when they came were stumbling, inconsequential, instantly regrettable. ‘You are from these parts?’
‘Mary is from Migdal,’ the man said. ‘I was born in Nazareth, in lower Galilee, but came here to this lake as a youth. These are my people, and this is my vessel.’
‘You are a boatwright? A fisherman?’
‘This sea is my vessel, and the people of Galilee are my passengers. And we are all fishermen here. You can join us, if you like.’
Claudius caught the man’s gaze again, and found himself nodding, and then looked back and gestured at the others. Herod bounded up, the mud spattering against his bare shins, and embraced the Nazarene in the eastern fashion, murmuring greetings in Aramaic before turning to Claudius. ‘When Joshua comes with me to Tiberias for an evening in the taverns we call him Jesus, the Greek version of his name. It trips off the tongue more readily, especially after a few jars of Galilean.’ He guffawed, slapped the Nazarene on the back and then knelt down beside Mary, gently putting his hand on her belly. ‘All goes well?’ he said in Aramaic. She murmured, smiling. He leapt back up, then caught sight of someone on the shoreline towards Migdal, a distant figure waving, then loping on. Claudius followed Herod’s gaze, and saw a man with black skin, tall and slender, wearing a white robe, carrying a stringer of fish.
‘Aha!’ Herod guffawed, slapping the man again. ‘You have a Nubian slave!’
‘He is Ethiopian, from a place called Aksum,’ the man replied. ‘He is a free man. And he is a good listener.’
‘Everyone listens to you, Joshua. You should be a king!’
The Nazarene smiled, then raised his hand in greeting to Calpurnia and Cypros as they came walking towards him across the mud, barefoot. He passed beside them wordlessly and heaved over a crude stone anchor which had been mooring the boat, then detached a thick hemp rope which had been looped through a hole in the centre of the stone. Herod and Calpurnia and Cypros placed the baskets they had been carrying in the boat, and Mary made as if to lift a pitcher beside her, but the Nazarene quickly took it off her and placed his hand on her belly, smiling. He coiled the anchor rope and tossed it over the sternpost, then braced himself against the stern and heaved, every muscle in his body taut and bulging. As Claudius watched him work, the Nazarene seemed like the bronze statues of Hercules and athletes he had seen in the villa of his friend Piso below Vesuvius. The keel slid along the mudflat until it was half in the waves, and the Nazarene stood back, glistening with sweat, while the others splashed past him and clambered on board. Claudius came last, awkwardly pulling his leg up and over. A few more heaves and the boat was afloat, and the Nazarene quickly leapt up over the gunwale and released the square sail from its yard, while Mary sat by the tiller oar.
Claudius and Herod sat side by side in the middle of the boat, each with an oar, and began to pull in unison as the wind took the sail and pushed the boat beyond the shallows. The hull and the rigging creaked, the water gurgled and crackled under the bow. Claudius relished the exercise, his face flushed and shining. If only he had been allowed into the gymnasium in Rome before the palsy took hold, then he might have led the legions in Germania just like his beloved brother. But now, in this boat, as they slipped further offshore, until the line of the coast was all but lost in the haze, the pain and unhappiness that had begun to cloud his life seemed to slide away, and for the first time he felt whole, no longer battling against himself and others, those who would rather have seen him never return when he was pushed towards the mouth of the underworld as a frightened little boy.
