Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

And so it begins. Legionaries open the heavy palace gates and the procession leaves Rome and enters Jerusalem. Past the pedlars and the bread-sellers; the beggars and the lepers; the stockers of pots and cloth. Past baskets of mint, with their Elysium smell of soft meadows. Past the ragged, shadeless palms. Past marbled flanks of skinless sheep, swaying in the meagre breeze.

Most of the legionaries hold javelins and carry shields, as if going into battle. Two soldiers at the front use short whips to clear space through the crowds, steel-bladed gladii ready drawn in their free hands.

When the prisoner walks too slowly, he, too, is whipped; though he is struggling to walk at all. There are many faces in the Jerusalem crowd who love him. None of them jeer at him — why would they, who could? People wail and people weep. Not just because they know who the prisoner is, although some of them do, but because they would weep for any man being taken by the enemy to be tortured to death. Women cry and hold their hands up to the sky. Young men tense their young men’s muscles and measure distances with their young men’s eyes, as they try to calculate how many others might join them if they were to rush at these Roman guards. And the young men all arrive at the same total as always: insufficient.

The soldiers try to take the broadest streets — for their own sakes, because it is harder for their spears and swords and training to protect them in narrower passages — but even still there are points where the prisoner’s burden must be turned sideways to fit through. Where an arch or a cart or a stall blocks the way. There are places where the beam jams and the prisoner must be manhandled to advance.

At one such place he falls, having been dragged too fast past an obstruction. As he stumbles, the weight of the wood on his back drops him face first to the flagstone. Unable to put down his hands, the force of his jaw hitting the floor makes a crack, louder even than the dropped-log bong of the beam. The soldiers pull him up again swiftly. Eager to be gone from these narrow streets and to the open ground of Golgotha outside the city walls, where they will once more feel in full control.

The beam has a slot in it, behind the prisoner’s head. It has been auger-bored, chiselled and scraped by a carpenter, so that it will lock over the post at Golgotha. Perhaps they are each numbered and this beam forms part of a pair; or maybe they are all cut to identical size, so that any crossbeam will fit every post. Romans favour such standardizations.

Which is why these legionaries all look so similar, with the overlapping plates of their armour, which deflect blows; with pattern-formed javelins, designed to bend as they strike, so that they cannot be thrown back; with shields that lock into a barrier near impervious to arrows; and with pitiless eyes that know no other way, or other world.

Further times the prisoner falls. And each time he does, dust and dirt from the street stick to the blood, so that he rises again with skin like flour-baked fish, in agony from the grit in his wounds. And each time he does, the plaited diadem of thorn branches bites as his head hits the ground. And each time he does, Jerusalemites wail and mourn.

Once, as he stumbles, a man from the crowd catches the prisoner, holds him up, takes the weight of the wood. And for a moment each of them shares the strength that flows from the other. But a legionary pulls the man away and punches the side of his head for his effrontery in stepping into the soldiers’ line.

It is strange, perhaps, that the prisoner continues at all. What could the Romans do to him here that could be worse than what awaits him at the destination? Yet he does continue, as they always do.

The group hears the howling dogs of Golgotha before they even get there. The dogs stay away from the procession, wary of spear butts and boots, but they know what such spectacles mean.

Golgotha — the place of the skull — is a stony basin, with limestone-cliff walls. Once it was a quarry. Formerly men from Jerusalem took rocks from Golgotha. Now Golgotha takes men from Jerusalem.

The land has almost overrun the carved limestone in the years of unwork. Pitted earth rolling forwards, motionless to the eye, yet relentless. Faces baked hard by the merciless sun, pocked with the nest holes of birds for which the heat is a blessing, allowing them to soar on the thermals that scorch from the ground below.

The stones all around are tawny and blunt, good Judaean stones. But everything is brown and grey and tan. There is so little colour in this place. Only the sun and the blood of the prisoner break the veil of numb beige.

The ground is littered with broken bone fragments, marrow licked free by the dogs, all covered with dust now, all the same colour as the rocks. Even the dogs are sandy-coloured; sandy and skinny, with tails like ragged flags, not so far from wolves. Scavengers; predators without prey.

The dogs snarl and snap at one another. And the air is thick with the flies that have no imperative to leave this place. Their whole circle of life, emergence, maggoty crawling, feeding, mating, spawning and death, takes place within Golgotha.

The vast rock bowl is scattered with crosses, like the abandoned crutches of cured cripples. Numerous posts standing permanently in place; many of them suspending rotting corpses.

Two at least of those who dangle from the crosses are still alive. They periodically try to heave themselves up on the iron pinions with which their ankles are pierced. They both look as though they near the end now. But such things are hard to judge: some men look like that for days.

And hooded crows circle and hop and try to stay out of reach of the dogs. And jackals, too fearful of men to come down by daylight, watch from the hillsides. And a marabou stork — hunching its bald pink head into the grey shawl of its feathers, like an old man — sits upon the cliff edge, waiting; waiting as if it has been always waiting for this.

And if you could choose, you would never end it here. Not in this place, please, God, not here. But the prisoner cannot choose, so he is pushed to the earth next to a ground-lain post, either numbered or standardized. Where he drops, the dust rises, a puff of smoke as if a pot is lifted from a clay oven.

Some women, who have spent hard lifetimes lifting such pots from such ovens, have followed to Golgotha and they watch from a distance.

The Romans allow the women that place and no closer. They do not threaten them off, but their stares and spears prevent further approach. A single man is with the group of women, apparently unafraid that his presence might be seen as collusion with the prisoner. Most men are fearful of coming to Golgotha, entry into which, without permission, can in itself be seen as cause for capture. The soldiers do not arrest this man, though. Perhaps because he looks so clearly like the prisoner, because they are so obviously brothers. Seeing the two men like that is a reminder of how we all can fall: one brother clean and straight and tall; the other drenched in blood and ragged with cuts, shortly to be naked and nailed.

All men are crucified naked. They leave the world as they entered it: covered with blood, a mother howling. And so the legionaries strip the prisoner of his loincloth; they don’t make the rules. Though one of them laughs at the prisoner’s circumcised penis, the only part of him unstained by blood, where the loincloth formerly blotted and soaked.

‘Look at that,’ the soldier says. ‘Imagine doing that to a little baby. These people are fucking barbarians.’

And his friend nods agreement, as he fetches the hammer.

The beam is slotted into place on the post and soldiers hold the prisoner, while one of their comrades readies the nails. They are reused, these nails. This one has probably been through the arms or ankles of others already.