“It is the waste of time,” Melchior said.
“That is all I deplore. You have been useful, he has been useful. I would gladly oblige you both. If you asked my right hand I would lay it on the block, willingly. But for nine months now I have followed this star and it does not, I swear, lead to Jerusalem. And time matters.”
“What are you gabbling about?” Caspar asked in the voice that often called the Five Hundred to attention. Melchior told him, shortly, honestly. And that gave Balthazar time to think up a really clinching argument.
“Suppose,” he said to Melchior, ‘you had not decided to halt at that inn where you found me. There was the twilight hour left; you could have ridden on, and five miles along the road found a better inn. Then you would have missed me and by now every one of his rose jekkals would have been spent, people cheating you as they did. Is it not possible that, leaving the intervention of gods and goddesses aside, there is something that governs our lives? Your stars, my dreams, his … what has he, poor man, except his money? A wish to see Jerusalem. To see Jerusalem he has travelled far and hard. May it not be that his will has as much significance as your star and my dream ? May it not be that we are to go to Jerusalem because something awaits us there?”
“I
do not understand such talk,” Melchior said coldly. He added, with reproach.
“I thought you were a sensible man.”
As he read it, the place for which he was bound was only a short distance from Jerusalem; he could travel so far without the help of Caspar’s money; what he feared was that he would reach his destination and find that nobody understood his message. Very soon Balthazar might be of the utmost importance, and he set himself to argue, to cajole, anything to win Balthazar round to his way of thinking. But in his humble, unaggressive way the black man was adamant. The fact that he had found these companions, was riding a camel, wearing the very clothes of his vision, fortified his stubbornness.
“I shall know the gateway when we reach it,” he said.
“And we must ride in.”
Then, soon, there was another trouble; the roads became crowded, not with the ordinary traffic, designed for speed, but by slow-moving groups of people on foot, mainly men, but enough women and children to be noticeable. A few rode inferior donkeys, here and there there was a cart with slow-turning, creaking wheels; everywhere there were bundles. To Melchior they were merely a nuisance, but to Caspar, who was interested in everything and only too willing to halt and order Balthazar to ask questions, they were a prod to curiosity.
“One would think,” he said, ‘that they were fleeing from the sack of a
city, but that they go in both directions. Ask him toask who they are and where they are going.” The first question Balthazar could answer immediately.
“They are all Jews,” he said and hoped that Caspar would be content with that, and not insist that he stop and ask questions and thus provoke Melchior even more. But Caspar insisted; so Balthazar gathered as much information as he could in the shortest possible time, and reported.
“They are going back to their places of birth in order to be taxed.”
“By whose order?”
“By the order of the Emperor, Caesar Augustus.” Caspar looked at the throng, moving this way and that, and gave his verdict.
“Then he is a fool as well as a rogue. What a way to organise taxation! In Jexal, when I…” He paused, on the brink of betraying himself.
“When I lived there the whole tax system was reorganised from top to bottom. People were ordered to stay in their homes and the officials went round. It was quiet and orderly. And all over in a day.” He looked more closely at the people, finding, on the whole, little likeness to the one Jew he knew.
“A miserable-looking lot,” he commented. Melchior passed this remark on to Balthazar—as he passed, almost without thinking, these days, any remark made by either man.
Balthazar said, “I think they are unhappy. Not only about the new taxing. The believe that they are being counted and that is displeasing to their God. I was once well acquainted with a Jew who told me many interesting things. One of their own kings numbered them, long ago and their God was angry and killed many people—to put the numbers wrong again!” He allowed his voice to be tinged by ridicule, remembering the time when he had been anxious to give himself to Eliezer’s God and been rejected with contempt.
“If they really believed that, or in their God,” Caspar said, thinking of the old carpet merchant’s honesty over the purple dye, ‘they would rebel.”
“Rome is mighty,” Balthazar said, “Also the Jews have no leader.” A long-buried loyalty to Eliezer, and the memory of the stories with which that fellow-slave had entertained him, made him say, “When they had leaders -they fought well and won many battles.”
Melchior, remembering that fantastic horoscope that he had worked out at the top of his tower in a long ago Spring, said:
“The child who is about to be born might lead them. If only we arrive in time. Which we may not if you insist upon wasting time in Jerusalem!”
The three-cornered argument then began again and went on until, just north of Jericho, something happened to give Caspar a temporary ascendancy.
Lately they had abandoned any attempt to sleep in they were too crowded and uncomfortable. This was well-watered country and it was easy enough to let the camels drink their fill at some public watering place, and Balthazar could shop, well and shrewdly, for what food they needed; he could also cook. Sometimes the nights were chilly but an unspoken competition in hardiness prevented any one of the three from complaining of that.
On this evening, when Caspar pointed out as tie so often did, that the camels were exhausted, and the truth of that was apparent even to Melchior, they were on a narrow road which wound in and out and up and down in bare, hilly country. The road, for once, was clear—which made Melchior all the more annoyed by the necessity to halt at all; none of the three was informed enough to know that this stretch of road was notorious and that nobody in his right senses would be anywhere on or near it after sunset. Looking for a place to camp they came upon a break in the rocks which for a long time had enclosed the road like a wall and Balthazar, the one who felt the cold most, and also regarded himself as being responsible for most of their practical arrangements, pointed out that if they pulled off the road here, they would be sheltered by the rocks on either side; that he could hear the noise of one of those curious little waterfalls which in this country appeared from nowhere and disappeared again; that this would, indeed, be an ideal place in which to spend the night. Melchior, raising his eyes to the heights on either side the little opening, agreed that it would be a good place; on either side the rocks rose sheer, unclimbable,
butstraight ahead was a steep incline, covered with scree up which he could make his way and so gain a clear view of the sky. Caspar, though accustomed to flat, open spaces, relished the loneliness of the place, and looking at the hard, inhospitable terrain, felt respect for the men whom Benjamin had mentioned to him: the nameless men, the nightwalkers, the rebels who had taken to the hills.
Earlier in the day Balthazar had bought some goat meat and he was soon busy, making a fire and rigging up his makeshift spit. He now carried the two forked sticks and the cross-piece with him, having learned that there were places where one could not count on finding even a bush. He was glad that the duty of provisioning the party had fallen to him, for Melchior and Caspar, though willing enough to eat when food was handy, never gave it much thought beforehand. It seemed, at times, as though they were trying to outdo one another in their indifference to it. Balthazar, for the most of his life, had been accustomed to regular meal-times; even when the Lady’s temper had resulted in a reduction of her slaves’ rations, there had always been something to eat when meal-times came round. And he had enough to contend with in the mere riding; he never complained, was never the one to suggest a halt, he had no intention of being a drag on his company; but the stiffness in his fingers had often, by the end of the day, communicated itself to every bone in his body and sometimes when he alighted from his camel the whole earth would swing and sway and reel around him.