Mariamme was an oasis girclass="underline" the promise of safety and plenty. A store pile of harvest fruits, still ripening. Saul longed not just for her, but for what a match with her would have given him: position; station; connection. And so to lose her is a double loss.
He gulps back the bile that rises on burning acid wings within his throat.
Saul’s men, all nine of them, are waiting for him, lounging on the itchy, mange-bare, camel-hair cushions outside Ephron’s pothouse. They shouldn’t be drinking on duty, but the wine there is so weak and watered it hardly matters. They’re a dungy bevy, slope-backed and semi-subordinate. Most of them probably only joined the Temple Guard because the barracks offered somewhere for new recruits to sleep. Jerusalem is an expensive place to live and full of young men from the diaspora, whose journey to the Holy City cost them more than they had counted on; they arrive penniless and part-starved. Not that all of Saul’s men are young. Midian barely has a beard to speak of, but old Korach already has aches in his joints, which grow worse in the winter. Though he’s a bruiser, Korach: his knuckles may only hurt him so much through the number of men he’s punched in the skull.
Saul is their captain; he was never one of them. He always felt destined for bigger things, as though set apart as special from birth; but now his greatest advance has just been wrenched from him, trampled underfoot by that lofty bastard Annas.
There’s a man preaching on the Temple steps. His Aramaic has the guttural sound of a Galilean. Saul spoke Greek as a boy, but his Aramaic is good enough to be able to pick out strong accents, though in speech it is a little stilted and halting, and sometimes he’s forced to take a slightly circuitous route to what he would like to say. The preacher on the other hand is evidently eloquent: he’s gathered a small crowd about him. He’s one of the sect of the Nazarenes. Followers of a dead messiah. Often they travel shoeless, like this man. Wearing ostentatiously shabby and worn-out robes. Making a show of the poverty they should find shameful. They hold all their meagre goods in common and preach that all men should be equal. They speak out against wealth and privilege, and they also preach against the occupation. To talk of messiahs is to spread sedition, which leads to riot and decimation as surely as clouds come before a storm.
Saul struggles to understand why the Nazarenes take so hard against Roman rule. Judaea has not had it the worst: when Caesar captured Gaul, more than half of its people — two million souls — were massacred or sold into slavery. And through their long unbroken history the Jews themselves have experienced uncountable generations of enslavement. There is more freedom under Rome than they have sometimes known. But, anyway, the Nazarenes’ king died without freeing his people, was put to death by the Romans. Thus was self-evidently unsuccessful. The Romans are still here and he is not. It’s not blasphemy to believe that this Yeshua was the Messiah, it’s just bloody stupid.
Believing a man to be an anointed one, even a dead man, is no crime, but speaking out against the Romans, near enough calling for their overthrow on the very steps of the Temple, with the Roman Antonia Fortress in view just behind it, that is something else: that kind of dissent threatens peace and order. That is something which needs attending to. Some thing that needs paying for. Saul feels a very distinct sense just now that someone should pay.
Under Saul’s motion, the guards belt themselves around the preacher’s cluster, loose but encircling, like wolves about a lost sheep. Several of those who were listening notice and edge off. New spectators emerge, from stall sides and shaded spots, but stay at a distance, people more interested in what might happen now than in anything the Nazarene might have had to say.
‘What’s your name?’ Saul asks.
‘Stephen,’ says the Nazarene. He has uncut hair long as willow fronds, uncommon among Jewish men. And his beard is parted at the front, like the hoofs of a goat. His face flesh is thin, bones visible, perhaps because of the laughable deliberate poverty these people practise.
‘A Greek name, but you’re from Galilee, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am, from Tiberius — there are many Greek names there. But Jerusalem is my home now.’
‘Then if this is your home, treat it with respect. Cease and desist,’ Saul says. ‘Stop preaching against the peace. Your leader is dead. He failed. And if you bring more havoc to the Temple, the same will most likely happen to you.’ Saul pronounces this with monotone menace.
‘You say he’s dead, we say he will come again and lead us to victory and a new age, a real peace, beyond this present servitude.’
‘He was crucified, fool. Your king was executed by the Romans. He’s not coming back.’
‘Killed by the Romans, yes, but as much by you, the toadies and collaborators. The fearful and the lusters after wealth and advancement. The cowardly and the covetous. Will there ever come a prophet whom men like you wouldn’t kill?’
It is hard to know if this Stephen is brave through his beliefs, or plain sun-stroke stupid. But what is clear: he’s really picked the wrong fucking day to have a go at Saul.
Stephen’s dragged bare feet leave trails in the dirt of the street. After the first attempt, he does not struggle to get away, but neither does he assist them, even by standing upright. His toes, though toughened from sandal-less road-walking are bleeding by the time they get to the Dung Gate. The guards stationed there do not salute. Saul mentally notes who they are.
The spectacle of a captured miscreant gathered a small following as the guard party progressed through Jerusalem’s streets. Most of the followers are idlers and part-time porters by the look of them. But they’ll serve the purpose as well as the next man, if fired up sufficiently. Everyone’s fired up in Jerusalem; Jerusalem can always be relied upon to erupt.
They drop Stephen to the ground outside the walls. Robe a little more torn. Hair a little more dishevelled. Nose a little more broken. Blood runs from it, down the divide of his beard, congealing into blackened tufts. They tie his hands to his feet, behind his back, so he is forced to sit in an awkward semi-kneel. His shoulders slump, head bowed. When he looks up it is directly at Saul. His eyes bore into Saul’s. Like they can see inside. Saul doesn’t hold the gaze; he turns and spits onto the bare dirt. It is little better than desert out here: generations of tethered camels, donkeys and goats have consumed or trampled every sapling, shrub and blade of grass that dared try to grow. Nothing is left now but dust and rocks.
It is hot work collecting stones. The guards leave their cloaks at Saul’s feet while they gather, worried that the street trash who have accompanied them through the Dung Gate might try to take off with one otherwise. They pile the stones in a line of slack cairns, facing the now muttering Stephen. Perhaps he is praying. He is drawn white with fear, but does not sob or beg.
Judaea is a vendetta land under vendetta law. An eye might be gouged out for an eye lost. Relatives can seek retributive vengeance. But stoning means no one man is responsible for the death. It is the community enforcing the law. And here, outside the walls, the guards and the dreg riff-raff they’ve gathered on the way are the community and the law.
Stones can’t be too big, or death will come too fast, nor too small, or the killing could take hours. The perfect stone, like the perfect orange, is the size of a woman’s fist.