The Blood of the Martyrs by Naomi Mitchison Read Free Book Online Page A

word?’
    â€˜I—I think I like it,’ said Beric.
    Suddenly Phaon said, ‘She laughed at you—I saw her. They do laugh. When one of us is hurt. They don’t think of us as people. We’re only people when—when He’s with us.’
    Beric flushed, for a moment hating that anyone should speak of that. Of her laughing. And of him and the slaves in the same breath, the same thought! Young Argas was watching him; a slave has to know what the masters are thinking. He said, ‘I’m a man, aren’t I? As it mightbe—your brother.’ Beric did not answer. Argas said humbly, ‘You don’t like to think that?’ What was going to happen? What was their master going to make happen?
    Argas was still kneeling in the dirty water. He had been doing the dirty work all evening while Beric lay on a couch among the gentlemen. While Tigellinus had been pulling Phaon and Lalage about, treating them like animals, like things. And he, Beric—he hadn’t noticed that they were people. He had been thinking about himself, sorry for himself, wrapped up in himself like a snail in its stupid shell. Now he had looked out and seen the others. ‘I don’t mind—brother,’ he said.

CHAPTER II
Mannases and Josias
    Eleazar the son of Esrom and Nathan the son of Berechiah took their instructions and set out together, northward through Galilee, barefoot, without money or even a change of clothes. That was nothing. They were both of them brave and simple men, who had been convinced that a certain course of action was right and obviously right; if others could be convinced of it, well and good. But if they were not open to conviction, then the two would go on. According to the country, much of which was very hilly and difficult, and according to how long they stopped in any village or group of houses, they would cover anything from three to twenty miles in a day. But sometimes they would stop for several days in a village, talking about the new way of life, and healing the sick and casting out fear of devils and evil spirits.
    These two men were convinced that there was a kind of relationship between people, which was attainable, as they knew from their own experience, and which was worth everything else in life. When people were in this relationship, they loved and trusted and understood each other without too many words; they were no longer separated by fear and suspicion and competition and class. In this relationship men and women could at last meet without each thinking the other was hoping to do some evil. When the relationship happened, those who experienced it were very happy; they did not any longer want power and glory and possessions. If everybody in the world could have it, then nobody would want these things and there would be no more tyranny and hatred and privilege and oppression of the poor by the rich. In the meantime it was not possible for the rich to enter into this relationship, because their possessions putup a barrier of envy and greed between them and their neighbours; they could not have this happiness, which was blessing, unless they separated themselves from their possessions, and indeed some of them did so, because they wanted to come into the Kingdom of Heaven so much more than they had ever in their lives wanted anything else.
    Eleazar and Nathan were so confident about all this, as indeed they had every reason to be, that people were constantly asking them for help. So few men walked about the world with that look of certainty about them, that look of being removed from ordinary human insecurity and fear, that it seemed as though they could deal with all difficulties. When men and women came to them with pains and terrors, they could usually take them away, and they themselves were not in the least afraid of darkness and wild beasts and all those things that ordinarily send village folk flying to shelter. But when they spoke about the Kingdom of