Uri was amazed. Around two hundred thousand living skeletons were thronging on the beach and in the water. They were praying in self-abandonment, ecstatically, thankfully, happily. He had the feeling that they had already obliterated their memories of all that had happened.
He spotted Demetrius in the crowd. Panting from the effort, Uri smiled at him.
“You scum!” Demetrius spat out. “Pity you didn’t croak!”
“Is your father still alive?” Uri asked in a whisper.
Demetrius gave no answer and disappeared into the crowd.
Uri lay down on the ground and fell asleep.
He awoke to find himself being wrapped in blankets, plied with drink and food. They were Greeks, and did not tell him their names. One begged Uri forgiveness for the horrors that had been committed against his people. Uri grunted: it’s not necessary, he wanted to say, but his lips had stuck together.
He reached the palace at daybreak. The sentries admitted him.
His eyes already red from weeping, Philo, on seeing Uri, cried out: “My son! My son!”, and embraced the bag of bones. Frail and short though he was, Philo was now able to lift him.
He was given tender meat, a soft milk loaf, and water before being laid down; he slept for two days.
He woke up in his own room with a feeling that he knew again what it felt like to be a baby.
Much attention was lavished on his health; he was supplied with drink and stuffed with endless oranges and light flatbreads, which he would vomit up from time to time. Philo spent several hours each day by his bedside, and while constantly urging him not to talk a lot, not to strain, asked him question after another. Any time Uri started to speak, to give an account of something or other, Philo would interrupt and say what he wanted to say.
We found ourselves in a very difficult position, my dear son, a hellishly difficult position.
On the first day, six weeks ago, the alabarch, with his two sons and elder brother, had withdrawn from the city toward Marea with around 250 excisemen, armed to the teeth. They took refuge in a village was near enough to the city to be able to have a significant effect on events. There was no running water, since there was no aqueduct, just a well, so there was no bath either, and there were no writing implements, no books, no beds — virtually nothing, it was awful, but the villagers had proven to be helpful and kept them fed (though it has to be said they also received generous payment). Every day, the alabarch sent spies into the city to keep an eye on what was happening. There was reason to fear an attack from the legion stationed in Marea, so a watch awas organized, even Marcus had stood guard, so, laudably, had Tija, the boys had dauntlessly held the line. Fortunately, Flaccus had not sent in the III Cyrenaica legion, maybe fearing that Caligula would send warships into the Western Harbor, so he had held them in camp for that eventuality.
We managed to send off couriers to the emperor, my son, thanks to which Caligula has been kept informed about everything since ten days after the Bane got underway. It was not easy for the emperor, truly not, as he was in no position to start a war, but in the end he advocated for the best — the only — option: Caligula sent a crack squad to Alexandria, with the intention of capturing Flaccus. These twelve men were led by Bassus, the centurion under whom Flaccus had all the weapons throughout Egypt collected a while back and who went over to the emperor’s side at the right time. Bassus was a magnificent choice due to his local knowledge, and once his boat arrived at the Eastern Harbor he and his men, as Agrippa had beforehand, disembarked undetected; the guards whom Bassus quizzed about Flaccus’s whereabouts did recognize him but were not suspicious because the prefect, wisely from his own point of view, had not spread news of Bassus’s desertion. At the time, Flaccus happened to be whooping it up with his friends in the house of a man called Stephanion, a freedman of the present emperor — who perhaps was also in on the plan and was sent to Alexandria for that very reason, though there’s no way of knowing that for sure. In any event, ten of Bassus’s men stood guard outside, waiting for the signal, another two dressed as servants and that was how they got into the room just as Flaccus was getting ready to toast his friends with a drink. At that moment Bassus entered; Flaccus took one look and froze, because he knew immediately that he was finished; and at that moment the signal was given and in rushed the crack troops, bound Flaccus, who showed not the slightest resistance, As the soldiers were made to pledge allegiance to Bassus, the prefect was taken to the Akra, in whose dungeon he has been languishing ever since. The Jewish elders who were being held there — at least those who were left alive — were all released. Bassus called together his bodyguards and gave them a declaration of amnesty to pass along to both legions, an extremely shrewd move on his part because it forestalled any possible revolt. Bassus will stay on as commander in chief of the two legions until the new prefect arrives — Hallelujah!
Philo added tearfully that the emperor had even gone so far as to fulfill the plea that Flaccus be seized on the first day of the Feast of Booths.
“That is, if they couldn’t capture him on Rosh Hashanah, as we originally wished and suggested!”
By this noble gesture the emperor had given Jews the chance to continue to trust with good reason in the providence of the Eternal One.
He’s a sharp fellow, this Bassus, Uri supposed: he must have received a fair reward from Flaccus for collecting all the weapons in Egypt for him, and now he’ll get an even bigger reward. Who knows, he might even make it to the Praetorian Guard in Rome, but even if he doesn’t, he will have made his fortune anyway.
Uri chose not to ask why the alabarch’s private army had not marched in the Sector’s defense. Those 250 excisemen, armed to the teeth, along with the Jews, suitably organized, would have been able to fight successfully against the cudgel-carrying Greek mob and there would have been no occasion for a Sector at all.
Uri did ask about certain details of Flaccus’s capture, and Philo unsuspectingly told him what he knew. Uri did some mental counting back and ascertained that Flaccus was not captured at dawn of the Feast of Booths but a day before, only the news had been withheld so that it would have more impact on Jews. On that one day hundreds had died. He did not ask anything more but stretched out voluptuously on his bed.
Theocritus and Democritus, my dear extramural friends among the XXIInds, you fed me to no avail! I shit on standing witness for you since you’ve been given an amnesty anyway, as have others who were much viler than you were.
Philo made a note of Uri’s reticent account, he made notes about the exaggerations in the accounts of those who survived the Bane out of the Sector. Those who’d survived flocked to the alabarch’s unscathed palace and demanded revenge, amends, legal redress, retraction of Flaccus’s Judaeophobic decree, punishment of the Greeks, punishment of the legions, and compensation for lost income. They also recounted horror stories about one another’s deeds during the Bane, their accounts sparing no detail in their prolixity. And of course they painted portraits of their own heroic acts: their unwavering resistance, how they had defended their synagogues as long as they were able to defend them, how many heathens they had strangled with their bare hands, and so on, now that the peace they had mutually longed for so desperately just a few days ago had broken out.
Of the forty-eight elders who had been arrested outside the Sector only thirty-three were left alive, the others having died of the scourging that they suffered for the entertainment of the audience in the amphitheater. It was unprecedented for Jewish social superiors to be humiliated by being punished at the hands of the lowliest slaves! Philo made a note of this for himself, underlining it as one of the most serious crimes. Andron, Tryphon, and Euodos survived. They were not even taken to the amphitheater to be flogged; instead they were confined with the other elders in the Akra, where, to make up for any omissions by the Greeks, they were given a sound thrashing by their cell mates because the cowards showed themselves to be ready to negotiate with Flaccus. Philo, however, noted down in such a manner as to indicate that they too were flogged by the Greeks. Also among those who survived was Nikolaeus, who had just arrived at the head of a delegation to the alabarch and looked, his dark eyes twinkling, at Uri, who smiled back sardonically and nodded, at which Nikolaeus nodded his acknowledgment. We could be good friends, thought Uri, but it was not to be.