The Tongues of Men or Angels

by Jonathan Trigell

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Religious & Inspirational

Synopsis

After the crucifixion, Jesus's followers - now led by his brother, James the Just - remained devout Jews, vigorously opposed to the Roman occupiers. But a rival faction emerged, via the charismatic itinerant Paul of Tarsus. Some called him Saint, some called him a liar, but Paul began telling the stories that would transform a small sect of Judaism into a world religion. In The Tongues of Men or Angels Jonathan Trigell shows the night sky of Biblical-era Galilee lit, not by guiding stars, but by flames of terror. He shows contested soil, on which miracles were performed and battles raged. He shows men of flesh and of blood, by turns loving and brutal. In so doing, he unseals a tale of the ages. The Tongues of Men or Angels is a dazzling act of imagination and learning.

Release date: February 19, 2015

Publisher: Corsair

Print pages: 288

Sample

If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.

That’s what Cephas’s father said one time, when a foreign-faced Roman legionary demanded directions. A wile as hoary as the hyena’s stripes: for the powerless to feign stupidity; to lull that they might deceive. Nonetheless, from here is where we must begin.

Cephas gazes down the Mount at Jerusalem, enthralled by its size. He’s a country boy, a country man, a hard man, grown in a hard land. Cephas isn’t his real name, it’s a nickname. It means ‘the rock’ or ‘rocky’, ‘stony’ maybe; a tough man’s name for a tough man. Cephas has a dense beard, matted and wired like the belly of a wild goat. His hair is knife-cropped against the heat, revealing folds of muscled neck. Skin baked dirt-brown from sun-blasted net-hauling. He was a fisherman once, an illiterate labourer, the sort of man irrelevant to the powers of this world. It is hard even to conceive of the ease and casual brutality with which people such as him can be disposed of, or the indifference with which they can disintegrate into dispossession and starve to death. Even so, only the very brave or the very dumb would fuck with Cephas one on one.

His unwashed feet are sandal-less and stiff with dust. His mutton-haunch right hand rests upon the cloth-taped handle of a cheap but sturdy sword, tucked unscabbarded into his belt. It is a belt much worn and much pierced; extra holes along its length betray times of relative plenty and times of near demise. He’s a big man – it takes a lot of food to keep a frame like that – but Cephas has known days of eating bitter unground corn, picked from the fields in which they hid. Picked even on the Sabbath, once, so desperate was their state and need. Cephas has known flights into the desert, and weeks holed up in the brush of maquis scrubland, periods when they envied the holes of foxes and the nests of birds. Cephas’s belly is fuller now: times have been better of late. Long may it last, though that lasting is in doubt.

Yeshua stares down at Jerusalem too. At the snaking walls of yellow limestone, mottled with grey like the camouflage of a horned viper, but too big to hide, cutting across the landscape like a leviathan. Visible even above those walls are the bulk of the Roman Antonia Fortress and the glory of the Second Temple – the Great Temple – not yet even fully finished, but already claiming the space between earth and heavens; making plain that only in Jerusalem can penances and sacrifices be made to God. Only in Jerusalem and only through blood.

Next to Cephas and Yeshua is James the Lesser, lean like a winter wolf. He is Yeshua’s brother. Second in line to the throne if – as they claim – the blood of royal David flowed through their father’s veins. But it is first-born Yeshua who will be king. And those who’ve met him would say that to be lesser than him is no sin, but only natural, inescapable, when Yeshua is a prophet and a prince.

‘What should we do now?’ Cephas asks James.

‘As planned,’ James the Lesser says, ‘as we must for Yeshua’s arrival to have impact. Word will spread about what has happened, if it’s done right. Send Judas the Twin and Thaddeus back to Bethpage. If Yeshua’s requests have been heeded, by now they’ll find a donkey colt tethered to a stone watering trough. The donkey will be young, but strong enough to ride. Tell them to lead it here. If anyone questions their taking it, they must say it is for their master, as agreed, and that it will be returned shortly. There shouldn’t be any problems.’

No, there shouldn’t be any problems, Cephas thinks, but there will be: there always are. And he can’t help noticing anew a marabou stork, which has trailed them at a distance all day. The stork hunches its bald pink head into the grey shawl of its feathers, like an eerie old man. From its throat dangles a purse flap of skin, like the goitres of the inbreds in the mountains. Does it use this skin to store food like the pelican or to roar like the bullfrog? It matters not: what bothers Cephas is that marabou storks feed on the dead and this one seems to think that carrion will come soon enough.



