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.The two looked at each other with some wariness.Philip at length remembered the name.Caleb’s reported work of subversion in Samaria had been driven out by more recent and privier events.Caleb had seen Philip around in Jerusalem but did not know who he was or what he did.Jerusalem was a great city crammed with citizens.‘What news in Jerusalem?’‘Persecution,’ Philip said, ‘of the Greek-speaking Nazarenes.I was lucky to get away.I’m taking the gospel to Samaria.By that twisting of your lips I guess you disapprove.’‘Who are persecuting – the Romans? No, of course not.The Nazarenes bow down to the Romans.The other cheek.Love your enemies.’‘One particular Roman.Who is also a Jew.’‘Saul of Tarsus.My old fellow student.He was hot against the Nazarenes.And now he’s persecuting them.Well.Do you know a man named Stephen?’‘I knew a man named Stephen.’‘A good man.I suppose I owe my life to him.Knew, you say knew.’‘Stephen is dead.He was stoned to death.For being a Greek-speaking Nazarene.’‘Saul did this?’‘Yes.You could say that.’‘And what happened to Stephen’s family?’‘The mother and father are good children of the Temple.’ Philip spat out the word with some bitterness.And then: ‘Ah yes, ah yes.You ask very obliquely and discreetly and with fear perhaps.You mean your sisters.The soldiers took them to the procurator Pilate.Pilate sent them as a gift to the Emperor.Along with camels and horses and dried dates and figs.’‘And,’ Caleb said, his colour not yet changed, ‘my mother?’‘I heard something from Stephen about the mother of Caleb being dead.And very quietly buried.Your eyes and changed colour tell me you blame yourself for all this.’‘I should have thought.’‘If thought always had to precede action there’d be little done in the world.Though most of the things done are hardly worth doing.We heard of your inciting the Samaritans to rise.And of the crushing of the rebellion.The outcome of which you will know, perhaps.Pilate’s no longer procurator of Judaea.Vitellius summoned him—’‘Who’s Vitellius?’‘The legate of Syria.Pilate’s been forced into premature retirement.It was a mistake, apparently, to try to sack that temple on Mount Gerizim.’‘You’ve been learning something about Samaria.’‘It’s as well to know something about the people one proposes to convert.’‘Your friends or overseers have made a good choice from one point of view,’ Caleb said.‘You don’t look like a Hebrew.’‘Whatever a Hebrew looks like.’‘They detest the Hebrews.They accepted me because of the stripes on my back.They spit at mention of the Temple in Jerusalem.Go carefully.’‘It’s a strange thing,’ Philip said.‘And I wonder if our master foresaw it.The Nazarene faith is already splitting into two.Stephen was condemned because he diminished the worth of the Temple and the whole hieratic order of the Temple.But Peter and the rest still look like good sons of Abraham and Moses.’‘You split already,’ Caleb nodded.‘You will split more yet.There’s no health in you, no unity.There’s no grip at the centre.You react to Rome in the wrong way.You’re as bad as the Sadducees.’Philip smiled, though thinly.‘And your way is what, now that you’re rid of Pilate?’‘Not to be caught by the next procurator, whoever he is.That, for a start.’‘There’s talk of your dream being fulfilled without knives or fuss.A client king, Herod Agrippa.No more procurators.’‘A client king is only a procurator in fancy dress.’ Caleb gazed at the lively street scene without seeing it: a camel haughtily dropping its sand-coloured dung; the basket-carrying women, veiled to the eyes but the eyes lively; a girls’ quarrel about the precedence of water-drawing from the well, eyes and teeth a flash of toy knives; an old man drunk asleep under a clump of dusty palms.‘I have,’ he said, ‘to strike at the centre.’Philip, with Nazarene tenderness, rescued a wasp that was trying to swim, against a current of waspish drunkenness, round and round in his half-full winecup.‘You mean,’ he said, ‘go to Rome?’‘First things first, you’re right, go to Rome.I take it my poor sisters will have been sent to Rome, capital of a slave empire.The first strike at the centre is the stroke that frees my sisters.If they’re still alive.’‘Slaves for the Emperor will, I think, be immune from rough treatment,’ Philip said in his cool Greek manner.‘I refer to the voyage under hatches and the clanking of the chained gang from Puteoli or wherever they land.I mean that there will have been no whipping or rape.The slaveowner expects whole skins and a look of health.What happens afterwards depends on the temperament of the slaveowner.And the slaveowner is the Emperor.No longer the wretched mad Tiberius.The sane and well-loved Gaius of the little boots.’‘You seem to get good fresh news in Jerusalem these days.’ The wasp staggered with feeble wet wings about the tabletop.Caleb saw himself in Rome, a city he knew only from fantastic visions: marble palaces with flights of laborious marble steps, gardens of planes and pines and oleanders closed to the rabble, ladies with predatory unveiled faces, wooden tenements quick to burn down, gigantic effigies of false gods
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