György Spiró - Captivity

Over the next hour and a half the squall lasted, the oar was wrenched out of his hands more than a few times, but Hilarus and Iustus were not much better oarsmen. Valerius fared better than them; his only trouble was that he was sick.

Uri was barely able to dip his oar in the water, just threshing with it, and yet he was soon dog-tired nonetheless. When the squall had blown through and the boat was rocking peacefully, allowing the slaves to take a rest, Uri lay flat out on the floor. The boat rolled in one place, the sails having yet to be hoisted; the slaves and sailors on the upper bank were also resting; at that moment moving on was not the important thing; what mattered was for them to recover. They finally clambered down from the upper level, and Uri ought to have gotten up, but he was unable to move. His companions left him to climb the ladder to the deck, but Uri did not have the strength and simply lay on his side. Matthew leaned over him.

“You weren’t rowing,” he informed him scathingly. “I was watching.”

Matthew also climbed up the ladder.

They’re going to pull the ladder up, and I’ll be left here among the slaves, it passed through Uri’s head.

And indeed, on reaching the top Matthew pulled the ladder up. He was laughing mischievously, Uri could see.

The slaves were going to tear him limb from limb, devour him.

Then the ladder was let down again, though not by Matthew: the head slave driver had to climb down.

“Wait!” Uri bawled, gathered all his strength to pick himself to his feet and, limbs trembling, struggled up to the deck.

Once there he almost tumbled back down into the depths when he looked back for the dog; it was nowhere to be seen.

He retched a sour liquid onto the slippery deck. The skin over his whole body ached; his heart was pounding at a horrifying rate.

Down below, the slaves were being shackled to one another again.

“You stood your ground just great,” he heard Matthew’s derisive voice. “All of you.”

Why does he hate me so much? Uri asked himself disconsolately.

He scoured the wet, slippery deck forlornly; it would soon dry if the sun continued to shine this brightly. He noticed an opening between the planks, a hatch cover of some sort, which had been completely lifted back; up till then everything had been shut. He stopped, bent down, and took a look into the small cabin.

He saw the captain from above, recognizing him from the big bald head; he knelt and bent over. Peering into the dimness, he could make out a gleaming statuette about three feet in height standing on a little table, with the captain bowing to it.

Uri was stupefied: what was a Jewish captain doing praying to an idol?

He held his breath and tried to bend closer in such a way that he did not block the sunlight. The captain sensed that someone was watching and glanced up. Uri was aghast and slid back, but the captain was in an extremely good mood that the ship had pulled through, and he shouted out, “Come down, whoever you are!”

Uri scrambled down the ladder.

“He saved us,” the captain said, indicating the statuette.

A snake was wrapped seven times around a standing male body, his head reminiscent of a lion’s. Wings sprouted from the man’s shoulders, his left hand held a globe on which ran two intersecting lines, and his right hand held a knife.

“The Celestial Lord,” said the captain. “He saved us. Twenty times or more he has saved me; my father, more than fifty times!”

He offered Uri a drink, which was strong and stung his throat. The captain, just glad to have someone to talk to, didn’t look to see who it was.

That was how Uri learned about Mithras, who killed the bull and whom pirates and astronomers on Rhodes and in Tarsus worshiped as the Celestial Lord.

The captain was from Tarsus, and his father had been a pirate, or rather not so much a pirate as a sailor, except that the Cilician king’s regular navy was considered by the Romans to be a pirate fleet, and anything that could be plundered, they plundered, just the same as the Roman pirates with whom they competed and, every now and then, would come into conflict. In the end they were taken over by the Romans when they conquered their land, and from then onward they had been valued as commercial seamen.

The captain’s father had also been both an adept astrologer and a captain. He had reached the fourth degree or rank of the mysteries of Mithras but had been unable to advance, because he did not have the appropriate knowledge to do so; initiates were highly erudite people, astrologers all, and they knew everything, and they had ancient clay tablets and papyri from long ago, and they even knew, so his father related, that one time long ago the vernal and autumnal equinoxes were in Taurus, but Mithras decided to displace them to later in the year, and that had been a thousand years ago and more. The sages kept calculating when the equinoxes would be precessed back in Taurus, because if Mithras had displaced them, then he would also replace them, and that is when the initiatory state would set in. That duration was called an Age, and everyone had a different opinion about how long that lasted, how many thousands of years. Mithras was a great lord, in other words, who had conjured the North Star precisely to the north, because, so said the sages, it had not been situated there before, but Mithras wanted mankind to orient by this readily located bright star so that people would be able to sail in certainty.

These and other things were related by the captain to Uri, who found it hard to follow even half of it.

Uri wondered what the Creator said about Mithras’s activities, given that this suggested he was able to move fixed stars around.

The captain said that naturally God was unique and eternal; he was Jewish, like his father before him, but a Great Force had begun to operate after the creation of the stars, the sun, and the moon, and if that was able to operate, then it was not counter to the Creator’s intention, may His name be blessed. The Creator was in fact depicted as the sun, to which Mithras, lion-headed and firmament-mitered, humbly sacrificed. After some hesitation, the captain added that in these depictions the Sun-Creator was generally shown as being the same height as Mithras, who was actually also Perseus, because he had come from the Persians, but then he was not the only Jew in Tarsus who had Mithras to thank when he or a member of his family had stayed alive after a storm.

From then on Uri would occasionally climb down to see the captain, who would relate to him marvelous things about Mithras, the lord of the Upper and Lower Firmament, who was powerful enough to move the constellations. He decided that when he got back to Rome he would inquire with believers in Mithraism there to find out where one could find written traces of these splendid tales.

Around two weeks later they reached harbor on Crete.

Uri did not go on shore with the rest. Crete was of no interest: a rocky island, houses of white stone, and men who somehow made a living there. Plotius tried to tempt him by saying that Cretan Jews were most hospitable, and exceedingly rich, but Uri simply shrugged his shoulders.

Prior to that, Matthew and Plotius, who had sailed that way more than a few times, had enumerated the names of all the totally identical, rocky, desolate islands and the settlements on them. They would be helped out sometimes by Alexandros, who, being a merchant, had also often passed that way. Uri was amazed, because Roman merchants were not known for traveling. Some lines from Homer came to Uri’s mind, and he quietly intoned them. On these Greek islands, according to these lines, the gods and demigods were born, and immortal heroes roamed. Even with his eyes screwed up, however, he saw little: white rocks, some green, and in the distance some darker spots, which had an equal chance of being either tall mountains or clouds.