“His name?” For a second Quintilius looked down at his food, then he lifted his eyes and looked straight at Vatinius.
“Oh, I called him Vatinius, after a friend I once had, in Gaul.” To his complete chagrin Vatinius felt a pulse leap in his throat, and the red blood pour up under his weather-beaten skin. He said in a half-choked voice: “There was no need for that!”
“No need at all,” Quintilius agreed, deliberately misunderstanding, ‘but boys must have names. And I … well, write me down as a sentimental fellow.”
No sound he had ever heard had been so welcome to Vatinius as the sound of the door opening behind him. He turned in his chair and said, “Oh, Caepio! Enter. What is it?”
Caepio reported, in clipped formal phrases, the arrival of the three trespassers.
“There seemed no need to disturb you, sir. I locked them up and intended to report it in the morning. Now one of them is causing a disturbance. He mentions Herod. I thought you should be informed, sir.”
“I’ll come at once.” Deliverance. Just when the situation had become unbearable. Another minute, and they’d have been weeping on one another’s shoulders!
“Wait,” Quintilius said, quietly, but with authority.
“This could be of interest to me. Have them brought here.”
Vatinius hesitated. A curious coincidence that in this unvisited place, in one evening, there should arrive Quintilius on some mysterious errand from Caesar, and now three men on Herod’s business. It was an axiom that spies were always spied upon.
“What sort of fellow is this? Likely to be violent?”
“Oh no. Very old. Very frail.”
“A Jew?” Quintilius asked.
Caepio acknowledged the source of the question by giving Quintilius a glance, but he punctiliously addressed Vatinius as he answered.
“None of them is a Jew, sir.”
“Bring him in,” Vatinius said.
Melchior, having attained his aim by being noisy, was quiet again. He put his hands in his sleeves and bowed and said in a voice in which politeness, impatience and petulance mingled:
“Please, who is chief here? I asked, when we were arrested, to be brought to someone in authority.”
Vatinius stared, uncomprehending. Quintilius, stirring a little on his cushions, said:
“It is a form of Greek. He asks who is chief here.” I wonder myself, Vatinius thought, angry at having been baulked in his attempt to escape.
“Tell him I am, Caepio, would you fetch Atticus; he’s a Greek.”
“We came,” Melchior said, ‘to the back of the house, like thieves. I am to blame for that. We are not thieves, we are harmless men on a very important errand, and we are already late. I beg you, let me and the black man proceed. Hold the other as hostage if you must. It is of the utmost importance that I should reach Bethlehem without delay.”
“He says,” Quintilius said, ‘that he has an urgent errand in Bethlehem.”
“Ask him why he mentioned Herod.”
“Simply as a means of gaining attention. I meant nothing. I shouted the most important name I knew.”
Melchior was now in quandary such as he had never imagined. His suspicions of Herod had so worked upon his mind that he felt it would not be safe to divulge his real errand; and yet these men must be persuaded to let him and Balthazar go. And how could that be done?
“What is your errand?” Quintilius asked.
“Harmless. Of no importance to anyone but me. I have to ask for the release of the black man because he speaks for me.”
Caepio returned, bringing Atticus.
Glad to exclude Quintilius, Vatinius said, “Now Atticus; ask this old man where he is going, and why, and why he mentioned the name of Herod the King.”
Atticus spoke; Melchior answered. Atticus said:
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand a word he says.”
“I’m not surprised,” Quintilius said, ‘pure Greek is worsethan useless. An ear accustomed to attuning itself and a mind capable of making leaps are of more service. Shall I try again?”
“Do,” Vatinius said, grudgingly.
“Ask him how he has made his needs known, speaking a tongue that only you seem able to understand.”
“He says,” Quintilius said, ‘that the black man speaks for him.”
“All right,” said Vatinius.
