György Spiró - Captivity

The elders were getting ready to go to Flaccus and lodge a complaint. What is the point of that? Flaccus is involved in it. No, he’s not involved, he doesn’t even know what’s going on; he’s been sprawled in a drunken stupor in the Akra for days. Sure he knows what’s going on: he planned the whole thing, paid the Greeks off. How can the emperor permit this? He doesn’t! He relieved him of the post, but Flaccus ignored that; he’s getting ready to go to war with Rome. Rome will trounce him, but by then we’ll be dead. We should dispatch a deputation to the emperor! Fair enough, but who should go? And how? Let the alabarch go! The alabarch won’t go: the emperor dislikes him! Why would he dislike him? Because the alabarch informed against the emperor’s father, his bankers said as much. Where are those bankers, speaking of that? Not one of them among us? Yes, they are. Several of them have been seen; they too have been squeezed in here. But what are they doing? Lending money at usurious interest rates? They’re smarter than that: they’re buying up food stocks to sell off at sky-high prices! What food stocks? Where are any food stocks to be found? There’s no purchasing of food being done here: more like thieving and pilfering!

I’ll have a look at the Council of the Elders, Uri resolved.

That happened sooner than he had supposed.

He was poking around the bank of the Taurus canal, wondering what he could use to catch fish, when someone called out:

“The alabarch’s man!”

He was surrounded, pushed around and had his staff wrenched from his grasp.

“The alabarch’s spy!” they called out.

Uri tried to pull himself free but was held fast. These people are hacking me to pieces, he realized with astonishment.

“Let’s take him to the council,” proposed one.

He was pushed and shoved; someone thumped him on the back with a stick, but murmurs went up not to do that. Uri muttered a prayer of thanks.

He was jostled to the upper floor of a pretty house where lots of people were seated, walking around or just standing in the reception room.

“The alabarch’s spy!” someone declared. “He always had a seat along with them in the Basilica!”

They let go of him. Uri stood there, breathing heavily. He screwed his eyes up but was unable to make out any faces. His feeling was that these were people he had never seen before, but they could have been in the Basilica for all he knew.

An intelligent-looking man stepped up to him. He was not someone whom Uri remembered seeing.

“What did the alabarch’s send you for?” he asked.

Uri held his tongue. He had been Agrippa’s messenger, and he had been the alabarch’s spy in Greek Alexandria, so now he had turned into the alabarch’s spy in the Jewish quarter. Whatever he said, the people here would only believe what they wanted to believe.

“I wasn’t sent,” he declared after a brief pause. “I came of my own accord.”

“What are you after?”

“The Jews are in Delta now, aren’t they?”

The man looked at him askance, ran his eye up and down, and shook his head.

“You’re the Roman Jew,” he surmised. “Philo’s favorite. Am I right?”

“Yes, I am a Jew from Rome.”

A second man, older and more stubborn-looking, stepped up alongside the first.

“What does the alabarch have in mind?” he asked.

Uri bridled. “Why don’t you ask him?” he retorted.

“That’s enough of your sauce!” the stubborn-looking man roared.

“I’m not too fond of being manhandled,” Uri declared. “My staff was also taken away!”

The two men looked at each other in puzzlement.

“I want my staff back!” Uri cried.

There was silence as everyone in the room looked at him.

“Give it back to him!” the younger man ordered.

One of them offered the staff. Uri took it back and turned away.

“Get them out of here, please.”

The younger man gave a nod; there was dignity in the movement.

The escort left the room.

“What do you want?” the younger of the men asked.

“I don’t want anything,” Uri answered. “They hauled me here. My apologies for disturbing.”

He bowed and set off to leave.

“Wait!” the stubborn-looking man exclaimed.

Uri stopped and turned around.

“Where’s the alabarch?” came the question from the slit-eyed man with the low forehead.

“How would I know? When I wanted to get back into the palace they were no longer there. I spent two nights in the necropolis, then I came here to Delta. Of my own accord. To my way of thinking it was safer.”

They looked at him dumbfounded.

“Do you think that money will smooth over everything?” hissed the narrow-eyed man.

Uri snorted a laugh.

“I haven’t got a drachma on me!”

“You buried it!”

“Are you kidding? What use is money here? Tomorrow you won’t be able to get even a loaf of bread for one hundred drachmas!”

There was another silence before the younger man said:

“Come over here! Take a seat among us.”

Uri looked at him and broke into a smile.

A stool was pushed under him at the table. He sat down.

And they asked him what he thought was to be done.

What ran through Uri’s head were all the things he had read in the scrolls Tija had recommended, about the tactics that a town under siege ought to follow. But there wasn’t much among the good advice offered by Philon and Aeneas Tacitus that could be applied here: the Greeks intended not so much to besiege as to starve and humiliate the Jews. Food and water were needed, and those could only be obtained from outside Delta; nothing at all could be grown in this densely inhabited quarter.

“The Greeks need to be prevailed upon to supply us with food,” he said, “though I’m aware that will be very costly. All the same, they need to be paid off not to stand guard gratuitously.”

“There will be no negotiating with murderers!”

“But there is no choice,” Uri countered.

“Let the alabarch negotiate!”

“It may well be that he is doing just that somewhere,” said Uri. “But here and now that is what we have to do — even with murderers.”

They resumed their argument, red in the face as they began screaming at each other. Uri suddenly realized that they had been discussing this very issue just beforehand. He was fueled by a new hope that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be seen as being the alabarch’s man; it might even be handy to get them to give him something to eat.

“Your alabarch is a gutless worm,” said one of the councilors, whom Uri thought he had seen before: why yes! It was Euodus; one of the guests who had dined at the alabarch’s palace. “Why doesn’t he come with his army? He would be able to rescue us! It’s only riffraff guarding us!”

“I can’t imagine why he doesn’t come,” said Uri. It was all very awkward; the proper thing for him to say would have been that the alabarch was obviously moving Heaven and Earth, but he could not find it in his heart to say so.

A few hours later he was able to eat together with the elders. Looking out of the window he could dimly see figures prowling on the far side of the wall, still equipped only with cudgels.

Uri figured the guards here were staying out of the major pillaging, otherwise they would have been pickled to the gills by now. It was possible, then, that they would be satisfied with a bit of money. It was not their aim that we should die quickly, he reasoned: they’d rather kill us off slowly because that way they would make a tidy profit. The bartering should start low, and we should be grudging in giving any ground; it would be no loss to break off talks at any point, because the Greeks would come hammering on the door for money soon enough.