‘But you didn’t escape, did you? According to the gaoler he found you running backwards and forwards up and down two corridors. But the one true God does have the power to help those who worship him and follow his laws. Tell him, Ananias, tell him of Paulus, the man you baptised in Damascus.’
A man appeared in the corner of Vespasian’s vision; he groaned as Ananias started to tell the same story that Sabinus had told about the earthquake breaking open Paulus’ gaol, but with much embellishment and exaggeration. Vespasian was in no mood for it.
‘So you see, proconsul,’ Izates said with annoying cheerfulness once the tale was over, ‘just how fortuitous this earthquake has been for you and for me. All you have to do is accept baptism into the Way of Yeshua and I can say to my nobles that God sent this earthquake to spring you from the deepest dungeon in order that you could follow him. Just think of it: my nobles would flock to the baptismal river if they knew that they could have a power like that on their side. And you would be free, free to live here as a permanent witness to the power of the one true God and his son, Yeshua. Free, proconsul, free and saved.’
Vespasian closed his eyes; he wanted none of the bewildered old King’s freedom at the price of rejecting Mars. If Mars indeed had a destiny for him then it would be Mars who eventually would lead him to it, not some jealous god who would brook no other and insisted on men mutilating their penises. He heard the King shouting at him but took no notice as he slipped back into his tranquillity that had been so disturbed by the anger of the gods below. Soon he felt himself being dragged away and he knew with certainty what he would see when he next opened his eyes: it would be the same thing that he always saw in the moment.
And it was so as the hammering on the door to his cell, fixing it back into place, disturbed his peace and forced him to open his eyes. He was back in the moment; his brief surge of hope dashed. He pushed away the offer of consolation from despair, the would-be companion who had been locked out of his cell with the repairing of the door, left in the corridor to whisper through the grille. Back he went to his blanket and his gruel, forbidding all images of his brief foray into the outer world; more and more he played scenes from the past with his inner eye, chewing slowly on his bread and sucking on bones, occasionally nodding in the dark when certain images pleased him.
Straw came, then more straw came and then, perhaps, more straw had come. The last grains of his gruel were lapped up by his tongue as it methodically pursued them around the bottom of his food bowl. Satisfied with his accomplishment of so far ingesting every morsel of nourishment from his meal he began to suck on the bone that he had saved for last. His children again – or was it for the first time? – paraded before his closed eyes. He had planned to do something that may well endanger Titus, he was sure; it had been to do with Tryphaena. Yes, it was Nero; somehow he was helping Nero’s cause, that’s why he was here. Yes, that was it. It was because of Titus’ friendship with Britannicus that he would be in danger if … but he was sure that he had thought of the way to protect him before he had embarked on the road that led to this moment.
The light again.
But he had not quite finished.
He opened his eyes and placed the inedible remnants of the bone onto a heap of similar fragments in the corner, now just visible in the dim but growing light of the approaching torch; he noted with half-felt curiosity that it was quite big. Had the pile always been like that? No, it could not have been; it must have grown and he must have fed it with other bones.
He stared at the pile; so many bones.
A wave of panic hit him.
How many?
He did not want to count.
He felt his chest tighten as he stared at the physical evidence of the length of this one moment. He lashed out at the pile with both hands, smashing it apart, spreading the bones all across the floor of the cell; scattering them amongst the muck so that they could not be counted.
He needed to breathe; he tried to inhale but could not.
And then he heard himself: he was screaming.
It was uncontrolled and from his very core; from deep within a consciousness that had been buried deep within the deepest bowels of the first foundations made by man. It was fuelled by the millennia of misery that shrouded this pit and sucked what life was left in the barely living incarcerated within it.
It was raw.
But it was also fed by shouts from outside his cell; shouts of anger. The gaoler was shouting at him and he was screaming back. He had not had communication with anyone in the whole moment that he had been in this darkness; in the time that it had taken that pile of bones to appear. No one had spoken to him since Izates and even then he had not responded because he had shut the world off to preserve his peace. But now he was being shouted at and now he was screaming back. Now he was having a conversation, he was interacting with another human being, he was screaming and the gaoler was shouting at him for doing so: the gaoler was acknowledging his existence.