He could see from up above that people were also walking atop the Temple. Also lookouts.
Those other lookouts were under observation from the tower of Phasael, who made sure that they were alert in keeping a lookout.
The Lord must have a lot to see when, from time to time, he looks down as Supreme Guard on his holy city. But there is no one keeping a check on Him.
Uri was eventually dispatched to Alexandria as carrier of the calculations of the New Year, but the arrangements were so slapdash that he was only able set off a good few days later than were strictly needed to make the voyage from Jerusalem to Alexandria. If he had not chanced to find a boat in Gaza, crewed by the remaining Phoenicians, and if they had not been granted favorable winds, with the prevailing north-westerlies getting up a bit earlier than usual that spring — he would certainly have been late. It did occur to him en route to wonder whether the stargazers in Jerusalem had caused the delay not just through simple negligence but because they explicitly wanted him to be late.
I’ve grown up, Uri reflected for the umpteenth time on his journey: I no longer necessarily ascribe good intentions to people.
There were a dozen or so astronomers sitting around at ground level, beside the timber Pharos, that slim, flat-topped, five-story building. They were eating and drinking, gossiping, and drawing leisurely lines on rolls of papyrus.
The Heraclitos in question was not the great Greek philosopher but a Jewish astronomer, elderly, graying, and in Hellenic style wearing no beard and garbed in a white tunic.
Uri hauled out from under his own tunic the leather cylinder in which the New Year calculations of the astronomers in Jerusalem were rolled up.
“About time!” said Heraclitos. “Here at last.”
Uri protested that they had been late in dispatching him, that wasn’t his fault, and he had gotten here a day early nonetheless.
“That’s them all over, the dolts,” said Heraclitos without any animosity. “Couriers are deliberately sent off late just to play us for suckers.”
“So what happens if a moon courier is late?” Uri asked.
“Nothing,” replied Heraclitos, taking the papyrus out of the case, unrolling it, glancing at it, nodding and pushing it back into the leather box. “They’re not the only ones who can do calculations. There’s not a new moon anywhere in the world that was missed on account of those dolts in Jerusalem. There were new moons long before there any Jews, even before the Egyptians learned to compute.”
“Then what’s the point of sending couriers?”
“Tradition, and we bow to that. It’s one of the ways we have of expressing our loyal devotion to the Temple, which is ninety percent sustained by the dues we pay.”
Uri was crestfallen; his heroic efforts to get there in time had been pointless. He wasn’t so important a person that they had been seeking to put him personally in an awkward situation by the crafty dodge of deliberately delaying his departure. They were continually seeking ways of humiliating Alexandria, which merely laughed off the infantile trick.
Heraclitos made a sign, a young man stood up, took the leather case and vanished with it through a door.
“We’ll file it,” said Heraclitos. “Deep underneath us is a cellar where we keep all the calculations, going back three hundred years, but there are also earlier ones, the oldest of them nine hundred years old and more. In a couple of hundred years or so someone will have to think about expanding it a bit.”
Heraclitos’s dry, self-assured humor appealed to Uri, but it was not an appropriate time to laugh.
Heraclitos sat back on a bench where others were in the process of measuring something on a papyrus.
Uri remained standing.
What next?
Heraclitos looked up.
“Do you need us to sign an acknowledgment of receipt?” he queried.
“I’m not going back to Jerusalem,” Uri said. “I was allowed to leave on the understanding that I was not expected to return. I want to stay here.”
Heraclitos made a disdainful, commiserative grimace and turned away.
There was silence; Uri was still standing until one of the younger men took pity on him.
“No one is allowed to settle down here, don’t you know that? The city is overcrowded; we are not in a position to support immigrants, and those coming from Palestine are particularly unwelcome.”
“But I’m a Roman citizen,” said Uri.
Heraclitos looked up and now inspected Uri properly for the first time as a human individual, sizing him up from head to toe, but he was not satisfied with the result and puckered his brow.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Gaius Theodorus.”
Heraclitos shook his head in disbelief. The other astronomers now also looked up. There was silence as Heraclitos went on:
“Not the son of Ioses Lucius, in person?”
Uri stiffened: how did he know that?
“Actually… yes.”
“So tell me: what is your father famous for?”
It then hit Uri.
“For having me as his son!”
“And what’s his son famous for?”
“For being one of the apostles who took the sacrificial tithe money from Rome to Jerusalem.”
Heraclitos whooped in joy and bounded up.
“Why didn’t you say so from the start, you hare-brain? We were just about to ask you to leave!”
The elderly, graying, highly respectable man leapt on Uri and embraced him.
The other astronomers also got to their feet, came over to Uri with great respect and, one after the other, gave him a solemn, ceremonial embrace, kissing his cheek on both sides of the face. Uri didn’t know what to make of this and tolerated the embraces; his hands were free and he knew that he ought to return the embraces, but he just couldn’t do it.
The young man returned meanwhile to the room and stopped in utter amazement.
“It’s him!” Heraclitos shouted to him jubilantly. “He’s finally here! Gaius Theodorus, Agrippa’s courier! Take him straightaway to Philo!”
Uri was shaking all over. This must be another dream. He didn’t know what to think.
“Philo?” he asked faintly. “The philosopher?”
“The same,” shouted Heraclitos. “He has been waiting for you most eagerly!”
He was not taken to Philo right away, because evening had come, and Philo did not receive guests during evenings: he was accustomed to doing his writing then.
Philo lived on the banks of Lake Mareotis, a few hours’ travel west of Alexandria; it was possible to reach the place at night if you had torchbearers to accompany you, but that was pointless. In any case a whole party was about to set off for the tavern; wouldn’t Uri tag along? Some one would take him to see Philo the next morning.
All fifteen of them went to the Alpha; not one was missed back home, even though several of them had families. Their wives had grown accustomed to the fact that their husbands did not spend the nights with them, and usually not the daylight hours either. The astronomers’ pay was not so great — they could have earned a great deal more working as merchants. That was not the reason why the wives forgave them, or their in-laws had considered them good catches in the first place. Rather, all of them had been schooled at the Gymnasium, which meant that they had been given military training and in the process had won Alexandrian citizenship rights, which could otherwise only be extended to Greeks and exempted them from the electoral tax usually imposed on Jews. Uri didn’t inquire any further about that; he find out later on, once he was allowed to put down roots.
They asked Uri about Jerusalem, and it turned out that none of them had ever been there, nor did they ever intend to go there: the Jewish stargazers of Alexandria were not big fans of pilgrimages, preferring to gossip. They knew precisely which hostelry they were headed for, but on the way they would pop into one inn or another for a drink or two. They did not give Uri a chance to say much at all about Jerusalem, because they grew more interested in Rome, though when Uri outlined how Far Side was arranged, they cut in to say that Rome wasn’t really of interest either. Uri was dumbfounded: they showed as little interest in anything else as the peasants in Judaea. Of course, the stargazers justified their outlook: if Mark Antony had been victorious, and there had been every chance that he would have, Rome would now be a province of Alexandria, and if one of the emperors had an ounce of sense, he would have transferred the seat of the empire to Alexandria — that was where the real money was, trade, and there was no Senate here to make life difficult.