In the forest, the river

This is a story about a girl and a dolphin.

 

The girl lived in a little hut on the bank of a channel that fed a tributary of a great river, in the middle of a thick forest, so thick that the sun had to struggle to reach the ground even when it was high noon.

 

The girl lived with her grandfather.  Neither she nor the old man had been born in the forest. The life they led, in that little hut by the river, was nothing like the life the old man had known before, or the life the little girl remembered from her earliest years. The man and the girl had been slaves. They had run away and were now free, but if they were caught they would be slaves again.

 

The girl was somewhere between eleven and twelve years old, thin for her age, and went about nearly naked most of the time. She spent her days tending the little patch of ground she farmed along with her grandfather, gathering wood for the fire, and swimming and walking around the forest in the vicinity of the hut. She loved the forest, and sometimes, she almost felt the forest loved her in return.

 

Down on the coast, the great city raised its church spires and mansions skywards, and in the fields, plantations and mines around it the slaves worked at producing sugar and rubber, coffee and tin, to feed the hunger of the city’s residents – to feed and clothe them, and for them to send off to foreign lands on big ships in return for other things they could eat and wear and play with. The slaves saw none of these things. They existed for one thing – to work. And, once in a while, some would take the opportunity to run away. There was only one refuge, the obvious refuge – the dark sheltering wall of the forest.

 

The girl and her grandfather had run away when the fever had struck the slave lines and carried away the girl’s parents and the old man’s wife all in the space of two short weeks. The slave overseers had made even the sick slaves work till they dropped, and the rest of them had been merely waiting until they, too, sickened and died. As long as the rubber and tin kept flowing, the mine managers and plantation owners couldn’t care less about whether the slaves lived or died.

 

So, one night when the lightning had flashed incessantly in the sky and the rain had thrashed the ground, the old man had taken the girl in his arms – then only a toddler, but already put to work sorting and arranging – and had escaped out of the slave lines into the forest. There had been guards posted, but they had been hiding from the storm, and nobody had seen them go.

 

They had been in the forest ever since.

 

The day the girl first met the dolphin was just after the season of the great rains, when the river overflowed its banks and submerged large portions of the forest. The girl had been up since before the dawn, and now that her work was all done, she’d come down to the river for a swim. Though the water was murky with the debris of the flood, here in the channel it was still quite calm and still. The little girl knew the channel well, its twists and turns, and where the bottom fell away into deeper water where the current could be strong, and where it was completely safe to swim. She knew the channel so well that she could, and often did, swim it in the middle of the night in pitch blackness and never lose her way.

 

On this day, the girl had walked into the channel to her armpits, and was about to push off with her feet from the flat rock on which she was standing, when a surge of water swept over her body, as though something large had passed her just under the surface. The water was opaque with murk, its surface dotted with twigs and leaves, and the girl wondered for a moment if she had imagined it. But the movement came again, and a very slight touch, as though someone had drawn a feather across her midriff.

 

Terror might have come then, if the girl hadn’t known the channel so well. She knew – none better – that hereabouts there were none of the caymans that lay like logs of wood on the mud flats further downstream. Nor did the great constrictors that twined around the branches of trees inhabit this patch of forest – and, in any case, these would have either attacked her already or stayed away. They would not have been swimming around her as though curious as to what she was.

 

She thought momentarily of leaving the water and watching from the bank for whatever it was to show itself.  But if it had come to her only because she was in the water, it might leave and then she’d be left wondering what it was. She hesitated, unsure.

 

Then the surface of the water bulged in front of her and parted, as something rose. First it was a beak, long and thin, followed by a bulbous pink head. The beak opened, rows of sharp teeth gaping, and a little black eye gazed at the girl for a moment. The creature breathed out with a mighty huff, and then plunged under again. A curve of bright pink back broke the surface, followed by a pair of flukes that slapped the water and vanished. The water rippled and spread from the spot, slapping against the girl’s chest and upper arms. Slowly, the ripples spread and vanished.

 

The girl knew what it was, of course, though she had never seen one before. It was the boto, the encantado, the pink dolphin which haunted the river and in the season of floods swam amongst the trees of the forest, which her grandfather had told her took human form and seduced maidens in the night, leaving them pregnant with its babies when the dawn came. It was the creature of mystery and awe, of which she’d heard so much and never thought to see with her own eyes. She was still gaping open mouthed at the water when the surface exploded.

 

The boto rose from the water like a god rising from the depths. His beak lunged for the sky, spray flying from the flippers as he pushed himself up, his body a column of flesh, looking far larger than his actual size. He hung suspended above the surface for an endless moment, his body shuddering, his little black eyes watching the girl. Slowly, toppling, he fell back into the water with a mighty splash and disappeared.

 

“Why did he come here?” the girl asked her grandfather that evening.

 

They sat on the bank in the darkness and listened to the boto break the surface to breathe every few minutes. “He must have followed a female into the forest when the flood was high,” the old man said, “and lost his way when the water began to recede.”

 

“Does that mean he’s trapped here?” the girl asked anxiously.

 

The old man peered at her in the darkness. “Why, no. If he wants to go, all he has to do is swim downstream. He’ll be all right.”

 

The girl hesitated before asking the next question. “Did you mean all that you’d told me – about the boto taking human form and seducing maidens?”

 

Her grandfather chuckled softly and touched her shoulder. “You know that’s a story as well as I do. Why – were you hoping it wasn’t true...or that it was?”

 

The girl did not answer. Embarrassed and furious with herself, she turned away and hoped her grandfather wouldn’t know that she was blushing.

