The word and the flesh (60)

It is not really the novel's 60th installment. I am in fact not sure which installment it is... but given the novel's fragmentary and jumbled up nature, I don't suppose it will make a whit of a difference in which order I present the letters of Khesroes to Markia, as long as I preserve the letters themselves in their entirety as written. So here are the two I was reading yesterday: letter the 11th and letter the 12th.

Wait, first we need a suitable picture. With a suitable caption, of course.

Opus tesselatum factum saeculo III post Christum natum

11

Is it true that you were not at all conceived to the repeat and breathless recitation of Quandocumque igitur nostros mors claudet ocellos accipe quae serues funeris acta mei? That Hiankintos found you three-year-old, cold and hungry, hugging a somewhat older boy, who was to grow up one day into the elusive Son of Vengeance? Were you his sister, Markia? Or were you two joined by accident, at the cross-roads of two paths of pain: orphancy and homelessness? Oh, upon the god of freedmen and men of mixed parentage, do I benefit richly from giving new year parties to Romans!


12

In a moment I’ll be leaving for Rome. Not alone: with Didia Klara and Numerianos. You will ask: perhaps orders have arrived from the kaisar altering my assigned place of residence and revoking Didia Klara’s exile? No. No such orders have come. Indeed, the exalted Septimios can at most open for us the portals of the Rome he rules, while our destination is the capital city of Kommodos, that city which still knew women-attorneys. It did not have as many of them then as it had had in the time of Hadrianos or the time of the first Antoninos; yet, as you moved – mournfully, I am sure – from the bed of Humidios Kvadratos to the bed of the kaisar, one could still hear in the basilicas defense speeches made by three or four proponents of the theory of the equality of genders – or at least their equality in the field of defense of justice and preservation of the art of rhetoric.

Yet, within eight short years, two or three more believers of this thesis let themselves be convinced that these fields, too, ought to be the exclusive preserve of men. The clinching argument may have been ridicule; or threat; or perhaps the awareness that a woman may well earn her daily bread in the legal profession – perhaps even her daily onion, too, if with some difficulty; but she will most certainly not earn her olive oil; and even less likely her wine; not to mention an occasional small bauble with which to grace her hair, neck, dress or shoe. But one woman could not be chased away from her lectern, not even by you: the ridicule did not bother her, the threats did not scare her, and as for income… – she had the wherewithal with which to bribe all the judges Urbis, and, if need be, Orbis, the most powerful of them all, your lover, the purple-wearer, included.

She did not bribe them, or rather, she says she did not; and perhaps she tells the truth: her father, the richest man of Rome, had in his time not been as rich as he had been vain; perhaps, taking after him, she was vain enough rather to lose a case than to owe its success to anything other than her own – never mind how true or imagined – capacity to convince the judges regarding the merits of her defense.

Of course, the fact that no one has ever tried to bribe her proves nothing – beyond the fact that Romans can’t think. Which they will one day regret; and which some regret already – Numerianos, for instance. Yesterday, during our lesson, his voice was shaken repeatedly by violent sobs; two hours later he was still reading this most amazing, most unbelievable book De spectaculis. And he interrupted his reading with frequent wild -- indeed, animal-like -- guttural cries of “Tear out his tongue!” and “Cut off his arms!” and “Gouge out his eyes!”; and yet there is so much intellectual honesty in his love of knowledge, that through all this thicket of his barely suppressed tears and through all his guttural cries of anger a whisper cleared its path towards his lips, a whisper of deep admiration, bordering on humble submission: “What a master of words! What an architect of sentences! How easily he managed to chain to his chariot Kikero, Julios Kaisar, Apuleios, Juvenal! How he manages to drive this quadriga! How proudly he races towards the victor’s podium to receive there, from the hands of Christ, the laurels of a sportsman above all sportsmen: the laurels of Christ himself!”

An d yet, if only Romans could think, De spectaculis could never have been written! Indeed, had but one been able to think – that fellow with three L’s in his name, your one-time companion in expeditions towards triangular cities of red-bearded monkeys… Of course, there had once been a moment when he did begin to think… it came the day after Klara had submitted her motion in the case “Klaudia the British versus her step-brother” the motion that the investigating committee call Hiakintos as witness. Yet, in his ruminations this Roman did not move beyond the conviction that res priuata could not tempt the daughter of Didios Julianos… which done, he lost his way and went aimlessly in the darkest wilderness... Perhaps only to accuse her father of crimen lesae maiestatis? Or to send an assassin to kill her?

A Greek would have done differently; too bad your father was by then dead! For he, familiarized with all the aspects of the case and after some moments of reflection would surely have asked: “Is there a thing which Didia Klara desires very much but which may not be bought for all the treasures in the world?” But the Roman thought of Livios was not capable of reaching such sophisticated heights… and so you have De spectaculis!

In case I forget, would you, Markia, please ask Alexandra to remind me when I return from Rome: I intend to ask Herais whether she knows De spectaculis and whether she continues to think herself capable of being wholly satisfied with the possession of the chariot of the eparchos of Egypt for a thousand human years and the whole eternity of the otherworldly time thereafter? For it now appears that an even better deal can be obtained for the same price: such as, for instance, the harnessing of… the chariot’s owner (instead of merely some purple swans) and the driving of him in the arena for a thousand years…

I wonder what Tatian-Taddeo-Adonai might say about De spectaculis? Would it be again something on the order of “Did you create the eparchos of Egypt?” Perhaps this time he might say more? For instance: “Florens Tertulian says that Christos promises this and that, but what assurance do we have that Christos is in fact speaking through Tertulian’s lips?”

I should like him to say this. I am very disturbed by the image of the amphitheater with Christ reigning upon its podium, while in the arena are tortured to death (and yet unable to die) for a thousand years consules, praefecti, procuratores. What a primitive mind has this master of words! They say that it is not written anywhere that Christ has ever laughed while he remained clad in his human body; but perhaps now he laughs at this supposed worshipper and defender of his? How I wish he may! Again my words of a few moments ago are clearly proven: Romans cannot think! An excellent lawyer that he is, and a brilliant writer, yet Tertulian is unable to penetrate through mere appearances to the essence of the obvious truth: when it comes to the science of the soul, nowhere can one find as much wisdom as in the commandment: “When your brother strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left”.

Though perhaps I am mistaken? Klaudios Julian is also Roman, yet he appears to understand the profundity of this commandment, however vaguely. It is simply impossible to explain otherwise his enthusiasm for the idea of employing the brotherhood of Klaudioses in the defense of the Third Race against both the anger of the street and the cunning plots of the Civilian Association for the Combating of Godlessness. Of course, all of his enthusiasm will be for nothing, should Klara go into the street with her story that you murdered principem Romanorum et omnium gentium in your role of a fanatical Jewess avenging the destruction of the Zion temple. It is precisely in order to prevent this deadly snake from crawling into the Alexandrian street that Klaudios Julian, and Klara, are sending me to the Rome of eleven years ago...

