The young donkey is tiny beneath Yeshua’s length. His feet reach almost to the palm-strewn ground. It might have been comical, but Yeshua has a way of making humble things look holy. He makes a virtue of the poverty that was enforced upon him anyway. He says the rich will come last once he is king. Had he entered on a charger, a man with his claims and his charisma could appear too proud.
Even now, on the other side of Jerusalem, just such a pompous procession is occurring. The Roman prefect and his cavalcade flood into the city. Pontius Pilate, bearing his flab like a badge of conspicuous consumption, face clammy with sweat. Riding a dappled giant of a horse, at the head of a phalanx of troops, marching to drum beat and horn blast. The blessed ground seems to tremble as they pass and their passing takes for ever, so long is the tail of this great snake. Three thousand scarlet shields like a tide of blood. The standard bearer beside Pilate is cloaked in a tawny lion skin, like Herakles, and holds the Imago, a beaten-metal portrait of the god-emperor. Their very presence and every act in the Holy City is blasphemy. But who can stand against them? They are a fighting monster. A war machine, before people who know not what a machine is.
The Romans, too, are coming for the festival. Pilate doesn’t live in Jerusalem. He lives in the sumptuous marble surrounds of Caesarea on the coast. There is a permanent Roman garrison in the fortress next to the Temple, always a spot potentially requiring suppression. But this aside, the Romans try to maintain at least the semblance that the high priest and Sadducee aristocracy run Jerusalem, enforced by the mercenary thugs of the Temple Guards.
But Passover celebrates Jewish victory over Egyptian oppression. It is a time when feelings against current oppressors can easily explode. And the festival means the already dense population of Jerusalem is multiplied many times. Every bed and floor space is taken. People sleep in tents pitched in the streets and outside the walls; they sprawl over rooftops and in alleys, in nightly bivouacs, or unprotected save by cloak and God. Jerusalem, always a flashpoint, at festival times becomes a clay oil lamp, teetering above a straw floor. One strong wind, one clumsy move, and the whole place erupts.
Zion in these days is a city of zest and tumult. Traders shout and sing from their stall sides. Yearling lambs are driven down the streets by country-rough shepherds, leaving trails of damp, rich dung to be kicked up by the children who chase in their wake. Pharisees — the pastors of the people — teach in huddles with eager acolytes, or debate and discuss with their fellows. Even the beggars are a little lifted, with so many people around in such a spirit of giving.
But there is a dread never forgotten. An anxiety that lingers at the end of every street and every sentence. The high priest fears the Romans; the people fear the high priest’s guards; the Romans fear riot from the people.
And this tremulous tinderbox is the city into which Yeshua rides on the foal of a donkey. Deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah. Declaring himself to be kin of David. Declaring himself to be king.
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
Cephas, named ‘the Rock’, stares at the rocks of Jerusalem’s vast walls as they pass through the East Gate. Boulder stones of ivory and ochre; pepper and salamander; dirty snow and threshed corn; soiled swaddling and first-fruit offerings. Wrinkled like camel knees, motley like a Roman pony, misted like a winter morning in the marshes. All of life is here in Jerusalem and all of Jerusalem is echoed in its walls. So shout, Jerusalem, shout. Your king has come.
Thirty-four Years after the Crucifixion
Useful is his name. One of them, at least. Everyone has multiple names in this mixed-up modern world — Roman names, Greek names, state names, slave names, religious names. It can’t always have been like that. It wasn’t. But Useful is a good name for a slave. Even if he isn’t.
If it wasn’t for that name, Useful would be dead. Or, rather, the act that saved him also gave him his name. A foundling on the steps of the shambles, exposure the preferred form of family planning among the Phrygians. A child so young he was still draped in birth offal, left amid the blood and mess of the meat market.
‘We could take the babe home, bring him up as a slave,’ the master had said. ‘He’ll be useful one day.’
He wasn’t.
Useful’s master is an atheist now. He no longer worships our Divine Lord and Saviour, the Prince of Peace, God and Son of God, Bringer of Grace, Redeemer of Mankind, the Deliverer of Justice: Augustus Caesar.
Neither does the master now believe in the Great Mother Cybele, or Artemis, or Apollo. Not even Sabazios, the city’s patron god. Patron of pit latrines and emptied bed pots, to judge by the summer stink.
The master worships only one god now, or two, perhaps, at most; there is some confusion as to whether one is a god or not. It seems to be complicated, this Jesus stuff, jealous and complicated …
Under his new faith, the master won’t even eat meat if it was previously offered as a sacrifice to other gods. Which is near enough to say any meat. Sometimes he sends Useful to buy mutton or goat from the Jewish quarter. About the only place you can find flesh that wasn’t first dedicated as an offering, unless you slaughter the beast yourself. You can see why the Jews are so strong, even though spread so wide: they separate themselves from the world, but in every city they are at home already. Their strange ways and laws are deeply familiar to them. Mostly the Jews seem to be a very moral people; many of the Greeks admire them for that. Though Useful has seen a stoning, which didn’t look so moral. A choke-screaming girl dragged barefoot outside the city walls, crying that she hadn’t done whatever it was they said she’d done, whatever it was that merited stoning to death.
It’s hard to kill someone by stoning, it seems: requires a lot of stones. The mob struggled to find sufficient. People are surprisingly sturdy, when it comes down to it, even though death is all about: sickness strides through the slums, splashing in the street sewers; children drop from unknown ailments — perhaps two-thirds of those who survive birth are dead before sixteen — and even the kin of emperors and ethnarchs are not immune. Mortality in the cities is so high that their wall-confined claustrophobia would be emptied entirely, were it not for the hordes always pouring in from elsewhere. Death is not some distant future end to life. Death is life’s constant companion. Death is the unloved neighbour of all who live crammed in unsanitary single workshop rooms. But if you actually try to kill someone, it takes a lot of effort. The girl being stoned, she survived long beyond the anger of the crowd. It took persistence to finish her off, her smashed-crab fingers still clawing at the dented earth as though some doorway might be found. Finally one of the kinder ones brought down a big corner-stone rock to crush her skull. Imagine such kindness as that: the kindness of crowds.
Useful is an over-sized urn-faced youth, with hips wider almost than his shoulders, but not in a womanly way, just as a bear’s are. Possibly it is this that gives him his ambling gait, which makes him look as if he’s taking longer than he ought. Which is not a good look for a slave.
Slavery is the way of things: you can’t complain about it. It has always been there and always will be. Useful would likely be dead if it weren’t for slavery: who but a wealthy man in need of slaves would save a foundling? Many slaves are freed on the death of their master, or can save up to buy their freedom. A favourite slave in a rich household often lives better than a poor freeman. In many ways, there are worse things to be than a slave.