The Silver Chalice Read Online Free Page A

a synagogue in the part of the city called Ceratium. It had once been handsomely adorned and a curious faith had been preached there openly, based on the teachings of someone called the Christ who had been a Jew. At the time when Theron, out of curiosity, took his youngest son, there had been a change of attitude on the part of the Roman authorities. The boy, who had seen multitudes of people bowing with covered heads before great bronze statues of the gods in the Gardens of Daphne, was astonished to see that the Christians held their heads up high as though watching something infinitely wonderful in the air above them. They sang together, simple airs about love and forgiveness, and their eyes were filled with so much content that Theron had whispered to his son: “These be strange people. But it is a strangeness about which we should know more.”
    A small man with a short blunt beard preached to them. Sometimes his voice was as shrill as the call of a bugle; sometimes it was deep like the thresh of waves over a stone reef; always it drew his listeners to him. His deep-set eyes had seen the miraculous things of which he spoke. He was not of Antioch, for his speech had more of the slurring note of the Romans. There were whispers about him in the audience which coupled the names of Paul and Tarsus.
    The room was as still as a tomb in the rocks of sepulture while he spoke. Theron did not move as much as a hair of his bushy head. Once his hand tightened on the shoulder of the boy and he whispered, “My son, my son, can it be there is only one God and that He is a God of kindness and light?”
    The discourse, however, was far over the head of a boy of six. Ambrose’s attention became riveted instead on a second man, who stood off to one side of the gathering. He had a broad brow and a kindly eye and a smile of such gentleness that each strand in his great red beard seemed to curl in amiability. He was watching, familiarizing himself no doubt with the new faces in the gathering.
    Theron was full of what they had witnessed when they reached the crowded room in the Ward of the Trades that served as home to his brood. “I have heard a great man deliver the most amazing message,” he said, his eyes still veiled and withdrawn.
    His wife had dampened his enthusiasm immediately. “Christians!” she said scornfully. “They are a bad lot. I saw one stoned to death in my native village. It was a woman, and I threw a stone myself.
That
is what happens to people who become Christians!”
    “But the man Jesus performed miracles,” protested Theron. “Those who follow Him cast out devils also and cause the lame to walk and the blind to see.”
    “Miracles!” scoffed his wife. “The face of that woman had turned black when I cast my stone. Why wasn’t there a miracle to save her? There is one Simon the Magician who can perform miracles as well. They are all tricks.”
    They never returned to the synagogue, but one thing kept the meeting in Basil’s memory. He recalled the face of the man with the red beard. It was still clear in his mind even when the contour of his own father’s features had become dim and uncertain. What made it stay was a hint there of seeing things which other eyes missed, of hearing sounds, perhaps of music, in the stillest air.
    There had been something of this same look on the face of the vendor of sweetmeats.
    His hands were never idle while he sat in the latticed
aliyyah
and watched the rich spectacle below. He used bits of charcoal to make sketches on papyrus or on discarded fragments of cloth, catching with a few deft strokes the proud folds of a toga or the dignity of a red-and-white nomadic turban, the furtive leer of an unshaven beggar or the animal grace of a gladiator from the amphitheater that great Caesar himself had built. Later he would carry the sketches back to his room and mold figures in damp clay from the best of them.
    Ignatius joined him once at his post of observation, seating himself