Few of Yeshua’s followers have farmland to tend. His strongest support comes from day labourers, beggars, boatless shore-fishermen, corn gleaners, ditch sleepers, tax absconders. Those who could leave their families have come with him now. The freedom of poverty. The bravery of desperation. The front runners have done their work well in gathering spectators. Only James the Lesser and the other eleven walk beside Yeshua, to represent the tribes of Israel; they will be his ministers, they will sit on twelve thrones. The rest throw their cloaks on the ground before the colt he rides. They run in front scattering brush they’ve cut. They skip and shout hosanna – ‘Save us, we beg you.’ They clap calloused hands and cry that revolution is coming. The streets are thronged with people anyway: pilgrims coming to Jerusalem for the Passover. The city will soon be swollen and bursting out, like an overfilled wine skin. A good number of the pilgrims join in with the cheering. The others stand and watch. Some smile, some laugh, some marvel. But all watch.

The crowds aren’t vast, not like some they have known in the past. Not like those the Baptizer used to pull in. Not like those who came to Yeshua at Bethsaida, after the Baptizer’s execution. But Cephas knows they’re not on home ground now. Galilee is many days’ walk behind them. That time is gone. But there are enough people here to start it. Enough to disperse the whispers. Something is happening: one who claims the line of David, a man who would be king, is come to Jerusalem.

Word has been spread among the poor and dispossessed of Jerusalem that something is to be expected. And there are many poor and dispossessed in Jerusalem. Giving alms in the Holy City is a doubly righteous act, so people who would have starved to death in the countryside can scrape an existence from the kindly guilt of pilgrims in Zion. Which is not to say that people don’t starve to death here too. There are too many dispossessed now for all to survive: property has been robbed from the peasant toiler. Laws created to protect them have been usurped. The Law of Moses says that land cannot be bought and sold, precisely to protect the lowly subsistence farmer. But Rome has no need of peasantry in its provinces: the Italian wolf gorges on extortion, tribute and taxes. Yeshua says he can change this. Yeshua says he will free Judaea from the Romans and the quisling collaborators of the Judaean aristocracy; that he can bring about a new kingdom. And who dares say he can’t, when Yeshua is a prince?

The young donkey is tiny beneath Yeshua’s length. His feet reach almost to the palm-strewn ground. It might have been comical, but Yeshua has a way of making humble things look holy. He makes a virtue of the poverty that was enforced upon him anyway. He says the rich will come last once he is king. Had he entered on a charger, a man with his claims and his charisma could appear too proud.



Even now, on the other side of Jerusalem, just such a pompous procession is occurring. The Roman prefect and his cavalcade flood into the city. Pontius Pilate, bearing his flab like a badge of conspicuous consumption, face clammy with sweat. Riding a dappled giant of a horse, at the head of a phalanx of troops, marching to drum beat and horn blast. The blessed ground seems to tremble as they pass and their passing takes for ever, so long is the tail of this great snake. Three thousand scarlet shields like a tide of blood. The standard bearer beside Pilate is cloaked in a tawny lion skin, like Herakles, and holds the Imago, a beaten-metal portrait of the god-emperor. Their very presence and every act in the Holy City is blasphemy. But who can stand against them? They are a fighting monster. A war machine, before people who know not what a machine is.

The Romans, too, are coming for the festival. Pilate doesn’t live in Jerusalem. He lives in the sumptuous marble surrounds of Caesarea on the coast. There is a permanent Roman garrison in the fortress next to the Temple, always a spot potentially requiring suppression. But this aside, the Romans try to maintain at least the semblance that the high priest and Sadducee aristocracy run Jerusalem, enforced by the mercenary thugs of the Temple Guards.

But Passover celebrates Jewish victory over Egyptian oppression. It is a time when feelings against current oppressors can easily explode. And the festival means the already dense population of Jerusalem is multiplied many times. Every bed and floor space is taken. People sleep in tents pitched in the streets and outside the walls; they sprawl over rooftops and in alleys, in nightly bivouacs, or unprotected save by cloak and God. Jerusalem, always a flashpoint, at festival times becomes a clay oil lamp, teetering above a straw floor. One strong wind, one clumsy move, and the whole place erupts.

Zion in these days is a city of zest and tumult. Traders shout and sing from their stall sides. Yearling lambs are driven down the streets by country-rough shepherds, leaving trails of damp, rich dung to be kicked up by the children who chase in their wake. Pharisees – the pastors of the people – teach in huddles with eager acolytes, or debate and discuss with their fellows. Even the beggars are a little lifted, with so many people around in such a spirit of giving.

But there is a dread never forgotten. An anxiety that lingers at the end of every street and every sentence. The high priest fears the Romans; the people fear the high priest’s guards; the Romans fear riot from the people.

