John Masters (11 page)
Authors: The Rock
Julius was bleeding heavily now. His son stared up, his eyes cold. The Day of Atonement was near its end. Julius said, "Remember you owe your life to a Jew—twice."
He stood and leaped out over the edge, his legionary's sword flashing. As he dived through space he shouted, "Shalo-o-om!" The wind began to press against his eyeballs, and the light went out on the sea.
ROMAN EMPIRE
The Jewish years 3831—4178
AUC 823—1170
A.D. 70—417
The sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70 were only single strands in a larger pattern. Although Rome had from early times turned one face east, now it bent its whole attention in that direction. From Spain the tide receded. Cadiz began to lose its wealth and fame. Instead of prominent Romans making their name in Spain, intelligent Spaniards made their name in Rome—for example, Pomponius Mela the geographer, born in Carteia under the Rock, and two of the greatest emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, both born in Italica, near Seville.
Life continued. At Belo (beyond Traducta) citizens worshiped at a famous temple dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, Trafalgar was then Cape Juno, and on it there was a temple dedicated to the goddess. Calpe-Carteia (so called to distinguish it from another Carteia near Seville) was one of the stages on the official military march route between Malaga and Cadiz. The tunny fishing and preserving again flourished, and the Carteians retained their skill in making the necessary pickles and sauces.
There was enough prosperity to enable some people to hoard coins in large quantities. (One such hoard was discovered on a farm near Jimena de la Frontera in the nineteen thirties, and there must have been many more.) But the hoarding of gold is not a healthy sign in any time or place. The tide of empire began to ebb, not only in the west but everywhere. Rome became a bauble squabbled over by the Praetorian Guard. Justice fled, and respectable citizens, oppressed and insecure, followed the idle and the criminal into outlawry. The Rock itself suffered an extra blow from nature: about the year A.D. 300 an earthquake threw up a sandbar which ruined the harbor of Carteia. The town and colony began to decay, though the process took centuries, and even today foundations, lines of walls, and one tall tower, the so-called Tower of Cartagena, still stand from the Phoenician and Roman colony.
For several centuries the Rock had watched over Carteia. They had been years of growth, of increase, of expansion in material achievement and in man's concepts of the universe and of his place in it. There had been violent change—that had come to Neanderthal Man, too—but now, for the first time, the Rock was to witness regression and rot.
It was not all bad, for as man suffers, the rest of nature rejoices. The carob tree and the wild olive and the wild fig would flourish, and if fewer men enjoyed the windblown scents of the Rock's rosemary and thyme and lavender, nature did not care. There would be more lynx, wildcat, pig: and the Barbary partridge, the Rock's own bird, would learn once more that its chief enemies were snakes and lizards and eagles, not man.
In the empire the milestones began to pass with increasing speed. In 323 Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire. Jews were already specially taxed, but now persecution increased until another emperor, the great Julian the Apostate, restored paganism and abolished the Jews' tax. Beyond the frontiers—indeed, inside them—the wolves gathered. The Rock was about a thousand miles from the nearest barbarians in Scotland and on the upper Rhine—but the ones who finally reached and passed it did not come from either of these places. They came from much farther away.
Until 376 the Visigoths (Western Goths) lived in what is now Rumania. Then they entered the empire and for a few years inhabited Bulgaria. In this period some became converted to Arian Christianity. (The difference between Arianism and Catholicism centered on barely comprehensible metaphysics about the nature of the Trinity, but that did not prevent the sects slaughtering each other in enormous numbers.) Only half pagan now, and all officially labeled as guests and allies of Rome, the Visigoths moved on west across northern Italy and Gaul.
In 409 three other barbarian groups—the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves—crossed the Pyrenees and entered Spain. In 415 the Visigoths followed. Finding the others unwilling to give up or share possession, in 416 they marched south to the strait, gathered boats, and made to cross over to Africa. Their boats were wrecked, and those in the first wave drowned. The rest decided it would be safer to fight the Vandals than the sea and (still ostensibly acting on behalf of Rome) set about their new enemies with a will.
While barbarians from the ends of the earth fought and marauded, sacked, pillaged, raped, and murdered, what of the ordinary people, caught in the death convulsions of the huge organism which had formed and sheltered them? How did
they
live in these times?
Could
one live...?
The goats heard the sound first and stopped, heads cocked, listening. Then the dog barked, and a man strode up out of the gully ahead. Rachel saw with surprise that it was Theophilus. He was totally naked, as always, his white-streaked gray hair hanging like a mane on his shoulders, but she had never seen him anywhere except squatting in the mouth of his cave in a gully at the far end of the Rock, a bowl beside him. Now the bowl was in his left hand and a new-peeled staff shiny white in his right. She remembered she had brought a hardboiled egg for him, as she usually did. She found it in her scrip and held it out.
He said, "The wrath of God is at hand. Say the Holy Creed after me, and though you will die, your soul might be saved, perchance."
She said, "You know we are Jews."
"Aye, aye, murderers, drinkers of Christian blood..."
He passed on, muttering to himself. His body smelled like the goats, who had fled when he appeared but gathered again as he talked, some leaning forward to sniff his knees.
Rachel whistled and called, the dog ran to and fro, and the goats moved on around the side of the Rock. She was eighteen, slim, full-breasted, black-haired and blue-eyed. She walked barefoot on rock and thistle, and all her clothing was a black kirtle to the knee, the waist pulled in by thirty feet of coarse cord, wound round and round into a sash. Above, the kirtle swelled out to hold her breasts, and in there she could put a kid or take bread to her father when the scrip was full.
