‘Then sleep.’ Paul turns to his companions. ‘Aristarchus, find Useful a pallet and a blanket upstairs.’
Useful throws himself to the floor again and kisses Paul’s toes, which are yellowed and scrunched, like the claws of some ancient fowl.
When he wakes, Useful finds Paul beside him in the chamber. He gives Useful bread, spread with thick garum, and a clay beaker of sharp, delicious wine.
‘You were not so useful to your owner, Useful,’ Paul says, ‘but I think you will become so to me.’
‘How, Master? Anything.’
‘I want you to help me unravel a story, a tangle of circumstance and circumcision. I think it would be well to try to get the tale straight and have an idea of how it should be told, not least because a trial at Caesar’s court awaits me. Its arrival is in a future contingent, it is true — in fact I have every expectation that the appointed time of God’s judgment of all mankind will come first and my trial, therefore, not at all. But it would nonetheless be sensible to make some preparation.’
‘Thank you for your confidence, Master. But I am unworthy to pay you this service. Surely, one of your companions …’
‘A couple of them write well enough. But they are also … how can I put it? … encumbered by their experiences. A fresh ear, I think, may be just what is needed. Some of the others were present at certain occasions and might bring too much of themselves to the history, or else they have already heard second-hand accounts, invariably inaccurate. With you I could have, as it were, a tabula rasa. You, Useful, will write my stories. You will tell the world how I am a real apostle because the crucified Christ appeared to me. The risen Jesus spoke to me!’
Seven Months before the Crucifixion
What is vision, what is demon, what is insanity?
It was near noon when he first heard the voices, the sun at its highest, not yet it’s hottest. The voices held out promises. They told him what he could become. They said the whole world would honour him, that he had been set apart from his mother’s womb. The voices have rarely ceased since.
Legion. The voices are called Legion. Maybe they are emissaries of God, but there is one God and the voices are many, overpowering him as the Romans have overrun Judaea. A man in torment; a land in chains; both infested with legions.
The man, too, used to have a name. And back when he did it was Shuni.
There are pigs now. They did not exist round here when he was a child. The pigs forage through the sacred soil. Filthy, impermissible animals kept only for the Romans. Swine have skin like people, but are bristled like beasts. He slept with a whore once, in Capernaum, before the voices came. She wasn’t bristled, but she was cleft in the middle like a swine’s foot; she was pink and forbidden like the swine. Now Legion tells him he should take a pig like he took the whore. He tries, but the small ones are too quick and the big tuskers too fierce.
Sometimes he watches the pigs coupling with one another, shrieking swiny glee-pain. The noise hurts his ears, the sight offends his eyes: that such creatures should be here in the God-covenanted land. That such snouty demon-beasts, prohibited even as food to those who fear Yahweh, should be foraging among the tombs of the ancestors. Filthy animals, bred only for the occupiers, sows to feed the Roman blasphemers. Despoiling the soil. Cloven like whores.
The man who used to be called Shuni runs unclothed among the pigs, whipping them and himself with briars and sticks, raising welts and gashes on their backs and his own, the bristled and the bare. The swineherds sometimes try to chase him away, but they are afraid of him, because he is strong and he is wild and he is filled with Legion.
Once, his family had had him shackled. His cousins and his mother — the sow who bore you, Legion said — dragged him foaming and moaning to the wooden trammel they’d had a carpenter fashion. But it couldn’t hold him for ever. Eventually he smashed the stocks with a rock, dug with bleeding fingers from the ground. It was like the big round eye of a behemoth, the rock, staring into him. Black like the bottom of the nearby sea whose waters had soothed his feet as a child. The blows he rained to break the wooden shackles gouged and bruised his ankles, but he found he didn’t mind. Pain was at least sensation, something to bring him back to the world, away from the voices. After he had fled he continued to pound himself with rocks. But only round ones. Only ever round ones, like behemoth eyes.
Now he lives among the tomb caves. It’s dry there, dusty as the grave, since graves they are. Legion makes him curl up in there at night, naked with the dead. When the pigs try to come in, he chases them away. Or, at least, he chases them and then they run away. Is that the same thing? Is it the result or the intent that matters? How are we to judge and be judged?
The Pharisees say that there will come another age, a time in the future when the righteous will be raised; the Sadducees say that this life is all, that we have just one go. He is alone in the tomb caves. No one is resurrected, lending credence to the Sadducees.
Bats dangle from the hewn ceiling though, like strange cave fruits. Still as statues of jackal-man Anubis: dog-faced, furred like cats, winged like beasts of myth. The cloth of their wings, wrapped tight around their fronts like Egyptian funeral windings, is woven finer and tighter than Alexandrian linen; the spiny finger-bones that run through them look too spindle-thin to stand the force of a single flap. It is through their frailty that bats create fear: he is scared that they will tangle and break themselves upon him, that he will somehow become infected with batness. But the cave-dwellers never collide: the bats make their eerie aerial way in the night without ever touching him.
The days are his alone. Alone but for the voices. Alone but for this land — the red desert rocks and the gorse scrub. The Sodom apples and flat-topped parasol thorn trees, which lean like the broken old, tired from resisting the wind, strangling each other in the fight for a place near water-carved cuttings. Seams of softer rock have been eroded into false pathways, narrow but not straight. Wind terraces, as wrinkles on an old baba, ring the hillocks. Boulders lie marooned in the scrub, tumbled from above. Shale piles up against the cliffs, like Roman ramps built to storm a city. Waterless wadis, some still cloaked in hopeful plants. Piles of post-brown brush, dead, waiting to be reborn when the rains come. If the rains come. Just because something has always been is not to say that it always will be.
In season, he eats brittle-skin locusts, because these are allowed by Yahweh, so long as the wings cover their body and they walk on four legs, using two to jump. He uses two legs to jump as well and two hands to catch his prey. Sometimes he cooks his locusts on the embers left behind by the swineherds when they move their tent settlements. More often he cracks the mottled grey locust shells apart and licks out the beckoning inner, as a Gentile might with a shellfish. The one-God of the Israelites does not approve of shellfish, but He likes locusts. The mottled grey at least, and the yellow and the red and some of the white. But never green. Eaters of green locusts will not be revived to walk the earth again with the Pharisees. Though the Sadducees say that now is all there is. Just one turn each, like beggars at the wedding leftovers. Be your time short or long, it is all you have.
Sometimes he sees ibex. They could be eaten. But the males grow horns as long and curved as Babylonian scimitars. And their spry feet carry them onto steep cliffs away from him. Their hoofs sound like masons’ mallets as they scramble upon rock. White stockinged, dun as sackcloth. Brown patched, like robes repaired. Their eyes are amber, slit-pupilled and wise. Perhaps they see things on the mountaintops in the drear mists. Perhaps they know things that are hidden from man.