Great Lion of God Read online

  It seemed to him frightful that she was a slave and that she did not mourn her state or speak sorrowfully of it. Romans did not release their slaves seven years after they had acquired them, as demanded by Jewish law. They sometimes freed them, but rarely, and to a Roman, as to a Greek, a slave was not human but was called by a word meaning “thing.” In short, they bad no rights, as things have no rights, or humble animals.

  “Are you a Greek, Dacyl?” he asked.

  Her eyes widened. “That I do not know, Master,” she said. “I do not know what I am, or who were my parents.” She laughed with a happiness that disconcerted him, and then he discerned that she spoke as a child, for she was still a child.

  “I am a Jew,” said Saul. “My father is Hillel ben Borush, and we live on his estate far down the road from the city.”

  Jews did not despise their slaves as others did, and considered their rights as human beings and immortal souls and treated them with kindness and charity and fed them well and respected their manhood, and filled their hands with rich coins when they freed them. They taught them to reverence God and to obey and serve dutifully and with pride. But Saul knew that only Jews did so. He said, “Dacyl, does your mistress flog you?” He had heard the direst stories of Gentile cruelty.

  The girl’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “No, my noble mistress is as gentle as a dove, and her slaves adore her!”

  This confused Saul. He knew only two or three Romans, and they only slightly and in passing, and he had scorned their powerful and arrogant faces and prominent noses, and would never admit, as his father admitted, that they strongly resembled Jews not only in countenance but in temperament. He said, “Is the praetor harsh to you, Dacyl?”

  She laughed merrily. “No, my noble lord is very land, though sometimes stern. So long as he is served obediently and without question or impertinence, he is just and generous. He will not permit the overseer of the hall to abuse us. We love him.”

  “But, you are a slave still, and may always be a slave,” said Saul, more confused than ever.

  The girl shrugged and stared at him with fresh curiosity. “So the gods have ordained,” she said. “It is my fate. It is not an unhappy one. What more could I desire?”

  Then she glanced, startled, at the newly brilliant sky, and uttered an exclamation of dismay. “It is late!” she cried. “My mistress will wonder at my absence!” She ran a little distance around the pond, then turned gayly and waved to Saul, and vanished.

  She is not intelligent, thought Saul ben Hillel, the Pharisee Jew. She does not mourn her direful state. She does not conceive of it being direful. She knows no sorrow. She does not think beyond today. That seemed monstrous to him, to consider no future. A slave with no hope of freedom was tragic to him, and his heart sickened with a new grief. Men accepted the will of God, it was true, and did not question it. But such men were free. A slave like Dacyl was a slave in his spirit also, for he had no will but his human master’s, and so he was never free.

  Saul did not return to that spot for seven days and on each morning he told himself that never again would he return. It was too painful to see Dacyl and to ponder her ultimate fate. He had heard from Aristo that it was not unusual for some depraved and cruel Roman senators to feed recalcitrant slaves to the lampreys in their pools, or to torture them, in spite of new and languid laws passed recently in Rome. When he considered such a fate for Dacyl Saul was overwhelmed with anguish. Once he considered giving her money and urging her to flee, and then he remembered how young and unprotected she was, and he despaired. He did not know, until he experienced that despair, that he loved Dacyl not only for her beauty but for her innocence and sweetness.

  “Are you afflicted by some illness of the body or spirit?” asked Reb Isaac with asperity. “Your mind wanders and your thoughts are far away, and that is blasphemous when we study the Scriptures, the Pentateuch and the Prophets and the Torah. Your countenance is less colorful than usual, Saul ben Hillel, and your manner is listless and your eye is absent,”

  Aristo the Greek was more shrewd. He looked at the young servant girls of the household and wondered which one had caught the eye of Saul, and for which he pined. He saw no evidence of any desire or wistfulness. He knew that no girls were present in Saul’s school, and that he was always prompt in returning in the afternoon to his father’s house. But Aristo knew all the signs of adolescent love, and he mused.

