The young man unrolled the scroll in his hands and started to read in Greek.
Without being asked, Jehoram, the scrawny youth, interpreted fluently into Aramaic. Not a pickpocket, then, but an interpreter. So he had been the spy among us, the Sanhedrin’s man.
The text read that they, the members of a festival delegation from Judaea heading for Mount Gerizim, on the morning of the day of the festival in the village of Tirithana were eyewitnesses of an attack by the Judaean cohort on a celebrating throng misled by the false prophet. Several hundred people had been slain.
That was exactly what Uri was able to hear in Aramaic as well; the youth interpreted it accurately.
But we were not eyewitnesses, and the cohort was not Judaean but Syrian.
“Are you in accord?” the high priest asked.
“I’m in accord,” said Aaron.
He stepped over to the small table on which the hunchbacked young man had placed the scroll and wrote his name on it with a quill, the inkpot held by the young man.
Everyone else, the Essenes included, went over and added their names in turn.
Uri was the penultimate; only Jehoram, who politely stepped aside, would follow him. It did cross Uri’s mind what would happen if he were to speak out and ask that the text be corrected because it was a lie as it stood. What would happen? He would be clapped in prison and would never reach Alexandria, that’s what would happen.
They needed several witnesses, preferably people belonging to different sects, and they clearly considered a Roman with full rights of citizenship to be important.
Uri dipped the quill’s nib in ink and wrote his own name in Greek letters under the others.
So did Jehoram.
The high priest got to his feet.
“Thank you, my sons. May the blessings of the Eternal One be upon you.”
He recited a priestly benediction, his right hand raised toward them, his fingers splayed, then left the chamber on the arm of the young man.
“I, too, thank you,” said a relieved Aaron. “You may pick up your rewards on the ground floor. Jehoram will lead you there.”
III Alexandria
“Most High Eternal One!”
The words escaped Uri’s lips as he first glimpsed the harbor of Alexandria through the bluish-violet gemstone he was holding to his left eye.
He had received the flat, circular stone, polished and set in a silver mounting, from the captain, who used it mainly at night when viewing the stars for long periods. One day, at around dawn, Uri had asked if he could try and placed it over his left eye — that was the stronger one — and he was amazed at how sharply he could see with it. All at once the odors of Far Side, that he had smelled as a child, when his eyesight had been good, filled his nostrils. Tears came to his eyes, and Uri resolved that either in Alexandria or back home in Rome he would learn how gemstones are polished.
The captain laughed: he was used to hearing expressions of that sort from the lips of those who caught their first glimpse of Alexandria from the sea.
On the right was the Pharos, much like the tower in Jerusalem in which Uri had lived for several months, except bulkier and topped by a statue of Zeus Soter; on the left, opposite the small island of Antipharos, was another promontory on which sat gardens and a palace. The proper name for it was Antirhodes, the captain related; it had been given that name around three centuries ago, when Rhodes had still had a larger harbor than Alexandria’s. A row of enormous palaces, each more magnificent that the last, rose to ever-greater heights along the shoreline. Alexandria might not have been built on hills like Rome, but so far as Uri could see Rome could never rival Alexandria: the banks of the Tiber were nothing in comparison to this huge harbor.
Around them, no end of deep- and shallow-draught boats — monoreme galleys, biremes, and triremes — waited to dock, bobbed gracefully or ponderously, almost perilously close to one another, surrounded by barges and rafts, the diminutive craft of pilots and scullers. On the docks, all crammed with boats, goods were loaded and offloaded amidst the endless bustle of crowds, pack camels, mules, handcarts, carriages.
“Most High Eternal One!”
As if he were a native Alexandrian citizen, the Judaean captain proudly pointed out the landmarks: “The palace of Cleopatra is to the right, easily recognized by the two tall obelisks of Cleopatra’s Needles. Cleopatra VII had started work on the building next to it, but it was completed as the Sebasteion a temple of Caesar Augustus. And that unfinished, yawning edifice was to become the temple of Arsinoë, with a roof made from lodestone so that an iron statute of Isis-Arsinoë should hover in the air above it. That was the plan at least, but the magnet turned out not to be powerful enough and the statue was stored somewhere in the palace, waiting for an engineer to work out a solution. That building with the elongated, transparent roof is the Emporion, the largest customs and excise office in the Greek world, where anything produced, grown, or manufactured by peoples around the Great Sea can be purchased cheaply. To the left of that are baths, then farther on, toward the sea and farther to the right, left of that north-pointing horseshoe of a stadium and past the line of hills, is the royal palace, and past the outer palace you can pick out the roof of the Mouseion, or Musaeum, in one wing of which is the old Great Library. That tall building beyond to the right is the Serapeion, or Serapeum, the temple of Serapis, on a hill in the town of Rhakotis. Atop the hill with corkscrew paths around it, that’s the Paneion, the temple of Pan, in the middle of the Gymnasium gardens. It is worth making the trip to the top — you’ll get a marvelous panoramic view of the whole of the city. Next to that — a little to the left, though you can’t see it from here — is the Square Stoa, with an observatory at the top; that’s not far from the Greek market, officially the Forum Augusti, though no one ever calls it anything but the marketplace.”
With the assistance of the pilot (with whom the captain turned out to acquainted — perhaps part of the reason why they were able to jump ahead of many ships that had been anchored outside the harbor for days on end) they maneuvered their way into the old harbor from the north, and Uri — who never once took the gemstone from his eye — felt that this spectacle was worth all the painful, tiring and humiliating adventures that he had gone through.
“This is my sort of town,” he said to the captain before stepping ashore.
The captain laughed:
“It’s everyone’s sort of town.”
On shore stood a knot of cantankerous excisemen; the captain cheerily waved at one of them and headed over.
“He came with me,” said the captain, pointing to Uri. “Let him through.”
“He has to pay the excise,” said the exciseman severely.
“Give it a rest,” said the captain. “I’ve brought your wife a nice muslin shawclass="underline" light as a feather with mauve and blue nymphs on it. With that wrapped around her waist, you can be sure you’ll at last get a hard-on.”
The exciseman looked around.
“Well, all right!” he said. “You know where, this afternoon. But not a word to the wife!”
Uri got off scot-free.
He gratefully took leave of the captain, noting that the Greeks in Caesarea had hardly been any pleasanter. The captain guffawed:
“He wasn’t a Greek but a Jew like me and you.”
The second authority, the border patrol, Uri did not manage to evade. The captain had warned him of this right at the start of the voyage: anyone who wanted to spend more than twenty days in Alexandria had to make an application on arrival, then go back to the harbor five days later to get the permit; until then one would be given a temporary residence permit. The captain had also said that the office, which had been operating now for two hundred years, had spent each of those two hundred years carefully but begrudgingly giving out permits, lest the city be overrun by even larger numbers of peasants. As a result, the permit might not be ready even after five days — at best one might get a renewed five-day temporary residence permit. It would do no harm, then, to find in the city a sponsor whom the authorities respected and at whose request they would issue a residence permit for a more prolonged period; although it was possible to lie low there for a month or two (it being a big city with a million or so inhabitants), anyone caught without a permanent residence permit would be expelled, but not before being beaten and stripped of everything of value as if they were stolen goods.