The Last Gospel (54 page)

‘There’s a cross beside the first word,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘You see that in medieval religious manuscripts too.’

‘There’s some scrubbed-out writing underneath it, older writing,’ Costas said, squinting at the paper from behind Jack. ‘Just the first few lines. You can barely make it out, but it looks like a different hand, a different script.’

‘Probably some older writing by Claudius,’ Jack murmured. ‘If so, it’d be in Latin. Maybe something he’d started then erased, notes he’d made on the journey out to Judaea. That’d be fascinating. We don’t have anything yet in Claudius’ own handwriting.’

‘Mass spectrometry,’ Costas said. ‘That’d sort it out. Hard science.’

Jack was not listening. He had read the first lines of the visible text, the lines that overlaid the scrubbed-out words. He felt light headed, and the scroll seemed to waver in his hands, whether from his own extraordinary emotion or from a waft of breeze he could not tell. He let his hands slowly drop, and held the scroll open over his knees. He turned to Helena. ‘
Kyriakon
,’ he said. ‘Am I correct in using the literal translation, House of the Lord?’

Helena nodded. ‘It could mean congregation as a whole, Church in the broad sense.’

‘And
naos
? The Greek word for temple?’

‘Probably used to mean church as a physical entity, as a structure.’

‘Are you ready for this?’

‘If these are his words, Jack, then I have nothing to fear.’

‘No, you do not.’ Jack paused, and for an extraordinary moment he felt as if he were looking down from a great height, not at their gathering on the mudflat but at a pinprick of light on a vast sea, on two shadowy forms hunched across from each other in a little boat, barely discernible in the darkness. He closed his eyes, then looked at the scroll and began to translate.

‘ “Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, these are his words . . .” ’

 

T
he eager young man in the white tunic stopped, and sniffed the breeze. He had never been to the east before, and the sights and smells of the last few days had been strange, startling. But now the breeze that wafted over the hills from the west came from the Mediterranean Sea, bringing with it the familiar smell of salt and herbs and faint decay, a smell which had been purged the day before by a sharp wind from the heights of Gaulantis on the opposite shore. He looked again, shielding his eyes against the glare. The mudflats extended far out to the edge of the lake, a wide shimmering foreshore where the water had evaporated in the long dry summer. The distant surface of the lake was glassy smooth, like a mirror. On the edge he spied a wavering shape, a fishing boat perhaps, with movement around it. He listened, and heard the far-off screech of a gull, then a tinkering sound, a distant knocking like rainwater dripping off a roof. It was becoming hot, suddenly too hot to keep up the pace he had set for himself. He turned towards the mountain they called Arbel, raised his face and yearned for that breeze again, for the cool air from the west to waft over and envelop him.

‘Claudius!’ It was a girl’s voice. ‘Slow down! You need water.’

He turned awkwardly, dragging his bad leg behind him, and waited for his companions to catch up. It was only ten days since they had landed at Caesarea on the coast, and five days since they had set off from Jerusalem, up the valley of the river Jordan to the inland sea they called Gennesareth, in the land of Galilee. They had spent the night in the new town of Tiberias, built by Herod’s uncle Antipas and named after Claudius’ own uncle Tiberius, emperor in Rome now for almost ten years. Claudius had been astonished to find images of Tiberius everywhere in Judaea, in temples and statues and on coins, as if the living emperor were already worshipped as a god. It seemed to Claudius that he could never escape them, his benighted family, but that morning as they had walked away from the bustle of construction in the town he had felt an extraordinary contentment, a sense of liberation in the simplicity of the coastal flats and the shimmering shore of the lake with the hills of Gaulantis beyond.