  On the eighth day of absence Saul could no longer resist the terrible longing to see Dacyl again. He had told himself over and over that she was but an ignorant slave girl of no people and no ancestry, and therefore of no significance—for she did not even realize that she was insignificant. It was useless. He dreamed of her awake or sleeping. Her voice was the voice of the pond where it rippled; it was the voice of the spring birds. It was not forbidden Jews to love servant women. It was forbidden only to abuse them and treat them cruelly. He argued with himself endlessly.

  And so he returned to the pond, not walking reluctantly but running like a hare, breathless and panting in the gray light of morning and in the first rising heat of the summer day. His red hair prickled on his scalp. His sandals slapped the silent stones of the Roman road. Birds, still sleeping, awoke to a startled questioning as he raced past. A thousand questions had tortured him over the past days, a thousand despairs, but now he thought of nothing but meeting the girl again. His heart seemed held in hands of leaping flame. The pillars of the dark and silent houses near the road were ghostly in the dim and shadowy light. Only he was alive, and he was alive with exultation.

  Dacyl was in the pond, her white reflection like alabaster in the pale yellow-greenness of the water, her black hair dimly glinting with copper and her mouth very red. She saw him and gave him a blissful smile and lifted her chiton high and waded across the pond to him. Her face glittered in the first light because of the drops of water on it, and her eyes gleamed with ardent pleasure at the sight of him. He reached his hand to her and she took it and it was their first fleshly encounter and her touch ran up his arm like a bolt of lightning and struck violently at his heart. Then she was beside him, laughing, shaking out her garment and then they were face to face. It was the most natural of all things to lean suddenly toward her and give his first kiss of love on her moist poppy lips.

  They were sweeter and softer and more fragrant than he had dreamed during those last tormented days. He was afraid he had startled her, but then her lips moved against his and he was startled himself, for he had not known that women responded to men in this fashion. Her breath was on his mouth, and he looked into her eyes and they were beaming and joyous. His senses literally staggered with ecstasy and his whole being seemed to burst into flame and sensations he had never imagined almost overwhelmed him. Then, laughing again, she drew away from him.

  “I thought you had abandoned me,” she said. “Wretch, that you made me weep!”

  He was overcome. “I made you weep, Dacyl?” He could not bear the thought that he had given her pain.

  Then she was laughing again at him. “Orion!” she exclaimed. “You are a mighty lover, and I am Artemis, and will set you among the stars!” She touched his bare arm and his flesh involuntarily quivered. “How strong you are! You delight my heart. Your hair and your countenance resemble Apollo’s, but your shoulders are those of a Hercules. Did a Cyclops detain you, or did you forget your handmaiden?”

  She was teasing him as his sister teased him when he was too serious. She could make him smile and laugh as Sephorah did, but with a wondrous and more exciting emotion. He said, and his voice shook, “I did not come because I could not.”

  She regarded him with sympathy. In her slave mind men had sober affairs which were exceedingly tedious, and Saul saw at once that the explanation he had ready for her question would not have been understood by her, nor did she wish any explanation. What he had implied was enough. He wished to say, “I restrained myself, for fear of what you are, but returned for the same reason.” But Dacyl
would not comprehend, and for the first time Saul finally knew that there were many minds, myriads of minds, which would be unable to comprehend him at all and all that he symboled. He had met incomprehension before in schoolmates and in his family, but he had thought it either malice or stupidity, or that he had been unable to express himself clearly, or that others deliberately refused to understand. Now he suddenly felt the vast isolation that every man endures, alone in his flesh, and he was aware that neither the most eloquent in speaking or writing could convey the deepness of his motives, the complexity of his thoughts. All at once he was choked by a sharp and alien compassion—though he was not a stranger to pity—both for himself and the others with whom he shared his world. It was a world in which no one truly communicated with another, and in this lay the greatest sorrow. Not even love made a common language.

  “Why is your countenance so somber?” asked Dacyl. But Saul had no words. “Let us be happy, for the day is fair,” said the girl and she took his hand and they entered the water together and laughed as children laugh and splashed each other.