I am very curious about this sojourn. It should work. If, as the High One claimed (echoing Gautama Buddha) -- and as Samgila now claims echoing the High One – all time is illusion, then surely so must be all space. And so, now, watch this, Markia: without leaving the table, without standing up, without even interrupting my writing – here I am in Rome! And I am now ascending the steps – I must be very careful, they are chipped and worn out – (Numerianos has once fallen on precisely this section of the staircase, between the fourth and fifth stories – fallen and hurt his knee). How strange that Didia Klara has never suffered a mishap here! Not even on the day on which Tertulian pushed her down the stairs while yelling at her: “You Babylonian whore!” Indeed, what a sight this must have been for that whole story! I should gladly dive into that day, into that hour. Alas, I am in a hurry to get to another evening, some six months earlier, into that moment when, undressed by Numerianos for the benefit of Tertulian, Didia Klara asked her dresser, willing but unfree:

“Is it true, my dear grammarian, that Vergilios Maron was able to see into the far away future? And that he recorded what he saw in his great work, twisting his words somewhat in order to hide their meaning?”

“I do not know what you are talking about” mumbles darkly Numerianos, checking once more whether his bed – his only nighttime companion for so many nights – might be sufficiently comfortable for the two lovers.

“I shall give you an example. But first rub my feet, they are so cold... No, no – first the right one. You liar! You want to cast a spell upon me… you want to prevent the African from being taken in by me… well, listen: what is the name of the Greek who, in the first book of the Aeneid lies to the Trojans regarding the true purpose for which the wooden horse had been built?”

“Sinon” mumbles Numerianos even more darkly, not raising either his sight or his hands from the instep which seems to taunt him: “Will you dare to kiss me?”

“Precisely. Sinon. But did Vergilios put an n in the place of an m?”

“I do not follow” answers submissively Numerianos, addressing himself to the instep rather than the excited voice.

“I always knew you were thick, though all around you always say “What a learned man!” Sinon – Simon, do you now understand? It is written “Sinon”, but it should be read -- “Simon”. The Jew Simon, otherwise known as Peter. That Peter to whom it was said: “whatever you dissolve on earth, shall remain dissolved in heaven…” and “to you I give the keys of the kingdom”…
“Who said that to him?”

“The Jewish Agamemnon, of course. Jesus. Joshua, Iozue – I am not too sure of his real name. He who twice performed silly magic tricks with the sun, as if it were but a red copper serving dish: once he stopped it, while he killed others; and then again later, when he was killing himself and threw a darkness upon his face at the moment of dying…”

“Troy! Judea? Where is Judea! And where is Troy!”

“Nothing… You know nothing! You do not know history… Who killed Ulysses?”

“His own son, born of Kirke, Telegonos.”

“And whom did he lead?”

“Some pirates.”

“Some! Some! Let go of my foot. Hear me? Our Eminence is approaching… If he only performs in bed like he does at the lectern… Go away now. And do not return until the first watch…”

“You were supposed to tell me whom Telegonos was leading… You will tell the two of us now.”

“I know what you want. Oh, yes, I do know you well. And no, you have not earned it yet…”

You will say, Markia, that it is no journey. That it is but empty talk. But I repeat, word for word, only as much as was said in that apartment on that night: first, I was told it by Klara herself; later, Numerianos confirmed everything. Yet, what is most interesting to me in this conversation is that Didia Klara’s banter had been confirmed to me, so to speak a priori, by Rachela Erato. I did not know then as much as the existence of Didia Klara and Numerianos… why, I had not even met Klaudios Julian at the time… and I certainly have not heard about Vergilios Maron…

Now, in the second year of our pretend-marriage, Rachela Erato began to read Greek with great enthusiasm. The memoirs of Herod Antipatride were not enough for her; she moved on to Apolodoros the Artemisian; and then to Appian. Both – the very same copies – I still have here with me now. Before I began to write to you, I looked into them frequently. These are notebooks, not scrolls; and every time I open Appian’s Syrian Wars, I always chance on the same place: the beginning of the Forty-Sixth chapter. There is a print of Rachela’s three bloodied fingers there: she had once sat down to read immediately after having robbed some caravan, without as much as having washed her hands first. She usually cut the throats of her bound prisoners with a short fruit knife… having first released one of them, of course, so that he may bear witness to wherever his caravan had set out from (and all places in between) – bear witness to the great and glorious power of the God of Gods who had donated all the silks of the world, and all her spices, to the… not so much descendants of Abraham as his adopted descendants… those who have not submitted their necks to the yoke of Edom, but who, like sharp-horned mufflons, disport themselves in the freedom of the highlands, and praise the Lord of Even Greater Heights by jumping upon the necks of the Edomites… necks weighted with the goods of the East and West, South and North… goods which are all the rightful possession of Israel.

“Something isnt’t right here”, I said once to Rachela. “Why has not your God of Gods warned those people whom you call the Edomites that everything they possess, and everything they will ever possess, is really the exclusive property of Israel? You can’t possibly tell me, and if you do, I will refuse to believe you, that your God of Gods is less just than the King of Kings… Yet, Vologases III, making my father the feudatory of Elamis, had warned him clearly: “You receive it for only as long as you live… without the right to pass it onto your sons...”

Just as Klara answered Numerianos, so did Rachela now answer me: “I have always known you were thick, even if everyone always says about you that you are oh-so-very learned…”

And then she began to explain to me how Yahwe had warned the Chinese by way of a parable; and Indians by way of the Jewish script; wanred both to the effect that everything that seems to belong to them, in truth belongs only to Israel. The argument made a huge impact upon me at the time, I listened to it with ever increasing amazement and respect; but as great as my admiration for Rachela had been then, so much more silly she seemed to me years later when, already in the Kushan state, I learned the secret of that Chinese prophecy; and the secret of the similarity of the script called kharoshti to Hebrew letters; similarity which, if it at all establishes anyone’s right to the riches of India, it hundredfold more so supports the rights of Ardashir than of Rachela; and thereby my own right to these riches, since Ardashir himself belongs to me, and with him all of his possessions; belongs to me and will continue to belong to me for as long as I please, regardless of Alexandra’s whims.

Returning, however, to the strange similarity of views between Klara and Rachela: they both hold that Rome, Troy and Edom are but three children of the same ancestor, while Jews and Spartans are branches of another tribe. Hence Rachela’s constant readings in the lives of kings Agis and Cleomenes. And Klara’s firm belief that Telegonos, son of Kirke and Ulysses, was leading a band of Edomites, when he clashed with his own unrecognized father at sea, who, by the way, was on his way to Judea, to render help to Moses. All of these are very interesting things; and may seem even more interesting, if I could afford at present the luxury of occupying my mind with anything other than the mystery of your origin. For if you are indeed a foundling, and not an incarnation of one half of a love wish of two Seleukian Greeks, then the last twenty years of my life have been but a confused dream, and all the heads in my room may laugh at me in derision. And most sarcastically, of course, the head of Rachela Eratona: for I will have escaped rendering services to one Jewess – to what end? Only to lay them at the feet of another Jewess; a foundling into the bargain!

