but it meant different things to some and to others.
Things were unsettled after that, in Judaea and all about the coasts. Now and again some man would get followers and arm them and call himself King, and those who hated the Romans would follow him, and it would be weeks or even months before the legions could put down the rebellion. The flocks and the crops would suffer and it was bad for everyone. It was a difficult Province, and whenever anything went wrong there, the Jews in Alexandria and Asia Minor sent letters or deputations to Rome, for they never forgot their country. There were armed brigands, too, who frightened the small villages into giving them food, and sometimes raided them and even carried away women and children.
One band of these brigands was often in the hills above Beth Zanita, and one winter they raided the community and carried off five children. There was no money to ransom them, and they were taken up the coast to Tyre. Two of them were girls, for whom there was always a market; they were sold at once. The other three were boys. Josias was a husky twelve year old who had fought them till he was beaten and tied down; he still seemed quite intractable, so he was sold to a dye-works where they could do with plenty of cheap boy-labour; he would last a year or two. Melchi was a strong boy too, and more easily frightened; he was sold as a house servant. The third, Manasses, was rather younger, a lovely little creature; he had not fought. At first he had cried a great deal, and then something out of the prayer had come back into his head, and he had really tried to forgive his enemies. They knew they could sell him well, and they kept him till they could get his price. The three boys promised one another, sobbing, that they would try to keep in touch. They would all say the prayer at the first and last light and think of one another, and perhaps … After the other two were sold, little Manasses spent some bad days. He remembered the community and tried now to think why it really was that his father and mother and the others were trying to live a different kind of life from the rest of the village. He thought of the stories old Eleazar used to tell and he turned them over in his mind. He wondered whether it had made any difference, his trying to forgive the brigands who had carried him off and hurt him; perhaps they had been kinder to the other two. Or perhaps it just hadn’t made any difference, but yet it was a good thing to do. Perhaps it made him, even by himself, nearer to the Kingdom. Though he felt far enough from it now, with no one in all Tyre to be his equal in trust and amity.
He went on thinking about the Kingdom and never speaking about it for months and months, and twice a day he said the prayer and remembered the other two. He had been bought by a dealer who prepared slaves for a better market, and here he was taught miming and dancing, as well as Greek. They were quite kind to him and he learnt docilely; he was fond of music, though it often made him cry, even when he was moving in time to it. He had better food and no more fleas than at home; he was not allowed out in case he should run away, but he was not beaten or knocked about, because his body was very saleable. But they wanted him cheerful and at last someone asked him what would stop his moping; he told them he had two brothers and two sisters—in the community they were always brother and sister to one another—somewhere in Tyre, and he wanted to see them. But he did not know the names of the masters to whom the two little girls and Melchi had been sold, and no one was going to take much trouble about tracing them. He did know the name of the dye-works where Josias was, and one day his master went over and bought what seemed to him a very wretched, coughing, limping piece of cheap human material, its hands and face covered with the sores they mostly got in the Tyrian dye-works.
Manasses fell on his master’s neck with an enthusiastic gratitude which made the old man feel quite silly, and set to work washing Josias’s sore hands and face; the sores healed in time, but left him slightly scarred, and he was always rather lame where a truck had gone over his foot. He would never be worth much and could only be used for rough work, but most of the fight had been knocked out of him. Lying in the straw at night with Manasses’s arms round him, Josias told about those months at the factory where a new boy was at everyone’s mercy, where it was no good trusting anyone or anything, where one was burnt with hot irons and splashed with hot acid of the dye-base, and worse—much worse—things he wouldn’t ever tell Manasses—things that no Jew—and he shuddered all over with the horror of it, poor little country boy who had not even heard much evil as a child.
After a time Josias got well and strong enough to want to run away, but each boy was told what penalties that would involve for the other, and they were never allowed out together. There was more and stricter mime training for Manasses, and sometimes now he did his dancing to an audience. He might be sent out for an evening, petted and given sweets by Tyrian merchants, and sometimes by their wives, for he was young enough to be allowed in and out of the harems. Sometimes he was petted more than he liked, and once all the women in a harem stripped him and dressed him up in girls’ clothes and did his hair, which was now in long dark tresses, and painted his face like a bride’s, and everyone said things which made him stamp and scream with rage. It was not until a long time afterwards that he could forgive those fat, stupid, cruel women, jeering at him, holding him with sharp nails, touching him all over, till he couldn’t bear to be touched, even by Josias, for days afterwards. There were little henna marks all over his skin from the women’s fingers.
The boys wondered whether these merchants made their money, and kept their wives, out of dye-factories: most likely. There was plenty of luxury industry of all kinds in Tyre, as well as shipping, and most of the big merchants had interests in other cities as well. They looked very fine, great, bearded, dark merchant-adventurers, with gold rings in their ears and gold bracelets on their arms, striding about the docks or across the market squares of Tyre, men who could laugh at Emperors and legions, who would not bow to a Roman Governor or to any travelling king, descendants of the men who had defied Alexander. But that did not make them any nicer to deal with or any easier to forgive if you were a dancing boy hired from your master for an evening’s entertainment.
But one day Manasses was made to dance during the morning for someone he had never seen, and then handled and priced, and told he was now going to Rome. He said gently that he would kill himself if Josias was not bought with him, for he knew that if Josias was left behind he would probably be sold back into the factory. After some grumbling, his purchasers agreed, and a few days later the two were on board ship, for the first time in their lives, sailing west.
During the next few years they were bought and sold several times, but were only separated once, and then Manasses found Josias again in the Jewish Quarter of Rome, where he had been kindly treated. Of course, Josias was always sold rather cheap, because of his limp and scars, but he was quiet and strong and didn’t grumble so long as Manasses was treated properly. Sometimes they both asked in the Jewish Quarter whether anyone had a slave called Melchi, but they never found him; they wondered how long he had gone on saying the prayer.
In the meantime Manasses went on learning; sometimes he was one of a dozen or more dancers, but he did not make friends much. The rest were usually Greeks, and somehow he still did not care for the smell and touch of Gentiles. It was difficult to keep the Law; often they lost count of the days and never knew when it was Sabbath for weeks at a time, until they met another Jew who knew; but they tried not to eat forbidden food. Ordinarily, slaves got very little meat, but, of course, a dancer was different; he might be as valuable as a racehorse and had to have his oats! Manasses was gradually saving up a little bag of money, but he knew it would cost him a lot to buy his freedom. He learnt to speak bad Latin, but Greek was almost a second language in Rome.
Rome was a great and horrible city; you could not think of the Kingdom there; it had become impossible, something not even to be hoped for. They usually said the prayer still, once a day at least, but mostly it meant no more than, say, touching an amulet. They did not talk any more about Jesus-bar-Joseph.
They were aware of large and evil forces moving over their heads, of masters not all-powerful, but themselves terrified. There was a time when Manasses was about fifteen. It was a big household; his master was a senator, a thin, nervous man with an odd habit of jerking his head about. Manasses was to dance Ariadne to the Bacchus of a rather older boy, a Greek. He was making up, darkening
