Fifth Gospel(8)

In the midst of this splendour of splendours Cassius felt himself a small soul among many; a man descended from the empyrean heaven to the body that had been prepared from out of the noble qualities of the seven planets. In this body he would live out his years, his days, this very hour, a Lion of the Sun.

He closed his eyes and recited in his mind the words of the poet Horace.

Polvere e ombra. All is dust and shadow.

When he opened them again, the day was brighter.

He did not turn to his optio but took an in-breath of fire into his lungs and said, ‘This day the God devours his children…’ He took the Spanish Gladius from the belt over his left shoulder and raised it in imitation of the god, and with the words, ‘We go!’ arced it over the world and down to his side again.

The company, barely half a century on foot, saw the sign and moved in unison behind him, ascending the rise towards the settlement and through the village gates.

Some of the citizens of the township had already risen and were beginning the day’s labours when the sound of earth thrumming to horses hoofs and the stamping of feet caught them by surprise. Cassius arrived first on his sure-footed horse and so he had a moment to sense the odour of clinker and coal, and the pleasant aroma of baking bread. A town bathed in a dream soon to end, he thought.

Septimus came up behind him and directed the company, made up of Samaritans and Syrians, to form a line before the rows of houses.

A moment passed.

Cassius waited. When he could wait no longer he gave the second sign, it told the soldiers to begin forcing their way into the mud brick houses. In a moment there followed a concord of shrieks and a chorus of desperate howls, which moved through Bethlehem like an evil wind. But Cassius did not come off his horse. He watched the scene from above with his mouth a thin, tight line and his thoughts quiet inside his skull. He held the reins of his animal with one hand and smoothed its nape with the other. In the meantime his soldiers dragged every boy-child from its crib and from its mother’s breast out to the street, to be slaughtered before the horror-struck inhabitants. His face changed not. He moved not a muscle. His breath made clouds in the frigid dawn and signalled no stirring in his heart.

But something else had caught his eye now. He looked to the south. He thought he could see dark figures shadowed by the soft light, they moved slow and steady in the penumbral distance. It occurred to him to send a soldier to those pleasant pastures and his mind was bent upon this duty when a piercing light entered into his skull to blind his eyes. It was not Mithras, this light, and yet he discerned in it something of the majesty of the sun! In its brilliance he saw the formless image of a child and in his mind’s fancy the child turned into a man and when their eyes met the intensity of that gaze bore a hole into his soul.

He lost his breath and had to grasp onto the reins so as not to fall from the horse. When he had gathered in his wits he looked to the pasture again but the vision was gone, traded for the revenant screams and wails of the people, which rose in pitch and extremity in his ears.

He cast his vision-laden glance at the ground where a growing pile of little bodies lay before his horse. The image of that child conjured by his mind had fixed itself to those children that lay dead. Of a sudden he felt bewildered and surprised for it. These bloodied things, the pitiful sight of the women pulling out their hair, and the sound of the men dashing their heads against mud walls, all of it looked different now to him. The lamentation grew woeful and loud and the smell of blood was thick in his nostrils. He blinked and blinked again and when the feeling loosened he realised that his optio was paused watching him.

Blood spattered and smiling, the boy held a woman by the neck, almost choking her. In her arms a plump, pink child squirmed.

He is too fond of this. Cassius thought.

‘She says the child is over two springs.’ Septimus said, and let go of the woman to pull the infant from her grasping arms. It began a cry of horror that made her faint to the ground as though dead. A man then, whom Cassius guessed must be the father, tried to make a way to him but was prevented by the flat of Septimus’ sword over his back. He too fell over his wife and from that position turned a red-streaked, tormented face upwards, saying in the Aramaic tongue of his people that the child had turned two only days before.

Cassius gathered up the metal in his sinews and looked at the screaming infant dangling by one arm. He wished it were true. The child was large enough in size, but it seemed young to him.

‘Put the child down,’ he told the sergeant.

Septimus hesitated.

‘Put it down!’ he shouted at him. The spit in his mouth was sour and his greaves chaffed his legs. ‘If it walks it lives, if it crawls it dies!’