at all is that the Romans have such disdain for the Jews and their doings.
But Yeshua and his followers drive out those who sold and those who controlled the Temple, and they overturn the tables of the money-changers and take the money for the poor. And since so many of them are themselves poor, some find that transaction to be swift. And they smash the stalls of those who sell pigeons. And lambs and goats and unblemished oxen roam about the broken wood and the golden frescos. And the gates are blocked by men of The Way and no Sadducee-sanctioned trade is allowed in the Temple for the remainder of the day. And when dusk falls, in one unstoppable mass the followers of Yeshua — many laden with new acquisitions — flood through the twin porticoes of the Huldah Gates, still whooping and hollering of victory and Yahweh, out into the scattered safety of the hill country and the desert behind the Mount of Olives.
And the smoke continues to rise from the Kidron valley, long after they have shaken its dust from their feet.
Thirty-four Years after the Crucifixion
Useful checks the time by the sun in the sky. It is later than he had thought. It’s always later than you think. But it’s hard not to get distracted by the atmosphere when you’re out on the streets of Rome, strolling amid the grandeur and the vagabonds, the graffiti and the statues of emperors.
Though Useful couldn’t claim to be among the comeliest of men, he would perhaps not fare so badly among the company of recent emperors: Tiberius’s tired overbite is probably the best of them; Caligula, who came after, looks as fat-faced as a baker’s son in the busts; and amphora-eared Claudius’s chin recedes into a neck that threatens to engulf it. He looks as though, had he continued in his corpulence, he might have become entirely composed of neck. Perhaps it was rather in kindness that Claudius’s buttered mushrooms were poisoned, if those rumours are true.
But now the emperor is Nero, and even in the statues — which are surely idealized portraits — his face is cruel. Above a chin-strap beard, a thin, grim mouth smirks, as though contemptuous of those not his equal, which is to say: everyone else.
This visible malice of Nero’s visage is a blemish on the surface of Useful’s world. A fear that spoils what otherwise would be perfection. Because Paul has appealed to Caesar for his case to be heard and sooner or later it must be. On the other hand, Useful trusts in Pauclass="underline" he can make the very birds believe his words. So powerful and palpable is Paul’s own faith that anyone who hears him cannot help but be carried along. As Useful has been: gladly and gratefully surrendering to the initiation ritual of baptism and emerging into a new spiritual world, losing fear and strife, gaining a surging sense of belonging, a binding commitment to worship, and the unfathomable solace that is the promise of eternal life. Perhaps that’s how it will be with Nero too. Paul himself has every hope that he may convert the emperor when the time for his hearing comes — if, that is, the risen Christ does not return to earth first.
Beyond the row of emperors are some statues of satyrs. They are hairy and leering and their cocks are carved all curled up, like those of swine boars. A crooked man stands among them, cleaning spittle from a kitten, which isn’t his but is a stray. He wipes the bag of bone and fluff with the edge of his robe, grinning at this moment of difference in his day. And passers-by stop too, though they have all seen cats before. Still, it is not every day you see one so small and alone as this one on the street. And the passers-by make suggestions as to how best to reunite the kitten with its mother:
‘Put him on the wall and she’ll find him.’
‘Don’t keep wiping him — you’ll make him smell of you.’
‘Hide him in the crook of that tree. He’ll be safe there and she’ll surely sniff him out.’
They make such fuss now, yet the kitten will shortly be forgotten by all of them and perhaps even the creature itself will eventually forget that it was once a kitten, should it survive to be full-grown, to fight and filch and fuck with the rest of the Roman cats. Cats were scarcely known of in Colossae, but in Rome — transported on grain-ships from Egypt — they approach commonplace. Though still not so rife that a kitten can’t draw a little gathering.
Useful has a mission, though: he shouldn’t linger any longer. He has been sent to buy more parchment, for the glorious work he does with Paul. His chest uprushes with the very thought of that work. Useful is filled with love, not only for his new God but also for his new life and the splendid task of recording this story. Because suddenly Useful is a person of significance and now he can leave an impression on the world. The world as we know it is soon to transform, of course, but Useful will still have made his mark upon it.
He falls into step behind a group of slaves formed about their master. The group clears a path through the throng of the streets, like the prow of a ship, which makes progress easier. Though Useful tries to keep a distance between himself and the slave who carries the sponge on a stick, jauntily slung over his shoulder like a soldier’s spear and waving as he walks. Such sponges are used by the rich — or, rather, used on the rich by their slaves — for the cleaning of the fundament after defecation and Useful would sooner not catch it across the cheek.
Split in two by the Tiber, but divided all over, Rome is a polar place, a city of opposites, perhaps more so than anywhere else that Useful has been. And he visited not a few cities in his travels with Philemon, his old master. The wealthy of Rome are among the richest of the entire world. People pass in sedan chairs, accompanied by retinues that might have made Cleopatra question the expense, and they are probably only going to visit a friend a few roads away. The toga, the civic dress, is just an elaborate show of how much cloth you can afford. And yet, because of the monthly corn-dole, Rome simultaneously supports a magnitude of poverty seen nowhere else to quite the same degree. Citizens of Rome can survive with nothing else to their name save that citizenship. If they could sell it, it would fetch them a sufficient sum to live in comfort a good few years. But they can’t do that — though the state itself can; their station as a Roman allows huge numbers to survive in levels of destitution well below the point where others would be forced to flee a city or go into voluntary servitude.