 

                                                *********************

 

Over the next days she spent more and more time with the boto. He would swim around her as she stood on the rock, rubbing her body with his flank, or nuzzling her with his long beak as though he were a friendly dog. And though she had seen that same beak snap a large fish in two with no effort at all, and knew something of the animal’s power, she felt no fear of him whatsoever.

 

Sometimes the boto would roll on the surface, slapping the water playfully with his flippers, or juggle a large seed he’d found somewhere as though it were a ball. He’d flip it back and forth, and then push it to her, as if it were a gift, and she would pick it up and take it to the shore. She had a small pile of these gifts from the dolphin in one corner of the hut, and her grandfather had begun teasing her that the dolphin was courting her and would come for her one of these nights.

 

And she would swim with him, down where the water was dark and impenetrable, and he would guide her,  as though she were blind, and she would let him rub and push her along. And as well as she knew the river,  the dolphin knew it too, even though he had never been in it before. He could find his way quite unerringly past the sunken trees and jutting rocks, the flotsam and jetsam at the bottom she had come to know well over the years, as clearly as though he could see them all.

 

“Some say,” her grandfather told her when she mentioned it, “that they have a separate sense, that they can see where it is impossible to see, know where they are going when it is impossible to know. Perhaps it’s a secret we will be able to understand someday. All we can say is that they are special in a way we don’t understand.”

 

As the days went on, the water levels dropped, and the girl grew anxious that the dolphin would go away. Each morning, as soon as she woke, she rushed to the river’s edge and scanned the surface eagerly, until she was rewarded with the sight and sound of the boto’s rising to breathe. Only then would she settle down to the chores of the day.

 

Some days the dolphin would disappear, often for many hours, and she would fret and worry constantly until the familiar sigh would come from the river and she would sigh, too, with relief and happiness. knowing the creature was back again.

 

“You’re so besotted with that animal,” her grandfather grumbled, “that I wonder who’s going to end up seducing whom.” But he would watch the girl and the dolphin play in the water, and he would smile secretly.

 

And then one day the slave overseers came to the forest.

 

They came in rowboats, muskets across their knees and coils of ropes and whips at their belts, to hunt down the runaway slaves who had not gone far enough into the forest, to whip and tie them and bring them back to the plantations and the mines, to grow more coffee and rubber and dig out more tin for the people in the city to exchange for the bright and shining toys and the shimmering foreign textiles their hearts so craved. They came with their dogs and their chains, but all they found were abandoned huts and little villages surrounded by plots of cultivation that were already falling back into jungle. Their coming had been expected, warned of by word of mouth, and the slaves had fled deeper in the forest, where the wild men dwelt and the slave overseers dare not follow.

 

The only exception was the girl and her grandfather, who lived away from the other runaway slaves, had no contact with them, and who did not know.

 

The girl saw them first. She had gone some way down the channel, to find a vine the old man had asked her to look for, because he wanted to use it to make ropes. She hadn’t found it where she’d expected, so she’d had to go further until she had almost reached the point where the channel emptied into a wider one.

 

The slavers’ boat was rowing up the channel.

 

The girl froze, sure they’d spotted her. But they were looking up river, and talking to themselves in low voices. They did not see her, and she slipped silently behind a tree and then deeper into the forest, until she could break into a run. Going by a more direct route, she managed to beat the boat back to her grandfather.

 

The old man was digging in the plot behind the hut when she arrived, gasping for breath, her little breasts rising and falling. All expression left his face when he heard what she had to say. For her, slavery was a word, a dim and almost forgotten memory. For him, it was a weight he had borne on his shoulders almost all his life. If there was one thing he feared, apart from dying and leaving the girl to fend for herself before she was ready, it was a return to slavery.

 

“We have to escape,” he said. “But where?”

 

Already, they could hear the dogs. They were long-limbed tan-and-black striped monsters, bred and trained to hunt runaway slaves, and it was said that any of their quarry would be better off giving himself up rather than be ripped into by their great yellow teeth.  Some of the slavers would follow the dogs through the forest, running behind them as they struck the scent, while others would take the boats up the channels and creeks and cut off the slaves’ retreat. It was a very familiar tactic, but no less effective for that.

 

“The dogs will catch us if we try to run into the forest,” the old man said. “Where is the boat? Almost here?”

 

“The boat is still part way down the channel,” the girl replied. “The dogs will be here long before it, from the sound.”

 

“We must go into the water, then,” the old man told her, “and swim upstream. They will stop and search this place, and that will give us a chance to put some distance between us and them. Come.”

 

“We’ll lose everything that we have put together here,” the girl said.

 

“We’ll lose it just as surely if we wait to be taken back in chains,” the old man snapped. “Come quickly.”

 

The howling of the dogs was loud in their ears as they slipped into the channel, swimming smoothly upstream and as far as possible underwater. They swam as close to each other as they could, touching each other in the murk because they could not see, and coming up only long enough to take a quick breath before submerging again. Although both were strong swimmers, the exhaustion and tension overcame them and finally drove them to leave the water and wait on the bank for a brief rest.

 

“Once they find that the hut’s deserted,” the girl observed, “they’ll come upstream behind us.”

 

“They will,” her grandfather said. “But we have no choice but to keep going.”

 

“The water is getting shallow,” the girl told him. “Soon it will be too shallow to swim. And we can’t wade fast enough to beat the boat, even if we manage to stay in the water so that the dogs lose our scent and can’t find it again.”

 

“We have no choice,” her grandfather repeated. “If it were only I, maybe it would be different. After all, I’m old and I don’t have long to live. And I’ve had a taste of freedom, at least. But you deserve better.”

 

“Don’t talk like that,” the girl said. “We must keep going.”

