Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

Pontius’s wine arrives, a vintage from the hills of Alba. The gold beaker is richly blistered with amber and crusted with beryl; condensation glistens on cast stags. There’s a crack in part of the amber, Pontius notices. He’s never owned such a fine goblet before. And now he owns one with a fucking crack in it.

‘I won’t insult you by offering you a cup of my dirty idolater’s wine, of course, Kayafa,’ Pontius says, taking a sip so deep that his nose is wetted.

Kayafa manages to produce a look that a charitable man might possibly construe as a polite smile. Pontius is not such a man.

Pontius strokes the giant mastiff beside him. Judaeans don’t seem to like dogs, but as far as he knows they have no specific proscriptions against them. Obviously they can’t eat them, but who does? Except in times of siege, of course. It’s not like Romans eat dogs, but they still use them as companions and guards and for herding and hunting. Judaeans seem to despise canines and be extremely uncomfortable around them. Which is partly why Pilate likes to go everywhere accompanied by his favourite Canis pugnax . In the heat it often has long dewy strands — like the threads a witch might use to drip poison into a sleeping man’s mouth — swinging from its sagging maw. Pontius delights in seeing the Judaeans recoil from the sight. They visibly flinch if the beast should turn its crop-eared head too sharply, as if it were a madman flicking his own seed at passersby not a little bit of dog dribble.

Pontius takes a sip of wine and sucks air in through his teeth to feel the tannin on his tongue. ‘So that is the charge is it, Kayafa? The prisoner says he has been anointed as King of Judaea?’

‘As you know, Prefect, he caused uproar and stopped all trade in the Temple, but he also opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be the Messiah King, descended from David.’

‘Well, in that last regard at least he is probably correct.’

‘Prefect?’

‘Well, it struck me as I was having your books read to me. Solomon — King David’s son — had a thousand wives and concubines and this was a thousand years or so ago. Think of all those children over that number of generations. My mathematician confirmed it: there is probably not a Judaean alive today who is not descended from David. You and the prisoner and the gangly eunuch who brings me my fucking bedtime broth are all descended from David. Probably why this land is so interminably cursed with would-be messiahs …’

‘You are wise, as always, Prefect. The prisoner Yeshua, though, claims to be the rightful king, through a line of first-born sons.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. And who could doubt that such records were carefully and indisputably kept by illiterates, exiled, enslaved and decimated countless times over that thousand-year span? Not I. If a man states something so foolish as to say that he is king of a country that already has an emperor, then you would have to think that he truly believes it. And if he does, that’s good enough for me.’

Pontius flicks two fingers to summon the centurion. The mastiff, now lying at the prefect’s feet, looks up, hopeful that the movement beckons something of relevance to it. Disappointed, it settles down again.

‘Gaius,’ the prefect says.

‘Prefect?’

‘Crucify this man.’

‘Prefect.’

The centurion motions and his troops approach the Temple Guards. With the surly uncooperative look of a gang of street-tykes being forced to make peace, the guards surrender their prisoner and the legionaries lead him away.

‘What should we put on his titulus ?’ the centurion asks, for the sign displaying the condemned’s wrongdoing.

‘Well, legally speaking, his crime is laesae maiestatis ,’ Pontius says. Then he looks at the high priest and smiles. ‘But write “ rex judaeorum ”. That means “King of the Jews”,’ he translates, into Greek, for Kayafa, probably unnecessarily, with a further warm smile.

Kayafa protests: ‘Surely it would be better described as “He claimed to be the King of the Jews”?’

‘Write “King of the Jews”,’ Pontius repeats to the centurion. ‘And write it in Aramaic and Greek as well.’

Kayafa nods shut-lipped approval, clearly aware that he is being mocked. But, then, that is rather the point of mocking.

‘Have a good festival,’ Pontius says to the high priest. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’ He turns and begins to walk away, mastiff at his heel, its claws audible on the stone. But then Pontius pauses and looks back to Kayafa again.

‘You know, Kayafa, some of us have a bath every day. Next time you wish to see me, you come into my fucking palace, Passover or not. Or I choose myself another high priest …’

‘Prefect.’ Kayafa drops his head.

‘These people,’ Pontius mutters to himself, as he goes inside. ‘These fucking people.’

‘You don’t think I’m dominating and cruel like these silly Jews seem to think, do you?’ Pontius says, as he crouches and scratches the dog’s white-blazed chest. It wags its butt stump of a docked tail. ‘You know I’m trying to rule them as justly and wisely as I can, don’t you? And, of course, earn a little to put aside for my dotage, as any man would.’

The dog licks his face, seemingly in agreement. Which is about as much confirmation as is coming. Pontius is pretty much resigned to the ingratitude of these bloody Judaeans. But such are the sorrows of leadership and he can’t say he didn’t court them. Some men are born to greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them. And some are forced to claw it, howling to the empty heavens, from out of the bosom of mediocrity.

Time passes in strange ways, when you are waiting for the end of days. Paul marks its passage with lashes.

It is a few months after the split with John-Mark that Paul receives his first flogging. Elders of a Pisidian synagogue don’t like his talk. Perhaps because Paul tells them that their revered and ancient Torah was given only by angels, through intermediaries, while he has spoken directly with God. Perhaps he just keeps coming back, long after they have warned him to take his new sect elsewhere. Perhaps they are baleful or savage or scared.

A physician — forehead walnut-wrinkled with thought — prods Paul’s flesh and declares him sufficiently strong to take the punishment. Paul knows these procedures well enough — he has officiated over them — but even strictures laid down in Deuteronomy have their local flavours and here whippings are conducted with the condemned stretched along the ground.

Sun-baked paving warms a bare chest, heaving with apprehension. A fear that seems to create focus: with his hands bound before him, Paul notices how grubby his fingernails have grown, black sickles cut across their ends.

The elders ask him if he has anything to say — they do not know him well — and Paul quotes Lamentations:

‘Who can carry out his will ,

unless it is the Lord’s order?

Are not weal and woe alike

decreed by the Most High?

Then why should mortal men complain ,

when they are punished for their sins?’

Paul continues grunting out these words, as and when breath allows him to speak, while the stripes are laid upon him. First they are just welts, but where a further lash falls across a fellow, blood begins to be drawn. It runs in lines down Paul’s ribs and is splattered by the whip and flicked into the air, drops flying like augur birds. But God is in Paul’s heart and chest and head, and Christ is in him and he is in Christ; and like this, the lash is of soft leather and the whip hand is not heavy.