Chapter 20

‘Whip him—and let him go!’ shouted Antipas.

A storm of protest rose. One enraged zealot mounted a chair and screamed, ‘To death with him! Nothing less!’ The crowd yelled its approval. Antipas held up a hand for silence, and the place grew suddenly quiet again.

‘It is not in the province of this court,’ he exclaimed, ‘to put any man to death.’

‘Yaa!’ shouted the man on the chair. ‘You sentenced the Baptizer to death—for no reason at all!’ The noise was deafening now…The Tetrarch, clearly frightened, wheeled about and disappeared through the small door behind him. The prisoner was roughly jerked from his mimic throne and a thick-set brute with a bull-whip began lashing him cruelly.

The Proconsul’s impulse was to leave the disgusting spectacle, but the exit was already blocked and he stood aside to wait. Pandemonium had broken loose in the vicinity of the magistrate’s elaborately carved bar. The august tribunal was being wrecked. The Tetrarch would presently learn his rating in the opinion of Jerusalem’s unwashed and irresponsible. Costly tapestries were being torn down, broadswords were thrust through the upholstery of the furniture, pikes were gouged into the exquisite mosaic portraits. Even the haughty face of Emperor Tiberius had lost an eye (not that the Proconsul cared a damn).

Pressing into the rioting pack that funnelled through the door, Mencius struggled out into the street. A score of the more audacious were attempting to tear down the hoarding and scaffolding from a building under repair across the street; and the legionaries, feeling that enough was enough, were cracking heads and making arrests. The rioters had been free to do what they liked to the inside of the Embassy, but they were not at liberty to set the building on fire.

With no taste for getting himself involved in the brawl, Mencius walked hurriedly north to the avenue of the Insula and turned to the right. Once away from the sight and sound of the frenzied mob, his thoughts turned toward the doomed Galilean. He wished he might have heard the man speak. He had never seen anyone quite like him. Not much wonder that Voldi had been impressed. It was a face that puzzled you, difficult to assign to any category. A profound student? A dreamer? What manner of man was he? A ‘Torchbearer’? No; Voldi had been clearly mistaken about that. A Torchbearer, with the mind and will of a Plato, a Socrates, or an Aristotle, would never have got himself into such an appalling predicament. He might be a teacher, but that didn’t mean that he was a Torchbearer. Whatever light he had thrown upon the path of a few people of the Palestinian provinces would be snuffed out before another sunset. Whose lamp—in backward little Galilee—would shed a reflected glow beyond the borders of his own community?

Anyhow, mused Mencius bitterly, as he moved wearily up the long slope toward Levi’s Inn, the human race didn’t want any light; it didn’t deserve any light; and it would never be granted any light—certainly not in his time!…The world was a disgrace to its maker, whoever he was; or to its makers, whoever they were! It was a wonder it had survived so long in its brutalities. Brutalities? That was not the right word for it. The brutes carried themselves with some dignity!