Yet, here I am seized by doubts: after all, the Second Race – like the Third – does not have among her customs child-abandonment. Yet, the little boy in whose arms you were supposedly discovered by Hiakintos carried upon his body undoubtful signs of having had close familiarity with a stone knife. Is there really no way to penetrate this mystery, to shine light upon it? Herais says: “Oh, but there is a way: Christ will return and raise Hiakintos from the dead, and then we shall know everything.” But when will he return? Is it not enough that half my life already is subject of the ridicule of six women’s heads? And whence the certainty that he will return? He said: “it is but a short time before you see me”. But everything depends on the question of who he was. Alexandra says: god. Theodotos: man. Herais: both this and that. But even if I assume that Herais is right, not either of the other two, yet this does not help me in my calculations as to when this arrival could possibly be expected. By saying “a short time” did he speak as man, or as god? If as man, then he should have returned a long time, a very long time ago; but if as god? Oh, then he may not return yet for a million years and no one should have the right to accuse him of making false promises. Herais, of course, repeats her story: that he promised his second coming as both god and man. Do you understand what you are trying to say? I ask her. She says she understands. I ask her to help me understand then. To which, she:

“Can you, prince, make a blind man see these beautiful women’s heads on the walls of your room? Forgive me, I misspoke. Not a blind man, but a man with cataracts on both his eyes?”

I: I can. I will bring and pay a surgeon. He will remove the cataracts.

She: The surgeon is waiting for you. He is waiting for you, even though you have not yet called him.

I understand what she is trying to say. But does she not realize that by saying it she only confirms the whisperings of the most determined enemies of the Third Race? That there is some kind of secret knowledge, which they reveal to no one who does not join? Yet I, however much I would like to plumb the secret of this “short time”, will not join them; I will not join them for two reasons. The first does not matter now -- for now, at least -- but the second I can reveal to you: I did not allow the posthumous thoughts of the High One, or its proponents, or Samgila and her circle to pull me onto the fourfold path of Buddha; all the less can I forget, for all my admiration, indeed, all my worship for your divine ally, the withered fig tree; or the terror of the pigs rushing towards the abyss. He created them as well as he created me and – the hippopotamus and crocodile? Well, first, I repeat what I had once said to Rachela already: I do not know who created me, you, the High One, crocodile, hippopotamus, pigs and the fig tree. But if I did know, I would ask the creator, whoever he was: “Did you make us so that we could be your toys? Why? So that you may be amused by your own powers, right?” Of course, I would not expect an answer: many who have asked this question broke down at this point: they believed that they deserved an answer; and when they received none they all drew but one conclusion: who are they to deserve the answer? Who are they even to ask? But I will do differently: having asked my question, I will add, all in the same breath: Was not the legless Achilles a greater master than you? He took great care to make sure that the toys he created could never ask him the question: Why did you make us? Or: to what end?

One could, of course, like one of the agents of Felix, join the Third Race formally, but say to oneself, one’s employer, and one’s gods: “I am only pretending. I am fooling them.” I would ask such a man: whom do you mean by “them”? Christians? Or Christ, also? For if he means to deceive the god as well as the men, I should advise him to be careful: imagine a dog belonging to Klaudios Julian pushing in among my dogs towards the food I give them, trying to convince me that he’d come with me from beyond the Tigris! But even if Theodotus were right, and Christ were not at all divine, only the greatest of all men who have ever lived – that is hardly reason enough to think oneself justified in deceiving Christians by fraudulent joining. What might the king of Atropatene say if Rachela, entering into the archery and singing games, were to shoot four arrows into the target, and reach for the luth four times, even though she’d been informed that each contestant is allowed three arrows and three songs? Would the king not ask: Is there not in your language, o knight, a word for “Respect”?

No, Markia: it is hard for me to resign myself to the possibility that I may learn the truth of who you really are only from Hiakintos raised from the dead. “A short time” may well mean a million years and I – am in a hurry. Are you curious: hurry to what? Why, to laugh back at the six heads. Or at least one of them.

You are asking me something else, are you not? Is it not – how I liked the Rome of Kommodos? Imagine this: far less than I had expected. I was in the amphitheater, I saw you in the disguise of an Amazon, standing next to your purple-clad lover. I had the impression that Kommodos had made fools of you all – of all the well born Romans as well as you personally. You thought that his performances in the arena were signs of madness – you were pained by it, you bewailed it; yet I think these performances were proof of extraordinary cunning, not madness. How could you – you of all people – not have realized the same thing? But perhaps I am mistaken? Perhaps you did realize it? Perhaps this is precisely why you killed him? Not because you could no longer stand the ridicule and the shame to which he exposed himself, not because you loved him, but because you felt you owed him unfaltering loyalty and faithfulness because he – loved you; you, the only person under the planets, other than himself. Oh, how I like such beautiful stories, filled with noble sentiments! But, as legless Achilles used to say, the most beautiful, the most edifying story about a lion will not convince its listeners to enter into a lion’s cave. And therefore neither will I, while trying to plumb the mystery of your origins, follow the trail of your fairy-tale duties of loyalty and gratitude towards Kommodos. Rather, I will sell to the Son of Vengeance, or, as he now styles himself, the Son of the Blind Woman, the right to hide here. I know that by doing so, I take a serious risk. But the sword which might cut my neck one day, remains yet in its scabbard, while the Son of Vengeance has a sword on his neck already. He was five and a half years old when (if one is to believe Klaudia and Klara) Hiakintos found you two; at such age one understands and knows a lot. And more: one remembers long afterwards what one has experienced and known at such an age. Let him pay for his hiding with the truth – the whole truth – about himself and – you.

The Word and The Flesh (9)

Parthian archer, Palazzo Madama, Turin.

I know: you'll say that this is not our main theme for you; that you ordered me to take the quill into my hand so that I may justify myself, not so that I may instruct others. It's an old Roman trick, that, well known to us, Parthians: "It is meet to bury the battle dead"! Well, let us bury them, then. But can we for a moment leave the corpses of my relations with Rachela Eratona, with Samgila, and with the gods and anti-gods who in turn blessed these unions or frowned upon them -- leave these corpses, I say, lying in peace upon the bier? After all, the very involvement of beings of divine nature in the progress and dissolution of these unions will prevent their corpses from rotting too quickly. But nothing divine permeates, or even shines its light upon the most curious case of Alexandra's marriage to Achilles, son of Kornelios. You'll say -- both of you will -- that its corpse has been buried. Has it? Really? It's strange, most strange. When, would you say, the burial took place? In the first decade of Apelaios, which month here is called Atyros? That is to say nearly two weeks ago? My dear Markia, do not believe it. The interment has not taken place. The stench of the corpse can still be smelled, though, I must confess, its smell is most unusual for a dead body. You know this stench -- I believe that ten years ago you compared it to the smell of dried up apple rinds soaked in cedar resin and sprinkled with spicy wine. At this very moment I can smell this mixture of scents very clearly because I have leaned my ruby-flamed inkwell against that can which you had once received from me along with the shoes of princess Kaliope and those six beards which at that time so much amused you.

I had never guessed that the can might return to me in any other way but along with all your earthly possessions (which had been your father's before you). Yet, it returned to me alone. Empty. For six days now I have believed that on the night which the Romans call New Year's Eve, you gave poison to Komodos Kaisar; and if so, then it follows that everything else which Klaudia of Britain and Alexandra, especially Alexandra, have told me about that night, and what is confirmed by the official protocol prepared from the meeting of the senatus in the wee hours of that night at the turning point of old and new year, must be true...

