Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

And those first years together, Drusilla and Felix were almost like Adam and Eve, so often were they naked and alone. Maybe the fruit of that forbidden Eden tree was a metaphor for language itself, Drusilla thinks, because all words must have been sex noises in the beginning. When there were only those two first people, grunts and moans were all the communication required. But afterwards we had to learn to promise because we had invented lies. We needed words; we needed consonants and vowels and verbs in order to conceal our true selves and obfuscate real intentions. But in sex, we return to Eden.

The first murmurings of that headache coming on seem to have gone, to Drusilla’s relief. A few cups of wine invariably work better than anything a physician might prescribe. Opposite her, on the other couch, the wife of Lucius Caecilius Jucundus holds a ball of amber, rubbing it occasionally and smelling its delicate fragrance. It’s a bit of an affectation, to Drusilla’s mind. Noble ladies do that in Rome in order to mask foul stenches, but there is no need for it in a fine villa in a delightful little seaside town like this one and among such aromas of food. It is borderline insulting, in fact; Drusilla wonders whether she ought to strip the woman from her future invitations altogether. Her husband is only a banker, after all, a dreadfully vulgar occupation. A banker is no better than a goatherd, save for proximity to money.

Goat is the diners’ next delight, when the slaves bring it in. Or not goat, but a plump kid, as tender-fleshed and juicy as a peach, so young it must have had more milk in its veins than blood when it was slaughtered.

It has always seemed to Drusilla that the Torah rule, Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk , was probably supposed to be a reference to the age of the animal, rather than some vague prohibition about combining meat and dairy. For a people teetering near survival’s edge, to kill a beast still suckling makes no sense; much better to let it fatten up first and eat it once weaned. However it was, Drusilla is no subsistence desert-dweller and she has long since left off worrying about those Laws.

Her first husband, good King Azizus, had been obliged by her brother to convert to Judaism before marrying her. But Herod Agrippa made no such terms for Felix. How could he? No one but the emperor tells a Roman prefect what to do. The Jerusalem high priest Jonathan had rebuked Felix on how he was governing and Felix simply had him murdered. One did not even give unsolicited advice to Felix.

Though Felix had seemed to enjoy talking with that curious man, Paul. He was about the only Jew Felix much listened to; the one who said the Law of Moses was ended. It was almost as if Felix was looking for confirmation that he was right to ignore the Torah. Though, so far as Drusilla knows, no one was ever brave or foolish enough to suggest to his face that he ought to convert anyway.

That thing with Paul was a funny old business start to finish. They were at the Herodian palace at Caesarea, which had become the prefect’s residence; Drusilla had been asleep, curled around the hard-body form of Felix, when the messenger came. The slave who had been fanning them throughout the night must have stirred Felix to alert him to the news, because Drusilla herself woke to the noise of Felix saying, ‘Go on then, read it out.’

And a centurion cleared his throat as he broke a scroll’s seal and told how the man Paul had been seized in the Jerusalem Temple and was about to be killed, when the tribune of the cohort had saved him, having learned that he was a Roman citizen. The tribune wrote that although Paul was charged with questions about the Torah, there was no charge against him under Roman law. But reliable sources had informed the tribune that more than forty men had taken a Nazirite Vow, which would not end until they had killed Paul. Whether these men were of the sect of the Nazarenes or not, the tribune didn’t know, but the assassins were supposedly unafraid to ambush Paul even while he was in Roman custody. And the tribune must have taken this threat to be very real, because the prisoner Paul was immediately dispatched to Caesarea guarded by two hundred legionaries and a cavalry detachment of seventy, with a further two hundred light skirmishers to protect the flanks.

So Felix had ordered the centurion to hold Paul guarded in the palace, though under open arrest, to let him have some freedom and not to keep any of his friends from visiting or caring for his needs. And the funny thing was, over time, Felix had seemed to grow rather fond of Paul. He did have this way about him, hard to define; it wasn’t that he was terribly congenial, yet people were pulled towards him, like the tides to a shore. He was a man hard to ignore; his presence demanded one decide whether to love or hate him. He was quite a small man — in fact the name Paul even means ‘small’ — yet he seemed to occupy a great deal of space.

Deputations of Israelites from Jerusalem came asking for Paul to be delivered over to be dealt with by the Sanhedrin, but Felix would have none of it. And, anyway, the man had the right of appeal to Caesar’s court: Paul was a Roman citizen — he had the proof of it in twin inscribed bronze tablets, folded together and wax-sealed — and even if that citizenship was newly purchased, it was no less of a fact. And Felix himself being a freedman, he had a certain disdain for old lineages; he believed a new citizen to be every grain as much a Roman as a man who could trace his family line for five centuries; a point on which the law agreed.

So for two years Paul had stayed with them at the palace in Caesarea. Felix wouldn’t hand the prisoner to the Jerusalem council, but neither would he release him. It wasn’t only that Felix grew affectionate, of course: he also had hopes of a bribe from Paul. Felix’s informants had learned that Paul had access to a great deal of money. And it must have been a very large sum indeed to have maintained the attention of a man like Felix. A pro consul might earn four hundred thousand sesterces per year — a sum sufficient to keep eight hundred average families — in wage alone, never mind what he could wring from the province he ruled. Felix must have had strong evidence that Paul had substantial gold stashed away. But, so far as Drusilla knows, no bribe was ever paid. There might have been remuneration here and there for upkeep, but the big pay-off seems never to have arrived.

So Paul was still there, at the palace in Caesarea, when Felix was recalled to Rome. And Drusilla went with her husband, leaving the land of her ancestors and leaving their customs too.

The slaves bring in a large silver platter; it takes four of them to carry it, their buttocks jiggling as they take little shuffle steps so as not to shift the whole roast porker on the salver. It is lying there, on a back crinkled with salted crackling, sprawled as if asking for its tummy to be tickled, but that belly is slit open and inside it are baked thrushes, mussels, figs and sweetbreads, spilling over as if trying to escape.

‘Such ecstatic creations,’ says Alypia, one of the couched women. ‘You really are spoiling us, Drusilla.’

Alypia’s husband is in garum , the ubiquitous fish sauce that Italians seem unable to cook or eat anything without using. Alypia is a little excitable and young, but she at least seems fun, and her husband is obscenely rich. He staged a gladiator show in the town’s stadium with thirty pairs of fighters earlier in the summer, without even seeking election, just for the spectacle of it.

Hopefully Felix will shortly come down from Rome to join Drusilla in their seaside villa. She yearns for him; she aches when they are apart. Over the years, she has come to truly love him. And more than that, when you are with a man like Felix, a man who fears nothing and believes he can do anything, you feel so invulnerable; maybe Felix perceived that same quality in Paul. But Drusilla cannot bear Rome, even to see her husband; she goes there as seldom as possible. The summer stink is intolerable and disease is rife and everything is just so much more pleasant when you can look out across the sea.