“Atticus, go back to your dice. Caepio, fetch the others. We may as well see them all.” He looked at the old man, saw that he was deeply distressed, tremulous and confused, and that part of him which had sympathised with Caleb and Ebenezer, and at second-hand with Josodad, came uppermost.
“Tell him not to worry. Tell him to take the chair and calm himself. Tell him he’s in no danger and that I’ve sent for the friend who speaks for him.”
Translated, these sentences drove Melchior to the very verge of panic. Balthazar knew that his errand was with the child. He’d blurt it all out, in this place where Herod’s name meant so much. It seemed to be a place for soldiers and it was on the very verge of Bethlehem. Oh, what had he done, acting always—except that he had implied to Herod that he would return while determining not to—in a straightforward, honest way? A simpleton, that is what I have proved myself to be, he thought, and I thought I was the wisest man in Korea.
Caepio, thinking—He treats me like an errand boy, but I’ll show him that I am at least an efficient errand boy, released the obviously harmless fellow first. To Balthazar, roused from sleep and still dazed, he said, “Walk straight ahead, turn right and wait by the first door.” Then he released Caspar who only two minutes before had regained consciousness, groped for his knife, and was on the point of going crazy again. When the door opened he had been thinking that death by his own hand, by his own knife, would be better than enduring the torture that being shut in this dreadful little cell inflicted upon him. Then the door opened and he thrust the knife, with one of his rapid movements, into the front of his jacket; and his heart rejoiced because, if he were to be locked in again, and thus forced to kill himself, he would kill one or two of his captors first.
Caepio opened the door, and having recognised Caspar as the dangerous one of the three, would have taken him by the arm; but Caspar said; “Don’t lay your hand on me}’ with such vehemence that though the words were without meaning, the tone and the look that accompanied them was perfectly clear.
So, let Vatinius, the storekeeper, the fussy housekeeper, the Jew-lover, deal with him, Caepio thought, and he beckoned and pointed, and finally ushered both Balthazar and Caspar into the room where Vatinius awaited them.
As soon as Melchior saw Balthazar, he said, in a low, sibilant whisper, “No mention of the child. Say anything, but not the truth.” And he was fortunate, for Caepio was, in the same moment, saying:
“I think, sir, that this one has a knife,” “You think! Weren’t they searched?”
“Yes. This one, I think, concealed his weapon.”
Vatinius looked at Caspar and saw him for what he was, and knew that had he been called, when he should have been called, he would have had such an obviously dangerous man stripped to the buff. Caepio, like every other centurion who had ever come here with his century, had made some fumbling, futile attempt to undermine his authority. Well, he must learn.
He said, almost casually:
“If you think he has a knife, take it from him.”
Testing me, Caepio thought; but alongside that thought ran another. Men returning from their two months’ boring sojourn, all agreed that Vatinius was fussy, strict, a Jew-lover; but they’d add that he never asked anybody to do what he wasn’t willing to do himself, that he was brave, a good soldier.
So, with complete confidence that should aid be needed, Vatinius was there to supply it, Caepio went to take away Caspar’s knife—if he had one, if that sudden furtive movement as the door opened had meant what Caepio was almost certain that it did.
But he had reckoned without any knowledge of Caspar, in whose country
one was either quick or dead. There was a briefscuffle; then the centurion, solid and heavy as oak, went reeling back against the wall, pain painting a white band about his mouth and in his mind the certainty that his back was broken. So swift and cunning a throw had never been seen in any arena. Caspar had not even drawn his knife; but, having thrown Caepio, he leaped upon the table, and stood there, knife in hand, his teeth bared in a wolfish grin, his eyes like a cornered rat’s.
Before anyone else could speak or move, Melchior turned, and with a movement swifter even than Caspar’s brought the edge of his thin old hand down on the desert man’s wrist with a gesture of a woman chopping meat for a stew. At the same time he screeched some kind of rebuke or instruction. The knife fell to the floor and Balthazar retrieved it and laid it before Vatinius.