You did not put the entire content of that can into Kaisar's celebration goblet. What happened to the rest? It had to remain -- for years and years -- where you had left it; or else there would not now rise from that empty can towards my nostrils that scent of dried-up apple-rinds, soaked in cedar resin and sprinkled with spicy wine.

But Klaudios Iulianos did not find as much as a smidgen of the poison-weed in the can when he lifted it from the night-stand, upon which Achilles the Hermopolitan used to rest his toy-ship-making tools before going to sleep. And he found the can that very morning when Alexandra -- having spent a day, a night, and a day again with me -- revealed to me that you are nearby, that she's seeing you, but that I may not see you until the day we make our escape together. As she said those words, her husband was already dead. But he had been alive the night before when, in order to celebrate Alexandra's visit, I gave a feast for nine guests.

Six Romans had awaited that feast for a long time; indeed, they kept inviting themselves in. We Parthians are famous for our hospitality, which makes this a bit of a shame, does it not?, that I forced these would be guests to invite themselves in, or, indeed, even as much as made them wait. But they did not take offense; nor did they complain; because clearly they understood that if Alexandra was delaying her visit to her brother (a brother she had not seen for ten years), then obviously she really could not leave the side of her handicapped husband.

Yet, she left his side; and more: she left him without attendants, alone, for a whole night, the whole following day, and the whole following night again! And during this entire time she was the most extra-ordinarily tender sister to me: as tender as she'd never been before my parting from her in India. So tender, in fact, that even the Karen's daughter -- o wonder of wonders! -- began to act as if she were jealous; not to mention Samgila and Samasariston's niece!

What is more: Asmodeos, the Median demon feared and respected by the Jews, who lives in the ruby-flaming glove, and who did not yet at the time suspect that his dwelling place will be soon and unceremoniously turned into an ink well, rebelled in the name of her who had enslaved him -- my former wife, Rachela -- and in the name of defending her rights to me, rights which, at her father's command she had then renounced: he rebelled, I say, and -- the glove fell off the wall and onto the stone floor with a racket so great, as if the glove had had to its account slapped faces of Antiochoses, Tituses and Hadrians, and not just those of a few humble merchants.

What a total lack of logic on my part! I just wrote a moment ago: at her father's command, Rachela Erato divorced me and married, in Babylon, a wise man of Israel, whom she'd already born as many Symeons, Jacobs, Joanneses, Judahs, Naathaniels and Matheuses as have broken off from Israel two centuries ago in order to follow him, who has caused it that also west of the Hind walking on water becomes accessible to human-kind. And she bore those twelve -- as says Samasariston -- in great joy; whence thus comes this appeal to her rights, by way of the rebellion by her demon-servant, rights which she'd laid at the booted feet of a caravan robber? Has she loved me, after all? Poor creature! She'd always so wanted for good fortune and long life -- or so, at least, says Alexandra. What will happen now? There is but one hope: that the demons of Media take their oaths of loyalty as seriously as the sons of the grand priests of Persis. Ardashir hates me, but serves me faithfully, and until I grant him his freedom, will not betray any of my secrets even to his own father. May Asmodeos, subdued by Rachela, be as loyal to her as Ardashir is to me! If she -- after all -- does love me, and he knows about that love, he'd be a scoundrel, not a knight, to reveal this fact to any of his incorporeal friends.

Do not rejoice too early, my tender sister: the mounted archer only seemingly pointed his far-ranging weapon towards the auxiliary unit recruited in the ravines of the borderland desert; in fact, he still aims straight into the Roman quadrangle: Klaudios Iulian says that, without slightest doubt at all, he believes the murderer of Achilles to be -- you, Alexandra!

(Which ends Khesroes to Markia letter the first, earning you stars for such faithful reading, and me -- a well deserved break).

The Word and The Flesh (8)

.

I set out, on horse-back and armed, from the banks of the Tigris the day after a night-time conversation with my mother in which which she'd revealed to me something which she'd considered a secret -- "a grand, terrible secret", she said -- of her descent. I know today that this secret was merely supposed -- and may even have been invented; but, when one is sixteen-years-old one is not inclined to doubt the truth of his mother's confessions, especially if they appear to give rise to a very practical plan for the entire future of her first-born son. And I think it was this practical plan that I fled more than the secret itself. Taking, as I do, by way of my father, as ancestors a countless lot of patricides, filocides and fratricides, which I bear well, why should I not bear easily the knowledge that, by way of my mother, I descend from a madman who claimed that the Sun stood still while the Earth rotated around it with a double motion? But that I should dedicate my whole life to the discovery of a proof establishing my ancestor's theories from three hundred years ago -- as my mother seemed to intend for me -- this I could not help but rebel against!

When at last my mother fell asleep, near dawn, I burnt all our books on heavens and planets, called Samasariston (who was then my mother's major-domo) and said: "You wanted me to marry your niece when she grew up? Well, I will. I give you my word of an Arsakid. But we must flee from here immediately."

We fled: he carried his niece in a basket slung on his back. Only when we got to Babylon, he asked:

"Where to?"

I said:

"To my paternal grandfather."

"To the court of the King of Kings?"

"You have forgetten that I have two paternal grandfathers!"

"But that one is in China!"

"Yes. We're going to China."

Without a word of objection or doubt, he bought us passage on a boat sailing down the Euphrates to Kharax. But that very same day we were discovered, in our lodgings, by Babrios, who'd been my mother's guest for several months as a result of a letter of recommendation from the father of Alexandra. I was not surprised to see him.

"And what says my mother?" I asked, half-bitter and half-triumphant.

But I was to be bitterly disappointed. My mother was not -- it turned out -- in despair. On the contrary. She was very pleased at my enthusiasm for the theories of Seleukos the Mathematician, which, she assumed, was what compelled me to leave her house in such a haste, without even bidding her good-bye, in order to find such a proof as may turn his theories into axioms.

At the time I knew by heart the so-called testament of one of my paternal grandfathers addressed to me by name. Though today I could not possibly repeat it word for word, I do know now something I did not know then: I know from which work he'd copied, word for word, those words in his testament which made upon me the strongest impression; those words which convinced me (they above all else) that He -- forgive me if I call him so -- would welcome me with his arms wide-open because I was a refugee: refugee fleeing from the feverish blabberings of mathematicians.

How wonderfully happy I was then in my naivete!

Today I know that that particular passage of Madshkima cannot protect young minds from the feverish blabberings of mathematicians. Yet it protected my grandfather, you will no doubt remind me. Yes, it did. But he was a pure-blooded Parthian...

...which formulation -- as soon as I put in on the parchment -- appeared to me inept. Yet, I suppose, Babrios may have been right when, pressed by me, he confessed his lack of conviction that I may yet one day become a Greek writer. Because, you see, I did not mean to say that it is sufficient to be Parthian in order to find, upon the path taught by Gautama Buddha, that great gift of indifference regarding such concerns as tend to disquiet great mathematicians. My eldest half-brother, born from the Karen girl, the very same who so very smartly banged the great drum on the temporary bridge connecting Seleukia and Ktesiphon, thereby announcing the arrival of Vologases IV's security for his fulfillment of the recently concluded peace treaty, is a pure-blooded Parthian. I was very amused to see him on the bridge; but I would have been a thousandfold more amused to see him on the fourfold path taught by Gautama Buddha! What does he care about the Sun? Oh, yes, he does: he dreams to be the Sun's brother, not his nephew!

