The Tongues of Men or Angels

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If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.

That’s what Cephas’s father said one time, when a foreign-faced Roman legionary demanded directions. A wile as hoary as the hyena’s stripes: for the powerless to feign stupidity; to lull that they might deceive. Nonetheless, from here is where we must begin.

Cephas gazes down the Mount at Jerusalem, enthralled by its size. He’s a country boy, a country man, a hard man, grown in a hard land. Cephas isn’t his real name, it’s a nickname. It means ‘the rock’ or ‘rocky’, ‘stony’ maybe; a tough man’s name for a tough man. Cephas has a dense beard, matted and wired like the belly of a wild goat. His hair is knife-cropped against the heat, revealing folds of muscled neck. Skin baked dirt-brown from sun-blasted net-hauling. He was a fisherman once, an illiterate labourer, the sort of man irrelevant to the powers of this world. It is hard even to conceive of the ease and casual brutality with which people such as him can be disposed of, or the indifference with which they can disintegrate into dispossession and starve to death. Even so, only the very brave or the very dumb would fuck with Cephas one on one.

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