Part 28 (1/2)
”Lodbrog,” he said, ”one can never tell what little summer cloud of their hatching may turn into a thunderstorm roaring and rattling about one's ears. I am here to keep order and quiet. Despite me they make the place a hornets' nest. Far rather would I govern Scythians or savage Britons than these people who are never at peace about G.o.d. Right now there is a man up to the north, a fisherman turned preacher, and miracle-worker, who as well as not may soon have all the country by the ears and my recall on its way from Rome.”
This was the first I had heard of the man called Jesus, and I little remarked it at the time. Not until afterward did I remember him, when the little summer cloud had become a full-fledged thunderstorm.
”I have had report of him,” Pilate went on. ”He is not political. There is no doubt of that. But trust Caiaphas, and Hanan behind Caiaphas, to make of this fisherman a political thorn with which to p.r.i.c.k Rome and ruin me.”
”This Caiaphas, I have heard of him as high priest, then who is this Hanan?” I asked.
”The real high priest, a cunning fox,” Pilate explained. ”Caiaphas was appointed by Gratus, but Caiaphas is the shadow and the mouthpiece of Hanan.”
”They have never forgiven you that little matter of the votive s.h.i.+elds,”
Miriam teased.
Whereupon, as a man will when his sore place is touched, Pilate launched upon the episode, which had been an episode, no more, at the beginning, but which had nearly destroyed him. In all innocence before his palace he had affixed two s.h.i.+elds with votive inscriptions. Ere the consequent storm that burst on his head had pa.s.sed the Jews had written their complaints to Tiberius, who approved them and reprimanded Pilate.
I was glad, a little later, when I could have talk with Miriam. Pilate's wife had found opportunity to tell me about her. She was of old royal stock. Her sister was wife of Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanaea. Now this Philip was brother to Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, and both were sons of Herod, called by the Jews the ”Great.”
Miriam, as I understood, was at home in the courts of both tetrarchs, being herself of the blood. Also, when a girl, she had been betrothed to Archelaus at the time he was ethnarch of Jerusalem. She had a goodly fortune in her own right, so that marriage had not been compulsory. To boot, she had a will of her own, and was doubtless hard to please in so important a matter as husbands.
It must have been in the very air we breathed, for in no time Miriam and I were at it on the subject of religion. Truly, the Jews of that day battened on religion as did we on fighting and feasting. For all my stay in that country there was never a moment when my wits were not buzzing with the endless discussions of life and death, law, and G.o.d. Now Pilate believed neither in G.o.ds, nor devils, nor anything. Death, to him, was the blackness of unbroken sleep; and yet, during his years in Jerusalem, he was ever vexed with the inescapable fuss and fury of things religious.
Why, I had a horse-boy on my trip into Idumaea, a wretched creature that could never learn to saddle and who yet could talk, and most learnedly, without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on the hair-splitting differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from Shemaiah to Gamaliel.
But to return to Miriam.
”You believe you are immortal,” she was soon challenging me. ”Then why do you fear to talk about it?”
”Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties?” I countered.
”But are you certain?” she insisted. ”Tell me about it. What is it like--your immortality?”
And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the giant Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and Loki and the frozen Jotuns--as I say, when I had told her of all this, and of Thor and Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and cried out, with sparkling eyes:
”Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You yellow giant-thing of the frost! You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions! But the spirit of you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your body is dead?”
”As I have said, Valhalla,” I answered. ”And my body shall be there, too.”
”Eating?--drinking?--fighting?”
”And loving,” I added. ”We must have our women in heaven, else what is heaven for?”
”I do not like your heaven,” she said. ”It is a mad place, a beast place, a place of frost and storm and fury.”
”And your heaven?” I questioned.
”Is always unending summer, with the year at the ripe for the fruits and flowers and growing things.”
I shook my head and growled:
”I do not like your heaven. It is a sad place, a soft place, a place for weaklings and eunuchs and fat, sobbing shadows of men.”
My remarks must have glamoured her mind, for her eyes continued to sparkle, and mine was half a guess that she was leading me on.
”My heaven,” she said, ”is the abode of the blest.”