  “It is good to be happy, for that state was intended by the Father, blessed be His Name, for all men,” Reb Isaac had said. But in his heart Saul had not believed that men could be happy in a world of vice and licentiousness and depravity and terror, which he had seen all about him on the burning streets of Tarsus, a world abandoned by God and abandoned by virtue, and ruled by the short-sword of Rome and taxgatherers and other fiends of oppression and lust. Yet, in a single moment, by her words, Saul knew that he had truly heard the simplest sagacity. “Let us be happy, for the day is fair.”

  He had thought men could be happy only in the ecstatic contemplation of God, if they had any intelligence at all, and were not as beasts and other animals. But as he gazed with delight at Dacyl he saw indeed that the day was fair, and that she was all happiness for him.

  And so it was for many days of the summer and Saul became young in heart and spirit as he had never been young before, and he hugged his secret to him, not from shame or embarrassment, but for fear that if he spoke of it the magic would fly from him, as Artemis, the favorite goddess of Dacyl, fled on the silver meadows of the moon.

  The girl sharpened all his senses. She gave incandescent meanings to the Songs of Solomon, brought jeweled subtleties to the glad Psalms of David. As Dacyl never reflected on the future, not even on the morrow, so he lost his own sense of time, marveling how deep were the colors of earth and sky now to him, how precious was every flower, how exciting every tree-form, how gracious every shadow, how keen every sensation, how delicious all food, and how glorious his dreams. A cup of wine was no longer wine to him. It had the color and the taste of Dacyl’s lips. It held the dance of her eyes. Now everything had a larger contour to him, a vaster meaning, an almost unbearable elation and gaiety. He found himself less attuned to Ecclesiastes and the Proverbs, and more to the bright hosannahs of the prophets, during the brief intervals when they were not mourning the human predicament and man’s propensities for evil.

  He was certain, in his innocence, that no man had ever experienced such ineffable joy before, and he gave thanks to God for it. Yet, never once did Dacyl utter a profound word, not even the unconscious wisdom of the unlettered and ignorant. She did not touch his mind, but she touched secret places in him, which were wiser if more primeval, with the freshness of the first morning of creation. She regarded existence as a young lamb regarded it, or a bird, or anything else as simple and natural and serene. She was a rose and she spread her fragrant petals to the sun and gave of the divine essence of her perfume. She played with Saul as a child plays, and with all the fullness of a child, though she was older than he. She kissed him as openly as a child, and fondled his hands and neck. At these times he became delirious.

  Best of all, she gave him an awareness of all other human creatures, an awareness that was never to leave him.

  Chapter 4

  TARSUS, whom her inhabitants called “the jewel of the Cydnus River,” was essentially a Phoenician city, commercial, murmurous with business and traffic both by water and highways, possessed of excellent academies and schools, mercantile establishments, factories, perfumers, weavers, forges, endless shops, remarkable museums and music halls, the freedom of Roman citizenship, cursed with a bureaucracy, gleaming with temples to many gods, Hellenistic in attitude though Oriental in emotion, famed for her craftsmen, enriched by her pirates who lived respectable and respected lives in their fine villas, wineshops, baths, bakeries, carpet manufacturers, banks, stock markets, inns where Egyptian cooks served superb meals, brothels, licentious theaters, arenas for sports and gladitorial combats. Many were the natives who proudly called themselves “a little Rome,” for a score of races lived here and the narrow streets clamored with a multitude of tongues. Here lived Syrians and Sidonians, students from Asia Minor, Nubians and Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians, pale-eyed barbarians from the forests of Europe, slaves, Gauls, Britons, artists, jewelers and the owners of bookshops, scribes knowing a dozen tongues, physicians, and tens of thousands of the free mobs who idled, worked when hunger threatened, scrawled graffiti on the walls at night, vociferously adored some local politician and as vociferously derided him, haunted the arenas, hunted slaves, fought with the police on occasion, gave their measure of robbers to the streets, served any master, gambled, diced, pimped, labored, sweated, cheated and behaved as the market rabble has always behaved and will invariably behave. They adored actors and acrobats and gladiators, extolled them one day and put their very lives in danger the next, harassed unprotected young girls hurrying with messages for rich mistresses, and were emotional, passionate, dangerous, colorful, frightening, seething, amusing and lively, stinking and wildly generous, and in general heartily enjoyed their lives and hourly blasphemed the gods, and paid taxes only when pursued by a resolute publican accompanied by slaves with staves, or legionnaires carrying fasces. They were the terror and vitality of the night, the vehemence of the day, and like all who live by their wits and infrequent labor they were exceedingly clever and full of wit.