She moved the goats slowly along, watching them pluck sustenance from holes in the rock and climb up thin trees to eat the young shoots. In the gully near Theophilus' cave a spring of fresh water gushed from the earth. She drank, then shooed the goats on to the flat land by the point. They spread out to graze. It had rained much the past week, and the grass was lush. Rachel sprawled on her belly on top of a rock, her chin in her hands. She remained aware of the goats—she had been guarding them for twelve years now and did what was necessary by instinct—but her thoughts were elsewhere ... the other pillar of Hercules, there across the narrow sea, a little cloud upon it: how near to see, how far to attain! The pale scent of a yellow flower growing in a crevice of the rock under her nose. The wind in her hair. Two partridges, redlegged, bright-eyed, oblivious of her in the act of love, bodies pressed down like her own against the earth. Warm rock firm against her belly and between her thighs. She was betrothed. The marriage was for next month, when the sowing of the fields would be done. Not long to wait.
She thought again, shall I bring Avram to my cave, or shall I keep it secret, inviolate? He will enter my body, so should he not know the other, too? But if he had done the one, would it not be all the more important to preserve to myself alone, virgin, the cave?
She got up, stood on a tall rock, and looked all round. No one. The wolves did not come to the Rock by day. The dog knew to stay with the goats and not follow her. She could safely leave them for a few minutes.
She ran lightly up a runnel in the low cliffs behind her. On the plateau above there was a tall standing stone—a magic stone, men said—and close to the stone she crawled into a thicket, and out of sight. Then, sliding sideways into a narrow cleft in the ground, she entered a tunnel. After twenty steeply down-tilted paces, she knew she was in the cave,
her
cave, Rachel's Secret. She closed her eyes tight, dropped to her knees, and waited.
After a long time she opened her eyes. Now the thin light streaming in from a crack in the roof of the cave showed the glistening walls, the shallow pond beside her, and, hung directly in front of her—herself, the goddess, a little naked woman of ivory, her hair coiled up on her head to make a loop, and by that loop Rachel had hung her on the wall of the cave.
"Give her love," she whispered. "A child of Israel. A man. Peace." The ivory woman was herself, and so was she herself. It was for both of them that she prayed. Her father and the Wise One would upbraid her bitterly if they knew, for the Lord YHWH was a jealous god. But they never would know.
"Give her goats, sheep," she prayed "Land. The Rock. This place, Rachel's Secret, forever."
She closed her eyes again and a little later rose, scrambled back up the steep dark tunnel and out into the open. The dog was barking, and after creeping carefully through the trees until she was far from the mouth of the cave, she broke into a run.
The goats had scattered, and the dog was barking at a man throwing stones at them. It was James, the father of the Christian family in the other part of their house. He saw her and called, "This land is not to be grazed until next week, Rachel. It was agreed between your father and me and the others."
She said, "My father sent me this morning."
"He is wrong!" A flung stone hit one of the goats in the head, and Rachel said, "Stop."
"Take your goats, then. Go."
She called the flock, tears in her eyes, and led them back. There was no other free grazing this side of Carteia, so she took the flock back very slowly, letting them search along the shore, and did not reach the town much before the usual time. Her family lived in part of a ruined marble palace. All the livestock shared the great hall, where part of the mosaic floor was still intact; but they had had to block up the spaces between the pillars with brush and thorn, and the grand staircase to the upper story now ended in midair, so here was a ladder instead. Upstairs there were pictures painted on the walls—black and red women in long pleated robes, gladiators, a woman being covered by a swan. Part of the roof had gone, but it was repaired with straw. Another ladder led up there, and it was a pleasant place to sit in the evening.
Her mother called to her to bring the milk vessels, and she went to help her with the cooking. In another room she heard her brother Yakov's wife whining and the baby twins crying.
After they had all eaten and the dishes were cleaned and she had gone twice to the river, bringing back jars heavy with water, she told her father how James had turned the goats off the Rock. Yakov's wife cried, "Shame!" and Yakov, who was twisted and lame from birth, snapped his fingers and said, "Dogs ... Christian dogs!" The three men argued—her father, Yakov, and Akiba, who was a year younger than she; and the women listened—her mother, Yakov's wife, and herself—with the baby twins and the infant son Isa, whom her mother had borne in her old age.
Yakov said, "Father, I was there when we settled this matter. It was
you
who said that none should graze on the Rock until the aedile gave word and
James
who said, 'There is no aedile, nor has been for years, so let us start at the time of the spring festivals.' ... Send Rachel back tomorrow, but let us all follow, hidden and armed."
After a long hesitation her father said, "Be it so, but we will take no arms. Let us argue, let us persuade them." There was no gray in his hair, but he looked old, his brow always furrowed and his narrow shoulders bent, like a thin crow.
Akiba said, "What has come to Theophilus? He walks the town naked, preaching doom to all."
Yakov said, "His name means 'Lover of God' in Greek, but he loves no one. The Christian bishop has come from Asido and reasoned with him, but he will not hear. He is mad, madder than our Prophets."
"Speak not so, son," her father said. "Perchance the Lover of God is mad, but as to preaching the end of the world, in that he is right. I was born forty-four years ago, and all was bad then—our river silted up, the docks of our ancestors sticking out of the sand a hundred yards from the water, fine houses empty and falling into ruin, bribery, oppression. I believed it could not get worse. I was wrong. It has been getting worse all the time ... wolves roaming the town in winter, outlaws infesting forests and mountains ... and they are not escaped slaves, murderers, deserters—as such used to be—but men of substance, family men—all driven to turn outlaw because their land is seized without cause, their business infamously taxed, their rights trampled on by the rich, by every petty official."