 

Only a little way past the next bend of the stream, the girl’s toes touched the bottom mud, and she found herself standing hip-deep in the water. It was too shallow to swim.

 

“Should we wade as far as we can,” the girl asked, “or get out now and move on through the forest?”

 

“I...” the old man began. What he was about to say was lost in a distant shout and the slaver’s boat rounded the bend behind them.

 

“They didn’t stop at the hut,” the old man gasped.  “Go quickly – get away while you can.”

 

“I’m not leaving you,” the girl told him.

 

“Go,” the old man said, and slapped her. She stared at him with shock. He had never struck her before. “You’re young,” he said. “You have a future, you can have a life. They might settle for me alone. Go!”

 

Still staring at him, she backed away. He turned away from her to look at the oncoming slavers, the tears running silently down his cheeks.

 

                                                ************************

 

The overseer was in a foul mood.   He had been on many slave hunts, but never one as fruitless as this one. They had been hunting for days, almost run out of time and rations, and not found a single slave. At the most they could remain out for one day more, and then they’d have to turn back.

 

He hated the slaves for the animals they were. He hated them because they forced him to come out into the heat and humidity of the river, this horrible place where the air was thick with clouds of mosquitoes, ticks would bury their heads in your skin if you accidentally brushed the leaves on which they were lying in wait, and leeches would bite your legs if you stepped in the water, and for all he knew schools of murderous toothy fish were waiting to strip you to the bone. It was all the fault of the slaves, and they didn’t even have the decency to get caught.

 

He’d dropped the dog handlers and their animals at the mouth of the channel, waiting until he was sure that they’d picked up a scent, and then followed the waterway. He had no great optimism that the dogs would hunt any slaves down – the quarry had grown remarkably elusive and resourceful in recent days, and they’d most likely have left already, or would the moment they heard the dogs. Perhaps they’d leave behind a decoy or two. Well, he had had enough of decoys. A murderous anger had begun to smoulder inside him. If he caught a slave or two, he’d take them back, yes, but first he would make them pay.

 

He had ignored the hut when he’d glimpsed it some distance up the bank, and snapped at the boatmen to continue. Unless the slaves who had lived in it were deaf or too infirm to move, they’d be long since gone, and if they were still there, the dog handlers could have them.  He looked over the prow of the boat, at the sluggish murky water, and his rage at the slaves rose with every splash of the oars in the water.

 

By the time they finally glimpsed the two wading figures, he was almost beside himself.

 

The nearest was an old man. The overseer was not particular – a slave was a slave – but his attention was fixed on the other one, the adolescent girl. She was further off, but they could always come back for the old man. He wasn’t going anywhere. Now, that girl – she would be valuable on the market, and besides, with her nubile young body and her small bare breasts, she was a morsel he would enjoy to the maximum.

 

Slapping the oarsmen on the shoulders, he turned the rudder to steer towards the girl. The water was very shallow, and the boat wasn’t flat-bottomed, but he wasn’t about to run aground. Not now, with victory within his grasp.

 

A few more oar strokes, and he would have her. He could feel his heart hammering with excitement.  Standing up, he leaned forwards for a better look.

 

And then the water under the boat erupted.

 

                                                      *********************

 

The boto had been far away in the forest, swimming among the trunks of half-submerged trees, looking for fish; and now he was returning to the channel, to the spot in the river he had begun to think of as home.

 

As he went, he scanned the environment before him, bouncing a stream of sonic waves off submerged logs and stones, off the shelving earth of the banks and the flat undersurface of the water above, painting a picture of the world in sound. A fish darted past his jaws, invisible in the murk but roiling the water with its fear-stricken passage. Without pausing, he stunned it with a sonic hammer-blow and scooped it up with a snap of his toothy beak.  A few more thrusts of his flukes and he was in the main channel, swimming homewards.

 

He had grown extremely fond of the creature which now regularly came to frolic with him in the water. Unlike the females of his own kind, he didn’t have to fight with all his strength for her affections, and she didn’t demand anything from him except his companionship, which he was more than happy to give. He always felt a thrill of pleasure when she plunged into the water and swam over to him, kicking about in her hilarious, clumsy way. He hadn’t yet seen her today, and was looking forwards to it.

 

He realised something was wrong long before he reached the spot. The water vibrated, erratically, and there was a noise of splashing and commotion. At first he thought it was wounded prey – but this was far too noisy, far too unnatural, to be prey. Cautious at first, pressing himself to the muddy bottom, he swam over to investigate.

 

He sensed her presence before he came upon her. He’d got to know her so well, over the time that he’d spent with her, that he could recognise her signatures instantly – the sonic imprint of her legs and hips, the sound of her voice, raised in anger and fear. And he could see the huge shape, squat and hulking, which was heaving itself through the water at her, accompanied by splashing.

 

The boto knew fighting. Like all the big males of his kind, he could be brutal when he had to be, utterly without pity as he snapped and bit at blowhole and fluke as he fought for females. He could be roused to an anger so single minded that his kind was feared by all the other denizens of the great river. And in this instant the anger took over, driving caution from his brain.

 

The creature who was his friend was in danger, and that was all that mattered.

 

The boto struck from below and to the side, slamming himself against the wooden hull of the boat. It lurched, tilted, and as the overseer flung out his arms and dropped overboard with a splash, the boat almost turned turtle, shipped water, and rolled back, the oarsmen yelling. The overseer, cursing, scrabbled in the muddy bottom of the channel for his gun, slipped and fell, and finally found his feet. Roaring furiously, he waded towards the girl.

 

And then the boto struck again.

 

                                          

                                                         *******************

 

“We can stop now,” the old man said. “They’ll never find us now.”

