Chapter 29

And then there was that first visit from Mencius. Peter loved to recall it. One morning, late in the autumn, Mencius had come. He hadn’t said how he had discovered Peter’s whereabouts, but here he was in the Catacombs—a Roman Proconsul! The frightened refugees had scurried away in the darkness. But Peter had had no fear. He had heard all about Mencius: Voldi had told him.

‘Let us go outside,’ Mencius had suggested. ‘It will do you good to breathe some fresh air.’

‘Will it not endanger you, sir,’ Peter had inquired, ‘if you should be seen talking with a Christian?’

‘No,’ Mencius had declared. ‘The patrols are not interested in my goings and comings. I talk with whom I please. The Emperor might not approve of my being here in friendly converse with you, Peter; but he cannot dispose of me. I know how to deal with the copper-miners in Cyprus. I know the ruffians who run the salt-caravans from Engedi to Gaza. I know what is going on in Joppa and Caesarea…Come—we have much to talk about.’

So they had gone up the narrow ladder and had sat down under the locust trees.

‘How do you find it possible to live down there in those caverns?’ Mencius had wanted to know.

‘Because I must!’ Peter had replied. ‘It is not so difficult to do what one must do.’ And then he had told the Proconsul about the little groups of Christians who met secretly in their own houses until the patrols suspected them, and they would flee to these labyrinthian caverns for safety, frightened, beaten, sick, and hungry; and of the secret exits from which the more fearless ones emerged to procure food from the peasant farmers and cheap fish from the smaller markets along the waterfront. ‘I pray with them and minister to their sick ones, Mencius. I offer words of comfort when they die—and beside their graves…And I bid them be of good cheer, for the Kingdom is coming!’

‘It must take great faith, Peter,’ mused Mencius, ‘to believe that the Kingdom of the Christos is coming when everything they had is lost.’

‘That’s when our faith is strongest, Mencius,’ Peter had replied; ‘when there is nothing else to lean upon. The Spirit of God is very real—and near—to these distressed ones… You remember how you felt on the Day of Pentecost? We have Pentecost every day in the Catacombs!’

After a little silence Peter had asked Mencius to tell him about himself, and his recent journeys; and the Proconsul had had quite a story to tell. He had just returned from the usual round: Cyprus, Caesarea, Joppa, Gaza, Engedi; and had ridden up into Arabia to see Voldi.

‘Is he making a good King?’ Peter had wanted to know.

‘The best ever!’ Mencius had declared. ‘The Arabians love him.’

‘Married?’

‘No—and perhaps it’s for the best. Voldi rarely shows up at the King’s Encampment. He spends his time visiting the tribesmen. Arabia has never been so completely unified…By the way, he told me a good story. I know he would want you to hear it, for you were on the ship when the word came that Prince Deran had been assassinated. The secret band of young caravan-guards, who called themselves the “Sons of Ishmael,” drew lots to see which one should attend to the Prince. Old Jeshri, their leader, filled a quiver with thirty arrows, the exact number of all men present at the meeting. Only one arrow was armed with steel. Jeshri hung the quiver on a tree and each man as he rode past took an arrow.’

‘So no one of them knew which man was appointed to kill the Prince?’

‘Right…But, afterwards, one of the men who had aspired to be their leader remembered that old Jeshri himself had not taken an arrow from the quiver, and he talked about it to Jeshri’s disparagement…Voldi told me that when the old man lay sick unto death he asked them all to leave his bedside except the King, and to him he said, “I have been maligned for refusing to take one of the arrows. I want you to know, sire, that I did take one of the arrows before I hung the quiver on the tree. It was the steel-tipped arrow. When I am gone, sire, will you tell my brave lads?”‘

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