And this tremulous tinderbox is the city into which Yeshua rides on the foal of a donkey. Deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah. Declaring himself to be kin of David. Declaring himself to be king.

Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!

See, your king comes to you,

righteous and victorious,

lowly and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.



Cephas, named ‘the Rock’, stares at the rocks of Jerusalem’s vast walls as they pass through the East Gate. Boulder stones of ivory and ochre; pepper and salamander; dirty snow and threshed corn; soiled swaddling and first-fruit offerings. Wrinkled like camel knees, motley like a Roman pony, misted like a winter morning in the marshes. All of life is here in Jerusalem and all of Jerusalem is echoed in its walls. So shout, Jerusalem, shout. Your king has come.

Useful is his name. One of them, at least. Everyone has multiple names in this mixed-up modern world – Roman names, Greek names, state names, slave names, religious names. It can’t always have been like that. It wasn’t. But Useful is a good name for a slave. Even if he isn’t.

If it wasn’t for that name, Useful would be dead. Or, rather, the act that saved him also gave him his name. A foundling on the steps of the shambles, exposure the preferred form of family planning among the Phrygians. A child so young he was still draped in birth offal, left amid the blood and mess of the meat market.

‘We could take the babe home, bring him up as a slave,’ the master had said. ‘He’ll be useful one day.’

He wasn’t.

Useful’s master is an atheist now. He no longer worships our Divine Lord and Saviour, the Prince of Peace, God and Son of God, Bringer of Grace, Redeemer of Mankind, the Deliverer of Justice: Augustus Caesar.

Neither does the master now believe in the Great Mother Cybele, or Artemis, or Apollo. Not even Sabazios, the city’s patron god. Patron of pit latrines and emptied bed pots, to judge by the summer stink.

The master worships only one god now, or two, perhaps, at most; there is some confusion as to whether one is a god or not. It seems to be complicated, this Jesus stuff, jealous and complicated …

Under his new faith, the master won’t even eat meat if it was previously offered as a sacrifice to other gods. Which is near enough to say any meat. Sometimes he sends Useful to buy mutton or goat from the Jewish quarter. About the only place you can find flesh that wasn’t first dedicated as an offering, unless you slaughter the beast yourself. You can see why the Jews are so strong, even though spread so wide: they separate themselves from the world, but in every city they are at home already. Their strange ways and laws are deeply familiar to them. Mostly the Jews seem to be a very moral people; many of the Greeks admire them for that. Though Useful has seen a stoning, which didn’t look so moral. A choke-screaming girl dragged barefoot outside the city walls, crying that she hadn’t done whatever it was they said she’d done, whatever it was that merited stoning to death.

It’s hard to kill someone by stoning, it seems: requires a lot of stones. The mob struggled to find sufficient. People are surprisingly sturdy, when it comes down to it, even though death is all about: sickness strides through the slums, splashing in the street sewers; children drop from unknown ailments – perhaps two-thirds of those who survive birth are dead before sixteen – and even the kin of emperors and ethnarchs are not immune. Mortality in the cities is so high that their wall-confined claustrophobia would be emptied entirely, were it not for the hordes always pouring in from elsewhere. Death is not some distant future end to life. Death is life’s constant companion. Death is the unloved neighbour of all who live crammed in unsanitary single workshop rooms. But if you actually try to kill someone, it takes a lot of effort. The girl being stoned, she survived long beyond the anger of the crowd. It took persistence to finish her off, her smashed-crab fingers still clawing at the dented earth as though some doorway might be found. Finally one of the kinder ones brought down a big corner-stone rock to crush her skull. Imagine such kindness as that: the kindness of crowds.



Useful is an over-sized urn-faced youth, with hips wider almost than his shoulders, but not in a womanly way, just as a bear’s are. Possibly it is this that gives him his ambling gait, which makes him look as if he’s taking longer than he ought. Which is not a good look for a slave.

Slavery is the way of things: you can’t complain about it. It has always been there and always will be. Useful would likely be dead if it weren’t for slavery: who but a wealthy man in need of slaves would save a foundling? Many slaves are freed on the death of their master, or can save up to buy their freedom. A favourite slave in a rich household often lives better than a poor freeman. In many ways, there are worse things to be than a slave.

But a slave is still property. A slave can be thrashed. A slave can be scourged. A slave can be raped. Or, rather, a slave can’t be raped, not by their master. It is the master’s right and therefore it is not rape. A slave is their master’s to do with as he wishes. Even to kill, if he wills. A waste of a valuable asset, but it happens. More slaves achieve manumission than are murdered, but it happens …

And, of course, a slave who runs away is a challenge to the Roman state. Thereby receives the penalty reserved for those crimes and those crimes only: the lingering, gasping agony of crucifixion. The body left on the tree, so dogs can chew the blood-scabbed toes and crows can peck away the face flesh and claim the soft marrow eyes. Useful heard of a man who took nine days and nights to die on the cross. Nine days spent hanged from a tree, shoulders and wrists dislocated from the strain of hauling up on the holding ropes, bereft of hope of reprieve or release, without even the means to end it himself: his final right removed.

