‘What’s that?’ Magnus asked as he stepped over a smashed market stall.
‘It’s the removal of the foreskin.’
Vespasian looked at Yosef in disbelief. ‘I’ll never understand you Jews; do you seriously expect me to believe that to become righteous a man has to slice off his foreskin?’
Yosef shrugged. ‘It’s God’s law.’
‘Well, you’re welcome to it if it makes you happy but stop trying to force it upon other people.’
‘We don’t, we only preach to our fellow Jews who’ve lapsed. Yeshua was quite clear upon that subject: we shouldn’t take the word of God to the Gentiles or even to the Samaritans who follow a heretical form of the Torah.’
Vespasian grunted and walked on in silence, down towards the lower city, wondering why these people thought that they had an exclusive insight into the will of God to the extent that they could accept no one else’s point of view.
Turning right, off the lower city’s riot-damaged main street, as the first rays of the sun hit the high-altitude clouds with an orange glow, Vespasian saw the centuries of auxiliaries forming up to the bawling of their centurions and optiones.
‘What a fucking shambles,’ Magnus declared as they passed by the ranks of the chain-mailed soldiers struggling to form a line in the semi-darkness, cursing one another as their oval shields became entangled with their neighbours’ javelins and enduring the savage swipes of their centurions’ vine-sticks.
‘This’ll be the first action that most of them have seen,’ Vespasian informed him, wondering whether they would have the discipline to work methodically through the quarter, rooting out the rioters.
‘And if they form a line like that it’ll be their last as well.’
‘Good morning, quaestor,’ Festus said as they came to the head of the first century. ‘The Jewish elders are waiting for you.’
‘Thank you, prefect, have them brought here.’ Vespasian peered down the street; in the dim light he could make out a substantial barricade about a hundred paces away.
Three old men with bushy grey beards and wearing long white robes and black and white mantles shuffled forward. Vespasian looked them up and down hoping that he might get some sense out of at least one of them.
‘Who speaks for you?’ he asked.
‘I do, quaestor,’ the middle of the three replied, ‘my name is Menahem.’
‘So tell me, Menahem, what caused all this?’
‘A man preaching a heresy, quaestor.’
‘Shimon?’
‘You know him?’
‘I know of him. What could he have said that could justify all this destruction and killing?’
‘He has converted hundreds of our people to his way; they no longer follow our teaching.’
‘Ah, so that’s the problem, is it: you’re all scared of losing your influence?’
‘What he preaches is blasphemous.’
‘I thought that the teaching of Yeshua is for Jews to love each other and follow the Torah — what’s blasphemous about that?’
Menahem’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘You are knowledgeable for a Gentile, quaestor. You’re right, there is nothing blasphemous about that; however, Shimon claims that Yeshua was the Messiah and the son of God. We cannot accept that.’
‘So you told your people to kill him and his followers.’
‘We didn’t tell them to do anything. There was an agitator in the crowd, someone we’d never seen before; he started it when Shimon made another even more blasphemous claim.’
‘Well?’
‘That after Yeshua was executed he came back to life three days later as proof of the resurrection of the righteous.’
‘What nonsense. And you did nothing to try and restrain your people?’
‘After this claim the agitator addressed the crowd. He got them so worked up that they wouldn’t listen to us; he said that the shortage of grain and failure of the silphium was God’s judgement on us for listening to Yeshua’s lies.’
‘But that’s been failing for years.’
Menahem shrugged. ‘They’re poor people made poorer by the failure of the crop and now can’t afford the high grain prices so they’re happy to blame any scapegoat. They threw themselves at Shimon’s supporters while the agitator urged them on, shouting that they should get the woman and her children who are always with Shimon. She escaped with the children while Shimon’s supporters held back our people, and since then there have been running battles in the streets as this agitator looks for them.’
‘And so now they’ve barricaded themselves into the Jewish Quarter until they find them, I suppose?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Menahem agreed sadly, looking towards the auxiliary centuries that had now managed to form up. ‘This man is a fanatic; he’s caused the deaths of a lot of our people already and a good few more will die before the day is out.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘He’s quite short with bow legs and has half an ear missing.’
‘Well, we should be able to recognise him from that. But tell me, Menahem, what has this man got against the woman and her children?’
‘He said that in order to purify God’s chosen people in Cyrene, so that He would make the silphium grow again, Yeshua’s bloodline must be wiped out; he claimed that they were Yeshua’s children.’
CHAPTER VII
The sun had burst over the horizon and there was now enough light to be able to see any ambushes that may be lurking up the narrow alleys to the left and the right of the barricaded road. Looking ahead to the barricade of overturned carts, barrels and broken-up furniture, Vespasian could see a mass of men behind it; a few heads peered over, back towards the Romans. The houses beyond them were more dilapidated than in the rest of the city, attesting to the poverty of the Jewish Quarter.
‘Order the advance, Festus,’ he called to the auxiliary prefect standing next to him at the head of the first century, formed up eight abreast.
Magnus handed him an oval auxiliary shield. ‘I can’t believe that they’re going to be stupid enough to resist us.’
‘They’re desperate — since the silphium started to fail they’ve been getting poorer and poorer. Now they believe this liar who tells them that if they kill two children then all their woes will disappear as their god will restore the crop.’
A
‘Shields up!’ Festus shouted.
Fifty paces from the barricade Vespasian heard the tell-tale hiss of a volley of arrows.
Vespasian tightened his grip on his shield and hunched down behind it so that he could just see over its curved rim; he felt the auxiliary behind him raise his shield over his head and prayed that the man was experienced enough to hold it firm. An instant later came the staccato hammering of many iron-tipped arrows thumping into the leather-covered wooden roof above the century’s heads. A few screams from within the ranks confirmed the lesser effectiveness of the oval shields in forming a perfect cover and the inexperience of some of the auxiliaries holding them.
The pounding of the soldiers’ hobnailed sandals striking the paving stones in step reverberated off the brick walls to either side and around the makeshift wooden box encasing them.
‘The fucking racing factions never shot arrows at us,’ Magnus grumbled loudly beside him as two barbs from