 

The girl leaned against the nearest half-submerged tree, gasping. For longer than either of them could remember, they had followed the dolphin as he had led them through a succession of little waterways and flooded passages through the trees, alternately walking and swimming, until now, with night falling, they could go no further.

 

“They won’t be back anyway,” the girl said. “They were frightened out of their wits.”

 

“They’ll probably destroy the hut before they go,” the old man said. “It’s a pity, but in a day or two we can go back and see what we can salvage.”

 

“Just now,” the girl said, “I just want to find somewhere I can lie down and sleep.”

 

Not far away, the boto snorted in the gathering darkness.

 

“He saved us, didn’t he?” the girl asked. “Grandfather? You remember the story about them taking human form?”

 

“What about it?” the old man asked.

 

“I think he’s fine as he is,” the girl said.

 

With an explosive rush of air, the boto breathed again.

 

 

Copyright B Purkayastha 2011

 

Rescue Party

"It's been a while since I last met you,” Professor McGrath said.

 

He was a big man with a white beard, thinning white hair, and greyish blue eyes that failed to look myopic despite the thick spectacles he wore. I had asked him before about those spectacles: surely he could have had contact lenses or corrective surgery. He had said the spectacles made a better impression. They were more “academic”. It was an odd conceit of his. I have known him for over fifteen years and never found any other eccentricity in him.

“Yes,” I replied. “Two years and a bit, in fact. I did try to contact you but they told me you were on an extended sabbatical from the university. And then last week I was told you’d come back, but when I went to meet you I was told to wait because you were in a meeting. I sat and waited in your office for an hour and left because I had things to do. And of course your cell has been switched off.”

“Two years?” he sounded pensive. “That long? Yes, I suppose it must have been. I’m sorry about making you wait. I was – I am – engaged in a difficult project. It’s taken up all my time.”

“What have you been up to?” I asked. “Writing a book on some obscure historical point no one but your fellow historians will ever read?”

“Well…” he hesitated. “Not exactly. Although I suppose if it had come out all right I might have got a book out of it.” He got up, went over to the window, and stood looking outside at the bright sunshine on the trees. He was big and burly, the Irish genes he had inherited from the father’s side of the family showing clearly. In a red hat and suit he’d be a shoo-in for Santa Claus. Not unnaturally, he hated Christmas celebrations and I had long since learned not to greet him on that day. “Look here,” he said, turning around, “if I tell you something, will you promise it will stay between us? That you won’t give it any publicity? After all, this is something I don’t want widely known. None of us do.”

“I’m a mathematician,” I said. “Who’s ever going to listen to what I have to say? I can’t even make people listen to my ideas about Boolean algebra, for heaven’s sake! Who’ll listen to what I have to say about you, even if I did say anything?”

Now no one who knows me will ever give me credit for being observant or sensitive to other peoples’ moods, but it was obvious that he had something on his mind and that he wanted to talk. I’m not a total moron, after all.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. But it’s going to take a while.” 

“I’ve got time,” I said, smiling. “As much time as you need.”

                                                           *****************

You know Bishop Mathew. (Professor McGrath said) Maybe you don’t know him to speak to, but you’ve seen his photo in the paper, you’ve seen him on TV. You know what he’s like – he even looks like a fanatic, with his balding head, his thin, ascetic face, his burning eyes. He looks like some holdover from the Spanish Inquisition. I suspect he knows it and deliberately plays up the impression. And you know that his church is going through a revival phase. Which means, basically, that they are trying to re-invigorate faith in all the poor devils of the congregation.

Now, of course, I have no place on the list of the faithful. I have never been a believer in either the God hypothesis or organised religion. Odd for an Irishman born of a long line of Catholic Irishmen, wouldn’t you say? So I was surprised, a shade over two years ago, to get an invitation from Bishop Mathew’s office. Could I spare the time to meet him? He would come here and meet me in my office. I wouldn’t even have to make the journey to his diocese.

I wondered for a moment whether he had the intention of taking me to task for abandoning Christianity, but then I reasoned that this would be the last thing he would try. It would get him nowhere, and he must have known it. Still and all, what did a Bishop of the Church want with a professor of history?

I wasn’t left in doubt long. He came straight to the point, sitting in that chair you’re sitting in now. “The Church,” he said, “is in trouble. Faith is in decline everywhere. Morals have gone down the drain. Nothing is as it should be. No one lives as Our Lord said we should. We need to bring faith back into the world. Ordinary means will no longer suffice. We need something exceptional. Someone exceptional.” 

“How should I be of help?” I asked when he paused. 

“I’m coming to that,” he said. “There is, it has come to my notice, secret research being done. That research has almost succeeded in producing something. A wonder. Science does not always do Satan’s work after all. I need that thing to work and I need your professional expertise.”

“And what is that wonder you mentioned?” I must confess that by this time I had begun harbouring doubts about his sanity. Maybe it would have been better for all of us if he had been insane after all. Not maybe; for sure. 

“There is a man, a physicist,” he said. “His name is Theopoulos. He’s a Greek, an unbeliever of the Greek Orthodox Church or maybe even an atheist, but he’s creating something that proves to me, at any rate, that God moves through the most unlikely routes to fulfil his purpose.

“He is making a machine to travel through time,” he said. “No, don’t scoff, or I am wasting my time talking to you. I have attended his demonstrations of the machine. He met me in Greece. He was desperate for two things: financial backing, and the opportunity to try it out in some venture great enough to win him recognition. You’ll understand, Professor, that anyone who says he is making a time machine might as well claim he can flap his arms and fly. The same number of people would believe him.