The master’s new god was crucified, apparently. It’s a strange sort of god that lets himself be crucified by the Romans. But, then, Philemon is a strange sort of master.

He’s in the cloth and robe business, Philemon. Travelled frequently the length of the coasts, from Mysia to Cilicia, in his day, making the connections that still serve him well.

When Useful was growing up, Philemon had a shrine of figurines and idols he’d collected from all the great cities he’d visited. Carved from wood, moulded from clay, cast from bronze and then silver, the homely family gods echoed not just his travels but his rise in wealth. He smashed them all with a splay-ended tent mallet in the end, though. His new god doesn’t like other gods, except maybe this Jesus.

Even later, in relative dotage, Philemon still journeyed, when business required it. Sometimes he’d take Useful with him, hoping he might prove himself worthy of his name. He didn’t. They’d camp on the damp-dilated planks of the deck by night. By day watch the shores; rarely allowed out of sight; sometimes close enough to count the cliff-top flocks. Hair clogged with salt from the spray. Legs shaking from the roll of the waves. And, though he knew he was just a slave, Useful always felt a bit more than that, on those voyages. There will be no more of such trips. Not him and Philemon together. Not after what Useful has done.



Useful is on a solo journey now, compounding his first crime with two more: the theft of the gold coins required to make his escape and the escape itself. But this is his only hope. A slave has just one legal chance for life, when he has committed an act his master deems worthy of death: he can flee to the sanctuary of a higher-status friend or patron of his master, plead his case to them and hope they see fit to intercede. There is only one man Useful knows of whom his master respects to that degree and who might, just might, believe that Useful deserves his life. So Useful is on his way to Rome. The ambling foundling from the shambles on his way to the greatest city on earth: the centre of the empire. He could weep for the fear of what he’s done and what he faces, but tries to stay cold and calm as a carved idol. For fugitivarii – slave-hunting bounty-killers – wait at every port, on the lookout for strangers who might be runaways. And any fellow passenger or traveller on the road would likely be ready to turn him in, for reward and through duty. The outlaw slave lives a knife-edge life of desperation and trust-less torment. Useful keeps a blade under his cloak, but doesn’t know if he would have the strength or skill to kill, if it came to it.

The coins Useful stole, they tell you a lot about this world: minted with images of different deities. Rome rules over all, but embraces all; there is no such thing as heresy. Every god is accepted and welcome to mingle in the imperial pantheon. But the master’s god won’t have that: the master’s god says you can praise no god but him. Indeed, he says there is no god but him. It seems a bit selfish somehow, to Useful, a bit childish. Did no one ever teach this god to share?

Mariamme’s eyes drop demurely when she sees Saul. But he catches the flush on her cheek. It casts a sharp, scarlet shadow beneath her cheekbone, accentuates her fine-bred features. A tiny scar on her upper lip, vestige of some baby tumble, no doubt, for post-blossoming she does nothing so ungraceful that could create such an injury. Her wrists are as slight as cyclamen stalks, drooping gently in the sun. But her eyes – it is those eyes that draw Saul in. Like the twin gates of the Temple, they beckon, but they bar those who are not purified; those without permission. A girl such as Mariamme cannot even be approached without the consent of her father. So Saul must find the perfect moment, when he is certain he has demonstrated his worth. Saul is in no doubt that Mariamme loves him. But, then, Saul is not really a man of doubt at all.

She nods in a slight bow and Saul returns it. Then she hurries off, small feet pattering, little ghost rabbits on the mosaic. She finds it uncomfortable to be near me, Saul thinks, so great is her love. But soon they will be united. Soon he will ask her father. They are separated by station now, but her father must be aware that great things are destined for Saul.

