And oryx, they are allowed; they must be the pygarg then, for what else is?
These are the beasts which ye may eat. The ox, the sheep and the goat. The hart and the gazelle and the roebuck and the pygarg and the antelope and the mountain sheep.
Veins are visible on an oryx’s massy flank legs. Horns twisted, like the speech of a liar. Ears as long and mobile as a rabbit’s, flicking at the flies that buzz around its pale muzzle. Baby fringed with hair. Black marks descend from its eyes like tear-stains. Maybe the oryx mourns the Roman invasion of these lands. White-robed like a priest, maybe it prays in the desert sun that the legions will leave.
Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. Day. Rhythm as familiar and instinctive as the humping hips of the swine boars. Just as loveless. Cold in the tomb caves at night. Daily burned in the sun and self-bruised with round, behemoth-eye rocks.
Across the lake is Galilee.
The lake is too large really to be called a lake, so people call it a sea. But it is also too small and too land-locked to be a sea; still, it is the species of sea found here. Sometimes the sea seems to float above itself in the heat, a double body, a mirage of reality, so perhaps it can be sea and lake at once.
Somewhen, a boat puts to shore beneath the tomb caves. It comes from across the sea that isn’t. Maybe an unseen boundary is breached, as the boat beaches, or perhaps it simply serves to remind, but he who watches it land remembers that he is called Shuni. Thirteen men descend from the boat. Or else one man does, with twelve companions. Shuni recognizes the man, from his youth maybe, or from his dreams. Shuni charges down to the intruders from the tomb caves; his feet are grown hard as ibex hoofs, but still they hurt from the pace of his descent, shale stones sliding as he goes, oblivious to path and pain. He howls and flaps his arms about, to scare them or to call them, he knows not.
The man from the boat calms Shuni. The man holds him and rocks him, like a wave-lapped craft. The man talks to him. Lays hands upon him and brings him back into himself. The man is a peasant — Pharisee-learned and vagabond-ragged, barefoot — but the disciples with him say he is a prince.
After the ragged prince has calmed him, Shuni understands for the first time in a long time what nakedness is. So the ragged prince blankets Shuni with his own outer cloak.
The ragged prince gathers his followers and together they herd up the swine — perhaps two thousand of them — and drive them off the edge of a cliff into the lake. The swine defile the sacred soil. The pigs are there to feed the invaders. The man’s disciples say that the prince is appointed by God and that, as surely as he drives their pigs into the water, he will drive the invaders from the land. His followers swing their bill-hooks and iron-blades, to scare the swine and the swineherds. The pigs shriek like people as they fall to their deaths. Their screams are legion.
The swineherds flee to tell the townspeople of Gadara what has been done: what has happened to the demoniac and to the swine. A delegation comes and sees Shuni sitting there, clothed and in his right mind. The delegation is afraid. They are afraid of the ragged prince and his men and they are afraid of the sane demoniac, but most of all they are afraid of the Roman warriors whose pigs still bob on the lake, floated by bloating gases. The swineherds charged with the pigs’ care will have to go into hiding and the rest of the townsfolk are dread-full of Roman reprisal. The delegation begs the prince to leave the area. The prince does not bow to anyone save the one-God, but he loves his people, so he acquiesces.
As the prince is getting back into the boat, Shuni pleads that he might come with him. The prince refuses, and says to him, ‘Go home to your friends. Tell them what marvels have been done, and what mercy has been shown.’ And Shuni promises that he will return to the town of Gadara and will proclaim and that everyone will be amazed.
As if it had been summoned, a gentle wind draws the boat of the prince and his companions back onto the lake. Sparkling fish, every colour in the world, play about them. Things of the water that have both fins and scales can be eaten whatever their hue. God hates shrimps but He loves fish, be they bottom-feeder brown or as bright blue as the flowers of the dwarf chicory. The ragged prince crumbles a piece of bread over the boat’s side into the sea-lake’s water. And the fishes all eat, but not as gluttons, each has a piece.
The man who had been possessed by unclean spirits waves from the bouldered coast. And the disciples, who will never return, believe that the man’s attacks will surely never return either. The wind pulls the prince and his disciples back towards the dark uneven hills of Galilee, where they eventually put to shore, amid the thickets of poisonous dogbane oleander and the grunting of night frogs.
Twenty Years before the Crucifixion
Saul grew up in Tarsus, no mean city, named for its ancient patron god: Baal-Taraz, the dying and resurrected saviour. Tarsus was the metropolis of the province of Cilicia, blessed to be sited in the region of Smooth Cilicia: a place of bounteous fields and abundant grazing plains, the fertility of which was guaranteed by the tree-hanged god Attis, whose flayed, eternal frame dripped blood upon the land. A plenty to be contrasted with that of Rough Cilicia, where mountains descended right to the sea, an inhabitance of rock and scrub and scavengers.
Tarsus was a great port and a great portal to the world: to the east lay Syria, Egypt and Judaea; to the north and west, Asia Minor and Macedonia. Traders and seafarers from all these regions shouted in strange-accented but comprehensible Greek across Tarsus’s river docks. It had fallen to Roman rule as a result of Pompey’s ruthless, scorched-shore campaigns against piracy. But, though staggeringly successful, Pompey’s victory cannot have been complete, because some of the scarred ruffian seamen, who spent clipped foreign coins in the Tarsean brothels and tent-taverns, were surely nothing were they not pirates. But the majority of native Tarseans were good people, law-abiders, given to philosophy and piety.
Only thirty miles behind the city, the cold, snow-cowled peaks of the Taurus Mountains towered like white bull horns. Tarsus was a territory of bulls. Bulls and blood. Like most significant cities of the day, Tarsus’s foundation myths claimed links to the Greeks and their gods. Who knows if it was mystics or the linen workers who first spun the incredible tale that came to be credited? But Herakles, adventurer demi-god, it was wholeheartedly accepted, had founded Tarsus.
Herakles was said to have been fathered by God. Zeus, god of gods, had sired him with a mortal woman. And so Herakles — part man, who could suffer and die like us, part god, who could not — roamed the earth for a time, performing mighty works and giving hope to those who came across him.
The Tarseans worshipped Herakles — slayer of the Cretan bull — by sacrificing bulls in his honour. But the Herakles of Tarsus was also entangled with crops and harvests, the death and rising of Baal-Taraz, the vaguer, earthier god, who predated the unifying conquests of Alexander the Great and his Greeks. So every autumn Herakles died and a giant pyre, flower-garlanded and sacrifice-stocked, was burned while Herakles descended to Hades. Every spring, he rose again, like the sun, and the virgin girls who had come to marriageable age through the winter danced. Lithe, slight, girl legs sprited — in what finery their families could afford — to honour Herakles and to celebrate renewal and to be watched, while they did so, by the men who hoped to be suitors and the men who just enjoyed watching virgin girls dance. Then bulls, cloth-draped and painted, were pulled through cheering streets. And the people ate grapes and drank them and roared their devotion in the warming sun, a festival offering to Herakles and to the fecund vegetation spirits they no longer remembered.