They drifted for hours, blown along by wafts of breeze, talking and dozing in the shade under the sail. The Nazarene cast his net, and caught only a few fish, but enough for him to cook in a pot over a small brazier. ‘Oh prince of fishermen,’ Herod had joked, ‘you tell us your kingdom is like a net that is thrown into the sea and catches fish of every kind. Well, it looks as if you have a pretty small kingdom.’ He guffawed, and the Nazarene smiled, and continued to prepare the food. Later, Mary played the lyre, making music that seemed to shimmer and ripple like the surface of the lake, and Calpurnia sang the haunting, mystical songs of her people. They ate the food they had brought with them, bread, olives, walnuts, figs, and a fruit Claudius had never eaten before, produced by the thorn tree, all washed down with pure water from the springs of Tiberias. Afterwards they played dice, and arm-wrestled across a loose plank, and Calpurnia made diadems for them out of the twigs of the thorn tree, solemnly crowning Herod a king and Claudius a god. Herod kept them entertained with a stream of stories and jokes, until his thoughts began to turn to the evening. ‘They say you can work miracles, Joshua son of Joseph,’ he said. ‘But you can’t turn water into wine, can you?’ He guffawed again, then scooped up a handful of water from the lake and splashed it over the man’s head. The Nazarene laughed along with him, and the two men jostled playfully, rocking the boat from side to side. ‘Anyway,’ Herod said, sitting back. ‘We can’t stay out here much longer. I’ll die of thirst. Anyone for the taverns?’
Dusk was colouring the sky red an hour later when Claudius again pulled the oar, this time sitting alongside the Nazarene. They had landed, and Herod had set out on the road back to Tiberias, eager to seek out the young bloods in the officers’ mess for an evening’s cavorting. The three women had gone back to Migdal, to Mary’s home. But Claudius had wanted to stay on with the Nazarene, to make this day last for ever, to ask more. He had offered to help the Nazarene set his seine net, a few hundred yards offshore from the mudflat where they had first set out.
The Nazarene rowed silently alongside him. Then he stopped, and gazed at the deep red sky where the sun had set, the colour of spilt blood. ‘The weather will be fine tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The net will be safe here overnight. Then, tomorrow, it will be time for the autumn sowing of the fields. The autumn wind will blow up from the west, bringing heavy downpours, coming over the Judaean hills and cleansing the land. The Sea of Galilee will once again be filled, and where we once stood there will be water.’
‘Herod says you are a prophet,’ Claudius said.
‘It does me good to see Herod,’ the Nazarene replied. ‘I have that same fire within me.’
‘Herod says you are a scribe, a priest. He says you are a prince of the house of David.’
‘I minister to the ha’aretz, the people of this land,’ he said. ‘But I am no priest.’
‘You are a healer.’
‘The lame and the blind shall walk the farthest and see the most, because it is they who yearn most to walk, and to see.’
‘But who are you?’
‘It is as you say.’
Claudius sighed. ‘You speak in parables, but where I come from our prophets are oracles of the gods, and they speak in riddles. I go to the Sibyl, you know, in Cumae. Herod thinks she’s an old witch, but I still go there. He doesn’t understand how much better it makes me feel.’ Claudius paused, self-conscious. ‘Virgil also went there. He was our greatest poet.’ He closed his eyes, declaiming from memory, translating the Latin verse into Greek: ‘“Now is come the last age of Cumaean song;
The great line of the centuries begins anew.
Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns,
Now a new race descends from heaven on high.
Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child,
Under whom the iron brood shall at last cease
And a Golden Age spring up throughout the world!”’
The Nazarene listened intently, then put his hand on Claudius’ shoulder. ‘Come on. Help me with my net.’
‘Have you ever seen Rome?’ Claudius said. ‘All the wonders of human creation are there.’
‘Those are things that stand in the way of the kingdom of heaven,’ the Nazarene replied.
Claudius thought for a moment, then picked up a chisel with one hand, the edge of the net with the other. ‘Would you renounce these?’
The Nazarene smiled, then touched Claudius again. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘about my ministry.’
Half an hour later it was almost dark, and the boat had gently grounded on the foreshore a few miles from where they had set out. The burning torches of Migdal and Tiberias twinkled from the shore, and other faint lights bobbed offshore. The Nazarene took a pair of pottery oil lamps from a box beside the mast step, filled them with olive oil left over from their lunch and deftly lit the wicks with a flint and iron. The lamps spluttered to life, then began to burn strongly, the flames golden and smokeless. He placed them on a little shelf on the mast step and then turned to Claudius.
‘Your poet, Virgil,’ he said. ‘Can I read his books?’