But he dreams it aloud; and his voice being no less mighty than the blows with which he summoned out of the drum upon the bridge the roar of a hippopotamus, I am very much concerned that at any moment now I might very well turn from the eleventh into the tenth son of the King of Kings. (Ten being an unlucky number is the only superstition which I have ever discovered in my mother, and the only one with which she'd infected me in my childhood).

Again I have lept away from my main topic, the way a horse-mounted archer leaps away from a Roman quadrangle, having loosed into it all his arrows. But ever since the day of the defeat of Likinios Krassos at Adiabenian Haran, the legiones forming the quadrangle can no longer allow themselves to trust that the archer, having exhausted his arrows, will not return to the battlefield the same day. For he will return well before you gather your dead back into the center of the foursquare, O Romans, and you half-Romans, and you Greeks who have learned to accept the Roman yoke! Attention, Markia! Here I return with my thought full of arrows, whose points have been hammered out of the conviction that neither you nor I must flee; and given wings by the belief that once you reveal yourself, you shall never have to seek for a hiding place again.

The Word and The Flesh (7)

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Parthian Empire, 1st century AD.

But I had to have an equerry also: and I did. Rachela Erato was still in mourning after her father and her second husband, but I asked three Jewish learned men of Susa whether they did not agree with me that it would be both wise and good -- and a clear sign of good will towards Rome -- to reveal to Marios Maksimos right there, on the bridge, the identity of the Son of Vengeance, the scourge of the uncircumcised in Palestine. As a result of this question, an insightful commentary on the appropriate passage of the Pentateuch (supposedly Mosaic) was speedily discovered, from which commentary it undoubtedly followed that Rachela was sinfully stretching the period of her mourning.

Threats, my dear Markia, are an amazing thing; all actions of the Son of Vengeance fill me with disgust, I admit, and I intend to deal with him in my own way one day, but I do not as a matter of habit reveal secrets with which I have been entrusted. This was obvious and clear to Rachela, but I assumed that she would not be able to convince of it the wise men of Israel, because they, ever since I staged in Harana Ezekiel's play about Moses, consider me capable of every iniquity; and thus, at the price of a mere threat I won the exceptional pleasure of having rested my foot on that same glove, the lifting of which had once exposed me to so many humiliations.

The throwing and picking up of gloves is, I should think, not a Parthian custom: I had not heard of it until I met Rachela Eratona. But Armenian, Alanian and Sarmatian knights practice it widely, even when the object of the challenge is a fortress rather than a person. But I was taught to challenge a city by sending an arrow into the shield above the gate; and to challenge a man by daring words. It's no surprise then that I didn't know what to do when, nearly eighteen years ago, on the Armenian-Adiabenian border a flaming-ruby-red knight followed his question why I schlepp around the world, armed and horseback, when it would behoove me better to stay at home and suck my mother's milk instead, by throwing his net-glove in my direction (the very glove which tonight serves as my inkwell).

Suck my mother's milk?! Indeed, I was barely sixteen then, but Phraates V had been even younger when the crown of the King of Kings was placed upon his head annointed with twenty six oils. As a teenager, it seems, I was able to hide my anger more easily than I can now; and thus, instead of letting my anger carry me, I replied the knight most politely: that I do not schlepp around, but wander as a knight errant, asking all those whom I encounter one question, only one.

"That's very interesting", replied the red knight, "and very sweet. I do the same thing myself. With the difference that, if it were permitted to place the image of a living creature on my shield, I would place on mine the image of a spider, not that of a fly."

And he pointed to my shield, adding that perhaps I mean to compare myself to a wasp rather than a fly, but this is understandable: young boys need to flatter themselves.

I needed to listen to him closely. He spoke -- of course -- Aramaic, but a different dialect of it from the one which had resounded around me as I was growing up in Babylon. But it was sufficiently clear to allow me to suppress my anger a little longer; on my shield I had half the emblem of Elymais, not some insect, as he assumed; and he mistook the anchor hooks for poorly drawn legs and wings of a wasp, or -- even worse! -- a fly. Or he pretended that he mistook them. So I called out to him angrily:

"Ask your question, and then, if you please, close in!"

As for the anger, I was making it up a bit. Too bad -- I had to because I noticed that the red knight's troop somehow, magically grew tenfold or more during our short exchange, while our number remained the same old five -- a eunuch and a Greek grammarian (a refugee from beyond the Euphrates) among them. Yet, I was not sufficiently afraid, not in any measure remotely equal to the danger: I was to learn only later that the red knight's troop was composed entirely of past-masters at the art of unerring and lightening-fast lassoing in of horsemen archers while at full gallop; and that it was not their habit to play with travelers who entered their narrow pass in lighthearted exchanges of knightly "if you please". Hence my suspicion today -- so many years later -- that that meeting with the red knight, that meeting which changed my life in so many dramatic ways -- had not been accidental.

But if it had not been, that fact has never been revealed to me. On the contrary, the red knight behaved in a manner which suggested that even my name was to him a meaningless sound, which was something I had not expected, and which frightened me, even terrified me.

The Word and The Flesh (6)

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Ahura Mazda (right, with high crown) invests Ardashir I (left)
with the ring of kingship. (Naqsh-e Rustam, 3rd c. CE)

Every day of my so-called exile took me further away from you.

How differently would everything have turned out had I, on the night on which you served Komodos poison, been on the Euphrates rather than in Mathura, whence it is closer to the Ganges than to the Hind! And, oh, how far it is from the banks of the Hind to Rome! And Alexandria, too, how far!

What sort of nonsense is this? Here we are in Alexandria now, both of us, but Alexandra tells us that our -- yours and mine -- child should only be conceived on the other side of the Hind. How generous, don't you think? One might have expected Alexandra to appoint for that purpose China. Or that land, dreamt up by Seneca, squeezed in the middle of the ocean, half way between Hispania and China. I should laugh. Which would be good: I have not laughed in a long time. Alas, I am told that it is not her, who says this, but you, speaking through Alexandra's mouth: we must flee!

Oh, you miserable Greek of half-breeds! Here I am, laboring my second day, trying to explain, in writing, as you wished, why it is not necessary that we flee, and how far have I gotten? I have not even managed to tell you yet how my father, beginning with the question about the elephant, set out to lead my tortured soul of a half-breed bastard towards that place, whence only one path was possible: towards absolute readiness to prove, at the cost of the so-called great sacrifices, even -- how much one can indeed rely on the so-called half-breed bastard, even at such times when one should rather trust that overhead monkey than any Arsakid truly deserving of that name.

I exaggerate. I was ready to make ultimate sacrifices, that is true. I knew that I was exposing myself to great dangers, yetI did not refuse the plea; this is also true. But how would it have been with that readiness of mine if here, among the Romans, you did not await me, Markia?