Many men would feel nervous and cowed, on their way to see the high priest; not Saul. He strides the corridor on feet of confidence. His legs are a little bowed, but only, he thinks, in the way Roman cavalry equites’ often are. Now in his thirtieth year, Saul’s hair is beginning to thin and recede, but surely this serves to show the world his fine brow. His forehead is broad and strong-boned. And fronts above expressive features, his face can transmit charm or anger into the watcher, a useful skill for a guard. Or not a guard, but a chief of guards, a captain of the Temple Guards. The police of the high priest. The bulwark against blasphemy and disorder. The guardians of the Holy City. If they do not carry out their duties flawlessly, then the Romans will take over entirely and Jerusalem will be lost. The Pharisees can debate fine points of faith in street-corner assemblies; the Zealots can die pointlessly, flailing against the unconquerable might of Rome; the people can flock to every fool who calls himself a messiah; but it is Saul who is at the sword-point of preserving Judaism. If revolt occurs, then Roman boots will again soil the Holy of Holies and the crucified will spike the hills like porcupine quills. Two thousand men were nailed at once, when Jerusalem last rebelled against Rome. What joy did the learning of the Pharisees bring then? To be a Temple Guard is surely a grander path.

‘I don’t want any fuck-ups this year,’ the high priest says. ‘It damages my position when the streets stink of disorder.’

Actually, technically Annas no longer has a ‘position’: he is not really the high priest at all. He was deposed by the previous Roman prefect for having too many people executed, an overindulgence the Romans reserve for themselves. But in Jewish law the high priesthood is for life, so Annas is still called high priest and still feels able to command the guard. Legally his son-in-law Kayafa is in charge, but he looks to Annas for instruction so often that Annas almost rules in his stead. Saul has every hope that he, too, will soon count Annas as father-in-law and wield some power in his name.

Annas has a noble head. If he were Roman he would doubtless have busts of himself scattered about his mansion. But such things do not do with the Jews, who disdain as blasphemy all depictions of man and beast. Saul can make out in the high priest’s face the shadows of his youngest daughter. Dark eyes, a little downturn at the edge of the mouth, perhaps even the same gentle curve to the chin, though that is hard to tell beneath Annas’s grey-splashed beard. His robes are made of fine linen, with perhaps just a little less purple than Saul would choose if they were his own. And one day such robes will be his own, of that there is no doubt. Saul has always felt a powerful sense of his own destiny.

Not that he could ever become high priest, of course. The priests can only come from the tribe of Levi and the high priest is chosen by the Roman prefect – generally on the basis of a considerable bribe – from among those few aristocratic Sadducee families who claim to trace their lineage to Aaron. Though Saul has confident hopes for a link by marriage to Annas’s daughter, he still would not be eligible for the priestly class. But there are many alter native roles in the upper echelons of Jerusalem’s rule for which Saul considers himself eminently well qualified.

The other guard captains summoned do not hold themselves with Saul’s bearing, he notes not for the first time. One of them sucks at a locust-green plant stalk, as Annas gives his orders. None of them have shown much attention to their appearance. Temple Guards are obliged to supply their own uniform: short grey tunics, which do not show the dirt and the blood. Most have secured something passable as cheaply as possible. Saul has spent all he could afford to make his own stand out: it is made from a well-woven cloth and has a simple black pattern sewn around the hems of its short sleeves. He even bought a leather breastplate, though he could not afford one with a back section; the absence leaves him feeling curiously far more vulnerable from behind than he ever felt before he acquired the armour. Now he is ill at ease when anyone stands to his rear, as if all of Jerusalem hopes to slide in a blade like a Sicarii – the nationalist assassins, named for the cacheable curved daggers they favour. All the guard captains are Jews, but most, like Saul, are from the diaspora. They speak Aramaic with varying degrees of accomplishment, but often break into street Greek when they are together. None has acquired Hebrew learning, as Saul has, though coming to Hebrew late in life made its study arduous even for him.

So many of the guards are from Greek-founded cities because most Judaeans prefer not to enforce the will of the governing class, seen as repressing their own people, as being in cahoots with the Romans. The simpletons cannot see that they are in fact being protected from the Romans, that Jerusalem can only retain some right to rule herself if she is seen to do as Rome wants.

Saul has been called a collaborator and a traitor, a stooge and worse, out in the city. Now he carries a short, dark-wood club – of the type fullers use to pound the wool – to deal with those insults, and alongside it, a sword, reserved for more serious challenges. It’s a good sword: Roman. Found, so the seller said, after the razing of Tzippori. Perhaps it has cut the throats of Israelite rebels in its time, but now it serves in the hand of Saul. Serves in the high and holy name of Annas, Kayafa and the priesthood. This is a noble calling. Saul should feel no shame for abandoning his Pharisee scholarship.

The gladiators move towards the centre of the arena, with stilted, unnatural steps. Each holds a gladius – the short sword favoured by the Romans – but has no shield. Their feet are bare. The hot sand of the arena is perhaps the last sensation of touch they will ever know, except the blade of the other. They are clothed only in loincloths and simple armour: each of their sword arms is protected by lizard scales of beaten iron – otherwise injury might end the con. . .