Afterwards, after this day, they planned to go over those hills to Antioch, to give offerings at the place where his beloved brother Germanicus had been poisoned four years before. Claudius still felt the pain, the stab of anguish in the pit of his stomach. He tried to push it away, and turned to watch as those dearest to him came up the dusty road from the south. His beloved Calpurnia, with her flaming red hair and freckled skin, not yet out of her teens but as sensuous a woman as he had ever beheld. She was wearing the red of her profession, the oldest one, but now only out of habit, not necessity. And beside her Cypros, wife of Herod, veiled and bejewelled as befitted a princess of Arabia, gliding along like a goddess beside her wild-haired companion. And striding behind them was Herod himself, black bearded, his long hair braided like an ancient king of Assyria, his cloak hemmed with real Tyrean purple, his big, booming voice regaling them with songs and bawdy jokes all the way. Herod always seemed larger than life, always the centre of attention, yet he was Claudius’ oldest and dearest companion, the only one among all the boys in the palace who had befriended him, who had seen past the stutter and the awkwardness and the withered limb.

Claudius took the skin of water offered to him by Calpurnia, and drained it. Herod pointed towards the distant speckle of movement on the shoreline, and they left the road and began to pick their way across the mudflats. Claudius had seen the tower of Migdal, the next town along the coast in a hollow in the hills, but now it was lost in the haze that rose up and obscured the shoreline like a shimmering veil. Then the sun broke through and reflected off a myriad shallow pools across the flats. To Claudius the view seemed to fragment, like a shattering pane of glass, the sunlight reflecting blindingly off each pool, and then regain its whole again in the haze. A hint of a rainbow hung in the air, a suspension of colour that never quite materialized, that stayed just beyond reality. Soon all he could see was the movement around the boat ahead of them, and even that seemed to waver and recede as they walked further on. Claudius wondered if it was real after all, or a mere trick of the eye, like one of the phantasms that Herod said he had seen in the desert, a reflection of some distant, unattainable reality.

Herod strode up and pushed him playfully, his voice big, booming, his breath smelling of last night’s wine. ‘Do you remember the Aramaic I taught you in Rome, when we were boys?’

‘My dear Herod. How could I forget? And these past years while you’ve been playing the rogue, I’ve been teaching myself Phoenician. I’m planning a history of Carthage, you know. You just can’t get by without reading the original sources. I don’t trust anything a Roman historian has to say about barbarians.’

‘We’re not barbarians, Claudius. It’s the other way round.’ Herod pushed Claudius again, almost toppling him off balance but catching him just in time, with his usual tenderness. ‘Anyway, I don’t trust Romans, period. With one noble exception, of course.’ He shouldered Claudius again, then embraced him to stop him from falling, and they both laughed.

‘Does he speak Greek, this man?’ Claudius asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then let it be Greek, not Aramaic. My dear Calpurnia is a real barbarian, you know. Her grandparents were brought as slaves by my great-uncle Julius from Britannia. A fascinating place. Calpurnia tells me such amazing things. One d-day I will go there. I believe the Phoenicians reached those shores, but I do not believe they left the Britons any knowledge of their language.’

‘Very well then, my dear Claudius. For your lovely Calpurnia. Greek it is.’

They came closer to the shoreline. Claudius was walking ahead again, and could now see that the boat was real, not a mirage, and was drawn up a few yards from the edge of the water. It was a good-sized boat, with an incurving stem and a single high mast, a bit like the one Claudius had sailed on the Bay of Naples as a boy and still kept in its shed at Herculaneum. He looked more closely. Under an awning behind the stern sat a woman, heavy with child, working at something on her lap. Beside the hull were loose pieces of wood, fragments of old boats, and a plank with a careful arrangement of tools, a handsaw, a bow drill, chisels, a basket of nails. Claudius realized that this was the origin of the tinkering sound he had heard. Then the carpenter came round from the other side, holding a plane. He was lean, muscular, wearing only a loincloth, his skin a deep bronze, with crudely shorn black hair and a full beard, just as Herod had looked when he came back from a hard season’s campaigning. Claudius hobbled up to the boat, keeping his eyes on the man. He could have been one of the gladiators in Rome, or one of the escaped slaves from the marble quarries who Claudius had befriended in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, where his mother had tried to abandon him but where he had been taken in, befriended by outcasts and others afflicted as he was.