True, this doubt has only now passed through my mind. But this great two-day -- or rather two-night -- concentration on the task of writing to you in Greek with the help of a goose feather, this, I will say it, painful concentration seems to dig up from the dark places of my memory something which I had completely forgotten, long forgotten, perhaps as soon as the day after my conversation with my father in Nisa. It was not me who asked the question of myself, but he: would I be so ready to be given up as a Roman hostage, if you were not awaiting me here? While characterising Septymios Kaisar -- yes, now I remember it all very clearly -- he began, apparently for no special reason, to name all those Romans over whose dead bodies the lust for power took Septymios while guiding him ever closer towards that imperial purple which had fallen off the shoulders of Komodos. And there, somewhere, between Eklektos and Aimilios Laitos, he sneaked in your name; for no special reason, apparently. But mentioning it, he looked at me most meaningfully. And me? What did I do? you will ask. I can't remember.

It's unbelievable, I know, but I cannot remember.

Of course, I knew at that time that you were alive. For though my father, until the moment of the Roman capture of Ktesiphon, had continued to reject all pleas, regardless who made them, to recall me from exile, yet I had managed to smuggle into the West first -- as you know -- Alexandra, then Ardashir, then Babrios. And all three sent the same message: you were alive! But did I tell my father, when he named you among the dead, that you were in fact alive? Perhaps not, for this I should have remembered. But, surely, I must have rejected that nonsense somehow: I simply cannot believe that I would have been able to control myself, and to summon such powers of pretending, that my father might actually believe: "This does not seem to concern him at all."

So what happened then? What happened?

Whatever happened, my father must have been satisfied; his doubts must have been dispelled; and he thanked me most passionately for my readiness to serve him so selflessly in such a difficult moment of his reign. And I think that this time the passion was not pretended, and that there was no hidden intent in his suggestion that I should cross the Tigris on the back of that elephant, given me once by Vasishka-Vasudeva. But I resisted this suggestion; I was in the position to name terms and I named them. I warned him that Romans might see in my appointment as hostage a ruse, perhaps even ridicule; after all, I added with a smile, no one has ever made it a secret that I was the least favored of all the nephews of the Sun and the Moon; and that from the royal treasury of Ktesiphon (or Ragas) not a single coin has ever passed over the last thirty years to any temple treasury to defray the cost of prayers for my life and my health. And that therefore it was necessary to do everything in our power to dispel any Roman doubts as to whether the King of Kings cared at all for the life, health and comfort of his hostage. Of course, only a small group will come with me to Seleukia: the Karen girl, Samgila, Adrashir, Samasaryston with his niece, and as many servants and guards as my father will be pleased to give me; but there should be no more of them than -- say -- two dozen.

But I must cross the bridge dressed fabulously, indeed: ceremonially; I should be accompanied by five Karens, as many Mirs and as many Geopatrans, all of them with their body-guards, flying their clan banners; it would also be advisable that the kettle-drum carried before me should be drummed by the King of Elymais himself, the oldest and the stupidest of my half-brothers; and let Gokhiras of Persia walk right behind me, leading in hand my palfrey.

He'll refuse? Let him try! Does my father still have in his hands those three Mages who had agitated in Arbela for the stoning of the Christians? Let Gokhiras choose then: either he will agree to lead my horse, or those three will be walled-in alive as guilty of violating royal edicts concerning freedom of religion. And, believe me, Markia, my father agreed to it all. Of course, those three Mages were never seriously under threat (even though, had anyone deserved being walled-up alive, it was those three) because Gokhiras was really tortured by another fear: I had announced that I should release Ardashir of the word he had given me, that word which chains him to me like irons; and Gokhiras knew very well, that the moment Ardashir appears in Istakar, the Basrangs' rule over Persis will have at most a week in it.

Of course, the humiliation and rage of Gokhiras could have speared my back on the bridge (to the greater glory of Ormazd), but for this eventuality I had Ardashir, who, for that occasion, transformed himself from my hand-servant into the sword-bearer of the King of Persia. And, oh, would it have given Ardashir special pleasure to cut in half the King of Persia with that king's own sword!

The Word and The Flesh (5)

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Vologases IV

How much I have to explain to you, dear Markia! How very much! And with what precision, how detailed precision! -- detailed in a manner better suited perhaps to the introductory year of one's schooling! Which is not, of course, your fault, but the fault of your world, that Wild West, that West which produced your mother and which consumed your father with its insatiable need to repeat constantly: "We are strong! Invincible! Alone!" When I read your historians and your geographers -- and by "your" I mean not just Romans, but also Greeks, who sold themselves to the Romans -- I can never stop being amazed by the intellectual laziness blowing from all those books. For how can one not term "laziness" that constant overuse of the epithet "barbarian" regarding all those whose life-style, customs, pleasures and ideas require a little effort in order to be understood?

I know, dear Markia, the words you uttered when you first learned about my existence: "Oh, what a pleasant diversion this barbarian princeling's imagination makes!" But what do you know -- and what would you say -- about... the Kushans? You know only that they wear pants which they tuck into tall boots and that the names of their rules usually end in -ishka; and you say "Oh, some barbarian of the sort common east of Euphrates". But these barbarians, my love, have managed to give flesh to the dreams of Eutidemides and Helioklides, and of all the Greek merchants from Seleukia on the Tigris to Marsilia: they managed to establish a customs border with China!

What is more: when Alexandra and I were in India, we spent two years in Taxila, with which surely you must be familiar from the history of Alexander, and out of which, two centuries after Alexander, Demetrios Eutidemides hoped to make the paragon of Greek-Indian spiritual and political unity. You will guess perhaps the exaltation with which I walked about that city of Demetrios: a double exaltation in fact, because after Greeks, we, Parthians ruled India from this city.

But -- it was not a harmonious doubling of exaltation: in Taxila, at the acropolis, I felt myself a thousandfold more Greek than Parthian. And I reasoned like a Greek: with truly Greek contempt for barbarians I looked down at the third Taxila, the Taxila of the Kushans. I laughed in the same way in which you, your mother, and Markos Imperator would have laughed at the atavistic power of nomadic inheritance: the fact that the Kushan rulers preferred to give up all the advantages -- of beauty and defensibility -- which the Eutidemide Taxila owed to its mountainous position; and preferred to build, at enormous cost, a wholly new city down below, so as not to have to part their feet -- and their gaze -- from the low, wide, flat plain.

I shared this observation with Alexandra's father. (He was then -- in vain -- trying to secure Kushan support for my father's dying -- as it then seemed -- rebellion against Vologases III; while it was through the latter king's mercy that I, instead of having died impaled on a stake, and having subsequently been eaten by vultures, crossed and recrossed India in the Eutydemid footsteps without a care in the world). The old fox, who had fooled for half a century Romans, Jews, Parthians, Siakas, Kushans and Chinese, listened to me with one eye slyly half-closed, and when I finished, asked: "And hat do you know about the art of fortification, son?" I admitted that I knew nothing about it. "Pity. Or maybe rather lucky: lucky -- for you. For your peace of mind, for your self-satisfaction. For if you knew anything about it, and took a careful look at the walls, towers and moats down below there, you would soon lose any desire to laugh at the atavist habits of nomadic blood. You say that Kushans do not understand how to employ the advantages of mountainous terrain? You are wrong, my dear. Rather say this: they can afford not to employ these advantages -- afford to see them as mere inconveniences, rather -- which neither Parthians nor Greeks could ever have afforded. Is that clear? I think not! Your mind is too occupied with the question whether Shakyamuni Gautama was or was not a god, too occupied, I say, to understand such simple things as these."