“So we made a deal. We – this diocese - supply him the money he needs, and he undertakes a mission for us. His machine is now almost ready. We’ve formulated the mission. Now what we need is the specialist knowledge to help us carry it out. You, being an acknowledged expert on West Asia in the time of the Roman Caesar Tiberius, have the knowledge we need.”

I was beginning to have a bad feeling about this. Obviously it was his project he was talking about, not the church’s; and I already told you he was a fanatic. Also, in the remote event that his mad scientist actually managed to create a working time machine, the mention of West Asia in the time of Tiberius had distinctly alarming possibilities. I decided to find out the worst right away.

“And what is the nature of the mission?” I asked.

He leaned forward over the desk until he was almost speaking into my face. His voice was very quiet, nearly a whisper.

“We want to go back, rescue our Lord Jesus Christ and bring him into the present,” he said. 

                                                      _______________________

In the end I agreed. What else would you have me do? I am an academic, after all; and after talking and writing about ancient Judea and Galilee for years, wouldn’t you have thought it natural for me to see what happened there with my own eyes? Even if I was convinced it was impossible?

I took long leave from the University. I had it coming, so they made no serious difficulties. In any case, once I had told them it would end in a research paper they were happy enough. Universities have their egos just like individuals. 

I flew to Athens and then down to Rhodes where Mathew met me. Together we met Theopoulos. He was a short, pudgy man of middle years, almost completely bald. He spoke English, but with a heavy accent I often had trouble understanding. He had, he said, finally finished his time machine. It was, he assured me, capable of moving objects and people back in time. “But not into the future,” he said. “Because the future, it has not happened yet.” It took, however, an appalling amount of energy to make itself work, and unless he could get the energy consumption down it was still impractical.

“To do that I will have to work many years more,” he said. “I need much money. More than His Highness the Bishop can get for me. I need to do something which will attract enough attention for me to get official backing. The Bishop’s plan is what I am depending on.”

                                                   _________________________ 

I don’t propose to bore you with details of all the preparations we went through over the next year. I’ll just mention the most important ones. Theopoulos demonstrated his machine, so well that even I was forced to admit that it worked, that it did send objects to the past (or at least made objects vanish) and then brought them back into the present when the controls were set accordingly. He made modifications – so many modifications! – and it was only when, one late evening, that I saw him send and bring back a dog that I finally admitted that he had done it. He had created something that actually was a time machine.

In the meantime Mathew made his plans and I did my research. Because between reading about something and actually preparing to go there lay gulfs of ignorance and peril. Mathew was the driving force; we would certainly have abandoned the project if he had not been at our backs all the while, cajoling, arguing, arranging. He must have stripped his diocese of every penny it could spare. And he had his own demands.

It was incredible, looking back on it, how little information there actually was about Jesus Christ in history. If your sources are the Gospels, you are faced with irreconcilable contradictions. If you depend on outside sources, you come up blank. No one seems to have heard of him, except the Jewish historian Josephus, in a couple of passages that are such obvious interpolations that they have no value at all.

We did not even have any agreement on the year that Christ was executed – John had him executed in 33CE, while according to the other Synoptic Gospels he was crucified in 30CE. We had to read through the gospels to cherry pick bits and pieces which seemed to make sense, which were in accord with what we knew, and with that we made our own composite history. I personally was not even convinced that Jesus Christ even existed; but of course I went along with what I was sure was a mad plan. I wanted to see the Jerusalem of the first century CE for myself, you see.

What with astronomical data and checking the dates of Jewish Passover, we finally selected the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nissan, Friday, April 3, 33 CE, as the most likely date of the crucifixion. Why was the date of crucifixion so important, you ask? Why did we not just go over and grab Jesus from the cradle, as it were? Well, for one thing, there is no information about Christ in the days before he actually entered Jerusalem. All we can be sure of is that all the stuff about his birth in a manger in Bethlehem, and his escape to Egypt, and even the Nazareth part of his history – all that was rubbish. Nazareth did not even exist in the first century CE – it was a burial ground. For another thing, our dear beloved bishop insisted that we take Christ at the last possible moment – when he actually became fully Christ, as it were, when his ideology was fully developed. 

We prepared. And we made plans.

The first thing we had to contend with was the fact that at this distance of time the machine was not perfectly accurate. It could not insert us at exactly the moment we chose, except by accident. We could have snatched Jesus from among his disciples before he was arrested, if only Mathew had permitted, but that he refused. So, our window of opportunity was only after the time when Jesus was arrested, tried before the Jewish court, the Lesser Sanhedrin, condemned for breaking Mosaic Law, and sent to the Roman Prefect, Lucius Pontius Pilatus, for re-trial on the charge of proclaiming himself king. All this, you understand, was on the supposition that Jesus existed and that all these things happened. Then when Pontius had finally sentenced him to death, had him scourged and sent to be crucified, we planned to take him from his guards on the way. Before that it would have been impossible; at all times, Christ would have been too securely guarded. And according to our Bishop Mathew, of course, he would not have matured enough ideologically to be the Christ.

All told, therefore, we had an hour, maybe less, to do what we were supposed to do. And we were faced with the fact that we did not even know where he would be crucified, there being no place called Golgotha anywhere near Jerusalem and there never had been; and also that the machine could not even be depended to put us where and when we needed to be.

A pretty problem!

It was obvious that we would have to be prepared to stay around for a while, if necessary, to have a chance of sneaking him away. And during this time, we would have to dress and comport ourselves in a way that would not arouse suspicion.

And – need I mention it? – the three of us, between us, stood not a chance of success. Actually, it would be two of us, since Theopoulos would have to stay back at the controls of his machine. We needed some more people to help. Those, Mathew found for us – about ten brawny young men. I don’t know where he found them; some secret Church organisation, perhaps. We were given to understand that questions would not be welcome, so we did not ask any. We just got them ready for the job. It required a great deal of training.