‘I am C-Claudius,’ he said in Greek, clearing his throat. ‘My friend H-Herod has brought me here from Rome, to seek your help. I am ailing.’

The woman smiled up at Claudius, then looked down and carried on with her work, mending the cotton strands of a fishing net. The man gazed at Claudius full in the face. His eyes were intense, luminous, like nothing Claudius had seen before. The man held his gaze in silence for a few moments, then looked down and pushed his plane forward and backward, carrying on working the wood. ‘You are not ailing, Claudius.’ His voice was deep, sonorous, and the Greek was accented in the same way as Herod’s.

Claudius made as if to reply, then stopped. He was dumbfounded, could think of nothing to say. The words when they came were stumbling, inconsequential, instantly regrettable. ‘You are from these parts?’

‘Mary is from Migdal,’ the man said. ‘I was born in Nazareth, in lower Galilee, but came here to this lake as a youth. These are my people, and this is my vessel.’

‘You are a boatwright? A fisherman?’

‘This sea is my vessel, and the people of Galilee are my passengers. And we are all fishermen here. You can join us, if you like.’

Claudius caught the man’s gaze again, and found himself nodding, and then looked back and gestured at the others. Herod bounded up, the mud spattering against his bare shins, and embraced the Nazarene in the eastern fashion, murmuring greetings in Aramaic before turning to Claudius. ‘When Joshua comes with me to Tiberias for an evening in the taverns we call him Jesus, the Greek version of his name. It trips off the tongue more readily, especially after a few jars of Galilean.’ He guffawed, slapped the Nazarene on the back and then knelt down beside Mary, gently putting his hand on her belly. ‘All goes well?’ he said in Aramaic. She murmured, smiling. He leapt back up, then caught sight of someone on the shoreline towards Migdal, a distant figure waving, then loping on. Claudius followed Herod’s gaze, and saw a man with black skin, tall and slender, wearing a white robe, carrying a stringer of fish.

‘Aha!’ Herod guffawed, slapping the man again. ‘You have a Nubian slave!’

‘He is Ethiopian, from a place called Aksum,’ the man replied. ‘He is a free man. And he is a good listener.’

‘Everyone listens to you, Joshua. You should be a king!’

The Nazarene smiled, then raised his hand in greeting to Calpurnia and Cypros as they came walking towards him across the mud, barefoot. He passed beside them wordlessly and heaved over a crude stone anchor which had been mooring the boat, then detached a thick hemp rope which had been looped through a hole in the centre of the stone. Herod and Calpurnia and Cypros placed the baskets they had been carrying in the boat, and Mary made as if to lift a pitcher beside her, but the Nazarene quickly took it off her and placed his hand on her belly, smiling. He coiled the anchor rope and tossed it over the sternpost, then braced himself against the stern and heaved, every muscle in his body taut and bulging. As Claudius watched him work, the Nazarene seemed like the bronze statues of Hercules and athletes he had seen in the villa of his friend Piso below Vesuvius. The keel slid along the mudflat until it was half in the waves, and the Nazarene stood back, glistening with sweat, while the others splashed past him and clambered on board. Claudius came last, awkwardly pulling his leg up and over. A few more heaves and the boat was afloat, and the Nazarene quickly leapt up over the gunwale and released the square sail from its yard, while Mary sat by the tiller oar.

Claudius and Herod sat side by side in the middle of the boat, each with an oar, and began to pull in unison as the wind took the sail and pushed the boat beyond the shallows. The hull and the rigging creaked, the water gurgled and crackled under the bow. Claudius relished the exercise, his face flushed and shining. If only he had been allowed into the gymnasium in Rome before the palsy took hold, then he might have led the legions in Germania just like his beloved brother. But now, in this boat, as they slipped further offshore, until the line of the coast was all but lost in the haze, the pain and unhappiness that had begun to cloud his life seemed to slide away, and for the first time he felt whole, no longer battling against himself and others, those who would rather have seen him never return when he was pushed towards the mouth of the underworld as a frightened little boy.