He exaggerated a bit -- as he always did when trying to characterize my mental type; and he did so (by right of being my step-father) at every opportunity. Luckily, he didn't have the opportunity often: after I married Rachela Eratona -- and you know from Alexandra that this happened very early -- I saw my step-father perhaps six, at most seven times over the space of eight years. Afterwards, I was no longer to see him, even if I wanted to, and I did often want to see him: though he was the most cunning devil I have ever known, yet he managed to miscalculate once: he decided to betray my father on the day which he judged to be the day of the rebellion's defeat, while, in fact, it was the day of breakthrough.

For me it was a day of change only to the extent that while up to that day I had been victim of the anger of Vologases III, after that day I became equally victim of an equal anger of Vologases... IV. And never ever after this day, or indeed never ever before this day, have I shed one tear of the sort one might expect an exile to shed: why, exile has its charms, very great charms! One is a martyr -- praise be to Christians, what a useful neologism this is! -- which means that whenever one says or does something displeasing to his hosts, they wink at each other with understanding, sigh and say: "Poor thing! Longing for lost fatherland has unhinged his mind!"

In fact, I did long for something. Not the fatherland, for where is my fatherland? Seleukia? Achaia? Kharakis? Hekatompylos? No. I longed for you.

The Word and The Flesh (4)

Auguste Jean Baptiste Vinchon, Propertius and Cynthia at Tivoli

It seems that I cannot pretend convincingly, though I would so much wish I could. And I know, and have long known, that -- though my mother never attempted to put any poison in the King of King's food, nor even as much as salt -- yet I am the fruit of one of those forty-three nights. The very same nights, dear Markia, which, far beyond distant mountains and seas, your mother passed reciting to herself breathlessly and repeatedly: Quandocumque igitur nostros mors claudet ocellos accipe quae serues funeris acta miei.

Perhaps now at last I can learn how this couplet continues? Perhaps the satisfaction of this curiosity alone might be worth taking the risk (with which Alexandra tries to frighten me day and night) that at last the Roman sword might fall upon my neck? How sad that this thought had not occurred to me then, in Nisa: I would not have had to throw into his face -- between his false eyebrows and his purple beard -- the complaint (interlaced with revolting sobs) that, in order to reach at last the one person who may love me for myself alone, I should be ready to go as a hostage even among the forked-tongued citizens of Iambulos' island (if such indeed exists). Or to those lands, which (as I learned reading with Numerianos some dreadfully dull play of Seneca) stretch somewhere between China and Lusitania.

Accipe, accipe! What did your mother, and whatshisname -- Propertios -- command to those who were to follow their funeral cortege? Numerianos is prejudiced against this poet: he says that though throughout the entire four books of his elegies he addressed himself to some Kintia, he was in fact only interested in himself. Unlike, of course, Numerianos himself: no one will suspect him of preoccupation with himself since he always so readily yielded his apartment on the Kelian Hill to anyone to whom Didia Klara was at that moment prepared to say "Where you, Gaios, there I, Gaia." Yielded -- both the apartment and her, too; and now he yields her still (though without the apartment); indeed, he offers her (at her request, of course). He even offered me. Oh, no! Numerianos cannot be suspected of Propertios-like self-worship, while he pretends to worship a woman. Though, my father suspects, it is all the same for the rest of us.

"You want love?" he asked, interrupting my revolting sobs. "Are you sure? Personally, I suspect that you wander across the world looking for -- you know what? The most flattering mirror! And for this -- only this -- you are prepared to pay a huge price. A huge price. For instance: the destruction of the Majesty of the King of Kings".

The Word and The Flesh (3)

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Ruins of the Parthian capital in Nisa, Turkmenistan (Central Asia).

You will perhaps say “Exaggeration!” – Alexandra said so yesterday. But you cannot say so, because saying so would amount to denying yourself: you would be going back on your own words: your reply (transmitted to me by Klaudios Iulianos ten years ago) to my proposal that you and I should correspond. Do you remember that reply? I will remind you: “I might in principle agree to this: half-breeds like us may correspond with each other in Greek without incurring ridicule. But – oh my distant, unknown friend, why, nearly my brother – Markia’s letters and letters to Markia will surely be intercepted. Let us not expose ourselves to derision then, let them not say that, again, half-barbarians dare abuse the divine tongue of Homer, Pindar and Plato. Let’s spare ourselves this humiliation.”

I wanted then to throw in the face of Klaudios Iulianos the words: and what about Lukianos of Samosata? And Markos Imperator? Neither was even partly Greek: neither had as much as a drop of Greek blood in him! But I was ashamed then to as much as look in the eyes of the commander of Dura and without saying a word I passed from under one sail (with the letters SPQR) under another: one decorated with a half-moon, a star and an anchor. As I leapt from boat to boat, I was pursued by the insistent, though friendly in its nature, and well-meaning advice: “Demand to be sent to Rome for talks regarding the return of the deserters from Roman auxiliary units!” Perhaps it was a sensible and friendly advice, but I did not follow it because I have always been against any talks on the fate of those Syrians who had fled from under the wings of the hated eagles into my father’s kingdom.

But perhaps that is why you are punishing me? For that omission? For that failure to seize the opportunity to meet you in Rome ten years ago already? Perhaps you believe that we are both too old now to create a worthy flesh for your mother’s and my father’s love-wish? That this child should have been conceived then, ten years ago, not now?

But that’s impossible! You could not punish me for that! I am as Parthian as you are Roman. I had my duties, duties of an Arsakid, and you – you had the duties of the favorite concubine Imperatoris Augustii. I had? You had? No! We have them still! Alexandra may not understand this, but you, Markia? It was your view that it was unworthy of the Roman Kaisar to perform in the amphitheater; it was my view that it was unworthy of the King of Kings to give up the deserters, for this reason, at the very least, that since the King of Kings holds himself to be the brother of Sun and Moon, his word, once given, cannot be changed just as the orbits of his heavenly brothers cannot be changed. And if I believe this – and I do, and Alexandra has known this for seventeen years – then it is simply reprehensible of her to try to convince me to flee; and worse than reprehensible to try to enlist you in the effort. My father has concluded peace with Septymios Kaisar, accepted such and such terms, and made me a living security for the fulfillment of those terms. How could I flee then?