Training for what, do you ask? There was only one way we might hope to be unrecognised and avoid challenge under any conceivable circumstance while we got ready to snatch Christ. That is, if we were dressed up as soldiers of the Legion.

From heaven knows where – theatrical costumers, perhaps – we acquired legionary outfits, complete with greaves, helmets, armour, sandals, bullhide shields with metal inserts, and even javelins and gladiuses, short swords. We learned as much classical Greek as possible, because that was the lingua franca of the legions. In this Theopoulos was not of great help; classical Greek is in any case not the same as the modern tongue. We had to pretend to be members of the Cohors Italica, the only Roman troops in West Asia at the time. All other legions were local levies; we would never have been able to pass ourselves off as them successfully. We prepared. We drilled, using as our source everything from Hollywood movies to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We planned.

How odd it all seems to me now, like the games of children!

And in the meantime, Theopoulos modified his machine and it grew and grew and grew. No, I can’t really describe it; it took up an entire floor of his building, a sprawl of wiring and plates and chambers and refrigerating units and huge storage batteries. I’m a historian, not a scientist. I’ll give you Theopoulos’ address if you want, but I don’t think he’ll give you the time of day.

It was not mobile, of course; we couldn’t trundle it over to Jerusalem, but it did have an additional feature: it could project one, within limits, both in terms of space and time. We could be sent from Rhodes to Jerusalem as we went from the twenty first century to the first, and then back again. And there was a sort of radio by which we could send coded signals; not long messages, but something to let Theopoulos know when we wanted to come back again.

But where in Jerusalem should we go?

As I told you already, there is no place called “Golgotha” near Jerusalem, or the Place of the Skull, where the Bible says Jesus was crucified; in fact there is no word in Hebrew called Golgotha. However, it stood to reason that Jesus would be crucified somewhere close to the city. The only place that suggested itself was a hill called the Hill of the Stonings, where the Jews used to perform their own executions. We did not know where it was; but we could narrow it down. And, poring over maps and plans, we did.

Why did we not send a reconnaissance party over first to scout out the land? Remember the energy costs I was talking about?

Finally we were ready, as ready as we could get. The funds were running out anyway. We would either have to go through with it or call it all off. It could no longer be postponed.

We “left” late one afternoon, with rain slashing down outside, dressed as a decuria of the Cohors Italica. The Bishop chose to stay behind, as I knew he would. If we had failed to find Jesus, I think he would have gone crazy right there in first century Jerusalem, and we would have had, I think, to leave him there. In his absence, I dressed as the decurion, the officer in charge, of this ten man platoon. I even shaved my beard for the part. 

I should mention a couple of things. We were clothed as legionaries, of course, and armed each with a long javelin and a short sword, but we were carrying extras. 

On the hollow side of each shield, instead of the short loaded javelins of the legionary, we carried a selection of smoke bombs and stun grenades. These were essential; we had to have some way of covering our planned abduction. Drilling or not, training or not, we’d not last ten minutes if we had to fight real legionaries, as we knew perfectly well.

There was one other item. 

I’ve told you that there was no certainty that the machine would bring us to the right spot at the right time. Also we might spend much time looking for the site of the crucifixion and the procession bringing Jesus there. It was by no means impossible that we might actually find him crucified. According to our ecclesiastic boss, once Christ was actually affixed to his cross, it became holy and a blasphemy to leave the cross untenanted. We must, he said, leave a body there for the disciples to bury, venerate, and grieve over. I don’t know how crazy that sounds to you; but the whole thing was crazy anyway. 

So, we actually carried a body with us.

I don’t know where the corpse came from; some West Asian mortuary, probably, obtained with the payment of a judicious bribe. The man was naked, very recently dead, so that rigor mortis had not fully passed off as yet. He was in a coffin lined with padded silk, a coffin equipped with carrying rods like a stretcher. We were supposed to bring Jesus back the same way, if he was in no shape to co-operate. The corpse was bearded and long haired. He looked very like the Jesus one sees depicted in all religious art. I don’t know of what he had died. There was no mark on him so far as I could see. At least he was circumcised, though. If not, the whole thing would have descended to the level of farce. Who ever heard of an uncircumcised Jew?

The ten of us – eleven if you count the corpse – stood on a platform while, somewhere, unseen to us, Theopoulos made his adjustments. There was no sign of Mathew. I have no idea if he simply had no stomach to be present when we left on his mission or he was busy arranging for the reception of his Lord. When the moment came, there was no fanfare. No dramatic countdown. Just a shimmy in the air and a brief blurring of everything around us to grey.

Then there was stony ground instead of concrete beneath our feet and the walls of a city in the near distance. It was all very undramatic. It was sometime in the later afternoon, with the unmistakable sensation of a hot day giving way to a hot night. We were on a hillside, and that walled city must be Jerusalem. There was no one else but us around.

How did I feel at that instant? Triumphant? Ecstatic? No. I was worried, because I was convinced there was something I had forgotten. Something important. 

We looked at each other. We of course had no idea what the time was, and we had no means of telling if we were too late or if there was no execution at all. We might be three years too late. We might be looking to rescue a man who had never been born. We might even be a day or two off, here or there. How would we know?

I had been to Jerusalem, of course, but that was the Jerusalem of the twenty first century. It had nothing to do with this walled city of two thousand years earlier. 

No way to find out but by walking along looking for the Hill of Stoning. So we did.

                                                  _____________________

It was nearing sunset, and we had very nearly given up hope, when we finally found them. 

