Melchior said, “Take me to your chief. Your khan. Your head man,” and realised with a lurch of the heart that nobody understood him. Once again dependent upon Balthazar whose advice he had disregarded, once again wasting time. He looked at the star, moving, moving,… In a thin voice he said, “Balthazar, speak to them. Ask for the head man.” Balthazar said, “We ask to have speech with your officer.”
“You shall have it,” one of the soldiers said.
“Here he is, now.” Caepio, who, with his century, had come to do a two months’ tour in Bethlehem and had arrived a few days before, came out, treading heavily.
He was in a cheerless mood, missing his drinking companions, the lively girls he knew, the opportunities for amusement that Jerusalem offered. Here there was nothing except duty, boredom and Vatinius, the permanent
centurion-in-chargewho acted as though he owned the place. Caepio knew all the gossip about this man; he had a blunt tongue and an inflexible nature, and so, though an experienced and reliable soldier, had missed the aim of all centurions—to be primus pilus, and had instead been promoted downstairs and put in charge of this dismal backwater. Caepio had expected to find an embittered, disappointed man, and since he himself was a man with a grievance, he had expected that they would have a good deal in common. But he found a contented man, apparently unaware of how he’d been pushed into a backwater, apparently pleased with himself and his job, holding himself a little aloof, and on good terms with several Jews. There’d been, so far, none of the ” long, grumbling sessions which Caepio had anticipated; nor had there been the one thing that compensated for the dullness of the place, leisure. Vatinius went about finding jobs to keep everyone busy, and if he couldn’t find one, he’d invent one, like a captious housewife.
That was bad enough; but this evening Caepio felt that he had been insulted. A visitor had arrived, not a Jew, a Roman, with a train of slaves, including a skilled cook, and Vatinius had not invited Caepio to join them at dinner.
So the centurion was in no mood to be sympathetic to three men who had come, after dark, and from the rear, on to barracks property. Balthazar did his best, explaining how they came to be trespassing, assuring Caepio of their harmlessness, begging to be allowed to proceed. He was lavish with the word ‘sir’ and when that did no good, substituted ‘lord’. All to no avail. Had they been three stray sheep Caepio would have impounded them, if only for the pleasure of proving to Vatinius that while he was feasting—the gentleman’s dinner had smelt delicious—his sentries had been alert, he had been available and prompt to act. He could see himself, in the morning, saying, “Oh, by the way …” and relating what had happened. Vatinius would be almost certain to ask, “Why didn’t you inform me?” and the answer to that was civil and correct, yet conveying a slight rebuke, “I thought you would not wish to be disturbed, sir.” He issued his order.
“Search them.”
Melchior, who had nothing to hide, only understood the order when he saw a soldier advance upon Balthazar; then he cried:
“This is intolerable! Even the cow-worshippers and the mare-milk drinkers never treated me thus.”
Caspar did not understand the order either, but the action spoke for itself. His knife! He carried it, in its sheath, stuck into the waistband of his baggy trousers, inside the belt. He drew in his stomach muscles sharply and under pretence of a willing raising of his hands, knocked his wrist against his leather jacket and the knife fell into the pouch where his trousers overhung his boots. He had been standing watching the soldiers with an unwilling admiration; they seemed well disciplined, they looked hard and tough and clean. But when the soldier slapped his hands under his arm, around the waist and at the knees and said, “Nothing, sir’ he thought—These people can be fooled, too! And he felt happier.
“What about the camels?”
“Fodder-bags, sir. And … these.”
“Balthazar,” Melchior said, ‘tell them not to touch my possessions. Is there no law in this country?”
Balthazar said, “Lord, they are the humble tools of his trade. Without them he is ruined.”
“You’ll all be ruined in the morning,” Caepio said.
“All right; take them away. Lock them up, separately.”
Melchior cast a despairing look at the star and began to protest, angrily, in his own tongue. Caspar said:
“There are too many of them,” and he was speaking to Melchior and himself. He had quickly calculated their chances of escape by violence and seen that there was no hope even had his knife been ready in his hand. A good soldier must take chances of course, but part of being a good soldier was knowing when you were hopelessly outnumbered. And to give no sign of dismay; so he stalked, a little more arrogantly than usual, as he was led away. Melchior went on protesting until he realised that by doing so he was inviting rough handling; then he subsided, knowing that a wise man bows to the inevitable once he
knowsthat it is inevitable. And this, he had, in a way, brought on himself; he had insisted, against advice, in riding across country. He called to Balthazar : “You were right, “I was wrong. I am sorry.” Balthazar let himself be led away like a sheep.
Even the indignity of being searched had not prepared Gas-par for the sheer horror of what happened to him next. They pushed him into a tiny space, nothing more than a hole in the wall; six feet wide, less than six feet long. It was built of brick and whitewashed, and along its length there was a ledge, also of brick, upon which a man might lie or sit. Nothing else at all. When the door was closed he was walled in, and once he realised it he began to go mad. His own simple language had no word for the peculiar thing he suffered from, the mental quirk which made him feel uneasy when he rode into Jexal and even more uneasy when he entered the Palace, that made him prefer the Balcony Room to any other apartment, made him sleep—once he brought himself to sleep there—with the door and window of the bedchamber wide open. There was no torture that the Romans could have thought of that would have hurt, hurt, hurt so much as being shut in, in this tiny airless space.
For a time he went frantic, behaving much as a newly captured wild bird thrust into a small cage will behave. He tried to break out, throwing himself against the walls, against the door, against the built-in bench. He emitted loud hoarse cries. He beat his hands bloody, he bruised his shoulders, his elbows, his thighs. Then, spent, suffocating, about to die, he thought of his knife; better to slit your throat and die quickly than to suffer this torment and be stifled. One small remaining grain of sanity told him that this was a desperate remedy, was there no compromise? High up in the door was a grating, could he jump and set his fingers in it and push his nose close, breathe, control his panic, and live? Could he?
The grating was set at a level from which anyone in the , passage, which was higher than the cell, could look in upon the prisoner. Caspar jumped and jumped, several times missing his hold; but at last he managed the jump-and-clutch that was necessary and had his fingers through the grating and hung for a moment against the door, like a carcase suspended from one limb. Then he tautened his bruised muscles and had just succeeded in bringing his face level with the grating when the guard, attracted by the noise, noticed the protruding, clutching fingers and dealt them a paralysing blow with the flat of his sword. The fingers loosed their hold and inside the cell Caspar fell like a sack, striking his head on the floor.
And he was back in Jexal, easy in the saddle, riding in with Kalim and Lakma and several others, on a sunny morning along the wide street, dappled with shade from the trees, all in flower. Their water bags were empty and he was thirsty, looking forward to a long cool drink. They came to the Fountain-of the Maidens, and there Ilya was waiting, with a great, two-handled silver cup in her pale hands. As he came level with her she offered him the cup, and this time there was no accident; he took the cup in his hands and drank and drank and drank..
..
Outside, the guard thought—That was the noisy one, and I’ve quietened him.
Balthazar, pushed into an identical cell, went and sat on the built-in bed, and thought—This is the end!