  “Cities without a market rabble could not survive,” Aristo would tell his pupil, Saul. “They would expire of boredom, for respectability has a certain deadness and ennui about it, a certain lack of life. It is the market rabble, dexterously turning a drachma or a sesterce or a copper here and there, which enlivens and creates trade, inspires that greed which is the mother of ambition and fortune, raises temples, gives the gods changeful faces, stimulates fashions, removes the lead from the boots of soldier and police, forms a subject against which priests and teachers and lawmakers can inveigh—what else could they do?—and, if their lustre is garish and gaudy and cheap, at least it is lustre and should not be despised. Their charlatanry, their brazen robberies, their wit and their cavortings, their heedlessness and their lewdness, their cruelty and their frequent violent compassion, are closer to the real nature of man, my Saul, than are the sober-faced philosophers and the writers of books. It is the market rabble, in truth, which inspire theses and book-writing and the best of plays, for that which is raucous and furious and even vicious has more verity before the sun than all of the old Greek virtues of continence, reflection, modesty and the Stoic imperative. This is something,” added Aristo, “which you will find angrily denied by those who believe even the common man can be greater than he is, or that any man can become like the gods, but then these sad defenders of the public weal and these fantasy-weavers are far removed from knowledge and validity and reality, and one could pity them if they were not so dangerous.”

  Saul thought that Aristo was merely conducting an exercise in perversity and contradiction, but since he had known Dacyl he was no longer certain. The girl, though a slave and protected, was of the market rabble also. He could not despise her. In truth, because of her, he saw mankind as it was and not as he had hoped it would be, and love filled him rather than repulsion. But he could not believe, with the smiling Aristo, that evil was as
necessary as good, and that good without evil would be a veritable hell of listlessness and dankness. He explained, over and over, the glories and the sweetnesses of the lost Eden, and Aristo always replied, “One should be grateful to your Adam and Eve. Not only did they set men free from absolute virtue, but they made them wholly human. They bore in their loins the beauty and the madness of cities, the great sails of commerce, the delight of theaters and dancing girls, and all the infinite variety of life as we know it, and without which we would live in a world of a single color, like babes in their nurseries. They were also very wise: they forebore to eat of the Tree of Life before feasting on the Tree of Wisdom, for what man would be immortal?”

  On this, they had always disputed, and Aristo, Saul would think, flourished on disputations, all cynical and full of skepticism, all sharp and laughing. But since the youth had known Dacyl he found himself listening more closely to Aristo who could give a keen edge to any discourse and fire the mind even if it disagreed with him.

  “You will notice, in Tarsus, as you will notice in Rome and Alexandria and Athens in the future, that we Greeks have given even vice a refinement which grosser races could never attain,” said Aristo. “All men are vile, as your Solomon has said, and is he not considered your wisest king? But vileness should not be, among men, a muddy animal vileness—though I wrongfully denigrate the animals in this instance—but the vileness of the elegant and gracious gods. That which you Jews call sin has inspired more poetry than virtue, and certainly more temples! What would man be without danger and war and terror and harpies and furies and even death? A sad little languid creature munching fruit under a changeless tree in a paradise on which terrible winds never descended nor any wave rushed nor any thunder sounded. Without controversy there can be no wise argument; without dissension there can be no agreement; without disaster there can be no peace, in all the meaning of the words. In a deeper subtlety than you know, Saul, wickedness created virtue, and all the arts, and vitality. Contrast, Saul, is the only thing which makes life interesting. And wine and love, of course.”