Three crosses, silhouetted against the reddening sky. 

I think I was more amazed that there was actually a crucifixion at all, and three crosses, that the Gospels had been borne out that far, than anything else. By that time we were all rather out of breath, because we had walked most of the way round the city, lugging our armour and that damned coffin along with us. We did not make exclamations; we did not point; we just walked silently towards the top of that hill. 

There was a thin scatter of people around. Very few, actually, and even fewer women, not the great crowds of Gospel. I don’t know who any of them were; but of the men, most were obviously not Jews. There was not a single unshorn beard or fringed robe in sight. This was no surprise. The following day was the Jewish festival of P’sach, the Passover. Jews would all be at home, preparing for it. A small guard of Roman legionaries sat near the crucifixes, chatting. None of the women, of course, were standing on the sides of the cross looking up at the man there with adoring eyes, as we see in the ludicrous Catholic statuary. They stood far away, averting their eyes, and most appeared to be sobbing. No wonder.

When we were close I looked up at the men on the crosses. They were, of course, all nude. Crucifixion never left a stitch on the condemned man’s body, no loincloth of the Catholic fantasy. The nearest to me was the one on the right. There was no doubt that he was either dead or close to death; his head hung on his chest, a swollen tongue protruded between parted lips, if he were breathing I could not detect it. I passed him by with no further glance; it was not he I was interested in. The soldiers were sitting at the foot of the centre cross. It was obviously that which we needed. But one had to be certain. 

As we trudged up to them, the legionaries glanced casually up at us. They were all local levies, obviously, with pronounced Semitic features. One of them said something I could not catch, then stood up. We stopped, a few metres away. He repeated what he had said. Now I am a historian of West Asia, but I’ll admit freely to you that my knowledge of spoken ancient Aramaic is poor, so I did not attempt to answer him in that language. Instead I asked him in Hebrew, which at least I can speak: “Which one is Yeshua ben Yosef?”

He looked instinctively up at the central crucifix, and that was all we required by way of confirmation. We could not delay any further. Every moment counted. We had rehearsed this many times, what we would do.

Our hands reached behind our shields and came out bearing smoke and stun grenades which we threw in all directions. Those legionaries and spectators never knew what had hit them. Just imagine; they had never heard of explosives, and suddenly their world went up in a series of deafening blasts and thick clouds of black smoke. Is it a wonder that most of them hit the ground and stayed there, shivering in superstitious fear, and the rest of them ran as fast as they could? I mean, those blasts were so loud, that smoke so dense, that they almost blinded and deafened us. 

And that is the source of the legend, I guess, of the darkness that fell upon the world when Jesus died, the noises and the earthquake. Of course no graves opened to let the dead walk; and nothing happened to the great veil in the Temple. But I think you know as well as I do how legends and stories grow in the retelling.

We did not hesitate; the tools we required, the mattocks and spades, were of course at the foot of the crosses. They had been placed there to put the crucifixes up in the first place. We grabbed them and went to work at the foot of the central cross. It was much shorter than the common idea which comes from the fantasies of the church. A cross is effective as soon as the condemned man’s feet are off the ground; any further height is superfluous and inefficient. Whatever else the Romans were, they were not inefficient. By the same token, the crosses were T shaped – the top part over the crossbar, as always, was missing. It had no function, would merely have made the crucifix top-heavy, and the Romans, as I said, did not mess around.

In minutes we had that cross down on the ground and were using our swords to cut the ropes that held the man to the wood. Because, of course, crucifixion involved tying the condemned to the cross; nailing was frowned on because the man usually passed out from pain and died relatively quickly from shock and blood loss. And crucifixion was a method designed to ensure that the prisoner lived in agony for the longest time possible. Days, sometimes. 

So, we cut the ropes and lifted him from the cross. Did we, devout Catholics as we all – bar myself – were, stop to worship him? Did we pause a moment in reverence? Did we hell. So far we hadn’t even taken a good look at him; we hadn’t had the opportunity or the time. He did moan once as we put him down, so he was alive, at any rate. We worked in two teams. The coffin had already been opened, and even as we took Jesus down the other team had the corpse in place. And there was my problem. The thing I had forgotten.

How the hell would we lash the corpse to the cross? We did not have any ropes!

If we’d had time, of course, we could have found ropes somewhere. But we hadn’t time. 

The smoke was beginning to disperse. Before lobbing a few more smoke bombs, I saw a few sledgehammers lying among the mattocks. Those sledgehammers were meant to finish off condemned men who had lasted inconveniently long, by breaking their legs. With their entire weight suspended from the arms, the men died quickly after that.

“Get those hammers” I told one of my men. “You might find spikes there too.” Which he did; because it was easier to construct the crucifixes at the site of the execution than to make the prisoner carry them all the way to the place of execution. A prisoner who did that was usually too exhausted to last more than a few hours on the cross. And as I said a death by crucifixion is meant to be a lingering one…

So we nailed that poor devil of a dead man to the wood. We put spikes through his wrists; the bones of the hand are so weak that had we nailed his palms to the wood, they would have torn out as soon as we had raised the cross. We put another through his feet; and, as my men heaved together and got the cross up, I threw the last of the smoke bombs and stun grenades to keep everyone’s heads down. Even as they burst, I reached into a pouch at my belt and pressed a switch that would let Theopoulos know it was time to bring us back. 