Alexandra says: my father has intentionally sent me to my death. Nonsense! Not that he either loves me, or is in any way proud of me; quite the contrary: he has been ashamed by my existence ever since my birth; and indeed has at times wished me dead. But that is over now. Now he wants me to live as long as I possibly can. Mongrel children are an embarrassment to rulers and nations only in times of their presumed greatness; in defeat, rulers and nations draw such children close to their hearts, the more tenderly the more they believe the old tale concerning the half-breed’s natural tendency to betray. The wiser among rulers, though they may share in the belief, do not rest at merely exposing their breasts to the potential viper’s bite; they can look into the minds of half-breeds deeper than I can now look at the coin which I am to hand to Didia Klara tomorrow in payment for Theodotos. And in this matter, at least, my father belongs to the wiser kind; the more insightful kind; the kind who can see at once both sides of the coin. When he called me in for our farewell conversation under the turquoise-encrusted dome of his palace in Nisa, he did not need to remove from his memory the acrimonious cries – and warnings -- of my uncles at his decision to nominate me viceroy of Babylon during the civil war ten years previously. On the contrary: he eagerly inquired whether I still recalled them. And, to make doubly sure, he asked about the health of that elephant upon whose back the daughter of the Kaisar of Kushan had intended to give her body to me -- but she gave that body only much later to ants, to whom the subtle poets and insightful thinkers of the East married her when she’d gone there to bear them (as she thought) enlightenment and its fruit – liberation. That martyrdom – if I may use such a daring neologism – was also known to my father in that moment when his eyes, illumined by the moon and the torches, sparkled with tears – tears brighter than all the turquoises of Nisa! – tears of joy (especially prepared by skillful court doctors) to welcome me, a son who could finally be of some use!

I pretended, of course, that I did not grasp the connection between the question about the health of the elephant and the king my father’s whining complaint that ever since his beloved brother’s rebellion, no Arsakid worthy of the name could inspire in the breast of the King of Kings as much trust as he has for a monkey which he may allow to play in the coconut palm overhead. Or for a kitchen maid whom he might take into his bed only to get tired of her after forty three nights.

The word and the flesh (2)

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Parthians, in the so-colled Sacrifice of Conon, a Parthian fresco,
in the Temple of Palmyrian Gods, Dura Europos.

Yes, I know: I should explain why I think so. And, two days ago, as I waited for your call, I had already prepared the whole argument in my mind hoping that, once we met, once we looked into each other´s eyes, I could lay it at your feet. You should not believe Alexandra when she says that the purpose of the first meeting I had proposed two days ago was only to conceive our first child. No. I did also intend to explain to you everything, or at least as much as time would allow. And I am certain that I would have convinced you about it all: that you and I owe a sacred duty to your father and my mother´s love wish; that my marriages with Rachel Eraton and Samgila were not betrayals of you; and, above all, that Alexandra´s notion that you and I should flee is nonsense.

It´s clear, though, that such a meeting of ours would not have been to Alexandra´s benefit; and thus she did all she could to prevent it. What´s more, fearing that I might discover your hiding place without her help, she convinced you to command me, by letter, that I should not attempt to see you until I have explained to you -- again by letter -- all that about me which you either do not understand or do not approve. And you do not approve, says your letter, a great deal; and you are puzzled by even more. These were your words, am I right?

This "am I right?", and the two sentences preceding it should bring you to the realization that I am still not certain whether the letter which I have received indeed comes from you. You might say perhaps that this suspicion belies what I had said earlier: that I believe that Alexandra never lies. And this would be a valid observation except that I had also added: that it is her custom to omit certain things from the truth. And thus, for example, how would I know whether this letter had not been accompanied by a message which was supposed to be transmitted to me orally? I did have the opportunity to assure myself that the letter was written by your hand (never mind how). And I recognized the seal: I have no doubt that the ring impressed in the wax was in fact the ring I had sent you ten years ago from the left bank of the Euphrates, just opposite Dura.

What´s more: Theodotos the Byzantine, whom you may remember, and whom I had purchased from Didia Klara two weeks ago, barely glanced at Alexandra´s feet as she returned from you but he exclaimed: this is my leather! Here, at the crossing of the straps -- a mark of my tannery!" And he began to cry, poor fellow, remembering what he had once been. I had to remind him that, supposedly, it is easier for the camel to pass through a the eye of a needle than for a rich man et caetera...

And yet, Markia, I am unable to dispel doubt, why, even anxiety. I am unable to believe that it is from you that this order comes: that I should arm myself - for a long time! - with a quill. That I should continue to maim -- maim? desecrate! -- the most glorious, most sacred language of your father and my mother.

The word and the flesh (1)

Parthian head, Louvre.

Forgive me, Markia, my love, but I do not believe that Christ has entered into a pact of mutual assistance with you.

But it does not follow from this disbelief that I make light of this revelation (made yesterday by you to me through the intermediation of Alexandra). On the contrary: whether such a pact does or does not exist is far less important than the fact that you believe in its existence, or at least once believed in its existence over the course of a certain period of eight days. This obliges me to reconsider my former view of the mystery of what happened on that New Year´s Eve nine years ago.

You know from Alexandra, that I have always doubted that any plot had really existed between you, Eklectos, Aimilios Laitos, Pertinax and Narkis. But you do not know -- because neither does Alexandra -- that I have always considered as pure invention the story of how you, supposedly, having served your imperial lover poison, and seeing that it seemed to take no effect, called out to Narkis (who was hiding behind a column): "Strangle him!" Yet now I am beginning to think that perhaps that report is true; indeed, that it must be true. And I think this because I think I now understand the entire thought process which guided you in the course of those eight days between the night on which the virgin birth of Mithra is celebrated in Rome and the Roman New Year´s Eve.

Equally understandable is now to me Alexandra´s strange eagerness to report to me your confession. Barely a week ago I would not have been surprised by it, thinking her eagerness and precision perfectly natural, but since I began to suspect (a week ago) that her husband did not die of natural causes, I have come to see her also in a different light from that in which I had seen her all these years since the day she had began to speak. Supposedly my most devoted companion, the most trusted recipient of my innermost thoughts, she proved capable of hiding from me the truth regarding the most fundamental of matters!

I do not suspect her of lying -- oh, no! She never distorts the truth -- she only omits to say things which, in her opinion -- might hurt me. Or so Ardashir, Samgila and Theodotos all say: all three are full of admiration -- worship even -- for Alexandra, that she treats me so gently and so very much tries to spare me any pain. Oh, to think of it! Ardashir, for so many years her staunchest enemy -- now admiring her! But what will happen to his admiration -- and that of the other two -- when I tell them that in this business -- the business of the great mystery: are you or are you not a regicide? -- Alexandra did not take the least care to spare my feelings? On the contrary: she told me the whole truth! How strange!

My mother had taught me not to be mystified but to look for that which is hidden behind the mystifying mask. And in this case, too, I have followed her advice: I have spent the whole night wondering what was behind Alexandra´s eagerness and -- precision. And now I think I know: it was, first of all (contra the triune admiration of my familae) the pure, unalloyed, irresistible and urgent need to cause me pain. And second: the far less pure desire to turn my attention away from a whole series of unusual circumstances surrounding the supposedly natural death of Achilles the Hermopolitan, my, after all -- how incongruously! -- brother in law. Finally, I think that she expected that by reporting to me your confession she will convince me to change my heretofore position regarding her suggestion that you and I should flee to the Far East. But in this she is mistaken: though I am now quite certain that you did indeed murder Kaisar Komodos, I repeat -- not "Flee!", but -- "Reveal yourself!" This idea that you and I should flee -- it is neither in your nor in my interest, and only to Alexandra´s benefit.

(I can only handle two paragraphs of this at a time).