At that moment there was a shouting. I turned round just in time to see the cross up, but swaying dangerously; it seemed as if it would fall at any instant. One of the “legionaries” of my decuria, in a gesture wholly instinctive, reached out with his javelin to steady the cross. The tip went straight into the dead man’s side. I did not wait to see if any blood emerged; the other men had managed to stabilise the cross, and that was all that mattered. I called them together quickly. Even as we all assembled round the coffin, the air shimmered, turned grey…

…and we were standing on concrete, in Theopoulos’ machine, and we had the man called Yeshua ben Yosef, alias Jesus Christ, in a coffin with us. 

Somehow it did not sink in right then. We had things to do. There was a medical team waiting, which was part of the contingency plans. They took charge of Jesus, and whisked him away at once, coffin and all. I did not see him again for a month.

In the next days, the team that had gone with me vanished as mysteriously as it had come. I stayed with Theopoulos for the time being. I had suggested that since my role was over, I should leave, but Mathew requested me to stay and help for the time being – and of course my burning curiosity held me. I tried to learn to speak Aramaic as well as possible. Theopoulos fiddled with his equipment. Mathew vanished on one of his mysterious missions. Jesus, presumably, was in hospital. 

Time passed. 

                                                        ________________________

It was a hot summer day when I saw Jesus again. It was not on Rhodes – there is no point telling you where it was exactly, but it was in a house in a forested valley far from the nearest town. I don’t know who owns the house, but I think – no, I’m almost certain – that its owners were the same organisation that had supplied my fellow “legionaries”. 

I got there in a car sent by Mathew, and driven by a heavily muscled young man who spoke not at all the whole way. The Bishop himself met me at the door. He looked pale and drawn.

“You’ve got to help,” he said. “He’s impossible! He refuses everything!”

The man he was talking about sat in a chair, awkwardly. Someone had dressed him in a dressing gown. Probably it was the only garment of ours he could wear. He sat and stared at me and I looked back at him. You have to understand that this was the first occasion I have ever got a proper look at him. Earlier there just wasn’t time.

Throw all your notions out of the window. Jesus Christ was not a narrow faced Nordic with long straight blond hair and beard. I guess that was our doing, leaving that crucified corpse for them to worship and to bury. Men and women who fail to recognise their living Lord cannot be expected to fail to recognise him when he is dead, even though his appearance is changed.

Well, then. Jesus Christ was stunted, scrawny, and sunburnt. What else had I expected of a carpenter and itinerant religious teacher? He had a round head with the skin stretched tight over the bones, a scrubby black beard, and kinky black hair. When he opened his mouth his teeth were worn down and stained dark brown. But his eyes were what I stared at longest.

The look in those eyes was that of a man enraged to the point of being beyond reason.

“He’s furious,” Bishop Mathew said behind me. “He says he wanted to be crucified, that he schemed and worked to be crucified, that we’ve stolen his death from him, that he won’t help us whatever happens, and that our church,” he swallowed audibly, “is evil, is a parasite, an abomination.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Talk to him! Get him to understand!”

I could hear the desperation in the poor man’s voice. I could sympathise. He had schemed for this for so long, gathered allies, made preparations, probably seen himself overthrowing the established order, bring the Lord Jesus out to sit in the Vatican and rule the Christian world, an authentic Godhead, with Mathew himself as his vicar on earth. He had done so much. And just because of the exasperating, inexplicable mulishness of that rescued Godhead, it was all in danger of falling apart.

I tried. I talked to Jesus, in Hebrew and in Aramaic. He did not answer a word except to curse me as Satan’s angel. Probably he did not speak a word of Hebrew, and as for my Aramaic, the accent may have defeated him. I could have written down what I wanted to tell him, but it wouldn’t have done the least bit of good. He was, naturally, absolutely illiterate. Which carpenter’s son of that era from Galilee wouldn’t be? 

                                                    ___________________

At last we sent him back. What else could we have done about him? We couldn’t keep him indefinitely. Once word leaked out, as it would, he would have been mobbed. And – fanatic that he was – if he had begun condemning the church in public, as he most assuredly would have, there would have been hell to pay. I could just see him being torn to pieces by a crowd of the furious devout.

He wanted to commit suicide by others’ hands. Balked once, he would have tried again.

I was present the day he went back. By that time he had stopped communicating in any way at all. 

There was nothing to it. He was put on the platform, alone, in a white shift, Theopoluos pressed some buttons. And the Lord Jesus disappeared to the time he had been brought from.

I came back here and rejoined work without a word to anyone. Theopoulos as far as I know is looking for another sponsor for fine tuning his invention. I have no idea where Mathew is – he disappeared after Christ left. I wonder sometimes if he has got himself transported to another era to get away from the consequences of his defeat. For, make no mistake about this, he staked all he had, money, faith, ambition, and he lost.

You don’t recover from that kind of defeat.

                                                            ********************

“And that’s all I have to say about the whole bloody mess,” Professor McGrath told me. “I wouldn’t mind going back to that era again, but not for any more ecclesiastical kidnappings. No sir. Put me in a nylon toga and send me back for a study tour, that’s all I want. Not that it’s going to happen again. Shall we go and have some beer? It’s on me.”

Quite a bit later, as he drained his second glass and wiped the suds off his moustache, McGrath spoke again on that topic, as if getting some thing off his chest. 

“There’s just this one big doubt I have,” he said. “Or call it a niggle, a worry, whatever you want. You know I said that when we went back, the machine couldn’t be depended on to get us to the precise point in time we needed? Well, we did send him to the site of a garden not far from the crucifixion site, but we slipped up a little on the time.

“We’d meant him to reach Jerusalem at the time we took him, before dusk on Friday before Passover. He actually got there, Theopoulos told me, only two days later.

“Yes, the Lord Jesus Christ walked again in Jerusalem three days after being publicly crucified, on Sunday morning…”

 Copyright B Purkayastha 2011